Interview with Mark Lilla

on Adversaries, Berlin vs Rawls, Anti-Moderns, Political Theology, Indifference vs Ignorance, and the Two Faces of the New Right

This is the original version of an interview I conducted with Mark Lilla in July 2024. It was published in portuguese at Não É Imprensa at the time, but I thought it would be a good idea to share it here in English. I tried to focus on Lilla’s work rather than (at the time) current political issues, so I believe the interview remains pertinent more than a year and a half later. Still, I cut some of the questions (on Trump vs Biden, for instance) that just don’t seem relevant now.

You have dedicated much of your intellectual energy to engaging with thinkers and ideas you fundamentally disagree with. What drives this approach, and what have you gained from it?

What a good way to begin an interview! You are absolutely right that I am drawn to my adversaries, and I of course feel obliged to say that “we must always try to learn from those who disagree with us.” So much for the cliché.

But for me it is more than that. What is exciting and challenging about studying those whose ideas I find alien is that they force me to articulate my own views to myself and to find the reasons – rational, empirical, psychological – why I hold them. It forces me to confront myself, which is hard – much harder than writing promotional literature for “my favorite authors,” which feels like going to the gym and lifting only one pound weights. It doesn’t make me stronger. Whenever I’m asked to do write hagiography I find myself bored and at a loss for words.

I do admire those who can sit down with a blank piece of paper and just start developing an argument, without an explicit adversary. I’m not like that. I need provocations to engage my passions as well as my mind. If a blank piece of paper was placed before me I would be tempted to begin with On the contrary…

In a previous interview, you mentioned that one “learns infinitely more about politics by reading Isaiah Berlin than by reading John Rawls.” Could you elaborate on this? What do you see as the limitations of analytical political theory?

I was once at a conference on Berlin at Oxford and heard a very impassioned presentation by Jeremy Waldron [or you can say an American law professor] who couldn’t quite see the point of reading Berlin. The most pressing issue in politics is justice and Berlin offered no help in thinking systematically about it, he said, unlike Rawls. Berlin was just a very cultured chatterbox.

This was in 2013 when the main international news concerned radical Islamism, the war against ISIS, and the strange phenomena of young non-Muslim Westerners leaving their homes and joining the fight to reestablish the califate. And so I responded to the presentation by asking the audience who would enlighten them more about this extraordinary development: Berlin or Rawls? Of course, Berlin. Many heads nodded.

Berlin’s great subject was, in a way, political psychology, not political philosophy in the contemporary sense. In his essays, and in particular his profiles of political thinkers and actors, we get a window into how the mind is driven by ideological passions and community feeling (particularly for Jews). The turn in academic political theory toward Kant-inspire moral theory over the past 50 years, which Rawls helped lead, meant that political psychology as a subject of study was left by the wayside. So while Rawls might help one get straight one’s moral ideas and commitments, he does not at all help one understand the nature of politics as a social activity undertaken by psychologically complex human beings.

In your first book, G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, you challenge the interpretation – endorsed by thinkers you admire such as Isaiah Berlin – of Vico as a precursor to modernist and Enlightenment social science. Instead, you argue that Vico was the first European thinker to present a profoundly anti-modern political theory under the guise of modern social science. Do you see this pattern of presenting anti-modern ideas within a modern framework in other reactionary thinkers as well?

Absolutely. I’m even more convinced of that now than when I wrote my book, when I hadn’t learned enough about the varieties of political reaction. A good example is the development of French social science in the 19^th century from Saint-Simon to Auguste Comte, and including the half-mad Charles Fourier. For all three, the point of social science was to build and maintain a new social cohesion after that of the ancien régime was destroyed by the Revolution – which they all welcomed. So they were not backward-looking reactionaries; they believed in progress. But they rejected modern individualism and worried about the decline of religion. Comte in particular believed in the need for a new “religion of man” and developed elaborate rituals and even religious calendars with saint days that would substitute for those of the Catholic Church. He even turned his chaste companion Clotilde de Vaux into a Virgin Mary figure to be venerated. Chapels were built to practice this religion around the world and many still exist.

Your work has consistently explored the intersection of politics and religion, culminating in The Stillborn God. There, you argue that the “Great Separation” of politics and religion was neither inevitable nor ever complete. Given the rise of postliberal and integralist movements – in the United States but also in Europe – do you believe political theology is poised for a significant revival?

