Ross Douthat: belief

Transcript context

…— that also is unacceptable to you. That would lead you to Mormonism, or something else. What makes that intermediate position so compelling to you? And is it in some way an underlying feature of how you think about politics? [laughs] I’ve never been asked that question. [laughter] I suppose that I’m drawn to the idea that the truth about human existence lies in what can seem like paradoxical formulations, and this is of course very Catholic in certain ways. Certainly a G. K. Chestertonian idea, so I’m just stealing it from other people. But the idea that various heresies of Christianity, Calvinism included — with apologies to my Calvinist friends — tend to take one particular element of you that’s supposed to be in synthesis and possibly in tension, and run with it. And therefore the truth about things lies in a place that may seem slightly contradictory. And I think this is borne out in many ways in everyday experience. This both-and experience of human existence. The idea that you can’t split up grace and works in any kind of meaningful way. It’s connected to larger facts about the nature of human existence. The tension between determinism and free will that persists in any philosophical system. You can get rid of God and stop having these Jansenist Jesuit arguments about predestination and so on, but you’re still stuck with the free will–determinism debate. That debate doesn’t go away. So, yeah, there’s a point at the intersection of different ideas that is as close to the truth as our limited minds can get and in Christian thought, we call that point orthodoxy. Now, how that is connected to my political views is a really good question. I think that a lot of the time, in politics, I suppose, I am — in certain areas of our politics, I’m looking for that point, I guess you could say. But that’s mostly true in . . . No, I guess it’s true in a lot of places. I think that the solution to . . . (maybe now we’re into more Hegelian territory rather than Christian territory), but there’s a solution to a lot of problems in some as-yet-uncertain synthesis. So I write a lot about social conservatism and abortion and feminism, and these kind of issues. And I do think that somewhere out there, in that zone of argument, there is a synthesis of the best social conservative ideas and the best feminist insights that I personally haven’t been able to grasp yet, and probably I’m not necessarily equipped to do so, and also that our society as a whole hasn’t grasped, but that that is where the actual truth lies. And you can distill it in certain slogan-ready ways, like saying, “Well, you need a more feminist pro-life movement,” or something like that. And those slogans only get you partway there. But I do think that that idea of synthesis is somewhat important to the somewhat speculative political writing that I do. But, as you know, there’s a tendency within Catholicism to try to use Hegelian arguments to push a very liberal version of Catholicism. “Well, this thing is going to keep on evolving, there’s no end to the process” — so we can get away from your idea of Catholicism as spanning the generations — as something continuous and unified. Are you worried you’ll become too Hegelian, or are you not yet Hegelian enough?…

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