the helder camara lecture, given at newman college, university … robert... · 2017-06-26 ·...
TRANSCRIPT
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The Helder Camara Lecture, given at Newman College, University of Melbourne, June 2017.
Delivered by Bishop Robert McElroy of San Diego, USA LISTENING TO POPE FRANCIS: CHALLENGING NATIONALISM, MARKET RULE AND OVERCONFIDENCE IN TECHNOLOGY
Catholic social teaching is an integrated reflection on the implications of
the gift of God’s creation to all humanity and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It
is framed explicitly within the context of faith, yet advances a vision of the
human person, the nature of society and the glories of the universe which
seeks to bridge differences of religious perspective. Catholic social
teaching is rooted in four enduring moral principles: the dignity of the
human person, the pursuit of the common good, the principle of
subsidiarity, and the call of solidarity. The Church’s doctrine is founded
upon ancient insights into the nature of the human person, but is also
renewed and expanded in every age to integrate new moral realities that
processes such as industrialization, secularization, globalization and
environmental deterioration have produced. Central to the vision of
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Catholic faith is the conviction that the framing concepts in society and
government must always be moral in nature and must serve to promote
the deepest levels of justice and freedom in society.
At this moment in international social and political life, three potent
framing forces are at work which have no moral identity and are often
directive in societal and economic life. The first of these is the imperialism
of free markets. The second is nationalism. The third is the technocratic
paradigm which seeks dominance over the environment and culture. None
of these currents is rooted in a philosophical or theological system. None
has any deep-seated sense of moral substance. In a very real way they
have been evacuated of moral substance and operate autonomously from
any moral anchors as principles of politics and governance in societal and
international life. In a very real sense, each of these three trends is a form
of false autonomy from moral norms, claims in society which pretend to a
moral legitimacy but in actuality corrupt the moral substance of a just
society. It is this notion of false autonomy which has been at the heart of
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Pope Francis’ prophetic condemnation of each of these impulses in the
modern world, for he correctly sees that these forces are purely
instrumental in nature and yet claim moral legitimacy and autonomy in
reshaping society.
The Sovereignty of Markets
In his Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis speaks
powerfully about this theme of inequality and the urgency it presents to
the nations of the world:
The need to resolve the structural causes of poverty cannot be delayed, not only for the pragmatic reason of its urgency for the good order of society, but because society needs to be cured of a sickness which is weakening and frustrating it, and which can only lead to new crises. Welfare projects, which meet certain urgent needs, should be considered merely temporary responses. As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems, or, for that matter, to any problems. Inequality is the root of social ills. (EG 202)
Pope Francis identifies this inequality as the foundation for a process of
exclusion that literally cuts immense segments of society off from
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meaningful participation in social, political and economic life. It breeds a
financial system which rules rather than serves humanity, and a capitalism
which literally kills those who have no utility as consumers. Inevitably,
such exclusion destroys the possibility for peace and security within
societies and globally. The cry of the poor in Evangelii Gaudium is a
challenge to “the individualistic, indifferent and self-centered mentality” so
prevalent in the cultures of the world to confront the evil of economic
exclusion and begin a process of structural reform that will lead to
inclusion rather than marginalization.
Commentators from the worlds of politics, economics, and business have
weighed in to identify the defects and limitations of the Pope’s prescription
for justice in the world. Some of these commentaries have been
superficial and highly politicized; others have been thoughtful and incisive.
The emergent critique of Pope Francis’ message about inequality focuses
on three major themes. The first is that the Pope does not understand the
importance of markets. The second is that Francis’ critique is aimed at a
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type of capitalism far different from the economy of Australia or the United
States. The third is that the Pope’s perspective has been skewed by his
Latin American roots and is out of step with the teaching of prior popes.
Thus Pope Francis’ criticisms of world economies are alternatively naïve or
misplaced or doctrinally extreme.
But a sustained reading of Pope Francis’ words on inequality and the
barrage of criticism which has greeted them raises another possibility,
namely that the negativity toward the Pope’s message did not emerge
because the he failed to recognize the centrality of markets, the nature of
economies like the Australia, the United States and the European Union
and the trajectory of authentic Catholic social teaching, but precisely
because he did recognize the these realities and in doing so has raised the
most fundamental questions about justice in our economic systems.
