The State as Machinery of Record or as Witness of Truth. On Pink on Vallier and Catholic Integralism
I first met Tom Pink when I attended as a witness a workshop on Hobbes in London back in March 2007. A decade later or so we spent a few intense days discussing Francisco Suárez (in his translation) at a Libertyfund event near Madrid. Since we try to make time to meet for tea at least once a year in London. Back in 2018 I blogged (here) about his three part essay (see part I; see part II; Part III), "Vatican II and Crisis in the Theology of Baptism” an intervention in intra-Catholic debates over the Church’s stance toward (to abbreviate) Church-State relations.
That three part essay, as well as Pink’s piece that triggered today’s post (here), was published in The Josias, which presents itself as “a manual of Catholic Integralism, an attempt to articulate a truly Catholic political stance from which to approach the present order of society, and promote justice, right, virtue, freedom, and the common good.” Elsewhere on its website it states:
The Josias was founded by a small community seeking to articulate an authentically Catholic political stance from which to approach the present order of society. Our goal is to make this site a working manual for those who wish to bring their faith into the public square and resist the tides of liberalism, modernism, and ignorance of tradition which have, in the past century, so harmed the Church and tied her hands in the struggle to advance the social reign of Christ.
The intellectual resurgence of Catholic Integralism is the subject of my former (undergraduate) student, Kevin Vallier’s book (OUP) All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism. Kevin is one of the leading theorists of public reason today, so this books marks a welcome broadening of his scholarly interests. I haven’t read the book yet, but (as regular readers know) I have blogged quite a bit about the recent writings of one of his subjects, Adrian Vermeule. As it happens Kevin’s book also pays substantial attention to Pink’s views (including but by no means limited to the three-part essay mentioned above).
It is fair to say that that intense public interest (among nerdy intellectuals like myself) in the intellectual resurgence of Catholic Integralism is driven wholly by the movement’s success in getting fellow-traveling judges placed on the US Supreme Court. That success is, in part, due to the political success of those that can be best described as “diabolical” or at least flirting with the diabolical. As readers of my original post on Pink’s three-part essay know, my own interest in Pink’s worldview is that “liberalism needs the Catholic church to believe in its own historical mission of the illiberal, rejectionist sort defended by Pink” in order to combat the diabolical political movements that threaten us all. That Pink (KCL), who shuns the political limelight, is now potentially a world historical intellectual agent reminds us that if there is providence it is inscrutable subject to Knightian uncertainty.
Okay, so much for set up.
Catholic integralism is, on Pink’s views, “magisterial Catholic teaching about the nature and competence of legal authority.” Pink goes on to write with an appeal to Leo XIII’s (1885) Immortale Dei:
The teaching is first that there are on this earth two potestates – two sovereign authorities for coercion (coercitio), meaning that they can impose legal obligations and enforce them with punishments (coercere). The Church is potestas for religion as the state is potestas for the civil order. And second, the state should recognise the Church as potestas for religion as the supreme good and, given that her people depend for their supreme happiness on religion, should be prepared to coerce for specifically religious ends – to make and enforce law to support religion as the supreme good. This could, for example, involve imposing taxes to support children’s education in the faith specifically because the faith is true. But because the Church alone has sovereign authority over religion, legislation for religious ends, in support of religious truth, requires the authority of the Church. The state can only coerce for religion as minister or agent of the Church. So Church and state cooperate, where religion is concerned under the authority of the Church, for the good of the population that they share, including the supreme good of their people’s salvation.
In what follows I call this the ‘double potestas doctrine.’ I stipulate that Pink is right about this qua Church doctrine. I do so not because I have no views on the matter, but in the spirit of MDN.*
Catholic integralism so understood is, thus, opposed to both Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. This is so, because for all their differences, Hobbes and Schmitt reject the double potestas doctrine. I put Schmitt in here not just because of Vermeule’s attraction to Schmitt, but also because Schmitt has had non-trivial influence on a stream of Catholic social thought that is (to put this delicately) very uneasy with liberal democracy under the conditions of pluralism. So, Pink’s work is not without controversy even among those who take integralism very seriously.
