Dear integralists,

Nationalism is not localism (and some other stuff)

You don’t have to teach children how to lie. It’s as natural a human disposition as speaking—a linguistic form of momentary self-interest separating oneself from accountability or laying claim to that which is as strongly desired as it is undeserved. What requires the discipline of character formation is teaching/learning/modeling/imitating how not to lie. I like to think of it as part of our fallen condition. Re-braiding language to suit ourselves, employing language manipulatively, and angling repurposed language in support of fantasies and agendas (often the same thing) is just a more complex architectonic treatment of this basic linguistic predisposition. Lying to ourselves is just a post-mirror-stage inversion of it. In societies organized around self-interest, the disciplines of character formation atrophy and eventually die, and its inhabitants lose the cultural capacity to differentiate between the manipulative and the non-manipulative, mindlessly pursuing ever more dis-aggregated transcriptions of self-interest, self-delusion, and commonplace dishonesty, often led along by assorted rival enterprises that thrive on the invention of ever-newer desires, fantasies, and agendas. Many of these manipulating enterprises are commercial; but some of them are the enterprises of explicit power—governance, that is . . . politics.

“Localism,” and the ever-more-false dichotomy localism v. globalism, is a lingusitic conceit now performing a service for “conservative” elements leaning into reaction—including some of my fellow Catholics, the integralists—who have taken up these terms in defense of nation-state nationalism, often of a nascent anti-immigrant variety.

Before I begin this attempt at a certain discernment, I’ll lead with further provocation. Conservatives: there is nothing left to conserve. I’m telling you what your mama did when you kept scrape, scrape, scraping the bottom of the ice cream bowl: “Stop!” (You look up.) “It’s gone, baby.”

*

We live in “farm” country, Southeastern Michigan, a stone’s throw from Ohio. We live in a small city, around 20,000 souls, which is an agricultural commercial hub, the county seat, and home to a couple of private colleges. My wife’s mother passed away recently. She lived fifteen miles away, outside a town that now numbers around 1,000, in a house that sits in the middle of massive flat fields, with a dusting of snow highlighting picked over cabbage ears and corn stubble. We’ve been going through the old photographs. Her house—now sitting by itself between a catalpa and an oak—is kept company only by a small shed; but as you look back through the photos, there was once a corn crib, a barn, more trees, chicken coops, and smaller surrounding fields.

Once, a family could own a farm and earn a sufficient living from it. Then the farmers were obliged—carrot and stick—to take jobs at factories near Toledo. They were good union jobs—the carrot—and the farms were being priced out by the encroachment of big companies—the stick. Later on, field was joined to field as former farmers leased land to the guys who’d cornered the market with the conglomerates. Diversity of crops was lost, a few “farmers” made mountains of money, and the rest came to rely on the commuter jobs. “Right-to-work” laws and offshoring undercut the unions, and only the old folks (like my in-laws) still had decent pensions from the good old days of strong unions. A whole generation—minus the few who’d bought up thousands of acres and receive millions every year thanks to federal subsidies—abandoned the area, seeking their fortunes in the cities. Quite a few were left behind with nothing. All this was just one instantiation of a process that’s been in train going all the way back to the now mythologized fifties.

These cultural and concomitantly psychological transitions were coupled with the material and economic ones, each one enabling the other. This isn’t hard, certainly not original. But what escapes many (it escaped me when I was still wedded to those fantasies of control, i.e., the future and governmental redemptions) is that while the powerful, of every stripe, were in many ways nudging the process and certainly profiting from it, the more comprehensive reality was never under anyone’s control. Failure to grasp this—which has ever been true—can produce the ancillary hallucination that (I, we, our side, someone) can and will someday-somehow supplant the bad people in power and put everything right when we take up positions at the helm. And not just because (though this counts) those in power are always contending against others in power. The truth is actually pretty prosaic: there’s just far too much going on all the time for anyone ever to control. Reality submits neither to reduction nor control.

That doesn’t stop people pursuing power. The devil and desire are quite familiar with one another. The problem—also a constant in human societies, especially at the scale we now have—is that these attempts to redeem through control incite the most ghastly forms of suffering in the end.

Now, I know I’m going around the block on this thing, but there’s some context that needs having before I get to the more precise point.

