The Economy Project

The feral rich

2012-01-21T10:13:00.003Z

A major article by Peter Oborne, chief political commentator in the "right-wing" Daily Telegraph newspaper, appeared today under the title "The Rise of the Overclass". Oborne argues that the middle and working classes are now caught between an overclass and an underclass that are effectively out of control – on the one hand the class of super-rich who seem "immune from the restraints that govern the lives of ordinary people", and whose wealth and immunity has grown steadily for the past 30 years, and on the other a "dependent and sometimes criminal class of welfare claimants", among whom "the idea of responsibility, duty, patriotism and neighbourliness has been destroyed". The interesting point is that Oborne shows that these last comments (about lack of patriotism and so forth) apply just as much to the overclass as the underclass. "These feral rich pose, in their way, every bit as much of a danger to society as the rioters who stole and pillaged London streets last August." It is a significant addition to the ongoing debate about the future of capitalism.

Competitive Social Market?

2012-01-16T22:19:00.001Z

The bishops' conferences of Europe (COMECE) have produced a brief analysis of the present economic crisis under the title "A European Community of Solidarity and Responsibility". It is a statement on the EU Treaty objective of a competitive social market economy. Among other things, it states that "it is of primary and utmost importance in the present European crisis to reaffirm the cultural bases of the concept of the social market economy. For it is much more than an economic model. It is based on the philosophical and juridical bases of Greco-Roman antiquity and grounded in Biblical theology."

The Corporation and the Market

2012-01-10T18:01:00.000Z

In a recent series of articles on this site, Michael Black argued that the Corporation can only be understood theologically – further, that the modern economic crisis is a crisis of the Corporation. But what about the "Market", which is the other big player in the economic game, along with the State and the Corporation?

In economic theory the corporation is a monstrous, if only temporary, aberration. It stops the march of contractual transactions and therefore is by definition “inefficient”. And economic theory is quite correct: the corporation always costs more than a set of equivalent markets. The market, after all, has no overheads, no supervisory management, no administration. If this is all that we see, we can only bemoan the fact, as many managers as well as corporate critics do, that the corporation continues in existence at all. What ever the Corporation is for, it is not for providing lower-cost products and services. So what is it for, in economic terms?

The Corporation creates economic value. Markets establish prices, not value. The Corporation determines what constitutes value – speed, precision, beauty, harmony, or any of an infinite number of other criteria – and persuades the participants in the Market
to price available commodities accordingly. If enough of the Market agrees with the Corporation, price tends to approximate value. You could say that the Corporation creates the Market though its promotion of specific criteria of value.

If the Corporation is about value, then we can describe it as a constant search for the Good; i.e. for those criteria of value that transcend what have been articulated in the past. A positive ethic of the Good is thus an inherent part of the logic of corporate relationship. It cannot be imposed from the outside, as a moral code might be, but only discovered for what it is: a vehicle for receiving grace and passing it on. The “vertical” dimension in which grace operates throughout the Corporation is the dimension of bestowal, of gift. The secret of management has something to do with allowing this gift to flow, and letting the Corporation be energized and transformed – made more alive – by its effects.

We appreciate this better as soon as we realize that the truly good is also the truly expedient. There is in fact no difference between what is good for us as individuals (what provides for our happiness), and what is good for us as a corporate group and what is good for humanity – indeed, what is good for the cosmos and all of creation. In Christian terms, God is that Good to which the whole creation points, and who alone can fulfil all natural desires. At any rate, the Corporation as an institution demands that we decide our destiny. It forces our hand about what constitutes the Good – or at least the “good” with a small "g". We are compelled within the Corporation not only to make a judgment about the criterion of the good, but to make this judgment public and therefore subject to negotiation with others who also share our corporate destiny.

This is the point at which the logic of the corporation becomes burdensome to many corporate members (and not just to managers and executives). It becomes a burden not because they must make a judgment about the Good – a decision about value – but because they are subject to corporation-wide criticism for this judgment. Unlike a judgment about action, the judgment about value cannot even be assessed by results. The value-judgment itself is the outcome. The only measure of correctness we can apply to this judgment is an aesthetic one: is it the best criterion for the whole?

And yet the fact that this judgment is aesthetic does not imply that it is either arbitrary or without foundation – that it is some sort of personal, entirely subjective decision. Beauty is not entirely subjective ("in the eye of the beholder"). It is in fact, as the medieval philosophers realized, one of the objective dimensions of being, along with unity, truth, and goodness. It has a lot to do with proportion and harmony, both of which have a direct bearing on the structure and conduct of business.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons.

Chief Rabbi on European crisis

2012-01-07T07:45:00.000Z

In his impressive address in Rome on the crisis in Europe, the Chief Rabbi praised the modern market economy and modern capitalism, which "emerged in Judeo-Christian Europe and not in other cultures like China that were more advanced in other ways," because our religious ethic was "one of the driving forces of this once new form of wealth creation." It "originated in Europe in the fertile environment of Judeo-Christian values sympathetic to hard work, industry, frugality, diligence, patience, discipline, and a sense of duty and obligation."

"The market’s 'invisible hand' turned the pursuit of self interest into the wealth of nations, and intellectual property fuelled the fires of invention. Capitalism has enhanced human dignity, leaving us with more choices and a longer-life expectancy than any generation of those who came before us."

But he adds that "his same ethic taught the limits of capitalism. It might be the best means we know of for generating wealth, but it is not a perfect system for distributing wealth. Some gain far more than others, and with wealth comes power over others. Unequal
distribution means that some are condemned to poverty." In fact, as the critics of capitalism allege,

"the market does not create a stable equilibrium. It engages in creative destruction, or as Daniel Bell put it, capitalism contains cultural contradictions. It tends to erode the moral foundations on which it was built. Specifically, as is manifest clear in contemporary Europe, it erodes the Judeo- Christian ethic that gave birth to it in the first place."

It ceases to be merely a system, and becomes an ideology.

"The market gives us choices; so morality itself becomes just a set of choices in which right or wrong have no meaning beyond the satisfaction or frustration of desire. The phenomenon that uniquely characterises the human person, the capacity to make second-order evaluations, not just to feel desire but also to ask whether this desire should be satisfied, becomes redundant. We find it increasingly hard to understand why there might be things we want to do, can afford to do and have a legal right to do, that none the less we should not do because they are unjust, or dishonourable, or disloyal, or demeaning. When Homo economicus displaces Homo sapiens, market fundamentalism rules."

He looks for the solution – a way of taming capitalism – to the Judaeo-Christian tradition and to the wisdom of the Bible: "the Sabbath, the family, the educational system, the concept of ownership as trusteeship, and the discipline of religious law".

"The concept of the holy is precisely the domain in which the worth of things is not judged by their market price or economic value. This fundamental insight of Judaism and Christianity is all the more striking given their respect for the market. Their strength is that they resisted the temptation to believe that the market governs the totality of our lives, when it fact it governs only a limited part of it, that which concerns goods subject to production and exchange. There are things fundamental to being human that we do not produce; instead we receive from those who came before us and from God Himself. And there are things which we may not exchange, however high the price."

He concludes:

"Stabilising the Euro is one thing, healing the culture that surrounds it is another. A world in which material values are everything and spiritual values nothing is neither a stable state nor a good society. The time has come for us to recover the Judeo-Christian ethic of human dignity in the image of God. When Europe recovers its soul, it will recover its wealth-creating energies. But first it must remember: humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind."

The importance of crafts

2012-01-04T09:58:00.000Z

An article by Sir Christopher Frayling in the prestigious RSA Journal ("Tools for Survival") claims that with the rise of the "maker movement" and the recognition of the importance of manufacturing in our economy, the crafts sector is back in the spotlight, only held back by an "outdated vocabulary". The crafts need to be "reclaimed and re-evaluated" – he has in mind the reinvention of guilds and apprenticeships and a new stress on the teaching of practical skills (in schools and colleges, but also to prisoners and young offenders to equip them with the skills they can use to rebuild their lives). Frayling doesn't say this, but I suppose one of the things Steve Jobs achieved with his obsessive emphasis on quality of design and attention to detail at Apple was to begin to blur the line between mass production and craftsmanship. Frayling even talks of the "potential for a second industrial revolution". His most recent book is called On Craftsmanship.

The illustration shows my brother-in-law working as a glassblower.

God will provide

2012-01-03T06:25:00.000Z

St Pio of Pietrelcina (Padre Pio)

Veteran hagiologist ("specialist in human goodness") Patricia Treece, author of numerous books on the lives of the saints and the strange phenomena associated with sanctity, has produced a new book in response to the present world economic crisis that will both comfort and amaze. God Will Provide is subtitled (rather sensationally) "How God's Bounty Opened to Saints – and 9 Ways It Can Open for You, Too". It is full of well-researched examples of how God met the physical and financial needs of people who relied on him to do so, from Mother Teresa and Padre Pio to much more obscure people. And it encourages the reader to do likewise, proposing nine ways in which you and I can align ourselves with God's providence, overcoming our fear and anxiety about the economic situation: 1) surrender everything as much as you can, 2) make serious efforts to grow your faith, 3) avoid faith-killers like the plague, 4) cultivate gratitude, 5) retool your mind, 6) cultivate belief in divine providence, 7) do your part to meet your material needs, 8) don't block the flow of God's supply, and 9) pass on the wonderful news of God's providence. All of these are illustrated by vivid examples. The book is recommended by Robert Faricy SJ.

Reinventing the Guild

2011-12-30T17:13:00.002Z

Russell Sparkes has written a new paper on the reinvention of the guilds, which is now posted on the Economy site. Here is an extract:

Where do we go from here? I want to suggest that one answer may lie in a revival of mutual self-help groups, inspired by spiritual values, which we might call by their old medieval name of ‘guilds’. Of course I am not suggesting an exact return to the medieval guilds, any more than I am advocating that people should go around talking Chaucerian English. However, I do argue that the guilds provide a model answer to two major problems of modern economic and social life. The first of these is the rapid shift in the labour market from life-time employment for most people to a world of self-employment and temporary contracts. The second, partly as a consequence of the former, is the reduction in the safety net provided by the welfare state and corporate health and pension provision.

Read the whole thing. Some of you may also be interested in a recent article in the RSA Journal on the growing importance of the crafts sector and the need for a "new language" in which to talk about it, by Sir Christopher Frayling FRSA: "Tools for Survival".

The Logic of the Gift

2011-12-24T09:20:00.001Z

Happy Christmas! It is a time for giving. But what is a "gift"? This may be one you don't want, but I have added my paper "A Theology of Gift" from the recent Blackfriars symposium to the Articles section of the Economy Project website. In section 34 of Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict writes: “Charity in truth places man before the astonishing experience of gift. Gratuitousness is present in our lives in many different forms, which often go unrecognized because of a purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life. The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension.” He goes on to argue that the “logic of gift” which is an expression of communion with others must be allowed a place even within economic systems and commercial enterprises, since no human activity exists in a sphere apart from God or separate from ethics. And in section 53 he adds: “Thinking of this kind requires a deeper critical evaluation of the category of relation. This is a task that cannot be undertaken by the social sciences alone, insofar as the contribution of disciplines such as metaphysics and theology is needed if man's transcendent dignity is to be properly understood.” The Blackfriars symposium was inspired by this challenge. Other papers are expected to be published in due course.

Crisis of the Corporation: 7

2011-12-18T10:40:00.001Z

Flag of the East India Company from 1801

The entire series CRISIS OF THE CORPORATION is now available as a single PDF article on our Economy pages. What follows is the final part.

"Many companies extol the value of work-life balance for their employees, but the reality for senior executives? There isn't any. Frequently, stressed and harried managers look up the organization hierarchy and assume that they'll have greater control of their time when they advance to the C-suite. What they don't understand is that modern-day telecommunications, the hair-trigger requirements of financial markets, and the pace of global organizations create 24 x 7 work lives for most executives."

This text is taken from that symbol of social radicalism called the Harvard Business Review in November 2011. It summarizes the existential issue of the corporation in terms that are direct and unequivocal. It also poses the fundamental ethical problem of modern life: corporate ambition.

Ambition in modern society, really the drive toward personal power, isn't fundamentally different from ambition in any other era. It involves persistence, single-mindedness, immense energy, and commitment. In a word: passion. The corporation has become an instrument of this passion. But it is an instrument which cannot be controlled. In theological terms it is a Power, a force beyond the control of human beings, a force, like the state, which we theorize is under our control but which in fact has a life of its own.

The legal recognition that the corporation is a “person” does not give it an inappropriate status. Rather it serves as a warning that the corporation is not a tool that can be
confidently directed toward some end. It has its own ends, which it defines and pursues even while giving the illusion of subservience. As the Harvard business experts know, the corporation consumes its most talented and most willing members.

The corporation dominates modern life, but its role has become destructive. It is destroying life by destroying relationships, beginning with family relationships; and from there, our relationships with friends, neighbourhoods, and national states; and finally our relationships with everything on the rest of our planet. The corporate is the fundamental relationship in modern society and it has gone wrong. How do we fix it? New laws? Law is now controlled by corporate interests. Better practices of corporate governance? Those who have been most damaged by the corporate system are those who wield most power in it. Historically no system of government has ever reformed itself from the top. Training better corporate managers? The world now has perhaps ten generations of professional corporate managers through which to judge the effects of training and advanced education for business. What conclusion can be drawn but that all this effort has produced simply more ambitious managers, more powerful corporations and a far less attractive world in which to live.

The real solution to the corporate problem is simple, straightforward, and immediate. It is also something so counter-cultural that it is daily rejected without real thought. We need to replace the passion of ambition with compassion. In short, give up using corporate relationships instrumentally. The relationship of the corporation is its own end. The separation of dominium from usufructus, of control from benefit, is a profound social act that implies an unlimited responsibility for those who exercise control to ensure their own benefit is subjugated to the benefit of others. Part of that responsibility is the articulation of what constitutes benefit at all. The modern conceit, taught to MBAs and repeated by politicians around the world that “shareholders own the corporation” and are consequently the genuine beneficiaries of management action is simply false, historically and legally. The beneficiary is the corporation itself, a moral and legal entity that is independent of every other corporate stakeholder, including the shareholder.

Although false the conceit is understandable. It is an attempt to formalize the danger of personal ambition to corporate existence. In fact it merely provides the means to act in personal interests by positing a supposedly objective criterion of managerial action that can be manipulated by the managers it is meant to constrain.

Corporate managers are indeed “agents”, but of the corporation, not of its shareholders. This is no easy relationship to be in. It demands, in theological terms, a kenosis, an emptying of self in the service of the corporation. This is an outrageous and irrational demand. It is nevertheless the foundation of “corporateness”. The implications are dire: Leave your “vision”, your dearest commitments, your dreams and aspirations, at the corporate door. It matters not whether these are toward personal aggrandizement and wealth, or about solving the world's energy and food problems. All ambitions are merely grist for the corporate mill of power. There are no meaningful distinctions that can be made between positive and negative, good and bad, selfish or altruistic ambitions. Ambition itself is the raw material of corporate corruption.

Only by voluntarily becoming a tool for others – in other words by mutual submission within the corporate relation – can the corporate monster be transformed into the vehicle for human, indeed planetary, salvation. This is the eschatological message contained in the history of the corporation, from its biblical forebears, its medieval entry into law, and even in its modern form. The corporation is, if we choose it to be, a way of living – with compassion rather than passion, through creative response rather than restrictive direction, with relationship as end not means. In this way the corporation becomes what it was born to be: a theological person with its own place in the kingdom of God.

Saving Europe's soul

2011-12-16T14:22:00.000Z

The full text of the Chief Rabbi's landmark address at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on 12 December can be read online here. Meanwhile David Cameron's recent speech in Oxford defining Britain as a "Christian country" and calling on Christians to "stand up and defend" our values and beliefs is HERE. There is a discussion of these important speeches and an interesting post about "Blue Labour" starting over in the Social Teaching section of our online forum.

Elderly care crisis

2011-12-14T09:21:00.000Z

British newspapers have recently been reporting that an estimated 20,000 people a year are forced to sell their homes to pay fees for nursing and residential care, which can reach hundreds of thousands of pounds. (My mother may be in this position very soon.) Spending cuts due to the recession have driven some care home companies out of business, while inspectors have warned that elderly people are being neglected and even abused by poorly trained helpers in their own homes.

Earlier this year, a government commission chaired by Andrew Dilnot recommended reforms to the system – a new private insurance scheme would be expected to cover the first £35,000 of care, with the State covering the rest. But the Treasury is understandably reluctant to agree the £1.7 billion a year this would take, and 2025 is being talked about at the earliest start date for the reform. That's a long way off, and the crisis will be much worse by then.

Clearly more needs to be done urgently. But it is important to note that throwing money at the problem is not a complete solution, even if it were possible (say, by diverting bankers' bonuses into a national elderly care fund). In a way the more worrying aspect of the crisis is the inhumanity with which the elderly are being treated when care is available.

I have an old friend now in her 90s, now in a care home. She recently wrote to me: "in so many care homes I fear the treatment is all theory with very little true understanding or commonsense." She is in a new unit surrounded by dementia patients, and describes
their situation as "utterly scandalous". She says "I am on the brink of feeling that I shall have to make the mismanagement of this home known to some public institution that can intervene - but how and to whom and where I could go from here, it is not easy to see and I am so physically exhausted the prospect of moving is almost unthinkable. But I know, as you do, that GOD is with us and knows what we need and why; even if I murmur to Him sometimes: Dear Lord, I know you know best but couldn't you just give one a bit of peace - which of course is utter nonsense because he is offering us His peace all the time."

Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, is perfectly right when he says “A failing of today’s society is to set the old over and against the young, in a state of mutual incomprehension. In fact, the old need the young and the young, the old. An integration of the generations is critical to a mutually supportive society.... A truly caring and Christian society is therefore one that sees older people, not as a growing and irrelevant burden, but as a rich treasure store of energy, experience and wisdom to be placed at the service of the young and of its future."

And of course it is not simply that the elderly can help us with their wisdom, but that for their own sake, as human beings, they deserve the respect and dignity our present system so often denies them.

Capitalism in question?

2011-12-10T13:33:00.000Z

As we wait for the final instalment of our series on the Crisis of the Corporation, after which we'll move on to discuss the Recovery of the Guilds, here is a general comment on the broader "crisis of capitalism", so called. Two big topics will be left out, for the moment – the environment, and Europe – to be addressed later.

In capitalism the pursuit of self-interest is supposed to work for the greatest common good. It hasn't. Maybe it was always just too simplistic an idea. George Soros makes some sensible points about the fallibility of the economic system we have created. He argues that

"rational human beings do not base their decisions on reality but on their understanding of reality and the two are never the same – although the extent of the divergence does vary from person to person and from time to time – and it is the variance that matters. This is the principle of fallibility. Second, the participants’ misconceptions, as expressed in market prices, affect the so-called fundamentals which market prices are supposed to reflect. This is the principle of reflexivity. The two of them together assure that both market participants and regulators have to make their decisions in conditions of uncertainty. This is the human uncertainty principle. It implies that outcomes are unlikely to correspond to expectations and markets are unable to assure the optimum allocation of resources. These implications are in direct contradiction to the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis. The extent and degree of uncertainty is itself uncertain and variable. Conditions may range from near-equilibrium to far from equilibrium. Again, it is the variance that matters. In practice markets have a tendency to move towards one of these extremes rather than to hover near a historical or theoretical midpoint between them. In evolutionary systems theory these extremes are called 'strange attractors'. My contention is that financial markets tend towards these strange attractors, not to equilibrium."

Many would go further. Markets are fine in their place, but not if everything is for sale and the market invades every aspect of our lives. Lets make a list of some of the things we might not want to "commodify". My list would include body parts, human beings, sex, nuclear weapons, private information, clean air, toxic debt, electoral votes, the surface of the moon (although someone gave me a deed to part of it as a birthday present and I am very grateful).

Surely no one disputes that some kind of regulation is needed for the markets, but who regulates and in whose interest? In any case, the whole idea of "self-interest" is way too fuzzy – once it becomes separated from ethics and a sense of real human flourishing we are bound to get into trouble. The moral anarchy of hedonistic individualism will probably lead to a surveillance state and some kind of attempted despotism – an "invisible hand" we could well do without.

Recent scandals in the National Health Service show what happens when quality and service are reduced to quantity and measurement. Money is wasted on excessive salaries and computer networks that don't work, the buck is continually passed, bureaucratic procedures takes precedence over patient care, old people are left vulnerable to abuse, and pressure increases to legalize euthanasia. The scandals in education, where we have recently seen examination boards competing to convince teachers that their tests will allow for higher marks and less failure (thus pushing down standards and turning schools into results factories), show the same thing. Teachers and nurses are understandably deserting their profession because it is just too dispiriting.

Then there is globalization. As Jeremy Warner recently wrote in the Daily Telegraph, "from the Occupy Wall Street and Tea Party movements of the US to the rise of populist politics in Europe, the globalisation backlash is everywhere."

In real terms, Americans are on average no better off than they were 30 years ago; in Britain, the Institute for Fiscal Studies says that our real disposable incomes are in the midst of a 14-year freeze. Vast tracts of gainful employment in textiles, potteries, shoe-making, machine tools and many other industries have disappeared.... The West’s competitive advantage, even in hi-tech industries such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace, is being fast whittled away too. The welfare and health entitlements to which we have become accustomed look ever more unaffordable, while the final-salary pensions that workers could once expect as reward for a lifetime of service are now confined to the public sector – and those too will surely be gone within 10 years.

Warner writes that "by opening up the global economy to Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the West seems to have unleashed a doomsday machine which threatens ever-greater destruction of its own living standards.... Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” cannot operate efficiently in a world of wildly different labour standards, attitudes to the rule of law and manipulated currency values." His recommendation is partly that we start to think and act more locally ("washing our own sprouts" rather than shipping them across Europe and back to be processed). Localism is certainly an option, if not a necessity, but again it calls for careful regulation based on agreed principles that are not yet in sight.

Economics cannot be separated from politics any more than either of them can (or should) be separated from ethics. But not only do we not trust our politicians; as a society we cannot agree on the basis for judging their actions. There is no generally agreed set of assumptions on which to base moral decisions. All we have to fall back on are our likes and dislikes (the "yuk" factor). Democracy has become an extension of reality TV. Can our political culture recover from all of this? The stakes could hardly be higher. During the next few years, increasing powers of destruction will fall into the hands of both governments and terrorists. The genetic engineering of human beings will be performed, at first clandestinely and later in the open, for medical but also for purely commercial and probably military purposes. The traditional family will become an oddity, found only among a despised subculture of religious believers dismissed by mainstream society as fanatics and fundamentalists.

The only way to rebuild democracy is from the ground up, rather than start with the whole system and work from the top down. A healthy national or global democracy depends on a healthy local democratic culture and a healthy civil society – precisely the two things we seem to lack. If those are in place, the big picture has a chance of sorting itself out. But a healthy civil society depends on networks of association, a strong local economy, small businesses, and a common ethos. It doesn’t happen in a fizzing entrepreneurial maelstrom or a depression. It needs the kind of stability over time which enables trust and friendships to grow and flower. Life grows organically, if it grows at all.

The organic recovery of civil society can be facilitated by a government that is prepared to behave more like a gardener than an engineer. But human ecology is not just about land and crops. It is about healthy, extended families, which form the basic structure supporting the rest of civil society. It is about a system of education geared to producing civilized, virtuous human beings – not merely producers and consumers. It is about the recovery of a sense of the transcendent origin and sacred dignity of life, and of the deepest human need: the need to love God with all our strength and our neighbour as ourself.

Crisis of the Corporation: 6

2011-11-27T10:13:00.001Z

The greater the spiritual importance of human institutions, the greater their potential for corruption and misuse. (See here.) The theological analysis of the corporation gives us a clue as to what has gone wrong – the reason why the corporation is in crisis today. The corporation has always presented an enormous temptation. Its legal form should always correspond to the essential relationship that determines its distinctive meaning. Once stripped of this reality, however, the corporation becomes an uncontrollable beast, a sociological mutant capable only of destruction. As it was with the Israel addressed by Isaiah and Jeremiah, and with the obstinate Corinthians who proved so problematic to Paul and Clement, and with the empty legalisms of the medieval kings and lawyers who used the institution of the Church for personal aggrandizement, so it is with the “robber barons” of the 19th century and the hedge fund managers of the 21st, who used the corporation as a smoke-screen to hide fraudulent financial dealings.

Corporate sin, however, is not corrigible by human action. It is a sin of wrong relationship. The only solution to wrong relationship is to be in right relationship; but no individual, nor even any group, can achieve this unilaterally. In the terms of the modern philosophy of the self (and the corporate self), a solution is impossible. This philosophy opposes the
individual to the social context, erroneously forcing us to choose between personal and social welfare. (As we have begun to see, this opposition is simply false and unnecessary.) That leads inevitably to a rejection of the very possibility of the corporate relation. What remains is a fatal attraction to the distorted legal corporate shell, a sort of institutional necrophilia which consumes us as we attempt to escape from its horrible charms.

We need a new approach – a completely new spirit in management – and the Christian in business is well placed to bring about that transformation. The Christian has been set free from what we have come to call since the Enlightenment, the separation of the subject and the object, or more critically, the separation among human subjects, their inability to naturally get along with one another because of basic misunderstanding about intentions and motives Just as the Image of God the Father in Jesus Christ is not merely a copy or an imitation or a representation, so the image of ourselves in the other is neither inferior nor defective nor misleading. “It is the very mirror in which reality knows itself and communicates itself in power.”