Specifically Pope Francis’ writings on inequality and economic justice
point to the fallacies inherent in a series of major cultural assumptions
which have become deeply embedded in free market societies. These
assumptions touch upon the meaning and significance of economic
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inequality itself, the moral standing of the claim for free markets and the
relationship between economic activity and membership in society. Only
by examining the legitimacy of each of these assumptions in turn can the
importance of the critique which Pope Francis has raised be understood.
Only by examining the cultural mindset which these assumptions taken
together have created, can it be understood why they collectively undercut
the possibility for greater justice in the world community today.
First Cultural Assumption: Existing Levels of Domestic and International
Economic Inequality are Best Viewed as a Part of the Natural Order of
Economic Life.
The logic behind this assumption is simple. Any economic system which
seeks to enhance growth must incentivize individual initiative and effort.
For this reason alone, economic inequality will be evident and substantial
in every nation that values growth and opportunity.
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But the legitimacy of economic inequalities does not rest solely upon this
foundation. For economic inequality arises from the free rights of men and
women to use their talents as they choose, and from the claims in justice
that reward individuals for their contributions to specific enterprises.
Societies may have an obligation to provide threshold economic supports
to their citizens, but to go farther and seek to limit economic inequality in
society would cripple economic growth and violate fundamental norms of
justice. Thus inequality is best seen as a necessary part of economic life.
But in Catholic thought this assumption is utterly unacceptable.
Catholic thought begins not with the need to maximize economic growth or
with individual claims to recompense, but with the equal dignity of every
man and woman made in the image of God. In the words of the Second
Vatican Council:
Their equal dignity as persons demands that we strive for fairer and more humane conditions. Excessive economic disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.
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Grave inequalities within and among nations are automatically suspect in
Catholic thinking and constitute not the legitimate natural order but a
profound violation of that order.
It is vital to note that the Council is not talking about threshold rights to
income in this passage; it is talking about disparities in income. Catholic
teaching has long recognized that the most profound effects of economic
inequality lie not merely in the material realm, but in the social,
psychological and political effects that flow from great economic
inequalities. Those who are marginalized economically are also
marginalized educationally, residentially, and in their opportunities for
meaningful work. As a result, as Pope Francis concludes, they are actually
excluded from society. “Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means
to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are not longer
society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised – they are no longer
even a part of it. The excluded are not the exploited, but the outcast, the
“leftovers.”
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Pope Francis’ assertion that existing levels of inequality constitute
profound injustice rather than a necessary part of the natural order is the
central friction that underlies the rejection of the Pope’s message by so
many of his critics. When the dire poverty that ensnares one billion people
in the world today could be largely eliminated by official development
assistance amounting to less than one percent of the gross domestic
product of the world’s rich nations, that is injustice, not a necessary part of
the natural order. The cultural currents that treat grotesque levels of
inequality as inevitable in a market economy constitute an ideology of
justification and complacency which is irreconcilable with the imperative to
reform that flows from any meaningful application of the Gospel to the
economy of our world.
Second Cultural Assumption: The Freedom of Markets Is a Categorical
Imperative Rather Than an Instrumental Freedom
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No element of Pope Francis’ teaching on justice and the economy has
received more criticism than his call for the rejection of the absolute
autonomy of markets. Critics have advanced two separate arguments. The
first is that the economic systems in the Western world are not in fact
absolutely autonomous, but instead have a series of restrictions in law
which safeguard important human rights. The second is that free markets
are the best engine for generating wealth for all segments of society and
for embodying the fundamental human right to contract and undertake
economic initiative.
Both of these criticisms have important elements of truth. Western
markets are not free in an absolute sense, but reflect elemental safeguards
for human dignity. In addition, markets are a central mechanism for
wealth creation which have sharply diminished poverty during the past two
decades, especially in China and India. Finally, free markets do express and
nurture the important human freedom of economic initiative and contract.
For all these reasons relatively free markets are necessary for establishing
economic justice in the world.
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But as Catholic social teaching has made clear throughout the past half
century, free markets do not constitute a first principle of economic justice.
Their freedom is merely instrumental in nature and must be structured by
society and government to accomplish the common good. In Centessimus
Annus, where Saint John Paul II skillfully integrated a modern appreciation
for markets into Catholic social teaching, he made clear that any market
system must be “circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which
places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as
a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and
religious…” And pointing to the financial wreckage of the collapse of
2008, Pope Benedict observed in Caritas in Veritate that both distributive
and social justice were essential to complement the commutative justice of
markets because “if the market is governed solely by the principle of
equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social
cohesion that it requires to function well.” The sustained conviction of
Catholic doctrine is that the dignity of the human human person is the
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mean and the measure of every system and institution, and that markets
must be structured to reflect that perspective.
