As
we saw in the previous posting in this
series, Pope
John Paul I was presented with what seemed to be an insoluble dilemma his
entire career as a priest, as a bishop, and even his all-too-brief tenure as
pope. He had the principles underlying
social justice (Aristotelian-Thomism applied in the philosophy of personalism),
he even had many of the “parts” of social justice, notably solidarity and
subsidiarity.
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| Alexis de Tocqueville |
What
John Paul I lacked was a completed philosophy of personalism as well as an
effective means to empower people to be able to organize to carry out acts of
social justice, social justice being the “vehicle” of personalism. Perhaps the best way to explain this is to
look at what Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy
in America (1835, 1840) discerned as the three basic types of democracy,
which he called the French or European collectivist type, the English or individualist
type, and the American or personal type. As de Tocqueville noted,
Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions,
constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies,
in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds. . . . If it
be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the
encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of
some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in
England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. (Alexis
de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.2.v.)
Take
the European type of democracy first, for that is the type with which John Paul
I was dealing. This is because it is now
prevalent throughout the world as what Hilaire Belloc called the Servile State,
thanks in large measure to its combining with the English type of democracy and
the dominance of Keynesian economics.
French or European democracy manifests as collectivism,
with the community or the State taking the lead in everything, from great
national endeavors to (eventually) dictating every aspect of daily life, down
to internal affairs of the family, even in extreme cases redefining marriage
and family to fit a political agenda.
The emphasis is on the dignity of the people as a whole, that is, the
abstraction of humanity rather than the reality of the human person. This is socialism.
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| Walter Bagehot |
Aristocratic England developed an elitist form of
democracy, exemplified by the political theories of Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)
presented in The English Constitution
(1867) and applied in Lombard Street
(1873). In English type democracy the
wealthy — “a chosen people” (Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution. Portland, Oregon: Sussex Academic Press,
1997, 17) — govern the lower classes for their own good. Not surprisingly, Bagehot despised America and
its institutions, and greatly admired the totalitarian philosopher, Thomas
Hobbes. English type democracy manifests
as capitalism, a system of concentrated private ownership of capital.
Interestingly, Keynesian economics, which combines
socialism and capitalism into the Servile State, relies heavily on Bagehot’s theories
of politics and economics (John Maynard Keynes, “The Works of Bagehot,” The
Economic Journal, 25:369–375, 1915), which it combines with the social
welfare concepts found in Fabian socialism.
In America, however, democracy manifests (or did in de
Tocqueville’s day) as the essence of social justice — organizing for the common
good — applied in daily life as a matter of course, even routine. The emphasis is on the dignity of the
individual human person under the highest sovereignty of God. This is personalism.
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| Emmanuel Mounier |
And what is “personalism”?
Interestingly, Emmanuel Mounier (1905-1950), considered the founder of
the personalist movement, carefully avoided defining what he meant by the
term! As he said in Be Not Afraid (1946, 1948, 1951),
We are aware of the pitfalls latent in all loyalty, and we
are therefore always prepared to break through the thickening walls of
principle to the exigencies within, which yesterday might have escaped or
disturbed us. We shall not be afraid to
contradict ourselves to-morrow if experience or reality have contradicted
us. We are ready to forgo any label if,
as a result of some unexpected reaction in our surroundings, this label were to
obscure our purpose and compromise the battle in which we are holding one
sector. Our major concern is that
Personalism should remain a continual creation, a continual awareness. We therefore repudiate anyone who might
crystallise it into a system or degrade it into verbalism. (Emmanuel Mounier, Be
Not Afraid: A Denunciation of Despair.
London: Rockliff, 1951, 175.)
This,
at first glance, hardly sounds like a denunciation of despair. It may be the fault of the translator, but it
sounds, in fact, very much like a cop-out, and a slide into pure moral
relativism.
Taking
a closer look, and taking into account the fact that Mounier explicitly rejected the absolutes of the natural law, we realize that Mounier was not talking about a true personalism at all.
Rather, he was making the dreadful mistake of confusing
true and unalterable principles of
the natural law with changeable applications
of those principles!
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| Aquinas: God is the natural law. |
What Mounier viewed as changeable principles in reality can never be changed, were actually applications of principles that can and must be changed. Thus, “the thickening walls of principle” that Mounier viewed with alarm are not really the principles
themselves — these are, and can only be, absolute and without change — but the
institutions or “walls” constructed to hold the principles in place to make
them useful, i.e., apply “the
exigencies within.” These “walls” are
what we must be prepared to modify or reject if it turns out they are not
exigent or expedient, that is, if they do not permit the principles of the
natural law to be applied properly or at all.
Thus,
if we find that the “walls” we have built — the institutions or social habits
we have developed and put in place — are “contradictory” or flawed, we must be
prepared to reject them and repair or build new “walls” or institutions so that
we no longer “obscure our purpose [or] compromise the battle.” We cannot allow a false loyalty to a
particular application (form or “accidental” as opposed to substance) to blind
us to the essential task of restructuring the social order and reforming our
institutions to conform to the natural law — which is, to any Catholic
and Aristotelian-Thomist, God Himself, so far as it is within our limited
human capacity to discern the Absolute.