We do encounter God through others in the corporation when we maintain the corporate relation of submission. When we express our view to them on what is important now as the criterion of action, we submit and make ourselves vulnerable; the more articulate that expression the more vulnerable we become. When we encourage, recognize and listen to the expression of another and attempt to synthesize (not compromise) a new ‘greater’ criterion, we submit and make ourselves vulnerable. When as a manager, we cut off further discussion about the criterion as a matter of appropriately exercising authority, we submit and make ourselves vulnerable. I believe no one has the ability to entire into this condition unassisted. These are real spiritual exercises, not pious rituals, not managerial technique. They demand more than we have to offer. And in them we are vulnerable to God, who will protect us most of all in this vulnerability. What we discover through this vulnerability is in fact new truth, not new truth about the fixed, undynamic, mechanistic aspects of the world, but truth about the reality of human existence, which is far more elusive and unstable.

Dorothy L. Sayers provides the precise criterion for this truth: “It is new, startling and perhaps shattering – and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment [it is] shown to us, we know that somehow or other we had always really known it.” This applies as much to statements we make as statements we hear. Both are attempts to account for the whole. Neither sort can be rejected on the basis of logic or fact. Each is potentially a step in uncovering the Good, which is the will of God in daily life. This then is an inherent part of corporate existence: searching for God.

Next: conclusions.

Crisis of the Corporation: 5

2011-11-23T16:16:00.001Z

Our series by Dr Michael Black and Stratford Caldecott nears its end.

It may be a hard thing to say in the modern boardroom, but the corporate relation we have been discussing is a theological concept. (Similarly, the notion of the human person started in Christian theology and has come to be universally accepted by the “secular” world. It began in the Jewish notion of an evolving Covenant between God and his People. In the later Christian understanding, both sides of this Covenant, divine and human, had come together in the one person, and the union between the two had been extended outwards through the mystery of baptism to create a “people of God” no longer confined to the descendants of Abraham – the people of the New Covenant (or New Testament). The relationship of mutual submission that binds God and humanity together in this Covenant – symbolized by the flaming torch that passes between the two parts of the sacrifice in the O.T. paradigm – is now understood to be none other than a divine Person, the “Holy Spirit”, who is the “soul of the Church”.

Modern corporate law emerges directly from the idea of this “supernatural” relationship of mutual service and commitment. In a very real sense the institution of the corporation is
the most successful export of early Christianity to the rest of the planet. Its penetration into every culture of the world is a reminder of the universality, the catholicity, of the Christian message. But even in an apparently secular setting, the “corporation” remains essentially a theological idea.

The Trinity is a relationship of utter distinctiveness and yet complete unity. Each divine person is entirely and equally God, and distinct from the others only in terms of relations determined by love. This relationship confounds any simplistic human notions of hierarchy or “connection”. It is also a relationship that is impossible for two of the divine Persons to create or maintain without the third, which constitutes the personal bond between them. Similarly, the covenant between God and Man – and by analogy the relationship between any and all members of a “corporation” – is not one of mere contract between the parties involved. Contracts are mutual agreements that can be broken and therefore abrogated by either side. A covenant, on the other hand, assumes a special kind of relation, a love or spirit that flows between the two parties. Members of the corporation do not commit themselves to each other by contract, but by enacting a covenant. It is this act that creates the corporate entity. Crucially, the relationship is held to persist even when the conditions of the covenant are breached. This is the sign of the real radicality of the corporate relation.

So for example, members of the corporation do not have to make legal agreements with each other for the provision of mutual support. There is no legally binding contract between the marketing staff and the production department about how many items will be ready for shipment at a given time. Plans are made and executed by each in light of mutual requirements. If deadlines are not met, however, there is no recourse to the law, only to higher corporate authority. And failure to meet mutual expectations on any occasion does not eliminate the continuing need to attempt to meet new expectations as they arise. That is, there is no contract to be abrogated and therefore no excuse for refusing to continue within the corporate covenant.

Just as in theology there is no superiority of the Spirit, as the relation of absolute love between the Father and the Son, to the Persons of the Father and the Son, so there is no superiority of the corporate relation to the individuality of its members. The corporation is not “more” than the individuals that make it up; it is, however, distinct, and its existence is dependent solely upon the continuing commitment of the members. This manifests as a preparedness to forgive – to show mercy, and to receive it.

The existence of the “corporate person” is incomprehensible without recognizing that it is the absolute commitment not just to support but to forgive that is at the heart of corporate life. What may be particularly annoying about corporate life is the involvement, the direct intervention, of other persons in the sphere of our own consciences. Each corporate participant must recognize the right (in fact the obligation) of all other members to judge him. The “payoff” for this radical submission to each other is an equally radical forgiveness. Corporate grace is bestowed upon all who err in good faith, as all human beings do. This is the source of the corporate protection, which appears at least strange if not criminal without an understanding of the theological roots of the institution. The implications for management and governance are to be explored next.

Crisis of the Corporation: 4

2011-11-21T14:54:00.001Z

Dr Michael Black continues our series on the Corporate Relation and its implications for the theory of business management.

In the Spring of 2010 the investigation of the mid-Staffordshire hospital was published. Its findings were remarkable. It found that

– Overstretched and poorly trained nurses turned off life-supporting equipment because they did not know how to work it.
– Newly qualified doctors were inappropriately left to care for critically ill patients recovering from surgery.
– Patients were routinely left for hours in soiled bedclothes and with no real hygienic much less medical attention.
– Non-medical reception staff were expected to judge the seriousness of the condition of patients arriving at Accident and Emergency.
–Doctors were commonly diverted from seriously ill patients to treat ones with minor problems to make the trust look better because it was in danger of breaching the Government’s four-hour waiting-time target.

In summary, the report said, the Mid-Staffordshire Hospital Trust had “lost sight” of its
responsibilities for patient care. It is not clear how many patients died as a direct result of the failures, but the commission found that mortality rates in emergency care were between 27 per cent and 45 per cent higher than would be expected, equating to between 400 and 1,200 “excess” deaths.

This event, and so many others like it in the health service and other corporate organizations, was without doubt an enormous human tragedy. But it was also an equally enormous management triumph, at least according to current mainstream managerial theory. The core of this theory is that corporate organization requires “alignment” among its members in order to function effectively. In short everyone must be pulling in the same direction, or some equivalent euphemism. The job of the corporate executive, so the theory goes, is to ensure this alignment by first formulating a vision, strategic direction, and programme for the corporation, and then ensuring “buy-in” or acceptance of these throughout the corporate hierarchy, from the janitor in the toilets to the head of finance and all the levels in between.

The manager’s job, that is, is to manipulate the behaviour of his or her subordinates toward some overall goal – in the case of mid-Staffordshire the achievement of independent trust status. This can be a tough job, especially if there is any moral hesitation on the part of subordinates to either the vision or the actions they are required to take in order to realize the vision. But the overwhelming power of managerial theory and technique is shown clearly in mid-Staffordshire. There the stakes involved were not simply those of economics or finance – an extra percent or two return on assets – but of life and death. Nor were the members of the hospital corporation uneducated peasants who might find it difficult to connect the dots between their own actions and the outcomes for patients. Rather these were highly trained and, more crucially, highly professional people who had been persuaded to act against the basic principle of their profession: do no harm. Overcoming education, training, professional norms, awareness of consequences, and even the pervasive values of British culture is no mean feat, and demonstrates the cultural strength of management theory in the modern world. We may be literally sacrificing our grandmothers in its name.

How does an entire organization forget its principle mission of caring for human life? The answer is, perhaps surprisingly, by forgetting about the relationship that its members have with each other. This relationship is one of mutual submission – of the junior to the senior in the matter of direction, and the senior to the junior in the matter of benefit. This total relationship is the sine qua non of corporate existence. In a sense this relationship is the real purpose of the corporation, since all other objectives, goals, intentions, and achievements spring from it. Adherence to the first aspect of this relation only results in not just error, but enormous, and indeed fatal error. The entire organization is then driven by the limited perception and judgment of senior members alone – through management procedures which limit any real discussion; through compensation based on metrics which are precise but entirely mis-directed; and through a culture of managerial dominance which makes simply false claims about corporate responsibilities. Attempts to change this perception and judgment, or report unexpected consequences of subsequent action by those more junior, are treated as symptoms of disloyalty, of an unwillingness to work in the interests of the whole, and punished severely through the managerial techniques of manipulation. Eventually even the most profound distortion of the relationship appears normal, as a reality of modern life that we all must bear and share. Thus even the most professional and dedicated of staff can not only tolerate but commit inhumane acts of neglect and patient abuse, all in the interests of a “corporate good” which is no longer evaluated (subject to valuation) but takes on a life of its own regardless of any human dis-interest involved.

The managers of mid-Staffordshire were apparently highly adept in this theory. For them the corporate distinction between dominium (control) and usufructus (benefit) had effectively disappeared. They believed that the desirable outcomes of their effort and knowledge was determined from above in the hierarchy and passed downwards where it was to be interpreted but not disagreed with. Their failure – and it is their collective failure not just that of senior managers – was not to demand that the corporate relationship be recognized. In the corporate relationship, usufructus, value, benefit, is decided upon “from below” and passed upwards. The key function of management in this process is to synthesize and reconcile competing and inconsistent formulations of the corporate intention. No other conception of corporate management can prevent what mid-Staffordshire has meant: death both individual and corporate.

The corporate purpose is not that of any individual who participates in it. But the corporate purpose is not independent of individual purposes; it is constructed from them. Because management theorists misunderstand the history and the unique character of the corporation, they cannot distinguish between dictatorial direction and corporate management. The corporation is far too important an institution to be left to the theorists.

For corroboration see the following articles on the detrimental effects of management by targets in British Medical Journal, and Systems Thinking Review, on pursuit of profit in Forbes, and the need to move beyond outdated hierarchy and command-and-control organizational structures at Management Innovation eXchange.

Crisis of the Corporation: 3

2011-11-18T16:38:00.001Z

Dr Michael Black continues our series.

The British Library has in the last few weeks exhibited its collection of Royal Manuscripts, which includes illuminated documents associated with many medieval English and continental sovereigns. Among these are several depicting the so-called “two swords” of secular and ecclesiastical power.

One of the most recent of these, from the sixteenth century, shows Henry VIII usurping the throne of King David – claiming the power of both swords, representing his absolute dominion over both State and Church. Henry, of course, was not the first monarch to claim such universal control. Another illumination from fourteenth-century France, Le Songe du Vergier, shows
Charles V with the same symbolic powers. Not that the modern separation of Church and State was something desired by the organized Church. At the end of the thirteenth century, Pope Boniface VIII in his struggle with King Philip IV le Bel of France had as his ultimate objective to create a theocratic government under which all other nations existed, and thus made the same claim for the papacy as ultimately ruling over both the State and the Church. The argument had been underway ever since the edict of Constantine in the fifth century had made the Church a legitimate entity in law. That act was in fact a dual-edged sword, on the one hand freeing the Church from oppression, on the other making it appear to some as if the Church were the creation of the State.

The most important and interesting aspect of this perennial controversy between civil and ecclesiastical power, however, is not its resolution in the modern modus operandi which eventually emerged, but in the fact that the controversy ever developed in the first place. The fact is that, although it is certain that religious politics has always been a part of State politics everywhere in the world, only in European Christendom do two claimants arise to be the holder of absolute power. And only there do two competing theories arise, which contradict one another but which continue to exist side by side. This may be the single most important contribution of European civilization to the rest of the planet. The effect of this sort of cultural schizophrenia is in fact modern democratic society, which is continuously balancing social order with appeals to some “higher power”. Sometimes this higher power is individual conscience, sometimes it is the will of God as expressed by religious officials, sometimes it is the “intention” of law-makers. But the presence of the two swords is always felt in permanent tension such that even democracy itself is subject to their power.

Institutionally, the emergence of the democratic State is correlated with the development of the Corporation. In fact both have their origin in the same fundamental Pauline innovation of the use of the Roman peculium as a model for the church. In this model dominium (control) is distinguished from usufructus (benefit). Those who have power do not wield it in their own interests but in the interests of an Other. The “managerial” responsibility for articulating what those interests might be is always subject to review and adjustment. It is never fixed by those in charge. This is the principle of democratic society, just as it is the principle of the Christian Church in which only the whole Church is authoritative in its acceptance of the pronouncements of its ecclesiastical officials.

It is also the, perhaps more hidden, principle of the Corporation. The modern corporate organization may appear rather more like the old Soviet politburo than an association that exists for the sake of its “whole self” but this is largely because we have lost our consciousness of its real function, which is both cooperative and spiritual. The great management theorist Peter Drucker, in his very first work, The Concept of the Corporation, an analysis of the General Motors Corporation in its days of glory, put forward the remarkable claim that the company's real strength was not in it’s efficiency in producing any particular products, or competing in any particular markets. Rather, its real power lay in its consistent ability to shape responsible, moral, empathetic people, especially as they rose toward senior levels. In later years he would note the decline in this ability as the cause of the company’s failure, a failure which is far more profound than the loss or market share or cost efficiency.

The Corporation fails, just as States fail, when the principle of separation of dominium and usufructus is ignored. Once managers, or politicians, believe that they have the authority to set and fix corporate or national purpose as a matter of their position, of their power to direct resources, successful cooperative society is doomed. The corporate principle is in fact a charter for human expression of the things that are important, and a rationale for ensuring that this expression is accounted for. This is but one of the reasons for the urgency of recovering the real meaning of corporate organisation.

Crisis of the Corporation: 2

2011-11-15T13:20:00.001Z

Dr Michael Black and Stratford Caldecott continue a series of reflections on the corporate relation in crisis.

Concerns about the relationship of ethics to economics, and the moral dimensions and responsibilities involved in economic life, have been intensified by the modern experience of globalization, and the various cultural, economic and environmental crises associated with it. Great wealth has been generated, but also great poverty; great advances but also great social instability – suggesting to many that economic growth and progress, in the sense commonly understood, may be unsustainable in the long term. These questions are too huge to be dealt with in a single project or by a single group. Rather than focus on globalization, the market, the role of the State or the impact of our way of life on the environment, we have chosen to look at a topic seemingly narrower but equally fundamental, namely the unit of economic life known as the corporation, understood as a “projection” and instrument of the human person.

The rise of the modern global corporation dates from the mid-Victorian codification of limited liability, but corporate life has existed for much longer than this. The corporation
(based on the Latin word for body, corpus) is the fundamental structural relationship of civil society, rooted theologically in notions of covenant that go back to ancient Israel. The origin of the corporation is therefore not secular, but religious: the “incorporation” (and transformation) of individual interests into the interests of the whole. The Church is in fact the first corporation, a dramatic innovation in organizational relationships first articulated by St. Paul. Brought into civil law through religious motives in the middle ages, the theory of corporate organization remained a virtually exclusive concern of the Church for centuries.

The corporation has been so far neglected in Catholic social thought, but its importance is enormous. It is a building block not just of modern economic life but of social and political life as well. It helps determine the way we act together as human beings. The relationships we have through corporations of various kinds – from the hospital in which we may have been born, to the local council that collects our garbage, and the companies that supply our daily needs, from North Sea oil to Japanese cars – employ us, sustain us, dominate our waking lives, forge our culture, and help shape our very humanity. Through their impact on the environment they may threaten the survival of life on earth. Unless our corporate lives promote human value, our bodies, even our hopes and dreams, are reduced to commodities for sale and exploitation. All too often the human is subordinated to the corporate. But this is to misunderstand and distort the nature of the corporation itself, which exists for the sake of the human person and the flourishing of persons in community.

Readers might be interested to see this opinion piece by Jo Confino of the Guardian about the return of values to business, and love in the corporation.

Crisis of the Corporation: 1

2011-11-14T17:36:00.001Z

Dr Michael Black introduces a series of articles on the mystery and crisis of the corporate relation.

The Occupy movement has gone global over the last several months, spreading from New York City to London, to every developed country on the planet. Despite the cultural diversity in which it is taking place and the variety of objectives expressed by the participants, every location seems to have the same focus: mitigation or destruction of the power of the corporation. Whether the language is that of economic equality, environmental sanity, political freedom, or personal fulfilment, the object of ire, fear, and reform always includes the institution of the corporation, not merely as a symbolic element in global destruction but as the primary instrument of individual repression and social division in modern life.

But what is a “corporation”? There is something mysterious at the heart of the corporation that eludes purely secular analysis. There are many forms of human organization we understand relatively well: partnerships, clubs, nation states, and so on. The distinguishing feature of a corporation – a limited liability company, for example – is that it somehow possesses an identity, a life, independent of its members. It can act through its members, whereas in the other cases it is the members who act through the association, either individually or collectively. This is expressed in law in a variety of ways, but the most important is the rule that the corporation has its own interests, values, or criteria of choice, which are not those of its members. This is universally accepted without
question. It is the formal method by which dominium (management) is separated from usufructus (benefit) and is the essential mark of the corporate relation.

The unavoidable question is therefore what is the measure of benefit for this independent entity? All corporate members have a responsibility for answering this question, in fact for agreeing answers to this question. Thus there is a relationship of mutual submission required among all members of the corporate entity. This is the essence of its strangeness and its genius. When that essence is forgotten or undermined the corporation becomes a social monster. That is what has happened in the modern world.

What the protestors have in common is their hatred of a particular social relationship, a relationship of exploitation. The corporation is responsible for the exploitation of employees by employers; of the environment, though the creation of cost “externalities” which must be paid for by others in the short-term economic interest of the corporation; of national governments, which are forced to compete in a regulatory race to the bottom in order to keep in corporate favour; of customers and suppliers, who do not have the economic power to resist corporate demands for inhumane prices and unsustainable conditions; of the political system, through intense lobbying and funding for candidates; of those whose capital is physical, particularly those whose only capital is their own bodies, by the owners of financial capital; and of the global legal system, through the formulation and enactment of legislation favourable to the maintenance of corporate power.

Like the institution of the State, which frequently has transformed its function from one of ensuring justice for its citizens to one of exercising the grossest injustice, the institution of the corporation has been deformed from one that promotes the practice of communal love to one that rewards the practices of hate: careerism, self-serving rationalization, and unbounded greed. If the heart of our society is troubled, it is due in large measure to this deep-seated corruption of the corporate relationship, without which it is unlikely that any other institution in modern society can perform its true role.

Recovery of the authentic corporate relationship is in the first instance a spiritual task, which can only be understood theologically. The very essence of this relationship, the separation of managerial control from beneficial interest, is an ancient theological idea which has been refined and developed over millennia. This separation implies and demands not the power of authority but the power of submission – of seniors to juniors, of strong to weak, of articulate to inarticulate, of rights to needs, of self-interest to the interests of others, and ultimately to the interests of the divine. Power does not flow downward as if from a central source; it is created and recreated precisely in the recognition and literal incorporation of the interests of others. It is the power of the Shekinah in ancient Israel, and the Trinity in Christian doctrine – the divine exemplar of self-giving love in its relationship with creation.

Such a relationship can never be adequately captured in law or enforced through regulatory action. (In the words of C.S. Lewis, “You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.”) Ultimately the problem is not one of formulating law at all, but of cultivating the essential habits of the corporate relationship: authentic humility demonstrated in the public renunciation of self-interest; uncommon courage in forthrightly articulating the unique criterion of the corporate interest; the creative ability to recognize this criterion as a uniting force among competing alternatives; the willingness to be judged in terms of these primary corporate tasks by others who share in the corporate relationship. This is the essential rationale of the corporate relation.

So corporate reform is a critical part of any programme for social improvement. But this reform cannot be brought about by legislation or regulation. It is a reform that must start with the heart not the head, with the spirit not the flesh, and with a suspension of the rationale of hierarchy and commercial thinking. Ultimately the corporation is about the relationship among human beings. Re-discovering what this relationship can be is deeply personal.

Dr Michael Black is Research Fellow and Librarian at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. He was formerly with McKinsey & Co., later Managing Director of the American Stock Exchange International, co-founder of Corporate Performance Systems and Senior Vice-President of CSC Index, and Director of Corporate Development at Lotus Cars.

Is this the moment?

2011-11-13T13:13:00.001Z

With a mood of fear pervading the markets, the likelihood of another round of economic collapse, the traumas afflicting the eurozone, the resignation of governments, and a spreading protest movement seemingly directed against capitalism itself – not to mention the "Arab Awakening" in the Middle East, the weakness of American leadership, and a possible increase in climate instability – it seems we are living in another interesting time for Catholic social teaching. It may be that even secular economic institutions are prepared to listen. But what are we to say, without falling into the obvious traps? The principles of Catholic teaching are clear enough; the applications less so. This blog will continue to highlight interesting developments, but my main interest is to delve into something more fundamental, namely the fact that economic and political instability have a spiritual dimension. Our mistake is to think of these structures as mechanistic, neutral, implacable, entirely "secular". This way of thinking is part of the divorce between nature and the supernatural in our civilization. Our economic and political woes are all part of the spiritual struggle of our times.

Picture by Neil Cummins licensed through Wikimedia Commons.

A global Authority?

2011-11-03T16:57:00.000Z

The document issued by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (PCJP) under Cardinal Turkson on the global economy and the reform of monetary and financial systems in October 2011 generated a storm of controversy, and has since been roundly repudiated by the Vatican Secretary of State and pulled to pieces in L'Osservatore Romano. Presented as merely a “reflection” and not an authoritative statement binding on the conscience of Catholics, it may still be helpful to look and see what was asserted here.

The document’s analysis is clearly critical of “liberalist” or “neo-liberal” ideologies. It looks back to Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II, pointing out that, “After the Second Vatican Council in his Encyclical Letter Populorum Progressio of 1967, Paul VI already clearly and prophetically denounced the dangers of an economic development conceived in liberalist terms because of its harmful consequences for world equilibrium and peace.” Economic liberalism is here linked to individualism and utilitarianism and defined as “a theoretical system of thought, a form of economic apriorism, that purports to derive laws for how markets function from theory, these being laws of capitalistic development, while exaggerating certain aspects of markets.” The document immediately adds: “An economic system of thought that sets down a priori the laws of market functioning and economic development, without measuring them against reality, runs the risk of becoming an instrument subordinated to the interests of the countries that effectively enjoy a position of economic and financial advantage.” It points out that Pope John Paul’s social teaching emphasized the ethic of solidarity, and the dangers of an “idolatry of the market”, an idolatry “which ignores the existence of goods which by their nature are not and cannot be mere commodities”.

Caritas in Veritate, the main social encyclical of Benedict XVI, is interpreted in the context of this tradition in modern Catholic social teaching, although it adds certain new ideas and themes. One of these is the critique of a “technocracy ideology: that is, of making technology absolute, which tends to prevent people from recognizing anything that cannot be explained in terms of matter alone, and minimizing the value of the choices made by the concrete human individual who works in the economic-financial system by reducing them to mere technical variables.”

The PCJP document has a tendency to slip into an exhortatory tone:

“Recognizing the primacy of being over having and of ethics over the economy, the world’s peoples ought to adopt an ethic of solidarity as the animating core of their action. This implies abandoning all forms of petty selfishness and embracing the logic of the global common good which transcends merely contingent, particular interests. In a word, they ought to have a keen sense of belonging to the human family which means sharing the common dignity of all human beings. Even prior to the logic of a fair exchange of goods and the forms of justice appropriate to it, there exists something which is due to man because he is man, by reason of his lofty dignity.”

The Guts of the Document
In the third section, the document makes its most controversial recommendation. Basing itself on John XIII’s hope in 1963 for a “true world political authority” reiterated by Benedict XVI:

“The purpose of the public authority, as John XXIII recalled in Pacem in Terris, is first and foremost to serve the common good. Therefore, it should be endowed with structures and adequate, effective mechanisms equal to its mission and the expectations placed in it. This is especially true in a globalized world which makes individuals and peoples increasingly interconnected and interdependent, but which also reveals the existence of monetary and financial markets of a predominantly speculative sort that are harmful for the real economy, especially of the weaker countries.”

However, the qualifications that the document attaches to this recommendation are very significant:

“A supranational Authority of this kind should have a realistic structure and be set up gradually. It should be favourable to the existence of efficient and effective monetary and financial systems; that is, free and stable markets overseen by a suitable legal framework, well-functioning in support of sustainable development and social progress of all, and inspired by the values of charity and truth. It is a matter of an Authority with a global reach that cannot be imposed by force, coercion or violence, but should be the outcome of a free and shared agreement and a reflection of the permanent and historic needs of the world common good. It ought to arise from a process of progressive maturation of consciences and freedoms as well as the awareness of growing responsibilities. Consequently, reciprocal trust, autonomy and participation cannot be overlooked as if they were superfluous elements. The consent should involve an ever greater number of countries that adhere with conviction, through a sincere dialogue that values the minority opinions rather than marginalizing them. So the world Authority should consistently involve all peoples in a collaboration in which they are called to contribute, bringing to it the heritage of their virtues and their civilizations.

Thus the document stresses the importance of subsidiarity as a fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching: “As we read in Caritas in Veritate, ‘The governance of globalization must be marked by subsidiarity, articulated into several layers and involving different levels that can work together.’ Only in this way can the danger of a central Authority’s bureaucratic isolation be avoided, which would otherwise risk being delegitimized by an excessive distance from the realities on which it is based and easily fall prey to paternalistic, technocratic or hegemonic temptations.”

In the fourth section, the document continues:

“With regard to the current global economic and financial systems, two decisive factors should be stressed. The first is the gradual decline in efficacy of the Bretton Woods institutions beginning in the early 1970s. In particular, the International Monetary Fund has lost an essential element for stabilizing world finance, that of regulating the overall money supply and vigilance over the amount of credit risk taken on by the system. To sum it up, stabilizing the world monetary system is no longer a ‘universal public good’ within its reach.

