I ran across a paper which expressed some of my hesitations well. I am no economist, but I know that. I have the distinct impression that all the social justice talk in Catholicism, so much of it warmed over lefty moralism, comes from people who are also not economists.
Thomas Woods writes:
The primary difficulty with much of what has fallen under the heading of Catholic social teaching since Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) is that it assumes without argument that the force of human will suffices to resolve economic questions, and that reason and the conclusions of economic law can be safely neglected, even scorned.
In fact, as with the German Historical School that Ludwig von Mises opposed, proponents of Catholic social teaching effectively deny the very existence of economic law. Their position therefore neglects altogether the role that reason must play in assessing the consequences of seemingly “progressive” economic policies, as well as in apprehending the order and harmony that can exist within complex (in this case market) phenomena. This attitude runs directly counter to the entire Catholic intellectual tradition, according to which man is to conform his actions to reality, rather than embarking on the hopeless and foolish task of forcing the world to conform to him and to his desires. This corpus of thought wishes to force reality into outcomes that cannot be realized by will alone.
Like so much progressive thinking, Catholic social doctrine strikes me as wishful thinking. Is there such a thing as the unnaturalistic fallacy*: when what ought to be is derived from what ought to be, despite what is?
*Actually, I discovered, there is. It's call the moralistic fallacy, which attempts to define what is on the basis of what (the thinker thinks) ought to be. All men and women of all race ought to be equal, so therefore, (regardless of things like evidence to the contrary) they are!
3 comments:
Perhaps you lack enough real-world cynicism precisely of the sort that Protestants have habitually suspected in "the" Church.
1. Tocqueville outlines the most possible way for a hierarchical Church to survive and even thrive under the conditions of modern democracy. Blandly pontificating every now and then in support of democracy and equality makes sense — but the emphasis is on blandness (unseriousness), because the thing most needful is maintaining subordination and hierarchy within the Church. The Church could not survive a political revolution in the masses against all 'bosses.' On the other hand, reactionary inegalitarian movements like l'Action française must be resolutely opposed by the Church, for the reasons that Tocqueville sets forth.
2. The social teaching encyclicals, then, were presumably first of all for maintaining the Church's good name as sympathetic to the plight of the working man. Not that the hierarchy would be unhappy if the working man received a 'living wage' etc, but merely that the hierarchy was not going to lead a march demanding such things. On Accordingly, whether the proposals in the social teaching encyclicals were practical policy advice for economics and politics on the ground was irrelevant.
3. And in fairness to the hierarchy, the social encyclicals seem not to have made the tasks of business managers, tycoons, politicians more difficult. The holy father address'd the powers of the oikoumene, not the common man as giving him a list of demands that he could use to rally a revolution. The social encyclicals merely stay'd somewhat au courant with changing conditions in order to not make the Church seem irrelevant to the "new things," and if the holy father's 'pontificating' seem somewhat unrealistic, all the better for the powers of the oikoumene.
4. The encyclicals were like the Church's current "opposition" to capital punishment. The ?work of the legal system is in no way impeded by this opposition. But the Church gets a good name, and this is the important consideration. Or the encyclicals were like the Church's traditional "opposition" to usury. The important thing was that the faithful feel that the Church is unhappy when lending systems results in destitution.
5. In fact, by always defending in principle the right of private property, the encyclicals were "conservative" in the most important consideration. By making theistic religion seem a supporter of the working man, the encyclicals also tended to make Marxist revolution impossible. Even "liberation theology" does this. Marx's religious method is resolutely atheistic. As soon as it accepts the "help" of theologians speaking in the name of 'Hebrew prophets' and other fanatics, it is undone: the populace don't commit to the "ruthless criticism of everything that exists" and remain mired in the opiate of longing for the supposedly imaginary transcendence.
6. Obviously at the same time the Church must refuse for the faithful the new democratic or at least egalitarian understandings of man that would make Christian and Catholic belief impossible: e.g. Hobbes' doctrine on vanity, Spinoza's doctrine of God, Rousseau's doctrine on amour-propre. And where 'secular' family life and the relations between the sexes is concern'd, the Church must completely disagree with feminism etc. The faith is undone when the BVM is rejected as as defeatist role model for girls or, worse, is transfigured into an autonomous deity for woman's independence from man.
7. Whether from study of Tocqueville or not, the RC hierarchy has maintain'd this contradiction for many decades: hierarchy and subordination within, vaguely democratic recommendations without. They made a tremendous apparent mistake, however, with the lobby they set up in Hollywood to agitate for 'favourable' presentations of the priest.
8. The contemptible “Protestant” cleric in Chaplain's "Modern Times" well accords with the mainline "Protestant" clergy's deep preference for an only invisible priesthood (cf Harnack): Let no "favourites of nature and fortune" admire and aspire to the ministry! But this contemptuous presentation by Hollywood would have been nevertheless congruent with a real effort to make a Protestant clergy with spiritual independence from "the world." But the heroic presentation of the priest in "On the Waterfront" became the forerunner of Catholicism à la "All in the Family" and Father Mulcahey in "Mash."
9. The celibacy rule in context with the Church’s mystique obviously makes the priest a more interesting cinematic and literary character than the minister or rabbi. Nevertheless, if the priest is a social justice hero, then he is not able to impress upon the faithful the duty of subjection to the Church in ordinary life circumstances. Roncali (good Pope John) when archbishop of France shut down the worker-priest movement.
10. Yes, it's glorious in Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" when the whiskey priest obeys the Church's rule to bury the dead and becomes a martyr (although unmention'd the Kingdom belongs to the untheistic Methodist Geshwisterpaar in the book), but ordinarily Catholics don't live in extreme conditions (or, as Machiavelli would correct, they don't see that ordinary circumstances are routinizations of extreme circumstances).
11. "The Power and the Glory" etc does not maintain the Church of Pius 12 against the expectation that the priest be a healing accepter like Father Mulcahey when he is not leading marches to demand justice for oppress'd minorities. I guess activism of some sort of relief for the oppress'd is not incompatible with the task of internalization into children, adolescents and adults of obedientness to the Church, but these two attitudes are very much at odds, as Tocqueville hints. Asking Hollywood to portray the glory of the priesthood was part of a huge blunder in "power instincts" in Nietzsche's nomenclature -- unless "the" Church came to share Prots' wish for invisibility?
jpm
Post a Comment