With the conclave, everyone has talked about the countercultural aura of secrecy in a society tired of transparency and the fascination with liturgy in a world without rituals. This is all very well, but I would say it's being discussed in a rather poor way, assuming a logic of caprice according to which we desire what we don't have simply so we can romanticize the past. But what if behind all this calling us the Catholic Church there were answers to important questions, whether we are religious or not?
The first idea is that the rituals of the Church make visible the political core that our liberal democracies hide from us behind a curtain of scientific and economic rationality. Here we must understand political in the sense given to it by the controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt, one of the 20th-century thinkers who is most fueling the post-liberal aspirations of the 21st century. Schmitt's great insight is that "all our political concepts are, in reality, secularized theological concepts." This means that, behind every decision politicians present to us as the fruit of technical deliberation, there is always a commitment to values and an identity that cannot be limited to the neutral and objective calculation of interests. For Schmitt, politics is better understood if we look more closely at how it works in times of crisis than on a day-to-day basis. Who decides whether the Catalans vote for independence or all Spaniards? What was rational about saying that the banks were "too big to fail" in 2008? How do we determine how many apartments we consider someone a "big holder"? To understand prime ministers and judges, we should understand the doctrine of papal infallibility.
Instead, as he argues in Roman Catholicism and political formThe Catholic Church retains its symbolic authority because it openly shows us how the world works. Through rituals, hierarchy, and doctrinal clarity, Catholicism manifests itself in visible and recognizable structures that remind us of the political nature behind the decisions made. Schmitt, who hated anything that smacks of liberalism, called for a return to ancient hierarchies that sit uneasily with our Enlightenment ideals. But for many years, many thinkers have been calling for an emancipatory version of Schmitt's critique of depoliticizing economism. It is precisely because economic power attempts to make itself invisible that we citizens accept certain parliamentary decisions as a technocratic inevitability and fail to demand alternatives. When we see the public forms of the Catholic Church, we sense that secular powers might be addressing us as citizens who must make ethical decisions rather than mere consumers.
And that brings us to the appeal of secrecy we saw in the conclave. There are two ideas here: one political and the other social, or, if you will, existential. From a political perspective, the conclave confronts us with the uncomfortable truth that public scrutiny of certain political processes can compromise them. If those in power are forced to reveal their long-term strategies, those against whom they are directed may adapt and flee. In a time when we lack trust in public representatives, bureaucratic oversight can lead to rigidities and absurdities in the name of a transparency so misunderstood that it can end up harming those governed. There is an irresolvable conflict between trust and immediate accountability, and the conclave makes us imagine what a political system with more trust would be like.
Finally, the other magnetism of secrecy stems from the possibility of escaping algorithmic surveillance. The internet has stifled the margin of freedom of subjectivity. The dream of modernity was that we shouldn't be prisoners of an identity, that our past doesn't determine us, but that we can change ourselves. But with the current technological framework, everything we've said, every job, every image, every purchase—everything is recorded in a way that gives society excessive power to pigeonhole us, especially during such important formative periods as adolescence and early adulthood, when everyone is hypersocial. Against this identity-based straitjacket, creative or spiritual work, which are one and the same, have always demanded the ability to shelter themselves from constant exposure in a protected space (the studio, the cell, one's own room, a getaway abroad), so that they can return transformed. Seeing those secluded bruises, we envy the tremendous power that comes with the ability to hide for a time from the gaze of others. Something that, by the way, some of us were able to experience for a few hours on the day of the blackout.