“The second factor is the need for a minimum, shared body of rules to manage the global financial market which has grown much more rapidly than the real economy. This situation of rapid, uneven growth has come about, on the one hand, because of the overall abrogation of controls on capital movements and the tendency to deregulate banking and financial activities; and on the other, because of advances in financial technology, due largely to information technology.”

Thus the document insists:

“Specific attention should be paid to the reform of the international monetary system and, in particular, the commitment to create some form of global monetary management, something that is already implicit in the Statutes of the International Monetary Fund. It is obvious that to some extent this is equivalent to putting the existing exchange systems up for discussion in order to find effective means of coordination and supervision. This process must also involve the emerging and developing countries in defining the stages of a gradual adaptation of the existing instruments. In fact, one can see an emerging requirement for a body that will carry out the functions of a kind of ‘central world bank’ that regulates the flow and system of monetary exchanges similar to the national central banks.”

These would be “first steps” towards the creation of an Authority having global jurisdiction, in establishing which “the primacy of the spiritual and of ethics needs to be restored and, with them, the primacy of politics – which is responsible for the common good – over the economy and finance.” Various measures are mentioned, including the taxation of financial transactions, the conditional recapitalization of banks with public funds, and increased regulation of credit and investment banking.

Conclusions
It is quite tempting to dismiss much of this as unrealistic. Several neo-liberal critics have already done so. The financial disaster of 2008 was, on their view, the result of ideological interference by government in the economy, insisting that the banks should lend to poorer classes of people who would be unable to repay their “sub-prime” mortgages. But on another view, the real problem was caused by the banks, who, in order to protect their short-term interests, bundled up these sub-primes and derivatives and sold them on to others, thus injecting a fatal poison into the financial system.

Intuitively, it seems that while economic growth measured in terms of production and consumption is an important goal (though not the only important goal for a human economic system), to pursue it at the cost of financial realism and responsibility is extremely foolish and dangerous. Economic growth may require the borrowing of resources along the way, but surely cannot be run on an expanding bubble of credit and interest that is likely never to be repaid, in the expectation that nothing will ever go wrong (a giant “ponzi” scheme).

As an interested but non-expert observer on the sidelines, I can see problems with both kinds of optimism: the optimism that systems will right themselves if given sufficient freedom to do so, and the optimism that more careful regulation and coordination by a central authority will solve the problem in favour of the common good.

The document rightly points out that the Nation State is a relatively modern development which in some ways may have outlived its usefulness, and is being steadily eroded by globalization:

"Modern States became structured wholes over time and reinforced sovereignty within their own territory. But social, cultural and political conditions have gradually changed. Their interdependence has grown – so it has become natural to think of an international community that is integrated and increasingly ruled by a shared system – but a worse form of nationalism has lingered on, according to which the State feels it can achieve the good of its own citizens in a self-sufficient way…. With dynamics similar to those that put an end in the past to the ‘anarchical’ struggle between rival clans and kingdoms with regard to the creation of national states, today humanity needs to be committed to the transition from a situation of archaic struggles between national entities, to a new model of a more cohesive, polyarchic international society that respects every people's identity within the multifaceted riches of a single humanity.

But is it really true that conditions now exist “for definitively going beyond a ‘Westphalian’ international order in which the States feel the need for cooperation but do not seize the opportunity to integrate their respective sovereignties for the common good of peoples”? Human history certainly shows an accelerating tendency towards globalization, largely mainly to the development of technologies of communication and transport, but it provides few if any examples of centralized authorities that are not rapidly corrupted by power – even when taking that power in the name of the people and the common good.

That is why, I believe, the Pope was more cautious in Caritas in Veritate when he spend much time and effort encouraging us to think about the deeper spiritual and philosophical roots of the present disorder, which would be likely to contaminate any new economic proposal at an early stage. He also directed our attention at alternative types of economic enterprise, and at the role of civil society as well as market and state.

Alongside profit-oriented private enterprise and the various types of public enterprise, there must be room for commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends to take root and express themselves. It is from their reciprocal encounter in the marketplace that one may expect hybrid forms of commercial behaviour to emerge, and hence an attentiveness to ways of civilizing the economy. (C in V, 38)

The PCJP document seems not to have taken these and other indications fully on board, and the solutions proposed, despite the emphasis it gives to subsidiarity, solidarity, the common good, and the need for creative thinking, appear too conventional. We need to think more about the conditions that are needed to support the development of a global civil society, and to transform in a practical manner the existing economic structures by allowing for the human dimension of “gratuity”. Without this, subsidiarity will remain an empty word and financial and political power will continue to be sucked into the hands of those who are most likely to abuse it.

“Truth, and the love which it reveals, cannot be produced: they can only be received as a gift. Their ultimate source is not, and cannot be, mankind, but only God, who is himself Truth and Love. This principle is extremely important for society and for development, since neither can be a purely human product; the vocation to development on the part of individuals and peoples is not based simply on human choice, but is an intrinsic part of a plan that is prior to us and constitutes for all of us a duty to be freely accepted. That which is prior to us and constitutes us — subsistent Love and Truth — shows us what goodness is, and in what our true happiness consists. It shows us the road to true development.” (C in V, 52)

[I have drawn on the provisional English translation of the PCJP document made available through the Zenit news agency in Rome.]

Special Issue on Ecology

2011-10-10T10:07:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of our journal Second Spring, number 14, entitled 'In the Garden", is themed around Nature, Gardens, and Ecology. For us, this is a landmark issue. Not only does it mark a developing focus in our work on issues of development, sustainability, and man's relationship to nature, but this year is the tenth anniversary of the first appearance of Second Spring as an independent journal in 2001.

The Garden issue of Second Spring contains lead articles by Cardinal Angelo Scola (the new Archbishop of Milan, formerly Venice), Mary Taylor (Pax in Terra), and Christopher Blum (Thomas More College). There are also articles on gardening by Vigen Guroian, Jane Mossendew and others. Peter Milward SJ contributes a piece from Japan. Mark Elvins OFM Cap. writes from a Franciscan perspective, and Aidan Hart from the Orthodox Church on the way Icons "transfigure matter". Together with poetry, book reviews, reports, and lots of beautiful illustrations, this is in many ways our best issue yet.

(Several articles on the same theme can be found online in our main articles section at www.secondspring.co.uk, including Keith Lemna on Human Ecology, Environmental Ecology, and Ressourcement Theology. There is also a longer version of the important Second Spring article "Healing the Rift" by Mary Taylor available online. And readers might be interested to read a fascinating study of the universal symbolism of gardens by Mihnea Capruta, from Eye of the Heart issue 4. Some beautiful pictures of Japanese gardens and a discussion of that aesthetic may be found at David Clayton's Way of Beauty site.)

Our issue is quite timely, given the high-profile speech the Pope recently gave to the Bundestag in Berlin, where he emphasized the intrinsic relationship between respect for human life and respect for nature. Pope Benedict said that "the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s... was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realize that something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives." "If something is wrong in our relationship with reality," he added, "then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture." He went on:

The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a further point that is still largely disregarded, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.

Sustainability in Crisis

2011-10-07T21:29:00.001+01:00

A useful report from The Tablet on a conference about climate change in Cambridge.

Quote of the month

2011-09-10T17:31:00.000+01:00

The philosopher Roger Scruton writes at the end of his article on the British Government's planning reforms:

When people refuse to pull down a cathedral for the sake of the coal beneath it, or insist on retaining a Georgian city when it could be rebuilt as a business park, they create obstacles to economic growth. Most forms of love are obstacles to economic growth. Thank God for obstacles to economic growth.

The British riots

2011-08-09T18:58:00.003+01:00

"We have learnt that barbarism is not a picturesque myth or a half-forgotten memory of a long-surpassed stage of history, but an ugly underlying reality which may erupt with shattering force whenever the moral authority of a civilization loses its control." -- Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 1950

How do we understand the riots and looting that have engulfed parts of many British cities in the last few days? Britain's "broken society" has come in for a lot of comment, but there are reasons that lie deeper than family breakdown, poor education, unemployment and poverty, and the loss of trust in politicians. John Milbank's comments are interesting. I would add that we are seeing the results of an erosion of the sense of transcendence and respect that accompanies, not necessarily a religious faith, but a religious sense - the sense that somewhere there may be something worthy of belief, even if we aren't exactly sure what it is. It is not religious dogma that awakens this sense, but the experience of being loved. Mindless violence is the result of mindlessness: of living entirely at the level of feeling, impulse, and instinct, of never having been woken by love to the reality of an existence greater than ourselves, which is the awakening of the mind as much as it is the awakening of true human feeling.

The roots of all this lie deep. In the previous post I recommended a book by historian Glenn W. Olsen called The Turn to Transcendence. Winston Elliott III mentioned another seminal title in his comment: David L. Schindler's Heart of the World, Center of the Church. Others that would be worth mentioning in the same breath are Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, Romano Guardini's The End of the Modern World, Louis Dupre's Passage to Modernity, Jean Danielou's Prayer as a Political Problem, and G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World? Helpful too are several works by the historian Christopher Dawson, including The Judgement of the Nations (1943) which, though written in the face of totalitarianism, correctly saw that Western civilization itself had already broken down, and that victory against the Nazis would leave us vulnerable to moral anarchy and the temptation to control our own populations by the use of ever more powerful (and ineffective) machines - by means of cameras, plastic bullets, and ultimately tanks. Without a spiritual revival individuals will be incapable of controlling themselves. It's all in Plato, of course. If order is not in the soul, we will not find it elsewhere.

Left and Right

2011-07-24T09:44:00.000+01:00

This column on other occasions has called into question the distinction between Right and Left (for example here). Further food for thought is provided by Charles Moore, a leading writer for the "right wing" Telegraph newspaper, in an article called "I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right". But, as historian Glenn W. Olsen notes, these days "the great division is not between liberal (or progressive) and conservative, but between materialists and those who acknowledge a transcendental order." The theme is explored with enormous depth and erudition in his book, The Turn to Transcendence. Materialists of Right and Left are playing the same game. But then there is a further division among those who do acknowledge a transcendent order, and that is the division between those who genuinely submit to it and those who don't: between those who are striving for truth, goodness, and beauty and those who are not; between those who are turned away from self by humility and love, and those who will try to use even the transcendent to advance their own aims. So everything comes back in the end to spiritual warfare, even politics. Glenn Olsen's book is a masterpiece on the role of religion in our society, and it ends with the Eucharist, where transcendence meets immanence - the "enactment within history of the new politics for which the human heart yearns."

The Origin of Religion

2011-07-23T11:22:00.000+01:00

For a long time, mainstream scholarship has gone along with the theory of the flamboyant Stalinist archeologist, V. Gordon Childe, that formal religion and the rest of what we call civilization originated in need to organize society, a need created by the invention of agriculture. He called this the "Neolithic Revolution". The National Geographic recently featured research that overturns this theory. At the northern end of the Fertile Crescent where agriculture seems to have originated and the first cities were built, digs at a Turkish site called Gobekli Tepe have revealed a remarkable temple complex, built and rebuilt over many generations starting 11,600 years ago -- seven millennia before the Great Pyramid, nine before Stonehenge, and long before human beings gave up foraging for food and started to settle down. (Follow the link to read the full text.) Even more intriguingly, it seems the temple was more sophisticated in its earlier stages, and subsequent generations rebuilt it more crudely.

Trust and the Big Society

2011-07-21T12:28:00.001+01:00

The editor of The Tablet has some interesting comments on Catholic social teaching online here. She points out that most social scientists would agree with the Church that trust is a "key ingredient in the ecology of a sound society". But trust cannot flourish in a society where everyone is encouraged to pursue their own short-term self interest. Too often those in whom we place our trust have proven unworthy of it -- whether it be bankers, MPs, health-service providers, priests, newspapers, or police.... "One of the points made by Caritas in Veritate is that an economic system driven purely by self-interest not only cannot be relied upon to provide a moral basis for economic activity, but will actively undermine it." Where does trust come from? How do we get it back, once it has been betrayed? Not from the government or the market, that's for sure. From civil society? Yes, but only if there is a religious dimension present -- a tradition -- by which individuals are encouraged and enabled to give of themselves to others and seek the common good. Without faith there is no trust.

Family farms

2011-07-13T08:06:00.000+01:00

Pope Benedict XVI, in an speech on 1 July 2011 to participants in an annual conference on hunger organised by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that persistent world hunger is a tragedy driven by selfish and profit-driven economic models, whose first victims are millions of children deprived of life or good health. In responding to the crisis, international agencies should rediscover the value of the family farm, promoting the movement of young people back into rural areas. “How can we be silent about the fact that even food has become the object of speculation or is tied to the course of a financial market that, lacking definite rules and poor in moral principles, appears anchored to the sole objective of profit?”

The Pope called for support of international efforts to promote the family farm as a key component of national economies. “The rural family is a model not only of work, but of life and the concrete expression of solidarity, in which the essential role of the woman is confirmed.” Food security also requires protective measures against “frenetic exploitation of natural resources”. This is especially true because the race to consumption and waste seems to ignore the threat to the genetic patrimony and biological diversity, which are so important to agricultural activity. The Bible’s injunction to “cultivate and care for the earth” was opposed to exclusive appropriation of such natural resources.

These remarks should be read in the context of his encyclical on development, and seem to fit very well with aspects of the Distributist tradition. This philosophy or approach is admittedly hard to apply in developed economies, but its relevance in poor countries (in Africa and Asia particularly) is easy to see. Please refer to our project in Sierra Leone. Also see the Vatican's document on the distribution of land in Latin America.

Liberalism, Consumerism, Islam

2011-07-11T11:59:00.002+01:00

In June I attended a conference of the Oasis journal founded by Cardinal Angelo Scola in Venice (recently elected Archbishop of Milan). It is a journal mainly for Christians in Islamic countries, published in English, Arabic, Hindi, and other languages, recommended to anyone who takes an interest in inter-religious questions and the position of Christian minorities in the Middle East and North Africa. The conference this year was about the “Arab Spring”. While listening to the distinguished contributions, my own thoughts moved in the following direction.

In a traditional society, whether Christian or Islamic, human beings live surrounded by reminders of God, which function as a call to prayer. In the world fashioned by modern technology, this is not the case. The environment created by mobile phones, TV, internet, and even modern transport is essentially a new culture, within which religious faith starts to seem irrelevant. (That is, within the world of the imagination, where most people live.)

If the Islamic world is now immersed in this electronic culture, I do not see why the Islamic religion will not go the way of the Christian, and lose much of its dynamic, culture-forming capacity. Recent riots and revolutions seem to have very little to do with Islam, and this may indicate that social behaviour is no longer being shaped primarily by religious conviction, even in its impoverished ideological form (“Islamism”), but rather by material discontent coupled with a sense of solidarity mediated by new technology. This certainly makes it easier to mobilize against tyranny and corruption, which is a great thing, but at the same time it leaves these societies wide open to a consumerism no longer just Western, but fast becoming universal.

Population crisis? AIDS?

2011-06-07T07:18:00.000+01:00

We have touched on this before, but it does seem as though one of the main accusations thrown against the Catholic Church - that she encourages a population explosion, and at the same time, rather inconsistently, is responsible for the death of millions from AIDS (both, of course, by her opposition to contraception) - is just as shaky as one might expect from knowing something about the history of anti-Catholicism. True, the UN now seems to predict a world population of more than 10 billion by the end of the century, but these projections are disputed, and in any case the more serious challenge is not demographic but political - caused not only by unjust political and economic structures in countries with growing populations, but by the massive social problems likely to flow from the decline and ageing of the population in Europe and North America. [China and Japan too? Read the debate in the New York Times.]

Skepticism about computer projections of human behaviour and natural processes generally is likely to be increased by viewing the fascinating documentary series by Adam Curtis on the BBC, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", which shows how these projections are largely based on ideology not reality - in particular by a determination to reduce the world to a cybernetic system that can be modelled by machines (in the face of scientific evidence to the contrary). As for AIDS, the CTS recently published an important report by Matthew Hanley called The Catholic Church and the Global AIDS Crisis which demonstrates not only that the use of condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS has been ineffective, but that the only effective method is precisely the one adopted by the Catholic Church, namely "partner reduction". The Church is the largest single provider of health-care and support for those suffering from AIDS-related illnesses worldwide; besides which her teachings offer the only hope of an integrated and humanistic approach to human sexuality.

Liquid modernity

2011-05-11T09:50:00.000+01:00

On his visit to Venice recently, hosted by Cardinal Angelo Scola (they are seen together in this picture from Zenit), Pope Benedict drew on the analysis of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his books Liquid Modernity, Liquid Love, Liquid Times and Liquid Life. European society, said the Holy Father as reported by Zenit, is submerged in a liquid culture; in this regard, he pointed out "its 'fluidity,' its low level of stability or perhaps absence of stability, its mutability, the inconsistency that at times seems to characterize it."

He noted that Bauman attributes the birth of the "liquid" society to the consumerist model. The philosopher stated that its most profound impact has been felt in social relations, and, more in particular, in relations between man and woman, which have become increasingly flexible and impalpable, as manifested by the present concept of love reduced to a mere passing sentiment.

Speaking to an audience in the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, Benedict XVI opposed this model of a liquid society with a model of the society "of life and of beauty." He said that "man is free to interpret, to give meaning to reality, and it is precisely in this liberty that his great dignity lies." He continued: "It is about choosing between a 'liquid' city, homeland of a culture that seems to be increasingly the culture of the relative and the ephemeral, and a city that constantly renews its beauty, taking recourse to the beneficent resources of art, learning, of relations between men and nations."

Bauman's analysis seems to extend more familiar discussions of modernity in terms of "atomic" individualism, increased mobility, the spread of relativism, the breakdown of traditional and conventional bonds and of civil society by consumerism, and so forth. The metaphor of "liquidity" seems eminently appropriate. It is interesting that the Pope chooses to oppose it with the notion not of morality or the natural law or even the common good, but of "life and beauty", which is perhaps the most profound response possible. Beauty is the self-revelation of Being, and a pointer to the underlying order of love which is the source of freedom and of civilization.

This blog is resting

2011-04-25T08:09:00.001+01:00

Happy Easter, everyone! This is just to let you know that I probably won't be posting much on this blog for at least a month or two, since I am concentrating my energies on some other writing and editing projects. It will remain for the time being an archive for reference - an extension of the main Economy Project site - until I decide on the next phase. Next year is the 20th anniversary of Second Spring, so time for some rethinking and a relaunch! Please try to follow the various blogs that are recommended in the left-hand column, which are doing a great job and are always full of good material.

The crisis of national identity

2011-04-04T21:16:00.000+01:00

Such a heading might be suitable in many countries. Every country seems to be going through a crisis of national identity, though perhaps for different reasons in each case. On a visit to Madrid recently I was told that Spain had never quite rediscovered itself since losing the great empire of Philip II, which he ruled from the Escorial, his monastic palace in the granite mountains, modelled some say on the Temple of Solomon. Britain, or the “United Kingdom”, lost hers as the Empire dissolved into the Commonwealth and the spirit of the Blitz was replaced by the spirit of consumerism and the dictatorship of relativism. As we struggle to integrate an influx of immigrants, we wonder what it means to be a British citizen and how it can be taught.

So where does a national identity come from? It does not come from navel-gazing or looking in the mirror. Identity comes from the relationships that define us. The identity of a nation is an aspect of the common good of its people – what they know, will, feel, and love writ large; what they won’t do, and what they will. It is the past (memory) and the future (imagination). It is the stories it tells about itself, the ideals it aspires to.

Deeper than all this it is a mission. As in the case of my personal identity, I am what I am given to do. I am unfinished; I must become what I am. Thus we find our identity when we hear a call, the summons to be a self. This is why a nation has a patron saint. Often, that saint expresses the particular character and mission of the nation, at least in some symbolic way. England should be asking St George, what dragon must we conquer?

Phillip Blond in Madrid

2011-04-02T09:10:00.001+01:00

While in Madrid this month for the Encuentro, I attended the excellent opening lecture about the Big Society by Phillip Blond of ResPublica. At the risk of caricaturing by oversimplification, and distorting by paraphrase, he made among others the following points.

The Big Society is about creating ownership, and opening up markets. Ownership implies taking responsibility, and taking responsibility implies a need to educate for wisdom and virtue.

To mutualise by creating public-sector cooperatives is a way of avoiding the main problem with privatisation, which is that it merely transfers monopolies from the State to small numbers of private individuals. It is important to devolve power and wealth, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity -- to devolve them where possible not to individuals but to groups. As individuals we are virtually powerless, but as groups we can create new schools, hospitals, guilds...

Individualism is "left-wing". Rousseau's extreme individualism easily flips into collectivism via the notion of the "general will" (made up of many individual wills). Anarchy and totalitarianism are two sides of the coin of individualism. If we are merely individuals with competing rights, we will require a surveillance or police State to ensure order. How do we escape from this dilemma? By realising who we are: that is, not just individuals, but individuals in relationship. To abstract ourselves from these relationships is to fail to understand the nature of the human being.

Europe is "locked in a conspiracy of decline". Bureaucracies proliferate due to suspicion and fear. We can reverse that decline by reviving civil society and creating a culture of trust (cf. trust networks like eBay). But the only way to do that, just as the only way out of the poverty trap, is through education -- education for virtue. Morality is not oppressive or repressive but essentially liberating.

This then connects with the themes of my other blog, Beauty for Truth's Sake. But I wonder if the Big Society, and mutualism and localism generally, can succeed without a profound spiritual impulse. The role of the Spirit in all this cannot be underestimated, and that is the subject of work by Michael Black that I intend to discuss in future posts.

Logic of Gift and the Meaning of Business

2011-03-28T23:13:00.000+01:00

A very worthwhile set of conference papers from the University of St Thomas, published by the Vatican, has been made available online here. I haven't had a chance to read through these yet myself, but as I do I hope to expand this entry with comments.

"It is important for the Church to speak meaningfully to all people of good will within the business community especially during this current economic and financial crisis. While business ethics can move us forward in this reflection and practice, what is taking place in businesses today is not just the loss of will to do good, but the loss of meaning, and especially theological meaning, which ultimately demands more than what traditional business ethics and corporate social responsibility can offer."

The Big Society

2011-03-01T13:19:00.000Z

David Cameron says it is his mission in politics to make the Big Society succeed – see his recent speech on the subject – although opponents claim it is being wrecked by spending cuts, or even that the whole idea was motivated by the need to reduce government spending in the first place. But there seems little doubt that, from well before the election, the Big Society was the Big Idea in Cameron’s mind. The BBC recently reported that the PM had told social entrepreneurs that the initiative would get “all his passion" over the five-year Parliament. The government has also set out details of a Big Society bank to fund voluntary projects. But it isn’t just about volunteering. A “Localism Bill” has already defined numerous ways in which the Coalition aims to encourage local and regional initiative, as part of an intended reduction in bureaucratic red tape and centralized management.

In my booklet Catholic Social Teaching: A Way In, some years ago, I quoted the English expert on Catholic social teaching, Roger Charles SJ: “civil society is… founded on respect for person and family, a morally responsible citizenry knowing its rights and fulfilling its duties, built up though a network of voluntary organisations, social, political and economic, and based on respect for morally responsible freedom.” Sounds familiar, doesn’t it! The question is, can the government get a Big Society to flourish at a time of massive cuts in social services, widespread unemployment, a rising cost of living, and a decline in religious adherence? Have the real roots of the recent financial crisis been addressed? Has the government taken on board other important elements of Catholic social teaching, such as the critique of consumerism, the concern for social justice, the understanding of marriage as the bedrock of society, and the sanctity of the unborn? These and other elements of the teaching make up a coherent whole, and one part of the teaching won’t work if the others are not integrated with it.

This blog entry is based on one I wrote for the new CTS blog Catholic Compass.

People Power

2011-02-24T18:32:00.008Z

The present wave of revolt across the Middle East -- Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc. -- seems to show the power of a rising generation that will no longer stand for rule by dictatorship. The degree to which Islamic belief plays a part in fuelling this revolt is open to question. Nor is it clear what will emerge to replace the regimes and ruling families that are falling. Western newspapers assume the call is for "democracy", but what does that mean, exactly, and what might it mean in a confessional Muslim state? The word itself literally means "people power". But how are the people to exercise their power,
which people, and what power are we talking about? There are many kinds of democracy. Iran could be classed as one, at a stretch; so too the Catholic Church, since the Pope is elected by a college of cardinals. Certainly such a college is small compared to the number of Catholics, but membership in the electorate is always limited by one factor or another. Even in the UK, where suffrage is said to be "universal", we do not allow children to vote, or parents to vote on their behalf. One might decide to confine the vote to those intellectually qualified to understand the issues (a very small part of the population). Or one might do the opposite, running a daily electronic referendum on every issue involving every citizen. Nothing in the concept of democracy rules out either of those interpretations, though there are good extraneous reasons for rejecting both.

Is an Islamic democracy possible? If majority votes can be a way of discerning the will of God, might a democracy qualify as a theocracy? Is this a Western concept that we are trying to impose on an alien culture? Or are younger Muslims beginning to desire what they see in the West? The journal Oasis specializes in the study of religious minorities and issues in the Middle East. An article by Abderrazak Sayadi in a recent issue argued that, despite the view of certain extremists, Islamic tradition is not a monolith but contains many variants, even leaving aside the possibility of reviving Ijma (consent) and Ijtihad (interpretation) as sources of law alongside the Quran and the Sunnah. An article by Michel Cuypers in the same issue demonstrates the extent to which the "rhetorical" complexity of the Quran leaves ample scope for -- indeed demands -- some kind of rational exegesis (if not at times an allegorical or symbolic interpretation of the kind favoured by the Sufis). It is not easy to have these kinds of discussions within the Islamic world at this particular time, but it is important to be aware that there are many kinds of Islam, which is not to be entirely identified with "Islamism".

