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Vice President JD Vance told Bishop Robert Barron that his conversion to Catholicism has helped him with the challenge as a political leader to support balanced policies that acknowledge the existence of the problems associated with poverty but create solutions “through cooperation as opposed to conflict.”
Vance, the author of the newly released Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, appeared as a guest on Bishop Barron Presents: Conversations at the Crossroads, in an episode that aired on Friday.
Soon into the start of the interview, Barron, bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester in Minnesota, and the founder of international evangelization ministry Word on Fire, and Vance pointed to social media’s viral nature as a hotbed of conflict.
The two agreed social media has become an example of “mimetic desire,” a concept developed by twentieth-century French anthropologist René Girard.
Girard saw that human desire is not individual, but collective, or social – a state that has led to conflict and violence throughout human history.
Barron and Vance say Girard may be the “great prophet of our time.”
Mimetic theory moves through a four-stage process:
“He is certainly the prophet of social media because the thing about mimetic desire… this idea that we identify what we want based on what other people want, and once you see it, like you said, it’s very hard to unsee it,” Vance said, using his own children as an example of how mimetic desire works and, then, applying the principle to the arrival of social media:
I have a nine-year-old, I have a six-year-old, I have a four-year-old. To see it with children is unbelievable. Like my nine-year-old will pick up a toy that none of the kids has played with in six months, and instantly all of them want that toy. Again, it is such a powerful explanation of human psychology. But here’s the thing: in a normal society, pre-social media, right? This takes time, right? Like mimetic desire happens through normal social interactions. You see what somebody else is focused on. You see what somebody else cares about. But social media has sort of taken this and supercharged it. It can spread like wildfire, and so you see what other people are talking about, what other people are thinking, what other people are desiring much more quickly because the virality of social media puts it in front of you at such a quick speed, and so again, because it sets that desire aflame and makes it spread so rapidly, it also makes the conflict side of it spread so rapidly.
The vice president observed how he has seen otherwise “really lovely” people engage in extremely hurtful arguments on social media.
“Like, how did we even get here?” he asks.
Vance said while the “social element” to human beings “can very often lead to virtue,” it must still “be ordered in the right way.”
“And so, you know, if let’s say you take two politicians who both are trying to achieve the common good, now that can lead to them working together, them recognizing their respective strengths and weaknesses, and actually trying to sort of do that together,” he said. “That could also lead to well, if we both want the same common good, and then we both, let’s say, we both want the same office in order to get to that common good, then that leads to rivalry again for rivalry’s sake.”
As a Catholic politician, Vance says “you constantly have to be on guard” that you’re not engaging in “rivalry for rivalry’s sake.”
“And recognize that something that is good in you can be ordered to something very positive, but can also be distorted,” he added, noting that even if “you just get a little off pace, it can become quite malicious very quickly.”
“It can turn like that,” Barron chimed in. “It’s a subtle thing, which is why you need prayer and spiritual direction a lot in your life. Because you can be going on this path: ‘I’m on the magnanimous path. I’m just seeking,’ but not realizing “you actually took a turn a while ago.”
“Look at mimetic rivalry breaking out,” the bishop continued. “Then you know you’ve deviated from the right path.”
Turning to how he has applied Catholic teaching to political life, Vance cited Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (May, 1891), the fundamental text of Catholic social teaching.
“I was compelled by the fact that it was trying to strike a balance, and in some ways was very prophetic,” the vice president said.
“I mean, when Rerum Novarum was written, you didn’t know where the industrialization trend was going,” he explained. “You couldn’t have possibly seen communism, fascism – all these things rising up,” but Leo XIII was obviously “worried about the tumult, and he’s very worried that if we don’t strike the right balance between human dignity and prosperity, between workers and capital owners, that it’s going to inevitably lead to this conflict.”
Vance asserted that the issue of abortion, for example, has grown totally distorted and out of “balance” when left-wing politicians are heard making claims such as, “Well, abortion is really good because if you didn’t have abortion, then you’d have way too many women who weren’t able to join the workforce.”
“Wait, wait, wait a second,” the vice president protested. “If that’s our argument here, our argument is that it’s good because it allows people to join the workforce? Then, we’ve made an idol out of the American corporation. We’ve made an idol out of economic growth, and again, that is what I think is a deeply anti-Christian idea because the economy exists to serve the human person. We don’t order our society so that we have a line on a chart go up, and if you do, then it leads to a lot of absurd outcomes.”
Discovering that Rerum Novarum was profound simply because it recognized “that the balance really mattered,” Vance noted that while Karl Marx pushed the idea that the classes must ultimately be in conflict with each other, and libertarian and free market economists denied the existence of any conflict at all, Rerum Novarum asserted that while conflict does indeed occur, “the way to solve the conflict is by cooperating between these different sorts of segments of society,” he explained.
“And what a statesman should be doing – what somebody who’s focused on the common good should be doing – is not pretending that like there isn’t a problem,” he explained. “If you have destitution on the one hand, and extreme wealth on the other, but also do not pretend that the solution to that is conflict … there can be a real compromise.”
“I try to think about that a lot: how can we gear certain policy outcomes in a way that doesn’t ignore the problems that come with destitution, but tries to solve it through cooperation as opposed to conflict,” he said.
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