Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  In his many years as Archbishop of Krakow and professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, Karol Wojtyła provided intellectual leadership for the people who gave rise to Solidarity. When he became pope, but before the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, he announced to the world that all of Europe was a single tree with two branches, east and west. Europe’s destiny, he said, is to be rejoined as one, drawing life from its common roots in Judaism and Christianity. As pope, he could on any day broadcast the pain of Poland and draw global attention to every Communist abuse. Perhaps unhappy with this role, someone sent one or more assassins to slay him on May 13, 1981. Although the pope nearly died, he recovered. Within a few days, he had planned to issue an encyclical celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum; it had to be released nearly a year later, in early 1982, under the title Laborem Exercens. In this encyclical, John Paul II appealed to the anthropology implicit in the Creation story of Genesis as the single best starting place for religious inquiry into the nature and causes of the creation of wealth.

  The underlying principles of John Paul II’s anthropology are the creative subjectivity of the human person, together with the resulting subjectivity of society. From his earliest work onward, the pope had been struck by the human being’s most arresting characteristic: the capacity to originate action; that is, to imagine and to conceive of new things and then do them. He found in creative acts the clue to human identity. Humans, he held, cannot take refuge from this responsibility by hiding behind society; for there, too, they are responsible for their acts. Being in society does not absolve them of the burdens of subjectivity. An unbeliever may achieve this insight with no benefit of religious belief. Karol Wojtyła approached it from two different directions: first in a philosophical way, and second in a Jewish-Christian way. For him, philosophy and theology meet in the anthropology of the real, existing human person. The philosopher sees homo creator; the theologian sees imago Dei. Man the creator (philosophy) is made in the image of the divine Creator (theology), and is endowed by him with an inalienable right to creative initiative.

  From this principle John Paul II derived a corollary for social systems: It is an affront to human dignity for a social system to repress the human capacity to create, to invent, and to be enterprising. In human creative subjectivity, Wojtyła saw the principle of liberty, which naturally deploys itself in conscience, inquiry, and action. It would be fair to say that John Paul II was a philosopher of liberty. No end in itself, freedom must be for something and must be ordered by something. Deeper in his eyes than liberty, however, was creativity. Of the two notions, liberty is less satisfying; it raises further questions. Creativity is the deeper and more substantive notion. So it is more accurate to think of John Paul II as a philosopher of creativity.

  From this starting point in creativity, the pope, over the years, slowly approached that much-disputed beast called capitalism.

  At the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II used the word “capitalism” in a pejorative sense—as it is often used in European countries, the more so wherever the Marxist tradition has been strong. In Laborem Exercens, he used “capital” to mean things, objects, or instruments of production. He reserved the word “labor” for all humane and virtuous attributes, including creative subjectivity.

  Some years later, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), the pope moved from the “acting person” and “creative subjectivity” to the fundamental human right “to religious freedom and also the right to freedom of economic initiative.”18 This was the strongest recognition of enterprise in Catholic social thought. He saw enterprise as a vocation, a virtue, and a right. By May of 1991, in Centesimus Annus, Wojtyła had moved further, to a theory of institutions as necessary for the flowering of this enterprise. From this he moved to a theory of the business firm and to a critique of the welfare state. At the heart of each of these positions lies his fundamental insight: Every woman and every man has been created in the image of the Creator, in order to help cocreate the future of the world.

  The pope emphasized how noble it is, and how many complex talents are required, to gain insight into the economic needs of the human race, to organize available resources, to invent new resources and methods, and to lead a cooperative, voluntary community to achieve real results. In the whole of section 32, the pope was eloquent about the lessons of creativity and community found in a modern economy. By contrast, the fundamental flaw in socialism, he wrote, was its faulty anthropology. It misunderstood the active, creative nature of the individual; it misunderstood both human misery and human grandeur.

  John Paul II rooted the capitalist ethos in the positive thrust of Judaism and Christianity, in their capacity for inspiring new visions and creative actions, rather than in the negative “this-worldly asceticism” that Max Weber found in the Protestant ethic. Common to the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant views of the human economic agent is the “calling” or “vocation,” which Weber erroneously thought to be distinctively Protestant. Every Jew and every Christian is called to be like God, since each is made in the image of God and called to be active and creative. Thence arises the visible dynamism of the Jewish and the Christian peoples in human history.

