Radical Orthodoxy

Philip Blond is a leader in the Christian intellectual movement called Radical Orthodoxy -- which, nota bene, doesn't have anything to do with Eastern Orthodox Christianity (well, nothing particular, anyway, though I can see very definite sympathies). The Centre of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Nottingham is, it seems, ground zero for Radical Orthodoxy, though I understand Cambridge University is also an outpost.

Giles Fraser recently had lunch with Blond, and describes his philosophy thus:

At the heart of Dr Blond's political philosophy is an attack on liberalism, which, he argues, eats away at the common good. In pro­mot­ing freedom and the rights of the individual as a means of warding off tyranny, liberal freedom ushered in an era of relativism that undermined any sense of values held in common. Liberalism won its battles at the expense of the old-fashioned type of communal solidarity that people remember when they speak fondly of the war years. Liberalism replaced com­munal values with empty atom­ised individualism, Dr Blond insists.

Behind this Red Toryism is the unmistakable hand of the theological movement Radical Orthodoxy, associated with people such as John Milbank and Rowan Williams. Dr Blond was a founder member, a former theology lecturer and com­mitted Anglican. Like other members of Radical Orthodoxy, he was influenced by its compelling com­bination of modern communitarian­ism and much older Catholic social theology.

John Milbank, the founder of the Radical Orthodoxy movement, encapsulates its political insights in a 2008 letter to the Guardian, in which he observes that New Labour is willing to sell out to free-market fundamentalism, in exchange for extending the sexual revolution and empowering science to do whatever it wants. Here's the letter:

Jackie Ashley (This fight really matters, May 19) reveals the bizarre bankruptcy of the current British left. By every traditional radical criterion New Labour has failed: it has presided over a large increase in economic inequality and an entrenchment of poverty, while it has actively promoted the destruction of civil rights, authoritarian interference in education and medicine, and an excessively punitive approach to crime. But never mind all that, says Jackie Ashley and her ilk: on what crucially matters - the extending of supposed biosexual freedom and the licensing of Faustian excesses of science - it is on the side of "progress".

Yet it is arguably just this construal of left versus right which is most novel and questionable. Is it really so obvious that permitting children to be born without fathers is progressive, or even liberal and feminist? Behind the media facade, more subtle debates over these sorts of issue do not necessarily follow obvious political or religious versus secular divides. The reality is that, after the sell-out to extreme capitalism, the left seeks ideological alibis in the shape of hostility to religion, to the family, to high culture and to the role of principled elites.

An older left had more sense of the qualified goods of these things and the way they can work to allow a greater economic equality and the democratisation of excellence. Now many of us are beginning to realise that old socialists should talk with traditionalist Tories. In the face of the secret alliance of cultural with economic liberalism, we need now to invent a new sort of politics which links egalitarianism to the pursuit of objective values and virtues: a "traditionalist socialism" or a "red Toryism". After all, what counts as radical is not the new, but the good.

What counts as radical is not the new, but the good. I couldn't have said it more clearly myself.

In a First Things essay nine years ago, Rusty Reno explained the theological and philosophical significance of Radical Orthodoxy. But a writer at the UK conservative mag Standpoint says Red Toryism is nothing but warmed-over compassionate conservatism.

Anybody know anything about Radical Orthodoxy, and care to enlighten the rest of us? I'm all ears. Any Radical Orthodox in Cambridge reading this blog? Contact me, and I'll stand you a pint when I'm in town in early June.

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