Suddenly
we realize where a great deal of Mounier's confusion lies. Mounier’s personalism is an attempt to
describe the functioning of the act of social justice, but without consciously
taking social justice into account!
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| Father William J. Ferree. S.M., Ph.D. |
Now,
this would not matter one bit were it not for one thing. After all, as Father William Ferree pointed
out in the conclusion of his pamphlet, Introduction
to Social Justice,
The completed doctrine of Social Justice places in our hands
instruments of such power as to be inconceivable to former generations.
But let us be clear about what is new and what is old. None
of the elements of this theory are new. Institutions, and institutional action,
the idea of the Common Good, the relationship of individual to Common Good — all
these things are as old as the human race itself. There is nothing more new in
those things than in the school boy’s discovery that what he has been speaking
is prose; nor must we ever believe that God made man a two-legged creature, and
then waited for Aristotle to make him rational. Moreover, much of the actual application
of these principles to practical life is to be found in older writers under the
heading “political prudence.” (Rev. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., Introduction
to Social Justice. New York: The
Paulist Press, 1948, 56.)
And
the one thing that makes what is not even an error into a major disaster? There is no practical means to undertake acts
of social justice as a usual thing — we are not talking extraordinary measures
here, which by definition are not the “usual thing” — unless ordinary people,
those who in personalism have the primary responsibility for the common good,
have the means and opportunity both to become capital owners and actually be
capital owners.
This
is because power follows property. Nor
are power and property “dirty words.”
·
Property we have already explained as
both the natural and absolute right to be an owner in the first place, and the
bundle of socially determined and limited rights that define how an owner may
use what is owned. Property is a good
thing if you control it. It is a bad
thing if others use it to control you.
·
Power is simply “the ability for
doing.” It is a good thing if you use it
to control your own life. It is a bad
thing if you use it to control the lives of others.
We
come to the inescapable conclusion that personalism, Catholic social teaching,
the Just Third Way — whatever you want to call it — is impracticable for all
practical purposes! This “paradox of
personalism” comes from the existence of two great and interdependent barriers,
neither of which can exist without the other.
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| Mortimer J. Adler |
These
barriers are, first, what Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer Adler called “the slavery
of savings.” This is the assumption that
the only way to finance new capital formation is to restrict consumption below
one’s income, accumulate the excess in the form of money, and then purchase
capital.
The
obvious problem with this “slavery of savings” — so called because it forces most
people to work for savings instead of making savings work for people — is that
it restricts capital ownership as a rule to those who are already capital
owners. Only capital owners can produce
far in excess of their ability to consume, and so necessarily accumulate the
excess, which they use to finance more capital formation, making the problem
even worse.
This
brings in the second barrier: rejection or lack of, or failure even to
recognize the act of social justice.
This is easy to understand. Since
power follows property, and only a few people have property, then only a few
people have power.
This
in turn means, as a usual thing, that most people lack the ability to organize
and carry out the acts of social justice required to remove barriers, or in
Mounier’s words, repair or build “walls” . . . we blame the translator for such
confusing, even contradictory terminology; it’s bad, bad, bad. Are we removing
barriers, or building walls? Is it flammable,
or inflammable? What does “noninflammable”
mean?
Having
explained what Mounier should have meant by building walls but consciously rejected, we will stick to Just Third Way
terminology from now on, and talk about building or reforming institutions and removing
barriers. Even so, we are faced with the
paradox of personalism, which can be stated very simply.
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| Pope John Paul I |
That
is, if people ordinarily need power to organize and carry out acts of social
justice, and as a usual thing power follows property . . . how do you organize
to remove the barriers that prevent or inhibit most people from becoming
capital owners?
John
Paul I was therefore faced with a Sisyphean task — Sisyphus being condemned for
all eternity to roll a stone up a hill only to have it roll down again when he
reached the top. The goal of Catholic
social teaching is to restructure the institutions of the social order to
provide the proper environment to acquire and develop virtue, which means
people take reasonable care of their material needs and then get to work on
their moral and spiritual needs.
But
if people can’t meet their material needs, in most cases they won’t meet their
moral or spiritual needs, either. And
there’s another catch: the way people meet their material needs often shapes
the way or if they meet their moral and spiritual needs. People who have everything handed to them
often do not grow and develop as moral or spiritual beings.
Simply
meeting people’s material needs, therefore, is not enough. It must be done in such a way as to allow
them to grow and develop, and that means they must, as a rule, meet their own
needs through their own efforts, and that means becoming productive.
But
what if technology is displacing human labor to the point where human labor is
insufficient to generate an adequate and secure income? Redistribute?
Institute a Universal Basic Income?
How does that help people grow and develop?
It
doesn’t, as the government of Finland recently discovered. The only real answer is to
organize to remove barriers that prevent most people from owning capital . . .
but that ordinarily requires capital ownership to have the power to organize,
which is the very thing people need to organize to do! Talk about a Catch-22!
Consequently,
John Paul I was trapped. The best he
could do under the circumstances was to tell people to be virtuous anyway, and
advocate redistribution to meet people’s material needs, even though it was
painfully obvious that redistribution can’t go on forever and creates an
environment that makes acquiring and developing virtue virtually impossible
except for extraordinary individuals.
.
. . and that created even more problems, which we will look at in the next
posting in this series.
#30#
