As we saw in the previous posting on this subject, the
Aristotelian and Platonic views of reality led to different theories of
politics — and this had a significant effect not merely on the direction of the
Oxford Movement, but on the fact of the movement itself.
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| Maisie Ward |
Even though there was a great deal of confusion over what,
exactly, “liberalism” might mean, the organizers and participants were more or
less agreed that it was something to be resisted. In their opinion it represented a mortal
danger to the Church of England . . . even as the movement ignored legitimate
liberalism and, as John Henry Newman later admitted, defended another that was
illegitimate. As Mary Josephine “Maisie”
Ward (1889-1975) noted in her biography of Newman,
It is hardly necessary to say that Newman hated all
this. Liberalism was the enemy, in
religion primarily, but one spirit ran through it all, and this external
activity was only a preliminary to its total triumph: it must be resisted at
every point. Of the Revolution in France
in 1830 he wrote to Jemima [Newman’s sister —
ed.] (August 10) “The French seem to me the most wicked nation on earth
. . . and King Charles and his ministers are a set of poltroons for not staying
to be shot or guillotined.” Following
the success of the Reform Bill [that
suppressed the Irish bishoprics — ed.] and Lord Grey’s warnings to the
bishops, he wrote to [John William]
Bowden (August 20, 1833): “The gift of excommunication will not forever remain
unused. If I were a bishop, the first
thing I should do would be to excommunicate Lord Grey and half a dozen more,
whose names it is almost a shame and a pollution for a Christian to mention.”
(Maisie Ward, Young Mr. Newman.
New York: Sheed & Ward, 1948, 232-234.)
The legitimate liberalism that was ignored, as Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger explained nearly two centuries later, was the American type
that in its original form as chronicled by Alexis de Tocqueville Ratzinger
claimed was “in
profound compliance with the faith.” (Joseph Ratzinger and Marcello
Pera, Without Roots: The West,
Relativism, Christianity, Islam. New
York: Basic Books, 2006, 71.) That is, the human person is sovereign
and all rights in civil society emanate from the individual human person. This is Aristotelian, or more accurately
Aristotle corrected and developed by Aquinas.
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| Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger |
The other type, that the Oxford Movement members viewed as
the danger, was the French or European type liberalism that in Ratzinger’s
opinion led directly to socialism as well as indifferentism in religion, even
as various forms of “the democratic religion” claimed to be restoring religion
by bringing back the original message of Jesus.
In European or French liberalism, the abstraction of the collective is
sovereign and all rights in civil society emanate from the collective to actual
human beings, turning them into persons.
This is Platonic, even if it is not directly from Plato, and was the type
of liberalism targeted by the Oxford Movement.
The problem, of course, was that movement partisans were
attempting to defend one form of liberalism from the inroads of another form,
and the two different types of liberalism were not all that different, as
Newman would eventually realize, much to his shock, even horror. And that brings us to the third type of
liberalism, the English type defended by the participants in the Oxford
Movement, based on a view of reality that more or less uncomfortably combines
the Aristotelian and Platonic political theories.
Three. The bastardized philosophy underpinning the
elitist English liberal (capitalist) model asserts in theory or principal that
all human beings are created equal and therefore have equal rights, status, and
dignity. In practice, however, adherents
assume that most people are not fully human, and therefore are necessarily
ruled by an élite; the average human
being lacks that certain something that prevents him or her from rising to the
level of the fully human.
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| Ayn Rand |
In this framework everyone may have rights, but they must
only be exercised as the élite see
fit. This easily degenerates into the
age-old idea that only members of the élite
are fully human, as happened in the “objectivism” of Ayn Rand. It leads inevitably to the claim that only
the élite have rights because only
they have the power and ability to exercise them . . . and that capitalism,
which in Rand’s opinion best embodies objectivism and is based solidly on the
English type of liberalism, is the only truly human system — and that,
incidentally, excludes pretty much 99.9% of the human race from the category of
“fully human.”
We see this graphically illustrated in how the ideas for
and justifications of capitalism developed as socialism gained ground as the
nineteenth century progressed. We
touched on this briefly in a previous posting on this subject, but it is
important to emphasize the fact that capitalism — in common with socialism —
derives from the belief that new capital cannot be financed without first
cutting consumption and accumulating that which is not consumed as money
savings.
In the eighteenth century the “new” methods of finance
(actually age-old but reinvented with the rebirth of commercial/mercantile
banking and the development of central banking) combined with the ideas about
the natural law that arose during the fifteenth century, viz., the shift from the “Intellect” (reason) to the “Will” (faith)
as the basis of the natural law. This in
turn led to a change in the understanding of private property as a natural
right.
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| William of Ockham: reliance on faith alone |
As the justification ran, since capital presumably cannot
be financed without restricting consumption, and since only a wealthy élite presumably has the capacity to
finance new capital, only that same wealthy élite
should or even can own capital. Obviously,
since in this line of reasoning only the wealthy élite have the capacity to own capital, it logically follows that
the propertyless masses do not have the natural capacity or right to own
capital.
The fact that these conclusions flatly contradict what it
means for something to be true was not a problem. What took care of any and all contradictions was
the change from the Intellect to the Will as the basis of the natural law. This allowed a shift from reason to faith as
the sole determinant of truth (replacing reason completed and enlightened by
faith and faith guided by reason) — for a reliance on “pure reason” is,
ironically, as faith-based as the “faith alone” position.
Within the “faith alone” framework, natural rights such as
life, liberty, and private property are no longer universally applicable, that
is, absolute or inherent in every human being.
Who has rights is not determined by nature, but by power — might makes
right.
Whether a particular individual or group has rights
becomes a matter of political expedience or prudence. Demonstrating why it is so easy for
capitalism and socialism to merge in the Servile State, it does not matter
whether the élite making the
determination as to who has rights is public or private, that is, whether the élite is capitalist or socialist, as
long as they have power and others do not.
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| Karl Marx |
As a result, most people remain propertyless. Ultimately, the quarrel between capitalism
and socialism is not whether private property is to be abolished. As Karl Marx pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, that question
is moot for most people:
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of
abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's
own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom,
activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan
and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois
form? There is no need to abolish that;
the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is
still destroying it daily.
Obviously, this in theory begs the question, for it
assumes that “private property” means different things depending on the
circumstances of the owner. It also
necessarily implies that there are different kinds of human beings, depending
on their circumstances, some of which have the right to own, and others who do
not.
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| Keynes: the capitalist socialist |
In practice, of course, such trivial matters as
inconsistency and contradicting the first principle of reason are swallowed up
in the greater contradiction that once private property in anything is made
conditional, it ceases to be a natural right and is abolished for everyone,
regardless of circumstances . . . unless one has the power to retain it. Capitalism and communism thus end up saying opposite things but doing exactly the same thing! As far as those in power are concerned, the
real issue is not whether the élite
that controls property is nominally private or public. Who cares whether you’re called comrade or capitalist? The only thing that matters is having power.
This was the background against which the Oxford Movement
began and the environment within which it flourished for a time until brought
down by the very establishment it tried to defend. As the nineteenth century wore on, it became
increasingly evident that the great conflict was not between capitalism and
socialism, but between a system of concentrated power and one in which power is
widely diffused. That is why, for
example, the political theories of Walter Bagehot would sound very socialist if
you didn’t already know they were capitalist . . . and that Bagehot’s theories
of political economy are the basis of Keynesian economics. . . .
#30#