In this 1996 speech at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Justice Scalia addressed the question “Is the political philosophy of the Left or of the Right more compatible with the public good?” He observed that socialism holds an allure for some Christians because it seems to mean well, but, he explained, that allure is deceptive.
If there was ever a topic that cried out for a definition of terms, it is this one. “Right” and “left,” “right-wing” and “left-wing” are terms that have virtually no fixed meaning in American political discourse, except that they all connote (as they do not in European political discourse) a degree of extremism. In America, both categories of term are pejorative. Thus, we have in American political commentary that familiar villain, the “right-wing extremist”; and, more recently, that ominous political force, the “Christian right.” The terms “left-wing extremist” and “Christian left” would have similar overtones of foreboding if they were ever used by the American media—but they are not, which is an interesting phenomenon.
Once one gets beyond their pejorative content, it is hard to pin down the meaning of “right” and “left” in American political usage. Sometimes they are used to denote, respectively, statists and libertarians—those who favor strong and authoritarian government versus those who favor a high degree of individual freedom. In this sense, Richard Nixon would be a man of the Right and Eugene McCarthy a man of the Left. But if those were the only meanings of the terms, both Augusto Pinochet and Fidel Castro would have to be referred to as right-wingers. A second, quite different, connotation of the terms uses them to distinguish between laissez-faire capitalists and socialists. This is not only different from, but sometimes the opposite of, the first connotation—since those who favor a high degree of individual freedom in other matters often favor a high degree of individual freedom in economic matters as well. Thus, the American Libertarian Party is a party of the Left under the first connotation, and a party of the Right under the second.
Yet a third meaning of “right” and “left” is much more relativistic: it draws a distinction between those who favor the status quo and those who favor change—between conservatives and progressives. Since over most of the past century change has been moving from a status quo of capitalism toward socialism, this third connotation tends to produce the same results as the second—Castro can be called a man of the Left in both these senses. But if and when the tide of history moves in reverse, the equivalence between the two connotations disappears. The old-line Communists in Russia, who resist the change toward democracy and capitalism, are referred to in the American press (believe it or not) as the “Right.” And finally, “right” and “left” may connote a distinction between nationalism and one-worldism. This may be merely one aspect of the first connotation I mentioned: those who favor a strong, authoritarian government are ordinarily nationalists. But it really must be an entirely separate connotation, since I can think of no other basis for calling Nazis a party of the Right and Communists a party of the Left. They are both authoritarian, they are both socialist, and they are both untraditional; but the Communists are internationalists.
For purposes of my remarks today, I am assuming the second meaning of “right” and “left,” the meaning that refers to the difference between capitalism and socialism. I take that approach in part because that probably comes closest to the meaning of the terms in European political discourse, and thus is more likely to be what the conveners of this conference had in mind; and in part because that is the only one of the dichotomies I have mentioned that is the subject of widespread current debate. In the waning years of the twentieth century, few have been urging a return to authoritarianism, vigorous nationalism, or traditionalism, whereas capitalism has made something of a comeback.
I must make a second clarification about the subject of my remarks. I have chosen to interpret “the common good” to mean “the Christian common good.” Thus, I take that system to be conducive to the common good which is conducive to virtue (as Christianity understands virtue) and sanctification. I assume that this is the meaning of “the common good” that the organizers of the conference had in mind—the Gregorianum being, as I understand it, a school of theology and not of government or economics.
Having fully defined my topic, the first thing I wish to say about it is that I do not believe in it. That is to say, I do not believe that a Christian ought to choose his form of government on the basis of which will be most conducive to his faith, any more than he ought to choose a toothpaste on that basis. To be sure, there are certain prohibitions. A Christian should not support a government that suppresses the faith, or one that sanctions the taking of innocent human life—just as a Christian should not wear immodest clothes. But the test of good government, like the test of good tailoring, is assuredly not whether it helps you save your soul. Government is not meant for saving souls, but for protecting life and property and ensuring the conditions for physical prosperity. Its responsibility is the here, not the hereafter—and the needs of the two sometimes diverge. It may well be, for example, that a governmental system which keeps its citizens in relative poverty will produce more saints. (The rich, as Christ said, have a harder time getting to heaven.) But that would be a bad government, nonetheless. This recognition of the separate spheres of church and state is not just the teaching of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is also, I think, the teaching of Jesus Christ—who spoke of rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and is not recorded as having indicated any preference about government, except one: He did not want the people to make Him king.
If I were to engage in the search for the form of government most conducive to Christianity, however, I would certainly not settle upon the candidate that seems to have such a great attraction for modern Catholic thinkers: socialism. It is hard to understand that attraction. Surely it does not rest upon the teachings of experience. I know of no country in which the churches have grown fuller as the governments have moved leftward. The churches of Europe are empty. The most religious country in the West by all standards—belief in God, church membership, church attendance—is that bastion of capitalism least diluted by socialism, the United States.
