American Realities and Catholic Social ThoughtAmerican Realities and Catholic Social Thought
IN 1978, THE NEW POPE JOHN PAUL II—DRAMATIST, POET, athlete, polyglot—took as his mission the reconciliation not only of neighboring states but of the two great blocs, East and West, which from the first he insisted on calling “the two great branches of the one tree of Christian Europe.” Until then, Saint Benedict (480–547) had been properly recognized as the patron saint of Europe, and his image graced the Medal of Europe awarded annually to the greatest contemporary artists, since so many European cities had grown up around early Benedictine monasteries with their cathedral schools, libraries of manuscripts and copyists, and patronage of music and the arts. The first Slavic pope added Cyril and Methodius as copatrons of Europe. These two brothers from Byzantium had translated the New Testament into the core Slavonic tongue a thousand years earlier. This translation took place at Nitra in Slovakia, at the very center of a larger Europe, well-described as comprising “the lands from the Atlantic to the Urals.” Thus, both halves of Europe grew as branches from a single Christian trunk.
A philosopher by training, the vigorous John Paul II made clear early on that he wished to impart to the Catholic body a deep and original philosophic stamp. “Ordered liberty” is the key concept with which he chose to begin, a liberty practiced by the human person as a free and creative agent of his or her own destiny. The pope’s emphasis on ordered liberty had special resonance behind the Iron Curtain, as well as among all those struggling under military dictatorships and national security states in the Third World. Having helped shape Dignitatis Humanae (1965), the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, John Paul II continued over the years to articulate his vision of religious liberty, the “first liberty.” Gradually, he built up the foundations of a fresh theory of the “second liberty,” economic liberty. Here he stressed the creative subjectivity of the free man and woman at work. This was fresh material, indeed—and to it we now must turn.
It is a curious matter that some of the key ideas which John Paul II was about to introduce into Catholic social teaching were voiced long before him, by a backwoodsman from Kentucky and Illinois, far out on the western American frontier during the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s, right around the same time Father Taparelli in Italy was writing the first known book on social justice. Europeans may be unlikely to think immediately of Lincoln as a forebear of later developments in Catholic social thought, but the connection is natural for an American.
This link with Lincoln was reinforced in the post–Vatican II encyclopedia of Catholic thought, Sacramentum Mundi, which introduced its entry on “subsidiarity” by citing Lincoln.1 In his effort to end the slavery that was legal in the southern states, Lincoln was quite prescient in laying out the principles of federalism on the one hand, and encouraging local communities based on almost-universal land ownership (see the Homestead Act, for example) on the other. Near-universal land ownership prevented the growth of the large plantations necessary for the practical use of slaves, and in addition bred in citizens a strong taste for liberty and a revulsion against slavery. On this social reconstruction, most new territories chose to live as free states and soon greatly outnumbered the older slave states.
Further, Lincoln was also among the first to highlight the dynamic role of knowledge and know-how (now often called “human capital”) in the creation of new wealth, which undergirds the high spirits that drive free societies forward. For instance, on a cold winter day in February 1859, in Jacksonville, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln delivered a “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions,” in which he described, starting with the time of Adam, six great advances in the history of liberty. The last of these great steps, Lincoln held, is the law of copyrights and patents. His lecture gives the best account I have ever read of the reasons why the United States, in a brief Constitution of just 4,486 words, includes a clause guaranteeing the right of inventors and authors to royalties for patents and copyrights. In this clause is embedded the single mention of the term “right” in the entire body of the Constitution. Until I read Lincoln on this point, I had never encountered anyone who gave patents and copyrights such high importance.