  Outline of Centesimus Annus

  Before plunging too far into the particulars, it may be well to fix in mind an outline of the six chapters of Centesimus Annus. First, John Paul II undertakes a rereading of Rerum Novarum, thus handing down an authoritative reinterpretation of that document, much as the U.S. Supreme Court includes in its decisions commentary on earlier decisions of that Court.

  In chapter two, the pope takes up the “new things” that have happened since 1891 that still affect us today. He analyzes the shortcomings of socialist anthropology, and describes the reforms that transformed the real, existing capitalism of advanced countries from what it had been in 1891.

  Next the pope lingers reflectively on the great events of “The Year 1989,” one of the watershed years of human history. He lays out several reasons for the collapse of socialism, and a few lessons of worldwide importance to be drawn from it.

  In chapter four, John Paul II addresses the classic Christian theme of the universal destination of material goods (which we also refer to above in chapter seven as the “social destination of all goods”). In this, the longest part of the encyclical, the pope examines existing political economies for their compatibility with the dignity of the human person. Here he develops his new approach to initiative, enterprise, profit, and capitalism itself. He severely criticizes abuses that still exist, particularly of the poor in the Third World, in whose name he eloquently urged inclusion in property ownership, the active worldwide market, and the spread of knowledge and skill.

  Chapter five discusses the state and culture. Here the pope stresses the limited state, democratic checks and balances, human rights, and constraints upon the state regarding welfare rights. He criticizes rather harshly the present excesses of the welfare state in economically advanced countries. He turns as well to the moral and cultural sphere, which is too often ignored: “People lose sight of the fact that life in society has neither the market nor the state as its final purpose.”19 Here, too, are found the pope’s comments on the formation of a “culture of peace.”20

  Chapter six, concluding on a theological note, looks to the future. We are, the pope thinks, “ever more aware that solving serious national or international problems is not just a matter of economic production or of juridical or social organization.”21 Rather, most problems call for “specific ethical and religious values as well as changes of mentality, behavior, and structures.”22 The most perfect structures will not function if citizens do not have the relevant attitudes, habits, and behaviors. Among these is the habit of effective concern for one’s fellow human beings around the world (the habit of “solidarity,” as the pope calls it—a new term for the old virtue of charity, calling attention to its international dimension).

  In sum, Centesimus An
nus calls for serious reform of the moral and cultural institutions of democratic and capitalist societies—including the institutions of the mass media, cinema, universities, and families—in order to make democracy and capitalism fulfill their best promises. The preservation of free political space achieved by democracy and the achievement of liberation from oppressive poverty wrought by capitalism are insufficient (alone or together) to meet the human desire for truth and justice.

  A Christian Social Anthropology

  This overview of the whole terrain fixed in our minds, it should now be easier to grasp the inner logic of Centesimus Annus. This logic begins with concrete inspection of the human being: “We are not dealing here with man in the ‘abstract,’ but with the real, ‘concrete,’ ‘historical’ man. We are dealing with each individual. . . . The horizon of the Church’s whole wealth of doctrine is man in his concrete reality as sinful and righteous.”23

  When the young Wojtyła first wrestled with modern Western thinkers such as Scheler and Heidegger, he fully expected that he would be living the rest of his life under real, existing socialism. In that ideology, the individual counted for very little. In actual practice, socialist work was wholly oriented toward the piling-up of objects, products, things, with no real regard for the subjectivity of the worker. After toiling for days on the freezing seas at the risk of their lives, fishermen would discover that the refrigeration unit of the storehouse in which their catch had been deposited was defective and that the entire fruit of their labors had spoiled. Steelworkers would see the steel beams on which they had labored pile up in huge lots and rust, because distribution systems (such as they were) had broken down. Under the economic system developed in the name of Marxism, it was in no one’s interest to see a product all the way through, from conception to execution to delivery to satisfying use. Every person felt like a cog in someone else’s machine. A new type of alienation was experienced which John Paul II described in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, precisely in contrast to a sense of personal action and initiative:

  In the place of creative initiative there appear passivity, dependence and submission to the bureaucratic apparatus which, as the only “ordering” and “decision-making” body—if not also the “owner”—of the entire totality of goods and the means of production, puts everyone in a position of almost absolute dependence, which is similar to the traditional dependence of the worker-proletarian in capitalism. This provokes a sense of frustration or desperation and predisposes people to opt out of national life, impelling many to emigrate and also favoring a form of “psychological” emigration.24