When I say least diluted by socialism, you must understand that I say it in a modern context, in which we are all socialists. In the United States, that battle was fought and decided with the New Deal. No one, even in the most conservative quarters of American society, now denies that there should be a so-called safety net provided by the government for our citizens. The only real argument is over how many services that safety net should provide, and how poor one must be in order to qualify. Few of us even understand anymore what a truly non-socialist mentality was like. I happened to encounter it, by accident, when I was a young law professor, doing research for an article on sovereign immunity—the legal doctrine that says that a state cannot be sued without its consent. I came across a debate in the Massachusetts legislature, during the eighteenth century, concerning a proposed bill that would provide compensation to a woman who had been seriously injured through the negligence of one of the agents of the state—a policeman, or a fireman, or whatever. Those members of the Massachusetts legislature opposing the legislation argued that they had no right—that it was morally wrong—to use public funds for private benefit, for a purpose that did not benefit the public at large. Because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity, they argued, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts owed this woman nothing in law, and to agree to pay her, out of public funds, money that was not legally owed was in effect to use public funds for a private gift, which (they said) was wrong. And this, I point out, was a woman who had been injured by the commonwealth; you can imagine what their attitude would have been toward dispensing public funds to the poor!
In the United States, a remnant of that non-socialist attitude lasted into the present century. Our federal Constitution, you may recall, gives Congress not a general power to expend funds, but only the power to expend funds “for the general welfare.” Until the triumph of the New Deal, there were many who thought that prohibited the expenditure of funds for any private assistance. Neither to the rich, nor to the poor. But that fight, as I have said, is over. We now believe that any expenditure for any citizen is an expenditure for the general welfare—whether to the poor, such as food-stamp recipients; or to the middle class or even fairly well-to-do, such as the victims of a tornado in Florida; or even to the downright rich, such as shareholders of Chrysler Corporation. All of these are now regarded as entirely proper objects of the state’s beneficence.
The allure of socialism for the Christian, I think, is that it means well; it is, or appears to be, altruistic. It promises assistance from the state for the poor, and public provision of all the necessities of life, from maternity care to geriatric care, and from kindergarten through university. Capitalism, on the other hand, promises nothing from the state except the opportunity to succeed or fail. Adam Smith points unabashedly to the fact that the baker does not provide bread out of the goodness of his heart, but for profit. How uninspiring. Yet if you reflect upon it, you will see that the socialistic message is not necessarily Christian, and the capitalist message not necessarily non-Christian. The issue is not whether there should be provision for the poor, but rather the degree to which that provision should be made through the coercive power of the state. Christ said, after all, that you should give your goods to the poor, not that you should force someone else to give his.
Bear in mind that in this discussion I am not arguing about whether socialism is good or bad as a system of government. If private charity does not suffice to meet the needs of the poor, or if we do not want the poor to have to regard themselves as the objects of charity, or if we even wish to go beyond merely assisting the poor and want to redistribute the wealth of the rich to the middle class, socialism may be a better way to meet worldly needs. But that can be decided on the economic and secular merits of the matter. The question I am asking is whether Christian faith must incline us toward that system, and the answer, I think, is no. Christ did not preach “a chicken in every pot,” or “the elimination of poverty in our lifetime”; those are worldly, governmental goals. If they were His objectives, He certainly devoted little of His time and talent to achieving them—feeding the hungry multitudes only a couple of times, as I recall, and running away from the crowds who wanted to put Him on the throne, where He would have had an opportunity to engage in some real redistribution of wealth. His message was not the need to eliminate hunger, or misery, or misfortune, but rather the need for each individual to love and help the hungry, the miserable, and the unfortunate. To the extent the state takes upon itself one of the corporal works of mercy that could and would have been undertaken privately, it deprives individuals of an opportunity for sanctification and deprives the body of Christ of an occasion for the interchange of love among its members.
I wonder to what extent the decimation of women’s religious orders throughout the West is attributable to the governmentalization of charity. Consider how many orphanages, hospitals, schools, and homes for the elderly were provided by orders of nuns. They are almost all gone; the state provides or pays for these services. Even purely individual charity must surely have been affected. What need for me to give a beggar a handout? Do I not pay taxes for government food stamps and municipally run shelters and soup kitchens? The man asking me for a dollar probably wants it for liquor. There is, of course, neither any love nor any merit in the taxes I pay for those services; I pay them under compulsion.