On that cold February day on the Illinois prairie, you must imagine Lincoln, tall and gangling, gazing across the stove-heated room, with a sweep of his hand summoning up a vision of that first “old fogey,” father Adam:
There he stood, a very perfect physical man, as poets and painters inform us, but he must have been very ignorant, and simple in his habits. He had no sufficient time to learn much by observation, and he had no near neighbors to teach him anything. No part of his breakfast had been brought from the other side of the world, and it is quite probable, he had no conception of the world having any other side.2
By contrast with this naked but imposing Adam, able to speak (for he names the animals) but without anyone to talk to (for Eve “was still a bone in his side”), Young America, Lincoln noted, the America of 1859, was awash with knowledge and wealth. Whereas the first beautiful specimen of the species knew not how to read or write, nor any of the useful arts yet to be discovered, “Look around at Young America,” Lincoln said in 1859. “Look at his apparel, and you shall see cotton fabrics from Manchester and Lowell, flax-linen from Ireland, wool-cloth from Spain, silk from France, furs from the Arctic regions, with a buffalo robe from the Rocky Mountains.”3 On Young America’s table, one could find:
Besides plain bread and meat made at home . . . sugar from Louisiana, coffee and fruits from the tropics, salt from Turk’s Island, fish from New-foundland, tea from China, and spices from the Indies. The whale of the Pacific furnishes his candle-light, he has a diamond-ring from Brazil, a gold-watch from California, and a spanish cigar from Havanna.4
Not only did Young America have a sufficient, indeed more than sufficient, supply of these goods, but, Lincoln added, “thousands of hands are engaged in producing fresh supplies, and other thousands, in bringing them to him.”5
Here, then, is the question Lincoln posed: How did the world get from the unlettered, untutored backwoodsman of the almost silent and primeval Garden of Eden to great cities, locomotives, telegraphs, and breakfast from across the seas? He discerned six crucial steps in this grand historical adventure.
The first step was God-given: the human ability to build a language.
The second step was the slow mastering of the art of discovery, through learning three crucial human habits—observation, reflection, and experiment—which Lincoln explained this way:
It is quite certain that ever since water has been boiled in covered vessels, men have seen the lids of the vessels rise and fall a little, with a sort of fluttering motion, by force of the steam, but so long as this was not specially observed, and reflected and experimented upon, it came to nothing. At length however, after many thousand years, some man observes this long-known effect of hot water lifting a pot-lid, and begins a train of reflection upon it.6
Given how arduous it is to lift heavy objects, the attentive man is invited to experiment with the force lifting up the pot lid.
Thousands of years, however, were needed to develop the habit of observing, reflecting, and experimenting, and then to spread that art throughout society. Some societies developed that habit socially, and some did not. Why, Lincoln asked, when Indians and Mexicans trod over the gold of California for centuries without finding it, did Yankees almost instantly discover it? (The Indians had not failed to discover it in South America.) “Goldmines are not the only mines overlooked in the same way,” Lincoln noted. Indeed, there are more “mines” to be found above the surface of the earth than below: “All nature—the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual—is a mine, and, in Adam’s day, it was a wholly unexplored mine.” And so “it was the destined work of Adam’s race to develop, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine.”7
The third great step was the invention of writing. By this great step, taken only in a few places, then spreading slowly, observations and reflections made in one century prompted reflection and experimentation in a later one.
The fourth great step was the printing press, which diffused records of observations, reflections, and experiments in ever-widening circles, far beyond the tiny handful of people who could afford handwritten parchment. Now such records could be made available to hundreds of thousands cheaply. Before printing, the great mass of humans
were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were capable of improvement. They not only looked upon the educated few as superior beings; but they supposed themselves to be naturally incapable of rising to equality. To immancipate [sic] the mind from this false and under estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to perform. It is difficult for us, now and here, to conceive how strong this slavery of the mind was; and how long it did, of necessity, take, to break it’s [sic] shackles, and to get a habit of freedom of thought, established.8
Between the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press, almost 3,000 years had intervened. Between the invention of the printing press and the invention of a modern patent law (in Britain in 1624), fewer than 200 had passed.
