For 2000 years, the Catholic Church has hammered home a trio of presently-unpopular ideas into the humus of human civilization: that there is truth; that it is not simply of the scientific variety; that it is knowable through faith and reason; and that it is not whatever you want or “feel” it to be. Throughout his entire life, Benedict XVI has underscored these themes, precisely because much of the world, including many Christians, has lost sight of their importance.
Perhaps Caritas in Veritate’s most important truth-claim about economic life is that the market economy cannot be based on just any value-system. Against all relativists on the left and the right, Benedict maintains that market economies must be underpinned by commitments to particular basic moral goods and a certain vision of the human person if it is to serve rather than undermine humanity’s common good: “The economy needs ethics in order to function correctly – not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which is people-centered” (CV No. 45).
“Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust,” the Pope writes, “the market cannot completely fulfill its proper economic function” (CV No. 35). This surely has been amply confirmed by the recent financial crisis.
America’s subprime-mortgage market collapse was at least partly attributable to the fact that, literally, thousands of people lied on their mortgage application forms. Should we be surprised that mass violation of the moral prohibition against lying has devastating economic consequences? “The economic sphere,” the Pope reminds us, “is neither ethically neutral, nor inherently inhuman and opposed to society. It is part and parcel of human activity and precisely because it is human, it must be structured and governed in an ethical manner” (CV No. 36).
Contrary to the pre-encyclical hype of certain American commentators and the ever-unreliable British press, predictions of papal anathemas against “global capitalism” have – as usual – been found wanting. In economic terms, the Pope describes as “erroneous” the tired notion that the developed countries’ wealth is predicated on poor nations’ poverty (CV No. 35) that one hears customarily from the likes of Hugo Chavez and whatever is left of the dwindling band of aging liberation theologians. That’s a pontifical body-blow to a central working assumption of many professional social justice “activists.”
Nor will they be happy with the pope’s concerns about the ways in which foreign aid can produce situations of dependency (CV No. 58), not to mention Benedict’s strictures against protectionism (CV No. 42) as well as his stress that no amount of structural change can possibly compensate for people freely choosing the good: “Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility” (CV No. 17).
Nor does Benedict regard the market as morally problematic in itself. “In and of itself,” the Pope states, “the market is not the place where the strong subdue the weak. Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically human relations” (CV No. 36). What matters, Benedict claims, is the moral culture in which market exists.
At the heart of the economy are human persons. People whose minds are dominated by crassly hedonistic cultures will make crassly hedonistic economic choices. “Therefore,” Benedict comments, “it is not the instrument that must be called to account, but individuals” (CV No. 36).
The implications of truth for economic life do not, however, stop here. For Benedict, it is a lens through which to assess ideas such as “business ethics,” “ethical investing” and “corporate social responsibility.” The notion that investment and business choices have a moral dimension is hardly new. What matters for Benedict is the understanding of morality underlying these schemes. Merely labeling an investment scheme as “ethical,” Benedict notes, hardly tells us whether it is moral (CV No. 45).
A second major truth underscored by Benedict is the indispensability of a strong civil society for both undergirding and limiting the market and the state. By this, he does not mean a plethora of government-funded NGOs, many of whom Benedict identifies as intent upon imposing some of the very worst aspects of Western lifestyle-libertarianism upon developing nations (CV No. 28). Certainly, Benedict believes, there is a need to re-evaluate (CV No. 24) how the state regulates different parts of the economy. Ultimately, however, Benedict stresses that the virtue of solidarity is about people concretely loving their neighbor; it “cannot therefore be merely delegated to the State” (CV No. 38). This is reminiscent of Alexis de Tocqueville’s attention to the manner in which the habit of free association limits the size of government and discourages people from retreating into their own little bubbles.
The economist John Maynard Keynes is famous for many things, including the saying that “in the long run, we’re all dead.” The horizon of Benedict XVI’s perspective on economic life is rather different. The Pope asks people to live their economic lives in the short, medium, and long-term as if living in the truth is eternally important, not to mention eternally relevant to their soul’s salvation.
That’s change we can all believe in.
*The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty is an ecumenical think-tank dedicated to the study of free-market economics informed by religious faith and moral absolutes. It is named after the great English historian Lord John Acton (1834-1902), best known for his famous remark: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” www.acton.org
