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March 18, 2004
The disposal of romanticism as an irrational subjective aestheticism clears the pathway for Schmitt to introduce Roman Catholicism as a way out of the form/content dualism of modernity.
Roman Catholicism addresses the meaningless of a secular (Protestant) liberalism by providing normative guidance for human life. Hence it is a thinking otherwise to the value neutrality of a economic/technical thinking that is normatively contentless.
This move would be seen as very attactive in Australia. Many Catholics of my acquaintance remain with Catholicism because ot its substantive ethics. It provides them with an ethical framewok from which they can judge everyday life in a secular world. They tacitly accept that an economics, which that shapes policy and action in the public sphere, is a positivist science. Hence it is weak in terms of ethics.
What ethics there is an individual one that based on human emotions or desires. The ethical language is seen to be emptied out of substantive content, and it offers little by way of guidance to live one's life or make judgements about the goodness or badness of public policies.
The ethics of Roman Catholicism are consistently rejected by those who shape public policy in our political institutions---the church should not interfer in public life. Often the Catholic values are collapsed into "traditional values"; and are roughly dismissed by liberals within our political institutions as irrelevant and dangerous. They question the liberal way of way which is assumed to be good.
What is not questioned in such knee-jerk responses is the ethical vacuity within liberalism in its current form as an economic/technical reason.
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