Interview on Zenit with Fr Samil Khalil on the "new Arab springtime": Part 1, Part 2.

Recovery of the Guilds

2011-02-07T16:36:00.009Z

Is it possible that the guilds, those great symbols of medieval culture and enterprise, might be restored to life in our own time? The guilds were an association of freemen, of craftsmen working together to sustain each other, and through apprenticeship and training, to ensure the quality of what they produced. In the UK, the 2010 election installed a government committed to the rebuilding of the “Big Society” and reviving localism. A revival of the guilds would be a keystone in the political process of rebuilding mediatory agencies along with church and school. It is up to us who believe in the necessity of as many members of our society as possible being the economic masters of their fate to create a demand for the recovery of the guilds in our time.

So argues Russell Sparkes, in a "Tract for Our Time" just published in the Articles section of Second Spring Economy. Russell is one of the UK's leading authorities on the practical interface of ethics and economics. He is a Senior Fund Manager for the British Methodist Church working in the field of ethical investment, and Secretary on the Ethics of Investment for the same organization.

Population bomb defused?

2011-01-18T17:07:00.002Z

For the first time in human history, more people live in cities than outside them. The world’s population has been rising steadily, from 3 billion in 1960 to nearly 7 billion now, and in forty years more it may reach 9 billion.

The numbers sound huge, but Paul Ehrlich’s alarmist prediction in his 1966 book The Population Bomb that in the 1970s hundreds of millions would starve to death has been proved false. Advances in agriculture (the “green revolution”) enabled the world to double its grain supply to compensate for increasing demand. Continued expansion of our population may similarly be offset by further advances in technology. This should not lead us to ignore the possible impact of such a huge increase of numbers on social, political and economic systems, as well as the environment. But Catholics, who are frequently confronted with arguments in favour of contraception based on the “population bomb” thesis, can take some heart from a recent study by National Geographic that emphasizes how hard it is to predict the effects of the population explosion. The real issue, it turns out, is not numbers (which in any case are due to level out by the end of the century) but the use of resources. A person in the developed world uses 32 times as many resources as someone elsewhere, and emits 200 times as much carbon dioxide.

What are the implications? You can have bigger numbers, but people have to stay poor. Or the consumption of the wealthy has to be reduced. Eliminate poverty, and educate third-world women, and population growth will cease. But eliminate poverty, and everyone will be consuming more resources. There is another way, one that allows bigger numbers while combatting poverty, and it goes by the name of “sustainable development”. That is where Catholic social teaching really comes into its own, based on an appreciation of the natural laws written into the created world. This is where we need to devote more research, to find ways to promote development without destroying the earth around us. For more on this, see the earlier post commenting on Caritas in Veritate. See also the book by Fred Pearce, Peoplequake.

Theology of the corporation

2011-01-03T10:05:00.000Z

This term in Oxford, our colleague and adviser Michael Black will be giving a series of important lectures at Blackfriars. The corporation is a dominant institution of modern society. Our economic, political and cultural life is almost inconceivable without the corporation as the legal, commercial and financial foundation for human association. And it is an institution that affects us all intimately as participants, partners, observers, and victims. Yet it is an institution that is frequently misunderstood in terms of both its history and its function in society. What ‘good’ does the corporation actually provide? Are there defensible reasons for the evolution corporate law and the conventions of corporate life? What does it mean to be ethical as part of the corporate way of being? These lectures will explore the history, practices, and prospects of the corporation from a theological perspective. Theology, it will be shown, is not something extrinsic to the corporation, yet another point of view among many from which to analyse the corporate character. Rather, theology is a basic constituent of the social relation which we call corporate – in its design, in its legal expression, and in its particular logic the corporation is a product of theological categories of thought. Theology therefore is able to help uncover the hidden form and potential of corporate life, and to suggest fresh approaches to its membership, management, regulation and evaluation. Students of law, economics, and business as well as theology may find the material relevant to their courses of study and are welcome to attend.

Slow down for Christmas

2010-12-05T21:33:00.003Z

Magnificat Dec. 2010

As Christmas approaches, time seems to rush by faster and faster. There is not enough time to do all that needs to be done. Many people find it the most frantic time of year. Yet a holyday was originally supposed to be a time of leisure, a period of contemplation. This loss of leisure is a symptom of modernity. Not that people in previous ages never got in a rush, but it seems pretty clear that the effect of modern communications, personal mobility and consumerism is to multiply the things we can do do and the places we can go, not to mention the people we can talk to. Our life span may have increased, but not our time (and not just because a large number of our extra years are spent in front of the television). There is a rebellion against this in the form of the Slow Food Movement, the Slow Cities and even the Slow Book Movement. The idea of these movements, now spreading around the world, is to slow us down and encourage us to focus on the quality and appreciation of life. For a believer, setting some time aside for prayer and meditation each day, no matter how busy we are, is always beneficial. The monthly Magnificat is designed to help with this. Distributed in the UK by The Catholic Herald, it contains prayers and readings for each day of the Church year, with spiritual reading from great writers and mystics. That's one way to prepare for Christmas, which is all about God's coming into a world that was almost too busy to find a place for Him.

LOCALISM
The Localism Bill laid before the British Parliament on 13 December is intended by the Coalition Government to help build the Big Society by putting an end to the hoarding of power within central government and top-down control of communities, and allowing local people the freedom to run their lives and neighbourhoods in their own way. The Bill contains a radical package of reforms that will devolve greater power and freedoms to councils and neighbourhoods, establish powerful new rights for communities, revolutionise the planning system, and give communities control over housing decisions. The legislation will transform relationships between central government, local government, communities and individuals. It comes right after a series of massive cuts to public spending necessitated by the recent economic crisis. For the Government summary of the legislation see here. No doubt there will be opportunities for Distributists and others to assess the reforms and their implications in the coming months.

The secret of life

2010-11-14T17:16:00.001Z

Goya, "The French Penalty", c. 1824

One of the important themes in Pope Benedict's social encyclical is the so-called "right to life", which has become a bone of contention in modern society. "When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man's true good" (28). The reason is simple. Man is not "merely the fruit of either chance or necessity" (as the Pope puts it in the section of the right to religious freedom, 29). He is made in God's image, and his life belongs to God. We must not treat it as something over which we have dominion, either to manufacture or destroy, as he discusses in Chapter 6 on technology. Both abortion and euthanasia are fostered by a "materialistic and mechanistic understanding of human life" (75).

Yet the pressures towards both cannot be overestimated. As we have seen with recent changes in sexual ethics, without a firm understanding of why these things are wrong, they soon become socially acceptable and then commonplace. Chesterton once joked that one might overcome the need for birth control by letting all the babies be born and then killing those one didn't like. He was attempting a reductio ad absurdum, but today influential philosophers are advocating infanticide in all seriousness.

So, what is intrinsically wrong with abortion and the "mercy killing" of human beings? We cannot understand this without some appreciation of the notion
of the human person. A human life begins at conception and ends with the loss of biological integrity at death. There is a small grey area in both cases, where we may not be quite sure whether life has begun or ended, but one should err on the side of caution. A human life, of course, has value for many reasons - a person who is loved, or has a great talent, or is playing an important social role, etc. has "added value" for all these reasons. The abortion advocates see only this kind of value, and argue that it may be outweighed or absent altogether in some cases. But each human life also has what might be termed an intrinsic value, which is infinite, simply by being what it is. Just as in mathematics, when we add a number to infinity, infinity does not get any larger, so in the case of human life, the addition of finite values to intrinsic value does not substantially affect the outcome, and so all human beings remain of equal value. Directly to act against a human life cannot be justified in the name of any good whatever.

This sort of argument is difficult to maintain without a belief in the existence of God as the creator and lover of man. It is from the infinity of God that the divine image acquires its infinite value, and by our direct relation to God that we transcend all other social relationships and all questions of utility. It would seem, therefore, that the abortion argument is unwinnable unless we first convert our opponent to a religious faith. We think of belief in God as creator, and in man as person, as matters of faith. In fact, though, not all beliefs are supernaturally infused, and these particular things are evident to human reason - that is why Catholics who argue for the banning of abortion are not merely trying to "impose their personal beliefs on others". Certainly faith strengthens and clarifies our understanding of these matters, but there are perfectly reasonable grounds for believing in the soul and in a Creator.

The "soul" is our word for the principle of unity that holds together the parts of a life and makes them parts of one entity. All living animals and plants have a soul, but human beings, since they are a rational animals, have a rational soul. This is not the same as having a "mind"; it is better described as having a self, an "I". The arguments can only be hinted at here. The ability to grasp truth implies a certain transcendence of biological cause and effect. The mere fact that it is the same "I" that feels a pain in my leg, a sweet sensation in my tongue and an itch in my scalp requires a single non-physical entity to own these experiences. There is also an argument from music - the ability to grasp a pattern across time indicates that the observer is not confined to a given temporal moment, as physical things are.

As for the Creator, the existence of something rather than nothing does not explain itself. The only thing that could "explain itself" in that sense is something whose essence is to exist, that logically could not not be. The universe, or any assembly of things that could be otherwise, is not such a thing. Such an entity, which we call God, would necessarily be invisible and would be the cause of the existence of all else. What can legitimately be said about it without self-contradiction has been carefully worked out by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, and will not be repeated here. (Stephen Hawking, of course, has not followed these arguments. A sufficient refutation of his recent argument for atheism can be found in a forthcoming book by William E. Carroll from CTS entitled Creation and Science, and on the educational web-site of the Magis Center.

What's Wrong with the World?

2010-10-12T14:19:00.002+01:00

A hundred years ago, in 1910, G.K. Chesterton published a book with this title – probably one of his most important, certainly on Distributism. It contained a critique of modernity, with a focus on imperialism, feminism, education and economics.

It is, in fact, quite tempting and easy to discourse on what is wrong with the world. Let me have a go right now. (I apologise in advance for spoiling anyone's day.)

Around the globe our democratic political systems are either corrupt, or if not corrupt then blinkered by short-termism, since many of our politicians are only interested in the next term of office, and so can’t deal with profound long-term or systemic problems. The alternatives to democracy, however, are far worse.

Our economic system is inherently unstable, being based on an ideal of unlimited growth fuelled by ever-increasing production and consumption, financed by a vast Ponzi scheme in which tomorrow’s money is spent on today’s problems.

Our natural environment is being destroyed by unsustainable economic policies. The accelerating destruction of species, increasing likelihood of man-made disasters (oil spills, reactor melt-downs, new plagues), and scarcity of vital resources (including fresh water) threaten massive social conflicts and the degradation of quality of life in the years ahead.

There is a population crisis that has two aspects – the ageing population in the West will not be sustained by the declining number of workers, while the growth of poor urban populations especially in the third world and Asia increases pressure on the environment and also contributes to the likelihood of social unrest and terrorism.

The evolution of technology is leading to the inevitable spread of increasingly deadly nuclear and biological weaponry to unstable political regimes and terrorist groups around the world.

So far, so depressing. But there is also something very wrong with talking about what is wrong with the world, or at least with the way we tend to do it, and this is how Chesterton ended his first chapter:

I maintain, therefore, that the common sociological method is quite useless: that of first dissecting abject poverty or cataloguing prostitution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it might be another business if we began to discuss independent and dignified poverty. We all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not all approve of purity. The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

We can argue about what is wrong, but it is more important to decide what is right. What is the ideal? What is the real? In fact, a lot of what is wrong with the world comes from having lost the sense of what is right. And that is what Chesterton’s book is really about. The negative always depends upon a positive. “For the present chaos is due to a sort of general oblivion of all that men were originally aiming at. No man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself.”

Gratuity in the Market

2010-10-08T10:02:00.002+01:00

In Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict tells us that “if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function” (35). That trust has today been severely undermined. He adds that “in commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (36). So what do we make of the market, and of the Pope's warning?

There is a kind of flow, or exchange, making the world go round. This is the flow of self-gift, sometimes called love. It is what creates the world, and keeps it going. But it is reflected or echoed within creation in many different ways, and as far as human organization is concerned it is reflected in two main ways. There are two ways in which to exchange or share tangible goods: it may be done either as a gift, or as a transaction. In a transaction – corresponding to contract-style relationships in law involving commodities – one thing is given in return for another. This may be a kind of barter, where I give you my sheep in return for your goats, or it may involve money. Money was invented for situations where I don’t happen to want your goats, or anything else that you have at the moment, but I might want something later. We establish currency as a medium of exchange. Money is therefore a symbol of the spirit of love within the market: it connects everything together and enables it to flow. That explains why it can so easily become a false god.

Lacking a well-defined community of faith, and under the influence of an individualist anthropology that defines human beings as units of production and consumption, modernity has turned the market – the field of transactions enabled by the lending and spending of money – into the primary means of social interaction. It is in this sense that the “logic of the market” has come to dominate and permeate our society and ways of thinking. Commodity exchange takes the place of gift-exchange – even within the family. The Pope is trying to draw attention to this danger, and remind us that the market is not everything. In fact we have to find a way of reintegrating the “logic of gift” within the market.

One way is through the use of loans (the Grameen Bank and other forms of microcredit would be examples). A loan is not quite a gift, and not quite a transaction. It lies on a spectrum between the two. If I lend you capital without interest, and without necessarily hoping to be paid back unless things go very well for you, it virtually amounts to a gift. You could say it is a kind of “temporary” gift. To insist on return within a set period of time, and to ask for a percentage on top, makes it more like a transaction again, and it turns money from being a medium of exchange into a commodity in its own right. This is the old argument about usury, or charging for the use of money.

Another way is by defining more carefully what can and cannot be bought and sold, and under what conditions. Throughout history there have always been limits, determined by the prevailing culture. There are limits even today. Not everything is for sale. We do not think it right to buy and sell human beings, for example. But even today people sell their bodies for sex, or rent out their wombs for surrogacy. Antarctica may not be for sale, but the native peoples who regarded other lands as being for use not ownership have long since been dispossessed. Is it right to sell weapons of mass destruction, or to take out patents on a genetic code? What kinds of information are to be made freely available (the makers of wikipedia and open source software have one view, certain governments might take another). Can we sell clean air and water, when they become scarce? Such questions force us to realize that there is nothing absolute about private property. Its definition and limits are dependent on negotiation and shaped by tradition and politics.

A third way is simply by giving, even if we give away what has previously been purchased. “Sell what you have and give to the poor.” That is the most direct way to affirm a freedom that transcends the logic of the market. Power over our own destiny has been confused with the power to choose and re-choose endlessly, with no permanent commitment and in abstraction from all the narratives that give a meaning to our lives. The state of life founded on poverty, chastity and obedience still stands as an alternative, a reminder of our humanity and an image of real freedom.

See my article on the "Theology of Gift" if you are interested in the theological foundations of the Pope's encyclical.

Illustration from Wikipedia Commons by Christian Frausto Bernal (Tepic, Nayarit, MEXICO)

Rights-in-relation: need for an anthropology

2010-09-29T15:49:00.001+01:00

Cardinal Angelo Scola, speaking in Venice recently, discussed the phenomenon of the expansion of the notion of 'rights' in the context of modern political discourse without any agreed philosophy underpinning them.

We are faced with a paradox: a hitherto unprecedented circulation and expansion of rights in tandem with a degree of vagueness about their content... Looked at from one side, any catalogue of rights has formidable economic and social implications, but in truth it is itself the product of a certain view of man which is always I-in-relation. To recover the true face of rights it is indispensable to engage with their anthropological and social dimensions: an objective on which the various sciences and disciplines converge, each with its own specificity but in a perspective which increasingly requires a transdisciplinary dimension.

It seems to me that the Cardinal is getting at the following. Human rights can only be based on (a) the inherent or intrinsic value of the person, existing in relation to God, cosmos, environment, and fellow human beings, and (b) the actual needs (rather than wants) of that person in that situation if he is not just to survive but to flourish. This requires that we know at least roughly what a human being is and what causes him to flourish - in other words, we need an adequate anthropology. Without that, we are whistling in the dark.

Good relations

2010-09-07T17:30:00.000+01:00

Pope Benedict writes in Caritas in Veritate that "a new trajectory of thinking is needed in order to arrive at a better understanding of the implications of our being one family;" adding that "interaction among the peoples of the world calls us to embark upon this new trajectory, so that integration can signify solidarity rather than marginalization." This is the task we have set ourselves for our meeting in Oxford (see last post). The Pope continues:

Thinking of this kind requires a deeper critical evaluation of the category of relation. This is a task that cannot be undertaken by the social sciences alone, insofar as the contribution of disciplines such as metaphysics and theology is needed if man's transcendent dignity is to be properly understood. As a spiritual being, the human creature is defined through interpersonal relations. The more authentically he or she lives these relations, the more his or her own personal identity matures. It is not by isolation that man establishes his worth, but by placing himself in relation with others and with God. Hence these relations take on fundamental importance (53).

This is the foundation of solidarity - the fact that we are relational creatures, not isolated units. Here we immediately run into a difficulty. Belief in God is not universal among us, and it may be a stumbling block for the secular environmentalists. Yet we can surely agree that we are "relations", even if not all of us locate the source of that relationality in God, in the Trinity of relations we call "Persons". Through biology and physics, I am related to and entangled with everything else on earth, especially the things that live and breathe. But more than that, my own sense of identity is bound up with these natural relations. They are not simply traces of my historical descent or effects of my actions. I have to live these relations (as the Pope says) in order to reach a mature identity.

What does that mean? Surely that in order to be true to myself, I must be receptive to the truth, goodness and beauty that reveals itself to me through these relationships. They impose upon me a responsibility, which I cannot shirk without diminishing my own humanity.

Picture: Port Meadow by Rose-Marie Caldecott

Natural solidarity

2010-08-11T10:00:00.003+01:00

Then I heard all the living things in creation—everything that lives in the air, and on the ground, and under the ground, and in the sea, crying, "To the One who is sitting on the throne and to the Lamb, be all praise, honour, glory and power, for ever and ever" - Rev 5:13.

On 18 October in Oxford our Association is organizing an event that may be of interest. Hosted by Blackfriars it is a lecture and roundtable discussion about humanity's relationship to nature and the environment. It is an opportunity to hear and meet Dr Pablo Martinez from Madrid, a member of CL and a professional ecological economist working in world development. We want to develop a new, non-ideological approach to ecology and the natural world, in response to the challenge of secular environmentalism. If things go well we may start to plan a conference in the next year or so. At the very least it is an interesting and worthwhile experiment. I have posted some more information about "Environmental Solidarity" in our EVENTS section on the main site.

The ecological crisis offers an historic opportunity to develop a common plan of action aimed at orienting the model of global development towards greater respect for creation and for an integral human development inspired by the values proper to charity in truth. I would advocate the adoption of a model of development based on the centrality of the human person, on the promotion and sharing of the common good, on responsibility, on a realization of our need for a changed life-style, and on prudence, the virtue which tells us what needs to be done today in view of what might happen tomorrow. -- Benedict XVI

Photo of Truffle courtesy of Rose-Marie Caldecott

New Guilds

2010-08-04T18:40:00.000+01:00

The Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in New Hampshire announced that it has established a series of medieval-style Catholic guilds that will enable its students to gain skills and experience from master craftsmen in areas such as woodworking, sacred art, music, and baking.

Thomas More College’s guilds will take their spirit from the associations of men and women who advanced their trades and responded to the needs of their local communities in the Medieval Age. Read more...

Imaginative Conservatism

2010-07-18T20:46:00.000+01:00

A new and rather impressive blog has made its appearance. The Imaginative Conservative seems to be the main forum right now for intelligent discussion of social and cultural issues from the vantage-point of the cultural or "paleo"-conservatives Russell Kirk and Christopher Dawson. It is American, so English and other non-US readers may need a glossary to decode the language sometimes. As I have remarked before, words like "conservative" (and liberal, and libertarian) have several meanings, depending on context. I am convinced that the next step for the conservative movement is to find common cause with conservationists, but that is a step that many are still resisting. However, if you want to conserve Western civilization, this conversation is worth joining.

Rural co-operatives

2010-07-07T06:48:00.000+01:00

If we want to develop "fraternity in the economy" we need guidance, inspiration, examples of good practice. One very helpful agency in this regard is the Plunkett Foundation, which exists in the UK to support social enterprises and particularly rural co-operatives. It provides very effective finance and advice for groups wanting to save local shops, reconnect people with the land, build community in practical ways. It was established in 1919 by Sir Horace Plunkett, the pioneer of agricultural co-operation in Ireland - the aim being "Better Farming, Better Business, Better Living". It has an online information centre and a vast database of case studies.

Secularity

2010-06-20T07:56:00.006+01:00

Recent calls for a 21st century Enlightenment (the new strapline for the Royal Society of Arts) go roughly like this. The Enlightenment legacy of Individualism, Universalism and Humanism needs to be reinterpreted and relaunched. Our society is prone to violence and selfishness, so we need a revival of ethics. Scientific research that shows morality and communitarianism to be rooted in biology strengthens the hope that such a revival is possible. In my view this risks being a feeble argument, unless it takes into account the spiritual as well as the material nature of man. The Enlightenment led to a privatization of faith that allowed an agressive materialism to flourish and dominate. What we need is a new kind of secularity based on a broader concept of reason. The Summer 2010 issue of RSA Journal itself contains a plea by Prof. Cecile Laborde of University College, London:

Secularism properly understood – as a political philosophy – need not be anti-religious. The secular state is not a state committed to substantive atheism or to the marginalization of religion from public and social life. It is, rather, a state in which citizens share a language – a secular language – for discussing political matters.

Prof. Laborde's view is that “religion has a legitimate place in the secular state”, and not merely as a cultural curiosity. She distinguishes Reformation secularism, which aimed at protecting the conscience of all citizens, from
Enlightenment secularism, which aimed to liberate the state from the influence of religion. In the former, religious believers may try to influence the democratic majority in favour of a specific policy (such as the banning of abortion) as long as they do so using arguments based on reason rather than revelation. I take it that under what she calls Enlightenment secularism, the reasonable arguments of believers tend to be discounted on the grounds that they are speaking as believers and are therefore not to be trusted.

There is quite a lot of thinking going on in Catholic circles about the ambiguity of secularism. Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, from the Vatican Secretariat of State, said while visiting Cuba recently that when religious liberty is subordinated to some other principle, there is a tendency to turn “neutrality into agnosticism and separation into hostility”. “In such a case,” he said, “paradoxically the state becomes a confessional state and no longer authentically secular, because it makes of secularity its supreme value, the determinant ideology, in fact a sort of religion, including with civil rites and liturgies.” “It should be the task of the state to recognize the key role of religious liberty and promote it positively.”

This is the kind of question being addressed in the summer school of the Marcianum in Venice this September. Cardinal Angelo Scola (the founder and head of the Marcianum) has said that what is needed is what he calls a metissage or crossbreeding of civilisations that is a continuing process, not a set goal. “I’m not arguing for syncretism” he said. “We have to conceive of laïcité in a new way, as a civil society in which all people offer their ideals of life and ways of conceiving the material and spiritual good and try to find common ground. In this sense, one should avoid the abstract idea of multiculturalism, which hasn’t worked either in Britain or in France.” The cardinal said Muslims should be active citizens in Europe and not try to keep a distance from society around them. “This is the way Christians (in the Middle East) do it. They have churches and their communities, but when they enter into the life of the city of man, they enter as citizens.” “The strength of religion is to propose a concrete universal ideal, in contrast to the formal conception of laïcité that only refers to a charter of human rights that is often reduced just to formal principles. It leaves problems unsolved … it neutralizes all public experience of religion so that, in the words of the German Idealists, it creates ‘a night in which all cows are black’.”

Many Europeans are tempted to see laïcité, as the French call the strict separation of church and state, as “a neutral and empty place and pretend that religious people behave like atheists,” Scola said. “That’s an abstraction that in the end will not bring much luck to Europe.”

Debates around the attempt to ban crucifixes from Italian schools have led to a clarification of the issues involved. In a homily on 15 April 2010, Pope Benedict XVI exposed many of the fallacies at the root of anti-religious secularism, in words that deserve careful meditation:

The modern age has spoken of the liberation of man, of his full autonomy, and therefore also of liberation from obedience to God. It is said that obedience should no longer exist, man is free, he is autonomous: nothing else. But this autonomy is a lie: it is an ontological lie, because man does not exist on his own and for himself, and it is also a political and practical lie, because collaboration, the sharing of freedom, is necessary. And if God does not exist, if God is not an imperative accessible to man, what remains as the supreme imperative is only the consensus of the majority. As a result, the consensus of the majority becomes the last word, which we must obey. And this consensus - we know this from the history of the last century - can also be a "consensus in evil." So we see that so-called autonomy does not truly liberate man. Obedience to God is freedom, because it is the truth, it is the imperative that stands before all human imperatives.

This is the difficulty. Let us suppose a democratic society hospitable to faith, which invites religious believers to make their case in rational language. What will be allowed to count as "rational language" here? It seems we need to go beyond the discussion of "values" such as tolerance, reciprocity, respect and freedom to debate the nature of rationality itself, and then return to consider the deeper meaning of those terms. Perhaps there is no purely secular language for discussing political matters, because our understanding of such terms depends on assumptions about truth and human nature. Faith and reason are distinct, but their relationship is too complex to allow a simple separation.

See this interview with the French thinker Remi Brague on "Religious Secularity".

