Every so often in
an argument we define socialism, and almost as often we have people (with
varying degrees of exasperation) inform us that we don’t know what we’re
talking about, because they define socialism differently. That, of course, makes us wrong and them
right.
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| "What? Who? Me?" |
What such critics
don’t seem to realize is something that G.K. Chesterton made a key point in his
book that most people think is about St. Thomas Aquinas, “the Dumb Ox of Sicily.” It’s not.
It’s really about the nature of truth, and is an introduction to a
method of understanding truth as truth from the perspective of Aquinas.
That is, in fact,
why Etienne Gilson considered a book that actually says very little about
Aquinas or his philosophy the best book on Aquinas. Like a micro version of Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940), Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”
(1933) gives you an approach to Aquinas, not Aquinas.
And the point
Chesterton made? After describing how
Aquinas blew his top at the leader of the Latin Averroists, Siger of Brabant
(who claimed that truth is not always true, and that there are different kinds
of truth), Chesterton commented,
At the top of his fury, Thomas Aquinas understands, what so many
defenders of orthodoxy will not understand.
It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a
denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can
force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody
else’s principles, but not on his own.
After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought
always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at
all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours. (G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”. New York: Image Books, 1956, 95.)
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| "Uh, huh. I don't understand socialism, and you do?" |
So, when we
define socialism as “the abolition of private property in capital,” we tend not
to be convinced by critics and commentators who rush in where the Angelic Doctor fears to tread and inform us that we
are stupid. This is because they claim
socialism is not the abolition of private property in capital, but something
else entirely that is the opposite of what we just said.
The problem here
is twofold. One, such critics don’t
understand private property. Two, they
don’t understand socialism. This makes
for a somewhat volatile mix when trying to convince us we’re wrong (and stupid)
about private property and socialism.
It is also a
trifle ridiculous, because often these critics are Catholics, which means they
allegedly accept papal teachings on, e.g.,
socialism and private property . . . with which the definitions used by the
Just Third Way just happen to agree. . . .
This is because
the Just Third Way and Catholic social teaching share a common basis in the
natural law — which the Catholic Church has infallibly declared is discernible
by the force and light of human reason alone.
This was stated in the Canons of the First Vatican Council, given
primacy of place in the Oath Against Modernism, and reiterated in the opening
of Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII’s 1950
encyclical “Concerning Some False Opinions Threatening to Undermine the
Foundations of Catholic Doctrine.” The
popes have repeated this so many times that you might think they consider it
important. . . .
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| Feel lucky, punk? Ready to take on the Grand Champion? |
Let’s start with
private property, since that misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the
problem. To discuss private property
intelligently, however, we have to know that it is a natural right . . . and
what it means for something to be a “natural right.”
Our answer is
going to be given within the confines of the principles of Aristotelian-Thomism,
the philosophy that underpins both Catholic social teaching and the Just Third
Way. And that means one thing: don’t try
to disprove our arguments or prove we’re stupid based on something that is not
Aristotelian-Thomism.
In
Aristotelian-Thomism, the natural law, the general code of human behavior, is
held to be part of human nature itself.
That means every human being who ever lived, lives, or will live has the
full spectrum of natural rights in their fullness by nature itself, no ifs,
ands, or buts. Period.
This is an
important point. Human beings have natural rights.
Humanity does not have natural
rights. That is because a “human being”
is a fact created by God, while
“humanity” is an idea made by human
beings (we’re distinguishing between creating
proper and making — artificing out of
God-provided materials — here). Human beings have an existence separate
from their Creator. Humanity has no existence separate from its makers.
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| The original deep, fat friar. |
Human beings have
rights because the Creator built them into the fact of existing as a human
being as a single act (there is a really deep philosophical argument here about
God’s Will and Intellect being inseparable that we won’t trouble you with). Every human being is therefore automatically
a human person; “person” is here defined as “that which has rights.”
Humanity, an
artificial construct, only has such rights as the human beings who made and
applied the idea choose to delegate to it — if at all. Humanity, or any other “corporation”
(strictly speaking, incorporation
means “put into a body,” and thus applies to any organized body of humanity) therefore only has rights — if it has rights —
artificially.
That is why human
beings are called “natural persons,” and corporations are called “artificial
persons.” God creates natural persons (except Himself; He is “uncreated”) out of
nothing. Human beings make artificial persons out of whatever
they need and is available; God is a Creator, human beings are artificers.
God is the natural law, and He built the
natural law into each human being. Each
human being therefore has all natural rights, among the most important of which
are life, liberty . . . and private property, which we will look at tomorrow.
#30#