It is in light of this fundamental stance that Pope Francis speaks to the
question of markets and condemns the absolutism of those who resist
structural reforms that will bring greater fairness and serve human dignity.
He identifies a “sacralized” approach to existing market structures which
resists all calls for change and reform in the name of freedom and
efficiency. Seen through this sacralized prism, any attack upon existing
arrangements is portrayed as a pathway to state centralization, an
encroachment upon personal freedom or an invitation to economic
stagnation.
The freedom of markets is essential to a vibrant and just economy, but it
is an instrumental freedom, not a categorical imperative. Markets exist to
serve the human person and human communities. It is society and
government which have the obligation to structure markets so that they
best carry out that role.
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Nationalism
The world is experiencing a merger of populism and nationalism in the
cultural and political wave which has threatened to engulf and undermine
the principles of solidarity and the common good which are so central in
Catholic social teaching. The elections in the United Kingdom and the
United States were surprising in their outcomes and explicable only as the
product of a widespread sense of grievance located in national, and at
times ethnic and racial, identity. It is possible, of course, to view this clash
as the conflict between cultural and economic elites and working class
members of society who have become dispossessed in the modern
economic environment, and in part this is true. But at its root, this
nationalist impulse confronts us all with a deep moral challenge: how can
we distinguish between the moral claims of patriotism, which Catholic
teaching has traditionally seen as a virtue, and nationalism, which our faith
has regarded with deep suspicion.
In Catholic social teaching the love of country is a virtue. The
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states that “the principle
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of solidarity requires that men and women of our day cultivate a greater
awareness that they are debtors of the society of which they have become
a part.” And in his moving message to the people of Poland entitled “My
Beloved Countrymen”, Pope John Paul II spoke of true patriotism amidst
the cauldron of oppression and upheaval: “Love of our motherland unites
us and must unite us above all the differences. It has nothing in common
with narrow nationalism or chauvinism. It is the right of the human heart.
It is the measure of human nobility.”
But if love of country is a virtue and a moral obligation in solidarity, the
nationalistic impulse itself has no moral identity. It can signal the most
virtuous patriotism which integrates the love of country into the spectrum
of moral obligations that accrue to our humanity or it can be rooted in
pride, isolationism and discrimination. As a consequence nationalism as a
directive force in society is an example of false autonomy; it is a moral good
only when it is connected and subordinated to the order of justice and
freedom. It is immoral when it functions autonomously from that justice
and freedom.
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One of the most important struggles which both our nations have faced
in their history is to understand through our immigrant routes that our
unity is founded not on ties of blood, but those of principle. In a very real
way we have repeatedly had to reject mono-ethnic and mono-cultural
views of nationality. Nationalism, in its historical embodiment in both of
our countries and throughout the world, has the devastating tendency to
rest upon precisely such a mono-ethnic prism in evaluating citizenship and
legitimate membership in society. Culture and heritage become not
sources for unity within our nations, but sources of distinction and
marginalization. Each of our countries has seen far too much of both these
social sins within our histories. Nationalism inherently drives our societies
apart and violates the core doctrine of Catholic social teaching that it is the
universal dignity of the human person which is the most powerful and
comprehensive claim for rights and source of unity within a society, not a
manufactured cultural identity which is designed to exclude and categorize.
Jonah Goldberg noted this corrosive effect of nationalism in society which
he recently wrote that “nationalism is ultimately the fire of tribalism;
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having too much of it tends to melt away important distinctions, from the
rule of law to the right to dissent to the sovereignty of the individual.” It is
this ugly face of nationalist trends in culture and politics which Pope Francis
has excoriated repeatedly during the last two years, pointing continually to
cultural and political actions that seem intent on identifying “the other”
rather than “the brother.”
A second problem with nationalism is that, as George Orwell noted,
nationalism, as opposed to patriotism, is inevitably linked to power.
Catholic social teaching proposes that the pursuit of the common good is
the central role of government, and that governments need power only to
the degree commensurate with the need to pursue the common good in a
given historical setting. Nationalism begins with the pursuit of power and
links it with the question of identity to forge an ever expanding drive for
power – power for the dominant social group in society, power for the
nation in the international area. Societal and global life are seen not as
centers for pursuing the common good, but as arenas of conflict revolving
around the acquisition of power.