The governmentalization of charity affects not just the donor but also the recipient. What was once asked as a favor is now demanded as an entitlement. When I was young, there used to be an expression applied to a lazy person: “He thinks the world owes him a living.” But the teaching of welfare socialism is that the world does owe everyone a living. This belief must affect the character of welfare recipients—and not, I suggest, for the better. Or at least not for the better in the distinctively Christian view of things. Christ’s special love for the poor was attributable to one quality that they possessed in abundance: meekness and humility. It is humbling to be an object of charity—which is why mendicant nuns and friars used to beg. The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced both donors without love and recipients without gratitude.
It has also produced a change in the product that is distributed. Most particularly, and most relevantly for purposes of the present discussion, social services distributed by the state in my country, for example, cannot be intermingled with Christian teaching, or even (increasingly) with Christian morality. They do not say the Angelus in public orphanages; there are no crucifixes on the walls of public hospitals; and the Ten Commandments are not posted in public schools. The religiously driven and religiously funded social welfare movements of the nineteenth century sought to achieve not merely the alleviation of poverty and hardship, but also what was called moral uplift. Of course that is no part of the function of state-administered social welfare today. The state-paid social worker, whose job is to see to the distribution of welfare funds to those who are legally entitled to them, is not—cannot legally be—concerned with improving not only the diet but also the virtue of her “clients” (which is the coldly commercial terminology that welfare bureaucracies use). It is quite simply none of her business.
Perhaps the clearest effects of the expansion of the state accompanied by the contraction of the church are to be found in the field of primary and secondary education. A relatively small proportion of Americans are nowadays educated in religious schools; Catholic schools are much less numerous than they were in mid-century. As the costs of primary and secondary education have risen, it has become very difficult for churches to run a system competitive with the tax-funded public schools. Simultaneously, litigation has caused the public schools to eliminate all religiously doctrinal materials from their curriculum. That is good and proper under our American system, which forbids the official establishment of any sect. But the non-sectarian state’s increasing monopoly over primary and secondary education can hardly be considered beneficial to Christianity. Whereas such overtly religious texts as The Pilgrim’s Progress were once the staple of the American schoolchild’s education, religious instruction, if received at all, is obtained one evening a week in confraternity classes, or on Sunday. In more recent years, as society has become more and more diverse in its views on morality, the state’s control of education deprives children not only of Catholic doctrine, but even of essentially Catholic moral formation. Schools distribute condoms, provide advice on birth control and abortion, and teach that homosexuality must not be regarded as shameful or abnormal. Again, it is not my place or my purpose to criticize these developments, only to observe that they do not suggest that expanding the role of government is good for Christianity.
Finally, I may mention that even the seeming Christian virtue of socialism—that it means well and seeks to help the poor—may be greatly exaggerated. It is true in the United States, and I believe it is true in all of the Western democracies, that the vast bulk of social spending does not go to the poor, but rather to the middle class (which also happens to be the class most numerous at the polls). The most expensive entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, for example, overwhelmingly benefit those who are not in dire financial straits. So one may plausibly argue that welfare-state democracy does not really have even the Christian virtue of altruism. The majority does not say to the rich, “Give your money to the poor,” but rather, “Give your money to us.”
Just as I believe the Left is not necessarily endowed with Christian virtue, so also I believe the Right is not necessarily bereft of it. Laissez-faire capitalism, like socialism, speaks to the degree of involvement of the state in the economic life of the society. Like socialism also, it does not speak to the nature of the human soul. There have been greedy and avaricious capitalists, but there have also been generous and considerate ones; just as there have been altruistic and self-deprecating socialists, but have also been brutal and despotic ones. The cardinal sin of capitalism is greed; but the cardinal sin of socialism is power. I am not sure there is a clear choice between those evils.
While I would not argue that capitalism as an economic system is inherently more Christian than socialism (so long as we are talking about a form of socialism that permits the acquisition and ownership of property), it does seem to me that capitalism is more dependent upon Christianity than socialism is. For in order for capitalism to work—in order for it to produce a good and a stable society—the Christian virtues are essential. Since in the capitalist system each individual has more freedom of action, each individual also has more opportunity to do evil. Without widespread practice of such Christian virtues as honesty, self-denial, and charity toward others, a capitalist system will be intolerable.
Let me conclude as I began, with a disclaimer: the burden of my remarks is not that a government of the Right is more Christ-like, only that there is no reason to believe that a government of the Left is. To tell you the truth, I do not think Christ cares very much what sort of economic or political system we live under. He certainly displayed little interest in that subject during His time among us—as did His apostles. Accordingly, we should select our economic and political systems on the basis of what seems to produce the greatest material good for the greatest number, and leave theology out of it. The minimum wage, for example—which is a current political issue in Washington—is a good or a bad idea depending upon whether it produces good or bad economic consequences. It has nothing to do with the Kingdom of God.