Dear friends of Istituto Acton,
The definition of a “straw-man” argument is to accuse an opponent of a position he doesn’t actually hold, show the error of that position, and then declare victory. It’s an old debating trick that is still used today, when, for example, some Catholic journalists accuse the Acton Institute of defending the “absolute autonomy of the market economy.”
No one at Acton has ever argued for such autonomy, which would indeed contradict Catholic social teaching. Every single person who works for the Acton Institute believes that ethics should be an integral part of economics. We do, however, have internal and external disagreements about the best way to maintain ethical standards in a free society. Some of us think that the law is a necessary but blunt instrument to enforce morality and worry about the centralization of state power that often results from expanding legislation. Others believe that the law should reinforce the cultural and moral norms of society. Our common concern is the need to appreciate the benefits of commerce, which are often neglected in the name of some other good, such as social unity or human equality, usually due to the morally inferior status of the profit motive and self-interest.
As you can easily gather from our responses to Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’, we also worry that environmental concerns may be another such good. No one enjoys polluting the air or water around us, but what should we do when this pollution is a necessary by-product of industrialization and other legitimate forms of human activity? Should the poor remain poor in order to preserve the environment? Are there ways of using markets and technology to help improve environmental conditions, recalling Pope St. John Paul II’s reminder that “besides the earth, man’s principle resource is man himself” (Centesimus Annus, n. 32)? As with so much else in Catholic teaching, the answer to our problems may be “both/and” rather than “either/or.”
The pope is not the first to criticize capitalism for its human costs. As the economic historian Jerry Z. Muller has shown, there have been intellectual opponents of the modern commercial society from its beginning, and eve the most famous supporters of free markets have recognized the validity of some of their arguments (see, for example, virtually the entirety of book V of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations). All but the most ideological defenders realize that there are losses as well as gains inherent in such progress. Pope Benedict XVI reminded us on several occasions that not everything that can be done should be done, and the ability to say “no” remains a fundamental if increasingly difficult aspect of human choice in our scientifically advanced age.
So if virtually everyone recognizes the need for ethical limits on the market economy, who is the pope’s real target? Having just lectured on John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau at Acton University, I am even more convinced that Pope Francis is a traditional critic of Lockean thought on property, commerce and the family, which also helps explain why so many of Francis’s critics are found in the United States, as Locke is often called “America’s philosopher.” (By traditional, I mean that Francis does not share Rousseau’s more radical critique of liberalism even if inequality is the most pronounced aspect of the pope’s argument.)
Locke understands property with such an emphasis on human work that nature is worthless without it. The unequal abilities between the “rational and industrious” and the “idle and quarrelsome” (which likely included the priests and intellectuals of his day) are what account for social inequalities in Lockean society. Such inequalities are to be celebrated rather than bemoaned, especially since they force the idle into more productive activities and benefit society as a whole. For Locke, the right to property is a natural right that is an extension of an individual’s life and being, whereas St. Thomas Aquinas and much of the Christian tradition hold property to be a conventional right to be regulated by the common good of society (“The division of possessions is not according to natural law, but rather arose from human agreement, which belongs to the positive law.” - Summa Theologica, II-II, 66).
Like Pope Francis’s denunciations of “la cultura dello scarto,” Locke held waste to be a bad thing, but waste is naturally occurring, mitigated only by the human inventions of money and trade, which allow for the more industrious to sell their surplus to the less industriousness rather than let it rot. In Lockean society, there is no real advantage to hoarding one’s wealth; the purpose of money is fulfilled by its stable value and its changing of hands through trade. The whole point of Lockean limited government is to encourage the acquisition and improvement of property through human industry.
The Lockean family, also known as the “nuclear family,” similarly serves the same political ends by de-emphasizing notions such as inheritance and primogeniture that supported ancestral understandings of property as sacred. Families will be smaller and more mobile as a result, and the condition of women will be drastically different since their individual consent, rather than that of their fathers, will become the basis of marriage. Religion also becomes a matter of individual choice rather than familial tradition; Christianity becomes more “reasonable” and “tolerant” with the proliferation of and competition among sects in liberal society. Much of the Lockean doctrine is couched in traditional Christian terms even as it serves to re-interpret them (see the collection Political Sermons of the American Founding Era for examples galore.).
Understood through this all-too-brief outline, it’s easier to see why an old-fashioned Jesuit may have cause to complain about commercial society, and why those in Locke’s America would take it so personally. Locke’s teaching was meant to be universal and has had incredible reach and effect, but nowhere like in the US. And even there, progressivism, existentialism and other ideologies, many of which are derived from Rousseau and his critique of Locke, have managed to water down if not negate the country’s original self-understanding. The problem is much more pronounced in Europe and Latin American, however.
The recent US Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage is only the latest example that traditional Christianity is losing influence in the one Western country where it had managed to maintain some level of political and social support. Perhaps this was inevitable in the Lockean scheme of things. Perhaps this is what Pope Francis, more than his predecessors, has intuited about the American way of life. If so, his trip to the US in September will contain more of the same polemics that have resulted from Laudato Si’.
Kishore Jayabalan
Director