Integralists, et al, I know where you’re coming from. I’ve seen your playbooks, studied them. I agree with you on much of what some of you have to say with regard to diagnoses. But you’re doing a Marx: somewhat accurately diagnosing social pathologies, using you clear-head, then letting your cloudy-head super-add these dangerous fantasies as a proposed treatment.

Your male-supremacist, throne-and-altar fantasies would frighten me with their fascist bass lines were it not for the fact that neither you nor anyone else can ever enact them. Your account of “tradition,” as the antidote to all you fear, is a dreary, neurotic manifestation of a kind of infantile anxiety about Others, which—dare I say it—is not Christian at all. More of a repurposed paranoid Constantinianism. When the Thomist-Aristotelian MacIntyre counterposed tradition to encyclopedia and genealogy as schools of philosophy, this was not—as has been reinterpreted by future-fantasists—the pinched, lifeless set of authoritarian propositions you’ve latched onto to drug away your fears. AMac’s tradition(s) are associated with and inseparable from practices—which have all changed. What’s doubly remarkable about all you who’ve girded your intellectual loins against a reified modernity is that you now defend a kind of cocooned nationalism as localism or even subsidiarity. This is a purely ideological emanation, one that gives a respectable gloss, in some cases—not all, to racial panics (re-coded as immigration—at least Vermeule advocated for more immigration, of Latin American Catholics, as a means of re-uniting throne and altar). It’s remarkable to me that people who can think as deeply, and with as much philosophical acumen, as many integralists and their reactionary non-Catholic accomplices, can so easily assimilate the central political artifact of the modernity which they claim to critique, even abhor—the nation-state. Put bluntly, the militarily-conceived nation-state is not in any way supportive of or representative of “localism.”

Globalism—however you mean that—appears to be the metric against which you plead on behalf of nationalism. The logic seems to be, if biggest is worstest, then preservation of the smaller is better—nations are smaller than the globe . . . something like that. And so you descend in a spiral from the heights of Thomas Aquinas to gross arithmetical abstractions, buttressed by xenophobic appeals to “culture.”

History, however, shows that the nation-state is the very institution which most earnestly annihilated local cultures. Prior to Napoleon’s imposition of public schools in “France,” there were more than 30 languages and dialects spoken within the national boundary. The development of an official language and grammar was a central part of his nationalizing project, an idea he’d inherited from Elio Antonio de Nebrija, who’d 300 years earlier tried to convince the antisemitic islamophobes, Ferdinand and Isabella, of the necessity of destroying local cultures (with grammar and linguistic centralization) to consolidate the nation. What is now Europe once contained more than a thousand languages, of which most inhabitants spoke at least two or three.

I’ve been a “localist” for some time, if that means advocating for “relocalization.” It’s a geographic/productive, not linguistic or cultural, idea. It means that, for purely ecologic and economic purposes, more and more production needs to scale down and move nearer to its points of consumption. Ecologic subsidiarity, if you like. Those of us who haven’t been caught up in anarcho-fantasies know that this would entail—were it to be enacted politically—the strong hand of a state committed to its own eventual disempowerment. To get anywhere, you always have to start from here. It also means—though I’m not at all optimistic here—there would have to be a global component. The climate-capitalism dialectic, as a most decisive example, does not and will not respect borders. Nor did Fukushima or Deepwater Horizon.

The fellow Catholics I’ve encountered who really-actually get this relocalization thing—without all the xenophobic (and too often, racial) baggage—are Catholic Workers.

When a few of you were quoting my worldly lodestar, Ivan Illich, I sat up and paid attention. It was during the Covid crisis, when some of his theses appeared prescient (and useful to you) with regard to the biopolitical actions (of nation-states!) of which you were (rightly, in my view) suspicious. You got there via Agamben (of all people), who’d claimed that Illich had arrived at “his hour of legibility.” What you overlooked—I can only surmise intentionally, these were all over everything he wrote—were his insights and critiques about institutionalization, the rituals of progress, and the perverse development of the liberal regime of scarcity growing directly out of Christendom from the clericalized Church. He was called onto the carpet by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for that, which must be terribly inconvenient for Catholic reactionaries who want to claim Illich. You’re not alone. For years, all manner of leftists wanted to claim Illich for themselves by cherry-picking his work while ignoring (or setting aside) the deeply Christological foundations upon which it rested.