Four principles

2010-06-18T06:17:00.002+01:00

Pope Benedict says somewhere: “The four fundamental principles of Catholic social teaching: dignity of the human person, the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity…offer a framework for viewing and addressing the imperatives facing mankind at the dawn of the 21st century…The heart of the matter is how solidarity and subsidiarity can work together in the pursuit of the common good in a way that not only respects human dignity, but allows it to flourish.” In my introduction to this blog, I also tried to reduce the principles of Catholic social teaching to four, and came up with a slightly different list: personality, solidarity, subsidiarity and sustainability. There is a nice completeness about this division of social teaching into four dimensions. You begin with a point, which represents the human person, extended into a line (x), which represents solidarity or the intrinsic relationship of self to neighbour. You then add the vertical dimension (y) to represent subsidiarity or the way in which authority is organised, and finally the dimension of time (z), which shows that we have a responsibility both to the past and to the future. All in all, CST is a very comprehensive system, which can be unpacked and applied in many ways.

Religion and Ecology

2010-06-11T21:38:00.003+01:00

HRH the Prince of Wales was in Oxford this week to give a speech on Islam and the Environment. The whole speech can be viewed or read on his web-site, but here is an extract:

I would like you to consider very seriously today whether a big part of the solution to all of our worldwide “crises” does not lie simply in more and better technology, but in the recovery of the soul to the mainstream of our thinking. Our science and technology cannot do this. Only sacred traditions have the capacity to help this happen.

In general, we live within a culture that does not believe very much in the soul anymore – or if it does, won’t admit to it publicly for fear of being thought old fashioned, out of step with “modern imperatives” or “anti-scientific.” The empirical view of the world, which measures it and tests it, has become the only view to
believe. A purely mechanistic approach to problems has somehow assumed a position of great authority and this has encouraged the widespread secularisation of society that we see today. This is despite the fact that those men of science who founded institutions like the Royal Society were also men of deep faith. It is also despite the fact that a great many of our scientists today profess a faith in God. I am aware of one recent survey that suggests over seventy per cent of scientists do so.

I must say, I find this rather baffling. If this is so, why is it that their sense of the sacred has so little bearing on the way science is employed to exploit the natural world in so many damaging ways? I suppose it must be to do with who pays the fiddler. Over the last two centuries, science has become ever more firmly yoked to the ambitions of commerce. Because there are such big economic benefits from such a union, society has been persuaded that there is nothing wrong here. And so, a great deal of empirical research is now driven by the imperative that its findings must be employed to maximum, financial effect, whatever the impact this may have on the Earth’s long-term capacity to endure.

This imbalance, where mechanistic thinking is so predominant, goes back at least to Galileo's assertion that there is nothing in Nature but quantity and motion. This is the view that continues to frame the general perception of the way the world works and how we fit within the scheme of things. As a result, Nature has been completely objectified – “She” has become an “it” – and we are persuaded to concentrate on the material aspect of reality that fits within Galileo’s scheme.

Understanding the world from a mechanical point of view and then employing that knowledge has, of course, always been part of the development of human civilization, but as our technology has become ever more sophisticated and our industrialized methods so much more powerful, so the level of destruction is now potentially all the more widespread and un-containable, especially if you add into this mix the emphasis we have on consumerism.

[I posted this blog before registering the Prince's comments on population control, which - especially in light of his quoting Chesterton, who would hardly have agreed with them - have been noted elsewhere. It would be a pity if his few remarks on this topic, tucked into the very end of the speech, and not even particularly clear, should distract from the excellent things he says earlier. I intend to return to this topic at some point in the future.]

Highgrove

2010-05-30T13:46:00.002+01:00

Talking of the "right use of creation", here's an example - Prince Charles' home and garden at Highgrove. Far from the hobby of a self-indulgent eccentric, this is actually a test-bed for agricultural techniques that should be applied on a wider scale, and with any luck a sign of things to come. Geoffrey Lean writes in the Telegraph:

Organic cultivation, the heart of the estate, has long been viewed as irrelevant, a throwback to the bad old days of "muck and magic" farming, before the liberating arrival of agricultural chemicals. But – quite apart from the popularity of chemical-free food, dented but not destroyed by the recession – there are good reasons for thinking that it is going back to the future.
Agriculture is going to have to be more sustainable... as population growth, resource constraints and climate change combine to cause shortages of food, water and energy... A recent report by Andersons, the farm business consultants, reckons it will become more profitable than conventional agriculture when the oil price reaches $200 a barrel, which is predicted within a decade.

I am beginning to plan a special issue of our journal Second Spring next year on the theme of gardening, and I expect Highgrove will get a mention.

Right use of creation?

2010-05-22T11:37:00.005+01:00

Catholic social teaching develops over time, and one of the newer elements that has emerged during the last two pontificates is certainly an emphasis on ecology. The recent oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico is possibly one of the worst man-made environmental disasters to date, and the consequences for the surrounding ecosytem, not to mention the way of life of thousands of families around the Gulf, will be incalculable. Maybe it will wake us up to the unacceptable risks of this kind of dependence on oil and the vast centralized corporations that make it available. Markets are all very well, but the real environmental and social costs of what we buy are rarely incorporated in the price. If they were, the world would quickly become a very different place.

This Pope asks us to rethink our lifestyle in a very radical way, not only because of the risks, but because it is the right thing to do:

We can free our life and the world from the poisons and contaminations that could destroy the present and the future. We can uncover the sources of creation and keep them unsullied, and in this way we can make a right use of creation, which comes to us as a gift, according to its intrinsic requirements and ultimate purpose. This makes sense even if outwardly we achieve nothing or seem powerless in the face of overwhelming hostile forces. (Spe Salvi 35).

This is not an appeal we should ignore. Every year we see more reasons to make it a priority for Catholic action. For example, 2010 is the UN-designated "Year of Biodiversity". There is a useful briefing here by my brother, and an article by Geoffrey Lean titled "We're Losing the Riches of the World" tries to summarize the situation:

Species are now going extinct at between 1,000 and 10,000 times the natural rate: by some estimates, half of the 13 million or so forms of life on the planet will disappear by the end of the century. That would be the greatest extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, from which life took millions of years to recover....Forty per cent of the world's forests – which absorb rainwater, releasing it gradually rather than letting it run straight off to cause floods – have been felled in the last three centuries. A third of its coral reefs – the most vital breeding grounds for fish – have been seriously damaged. And every year a staggering 25 billion tons of precious topsoil is eroded away.

The Pope believes that Christianity offers the right balance between the value of the human person and the value of nature as God's creation. Yet he adds that environmentalists have had good reason to reject believers as potential allies – for “modern Christianity, faced with the successes of science in progressively structuring the world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the individual and his salvation. In so doing it has limited the horizon of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness of its task” (Spe Salvi 25). This restriction of Christianity to the individual level is what we need to overcome. As Christians we have been too hasty to “limit the horizon of our hope”, so that hope has indeed become a feeble-minded excuse for inaction.

The Disunited Kingdom

2010-05-09T10:37:00.002+01:00

An interesting moment in British politics. David Cameron was criticized from within his own party for not winning a sufficient majority to create a strong Conservative government, by people who wanted a return to Thatcherism rather than vague talk of a "big society". It seems to me he would have done considerably worse if he had taken that line. The election shows a kingdom divided and fragmented against itself - Phillip Blond's analysis of how we got to this position is spot on, and his ideas for reviving civil society (what the Pope calls "breaking the hegemony of market-plus-state") are surely pointing in the right direction. (See preceding post for more on this.) It may be that the coalition government has a better chance of moving us from a "market state" to a "social state" than the Tories would have on their own. Prolifers, by the way, seem pleased by the results of the election, although as John Smeaton points out the overall tenor of the main parties is hardly congenial to optimism.

The Colour Purple

2010-04-29T11:09:00.002+01:00

G.K. Chesterton once joked that "the business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." When one sees billboards around the country proclaiming "Vote for change: vote Conservative", one knows that the old Right is dead and buried. Conservatism ought to mean something like keeping things the same, but now there is nothing much left anyone wants to keep. It has all been broken and messed around, and all that is left to do is change it further. That, at least, is how many in England feel when they contemplate the schools, the NHS, the army, the Church of England, and Parliament. Everyone wants change, and the only question is what sort of change and who will deliver it.

The most radical kind of change we might hope for is one that cuts deeper than both Right and Left. There is an important strand of modern thought that identifies both our main political movements as manifestations of the same phenomenon - "Liberalism". This is a
tendency to elevate freedom to the top of the list of values, and it gathered momentum after the French (and American) Revolution. Nowadays all sins seem to be against freedom. Democracy is good because it gives freedom of choice. So are supermarkets. Even paedophilia is wrong only because the will of the child is coerced or corrupted (or because the child is too young to have a will in the matter). But critics of this strand of Enlightenment thinking argue that freedom is not the supreme value; it should exist in the right relation with others. Freedom, let's say, exists for the sake of love. If any value is supreme, it is love, not freedom. And that has implications for how we understand freedom, because freedom unshackled from love is pure "will to power", and freedom separated from truth (that other neglected value) is an illusion. The critics of Liberalism say there is another kind of freedom we ought to aspire after: a qualitative, not merely quantitative, choice - the freedom to choose the good. Oh yes, the good - another value to which freedom should be subordinated.

Phillip Blond is one of these critics of Liberalism. And like all of them he provokes the panic reaction, being accused either of nostalgia (for an age before Enlightenment) or of a yearning for Fascism (because he thinks freedom is only part of the moral picture, and therefore surely he means to abolish it). An article in the Guardian that was taken from the London Review of Books (“Cameron’s Crank” by Jonathan Raban, 22 April) claimed Blond’s ideas were taken from Belloc and Chesterton, who were supposedly fans of Mussolini, and so indirectly tried to smear Cameron with Fascism. The article was venomous and unfair, not least because Blond’s analysis and prescription are based on arguments of his own, not an appeal to the authority of anyone in the tradition. They deserve to be addressed as such, and they may or may not be well argued. But it is also not the case that Chesterton, at least, was any kind of Fascist. Even in his 1930 reflections on the Rome of Mussolini and his audience with the dictator, he pinpoints the fallacy of Fascism – it brings order to the State without first bringing it to the mind; it “appeals to an appetite for authority, without clearly giving the authority for the appetite.” In other words, it subordinates truth to power.

Mr Blond is to be congratulated for injecting some real interest into the current debate. And he must be right, I feel, about one thing – that between the individual and the government there should be a well-developed civil society, beginning with families. The freedom to flourish as human beings depends more on civil society than on government, or on the market that (hand-in-glove with the state) insinuates itself as the only substitute for civil society in a world where everything has a price. I wish that we would see the resurrection of another sense of “civil” society too: a society in which issues and arguments could be debated intelligently and open-mindedly, with the courtesy and respect that Chesterton showed to his opponents in an earlier age.

Read Blond on the Red Tory tradition on the ResPublica website and here. And to join in with the current political debates you might like to try “Open Democracy”.

Dorothy Day in Houston

2010-04-19T02:44:00.007+01:00

I was recently lucky enough to spend a few hours with Mark and Louise Zwick, who run the Catholic Worker house inspired by Dorothy Day in Houston. Casa Juan Diego is a remarkable operation, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary in December. Serving many of the poorest and most needy in the Houston area, especially immigrants, Mark and Louise have ten houses in all, housing forty men and several dozen women and their children, many of them ill or severely abused when they arrive. They offer not only shelter and food but medical and dental attention in clinics staffed by volunteer medics. Approximately 800 families are served with take-home food, and along with a wider community all are helped to negotiate the intricacies of state and government programs that the Zwicks know inside out. This is Catholic social teaching in practice.

It started back in 1980 when the Zwicks, coming back from an inspiring few years in El Salvador determined to become saints, spent a couple of hundred dollars buying and converting a house that soon burned down. Undaunted they continued to acquire cheap property and open their doors to those in need. Volunteers came forward to help, and somehow they always had just enough money to keep going. They do not go out asking for money (they’re much too busy, and perhaps a bit too shy), but the Casa does have non-profit status, and I can assure you that any donations would be put to excellent use. Visit their website to find out more about them and to explore their resources on Catholic social teaching.

Poverty

2010-04-04T15:24:00.001+01:00

Surely for all people of goodwill, and for Christians especially, the growing gap between the rich and the poor is a scandal that screams out for justice. We are presented, as Benedict XVI has said in Caritas in Veritate, “with choices that cannot be postponed concerning nothing less than the destiny of man” (n. 21). The gap between the rich and poor is not an act of nature, like the weather, something we can complain about, but cannot effectively change. Our DNA does not include a rich or poor gene. Wealth and poverty are created by human actions and structures; they reflect the choices we make, as individuals and collectively as citizens, and the choices made by those who came before us, the results of which we simply inherit.

However, it is not merely “the cries of the poor” that call out for God’s justice. Equally troublesome is the excesses of consumerism and the “overabundance” of the affluent; the modern-day idolatry that drives markets and motivates individuals and businesses, blinding them to the suffering of the poor and to their own spiritual suffering. Consumerism is a futile attempt to fill our natural longing for the infinite with an infinite amount of what is finite. We substitute fast cars, expensive clothing and large houses for a deep relationship with God. As physical beings we have natural needs which are satisfied by natural things: thirst (water); hunger (food); protection from the elements (shelter). All of these needs are easily satiated. What we perceive as a longing for more things, more money, more of everything, is really our longing for God displaced onto the material world.

[Based on an extract from the booklet Rich and Poor, by Charles Clark and Sr Helen Alford, the latest in the Catholic Social Teaching series from CTS.]

A Third Way

2010-03-19T07:42:00.004Z

I am not sure how helpful it is to speak of a "third way" between capitalism and socialism. Certainly there is a broad ground between the extremes of individualistic capitalism (where persons are all in competition with each other) and collectivistic socialism (where personal initiative is suppressed in favour of the social unit). That middle ground is something to do with cooperation and subsidiarity, but this is not enough to define a clear alternative between the two great ideologies, since the milder forms of capitalism and socialism could both lay claim to that territory (especially in England, where the Anglicans have a longstanding tradition known as "Christian socialism" that is hardly recognized in America).

The Distributism of Chesterton and Belloc has been called a form of
"third way", and you will find much discussion of it on our website, especially in the section on Economy. Another - perhaps complementary - approach is represented by the Center for Economic and Social Justice which I hope to discuss in a future posting. Phillip Blond, the founder of the ResPublica think tank, represents the best hope for radical communitarian thinking to enter the political debate in Britain. His views were summarized in an article for the New Statesman in September, and more recently in this op-ed piece by David Books in the New York Times. Here is a controversial sample of his argument:

"To understand why the legacy of liberalism produces both state authoritarianism and atomized individualism, we must first note that philosophical liberalism was born out of an 18th-century critique of absolute monarchies. It sought to protect the rights of the individual from arbitrary abuse by the king. But so extreme did the defense of individual liberty become that each man was obliged to refuse the dictates of any other—for that would be simply to replace rule by one man’s will (the king) with rule by another. As such, the most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society—for human community influences and shapes the individual before any sovereign capacity to choose has taken shape. The liberal idea of man is then, first of all, an idea of nothing: not family, not ethnicity, not society or nation. But real people are formed by the society of others. For liberals, autonomy must precede everything else, but such a 'self' is a fiction. A society so constituted would be one that required a powerful central authority to manage the perpetual conflict between self-interested individuals. So the unanticipated bequest of an unlimited liberalism is that most illiberal of entities: the controlling state. Even the most 'communitarian' liberals—from philosophers like Michael Sandel to politicians like Ed Miliband—cannot promote community without big government. They see the state as the answer, when it usually makes the problem worse. The legacy of liberal individualism is the restoration of the very absolutism that it originally sought to overthrow—a philosophical tragedy that can be summed up as: 'the king is dead, long live the king.'"

Picture: The old House of Commons at Westminster as drawn by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson around 1810, from Wikimedia Commons

Choosing the Common Good

2010-03-11T08:39:00.001Z

My previous post attracted some interesting comments and challenges which will be addressed shortly. In the meantime, the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales have released a summary of Catholic social teaching as it applies to Britain in the approach to the General Election. It is an important document and available for download here. Here is a key passage:

In place of virtue we have seen an expansion of regulation. A society that is held together just by compliance to rules is inherently fragile, open to further abuses which will be met by a further expansion of regulation. This cannot be enough. The virtues are not about what one is allowed to do but who one is formed to be. They strengthen us to become moral agents, the source of our own actions. The classical virtues form us as people who are prudent, just, temperate and courageous. The Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity root our human growth in the gifts of God and form us for our ultimate happiness: friendship with God.

The Bishops then go on to say: "Our society will rediscover its capacity to trust by the recovery of the practice of virtue, and through an ethically founded reform of many of our social and economic institutions. This will itself begin to restore the economy to a path that is both sustainable and just. In this way trust will be
re-established. We believe that this is what the vast majority of ordinary British people instinctively want."
This prediction seems rather optimistic to me. But of course what it implies is the urgency of evangelization.

Beyond Binary Economics

2010-03-04T19:07:00.003Z

The continuing economic crisis of our times is only in part about finance. It is true that a near-collapse of the financial system, triggered by a crash in the US property market, brought global capitalism to its knees. Nor does it seem likely that a problem caused in the first place by imprudent lending by banks and mortgage-lenders can have been solved by the injection of billions of notional dollars imprudently borrowed by governments. But this financial crisis, serious though it is, is part of something larger. The more worrying question is whether liberal capitalism itself is inherently unstable and unsustainable, being based on the artificial stimulation of human desire for material goods. An economy that must continually grow or else collapse completely, and in which the true long-term costs of production are hidden or postponed, is surely an unsustainable economy.

Of course, to suggest this in our highly polarized society is to invite the accusation that one is a “Socialist” or at least “on the Left”. If, like me, one rejects Socialist solutions to the crisis, one is then accused of simply being naïve, impractical and some kind of romantic. Chesterton was of course accused of all these things, and not entirely unjustly, despite the profundity of his intuitions. But finding
a practical alternative to our present economic system is hardly easy, if it is possible at all.

The most damning critique of what I am (too crudely) calling “liberal capitalism” is not economic but moral. That is to say, even if it were sustainable, it would be a bad way to live, for the hyperactive consumerist economy has a tendency to destroy freedom, culture and the environment. That is to say, (1) it reduces freedom to a matter of quantitative choice while conspiring to enslave us to our desires, (2) it undermines tradition by promoting continual technological progress, thus cutting us off from the past, and (3) it destroys the environment by treating the world as raw material to be consumed or packaged or processed for human ends.

Each of these claims, I think, could be defended in greater detail. The dangers in unrestrained capitalism have become obvious even to exponents of the Open Society such as financier George Soros, who now believes that markets by themselves do not tend towards equilibrium. He argues that the rising alternative to our failed and unjust system of international capitalism is state capitalism of the kind we see in China (see his speech “The Way Ahead” at www.georgesoros.com). But a world dominated by the Chinese model will be a world of intensifying conflict between states. He therefore hopes that a new multilateral economic system will be invented, perhaps involving a radical overhaul of the IMF with the cooperation of the UN.

The Pope's critique of capitalism in Caritas in Veritate is yet more radical. Of course, capitalism restrained by some legitimate authority is much better than unrestrained capitalism. Thus the Pope speaks of the need for regulation and legislation. However, he flatly rejects the "binary" model of market-plus-state (39). Nor does he think it is enough to rely on civil society to soften the impact of these two forces through the cultivation of a moral or cultural ethos that will limit our behaviour in the market, and direct our economic energies towards human solidarity.

In general, when a person or community is behaving in inappropriate or dangerous ways, it may be necessary to restrain them by force. A fence may prevent them wandering over a cliff, or a severe punishment deter a particular crime. In the modern world, where technology is so dangerous, misbehaviour so widespread, and the inability of democratic states to control it so manifest, pressures are rapidly mounting to adopt more tyrannical measures. This is the spectre of "Green Fascism". If we save the planet from destruction this way (if things are as dire as we are told), it may well be at the cost of our own souls and freedom.

That is why the Pope in Caritas in Veritate directs attention to ethics as a dimension of economics. He is reaching for a way to place moral concerns not outside but within both market and state. In section 45 he writes: "The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly - not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which is people-centred." In a Catholic view, the root of ethics is not some arbitrary set of commandments received from God; the “good” is built into creation, and what is good for man is what tends towards human fulfilment. Human beings can only reach happiness through the gift of themselves to others. This is why, for Aquinas, love is the form of all the virtues.

The idea that we are made for self-gift is familiar to Catholics in the context of papal teaching about marriage and the family, which was unfolded by John Paul II into a complete theology of the body. It’s most famous reference point is in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, especially section 24 of Gaudium et Spes, which states that man “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself”. Pope Benedict applies the idea to economics, rejecting the idea of homo economicus – “economic man” who always puts his own interest first – in favour of homo socialis, whose “self-interest” is actually the interest of others and of the group. This is the "ethics that is people-centred". We are made in such a way that our true self-interest is served by giving of ourselves to and for others. He deepens this point in chapter 5 by a “metaphysical interpretation of the ‘humanum’ in which relationality is an essential element” (55).

In section 34 the Pope writes that “Gratuitousness is present in our lives in many different forms, which often go unrecognized because of a purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life. The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension.” Over and over again the Pope insists that “in commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (36). This is why he calls for new types of economic entity and wealth-creation that do not seek profit as an end in itself, but as a means to an end, namely the common good of human community (38).

If these words are to be translated into action, we must take seriously the Pope’s call to rethink our economy and our lifestyle, to support local economies, to decentralize economic power according to the principle of subsidiarity, and to steer globalization towards greater human communion and the sharing of goods (42).

A Greater Justice

2010-02-19T08:23:00.000Z

After reflecting last time on Plato's study of justice in The Republic, it seems appropriate to refer now to Pope Benedict's reflections on justice, which form his message for the beginning of Lent 2010. There he begins:

I want to consider the meaning of the term “justice,” which in common usage implies “to render to every man his due,” according to the famous expression of Ulpian, a Roman jurist of the third century. In reality, however, this classical definition does not specify what “due” is to be rendered to each person. What man needs most cannot be guaranteed to him by law. In order to live life to the full, something more intimate is necessary that can be granted only as a gift: we could say that man lives by that love which only God can communicate since He created the human person in His image and likeness. Material goods are certainly useful and required – indeed Jesus Himself was concerned to heal the sick, feed the crowds that followed Him and surely condemns the indifference that even today forces hundreds of millions into death through lack of food, water and medicine – yet “distributive” justice does not render to the human being the totality of his “due.” Just as man needs bread, so does man have even more need of God. Saint Augustine notes: if “justice is that virtue which gives every one his due ... where, then, is the justice of man, when he deserts the true God?” (De civitate Dei, XIX, 21).

And he concludes:

What then is the justice of Christ? Above all, it is the justice that comes from grace, where it is not man who makes amends, heals himself and others. The fact that “expiation” flows from the “blood” of Christ signifies that it is not man’s sacrifices that free him from the weight of his faults, but the loving act of God who opens Himself in the extreme, even to the point of bearing in Himself the “curse” due to man so as to give in return the “blessing” due to God (cf. Gal 3, 13-14). But this raises an immediate objection: what kind of justice is this where the just man dies for the guilty and the guilty receives in return the blessing due to the just one? Would this not mean that each one receives the contrary of his “due”? In reality, here we discover divine justice, which is so profoundly different from its human counterpart.

God has paid for us the price of the exchange in His Son, a price that is truly exorbitant. Before the justice of the Cross, man may rebel for this reveals how man is not a self-sufficient being, but in need of Another in order to realize himself fully. Conversion to Christ, believing in the Gospel, ultimately means this: to exit the illusion of self-sufficiency in order to discover and accept one’s own need – the need of others and God, the need of His forgiveness and His friendship.... Thanks to Christ’s action, we may enter into the “greatest” justice, which is that of love (cf. Rm 13, 8-10), the justice that recognises itself in every case more a debtor than a creditor, because it has received more than could ever have been expected.

It would be interesting to explore the relation of these comments to the whole twentieth-century debate about nature and grace. For he is talking here about what is "due" to man, and that debate was about how we might think that man has no purely natural "end" - since he can arrive at union with God only through the free gift of grace - and yet simultaneously maintain the truth that we have no "right" to that grace, as though we could demand it as our due. The Pope seems to be saying that the answer lies in the difference between human and divine justice. Man has no right to expect more than his "natural" due, and yet God would hardly be God if he did not love us in a way that gives infinitely more than that. In God, justice seems to converge and even coincide with mercy.

Plato's Republic

2010-02-10T12:19:00.006Z

I tend to write from within the Christian Platonist tradition. Plato himself, however, I have never studied as deeply as I would have liked. The Republic I have read mainly for its teachings on epistemology and education, but I still do not quite know how to take the whole political discussion, in which Socrates seems to advocate that wives and children should be held in common - in other words, he proposes the destruction of the family for the sake of good government. Christians sympathetic to Plato's other views tend to shy away from this rather central theme in The Republic, and focus more on the very different prescriptions and arguments in his later dialogue, The Laws. So was Plato a totalitarian or communist thinker, as Karl Popper and others have alleged? Or is there some
other way of reading these texts, as Leo Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Eric Voegelin have suggested? Simone Weil is an insightful writer who knew Greek well, and her comments in Intimations of Christianity Among the Ancient Greeks are worth noting here. She believes that Plato viewed society as an obstacle between man and God, an obstacle that "only God can overcome". The "great beast" of Republic 493a is the same as the beast of the Apocalypse, the beever hope to make it less evil. "This is what Plato understood and his construction of an ideal city in the Republic is purely symbolic. There is frequent misunderstanding upon this subject."

