As we saw in previous postings in this series, Fulton
Sheen’s “obsession” with socialism was founded solidly on his commitment to the
principles of reason found in Aristotelian-Thomism, the philosophy of common
sense. Socialism, as Pope Pius XI
explained, “is based . . . on a theory of human
society peculiar to itself and irreconcilable with true Christianity. Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are
contradictory terms. (Quadragesimo Anno, § 120.)
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| Pius XI: No Catholic can be a socialist. |
That being the case, no Catholic —
and certainly no Aristotelian-Thomist — could possibly accept socialism in any
form, or by any name. Why, then, have so
many done so? Even Mortimer Adler
declared himself a socialist . . . before he met Louis Kelso and was introduced
to the logic of binary economics and the economic foundation of the Just Third
Way,
eventually embodied in CESJ’s Capital
Homesteading proposal.
While they are difficult to separate in practice, in our
opinion there are two reasons — actually rationalizations — for accepting
socialism, each a circular argument seeming to validate the other. The first, the slavery of past savings, is
the “civil” or “temporal” rationalization.
The second, the lack of the act of social justice, is the “religious” or
“spiritual” rationalization.
Ironically, both of these rationalizations also hold true
for capitalism. This is not
surprising. As Sheen (and others) have
remarked, socialism (the abolition of private property for all) is sometimes described
as “state capitalism,” “capitalism” being defined as private property only for
a private sector élite, and thus the
abolition of private property for the many.
This is easy to understand.
If we assume that it is only by consuming less than is produced, and
accumulating the excess in the form of money savings, that we can finance new
capital, we necessarily limit ownership of all new capital to those who can
afford to consume less than they produce.
As technology advances and becomes increasingly expensive, this means
that only those who are already rich can, as a rule, own capital.
The presumed necessity of past savings to finance new
capital was completely disproved by Dr. Harold Glenn Moulton in his 1935 book, The
Formation of Capital, the third volume in a four-volume work, The Distribution of Wealth and Income in
Relation to Economic Progress (Washington, DC: The Brookings
Institution,1934-1935), presenting an alternative to the Keynesian New
Deal. Moulton’s work was the basis for
Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler’s 1961 collaboration, The New Capitalists (which had nothing to do with capitalists or
capitalism), which presented a feasible proposal to (as the subtitle has it)
“free economic growth from the slavery of [past] savings” and finance
widespread capital ownership without redistribution or redefining ownership.
Unfortunately, capitalism, socialism, modernism, and New Age
thought were and remain firmly locked into the past savings assumption that has
crippled the sciences of finance and economics for generations. Consequently, few people saw Moulton’s, or
Kelso and Adler’s work as a way out of the traps created by the “new things” of
the modern world, especially socialism.
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| John XXII corrected the errors of the Fraticelli. |
This is not to say that various forms of what became known
as socialism did not exist prior to the nineteenth century, or before the
Medieval shift from the Intellect to the Will as the basis of the natural
law. It appears, in fact, that the fundamental assumption of socialism — that God vests rights in the collective and not individual
human beings, or that the collective self-generates rights — preceded the actual
shift; the actual theory was worked out and articulated much later to justify what people wanted to do. For example (and assuming G.K. Chesterton was
correct), the renegade Franciscan Fraticelli first changed their view of
natural law (especially of private property), and then of religion to conform
their religious beliefs to their economic and political program.
Nevertheless, it was not until the effects of advancing
technology were felt on a wide scale hard on the heels of the Industrial
Revolution that socialism became a serious problem. This is because the effect of technology is
to displace human labor from production.
Given the past savings assumption, when technology is inexpensive, everyone
can own it, but if it is expensive — as advanced capital instruments tend to be
— then few can own it. Further, it is
highly unlikely, as wages are forced down in competition with advancing
technology and cheaper labor elsewhere, that propertyless wage-workers will be
able to cut consumption and save.
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| Karl Marx: "To each according to his needs." |
Within the past savings framework, then, it seems obvious
that common humanity demands that since the goods of the earth were created for
the benefit of everyone, that everyone has a claim in common humanity to a fair
distribution of what is produced, whether or not what anyone produces equals what he or she consumes. As
Karl Marx put it in his Critique of the
Gotha Program, “From each according to his ability, to each according to
his needs.” (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program. Peking, China: Foreign Languages Press, 1972,
17.)
It necessarily follows that if how much each contributes
makes no difference to what each receives, then no human being can have an
inherent right to receive a distribution in proportion to his or her
inputs. The right to receive outputs in
relative proportion to one’s inputs, however, is the classic definition of
distributive justice from the Aristotelian-Thomist theory of natural
rights. The socialist therefore
inevitably concludes that the natural law must be based on something other than
common sense (reason) — or (more accurately) on human nature
(in Catholic belief reflected from God’s Nature) and discerned by reason.
