Credo

Jim Kalb still has his site Turnabout where he posts his activities on other websites and publications.

Here is the credo he posted at Turnabout, I assume around 2003 from the comments it generated.

Turnabout is:

- Antimodernist, and rejects the stripped-down understanding of knowledge, reason and reality that has led to the current intellectual, social, and spiritual dead end,
- Hierarchical, and accepts that man is a composite being—free and bound, individual and social, physical and spiritual—and each aspect of what he is must be given weight within an ordered whole.
- Traditionalist, and views particular attachments, the development of social habit, and informal refinement and transmission of past acquisitions as essential to a reliable understanding of almost anything,
- Catholic, and accepts the authority, sacraments, and teaching of the Church as an ultimate reference point.

We recognize that the great enemy today of Catholicism, a tolerable human existence, and even reason itself is a technocratic view of man and society. That view takes human desire, know-how, and purely formal—and therefore empty—concepts like equality as its final standards. It rules out all thought of a precedent order of things that is given by God, nature, or culture, and so must be respected. The “dignity of the individual” becomes identified with an equal right to the satisfaction of desire, and everything becomes a means to that end.

The technocratic outlook thus aims at comprehensive transformation of human life on simple principles. Equality, rationality, and efficiency become the highest goals. Traditional distinctions and standards are done away with in favor of universal technically-rational organization designed to secure the equal satisfaction of desire.

The self-contained perfection to which the outlook aspires demands that all things be subordinated to a universal administrative scheme that pervades and controls everything. The creation of such a system, and the abolition of principles of order not based solely on human will and formal rationality (for example, the particularities of religion, historical community and sex), become overriding political goals.

The attempt to establish such a system leads to self-seeking hedonism, politically-correct bureaucratic tyranny, and in the end utter irrationality due to its inability to recognize any principle of order or judgment outside itself. To avoid such an outcome, renewed emphasis is needed on man’s transcendent setting, on the natural basis of human life, and on the relative mutual autonomy of the various spheres of life.

The good life is possible only with the aid of the principles of well-ordered freedom, which Catholics sometimes call subsidiarity—limited government, decentralization, tradition, and public recognition of transcendent religious authority. Catholics should therefore promote those principles, and reject whatever fundamentally opposes them: liberalism, the welfare state, “human rights” as now understood, radical secularism, and contemporary ideologies such as feminism and inclusiveness.

By taking such a position. we put ourselves at odds with the functionaries and apologists of the technocratic order: the experts, educators, academics, lawyers, bureaucrats and media people who provide and make authoritative the asserted facts, concepts, and principles that order relies on.

Turnabout will develop facts and arguments relating to these issues and propose considerations relevant to their understanding. Criticism and debate is of course welcome—there’s nothing necessarily correct about what any of us say, and what’s worthwhile in it can only become apparent if it’s questioned and tested. I hope you join us!