Pink’s own views are decidedly unliberal, but the basis for a practical accommodation (or as it is known in Islam, a Hudna) with liberalism are available in a view like his. In particular, many liberal states are willing to collect taxes on behalf of the Church, and (as I note and Pink surely knows) other churches, to support children’s education in the faith. (In the Netherlands something like this was, in fact, a major political compromise in order to end confessional battle over education at the start of the twentieth century.) So, while Catholic integralism may be uneasy about the more Lockean interpretation (which also emphasizes the possibility of free exit from any church) a liberal may spin on this state of affairs there is, thus, room for practical accommodation.
In fact, Pink explicitly recognizes that the double potestas doctrine is an ideal and “may not be a real possibility in the here and now.” Unlike my emphasis on pluralism (and so the need to accommodate multiple churches), Pink emphasizes “the profound secularisation of modern political community” as the main obstacle to its realization. For secularism suggests that some may never fall under any church potestas.
This fact doesn’t make the ideal irrelevant because it “is magisterial teaching about God’s will for legal authority. It explains the true nature of legal authority in general, that of the state as well as of the Church.” For those who are interested in the role of coercive authority in this ideal not the least in its relationship to Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, I warmly recommend Pink’s essay not the least for the significance of its analysis of two kinds of coercion (coercitio and coactio).
Now, Pink’s essay is primarily directed against Vallier’s argument that the double potestas doctrine is incoherent because it treats the baptized differently from the unbaptized. (Before one scoffs at such differential treatment, remember that this is the very wedge that Las Cassas used to argue that the Spanish ought not coerce the locals into forced labor or Christianity.)
My present interest is in that part of Pink’s argument in which he suggests that legal authority “is not a purely coordinatory device exclusively directive of the voluntary.” Rather (legitimate) legal authority may “coerce such non-voluntary attitudes as belief.” By belief, here, Pink means, I assume, (now quoting Schwitzgebel) “whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true.” Some (perhaps inspired by Spinoza) may doubt to what degree belief can really be so coerced, but on this subject Pink agrees with, say, a free spirit like Feyerabend (e.g., Science in a Free Society, p. 74).
Now, Pink treats the idea that (legitimate) legal authority may “coerce such non-voluntary attitudes as belief” as contrary to the (post-Hobbesian) liberal idea that treats legal authority as a coordination device. There are surely many liberals who would agree with Pink that this is an important liberal commitment and that forcing people to believe the truth is illiberal.
But as regular readers know, I regularly argue that on this point many liberals misunderstand their own position (in part because of the manner in which the American first amendment has been elevated into central commitment of liberal self-understanding). So, let me remind you briefly of an alternative strain in liberalism which (as I have documented together with Nick Cowen) can be found in Adam Smith, J.S. Mill, and Lippmann amongst others. This is the idea that the state is a machinery of record: it collects and disseminates immense data and records (births, deaths, marriage, property deeds, imports, exports, etc.) that it certifies as truth, or that can be regarded as true. (One can add measures and coins, etc.)
Now, one may treat the state as machinery of record merely as a coordination device. (The fact that Nick and I published our argument in Public Choice would fuel that suspicion.) But this misunderstands the underlying argument (at least my part of it, but I think Nick agrees). In different ways, Smith, Mill, and Lippmann explicitly allow that the state teaches the truth or can impose the curriculum by which the young are educated by non-state agents.
That is, and hence my nod to Feyerabend above, in liberalism state and science lend each other and mutually enforce each other’s authority without collapsing into each other. To be sure, unlike the double potestas doctrine, in the liberal understanding science is not like the Church once was a sovereign (and the state’s sovereignty highly dispersed).
How might one understand this? Pink himself offers a suggestive way forward:
The function of political authority and its legal direction is to facilitate this understanding and reinforce it – to facilitate our response to reason as it concerns the bonum commune, the common good of a complete human community. Authority does this by witnessing to what constitutes the bonum commune and what it justifies.
Now, to what degree a liberal can embrace what Pink calls the bonum commune is a controversial matter. My own view is that liberals do, in fact, embrace something like it (e.g., “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”), although with differing contents. But what follows will allow that for many liberals (recall) the pursuit of meaningful choices is something distinct from the common good of a complete human community and intrinsically private.