The natural law must, therefore, be based on the will in order to
conform to the past savings assumption, which means on expedience or the
desires of the strongest. Might makes
right, as is inevitable when there is a shift from the Intellect to the
Will. Lex ratio becomes lex
voluntas, and pure moral relativism — lex talonis — takes over, leading in extreme cases to
nihilism. (All of this is explained in
much greater detail in Heinrich Rommen’s book on the natural law; this is a
very brief summary.)
Consequently, for the socialist only the collective —
humanity as a whole — has rights, which the strongest dole out as they see fit
or as expedience dictates. The
distortion that is capitalism transforms into the perversion that is socialism.
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| Fulton Sheen: Novelty trumps truth today. |
If that were all, however, it is unlikely that socialism
would have made much headway in the West, and its combination of
Greco-Roman legal and political philosophy (reason — lex ratio) in civil society with its emphasis
on inherent rights, and Judeo-Christian-Islamic theology with its emphasis on
the inherent dignity of each human being as a human being under the highest sovereignty of God in religious society. The new concept of civil society with its
innovative scientific principles that overturned traditional
Aristotelian-Thomism had to be joined with a new concept of religious society to
replace traditional God-centered monotheism.
As Sheen explained,
“The whole appeal of the new
idea of religion is that it is in perfect accord with the latest findings of
science. Professor [Alfred North]
Whitehead, so deservedly recognized as a great scientist, has recently come
forward in his ‘Religion in the Making’ to construct a religion on the new
theories of science. If a theory quite
as fragile as relativity is dubious for science, the field where it properly
belongs, it does not seem reasonable to make it serve as religion’s
all-sufficient foundation. There can be
no doubt that it is the novelty in the application, and not the truth which
appeals. It is not by bread alone that
the modern philosopher of religion lives, but principally by catchwords.” (Sheen, Religion
Without God, op. cit., 244.)
Suggesting that Chesterton was more than a little familiar
with the passage quoted above, we find the same idea expressed in The “Dumb Ox” five years later. This is where Chesterton described the
presumed conflict in the Middle Ages between the new, half-understood science of
Aristotle that had been twisted by the Averroists, and the demand for a new
concept of religion to reconcile religion and science by making one go down
before the other.
Aquinas, of course (and Chesterton, Knox, Sheen, and Adler),
took the stand that both science and religion — reason and faith — are true. Being different aspects of the one truth, science
and religion are true in the same way. Neither
one need be sacrificed to preserve the other, either by inventing a new concept
of science to conform to religion, or a new concept of religion to conform to
science. As Chesterton explained,
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| Thomas Aquinas: There is only one truth. |
“St. Thomas was willing to allow
the one truth to be approached by two paths, precisely because he was sure there was only one truth. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing
discovered in nature could ultimately contradict the Faith. Because the Faith was the one truth, nothing
really deduced from the Faith could ultimately contradict the facts. It was in truth a curiously daring confidence
in the reality of his religion; and though some may linger to dispute it, it
has been justified. The scientific
facts, which were supposed to contradict the Faith in the nineteenth century,
are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth
century. . . . But whether his confidence was right or wrong, it was specially
and supremely a confidence that there is one truth which cannot contradict
itself.” (Chesterton, The “Dumb Ox”, op.
cit., 93-94.)
Outside the Catholic Church the effort to reconcile science
and religion by changing both of them was found in the tenets of what became
New Age thought, of which the most influential was theosophy. Inside the Catholic Church this was found in
what became known as modernism — what Pope Pius X accurately described as “the
synthesis of all heresies.” (Pascendi
Dominici Gregis, § 39.) Both are
very hard to pin down as regards specific doctrines, making it easy to adapt
both modernism and New Age thought to all the myriad socialisms, as well as make
all the various forms of socialism conform to modernism and New Age thought.
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| The Abrahamic Aristotelian Tradition |
Because both socialism (the new concept of science,
philosophy being a science) and the new concept of religion could be adapted in
so many ways, the vagueness and “Manichaean mutability” of modernist and New
Age thought with their invention of and reliance on an entirely new cosmology
to replace the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition made them plausible
substitutes for the act of social justice.
Instead of being bound by the scientific — philosophical — principle of an
absolute, reason-based concept of the natural law and inalienable rights held
by every person (albeit distorted by capitalism), civil society could support
the demands of socialism on an ever-changing basis of self-justifying faith
that constituted a new concept of truth as well as religion itself. Thus, as Sheen pointed out,
“There is humility and there is
prudence in the caution of scientists when they speak of their theories as
hypotheses, but there is no humility and no prudence in the recklessness with
which philosophers of religion apply these hypotheses to religion. Religion is not to be made the proving ground
of every scientific hypothesis any more than the soul is to be made the puppet
of every demand of the body. It is not
wisdom, it is not common sense to overthrow the established relations between
God and man, because of certain hypothetical relations between space and
time. [Or between capital ownership and
finance — ed.] It is not good science, it is not good
philosophy, it is positively bad philosophy of religion, to make
approximations, and uncertain explanations of the universe the reason for
overthrowing the abiding and eternal relation of Sovereignty and Paternity
which are the bonds uniting man to God.”
(Sheen, Religion Without God, op.
cit., 245-246.)
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