Vermeule

Oops, I meant to add: By which I mean, that maybe he was always this way, but was feigning moderation and sanity because he thought it was necessary to be taken seriously.

He was a “reasonable” conservative who published with people like Sunstein and Eric Posner (Posner the Younger.) But, as noted, he converted to Catholicism and, like many adult converts, he’s “more Catholic than the pope” now. Lots of adult converts to any religion, it seems, are undergoing a sort of personal or mental crisis, and latch on to extreme forms of the belief. I don’t know his personal story at all, but I would be surprised if it wasn’t largely banal, and would be of interest only to him, if he were not an “important” person (for some value of “important” ) advocating theocracy. It’s not like any of the arguments are any good.

What CM said. And I know several Catholic artists and intellectuals who support DT and have announced their views in past four years. As the spouse of one said about her husband: “there’s an almost desperate need for certainty there…” Instead they get chaos.

Oh the old story: new convert to “tradition”-based religion has a massive fetish for “traditions” as such and thus goes for the most extreme anti-everyone-else version they can imagine. See also: Robert Sungenis, champion of geocentrism against Galileo.

Yawn. The most extreme ones are sometimes coming in from a “far Left” angle and bring the old mentality with them.

This is the great advantage of being born in to RCism: all these lost boys have been haunted all their lives by this idea that it would all make sense if they were in a big proper institutionalised religion, not any wishy-washy liberal stuff. And those of us who start here already know that’s not true. At least not if you’re bothered about all the modern stuff about “meaning” and “identity” and drivel like Kierkegaard… that was never what it was about, and you’re not going to find those “answers” in the medievals any more than analytic philosophy.

I think Murthy has it nailed on the head…

The story I have heard (perhaps wrong) is that he had a genuine conversion experience. The couple of times I met him before the change he seemed to me to be a decent, intelligent right of center thinker, but that is certainly not his public persona these days (can’t speak to how he is in private). This has some more on his intellectual transition.

I mean – this – https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/nudging-towards-theocracy

But I read his book on administrative law, “Law’s Abnegation.” And I think it’s very useful for anyone thinking about what kind of government we actually need if we’re to tackle climate change in any serious way. And he correctly puts the lie to the idea of the “separation of powers” – every judge makes policy, every policy-maker applies law. Maybe he wrote it as part of a grand plot to appoint theocrats into government. But I wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. You know, sort of like how we deal with Schmitt.

I was not aware of Vermule until I read his recent piece in the Atlantic. Truly bizarre. I can’t imagine the author teaching constitutional law when his current view seems to reject any teachable method of constitutional analysis. Apparently when Vermule was hired by Harvard he was a fairly standard scholar of administrative law. The upside is that Vermule’s theocratic “it’s all for the greater good” scheme offends so many interests it’s unlikely to go beyond being his hobbyhorse. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/

Thanks for the multiple links to the Dissent article. Should I read that guy’s book? (James Chappel, Catholic Modern)

Mister Mr @ 5: First Things has been consistently publishing pieces that oppose current Vatican doctrine on capital punishment.

Bushels said; ” … late conversion to Catholicism would require a lightning-bolt-to-the-head level of cognitive and evaluative change for the convert.”

Looks like a case study for “Delving into the most recent work on decision theory, the nature of consciousness, and philosophy of mind, Laurie Paul has developed an account of those threshold moments where life is sure to change forever ”
https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/philosopherszone/crossing-the-threshold/6442880

And as my Master in Religious Ed catholic since 6yrs old greens voter friend would say “there are 2,000+ types of Christians”. So only 1,000 to convert for him to dominate.

What struck me most reading the death penalty article was its airy dismissal of a nonconsequentialist approach to thinking about state punitive killing, based on arguments about the act/omission distinction that simply assumed out of existence the possibility of principled nonconsequentialism. I have wondered whether Vermeule’s conversion means that he no longer adheres to this casual instrumentalism about human persons, which (whatever else you might say about its many faults) Catholic moral theory emphatically rejects. I hope it does mean that.

Vermeule sees no viable middle course between atheism and Catholicism.

I don’t suppose Vermeule would go so far as to deny the existence of Islam, Hinduism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism, and so on; so what does he mean by denying that they are ‘viable’? It’s a curious way of expressing oneself; less curious if the purpose is not to express one’s meaning but to disguise it.

