Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  The Marxist solution has failed, but the realities of marginalization and exploitation remain in the world, especially the Third World, as does the reality of human alienation, especially in the more advanced countries. Against these phenomena the Church strongly raises her voice. Vast multitudes are still living in conditions of great material and moral poverty. The collapse of the Communist system in so many countries certainly removes an obstacle to facing these problems in an appropriate and realistic way, but it is not enough to bring about their solution. Indeed, there is a risk that a radical capitalistic ideology could spread which refuses even to consider these problems, in the a priori belief that any attempt to solve them is doomed to failure, and which blindly entrusts their solution to the free development of market forces.6

  Although economic growth falls far short of being the only goal of free societies, its blessings for education, medical improvements, the prospering of freedom of conscience, and the private financing of civic life are not inessential to the common good. Fault it we must. But in all justice, such a system surely deserves gratitude for what it does better than all prior systems.

  There are good versions of capitalism and bad ones. One test of the difference is how well and how rapidly the good system raises its poor out of poverty. On that, Pope Francis is on target.

  It is all too true that market systems do not alone produce upward mobility, economic progress for all, and wide economic opportunity. Argentina has always had a market economy. So, too, almost all the peoples in human history. Market systems alone do not lift up the poor.

  Jerusalem in the biblical period cherished private property (“Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”), and it lived by a vital market (it was the commercial interface of three continents). But for 1,800 years after Christ lived, none of the world’s markets—nor the aggregate thereof—produced much economic development. The world’s economies remained relatively static as they faced a merciless cycle of “fat” years followed by “lean” ones. In nearly every generation, traditional market systems experienced famines and massive outbreaks of deadly diseases. No more.

  Pope John Paul II came to see this historical reality. His insights are still in the treasury of Catholic social teaching, and naturally they will come to the attention of Pope Francis, who devotes a whole section of Evangelii Gaudium to the theme “Reality is more powerful than ideas.”

  [CHAPTER 14]

  A New Theological Specialty: The Scout

  MY KIND AND SUPER-INTELLIGENT PROFESSOR IN ROME, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., published Method in Theology to call attention to the eight different methods deployed in theology—different functional specializations, he called them.1 To this list I want to add a ninth, which is of particular moment in the study of Catholic social teaching.

  Necessarily, Catholic social teaching lags behind the times by a generation, because at least that long is necessary to test new initiatives, to see whether they work, and to discover what their unintended consequences might be. The reason is that Catholic social teaching, more than any other specialization, depends on accurate judgments about highly contingent movements in history.

  Some early experiences with republican government taught the Church to be highly suspicious, indeed bitterly negative, toward propositions praising democracies and republics. For instance, the first French Republic was so anticlerical and anti-Catholic in its bloodlust and destructiveness that it emptied seminaries and convents, gutted whole libraries of books, and took over Catholic colleges and schools to use as army barracks. It choked off Catholic intellect in France altogether for at least a century. The Italian Republic was not much gentler. It took some generations for the papacy to grasp (from its missionaries) the more favorable fruits of republican institutions in America.

  Europe, though, was slower to learn. As Mussolini grew in power in Italy, Pius XI sent the founder of Italian democracy, Don Luigi Sturzo, into exile (in faraway America), and discouraged Catholics from embracing democracy. Then bitter experiences under Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany led Pius XII in his Christmas Message of 1942 to recommend democracy, even with all its many faults, as a necessary defense against torture, concentration camps, and other abuses of human rights. This choice was further reinforced by the reliance of Pius XII on the Christian Democratic parties after World War II to turn back the rising tide of Socialist and Communist parties in European politics.

  Meanwhile, thinkers and leaders of stature were quickly building postwar political parties, both in their theory and in their practice: men such as France’s Charles de Gaulle, Robert Schumann, and Jacques Maritain (in Christianity and Democracy2), and in Germany Wilhelm Röpke, the Das Ordnung circle, Konrad Adenauer, and others, along with up-and-coming political leaders such as Italy’s Giulio Andreotti and Amintore Fanfani. The continuance of a free Europe depended on the electoral victories of such leaders over powerful communist parties in their nations.

  Yet, as we have seen, another example of historical change is recounted in meaty detail by John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, in which he shows what Leo XIII accomplished, but also the realities that had changed dramatically since 1891.3 Few documents make it clearer how contingent in its practice Catholic social teaching necessarily is.

  For this reason, Catholic social teaching always needs scouts and explorers willing to go out ahead of the main body, persons who are reporters and analysts both. Such persons have to be skillful in applying the lessons of the past while also recognizing their own limits. They often need to make new distinctions, assemble new concepts and new strategies to propose for meeting ever-changing circumstances. Consider, for example, the very different world forces arrayed by these and other pivotal events of the twentieth century: World War I, the Communist revolution, World War II and the atomic bomb, the close of Vatican Council II, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the political economies of the world did not stop changing in 1991.