The clue comes in Book II (368c-369b). Socrates is proposing to construct a theoretical model of an ideal city in order to explore the notion of justice in the human soul, projected outwards as it were (see e.g. 443d-e). But Glaucon objects that the city Socrates describes first (see 372a-c) is lacking in luxury - such things as couches and desserts. To this Socrates replies that he now understands Glaucon to be interested not in a healthy city but in a luxurious city, a "city with a fever" (372e).

In the rest of the book he goes on to develop this second city in great detail, and this is the city we normally associate with The Republic. It is this city that needs to be defended from enemies outside and within, who are jealous of its possessions, which therefore needs Guardians who will be trained and prepared for their task, and which must be continually purified of its tendencies to corruption. But it may be that Plato intended these prescriptions to be taken seriously no more than the reincarnation myth he presents at the end of the dialogue (or the joke at the expense of Pythagorean numerology he throws in at 546b-c).

The moral seems to be that the desire to have more than we truly need is incompatible with true justice, and under those circumstances the attempt to impose it will only lead to lies, propaganda, eugenic breeding, and the destruction of the family. In Books VIII and IX he traces the way his "ideal" aristocracy will inevitably degenerate into a timocracy, an oligarchy, a democracy and finally the worst sort of tyranny.

Plato was writing, we must remember, without the benefit of Christian revelation and the doctrine of the human person. In projecting the divisions of the human soul on to the canvas of the state, he was applying a strict analogy between the two (IV, 434). The various classes each have their own work to do, and each corresponds to a part of the human soul - elements symbolized by gold, silver, bronze and iron. They must be kept in order in the same way, in order to serve the good of the whole. The best of the "cities with a fever" is the one in which the golden element is dominant and the classes unmixed. But as soon as the ruling class contains traces of the one below it, conflict will arise and eventually the military caste will become dominant. In this way the whole social order begins to unravel.

The mistake here, from a Christian point of view, is that each individual member of society and each member of every class is a person, therefore a whole and not merely a part, and should be treated as such. The harmony of society cannot be ensured by forcing each member of each of the four classes or races to conform to just one of the four elements that are found in everyone. Perhaps Plato would respond that my comment merely demonstrates that I am writing at a time when the worst has happened, and the classes have become completely mixed. But I suspect he intended his description of the Golden Age as a myth, pointing towards the ideal of the healthy city, the city without a fever, which is the city of the just soul.

Recommended on other themes in Plato's Republic are two books from the Catholic University of America Press: David C. Schindler, Plato's Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic and Giovanni Reale, Toward a New Interpretation of Plato.

More on Money

2010-01-13T17:29:00.001Z

"And I believe in Mammon, the Lord, the Giver of Life; who proceeds from the CEO and the Bank Manager. With them together he is worshipped and glorified. He has spoken through the profits...."

Philip Goodchild’s reference to the “religion of money” prompted me to this thought about moral ambiguity. Could one argue that money is a secular analogy to the Holy Spirit? It is a medium of exchange - it makes much of social life possible. It is founded on trust. The word is derived from the goddess Juno Moneta in Rome - Juno was one of the Roman Trinity of Jupiter, Athena and Juno, and she was also the "mother of the muses", responsible for divine protection of the arts and sciences. "In some sense, money represents everything we could desire. It is the thing that gives us potential access to what we want. Like language, money is one of the two ways we have to communicate" (Keith Hart). In this sense language is like the Word (second person of the Trinity), and money like the Spirit. Does that account for the ease with which we turn it into an idol?

The Religion of Money

2010-01-07T11:45:00.008Z

Modern society is based on the idea of economic growth, a continually expanding cycle of expectation (which supplies the motivation to drive the economy forward), trade leading to income, income leading to consumption and investment. This expansion is made possible by improvements in technology making possible cheaper production (machines replacing slaves and eventually workers) and virtually unlimited natural resources (because natural energies are released by advancing technology). But can growth continue forever? The answer will help to determine our response to the present global economic crisis.

The assumption that growth can be unlimited has been criticized in books such as Richard Douthwaite’s The Growth Illusion, summarized online here. He thinks that our society is wearing “a pair of spectacles which give short term economic issues such prominence that they obscure our vision of the future”. Douthwaite see money as the root of the problem, for “under our current debt-based monetary system, no country has the option of foregoing growth because, without growth, it will fall into serious economic decline.” Another critic of growth is Philip Goodchild, of the University of Nottingham. In a 2009 summary of his book The Theology of Money, Goodchild sees

“2008 as the first shock in the terminal collision between economy and ecology, with a major depression to follow in the coming decade due to an ongoing crisis in energy supply. The hope upon which the modern world is based will soon collapse, and competition for increasingly scarce resources will significantly undermine the moral and political cooperation to which we currently aspire.”

This is a bleak picture indeed. Goodchild agrees with Douthwaite's claim that money is debt. For him, money is “essentially credit, a belief system, in which we participate in practice so long as we treat money as valuable. This means that money is also debt. Every time we handle money, we handle someone else’s debt or obligation.”

Prior to the modern world, the economic sphere was bounded by the finitude of the production of value through human labour, on the one hand, and the finitude of money in circulation, on the other. In the modern world, however, the finitude of production has been partially overcome by harnessing energy stored in fossil fuels and the elements. At the same time, the finitude of currency has been overcome by treating signs of monetary value as themselves valuable, ensuring the value of newly created money by issuing it in the form of loans, attached to debts. Rates of production and rates of interest escape finitude by compound growth. Production for the sake of profit replaces production for the sake of use.

In this way, he says, “money as a supreme value and transcendent obligation shapes the conduct of our lives and institutions. Debt has replaced God as the guarantee for human cooperation, and our modern globalised world is driven by the religion of money.” Goodchild’s “theology of money” is summarized in an article posted online:

   1) The value of money is transcendent: it is a promise, taken on faith, and only realized to the extent that this faith is acted out in practice in contractual exchange.
   2) Money is the supreme value because it is both the perspective through which we value the world and our means of making what we value real. Since money is the means by which all other social values may be realized, it posits itself as the supreme value.
   3) Financial value is essentially a degree of hope, expectation, trust or credibility. Yet financial value, measured by money, is our underlying reason, the discipline for our conduct, the pivot around which the world is reconstructed. Being transcendent to material and social reality, yet also being the pivot around which material and social reality is continually reconstructed, financial value is essentially religious.
   4) The entire monetary system has its own intrinsic logic of growth. This drive for growth is a separate engine of the global economy in addition to the individual acquisition of necessities and the individual pursuit of self-interest.

If Goodchild is right, “The entire global economy is driven by a spiral of debt, constrained to seek further profits, and always dependent on future expansion. It is a bubble of speculation and leverage.” And he suggests an alternative financial system would require “an entirely new way of accounting, a new way of reasoning, and a new way of trusting”. Back, I suspect, to Caritas in Veritate.

The Right to Land

2010-01-02T11:00:00.006Z

The "market" is not absolute but always conditioned by culture, philosophy, history and law. We can see this merely by considering what counts as a commodity. Human beings were once considered as such, but slavery has been abolished by law. Should there be a trade in body parts, in relics of the saints, in drinking water or air? Should we be allowed to "patent" a genetic code? The decision is up to us. If I can put something in a bottle or box and someone else is prepared to pay for it, it enters the market. I was reminded recently by an article in Prospect magazine ("A Place of One's Own" by Andrew Linklater) that land ownership rights only began to be recognized under the common law in the 12th century. For most peoples throughout history, while "animals and crops could be owned, occupancy might be bought and sold, but the Earth, the source of life itself, belonged to no one." (In 1800, Linklater estimates, two thirds of the world's agricultural land was still owned communally.) But in the modern era that distinction was lost.

Of course, the right to use land easily turns into a claim on the land itself - leasehold turning by degrees into freehold. In ancient times the King (or in the case of Israel, God) granted use of the land to his tenants, or in the case of "common land" rights of use may have predated even the monarchy, but with the Enclosure movement most of England became parcelled up into private plots. When in the 16th century money began to be lent against the value of a chunk of land, the concept of "equity" was invented (as the residual value after the payment of the debt) and equity became the basis for capital - but I suppose the key development was the assigning of a quantitative "value" to the land in the first place. The injustices to which the accumulation of landholdings around the world gave rise, once the principle of a "social mortgage" on private property was forgotten, are condemned in a powerful and informative document from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace called "Towards a Better Distribution of Land" (1997).

The global boom a few years ago, Linklater argues, was built on the disparity between the way land was owned in the West and in China. In the West, Clinton and Bush lifted financial regulations on home loans to spread homeownership to the poor, assuming the endless rise in the value of those homes would enable them to pay off their mortgages eventually. This rising value powered the expansion of the consumer economies - people (thought they) had more to spend. GDP expanded enormously. In China meanwhile, lack of property rights drove the peasants into urban factories, producing goods for Western markets - and savings too had to be invested abroad because of the lack of property at home. This created the whole unstable edifice of global finance ("around $2 trillion in Chinese savings invested in US treasury bonds, which in turn kept interest rates low, mortgage lending high, and economies growing", with derivative securities growing to more than $600 trillion by 2007). The rug was pulled from under this by the inevitable collapse of the property market in the US. Linklater concludes that a "future government would be wise to find ways to support property owners against their mortgage-lenders, and favour both ahead of the financiers who lent to them in the first place."

[Picture: Port Meadow Oxford, by Rose-Marie Caldecott]

On Surviving and Flourishing

2009-12-15T12:15:00.008Z

Pope Benedict's 2010 Message for the World Day of Peace is entitled, "If You Want to Cultivate Peace, Protect Creation".

No comments here on the outcome of the Copenhagen Summit (!). However, on another matter, a fascinating article by Craig McLean on the success of Lego, the family-owned toy firm based near Copenhagen, recently appeared under the title 'Play it again'. We sometimes forget that family-owned businesses can get this big - and that big can be beautiful. A lot of lessons can be learned from this story about the creativity and innovation needed to keep a company alive.

The article doesn't talk much about the company ethos, but according to Arie de Geus, author of The Living Company, the only corporations that survive and flourish over a long period of time are those which treat their enterprises as "living work communities" - i.e. humanistically rather than as purely economic machines, valuing human talent above money and capital.

Analogously, perhaps, the Pope writes:

The ecological crisis offers an historic opportunity to develop a common plan of action aimed at orienting the model of global development towards greater respect for creation and for an integral human development inspired by the values proper to charity in truth. I would advocate the adoption of a model of development based on the centrality of the human person, on the promotion and sharing of the common good, on responsibility, on a realization of our need for a changed life-style, and on prudence, the virtue which tells us what needs to be done today in view of what might happen tomorrow.

The term "ecology" is quite recent, and is used to refer to a scientific approach that studies the living systems of the planet as an integral whole, interconnected with each other, rather than individual species in isolation. Humanity is taken into account as one more animal species that depends on, but also transforms, the environment around it, but as the Pope points out, human beings are in a special category. Like it or not, we play a central role. What we need is a humanistic ecological vision that "takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations"; that is, our "duties towards the human person" (CV, 51).

[Picture: Wikimedia commons]

George Soros

2009-12-11T05:32:00.003Z

The financial speculator and philanthropist George Soros recently gave a lecture at a panel discussion in Oxford's Sheldonian Theatre, sponsored by the 21st Century School. In it he developed his theory of reflexivity and financial markets. He also announced the creation of an Institute for New Economic Thinking to be launched in April in Cambridge, through the Central European University. Interestingly, the distinguished panelists made several key points: that one's model of the human person determines one's economic model; that the economic order cannot be separated from the religious, political, social, and cultural orders; that there is a need for a new integration of the different academic disciplines in order to study big events (such as the recent recession); and that we have by and large lost the ability to educate students in such a way that they are capable of seeing the big picture, thanks to the fragmentation of our educational system (for more on that theme see my Beauty-in-education blog).

The point of the lecture in Oxford was to see what lessons could be drawn from the recent global financial crisis. For Soros, the lessons were stark. International, deregulated capitalism is over. It does not work. When governments were forced to put the market on to artificial life support, it became clear that markets by themselves do not tend towards equilibrium. The alternative, he concluded, is state capitalism of the kind we see in China (and much less successfully in Russia, he added), where the market is explicitly regulated by the state.

Many will react to this suggestion with scepticism, if not horror. Whatever happened to the Open Society? Personally, I wonder if Mr Soros in his preference for bipolar thinking has jumped too quickly to contrast the unregulated with the state-controlled market, ignoring the actual and potential role of civil society, in the space between the individual and the state. When the dinosaurs collapsed many millions of years ago, tiny little mammals running around their feet inherited the earth. Maybe the alternative to big state-run markets is a multiplicity of overlapping tiny markets, supported by credit unions, cooperatives, guilds and local currencies. That may be a dream, the dream of a small mammal in a world of big beasts, but as for putting our fate in the hands of the state, Leopold Kohr warned us against it long ago:

The fourth and last form of Radicalism is therefore no longer directed against capitalist exploitation, political privilege or religious superstition. Socialists, Liberals, and Christians have taken care of these. It is directed against the power of the state, symbolised by the swollen sponge of Parkinsonian bureaucracy. Since this is proportionate to the size of society on which it feeds, it follows that the most modern form of radicalism, having again to step outside the existing order to accomplish its ends, must aim at centering social life in national communities whose size is so reduced as to render excessive governmental power both impossible and unnecessary. For what good is the welfare state if its costs of administration become larger than the benefits it yields? The new radicals are therefore the decentralisers, the federalisers, the regionalists, the regional nationalists (in contrast to the centralizing, expansionist and hence non-radical nationalistic power megalomaniacs) such as they begin to emerge in all corners of the world.

Image: Sheldonian from Catte Street (Wikipedia Commons)

Appropriate Technology

2009-12-05T10:06:00.005Z

The phrase "appropriate technology" is sometimes associated with E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, though his term was "intermediate technology". The impetus for the idea seems to have come from Gandhi's advocacy of sewing machines, spinning wheels and bicycles - relatively simple technologies that nevertheless can make a huge difference to productivity at the local level, empowering the poor, and requiring fewer resources to produce and maintain. Recently there has been a lot of talk about "sand dams", as one example. The decentralised storage of water is an important strategy in semi-arid and arid regions outside the reach of perennial rivers, springs, deep groundwater or other water sources. Building small concrete dams backfilled with sand in seasonal rivers is an ancient method of storing water that is now being used extensively in Kenya and elsewhere to support local farming communities. As water becomes an increasingly scarce resource in many parts of the world, this relatively cheap solution is becoming more important.

The Pope writes about this in Caritas in Veritate (n.27):

Hunger is not so much dependent on lack of material things as on shortage of social resources, the most important of which are institutional. What is missing, in other words, is a network of economic institutions capable of guaranteeing regular access to sufficient food and water for nutritional needs, and also capable of addressing the primary needs and necessities ensuing from genuine food crises, whether due to natural causes or political irresponsibility, nationally and internationally. The problem of food insecurity needs to be addressed within a long-term perspective, eliminating the structural causes that give rise to it and promoting the agricultural development of poorer countries. This can be done by investing in rural infrastructures, irrigation systems, transport, organization of markets, and in the development and dissemination of agricultural technology that can make the best use of the human, natural and socio-economic resources that are more readily available at the local level, while guaranteeing their sustainability over the long term as well. All this needs to be accomplished with the involvement of local communities in choices and decisions that affect the use of agricultural land. In this perspective, it could be useful to consider the new possibilities that are opening up through proper use of traditional as well as innovative farming techniques, always assuming that these have been judged, after sufficient testing, to be appropriate, respectful of the environment and attentive to the needs of the most deprived peoples.

Readers may be interested in a rural education project in Sierra Leone, started by a former student of Plater College, John Kanu, under the name Sierra Leone Chesterton Centre.

Community-owned shops

2009-11-08T10:25:00.004Z

The encyclical letter, Caritas in Veritate, encouraged cooperatives and other applications of solidarity within the economy (e.g. section 66). In Britain, the recession seems to have led to just such a development. The Plunkett Foundation, a charity which promotes self-help in rural communities, reports that 2009 saw an unprecedented number of community-run ventures being set up. So far this year, 25 shops have opened and there are a further 65 in the pipeline, which would take the total number to at least 285, stretching from Cornwall to the Isle of Skye. "We think we've reached a tipping point where we have now gone from a few communities doing something that others saw as unusual to a situation where people are now thinking they could do it too. It is seen as a credible, viable option. It is incredibly rare for the shops to fail, closure rates are virtually zero." While the catalyst for action is often the impending closure of a shop, villages which have not had one for more than 20 years are also joining in the burgeoning movement.

Read the article by Ian Johnston. (The image is from FreeDigitalPhotos.net.)

The Plural Society

2009-11-08T06:18:00.004Z

The Catholic Patriarch of Venice, Angelo Scola, is a man of enormous energy and vision. His intense interest in education and the Church’s engagement with the modern world have given rise to a number of important initiatives over the last five years, not least the journal Oasis, published twice yearly in several languages including English and Arabic and aimed primarily at Christians in Islamic countries. Oasis is a lavish production, as yet without a distributor in the UK, containing articles and book reviews as well as important extracts from classic works by the likes of Guardini and Ratzinger. The intention behind Oasis is to foster improved understanding between Christians and Muslims.

A extension of this initiative was launched in September under the name ASSET (for “Advanced Studies Society Economy Theology”). ASSET is a research centre devoted to the interdisciplinary and international study of “the plural society” – by which is meant the postmodern collision or, better, hybridization, of multiple cultural influences. Secular liberalism pretends to value freedom whilst excluding religious hypotheses, in order to ensure that faith can only enter the debate under terms already defined by its opponents. If ASSET is to be successful, it must find a way to reintroduce both theology and the social doctrine of the Church into the public debate.

Information about ASSET and copies of Oasis will be available on the Second Spring stand at the TOWARDS ADVENT Catholic cultural festival in London on 14 November.

Picture of Venice by Oliver-Bonjoch (Wikipedia)

Transhumanism

2009-11-04T21:55:00.004Z

“We have the technology” – a stock phrase from the old sci-fi show Bionic Man that might serve as the headline for this reflection. But if a thing can be done, should it be done? If there is money to be made, it most certainly will. There is a growing “transhumanist” movement – described by Peter Snow in a recent issue of Oxford Today – that indicates the shape of things to come. The radical enhancement of human beings through technology has already begun. Athletes often resort to treatments to enhance their physical performance. Now we are developing techniques to alter moods, eliminate depression, enhance memory and cognition, and extend life expectancy to two or three hundred years. The genetic engineering of human beings for specific professions and tasks is also becoming possible. Direct interface between brain and computer – and the worldwide web – is on the cards. You may not need your laptop for much longer. The more extreme transhumanists predict and advocate the replacement of the human species by other, superior forms of life developed artificially to improve on the slow efforts of Mother Nature. (See my earlier blog “The Rise of the Machines”.) But such developments will almost certainly create new forms of “wealth” and “poverty”, or reinforce the existing divide. It is only the rich who will be able to give themselves these advantages – if that is what they are.

To my mind, the deeper question raised by all this is not so much the social effects of transhumanism (which will, of course, be disastrous), but what it reveals about the spirit and philosophy of the age. Believing that natural forms are randomly generated by the algorithms of evolution, people have no intellectual defence against these ideas. They are unable to discern any spiritual message in the material world, any divine wisdom in the realm of nature. The ink on the pages of the world has become invisible, leaving them free to scribble whatever they like. Where do we draw the line between legitimate medical treatment and the creation of monsters, if for us the natural forms do not represent some kind of meaningful norm? There is no solution to all this in legislation.

The Economy of Communion

2009-09-20T08:57:00.002+01:00

The following notes are borrowed from an article in the Houston Catholic Worker. Follow the link for the full article and for other online resources about social justice. - S.C.

In his new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth) , Pope Benedict pointed to the Economy of Communion as a promising economic model.

The Economy of Communion in Freedom, as it is officially called, is a network of businesses linked to the Focolare Movement.

The Economy of Communion was launched in 1991 when Focolare founder Chiara Lubich visited Focolare communities in Brazil. During that visit Chiara was disturbed to find a whole ring of shanty towns in a circle surrounding the city, the favelas where people lived in abject poverty, "a crown of thorns" around the city. Those involved with the Focolare in Brazil included not only professionals and the middle class but many of these poor.

After that visit, in order to help meet the material needs of the local community, Chiara Lubich proposed a new economic model where for-profit businesses could generate additional jobs and voluntarily share profits in three parts: 1) for direct aid to those in need, 2) for educational programs that foster "a culture of giving" and 3) for continued business development.

EoC businesses commit themselves to building sound relationships with employees, customers, regulatory agencies, the general public and the environment. These new relationships include those who receive aid, who are truly active participants in the project. Sharing one's needs with dignity and sincerity is appreciated as a contribution to increase the life of communion, and many renounce the help just as soon as they reach a bare minimum of economic independence.

The Focolare movement has millions of members throughout the world. The EoC has brought together 754 companies worldwide that are committed to pursuing higher goals than just profit.

For more on the Economy of Communion, see the offical EoC site, which is also permanently listed on the Second Spring "Economy" site under Alternative Economic Paradigms.

CONTROVERSIES: 8. Ecology

2009-08-23T14:32:00.009+01:00

The Pope does not use the fashionable phrases “global warming” or even “climate change”, but his remarks in the 2009 encyclical (Caritas in Veritate) constitute the most sustained and systematic papal statement yet on the importance of ecology, clearly building on the remarks of John Paul II in Solicitudo Rei Socialis and Centesimus Annus. The Pope has spoken at a Wednesday audience on this theme during August and will revisit it in his January 2010 Message for the World Day of Peace.

I have already drawn attention to the Pope’s remarks on population and “responsible procreation” in the encyclical, which follow his treatment of rights and duties and precede those on ecology. In the same important chapter he talks of how the pursuit of profit should be subordinated to the goal of a “more humane market and society”. He speaks about how development programmes can be made sustainable, and the need to base them around an accurate assessment of need. It is only after this that he turns to the issue of the environment.

“The environment is God's gift to everyone, and in our use of it we have a responsibility towards the poor, towards future generations and towards humanity as a whole” (48). Nature is not more important than the human person, but “is more than raw material to be manipulated at our pleasure; it is a wondrous work of the Creator containing a ‘grammar’ which sets forth ends and criteria for its wise use, not its reckless exploitation.”

The Pope goes on to highlight the exploitation of non-renewable energy resources and the need for research into alternatives. He insists that “technologically advanced societies can and must lower their domestic energy consumption, either through an evolution in manufacturing methods or through greater ecological sensitivity among their citizens,” with a view to “a worldwide redistribution of energy resources”. This is all part of our “responsible stewardship over nature, in order to protect it, to enjoy its fruits and to cultivate it in new ways, with the assistance of advanced technologies, so that it can worthily accommodate and feed the world's population” (50).

Economic development cannot be separated from a concern for the environment. In section 51 he states: “The way humanity treats the environment influences the way it treats itself, and vice versa. This invites contemporary society to a serious review of its life-style, which, in many parts of the world, is prone to hedonism and consumerism, regardless of their harmful consequences.” “The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that belong to everyone. She must above all protect mankind from self-destruction. There is need for what might be called a human ecology, correctly understood.” This human ecology is bound up with a sense of the dignity of the human person, particularly “the right to life and to a natural death”.

There is a reason for that. “The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development. Our duties towards the environment are linked to our duties towards the human person, considered in himself and in relation to others. It would be wrong to uphold one set of duties while trampling on the other.” Section 52 concludes: “That which is prior to us and constitutes us — subsistent Love and Truth — shows us what goodness is, and in what our true happiness consists. It shows us the road to true development.”

The Pope refers in passing, as we have seen, to some specific ecological issues such as energy and population (he also mentions the problems of desertification, water supply, and the impact of war, in section 51). But in general he is laying down fundamental principles, and there are several issues that are not mentioned by name. Climate change is undeniable, the destruction of biodiversity unacceptable (the mass extinction of named and unnamed species presently occurring is not receiving the attention it deserves). These and other examples of our impact on nature merely emphasize the central role played by human beings in the world’s ecosystem. The Pope along with other religious leaders (including the Archbishop of Canterbury) is calling on us to take seriously our God-given role as steward and protector of the integrity and harmony of creation.

Symbolic Metaphysics
In an earlier statement, published in July 1989, Cardinal Ratzinger had already linked the theology of the body with environmental ecology:

We have to make evident once more what is meant by the world's having been created 'in wisdom'…. Only then can conscience and norm enter again into proper relationship. For then it will become clear that conscience is not some individualistic (or collective) calculation; rather it is a "con-sciens", a "knowing along with" creation and, through creation, with God the Creator. Then, too, it will be rediscovered that man's greatness does not lie in the miserable autonomy of some midget proclaiming himself his one and only master, but in the fact that his being allows the highest wisdom, truth itself, to shine through. Then it will become clear that man is so much the greater the more he is capable of hearing the profound message of creation, the message of the Creator. And then it will be apparent how harmony with creation, whose wisdom becomes our norm, does not mean a limitation upon our freedom but is rather an expression of our reason and our dignity. Then the body also is given its due honor: it is no longer something "used", but is the temple of authentic human dignity because it is God's handiwork in the world. Then is the equal dignity of man and woman made manifest precisely in the fact that they are different. One will then begin to understand once again that their bodiliness reaches the metaphysical depths and is the basis of a symbolic metaphysics whose denial or neglect does not ennoble man but destroys him. [Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Fundamental Characteristics of the Present Crisis of Faith,” L’Osservatore Romano, July 24, 1989.]