If we are to believe its proponents, political theology already has been revived at the fringes of contemporary intellectual life by neo-Catholics of various sorts in the US, Austria, Britain, and elsewhere. But what is the relation between this development and the pre-modern political theologies of the Catholic Church and the Reformation? The latter were inspired by a revelation and faith in that revelation. What we see today strikes me as more inspired by a belief in the human need for religion to hold back the forces of modernity – in other words, by the same reactionary impulse that inspired the French figures I just mentioned. That is why I don’t expect neo-integralism to leave a lasting mark on Western political and religious thought, though the reactionary impulse behind it may. A genuine revival of belief in Christian revelation is the necessary but insufficient condition of a revival of genuine Christian political theology.

One of your recent essays is called On Indifference. The views you express there seem to contrast with those of your forthcoming book, which will be published in Brazil, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know. There you criticize the will to ignorance and nostalgia for an “age of innocence,” and instead praise the value of knowing and confronting the truth. Why should we be more indifferent? How is being indifferent distinct from being willingly ignorant?

I’m glad you asked this question because it reveals an ambiguity in my recent writings that I should clarify.

To begin, my forthcoming book is really an exploration of the psycho-dynamics of our competing wills to know and not to know the truth. There is a difference between lacking a will to know something and having an active will not to know something. I am indifferent to knowing how barometric pressure is calculated; it doesn’t impinge on my life or interests. But I actively do not want to know what every person thinks of me at every moment of the day. Imagine we all had LED screens on our foreheads that showed what we were thinking. Meeting other people would be a new kind of hell.

That example shows that some wanting-not-to-know is beneficent. You remember the story “El Curioso Impertinente” in Don Quixote, about a man who ruins his marriage by going to extreme ends to determine if she is faithful to him? There are many situations like that in life. So Ignorance and Bliss is neither an unmitigated attack on the will to ignorance, nor an unmitigated defense of curiosity. I hope you’ll read it.

But the indifference I discuss in my essay “On Indifference” is something altogether different. What is at stake is to what degree particular things – or even everything – should matter to us. The issue first comes up in medieval Christian theology: does every one of our actions have a moral valence for God, or do only some? A classic, intentionally absurd, example discussed back then was whether unconsciously scratching one’s beard had to be judged to be either a virtue or a sin; tertium non datur. Extrapolating out, the important implication of the question was whether there are areas of human activity which are outside of God’s judgment, that are indifferent to Him.

The reason I wrote about this subject, as the reader eventually discovers, is to address the moral pressure that exists in the United States, and especially since the “racial reckoning” that began in 2020, to take a position – and perhaps even take action – on every political issue. This is an old problem in American society, due to the secularization of Puritan moral rigorism in our public discourse. Political correctness, in its North American version, arises out of this rigorism. It presumes that every issue is moral (or, as we say today, political), that one’s position reflects one’s inner worth, and that those who fail to accept the consensus of the moment must be denounced and even banished.

This rigorism, which may be waning a little, can infect everything. But it is especially corrosive in the arts, especially the visual arts, where “virtue signaling” has come to replace the search to find and express a personal vision. And so I wanted to defend the individual’s right, and the artists need, to not have a position on everything. To so say, with Bartleby the Scrivener, that I prefer not to. We all need more space and air to breathe today.

In your most recent essay, The Tower and the Sewer, you quite tellingly begin your analysis of the postliberal and integralist American movement in France. How do you see the future of the French far-right?

Another interesting question that reveals a basic distinction between two kinds of right-wing movements out there today. The NR (Rassemblement National) represents a movement w/o a clear ideology. It expresses a mass of grievances — immigration, elite domination — that are not connected by any discernible principle, apart from la patrie, it simply gives voice to le peuple at this point in time. It is also carries with it a historical and sociological legacy connected with Vichy, Algeria, and the personality of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Marine Le Pen has been working to “de-diabolize” the party by purging from it the elements related to that legacy, particularly anti-semitism. But without that legacy, the party really has no foundation. And I actually think that is an advantage: without a developed ideology there is one les barrier to becoming a more “normal” right party. Not that this is guaranteed.

The second kind movement is driven by ideology — and for just that reason has trouble transforming itself into a major party because it finds it harder to compromise. There is also always competition among ideological leaders to determine who is more pure. You see that today in the left wing New Popular Front in France, which is held together by little more than a common adversary (the RN), a little string and Scotch tape.

Eric Zemmour has just tried to create an ideologically pure party on the right, Reconquête, but it has almost no followers. There is a Catholic post-liberal movement, influential in journalism in particular, but they too cannot extend their reach beyond the faithful, and they have no standard bearer.

This, I believe, is the situation right-wing movements everywhere will find themselves in the near future. Only in heavily Catholic Poland could a right wing party like Law and Justice develop, which is essentially populist but can also draw on religious symbolism. Elsewhere, the more ideological pure the movements, the less likely they will be to govern; that leaves the field open to populist parties that lack a foundation but could potentially be co-opted by the democratic system.