  For this task, a new specialization in theology has grown up. It is in very large measure a theology of economics. This new discipline has at least three tasks. The first is to clarify realities that occur under all systems of economic thought, such as scarcity, development, decline, taxes, the creation of wealth and its distribution, and the like.

  The second is to compare today’s rival systems: traditional market systems continuous from ancient history onward, compared with such variants as feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, and socialism (democratic and totalitarian).

  The third task is to take account of newly emerging, concrete patterns of economic reality, such as globalization (in its many meanings), the movement of large numbers out of poverty, economic decline, patterns of new business formation, employment, and changing distributions of wealth (with special attention to movements in the bottom and top quintiles).

  In this three-pronged discipline, special attention needs to be given to the causes of the wealth of nations and to the effects of neglecting them in particular societies. But there is almost no limit to questions that must be asked about economic realities.

  All these realities are why a ninth specialization has grown up among the traditional methods drawn upon in theology. The theology of economics is fundamentally concerned with how to improve the condition of the poorest peoples in the world—how to help them break the chains of poverty and gain a better life, both in income and in education. It is focused not solely on the economics of these questions but also, and mainly, on their significance for the gospels and for theology. It is so young a discipline that it still relies on explorers and scouts. Two of its very real achievements thus far are drawing intense attention both to creating wealth, not just distributing it, and to the reality of human capital.

  Three Perspectives in Conflict

  In approaching economic reality down through history, there appear to be three conflicting paradigms. The first is the traditional perspective of the largely agrarian societies that
characterized all of human history until recent centuries. Here, humans were dramatically affected by years of plenty versus years of scarcity, good times versus bad times, and these variations were largely out of human control. Huge majorities were born poor and stayed poor. Gains in wealth often accrued by sending armies out to plunder the wealth of others. (This armed stealing is the backstory of the saying, “The root of evil is cupidity: Radix malorum cupiditas.”) Very little new wealth was created; the existing wealth of others was plundered. To relieve the most desperate needs of the poor, Judaism and Christianity championed alms—and also the many works of mercy mentioned in the bible, Jewish and Christian.

  The second paradigm is statist, the ideology and practice of turning the powers of the state toward helping the poor in one after another of their many economic needs, such as food, housing, income, social insurance of various types, employment, health care, and so on. The two most extreme species of statism are communism and socialism. A third form, tempered by democracy and allowing some scope to a free (but heavily regulated and highly taxed) economy, is social democracy, such as what is found in Western Europe today.

  One pattern that runs through both of these paradigms, the ancient and traditional one and the statist one, is the power of those at the top to provide, to guide, and to rule. In older times, those at the top were kings and aristocrats; the new style uses political leaders (unelected or elected) and a huge administrative apparatus. The latter type has become aptly known as the administrative state.

  The third paradigm is to promote personal initiative, creativity, enterprise, ownership, and cooperatives, together with a whole realm of voluntary associations (such as the Red Cross) and natural associations (the family). In this paradigm, the stress is placed on the responsibility and the creative capacity of individuals and their organizations and associations. Even before the modern state came into being, individuals pursued many of their goals through organizations and associations they themselves founded and ran: the newly dubbed “mediating structures” that protect individuals from full dependence on the state. The term devised to name the whole realm of these mediators is civil society or, in Vaclav Havel’s term, the civic forum.

  Catholic writers are fond of describing the United States as a land of (Protestant) “individualists,” lonely cowboys, and atomistic individuals. But those who say this lack experience in Protestant communities, bible camps, and church outings. In fact, the Anglo-American way is quite communitarian. Church potlucks, quilt sales, and bake sales are routine events. The thrust of the whole American project was to build up early settlements, villages, cities, territories, and finally, the Union. A principal aim of American life, as the Preamble of the Constitution of the United States puts it, is “to promote the General Welfare.” The best way to promote that welfare, the American experience shows, is not through a dominating state but through the initiatives of as many citizens as possible working through their multiple associations, organizations, and businesses, both unincorporated and incorporated.

  It was distinctive of the American Experiment, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out, that citizens in their social needs should not turn to the monarch (as the French do), nor toward the aristocracy (as the English do), but toward free associations of their own design and for their own variegated purposes. In America as nowhere else, leading colleges and universities were put up and supported by individuals and associations, not the state. My wife’s ancestors, pioneers who went by horse and wagon to Iowa from New York State in the late 1830s, left behind diaries that show how their daily lives on the frontier were characterized by communitarian activities—building one another’s cabins, then one month putting up a church, another planning a school and throwing a bridge over the creek. The Americans were not rugged individualists, but rugged communitarians. Look around you and observe: They still are.