Picture by Rose-Marie Caldecott

More on Distributism

2009-08-01T11:10:00.004+01:00

The best book on "evolved" or contemporary Distributism in its co-operative form is Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society - Alternatives to the Market and the State, by the Australian Race Mathews. This has recently been made available by the Distributist Review Press. If you follow the link paragraph you will find the relevant web page, from which this extract is taken:

Mathews focuses on Antigonish and Mondragon as two major attempts to put the ideas of distributism into practice. Although he had other examples to choose from, these two movements illustrate his central thesis: distributism only works when people have jobs (that is, work) of their own.

In the early 20th century, Antigonish was a movement of consumer co-operatives in Nova Scotia which flourished for a time, but ultimately failed. Although Mathews finds much to praise in their work (and plenty of consumer co-ops flourish today), he uses Antigonish to illustrate how the basic agency dilemma will weaken any co-operative that operates only on the consumer level. You may have a food co-op, but if you hire outside managers to run it, there's nothing particularly co-operative about their incentives. They may as well be working at the mall.

In contrast, Mondragon is a worker co-operative. This co-operative (really a co-operative of co-operatives) is altogether the seventh largest corporation in Spain. Big business? Hardly. Mathews examines the intricate mechanisms by which a worker in a Mondragon factory has a real voice in how his shop is run, a real stake in the success of the whole enterprise, and a real safety net for keeping at work, not getting welfare payments.

By the way, THE DISTRIBUTIST REVIEW has reviewed the encyclical Caritas in Veritate here. The review is by John Medaille, and it is one of the best I have seen.

CONTROVERSIES: 7. Education

2009-07-29T07:07:00.007+01:00

Death of Socrates, by Jacques David

Although it is not a major theme of Caritas in Veritate, education is not unrelated to the “integral development” of homo socialis, of man in society, and what the Pope says about it is significant. He ties it in to the search for a wisdom capable of integrating the different aspects of our divided culture – a chaotic cultural state which reflects our degraded and fragmented image of man.

“Paul VI had seen clearly that among the causes of underdevelopment there is a lack of wisdom and reflection, a lack of thinking capable of formulating a guiding synthesis, for which ‘a clear vision of all economic, social, cultural and spiritual aspects’ is required. The excessive segmentation of knowledge, the rejection of metaphysics by the human sciences, the difficulties encountered by dialogue between science and theology are damaging not only to the development of knowledge, but also to the development of peoples, because these things make it harder to see the integral good of man in its various dimensions. The ‘broadening [of] our concept of reason and its application’ is indispensable if we are to succeed in adequately weighing all the elements involved in the question of development and in the solution of socio-economic problems” (31).

The broadening of reason is, of course, a theme not just of this encyclical but of his whole pontificate. Here he emphasizes that it must involve collaboration between the various separated academic disciplines under the umbrella of charity (which implies an important role for theology, correctly understood). In fact it is the nature of love as the highest form of knowledge that makes the new synthesis possible.

“In view of the complexity of the issues, it is obvious that the various disciplines have to work together through an orderly interdisciplinary exchange. Charity does not exclude knowledge, but rather requires, promotes, and animates it from within. Knowledge is never purely the work of the intellect. It can certainly be reduced to calculation and experiment, but if it aspires to be wisdom capable of directing man in the light of his first beginnings and his final ends, it must be ‘seasoned’ with the ‘salt’ of charity. Deeds without knowledge are blind, and knowledge without love is sterile” (30).

But all of this implies an adequate anthropology. The Catholic faith gives us an understanding of the human person in which all the divided pieces fit together, but the world around us continues to divide, and therefore to promote systems of education that erode and corrode our very humanity.

“The term ‘education’ refers not only to classroom teaching and vocational training — both of which are important factors in development — but to the complete formation of the person. In this regard, there is a problem that should be highlighted: in order to educate, it is necessary to know the nature of the human person, to know who he or she is. The increasing prominence of a relativistic understanding of that nature presents serious problems for education, especially moral education, jeopardizing its universal extension” (61).

There are, of course, many books that I could recommend for a deeper study of this question. (I have had a go at writing one myself, called Beauty for Truth’s Sake.) The one I want to single out here is a wonderful little book of essays by Thomas J. Norris called Getting Real about Education from Columba Press. Influenced by Newman, Balthasar and Lonergan he writes, very much in the spirit of Pope Benedict,

“The human being is in fact and image of infinity, being made in the image and likeness of God, and being born with an insatiable hunger for communion with mystery, love, truth and beauty. To disconnect the education of the human being from the integral identity of the human being is to deform and not to educate. Such a person may have everything he or she needs, except a reason to live and a reason to die! If the university project is severed entirely from the moral and spiritual, then the weight of knowledge, scientific technique and technology will crush out of existence the springs of love that are in the world – the family, the community, the volunteers” (p. 12).

By the way, a recent book by James Tooley looks interesting. Called The Beautiful Tree, it tells the story of private education among the world's poor - not mission schools for the rich, or government schools, but co-operative, community schools. This connects with our item above, dated 1 August, which concerns the cooperative movement. Tooley's book is recommended by MercatorNet.com.

CONTROVERSIES: 6. Justice

2009-07-25T19:58:00.003+01:00

Love that moves the sun and the other stars...

One of the most remarkable discussions in Caritas in Veritate concerns the notion of justice. There are three main places where justice is discussed – first where it is compared to love, secondly where the notion of “rights and duties” is introduced, and finally in relation to the market. How the Pope’s treatment of this subject will end up influencing the development of “justice and peace” groups is anyone’s guess, but it has a close relationship to the more radical things he is saying about the economy.

Justice consists in giving to everyone what is due to them, what they have a right to, what “belongs” to them. The question is, what is due? And how do we know what is due?

Free-market liberals prioritize an understanding of freedom based on the assumption that all moral obligations stem from individual acts of will. In a contract, each party voluntarily binds itself to do or give something in exchange for something else. In a market-dominated society, the contract becomes the basic paradigm for all human relationships. Opposed to this is the traditional understanding that obligations (i.e. duties and rights as twin aspects of responsibility) are often prior to acts of will, because they flow from the relationships constitutive of our identity as creatures in society, creatures who are called to self-fulfilment through love; that is, self-gift.

Obligations such as the duty to pay one’s workers a just family wage, or to allow time for worship, or to preserve human life, are rooted in our constitutive relation to God, not in any decision to grant those rights in return for some advantage to myself. As the Pope says, “if the only basis of human rights is to be found in the deliberations of an assembly of citizens, those rights can be changed at any time” (43). Human rights are based on the needs of each person to fulfil himself according to his nature – that is what is “due” to us as persons – and on the duty of others to permit that fulfilment.

Henri de Lubac SJ brilliantly traced this back to a failure to admit the “natural desire for God” taught by Aquinas. If human nature has to be made to desire God by a supernatural influence upon it, it must have a natural fulfilment outside God. But the assumption of a natural order separated from the supernatural order proves to be the first step in establishing the autonomy of the natural and the total irrelevance of the supernatural (and of theology) to anything in the “real world” – a truly secular order, a novus ordo saeculorum.

In Caritas in Veritate the Pope insists that justice is “inseparable from charity” (6). It “demands justice”, in the sense of “recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of individuals and peoples,” as a first step. For “I cannot ‘give’ what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them.” (Note the Pope’s emphasis on “legitimate” rights, which is clarified in chapter 4. Not everything we want is a right.) But there is also a sense in which justice demands charity, for the Pope adds elsewhere: “today it is clear that without gratuitousness, there can be no justice in the first place” (38).

De Lubac’s understanding of nature and grace helps us to understand this point. If justice is giving what is due to another in the integrity of their humanity, it must ultimately mean giving to them more than they have a right to expect. After all, I have no natural right to the vision of God, yet I am called to that vision nevertheless. In a sense we can only do “justice” to the integrity of their humanity by loving them (and that is perhaps why at Matt. 5:40 Jesus says, “if any one would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well”). There is no purely natural man whose “due” is determined solely by his natural needs. For in fact our natural needs include the need for love, which is supernatural.

This is why the Pope insists that the market itself be governed not simply by commutative justice, “which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction”, but by distributive and social justice as well (35), and why he concludes that while “Economic life undoubtedly requires contracts, in order to regulate relations of exchange between goods of equivalent value…. it also needs just laws and forms of redistribution governed by politics, and what is more, it needs works redolent of the spirit of gift. The economy in the global era seems to privilege the former logic, that of contractual exchange, but directly or indirectly it also demonstrates its need for the other two: political logic, and the logic of the unconditional gift” (37). Thus the Pope’s new synthesis of justice and love leads directly to his proposal for a new “economy of fraternity”.

CONTROVERSIES: 5. A Distributist Manifesto?

2009-07-22T10:51:00.010+01:00

On 11 July 2009, the international conference of the G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith and Culture took place at St Benet's Hall, Oxford, on "Distributist responses to the global economic crisis". A full report by one of the four speakers, Allan Carlson, can be read here. As the report mentions, the first speaker, Phillip Blond, wasted no time in claiming the new papal encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, as "a decisive repudiation of neo-liberal economics and an open embrace of Distributist principles", perhaps even a Distributist manifesto. At the same time, he urged Distributists "to give more thought to how their goals can be made relevant to urban majorities."

Writing in the Guardian, Adrian Pabst, a colleague of Blond's, outlines the Pope’s radical call for a new political economy “that transcends the old secular dichotomies of state vs market and left vs right.” He concludes that “Taken together, these and other ideas developed in the encyclical go beyond piecemeal reform and amount to a wholesale transformation of the secular logic underpinning global capitalism.”

“The state enforces a single standardised legal framework that enables the market to extend contractual and monetary relations into virtually all areas of life. In so doing, both state and market reduce nature, human labour and social ties to commodities whose value is priced exclusively by the iron law of demand and supply.

“However, the commodification of each person and all things violates a universal ethical principle that has governed most cultures in the past – nature and human life have almost always been recognised as having a sacred dimension. Like other world religions, Catholic Christianity defends the sanctity of life and land against the subordination by the ‘market-state’ of everything and everyone to mere material meaning and quantifiable economic utility – an argument first advanced by Christian socialists like Karl Polanyi and his Anglican friend RH Tawney."

That is why we find the Pope writing in the encyclical that "the exclusively binary model of market-plus-state is corrosive of society". According to Pabst, instead of defending civil society in its current configuration, Pope Benedict wants to see the market-plus-state "embedded within a wider network of social relations and governed by virtues and universal principles such as justice, solidarity, fraternity and responsibility."

“Concretely, the pope encourages the creation of enterprises operating according to mutualist principles like cooperatives or employee-owned businesses, for example the Spanish-based cooperative Mondragon which has over 100,000 employees and annual sales of manufactured goods of over $3bn. Such businesses pursue both private and social ends by reinvesting their profit in the company and in the community instead of simply enriching the top management or institutional shareholders. Benedict also supports professional associations and other intermediary institutions wherein workers and owners can jointly determine just wages and fair prices."

In section 39 the Pope picks up on the teaching of an earlier encyclical, Rerum Novarum, to the effect that "the civil order, for its self-regulation, also needed intervention from the State for purposes of redistribution." (This is something Pabst downplays.) But Pope Benedict adds that this redistribution of wealth by the State is today "evidently insufficient to satisfy the demands of a fully humane economy." Thus he is led to propose something more radical, which Pabst calls a "third way". His summary: "labour receives assets (in the form of stake-holdings) and hires capital (not vice-versa), while capital itself comes in part from worker and community-supported credit unions rather than exclusively from shareholder-driven retail banks." Furthermore, "the world economy needs to switch from short-term financial speculation to long-term investment in the real economy, social development and environmental sustainability."

Those on the free-market side of the social debate are grasping at straws when they dwell on the fact that the Pope has not condemned markets as such (why would he?). They tend to quote the passage where he says “it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals, their moral conscience and their personal and social responsibility” (adding “it is man's darkened reason that produces these consequences, not the instrument per se”). But these sentences in section 36 are sandwiched in between some of the Pope's strongest assertions of the need for structural reform of the economic sphere to include ethical concerns from the outset.

We may want to avoid the term “third way”, with all its complicated associations, just as we may wish to avoid the term “Distributism”. No doubt a new term is needed – perhaps we should speak of an “integral” or “fraternal” economy. But whatever we call it, the Pope is certainly pushing for a “new humanistic synthesis” and a “new vision for the future”, because he says so (in section 21).

More on Distributism here.

The picture shows a true "Distributist manifesto" - a new collection of essays by some of the best contemporary writers in the Distributist tradition, published earlier this year by IHS Press. See also this new edition of the best book on "evolved Distributism", Jobs of Our Own by Race Mathews.

CONTROVERSIES: 4. The Rise of the Machines

2009-07-19T22:19:00.003+01:00

We seem to be haunted by the fear of our machinery and what it is doing to us, or what might happen when it goes wrong. According to landmarks of popular culture such as the Terminator and Matrix movies and Battlestar Galactica, sooner or later the machines will turn upon us. They will use us as a source of energy, or treat us as a biological infection to be expunged. At best they will regard us with disdain. J.R.R. Tolkien dramatized the dangers of technology and the dark side of globalization in his novel The Lord of the Rings. In his letters he refers to the Ring of Power as “the Machine” – a symbol of the attempt to gain power over the world. Sauron “exteriorizes” himself in the form of the Ring in order to bind others, but in so doing he paradoxically makes himself weaker, just as we have done to the degree we have become dependent on our technology. C.S. Lewis described the same process more philosophically in The Abolition of Man.

Pope Benedict offers an unprecedented papal critique of the “technocratic mindset” in his 2009 encyclical Charity in Truth. On the one hand, “Technology enables us to exercise dominion over matter, to reduce risks, to save labour, to improve our conditions of life” (69). On the other hand, it can become “an ideological power that threatens to confine us within an a priori that holds us back from encountering being and truth. Were that to happen, we would all know, evaluate and make decisions about our life situations from within a technocratic cultural perspective to which we would belong structurally, without ever being able to discover a meaning that is not of our own making” (70). That is a perfect description of the premise of The Matrix.

Benedict’s critique rests on a profound Christian anthropology, a sense that we receive our own existence from God, that truth is a “given”, and that our true freedom lies in respect for the “call of being” (70).

“Our freedom is profoundly shaped by our being, and by its limits. No one shapes his own conscience arbitrarily, but we all build our own ‘I’ on the basis of a ‘self’ which is given to us. Not only are other persons outside our control, but each one of us is outside his or her own control. A person's development is compromised, if he claims to be solely responsible for producing what he becomes. By analogy, the development of peoples goes awry if humanity thinks it can re-create itself through the ‘wonders’ of technology, just as economic development is exposed as a destructive sham if it relies on the ‘wonders’ of finance in order to sustain unnatural and consumerist growth. In the face of such Promethean presumption, we must fortify our love for a freedom that is not merely arbitrary, but is rendered truly human by acknowledgment of the good that underlies it. To this end, man needs to look inside himself in order to recognize the fundamental norms of the natural moral law which God has written on our hearts.” (68).

We have come to rely on “automatic or impersonal forces” to improve our lot, but this is a mistake. “When technology is allowed to take over, the result is confusion between ends and means, such that the sole criterion for action in business is thought to be the maximization of profit, in politics the consolidation of power, and in science the findings of research” (71). There must be “moral consistency” between ends and means. That is to say, technology must be at the service not of our desires and intentions, but of truth, and in particular the truth of the human person who is made for love.

The implication of all this is radical. The Pope is calling on us to change the way we think and act.

“Technologically advanced societies must not confuse their own technological development with a presumed cultural superiority, but must rather rediscover within themselves the oft-forgotten virtues which made it possible for them to flourish throughout their history. Evolving societies must remain faithful to all that is truly human in their traditions, avoiding the temptation to overlay them automatically with the mechanisms of a globalized technological civilization” (59).

CONTROVERSIES: 3. Homo Economicus

2009-07-18T06:18:00.001+01:00

What is all this about "gratuitousness" in the market? The Pope's Caritas in Veritate has planted several little bombs under conventional economic thinking. One of the most important is an attack on homo economicus. In section 34 the Pope writes that “Gratuitousness is present in our lives in many different forms, which often go unrecognized because of a purely consumerist and utilitarian view of life. The human being is made for gift, which expresses and makes present his transcendent dimension.” Thus “economic, social and political development, if it is to be authentically human, needs to make room for the principle of gratuitousness as an expression of fraternity.” Over and over again the Pope insists that “in commercial relationships the principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity” (36). This is why he calls for new types of economic entity and wealth-creation that do not seek profit as an end in itself (38).

The idea that we are made for self-gift is more familiar to Catholics in the context of papal teaching about marriage and the family. Its most famous reference point is in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, especially section 24 of Gaudium et Spes, which states that man “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself”. This was unfolded by John Paul II into a theology of the body. Pope Benedict applies it to economics, rejecting the idea of “economic man” – the individual acting always in his own interest, a model favoured in business schools the world over – in favour of homo socialis, whose “self-interest” is actually the interest of others and of the group. We are made in such a way (he argues) that our true self-interest is served by giving of ourselves to others. He deepens this point by a “metaphysical interpretation of the ‘humanum’ in which relationality is an essential element” (55) in chapter 5.

This changes everything – but we may not immediately see how. One place to look for clarification is a brilliant 2003 essay by Dr Adrian Walker (an editor of Communio and translator of the Pope's book Jesus of Nazareth) called “The Poverty of Liberal Economics”, now published online for the first time on the Second Spring site. It can be found in Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler (eds), Wealth, Poverty and Human Destiny, which brought together writers from different points of view to discuss the triumph of capitalism. Walker argues precisely for the point made by the Pope – that the market is not morally neutral, and that (in his words) “the best, most central paradigm for understanding free economic exchange is not contract among self-interested strangers, but gift-giving among neighbours” (p. 23). In fact, only a “communion of giving and receiving… can unlock for the individual the wealth of his being as a person” (p. 33). By contrast, the market of pure exchange, far from generating genuine wealth, engenders the “ontological poverty” expressed in boredom, stress, alienation, misery.

Walker also shows how liberal economics is based on an inadequate sense of economic freedom, profit, justice and value. Liberal economics guarantees neither real freedom nor real prosperity. He calls for us to address the “necessary task of developing an economics of gift” (p. 42), to reconsider the well-being of local economies, and to decentralize economic power according to the principle of subsidiarity. Like Pope Benedict, he offers a humanistic critique of technical “efficiency”, and claims that “conventional economics, deeply shaped by the liberal tradition, gets economics itself wrong by separating it from theological considerations” (p. 46). For the “neutral” economy that takes no stand with regard to God or the nature of man is a pure illusion.

For further study: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Random House, 1979); Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Marquette University press, 1982), and The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005); and especially Joseph Ratzinger, Chapter 5, Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius Press, 2004), where he talks about Trinity, person, and relation. See also my article "The Theology of Gift".

More notes on controversies sparked by the encyclical to follow. For an overview of the document itself see below.

CONTROVERSIES: 2. Population control

2009-07-17T09:01:00.010+01:00

Is there a population problem? Yes and no. The Zenit news service, which has been running a helpful series of commentaries on the new encyclical, recently interviewed the president of CESPAS (the European Center for Studies on Population, the Environment and Development). Riccardo Cascioli points out that the Pope rejects the view that population increase is the cause of underdevelopment. There is a demographic crisis, but “it is that of the developed countries, which for more than 40 years have a birthrate lower than that of the generational replacement level. In many countries, he says, attempts to reduce population have

“diverted important resources needed to promote true development projects. Moreover, the savage application of these policies – as in the cases of China, India and other Asian countries – has caused grave social disequilibrium, of which the absence of hundreds of thousands of women is merely the most striking aspect. It is no coincidence that this encyclical does not use the concept of ‘sustainable development,’ which is based precisely on a negative view of population.”

Some care in needed here. The Pope does talk of, and advocate, sustainability – for example when he says in section 21 that “The economic development that Paul VI hoped to see was meant to produce real growth, of benefit to everyone and genuinely sustainable,” or when he speaks of “investing in rural infrastructures, irrigation systems, transport, organization of markets, and in the development and dissemination of agricultural technology that can make the best use of the human, natural and socio-economic resources that are more readily available at the local level, while guaranteeing their sustainability over the long term as well” (27), and by implication elsewhere when he argues for taking a long-term view, and for “inter-generational justice” (48).

As far as population control is concerned, the Pope rejects coercive population policies and the fostering by developed nations of an “anti-birth mentality” which is too often confused with cultural progress, arguing instead that “Openness to life is at the centre of true development” (28) and “Morally responsible openness to life represents a rich social and economic resource” (44). He points out the disastrous economic consequences for developed nations of a population failing to replace itself, as well as the positive contribution that a youthful population and large families can make to economic as well as social development. The Church has to remind the world that sexuality “cannot be reduced merely to pleasure or entertainment, nor can sex education be reduced to technical instruction aimed solely at protecting the interested parties from possible disease or the ‘risk’ of procreation. This would be to impoverish and disregard the deeper meaning of sexuality”. But he is speaking of “responsible procreation” (44), for he trusts human beings, couples and families to make the right decisions if they are educated and informed.

There are certain technical controversies the Pope does not venture into. One of them is the question of “carrying capacity” – whether of particular countries or of the earth itself. But what has become increasingly clear to everyone in recent years is that population growth, even if it causes problems in many areas and will cause more in the future, is less of a problem than the technology with which it impacts on the environment. More on that another time.

CONTROVERSIES: 1. Global governance

2009-07-15T12:23:00.008+01:00

The Pope’s comments in his new encyclical on the “urgent need of a true world political authority” that would have “the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums” (67), have attracted a great deal of concerned comment. Could this be a recipe for global tyranny? But the Pope adds: “Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth.” In section 57, he has already said:

“In order not to produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature, the governance of globalization must be marked by subsidiarity, articulated into several layers and involving different levels that can work together. Globalization certainly requires authority, insofar as it poses the problem of a global common good that needs to be pursued. This authority, however, must be organized in a subsidiary and stratified way, if it is not to infringe upon freedom and if it is to yield effective results in practice.”

What does this imply? The Pope does not think that international law should be determined by “the balance of power among the strongest nations” (67), but nor should it be dictated by some arbitrary authority. The authority should not be arbitrary but governed by the principles he has outlined. Furthermore, its only role is that of serving and coordinating the other “layers” of political authority. How this could be done – if it is possible at all – is for others to work out. “The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does not claim ‘to interfere in any way in the politics of States.’ She does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his vocation” (9).

Also read John Zmirak on "The Pope and Global Tyranny" at Zenit, and Robert A. Gahl Jr's summary article on the encyclical on MercatorNet. Professor Gahl usefully clarifies the point made above concerning global governance by noting:

"some infelicitous translations in the preliminary but official English translation of the encyclical (for instance, 'polyarchic' is rendered as 'stratified', 'polycentric' as "many overlapping layers', and 'Monti di Pietà' as 'pawnbrokers'). The use of 'stratified' rather than 'polyarchic' might seem to imply a clumsy addition of bureaucratic layers of statist government agencies. In contrast, Benedict advocates polyarchic authorities of governance so that a higher, or simply complementary, authority may safeguard the pursuit of a globalized common good while also fully respecting the principle of subsidiarity. By proposing polyarchy, the Pope offers an innovative principle while entrusting its detailed policy implementation to technical experts capable of adjusting the principles in accord with our rapidly changing world."

See also a helpful piece in First Things by Douglas Farrow. More notes on controversies sparked by the encyclical will follow soon. For my own overview of the document see below.

SUMMARY of the Encyclical

2009-07-13T19:15:00.006+01:00

Love in Truth is uneven in style - not uncommon in such documents - and has been roundly criticized for incoherence by George Weigel, but I find it an extremely impressive text. It naturally has to cover a vast field, but it does so brilliantly, consolidating and updating the teaching of previous popes (particularly Populorum Progressio and Centesimus Annus) in the light of changed circumstances, but also boldly advancing strong arguments that take Catholic social teaching to a whole new level. As anticipated in previous posts, there are echoes of John Milbank's point that "we need a new sort of market, and a new sort of politics, in which economics and politics are no longer defined in isolation from each other (exclusive regard for the power of money, or the power of law)." Similarly, Michael Sandel had spoken of the fundamental importance of remembering life as a "gift", and stated that "Economics is not a 'value-neutral science'." While avoiding reference to certain specific controversies around “capitalism” (he prefers to speak of the “market economy”) and “climate change” (he speaks of our responsibility to preserve natural resources), the Pope maps out the principles that must guide us in engaging with these controversies and others.

Closely related to the Pope’s two previous encyclicals, on Love and on Hope, this one starts from the fact revealed in Christ that “God is love”. Love is the heart of the Church’s social doctrine and as such is applicable to everyone, Christian or not. But what gives meaning and value to charity, saving it from sentimentality, is truth. Love is not merely a mood or a feeling, but “Logos”, intelligible order. This is what gives the encyclical its teeth, in line with the Pope’s appeal elsewhere to the need for us to broaden our concept of reason, rather than confining it to purely material concerns (31). In chapter 5 he describes the deepest foundation of human solidarity and subsidiarity, namely the nature of the human creature as spiritual, being “defined through interpersonal relations” (53), in the image of the Trinity (54), and growing to maturity by living these relations properly. The Trinity is the basis for diversity at every level within an overall communion. Thus the Pope calls for the social sciences to work with metaphysics and theology in order to do justice to “man’s transcendent dignity” as a social and therefore relational creature. We need “a deeper critical evaluation of the category of relation” (53). Connected with this emphasis on wisdom and metaphysics is an insistence that God and theology cannot be excluded from the public realm (cultural, social, economic, political) without damaging or seriously distorting human development (56).