However, as hinted, and to get to my contribution to the debate between Vallier and Pink (and also my own modest disagreement with Vallier recall), liberals share with Pink the idea that the function of authority even in such mundane matters as being the machinery of record is something like what he calls “witnessing” the truth. This sounds rather highfaluting, but it can be motivated in the language of recent social epistemology. I quote myself (reviewing Neil Levy’s Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People):
Other people and institutions routinely provide us with cues of what one ought to believe, that is, authoritated belief. That a ‘proposition is socially approved is higher-order evidence that bears on its truth’. (81) This is also true of mechanisms like asking oneself ‘what do people like me believe?’ (82) This means it is often okay to shrug one's shoulders when one cannot explain why a certain practice (say astrology) should be rejected, and ‘rely on others to tackle them for us’. (94) And often it is silly to do one's own research in such cases, and, as Kuhn emphasised, within science it is often rational to ignore anomalous evidence (95; see also the cost-benefit argument at 99).
By ‘authoritated belief’ I mean the non-expert held believer's endorsing or adopting the beliefs held by the relevant epistemic authorities (at a suitable level of simplification). Our social life isn’t just facilitated by authoritated belief, it is often constituted by it. Now as my quoted passage suggests we don’t always require a potestas to provide us with important social cues or higher order evidence. In fact, rather than seeing science like a single source of authoritated belief, it is much healthier to discern in it a mélange of practices that generate many different kinds of only partially authoritated belief some of which in tension with each other (recall my essay with Eric Winsberg).
Pink puts the idea behind witnessing as follows:
The communicative nature of law allows for the legal direction of belief itself – or what, even if not formally presented as such, clearly amounts to the same…Commands and threats of punishment in themselves are irrelevant to truth, but belief is a truth-responsive state. So if a state authority legally directs and obligates us to believe something, it cannot be asking us just to obey a brute command. It is directing us towards truth: its directive presents us with its witness to that truth, to which we are to respond as we would to any witness in whom we trust. What moves us to believe is not mere fear of sanction, but the force of reason mediated by this witness. Beyond the truth communicated, coercion – the imposition of obligation and the threat of punishment for non-compliance – serves a further communicative function. It communicates the vital importance to the community that certain truths be generally acknowledged, and the great damage done to that community by doubt or disbelief in them.
There is nothing to object in here from the perspective of a liberal. (Pink himself has a tendency to treat liberalism as a post-Hobbesian view, but that’s because like Leo Strauss, Pink has a tendency to treat liberalism as intrinsically derivative from Hobbes.) When the state registers property deeds, it also communicates that property is an accepted part of the political community. This is one reason why some Marxists emphasize that property is theft and that the modern state is ineliminable intertwined with violence to protect those property rights. As Pink notes, “in much of modern continental Europe, the state now uses coercion to witness to the truth that the Holocaust did happen, disbelief in the Holocaust being seen as a malign vehicle of anti-Semitism and so as pernicious to human community as religious unbelief once was viewed to be.” (Pink treats this as a kind of heresy law.)
Obviously, treating the state as a witness to truth and authoritated cues is also open to abuse. And there are many pragmatic arguments to suggest that we ought not have any such modern heresy laws at all. This is why the liberal state often makes an effort to create opt-out clauses for many of the truths its witnesses, and tries to establish whether local deviation (Amish, conscientious objectors, etc.) from its authoritated beliefs is sincere. As Pink puts it, “the value of conscience is better recognised by the use of law to form and direct it, than by the restriction of conscience to a sphere of the ‘private’ supposedly beyond the state’s concern.”
This is also why it’s important to leave sufficient space open to permanent contestation of the state’s authority and its machinery of record. And this is why it matters that scientific disciplines are transparent about their evidential arguments (and make them subject to verification and reproduction) and why their internal debates need to be a matter of public record. And why local academic communities articulate their own academic freedom in terms of procedures, values, and commitments as a limitation on or orthogonal to freedom of speech.
One may find it puzzling that (qua skeptical) liberal, I am so at ease with authoritated beliefs. (Pink himself quotes Rawls’ Spinozist concession “to common interest in public order and security” as a limitation on pure freedom of speech.) But that’s because (and I again quote Pink) the view is built on the idea of humans having freedom in the sense of “a power of control over alternatives that we exercise contingently and that is sharply to be distinguished from voluntariness – from a simple capacity to do things as an effect of a will or desire to do them.” While we can discern in the the latter homo economicus (or Hobbes), it’s the former that is the freedom worth having (Dennett’s ‘elbow room’'). Notice that unlike Pink, the liberal can assert that we have both freedom and voluntariness.
To be continued.
*From the German and Yiddish for Mischt dich nicht, or stay out of it!