  Abroad, the lie persists that Americans are—and always have been—lawless libertines. But the emphatic record of pioneer life shows that the moral code of early Americans was rather strict, ascetic, and biblical—not necessarily Puritan, but not falling far from that tree. Nevertheless, the places beyond the frontier where the gospel had not yet been preached were regarded as lawless places, the “badlands.” But as the pioneers moved westward they built churches and schools and libraries and, in a rugged communal effort, civilized the West. (Do not underestimate the contributions of “Marian the librarian.”) Building the United States was a thoroughly communal project.

  Generation by generation, sadly, we have been unlearning the older disciplines. There is now reason to fear that our institutions will not long endure. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”4 Many of our political elites today, with the collusion of our media elites in Hollywood and in print and television journalism, are busy uprooting the biblical force from our institutions and practices. They are likely to reap the whirlwind, when families cannot hold, when lawlessness increases in the cities and rural areas, and the internal policemen—the personal consciences of citizens—have faded helplessly away. Only deep moral capital civilizes peoples, and this moral capital has an ecology of its own. It cannot be taken for granted. Destroy it, and in less than two generations a civilization tends to collapse.

  Liberation Theology versus Creation Theology

  Meanwhile, in turning attention to the poor, two underlying narratives have been developed in Catholic theology. One is liberation theology, and the other creation theology. The first narrative proceeds on the assumption that poverty is imposed from outside, as a matter of oppression. People are poor because someone else holds them down. (This is the proposition that the greatest of all Polish Communists, Leszek Kołakowski, called the basic Marxist stencil, to be applied to disparate situations all over the world.) The cure for this condition is to liberate the poor from their oppressors.

  The operative passion in liberation theology is to bring down oppressors, rather than to assure the well-being of the poor from the bottom up. In liberation theology, not much is written about how the poor, relieved of their oppressors, are actually going to raise themselves up out of poverty. The Marxist narrative openly suggests that someone else—that is, the state—will lift them up. This narrative does not demand much in terms of individual effort and responsibility. And it fails to specify which social actions promote the creation of new wealth and which do not.

  The second narrative, introduced by John Paul II in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, chooses as its master narrative not liberation (from oppressors) but creation. It stresses for the first time in papal documents “the right to personal economic initiative”—an important part of the “subjectivity of the person.” Subjectivity means in this sense the ability of a person to become a conscious subject, an active agent, a creator.

  In addition to this stress on the responsibility of the human person, Sollicitudo also stresses the right of societies to maintain their own unique character, the integrity of their own culture, and the historical source of their own spiritual unity; all these constitute the “subjectivity of society.” Thus, two types of subjectivity are stressed by John Paul II: the subjectivity of the person and the subjectivity of a society. What is noteworthy is the designation of these two as rights of human subjects, both alone and in their communities.

  Creativity, therefore, is not only about the individual. It is also about the union, about the people, about the nation. For instance, that spiritual Polonia which has always held the Polish people together in their own culture, even when the territory of Poland has been—as so often in history—overrun and ruled by outsiders. So also, the dynamism of overcoming poverty lies in the creative capacities—the human capital—of the human person and his communities.

  John Paul II drives this point home in Centesimus Annus, when he stresses that the cause of the wealth of nations is knowledge, know-how, and invention—in other words, human capital, the old capu
t, the seat of creative practicality.5 Here is where whole new industries are generated. Here is where scores of thousands (even millions) of new jobs come into being. Here is where multitudes of the poor become entrepreneurs in their own fields, shops, and enterprises, allowing for the development of a huge range of different talents never before so empowered in all of human history. The talents of the poor are immense. It is through creative theology and its novel institutions, practices, and habits of the heart that these come into flower.

  It is not at all necessary that there should be poor people on this planet. The Creator of this world has made it abundantly fruitful for all, and has hidden within it huge resources for human wit to discover and put to use for all. To ask, “What causes poverty?” is an otiose question; for answering it would merely enable one to exclaim, “Oh, great! Now we can create more poverty.” Poverty is the natural condition of man, the most enduring condition of man. Poverty is what you get when people don’t know the causes of wealth. Poverty spreads in human systems that fail to ignite the cause of the wealth of nations—the creativity of every single human person.

  I do not argue that creativity is the soul, heart, and end of Christian life. I argue only that it is the best means, probably the only means, of making the “preferential option for the poor” into a preference for the raising up of all the poor (by their own creativity) out of material poverty.

  Higher than creativity lies the calling to live in a manner worthy of economic creativity and political liberty, by living lives of caritas—the love of our Creator, his own love infused in us, the love by which he calls each of us human beings to accept his invitation to become his friend. Union in friendship with our Creator and Redeemer is the common good of every person on earth. The elimination of acute material poverty on earth is only one tiny step toward human dignity, and the happy acceptance of his friendship, in mutual love, in concert with the universal love of all.