At a practical level, in response to the new circumstances – “global interrelations, the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing, large-scale migration of peoples, often provoked by some particular circumstance and then given insufficient attention, the unregulated exploitation of the earth's resources” (21) – the Pope advocates sustainable and holistic development that takes account of all the dimensions of the human person and remains open to the transcendent. In chapter 4 he examines several threats to the integrity of human development. One of these is the proliferation of rights detached from duties, which takes place when rights are no longer understood as rooted in the nature and authentic needs of the person. Another is the impoverishment of sexuality and the imposition of materialistic ideas and policies with regard to the family. Human development on every level will be thwarted by continued attacks on marriage, the unborn, the elderly. He mentions also the excessive centralization of certain development programmes, which take little account of the need for subsidiarity and effective local management. Finally, he stresses the enormous range of duties that arise from our relationship to the environment, which is bound up with our relationship to the poor and towards future generations. Nature is a gift of the Creator containing an inbuilt order which we must respect. Once again, stewardship of the environment cannot be separated from respect for human life, sexuality and the family – “the book of nature is one and indivisible” (51).

One important theme that runs through the encyclical is the inseparability of justice and charity (6). Giving and forgiving transcend justice but also complete it. This is developed further in chapter 3, which establishes the priority of the “gratuitous” (including truth as gift) over the contractual arrangements of the market (35). With this the Pope overturns the model of homo economicus – the self-interested individual who plays such a central role in textbook economic theory. Economic action and commercial logic cannot, he says, be detached from political action and the principle of the common good (36), for the economic sphere is never ethically neutral (36). Economic life depends on three “logics”: not only contractual exchange, but also political justice and unconditional gift (on which justice today depends). Flowing from this is a call to create space within the market for economic entities aiming at a higher goal than pure profit. The “principle of gratuitousness” is not to be confined to civil society or delegated to the State. It is to be fully integrated within the market through the presence (alongside profit-oriented private enterprise and various types of public enterprise, and hybridizing with them) of commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends – for example, by taking account of the interests of all the stakeholders and not just the shareholders (38, 40).

The Pope has opened the door here to the “new economics”, or the development of new economic entities that do not fit the old distinction between for-profit and non-profit enterprise, which perhaps make a profit but treat this always as a means to a social end, including cooperatives, credit unions, micro-finance, and the “economy of communion” (46) – not to mention new “hybrid” forms of economic activity that must be encouraged to emerge in the future (38). He has integrated this with a strong vision of human and environmental ecology, while purifying the latter of materialist ideology, and goes on in chapter 6 to tackle the whole question of technology, in which the distinctive problems of modernity come to a head. There many of these threads come together in his claim that “the development of peoples goes awry if humanity thinks it can re-create itself through the ‘wonders’ of technology, just as economic development is exposed as a destructive sham if it relies on the ‘wonders’ of finance in order to sustain unnatural and consumerist growth. In the face of such Promethean presumption, we must fortify our love for a freedom that is not merely arbitrary, but is rendered truly human by acknowledgment of the good that underlies it” – the fundamental norms of the natural moral law (68).

Technological progress is a legitimate response to God’s command to “till and cultivate” the earth, but this must be comprehended within the “covenant” between human beings and the environment which “should mirror God’s creative love”. Otherwise technology becomes an “ideological power” holding us back from being and truth. (There are important paragraphs on social communications and biotechnology in this connection.) Here as elsewhere, integral human development is prevented by a confusion between ends and means, as if our goal could be limited to the attainment of scientific knowledge, the consolidation of power, or the maximization of profit.

Human development, the Pope concludes, depends on our “rising above a materialistic vision of human events” to include the spiritual dimension, the “beyond” that technology cannot give (77), in a “humanism open to the Absolute” (78). In other words, we must become aware of our constitutive relation to the transcendent, our “calling” towards God for the common good of all, in love and truth.

Charity in Truth

2009-07-08T06:44:00.007+01:00

The text of the new social encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI on globalization and 'integral human development' is called Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth). The text can be read in English by following the link from the title. My own first comments follow, and a more detailed summary will be added in the next few days. (These comments were solicited by the Zenit news agency, which has also posted the official Vatican summary here. There is also an interesting new blog on social teaching by Andrew Abela of the Catholic University of America here.)

Without claiming that these are the most important features, there are four particular elements of this encyclical on “integral human development” that are worth mentioning because they have so far not been widely noticed.

1. It is closely interlocked with the Pope’s two previous encyclicals, on Love and on Hope, and forms with them a triptych on the Christian faith, in both its theoretical and its practical dimensions – Love and Hope grounded in Truth.

2. It takes Catholic social teaching to a new level by basing it explicitly on the theology of the Trinity and calling for “a deeper critical evaluation of the category of relation”. Metaphysics is back.

3. It introduces a new principle – that of “gratuitousness” and “reciprocal gift” – which enables us to break the “hegemony of the binary model of market-plus-State” (38, 39, 41). Economics as a human activity is not ethically neutral and must be structured and governed in an ethical manner; that is, in accordance with the highest ends of man. Economics and politics are not to be separated, because justice must enter into the economy from the outset, and justice is made perfect only in “giving and forgiving”. The radical implications of this principle for the market economy will need time to unfold.

4. Those in the Distributist, Green, and “alternative economics” movements will be encouraged that the encyclical opens the door to the development of alternative “economic entities” that act on principles other than pure profit, or which treat profit merely as a means to a social end, including cooperatives, credit unions, micro-finance, and the “economy of communion” (46). In fact it hopes that new “hybrid” forms of commercial behaviour will emerge in the marketplace in the future (38). It insists that the “weakest members of society should be helped to defend themselves against usury” (65), and insists that use of technology be subordinated to the “holistic meaning” of the human (70). It consolidates the strong environmentalist emphasis of John Paul II within Pope Benedict’s vision of integral human development, linking human to environmental ecology and the natural law (51). Man is called to be the wise steward of creation. The Church must defend earth, water and air as “gifts of creation that belong to everyone”, and help to prevent mankind from destroying itself (51).

In fact the Pope writes that it is “incumbent upon the competent authorities to make every effort to ensure that the economic and social costs of using up shared environmental resources are recognized with transparency and fully borne by those who incur them, not by other peoples or future generations: the protection of the environment, of resources and of the climate obliges all international leaders to act jointly and to show a readiness to work in good faith, respecting the law and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the planet” (50). But all this is set against a spiritual horizon, for we cannot achieve true solidarity with others without transcending our own selfish and material concerns in the “experience of gift” (34).

Reith Lectures completed

2009-07-07T11:38:00.004+01:00

Now that Michael Sandel has completed his four Reith Lectures on the BBC it is possible to look at them as a whole. (Transcripts and podcasts are available on the BBC Radio 4 website, and see below for comments on the first Lecture.) In some ways Sandel, whose religious allegiance is Jewish, has prepared the ground admirably for the forthcoming encyclical, Caritas in Veritate.

Sandel was arguing, overall, for a 'better kind of politics', one oriented 'less to the pursuit of individual self-interest and more to the pursuit of the common good.'

First he showed that our present politics is too influenced by the ideology that allows markets to intrude where they do not belong - we have drifted 'from having a market economy to being a market society'. In fact not all values are quantifiable or economic, and not every good should be treated as a commodity.

In the second lecture he showed that the right way to value things (for political or other purposes) is to 'figure out the purpose, the end of the social practice in question'. This took him into Aristotle's theory of justice. He concluded that we cannot and should not avoid substantive moral questions in politics - questions of what we mean by the 'good life', which determine the nature of justice. We need a much more open and robust debate about this.

In the third, he applied all this to the question of genetics, and the growing threat of a new 'liberal' or non-coercive eugenics movement, which erodes our fundamental sense of human life and of our own talents and abilities as 'gift'.

Finally, in the fourth lecture, he spoke of the end of 'market triumphalism' and the need for a new philosophy of public life. We need to return to traditions of solidarity and civic virtue instead of trying to avoid moral questions by relying entirely on the mechanism of the market. Economics is not a 'value-neutral science'. The attempt to empty politics of moral controversy (by always trying to be 'non-judgemental') is actually 'corrosive of democratic life'. We should regard ourselves less as consumers and more as citizens.

'So rather than focus on access to private consumption, a politics of the common good would make the case for rebuilding the infrastructure of civic life; public schools to which rich and poor alike would want to send their children; public transportation systems reliable enough to attract commuters from all walks of life; public health clinics, playgrounds, parks, recreation centres, libraries and museums that would, ideally at least, draw people out of their gated communities and into the common spaces of a shared democratic citizenship.'

And he concludes that 'the virtues of democratic life - community, solidarity, trust, civic friendship - these virtues are not like commodities that are depleted with use. They are rather like muscles that develop and grow stronger with exercise.' 'A politics of moral and civic renewal depends... on a more strenuous exercise of these civic virtues.'

Well, it seems a bit like wishful thinking in some ways. Very true though! Lets see if the Pope can do better.

Radical Orthodoxy

2009-06-28T04:27:00.007+01:00

On 11 July at St Benet's Hall in Oxford the Chesterton Institute based at Seton Hall, NJ, is running a conference on Distributist responses to the economic crisis. One of the speakers is Phillip Blond, who is associated with John Milbank's (shown here) 'Radical Orthodoxy' movement. What is all this about, and how does it related to the British reception of the forthcoming social encyclical, 'Caritas in Veritate'?

Here is Milbank's perceptive analysis of the economic crisis from his fascinating book The Future of Love. He talks of the danger that as a reult of the crisis 'State bureaucratic oligarchy would now start to fuse with the "private" oligarchy and monopoly of capital. Hilaire Belloc's "servile state" would start to emerge.'

'With the current apparent collapse in 2008 of the finance and debt-fuelled domination of neoliberalism in a crisis of the "non-realizability" of abstract assets through linkage to more material ones, this specter now looms. State control of banking could easily dictate greater state direction of production and a greater use of technology - yet still in the interests of the market and still involving an extraction of surplus-value from the dispossessed who do not equitably share in the profit of industry, but are bought off with "wages" and "salaries" (p. 96).'

Milbank stands within the tradition of non-statist Christian "socialism", alongside other types of thinkers who 'characteristically stress subsidiarity (the distribution of money and power to appropriate levels, not necessarily the lowest) and the break-up of central sovereignty through the operation of intermediary associations.'

'These theories can appear as relatively more "left" or "right", yet all in reality question the left/right distinction in its secular form. In relation to the latter, Christians must pursue a politics of seeming paradox from apparently "opposite" vantage points. Thus some within Radical Orthodoxy will follow Phillip Blond in his espousal of a new British form of "Red Toyism". Others, currently the majority, will follow my own brand of "Blue Socialism" - socialism with a Burkean tinge, now common to many on the left, including some within the centre-left (anti New Labour) British Labour Party "Compass Group"' (p. xvii).

But he rightly adds that 'these differences may not be what matters' in the debates concerning

'the role of nuclear and extended families, of co-operatives, of trade guilds, of mutual banks, housing associations and credit unions, and of the law in setting firewalls between business practices, defining the acceptable limits of usury and interest, and the principles that must govern the fair setting of wages and prices. Above all perhaps they concern how we can turn all people into owners and joint-owners, abolishing the chasm between the mass who can only earn or receive welfare and so are dependent and the minority who own in excess' (ibid.).

More philosophically, Milbank argues that we need a new sort of market, and a new sort of politics, in which economics and politics are no longer defined in isolation from each other (exclusive regard for the power of money, or the power of law). Does this sound fantastic, he asks? 'No, the fantastic is what we have: an economy that destroys life, babies, childhood, adventure, locality, beauty, the exotic, the erotic, people, and the planet itself' (p. 263).

And speaking of the New Distributists, a particularly fine new introduction to this important strand of Catholic social thought has been recently published by IHS Press. Titled Beyond Capitalism and Socialism: A New Statement of an Old Ideal, and edited by Tobias J. Lanz, it contains powerful statements by twelve of the most impressive Distributist thinkers alive today.

What Ails Modern Society

2009-06-17T16:06:00.003+01:00

by Peter Maurin (Catholic Worker)

What ails modern society
is the separation
of the spiritual
from the material.

When religion
has nothing to do with education,
education is only information;
plenty of facts,
but no understanding.

When religion
has nothing to do with politics,
politics is only factionalism:
“Let’s turn the rascals out
so our good friends
can get in.”

When religion
has nothing to do with business,
business is only commercialism:
“Let’s get what we can
while the getting is good.”

And when religion
has nothing to do with
either education, politics or business,
you have the religion of business
taking the place of
the business of religion.

Reith Lectures

2009-06-09T10:12:00.009+01:00

The social encyclical is due to be signed at the end of June. In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than sharpen your mind by reading or listening to the 2009 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4. This year's lecturer in the prestigious series is Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel, and his lectures, entitled A New Citizenship, are about "the prospect for a new politics of the common good". (The Radio 4 website has podcasts and transcripts available.) Outlining the subject matter for his lectures, Professor Sandel said: "The Reith lectures have a storied tradition of engaging the life of the mind and the public square. At a time of political change and economic turmoil, we need new thinking about the common good: What, in an age of globalisation, are the moral limits of markets? What should be the place of moral and spiritual values in public life? How is biotechnology transforming our relation to nature and the environment?"

The lectures are being broadcast both on Radio 4 and the BBC World Service. The first ever Reith lecturer was the philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1948, who spoke on "Authority and the Individual". Professor Sandel is the author of Liberalism And The Limits Of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1997), Democracy's Discontent (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays On Morality In Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), and The Case Against Perfection: Ethics In The Age Of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Also well worth noting and reading is a series of articles by Mick Brown in the Telegraph Magazine, called 'High Street: High Noon', looking at the recession and the world that is emerging from the ashes. The first article looks at the High Street in Chester and goes on to examine the impact of alternative economics in Totnes - fascinating!

Catholic social teaching is no secret

2009-04-23T11:57:00.006+01:00

The body of Catholic social teaching built up in modern times has become quite a formidable edifice. Naturally successive papal encyclicals on the subject have to reprise their predecessors as well as develop the teaching further. Each repays careful study in its own right, but conveniently the Church has summarized the accumulated tradition so far for us in her Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. The soon-to-be-released social encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI will build on this foundation.

In my first posting, I tried to reduce the whole body of principles to four: personality, solidarity, subsidiarity and sustainability. The starting point of the whole teaching is the revelation of the meaning of the human person, created in the image of the Trinitarian God - relational not merely individual. On this depends all our dignity, our rights, and the responsibility to act accordingly. A Dominican friend has pointed out that this theme was developed beautifully in an important but little-known document of the International Theological Commission of the Holy See called Communion and Stewardship (2004). The document discusses the theology of the divine image, including its relevance to gender, community, ecology, evolution, science and technology. Here are some extracts concerning ecology:

Created in the image of God to share in the communion of Trinitarian love, human beings occupy a unique place in the universe according to the divine plan: they enjoy the privilege of sharing in the divine governance of visible creation. This privilege is granted to them by the Creator who allows the creature made in his image to participate in his work, in his project of love and salvation, indeed in his own lordship over the universe. Since man's place as ruler is in fact a participation in the divine governance of creation, we speak of it here as a form of stewardship. [57] ...Human beings exercise this stewardship by gaining scientific understanding of the universe, by caring responsibly for the natural world (including animals and the environment), and by guarding their own biological integrity. [61] ...A misunderstanding of this teaching may have led some to act in reckless disregard of the natural environment, but it is no part of the Christian teaching about creation and the imago Dei to encourage unrestrained development and possible depletion of the earth’s resources. [73]

What Is Happening to Capitalism?

2009-04-02T18:50:00.012+01:00

Geoff Mulgan has an interesting article in the April 2009 issue of Prospect magazine, entitled 'After Capitalism'. It begins: 'The US banking system faces losses of over $3,000bn. Japan is in a depression. China is headed for zero growth. Some still hope that urgent surgery can restore the status quo. But more feel that we are at one of those rare points of inflection when nothing is the same again.'

Meanwhile the Spring issue of RSA Journal is concerned, in the words of its editorial by Matthew Taylor, with the question of 'whether the economic collapse is an accident or a revelation,' and wants to take the debate to a new level.

Market globalisation, turbo-consumerism, the fetishising of economic growth, indifference to inequality, scepticism towards the state and even the very idea that human beings are best understood as rational, self-interested, individuals: all these aspects of what some in the UK might loosely call the neo-liberal inheritance are now subject to a concerted attack.

The first article that follows this RSA editorial, by Oliver Kamm, argues that we are facing not a 'crisis of capitalism' but 'a severe malfunctioning of one part of the capitalist economy, its financial sector' - to be corrected not by increased protectionism and state control but by openness and regulation (and in the short term by injecting money, purging bad debts and writing down assets). Pete Lunn writes of the rise to prominence of the 'behavioural economists' who argue that human beings function economically in a much less 'rational' manner than neo-liberalism assumes. We behave as a herd (even experts and CEOs), we often make worse decisions the more information we are given, and we act on the basis of trust and a sense of fairness, rather than as 'independent, rational economic agents out to maximise their own self-interest'. An article by Jonah Lehrer then examines the psychology of spending, and the way credit cards lead us into temptation, bypassing the normal inhibitions that constrain desire, and he applies this principle to the subprime mortgages that triggered the present crisis. Finally, Barbara Taylor asks the question whether men are to blame for the crisis more than women, pointing out that in Iceland the male bosses have now been replaced by females. This leads into a fascinating discussion of the differences between men and women and the history of feminism.

Back at Prospect magazine, Geoff Mulgan wants to look at how things might change for 'capitalism'. But what does this ubiquitous word actually mean?

The French historian Fernand Braudel offered perhaps the best description of capitalism when he wrote of it as a series of layers built on top of the everyday market economy of onions and wood, plumbing and cooking. These layers, local, regional, national and global, are characterised by ever greater abstraction, until at the top sits disembodied finance, seeking returns anywhere, uncommitted to any particular place or industry, and commodifying anything and everything. Capitalism became an “ism” when the vigorous banking and trade of Genoa and Venice, London and Bruges, combined with inventive manufacturing to create a world where the holders of abstracted capital became dominant, displacing the many other contenders for pole position, from warriors and scholars to bureaucrats and makers of things.

He goes on to talk of various versions of capitalism that have flourished at different times and in different cultures, and then about alternative utopias that have been proposed relatively recently:

The answers ranged from communism to managerialism, and from hopes of a golden age of leisure to dreams of a return to community and ecological harmony. Today these utopias can be found in the movements around the World Social Forum, on the edges of all of the major religions, in the radical sub-cultures that surround the net, and in moderated form in thousands of civic ventures across the world. They are bound to find new adherents. But their weakness and the weakness of much contemporary anti-capitalist literature (from David Korten, Wendell Berry, Alain Lipietz or Michael Albert) is that they offer little account of how their visions might be realised and how powerfully entrenched interests would be overcome.

Daniel Bell and others have spoken of the way capitalism tends to erode the traditional ethical and social norms on which its success depends. Others point out that as populations become older in the developed nations, a growing number of elderly will need more and more support from a dwindling group of youngsters. Even the success of capitalism works against it, forcing it to 'invest ever more in creating new needs fuelled by anxiety about status, or beauty and body mass'. But for a deeper insight, Mulgan turns to Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez:

Perez is a scholar of the long-term patterns of technological change. In Perez’s account economic cycles begin with the emergence of new technologies and infrastructures that promise great wealth; these then fuel frenzies of speculative investment, with dramatic rises in stock and other prices. During these phases finance is in the ascendant and laissez faire policies become the norm. The booms are then followed by dramatic crashes, whether in 1797, 1847, 1893, 1929 or 2008. After these crashes, and periods of turmoil, the potential of the new technologies and infrastructures is eventually realised, but only once new institutions come into being which are better aligned with the characteristics of the new economy.

Here is the relevance to our present situation:

Perez suggests that we may be on the verge of another great period of institutional innovation and experiment that will lead to new compromises between the claims of capital and the claims of society and of nature. In retrospect these periodic accommodations are as integral to capitalism as financial crises—indeed it’s only through crisis and institutional reform that capitalism adapts to a changing environment and rediscovers the moral compass that is so vital for markets to work well.

'If another great accommodation is on its way,' he adds, 'this one will be shaped by the triple pressures of ecology, globalisation and demographics.' However:

Forecasting in detail how these might play out is pointless and, as always, there are as many malign possibilities as benign ones, from revived militarism and autarchy to stigmatisation of minorities and accelerated ecological collapse. But the new technologies—from high speed networks to new energy systems, low carbon factories to open source software and genetic medicine—have a connecting theme: each potentially remakes capitalism more clearly as a servant rather than a master, whether in the world of money, work, everyday life or the state.

This sounds nice, but what could it mean? He talks about the pressure for increased regulation and accountability, the rise of social and ethical investment, and various forms of mutualism.

Even money itself may be rethought. The privileges that accompany the ability to create money will come in future with more responsibilities, but we may also see more enthusiasm for alternative currencies that are more embedded, like the local currencies in Germany or timebanks.

There are already 'strong movements to restrain the excesses of mass consumerism: slow food, the voluntary simplicity movement and the many measures to arrest rising obesity, are all symptoms of a swing towards seeing consumerism less as a harmless boon and more as a villain.' The evolution of low-carbon production methods, and the success of open-source software, cooperatives and employee-owned firms like John Lewis, point towards the new types of capitalism Mulgan has in mind, although here, he says, the decisive issue 'is whether capitalism can find a new accommodation with the family'. He concludes that there is

no inherent contradiction between capitalism and community. But we have learned that these connections are not automatic: they have to be cultivated and rewarded, and societies that invest large proportions of their surpluses on advertising to persuade people that individual consumption is the best route to happiness end up paying a high price.

I hope it is clear why I am summarizing all this material on a blog about Catholic social teaching. It is not that any of these authors are Catholic (as far as I know), but it does seem to me that the new ideas thrown up by the crisis and new approaches being suggested in mainstream journals do dovetail quite nicely with CST. The teaching of the Popes and other religious traditions has inevitably appeared of marginal interest to a civilization secure in its own liberal ideology. But that security has vanished, and a deeper wisdom is being sought.

See also Democratic Capitalism, Adrian Pabst on Karl Polanyi, the Progressive Conservatism project, Proutism, Allan Carlson's Third Ways, an online book on Subsidiarity, Distributist Perspectives, and John Zmirak on Wilhelm Roepke

The Ethical Dimension

2009-03-28T07:01:00.005Z

A Catholic perspective on the ongoing financial crisis is provided by Edward Hadas, whose booklet on the Credit Crunch is being published by the CTS as the first in a new series edited by Stratford Caldecott on Catholic Social Teaching. At a talk in Milan recently, Hadas concluded as follows:

"The ongoing financial crisis, which I study carefully as a professional commentator, provides an excellent example of the danger of ignoring the ethical dimension in economic descriptions and policies.

"Finance is not, as often claimed, chiefly concerned with profits. It is primarily a technique for using the monetary system to express social solidarity. The money I deposit in a bank account or invest in a security represents a sharing of my resources with the community – with the firms which borrow from the bank or which issue the security. My financial sharing need not always take the form of a gift, though; in a well run financial system, I am able to reclaim the resources (perhaps after some delay) and receive some sort of income while the sharing lasts.

"The genius of the modern financial system is that it relies on and develops the human desire to work together for the common good but takes the human inability to be perfectly generous into account. For the system to work well, the rewards for sharing must be neither too small to entice or so large that greed is encouraged to grow. Further, unless those who labour within the financial system are carefully supervised, the large sums of money (representing large claims on resources) which pass through their hands will nourish the noxious forces of greed and recklessness.

"This moral portrayal of the financial industry does not lead directly to specific guidelines for bank regulation. It does, however, make clear why there are so many more financial crises than industrial breakdowns. The greed and foolishness of bakers, automakers and airlines are constrained by careful regulation and a well established ethos of quality and service. In finance, such regulation needs to be particularly firm, for all involved but especially for those in the industry, because money has an especially powerful intoxicating effect on men’s moral faculties. In fact though, financial regulations have almost always been inadequate, and “free market” economists deserve much blame for encouraging a loosening of these regulations over the last generation.

"I do not think the current financial crisis will destroy industrial economies. They are built on too firm a foundation of trust for that. The reconstruction of the financial economy can, however, be an opportunity for economists to make more room in their discipline for a pearl of great price – the good. "

Introductory remarks

2009-03-23T06:32:00.010Z

By the end of 2008 the world had found itself in a financial crisis, teetering on the brink of a global recession. At the same time, many scientists are convinced that the coming century will witness climate change of catastrophic proportions, partly due to human activity and resulting in the death or displacement of millions. Urgent, clear and profound thinking is required.

The hundred years from 1891 to 1991 saw the development of a systematic papal teaching on society that has proved helpful and influential well beyond the Catholic Church. This teaching revolves around certain key principles and themes: beginning with (1) the inalienable dignity of the human person as created and called to perfection by God, on the basis of which it emphasizes (2) solidarity, or the intrinsic relationship of the person to the family, the community, and the common good; (3) subsidiarity, the maximization of human freedom and responsibility at the lowest and most local level compatible with the common good; and (4) sustainability or stewardship, or our responsibility for maintaining and cultivating the resources that have been entrusted to us.

On these pages we want to explore those principles, their possible applications, and the new paradigms they might inspire. The new-look Economy section of our main web-site can be found by following the link in this sentence, or by using the 'Economy' button on the main menu at secondspring.co.uk. Please bear in mind that in these site titles we are using the word 'Economy' in a broad sense. The word originally comes from L. oeconomia, from Gk. oikonomia meaning "household management" (oikonomos "manager, steward," and oikos "house").

Meanwhile this blog invites comments from readers. Please note that we also have the facility for more extended conversion at http://secondspring.yuku.com.