Naturally I expect Catholics to dismiss all those other alternatives as false/incorrect/inaccurate, but I expect them to dismiss atheism in the same way. That’s only sense: when there are different positions which are mutually exclusive, to affirm one is to deny the others. I’m an atheist myself, and that means I think believers, including Catholics, are mistaken (as I was myself when I was a believer); but I wouldn’t say there’s my (atheist) position, one other viable position, and then a lot of other positions which are non-viable. I understand that Vermeule, as a Catholic, rejects my own atheist position; but I don’t understand what he means by considering it to have a viability that all the other non-Catholic positions don’t have. The word ‘viable’ seems out of place in this context.

Slightly tangential, but I’m reminded of a passage from an early Julian Barnes novel, Staring at the Sun:

“The mind longs for certainty, and perhaps it longs most of all for a certainty which clubs it down. What the mind can understand, what it can ploddingly prove and approve, might be what it must despises. It longs to be attackec from behind, in a dark street, certainty a knife at the throat.”

In the modern world, religion is an institution that’s critical of society without being responsible for changing it (as such, admirable enough, and not to disparage its other purposes) and at worst, a way of garnering power for individuals and points of view that would otherwise be too weak to dominate (and may or may not have some specifically “religious” character). The idea seems to be that by making religion responsible for the whole shebang, it would magically change into an ideal version of both religion and society combined.

Since that would be quite different from what even most religious people today believe in, they’d have to be suppressed, bought off, or permitted to rage against scapegoats, it seems to me. (I leave off reeducation as that seems to be the one thing religious reactionaries distance themselves from.) Maybe VR can be used for the purpose.

I think that this is just the sort of thing we saw back during the Dubya debacle, where various right-wingers assumed that they’d be dominant forever, and wove theories of Republican Monarchy.

I finally finished the article on Vermeule linked in the OP, and have to admit I find its thesis unconvincing, though typical enough among certain of the very online crowd: Catholics blaming ultra-Catholics on liberals and other assorted non-Catholics, could be said to be an especially bad look. Though I suppose the concession that he’s only against certain unnamed “technocrats” and not “liberalism” properly understood makes a difference.

One question looming in the background of all this: who adjudicates the truth or falsity of claims to membership in a particular religious group?

Census-takers and other demographers accept self-identification because what else are they going to do?

An opposing view is that it is quite possible for people, even large numbers of people, to be mistaken in the belief that they are Catholics, and the Church has a strong claim (even without resort to any supernatural authority) to authority on such a question. Maybe it’s too polite to say so, or it’s busy with more pressing matters, but it seems to me the RC Church should call out born-again Republican Catholics as the heretics and apostates that they are.

The official position of the (Roman) Catholic Church itself is that even people who have been excommunicated are still members of the church; baptism makes somebody a member of the church and its effects are irreversible. From that point of view, what you’ve got are not large numbers of people who aren’t part of the Catholic Church but think they are; what you’ve got are large numbers of people who are part of the Catholic Church but think they aren’t.

P.s. Apologies for the typos in my above comment. Typing too quickly.

@J-D 38

The problem is that catholicism differs from other Christian groups because, historically, it insisted on the preeminence of church interpretation of doctrine above personal interpretation of the scriptures, and more recently came out with the dogma of papal infallibility when the pope speaks ex cathedra, both based on the idea that the Holy Ghost directly speaks through them.

Peole who are baptized but disagree with this are still part of the church, but do not hold catholic beliefs.

So while in some sense we can say that V. Is more catholic than the pope, in official catholic doctrine that V says he adopts he actually isn’t.

If I can make a parallel with socialism, both Kautsky and Stalin said they were Marxist, and in my view Kautsky was way more orthodox than Lenin or Stalin, so how comes that when we speak of marxism Lenin and Stalin are taken as examples of marxism while Kautsky is not and is in facts often described as a social democrat?

How comes that V is described as an extremist catholics and not as a pretend catholic?

My opinion is that this happens because morality is a social thing, so moral systems will generally create an ingroup – outgroup distinction, and those who are more aggressive against the outgroup are taken as more fervent believers.

But I think that being more aggressive against outgroups is more a psychological attitude than something that depends on the specific faith /ideology, so I think we should reject the idea that V. is more catholic than others, or that Stalin was more marxist than Kautsky.