Who are you?

We’re a group of young Catholics in the United States and the United Kingdom (with friends further afield than that)

What are you doing?

We’re trying to live out our baptismal vocation as disciples of Christ and children of the living God.

Why personalism? Why “new”?

The original personalists were a movement of intellectuals and activists in interwar France who responded to the crises of their age with an assertion of the value and significance of the human person. They saw themselves as working in opposition to philosophies which dismissed the individual in favor of the state or nation, and systems  which reduced individuals to economic, political and social atoms.

One reason they took the name 'personalist' was - whilst they didn't deny individuals had material needs and interests - they recognised we want, and deserve, much more than that. Our capacity for transcendence, expressed in art and virtue, friendship and self-sacrificial love, was, for the personalists, what made us fully human. We’re spirit as well as flesh.

These commitments brought the personalists into conflict with the prevailing social order: “capitalistic in structure, liberal in its ideology, bourgeois in its ethics”. Working for the “spiritual revolution” was one with the struggle for self- transcendence. But Personalism wasn’t an ideology or a theoretical system: it emerged, one participant wrote: “from the comradeship of the road rather than the diagrams of the classroom”. It was less a philosophy than it was a way of life.

We don’t think the first personalist movement had all the right answers. But we do think they asked many of the right questions. We start, as one of our inspirations once wrote, “not from new beginnings, but from interrupted paths”.

So you’re opposed to capitalism?

We’re opposed to capitalism, and the contemporary form capitalism takes: the bureaucratic synthesis of state and market we call Leviathan. This system isn’t just about who owns property, or even who manages it, but the warped social relations of a world organized around acquisition, ordered by force, and divided into those who give orders and those who obey them

In this system, as Marx put it, human community – the human person itself - is a means, not an end. The result is social injustice, ecological destruction, the debasement and fragmentation of the self. Capitalism is both spiritually corrupt and spiritually corrupting: it makes, as Jacques Maritain said, “the definition of mortal sin” – the pursuit of material things – “the general attitude of civilization.

We believe more is possible than this. We believe people can and should organize their own lives and those of their communities – in our homes, our workplaces, our public squares - around our needs, not those of the system. We believe it’s possible for our relations to each other and the world around us to be characterized by fraternal love instead of violence.

We believe the kind of society those relations would create would have to break not only with the world we live in but with that world’s values: atomized, materialistic, self-interested and self-deceiving. We’re not just worth more than what we’re given by the system. We are more. To transform the world around us we need to transform ourselves: living as free people, we’ll discover what it means to be free.

This transformation, already invisibly present around us, isn’t the inevitable outgrowth of material conditions but their overcoming: an attack on reality from somewhere the market and the state can't touch and won't ever understand. Justice, to give people what they deserve, is, in our world, a synonym for revolution. And the revolution will be spiritual, or it won’t be.

So you’re an organization?

No. We’re not opposed to becoming one, but organizations can’t exist to exist: they need to have a practical aim and clear means to achieve it. We know what we want; we don’t, at present, know how we’re going to get there, still less the intermediary steps of our journey.

So we’re not publishing a manifesto or a programme, recruiting a membership or setting out demands. We’re calling ourselves a movement because we think that’s what we have: a direction of travel, a line of thought and practical activity we want to follow wherever it leads.

We have everything still to learn.

What do you want to do?

We want to think together. That means reading and writing and the discussions Peter Maurin called clarification of thought. It begins with retrieving thinkers – some past, some contemporary – who we think began the intellectual work we want to continue. 

Many of these will be Christian – the influence of the Catholic Worker movement is, to take one example, hard to overstate. But many won’t be. The spirit blows where it wills, and one of New Personalism’s central assertions is that parts of the revolutionary movement and parts of the Church, speaking very different languages, have ended up saying very similar things.

And we want to act together. That means finding and pursuing the kinds of practice that will allow us to intervene effectively in the conflicts of the world around us. What that action is will depend on what those conflicts are, and where we find ourselves within them, and what our resources are. But we can give the form of that action a word: friendship.

Action isn’t a subordinate part of the project: we launched with an inperson event for that reason. We want to base our work on what useful and coherent interventions in the struggles around us we can make. What we will do in future depends on what the future holds. And on ourselves.

We want to, where we can, create the kind of in-person relationships that can express and develop our intellectual commitments. That includes, for the moment, prayer and a common meal in New York and London, and we’d like to start in-person or online study groups. That depends on what we can do, and what people are interested in doing.

We’re prepared for things to go badly, or not get going at all: this is a project we want to measure in years, not months. We don’t know how that’s going to look. What we do know is that both thought and action have to rest on a foundation of prayer. We’re in a spiritual struggle. We should behave accordingly .

To what am I committing myself by joining you?

To life.

AN INVITATION

To the persecuted, the insulted, the excluded, the poor. To those who refuse war, who refuse comfort, who refuse to betray others, to those who refuse to betray themselves; to those who persevere. To those who hunger and thirst after everything this world cannot give. To those who love:

The New Personalist Movement is for you.

+ OREMUS +