The fifth great step was the discovery of America. In the new country, committed to liberty and equality, the human mind was emancipated as never before. Given a brand-new start, calling for new habits, “a new country is most favorable—almost necessary—to the immancipation [sic] of thought, and the consequent advancement of civilization and the arts.” The discovery of America was “an event greatly facilitating useful discoveries and inventions.”9
The sixth great step was the adoption of a Constitution, Article 1, section 8, clause 8 of which recognized a natural right of authors and inventors. Among the few express powers granted by the people to Congress, the framers inserted this one: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”
The effect of this regime was not lost upon the young inventor and future president. “Before then,” Lincoln wrote, “any man might instantly use what another had invented, so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention.” Lincoln cut to the essential point: “The patent system changed this, secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention, and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”10
“The fuel of interest added to the fire of genius!” Ever the realist, Lincoln knew what is in the human being: to be a genius is one thing, to be motivated is quite another, and then to be supported in this motivation by a wise regime is an unprecedented blessing. By contrast, a regime that does not secure natural rights depresses human energy. Natural rights are not mere legal puffs of air; they formalize capacities for action that in some societies lie dormant and in others are fueled into ignition.
The United States, Lincoln believed, ignited the practical genius of its people, among the high born and the low born alike, wherever God in his wisdom had implanted that genius. In the same year as his lecture, 1859, Lincoln himself won a U.S. patent (number 6469) for a “device to buoy vessels over shoals.” That patent is not a bad metaphor for the effect of patents on inventions: to buoy them over difficulties.
The great effect of the patent and copyright clause on world history was a remarkable transformation of values. During most of human history, land had been the most important source of wealth; in America, intellect and know-how became the major source. The dynamism of the system ceased to be primarily material and became, so to speak, intellectual and spiritual, born of the creative mind. Lincoln’s motive in favoring the Homestead Act and the patent clause (and both together) was to prevent the West from being dominated by large estates and great landowners, so that it might become a society of many freemen and many practical, inventive minds. And so it has. More than 6 million patents have been issued in the United States since the first patent law was passed in 1790.
Implicit in Lincoln’s Jacksonville address are several assumptions about the nature and meaning of the universe. Lincoln saw history as a narrative of freedom. He believed devoutly that the fact that the Creator of all things had made human beings in his own image—every one of them, woman and man—was provident. History, he thought, is the record of how human beings have gradually come to recognize their true better nature and have striven to make it actual, both in their own lives and in the institutions of their republic.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the god who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time,” and, while Lincoln did not actually say that our God wishes to be adored by men who are free, he sacrificed much, very much, so that this nation might have “a new birth of freedom.” That horrifying bloody project, that new birth of freedom, cost some 40,000 dead and wounded in a single day, and multiples of that in the sum in many other bloody battles. All that, Lincoln said at Gettysburg, fell under the will of the Almighty:
We can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. . . . It is for us the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.11
The universe is so created that it positively calls forth human freedom. To that call, it is the sacred duty of humans to respond, even at enormous cost.
Some seven score and two years after Lincoln’s address in Jacksonville, there came an international echo of his beliefs from an unlikely quarter, in a worldwide letter published by Pope John Paul II in Rome, on May 1, 1991: Centesimus Annus. No doubt John Paul II had few opportunities to encounter Lincoln’s writings. What Lincoln and John Paul II did share was an ability to notice common, ordinary phenomena which other people tended to overlook. Lincoln’s humble ruminations on how common things like covered pots behaved over a fire set a historical precedent for the pope’s commonsensical reflections on the relation of land to wealth over so many centuries. Poland is a land of farm after farm, of great landholders and small. The pope recognized that the primary form of wealth had been land for a thousand years. But by 1991 the cause of wealth had changed: “In our time, in particular, there exists another form of ownership which is becoming no less important than land: the possession of know-how, technology and skill.”12 The wealth of the world’s most economically advanced nations is based far more on this type of ownership than on natural resources. This is the same insight Lincoln had come to.
“Indeed, besides the earth,” observed the pope, “man’s principal resource is man himself. His intelligence enables him to discover the earth’s productive potential and the many different ways in which human needs can be satisfied.”13 The pope’s words seem cousin to Lincoln’s words: “All nature—the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual—is a mine” echoes “the destiny of Adam’s race” is “to develop, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine.”