  Amid such sour alienation, Wojtyła’s emphasis on the acting person was entirely convincing. His emphasis on the creative subjectivity of the worker unsettled those Marxists who were assigned to do ideological battle with him. He turned the tables on them: He forced them to argue on Christian terrain. He accepted their emphasis upon work, but then asked about the meaning of work to the worker, obliging them to confront, on the one hand, the alienation inherent in socialist organizations, and, on the other, a deeper and richer humanism, Christian in lineage. While he was the Archbishop of Krakow, he had noted that the front between Catholicism and Marxism (or, more broadly, between humanism and socialism) had become a contestation over the meaning of man. In Centesimus Annus, he hit the mark exactly:

  The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order.25

  “Reduced to a series of social relationships”—that was the fatal flaw: the loss of “the autonomous subject of moral decision.” In other words, the loss of a healthy respect for the individual—the acting, deciding person—and the loss of society’s subjectivity, too.

  This direct confrontation with the erroneous anthropology of socialism allowed John Paul II to begin with the human individual and move to the larger context of social relations and social systems: “Today, the church’s social doctrine focuses especially on man as he is involved in a complex network of relationships within modern societies.”26 The mere individual is not what is in focus; rather, the pope’s emphasis on invention and choice obliges Western economists to deepen their understanding of work, the worker, and creativity in work.

  The main lines of Centesimus Annus are clean and clear: The human is an acting, creative person, capable of initiative and responsibility, seeking institutions in the three main spheres of life (political, economic, and cultural) worthy of his or her capacities—institutions that do not stifle or distort human liberty. For God himself made human beings free:

  Not only is it wrong from the ethical point of view to disregard human nature, which is made for freedom, but also in practice it is impossible to do so. Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society becomes progressively disorganized and goes into decline.27

  This is the lesson the pope draws from the self-destruction of socialism.

  There is a further lesson about human capacities for evil. A good Calvinist joke roughly expresses the pope’s views: “The man who said that man is totally depraved can’t be all bad.” Analogously, the pope: “Man tends toward good, but he is also capable of evil. He can transcend his immediate interest and still remain bound to it.”28

  Thus, respecting man’s limited but genuine goodness, the pope urges us not to stress an opposition between “self-interest” and the “common good.” He urges us, rather, to seek a “harmony” between “self-interest” and “the interests of society as a whole,” wherever this may be possible: “The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact [man’s two-sided nature] into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony.”29

  In The Federalist, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton caution against allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. They resisted utopic theorists and appealed to a basic realism about human beings rooted in a sober consideration of historical experience. In a spirit not altogether dissimilar, John Paul II recognized the claims of legitimate self-interest:

  In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a “secular religion” which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society—which possesses its own autonomy and laws—can ever be confused with the kingdom of God.30

  In politics, Aristotle wrote, it is necessary to be satisfied with a “tincture of virtue.” The pope displayed a similar sobriety. In this direct way, Pope John Paul II grasped the horns of the contemporary problem of free persons and the common good.

  It was relatively easy to determine what the common good was when a single chief was charged with pointing it out. It is far more difficult when the freedom of each person to discern the common good is respected. Moreover, many aspects of the good of a whole people are not achieved in concert or by single-minded direction from above; on the contrary, they are achieved by a large number of persons and groups independently performing their own tasks with excellence. A sound family life is not ac
hieved in a society by dictate from above, for example, but by each pair of parents independently doing their best. And individual small businesses do not await commands from planning boards, but achieve their purposes within their own markets and in their own particular niches in their own various ways. Thus, in asserting the principle that the coincidence of private interest and public good, as often as it can occur, achieves an outcome not at all bad for society, John Paul II was being more than world-wise. He was not only taking account of both the good in humans and its ordinary limits; he was also assuming a more subtle view of the common good than was possible in the less pluralistic past.

  There is a difficulty here, of course. Many societies today are entrenched in “culture wars.” Large and important factions hold radically different views about which way the society as a whole ought to go. What one faction finds good, another finds evil. In the last chapter of Centesimus Annus, the pope pointed out that cultural issues are the most important of all—and perhaps the most neglected by thinkers and doers. So much energy has gone into earlier conflicts over which political and economic order is most suited to human nature that for more than two centuries, the West has been living off of cultural capital. Concern over the physical climate has not yet been matched by concern over the moral climate. The ecology of liberty needs as much attention as the ecology of air, water, and sea.