Yes, I suspect you of just this kind of ideological opportunism. Please prove me wrong. Because we’ve been here, in case you’ve overlooked it. I would refer you to Augosto Del Noce—hardly a “progressive”—and his observations of the outcomes of the attraction fascism once held for paranoid Catholics. Start with The Crisis of Modernity, Chapter 4, “The Latent Metaphysics within Contemporary Politics.” Then find what you can of fellow Catholic Paul Virilio’s work on the state as “a logistical society.”

Virilio and Del Noce were people forged in and formed by wars. Virilio, in particular, saw clearly the nexus of war-state-and-technology, making him one thousand times more the valid critic of modernity that the integralists and rad-trads, whose main agenda seems to be the restoration of male domestic power to something approximating 1950 only without the female franchise. That is, these “critics of modernity” want to resurrect out of a lost past the period when late modernity began is its most metastatic growth spurt.

Tradition!? David Bentley Hart, writing in Tradition and Apocalypse, said:

[C]an an impartial historian really look at that unhouseled association of communitarian pacifists and social recusants that constituted the church of the apostolic era, and then look at the chain of historical events connecting it to the enfranchised and powerful institutions of imperial or national Christendom, and then honestly conclude that this story of continuous mutation manifests some kind of marvelous organic vitality or the real continuity of any kind of “living idea”? . . . If we are to trade in organic metaphors, we might to better to think of “tradition” by analogy to an evolving species rather than a single phenotype.

The Church is my home, just for the record, but it’s a big home with many fractious families and frequently dysfunctional parenting. Most of its members are, if at all, only dimly aware of these highfalutin disputations; and yet most would realize, from plain daily experience, that the reunification of throne and altar just isn’t going to happen. The attempt to manipulate them for political agendas hasn’t resulted in steps toward this dangerous fantasy; it’s taken the form (in my country) of brain-dead, jingo “Americanism” and people voting for Donald fucking Trump.

One small thing that encouraged my own passage over the Tiber was the fact that the Catholic parish was the only church in town that did NOT display an American flag in its sanctuary. (Another thing [not so small] was the day I was sitting in the sanctuary, and I saw a rough looking Latino character covered in scars and gang tats enter the little Our Lady of Guadalupe alcove, cross himself, and begin fervently praying.)

Many of the new converts today (in the US, I can’t speak for elsewhere) to both Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are attracted to the degree that they think these churches reflect their reactionary political assumptions . . . which is slowly changing the demographic composition of both. Just as the more sophisticated integralist-and-co-conspirator cohort, they see “religion” more as a brake on the libido dominandi and an adjunct to the capture and exercise of power. Which is a very long way from the Christ they claim to worship.

The devil came and took Jesus out into the desert. The Gospels call this devil the Satan, which means the tempter. And what the tempter invites him to do, ultimately, is to worship power, the powers, the powers of this world. Jesus replies to the tempter, “You shall worship God, not power”; and, with these words, the New Testament creates the cosmic atmosphere in which the Samaritan can step outside his culture, and the guardian spirits that watch his “we.” He can claim that even though, as a Samaritan, his “I” is the singular of a “we,” he can transcend this limitation and reach out to the Jew. In a certain way, he is superior to the most powerful demons, watchdogs, dragons, horrors, and menaces which, in the world before Jesus, guarded the “we.”

—Ivan Illich

Did you get that? Jesus and the whole incarnation’s affront to common-sense xenophobia was a scandal to this kind of parochial respectability.

As to your desire to impose dogma along the edge of a sword, this seems the natural denouement of any backward-looking political philosophy cum tactical theology; and I say this not as some paradoxically would-be future-builder like yourselves, but as a Christian whose horizon—I learned at the knee of my friend Stanley Hauerwas—is eschatological. You might want to fix your eyes, instead of on power, on the parousia as final cause, a teleology that pulls with a call, not pushes with a truncheon. That promise—of a new sky and a new earth where he [not you] will wipe away every tear—renders moot your dangerously unattainable appetite for control.

Christians are called from this horizon, not force marched into its counterfeit by dragoons.

I had an old commander in the Army who liked to say, “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.” You can’t return to a (mythologized) past, when its material, relational, and semiotic substrates have disappeared.

And your national “cultures”? Ha!

^^^This is localism?