The pope goes on:
Whereas at one time the decisive factor of production was the land, and later capital—understood as a total complex of the instruments of production—today the decisive factor is increasingly man himself, that is, his knowledge, especially his scientific knowledge, his capacity for interrelated and compact organization, as well as his ability to perceive the needs of others and to satisfy them.14
Similarly, where Lincoln had written “but Adam had nothing to turn his attention to [but] work. If he should do anything in the way of invention, he had first to invent the art of invention,” the pope writes:
At one time the natural fruitfulness of the earth appeared to be, and was in fact, the primary factor of wealth, while work was, as it were, the help and support for this fruitfulness. In our time . . . work becomes ever more fruitful and productive to the extent that people become more knowledgeable about the productive potentialities of the earth and more profoundly cognizant of the needs of those for whom their work is done.15
Washington, Madison, and Lincoln held that the American regime, measured by “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” would blaze a trail for other nations. Under John Paul II, important portions of America’s “new science of politics,” after much testing, have at last been ratified by what is now the most widely held body of social thought in the world. This practical intellectual influence may stand as an important contribution of American civilization to world history.
In this new era, observes Fred Warshofsky, a journalist-historian, “creativity, in the form of ideas, innovations, and inventions, has replaced gold, colonies, and raw materials as the new wealth of nations.”16 The remarkable “new technologies, new processes, and new products that constitute intellectual property now form the economic bedrock of international trade and national wealth.”17 As more and more nations take halting steps on the path of democracy and free markets, they will increasingly need the fire of invention, the fuel of interest.
Centesimus Annus hit Rome like a sonic boom on May 1, 1991. Even the first fleeting sight of John Paul II’s new encyclical led commentators around the world to predict that it would lift the worldwide terms of debate on political economy to a new level. Immediately evoking praise from both the left and the right, this encyclical seemed, to some at least, to be the greatest in the series of which it is a part. In reply to questions raised about political economy and free social institutions by the events of 1989, it is a classic restatement of Christian anthropology.
Earlier in his career, the pope had done significant work in phenomenology, particularly in his book The Acting Person. The title of that book is a key to the nuanced approval that the pope later gave to capitalism rightly understood, rooted in the creative mind of the human person. It is such a capitalism, bounded by law, which he recommends to his native Poland, other formerly socialist nations, and the Third World. This approval surprised many commentators. The London Financial Times, probably basing its story on leaks from one faction among those preparing the document, had predicted the ringing endorsement of a socialism more advanced than that of European socialist leaders, such as Neil Kinnock, Willy Brandt, and Felipé Gonzalez. Pope John Paul II’s Christian anthropology, plus his acute observation of the way the world works, led him to other conclusions.
The success of Centesimus Annus is due, in any case, to its philosophical profundity. From the beginning of his pontificate, the pope thought in a worldwide framework, appealing to the bond of human solidarity. But he also thought deeply, not only broadly. He rooted his social proposals in his anthropology of the acting person and creative subjectivity. This enabled him to criticize every existing ideology, including democratic capitalism. Of the three great ideologies that put their mark upon the twentieth century, National Socialism failed first, then Communist socialism. From Eastern Europe, from the Third World, many were asking the pope: What next?
John Paul II proposed a tripartite social structure composed of a free political system, a free economy, and a culture of liberty. After living through the great political debate of the twentieth century, he favored democracy; after living through the great economic debate, he favored capitalism rightly understood (that is, not all forms of capitalism). He was not satisfied with the way things were. He warned that a formidable struggle awaits us, in building a culture worthy of freedom. If we have the politics and the economics roughly (but only roughly) straight, how should we live? How should we shape our culture? These questions are now front and center.
Background Reflections
Soon after his election to the papacy in 1978, his Polish countrymen began to recognize that Karol Wojtyła was their international tribune. As long as a son of Poland sat on the chair of Peter, the Communist rulers of Poland found themselves in a glaring international spotlight. The Iron Curtain no longer hid their movements. Although they attempted to crush the labor movement Solidarity, they could not.