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As President Trump embarked on his first international trip last month,
his chief foreign policy and economic advisors published an essay
emphasizing the contrast between the Trump Administration’s worldview
and that of its predecessors: “The president embarked on his first foreign
trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a “global community”,
but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses
engage and compete for advantage.” It is this Darwinian view of both
domestic and international politics which corrodes nationalism and
challenges the most fundamental assertions in Catholic social teaching that
a global society has indeed emerged and that moral claims are binding
upon nations in the order of justice.
The Technocratic Paradigm
One of the most penetrating themes of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato
Si’ critiques the manner in which the technocratic paradigm has taken hold
in the modern world as a form of mastery over the earth which claims to
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make infinite progress possible for humanity. “This paradigm” Francis
writes “exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational
procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external
object.” This control is achieved using scientific concepts and an
engineering perspective, which inevitably bring with them a sense of
possession, mastery and transformation.
Pope Francis asserts that the central myopia of the technocratic
paradigm springs from the fact that it reduces complex realities of the
human person and the universe to the plane of instrumentalization and
scientific abstraction. “Technology tends to absorb everything into its
ironclad logic, and those who are surrounded with technology “’know full
well that it moves forward in the final analysis neither for profit nor for the
well-being of the human race, that ‘in the most radical sense of the term
power is its motive – a lordship over all.”
The most important external object which the technocratic paradigm
threatens is the earth itself. Even as ever more compelling signs of the
deterioration of our planet emerge, the ethic of mastery denies that this
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deterioration is real, and proposes that if the earth does deteriorate
technology will produce a solution. The technocratic paradigm is an
especially strong current in American culture because it resonates with the
American tendency to believe that there are no limits to human
achievement and the assumption that enlightened engineering provides
the soundest pathway for human progress.
The technocratic paradigm is a devastatingly corrosive form of erroneous
autonomy. It claims moral status through its ability to capture one element
of reality and promises that this one element has the capacity to produce
human flourishing. Yet the exhaustibility of the earth’s resources, the
rapaciousness of human appetites unleashed in the ever expanding
competition for material goods and the bankruptcy of a notion of human
flourishing reduced to any one dimension of our existence all testify to the
emptiness of that promise.
Laudato Si’ is the fire bell warning the world that it must reject the
technocratic paradigm and treat the earth as our home, a sacred gift
bestowed upon us by our Creator as a grace destined to benefit all of
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humanity and every generation. Pope Francis testifies to the reality that
we are called to be the stewards and servants of creation, rather than its
masters. We are called to have an awe for the environment in all of its
magnificence, vitality and fragility. Policy decisions must proceed from this
sense of awe and stewardship, and technological perspectives must be
seen as mere instruments of a much richer order of justice.
While the devastating effects of the technocratic paradigm are most
evident in the assault upon the earth which is our common home, the
application of the technocratic perspective to culture has also proven
injurious in the present day. Catholic theology teaches that culture is a
spiritual and ethical enterprise, richly interwoven with the lives and
heritage of a people. While every culture must be subjected to the
demands for renewal and reform based upon the deepest ethical
exigencies of the human person, the technocratic perspective in the
international system has frequently resulted in attacks upon cultures which
demean them and victimize their societies. Pope Francis has stated that
these interventions often have the mark of neo-colonialism, in their
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imposition of the values of the dominant international culture upon
economically challenged societies.
The Challenge of Erroneous Autonomy
The past year compels us to pay greater attention to deep cultural and
political currents which rage within our world, rather than to carefully
thought out ideologies and political programs. It has also alerted us to
central cultural forces which claim moral legitimacy, but which are in
themselves morally neutral or even devastatingly destructive when
disconnected from a moral and political framework tied to the order of
justice, freedom and solidarity.
It is not in their internal structures that the drive for free markets, the
technocratic perspective or nationalism are dangerous. It is when they are
morally autonomous, when they in themselves are directive of cultural
thinking and public policy, that they become perilous for the well-being of
our nation.
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It is our task as a Church and as a people to reconnect these cultural
currents to sound moral anchors. It is a task of dialogue and solidarity,
honesty and openness. And ultimately it is a task of grace and hope.