Benedict's crunchy-con encyclical

John Schwenkler has convened a "Charity in Truth" online reading group that you might want to join.

Spengler, who is probably Papa Ratzinger's biggest non-Catholic fan, is somewhat cool to this encyclical, observing:

The lesson I would draw from the available data is somewhat different than the one in the encyclical. Markets work reasonably well if people are moral (e.g., do not engage in behavior that leads to pandemic disease). If people fail to have children, by adopting a hedonistic model of life and sexuality, economies fail, as I wrote in "Demographics and Depression" in the May 2009 issue. If the Biblical injunction is ignored to maintain honest courts and to decide cases without favor to rich or poor, economies fail. Markets need morality to function. No amount of regulation can replace morality. Markets can't be better than the people who participate in them.

Call this an African encyclical. Its description of economic developments applies to Africa, but not to East or South Asia, nor for that matter to most of Latin America.

As a non-Catholic, I find far more persuasive than Cardinal Ratzinger's 1985 statement on morality and markets:

It is becoming an increasingly obvious fact of economic history that the development of economic systems which concentrate on the common good depends on a determinate ethical system, which in turn can be born and sustained only by strong religious convictions. Conversely, it has also become obvious that the decline of such discipline can actually cause the laws of the market to collapse. An economic policy that is ordered not only to the good of the group - indeed, not only to the common good of a determinate state - but to the common good of the family of man demands a maximum of ethical discipline and thus a maximum of religious strength.h.

I had written about that Ratzinger address last year.

It is very different to emphasize how much markets depend on the morality of the participants, and the religion whence this morality derives, and quite another to argue that morality can be imposed upon the market mechanism by various kinds of tinkering and the creation of supranational agencies.

Before I read the encyclical, I read George Weigel's strange attempt to dismiss parts of it that he doesn't like (the stuff critical of capitalism) as the fruit of Vatican curial politicking, and therefore safely disregarded. I guess that just goes to show that cafeteria Catholicism is not only a thing of the American Catholic left. I am highly allergic to this "good pope, bad advisers" line that Weigel takes, which is deeply, though no doubt unintentionally, condescending towards the pope. Staunch defenders of John Paul II in the midst of the sex abuse crisis followed the same implausible strategy ("Oh, if only those advisers would tell the Holy Father the truth about what's going on, surely he would handle the problem.") I understand the diplomatic and perhaps psychological and theological need to keep the Holy Father blameless in all things, but come on. I suppose somebody like Spengler, who is Jewish, has more freedom to tell the Pope that he's wrong than a faithful Catholic does, but it really won't do at all to say the Pope didn't really mean what he wrote.

I very much liked John Zmirak's commentary on the encylical. Excerpt:

In most ways, the pope's encyclical is a gradual, organic development of the writings of previous popes. Perhaps the most "creative" contribution to be found here is the pope's strong emphasis on the need for a rebirth of "civil society," of non-governmental institutions ranging from the family to charitable organizations, the churches, and even consumer cooperatives. He rejects the stark polarity between the individual and the State that characterizes American politics, noting that this dismal pairing is a deeply modern error. The pope calls specifically for the greater development of enterprises intended to serve economic ends that are not purely driven by the calculus of profit - such as co-ops, credit unions, and non-profit banks that offer "micro-credits" to aid small businessmen and farmers. The point made here by the pope is that the vast range of human interactions should never have been artificially reduced to the simple triad that motivates modern life: We keep our friends for pleasure, do our jobs for profit, and pay our taxes at gunpoint.

Instead of this hedonistic, rationalistic calculus, the pope urges us to recognize the fundamental truth that each of our lives is in fact a gift. Not just from God - which, of course, is most fundamental - but from our fellow men. When a follower of Ayn Rand (for instance) demands of me why he should give a penny of unearned charity to the unfortunate, I like to respond this way: "Did you invent the English language? Did you develop Common Law, or write the Constitution that protects your cherished rights? Did you build up urban civilization, or invent the technology that lets you live better than what man is by nature - a hunter-gatherer? I didn't think so. It seems to me you inherited a great deal of social capital that you did absolutely nothing to earn. So now it's time to pass along a little bit of the largesse you received. Or else you really ought to strip naked and go hunt wildebeest on the savannah."