For the ten long years until 1989, a certain space for civic activity—intense, intellectual, practical—opened up within the bosom of the totalitarian society. Citizens in other Eastern European nations took heart. Poland was the first to nurture an independent people, spiritually free of communism, able to negotiate with the Communist leaders as equals—even better than equals. Once Solidarity broke the mask of totalitarian conformity, democratic movements began to grow in boldness throughout that empire which many finally dared to call evil.
In the days when he was the young Archbishop of Krakow, attending the Second Vatican Council in Rome, Wojtyła first came to international attention for a speech he gave before the Council on Religious Liberty. The American echoes in that speech were widely noted, for at the time a strong statement on religious liberty was high among the priorities of the American bishops. Then, from his first days as pope, John Paul II spoke often about liberty of conscience, going so far as to call it the “first liberty.” Gradually, too, he came to understand that the American meaning of liberty—ordered liberty, as he came to call it (liberty under law, liberty under reason)—does not mean libertinism, laissez-faire, the devil take the hindmost. At least one American bishop played an important role in drawing the pope’s attention to the vital difference in this respect between the American Revolution and the French Revolution.
In his many years as Archbishop of Krakow and professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, Karol Wojtyła provided intellectual leadership for the people who gave rise to Solidarity. When he became pope, but before the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981, he announced to the world that all of Europe was a single tree with two branches, east and west. Europe’s destiny, he said, is to be rejoined as one, drawing life from its common roots in Judaism and Christianity. As pope, he could on any day broadcast the pain of Poland and draw global attention to every Communist abuse. Perhaps unhappy with this role, someone sent one or more assassins to slay him on May 13, 1981. Although the pope nearly died, he recovered. Within a few days, he had planned to issue an encyclical celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum; it had to be released nearly a year later, in early 1982, under the title Laborem Exercens. In this encyclical, John Paul II appealed to the anthropology implicit in the Creation story of Genesis as the single best starting place for religious inquiry into the nature and causes of the creation of wealth.
The underlying principles of John Paul II’s anthropology are the creative subjectivity of the human person, together with the resulting subjectivity of society. From his earliest work onward, the pope had been struck by the human being’s most arresting characteristic: the capacity to originate action; that is, to imagine and to conceive of new things and then do them. He found in creative acts the clue to human identity. Humans, he held, cannot take refuge from this responsibility by hiding behind society; for there, too, they are responsible for their acts. Being in society does not absolve them of the burdens of subjectivity. An unbeliever may achieve this insight with no benefit of religious belief. Karol Wojtyła approached it from two different directions: first in a philosophical way, and second in a Jewish-Christian way. For him, philosophy and theology meet in the anthropology of the real, existing human person. The philosopher sees homo creator; the theologian sees imago Dei. Man the creator (philosophy) is made in the image of the divine Creator (theology), and is endowed by him with an inalienable right to creative initiative.
From this principle John Paul II derived a corollary for social systems: It is an affront to human dignity for a social system to repress the human capacity to create, to invent, and to be enterprising. In human creative subjectivity, Wojtyła saw the principle of liberty, which naturally deploys itself in conscience, inquiry, and action. It would be fair to say that John Paul II was a philosopher of liberty. No end in itself, freedom must be for something and must be ordered by something. Deeper in his eyes than liberty, however, was creativity. Of the two notions, liberty is less satisfying; it raises further questions. Creativity is the deeper and more substantive notion. So it is more accurate to think of John Paul II as a philosopher of creativity.
From this starting point in creativity, the pope, over the years, slowly approached that much-disputed beast called capitalism.
At the beginning of his pontificate, John Paul II used the word “capitalism” in a pejorative sense—as it is often used in European countries, the more so wherever the Marxist tradition has been strong. In Laborem Exercens, he used “capital” to mean things, objects, or instruments of production. He reserved the word “labor” for all humane and virtuous attributes, including creative subjectivity.