And like John, I am deeply troubled by the part of this encyclical that calls for a world government to manage development charitably. Here's the papal paragraph that made the ghost of Hal Lindsey jump out and say, "Boo!":

To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. 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. Furthermore, such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights. Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums. Without this, despite the great progress accomplished in various sectors, international law would risk being conditioned by the balance of power among the strongest nations. The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater degree of international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that at last conforms to the moral order, to the interconnection between moral and social spheres, and to the link between politics and the economic and civil spheres, as envisaged by the Charter of the United Nations (CV, 67).

John Z., no doubt speaking for many of us, writes:

Perhaps I am too Augustinian, but I cannot help deeply suspecting that any such state would by its very nature begin or (more likely) end as a tyranny. The very monopoly of its power, and the fact that there was not one square inch of the earth from which anyone could escape its clutches, would remove any check or balance from its bureaucrats. Its tax codes would be uniform, with no threat of "competition," so they could rise astronomically high. Its laws could grow ever more Draconian, since there is nowhere its citizens could flee. Its ideology, backed by all the coercive power of the ruling class of the planet, would - in the hands of the fallen men who administered it - quickly become a global religion.

If such a State (as I think it inevitable) decided to persecute the Church, there would be no exile we could seek - no Douai from which to send out Jesuits, no refuge from martyrdom. Indeed, as prophetic writers from Vladimir Soloviev to Robert Hugh Benson have warned, the man who steps forward as the architect of a world state is less likely to prove the humble servant of the truths taught by the Church than he is to be the Antichrist.

I know that the pope suffered deeply, and personally, from the sick excesses of nationalism. Perhaps if I'd been drafted into the Hitler Youth, and seen my nation ruined and dishonored by a cancerous tribal cult like National Socialism, I might also daydream about a universal benevolent State. But there's only one thing worse than a national bureaucratic tyranny - and that's an international one.

Lewis McCrary is less inclined to object to this. From his essay:

Ultimately, however, the argument for more consistent and just world political authority rests on Caritas' claim that there is an imbalance of "power among the strongest nations" that unjustly shapes the terms international cooperation. One need only look at this week's meeting of the G8--which only represents only the world's richest countries, but discusses issues which have great impact on all peoples of the world--for evidence that the risk of injustice identified by Caritas is real.

How seriously one takes this claim of injustice is no doubt influenced by one's perspective. Today a thoughtful friend remarked to me that the inclusion of the "world political authority" paragraph is evidence that the Pope has become a misguided utopian dreamer; he is living in a bubble, my interlocutor remarked, clueless as to the potential dangers of large-scale tyranny (I'm sure his use of bubble wasn't intended as a joke about the Popemobile). But we must consider that perhaps it is we Americans who are living in a bubble. After all, it's easy for Americans to dismiss the claim that other peoples of less firepower and economic might should have a seat at the table when America is already the de facto "world political authority."

Phrases like "effective power to ensure security for all" and "to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties" should give us pause to consider the appropriate scale of international organizations. There is a danger that, taken out of context, this language could be used to support some kind of global tyranny. But a closer reading of Caritas demonstrates that more international solidarity is not necessarily a recipe for global Leviathan, particularly if it is conditioned by the Church's formulation of subsidiarity.

Well, look, I suspect that this "New World Order" paragraph of the encyclical will get far more attention than it deserves, especially because it's easier to talk about that than to grapple with the far more serious and substantive critique and prescription of the Pope for how to move forward in an era of globalized capitalism. I hope you will at least read the Catholic Culture summary of the encyclical before you comment on it here.