Some years later, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), the pope moved from the “acting person” and “creative subjectivity” to the fundamental human right “to religious freedom and also the right to freedom of economic initiative.”18 This was the strongest recognition of enterprise in Catholic social thought. He saw enterprise as a vocation, a virtue, and a right. By May of 1991, in Centesimus Annus, Wojtyła had moved further, to a theory of institutions as necessary for the flowering of this enterprise. From this he moved to a theory of the business firm and to a critique of the welfare state. At the heart of each of these positions lies his fundamental insight: Every woman and every man has been created in the image of the Creator, in order to help cocreate the future of the world.
The pope emphasized how noble it is, and how many complex talents are required, to gain insight into the economic needs of the human race, to organize available resources, to invent new resources and methods, and to lead a cooperative, voluntary community to achieve real results. In the whole of section 32, the pope was eloquent about the lessons of creativity and community found in a modern economy. By contrast, the fundamental flaw in socialism, he wrote, was its faulty anthropology. It misunderstood the active, creative nature of the individual; it misunderstood both human misery and human grandeur.
John Paul II rooted the capitalist ethos in the positive thrust of Judaism and Christianity, in their capacity for inspiring new visions and creative actions, rather than in the negative “this-worldly asceticism” that Max Weber found in the Protestant ethic. Common to the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant views of the human economic agent is the “calling” or “vocation,” which Weber erroneously thought to be distinctively Protestant. Every Jew and every Christian is called to be like God, since each is made in the image of God and called to be active and creative. Thence arises the visible dynamism of the Jewish and the Christian peoples in human history.
Outline of Centesimus Annus
Before plunging too far into the particulars, it may be well to fix in mind an outline of the six chapters of Centesimus Annus. First, John Paul II undertakes a rereading of Rerum Novarum, thus handing down an authoritative reinterpretation of that document, much as the U.S. Supreme Court includes in its decisions commentary on earlier decisions of that Court.
In chapter two, the pope takes up the “new things” that have happened since 1891 that still affect us today. He analyzes the shortcomings of socialist anthropology, and describes the reforms that transformed the real, existing capitalism of advanced countries from what it had been in 1891.
Next the pope lingers reflectively on the great events of “The Year 1989,” one of the watershed years of human history. He lays out several reasons for the collapse of socialism, and a few lessons of worldwide importance to be drawn from it.
In chapter four, John Paul II addresses the classic Christian theme of the universal destination of material goods (which we also refer to above in chapter seven as the “social destination of all goods”). In this, the longest part of the encyclical, the pope examines existing political economies for their compatibility with the dignity of the human person. Here he develops his new approach to initiative, enterprise, profit, and capitalism itself. He severely criticizes abuses that still exist, particularly of the poor in the Third World, in whose name he eloquently urged inclusion in property ownership, the active worldwide market, and the spread of knowledge and skill.
Chapter five discusses the state and culture. Here the pope stresses the limited state, democratic checks and balances, human rights, and constraints upon the state regarding welfare rights. He criticizes rather harshly the present excesses of the welfare state in economically advanced countries. He turns as well to the moral and cultural sphere, which is too often ignored: “People lose sight of the fact that life in society has neither the market nor the state as its final purpose.”19 Here, too, are found the pope’s comments on the formation of a “culture of peace.”20
Chapter six, concluding on a theological note, looks to the future. We are, the pope thinks, “ever more aware that solving serious national or international problems is not just a matter of economic production or of juridical or social organization.”21 Rather, most problems call for “specific ethical and religious values as well as changes of mentality, behavior, and structures.”22 The most perfect structures will not function if citizens do not have the relevant attitudes, habits, and behaviors. Among these is the habit of effective concern for one’s fellow human beings around the world (the habit of “solidarity,” as the pope calls it—a new term for the old virtue of charity, calling attention to its international dimension).
In sum, Centesimus Annus calls for serious reform of the moral and cultural institutions of democratic and capitalist societies—including the institutions of the mass media, cinema, universities, and families—in order to make democracy and capitalism fulfill their best promises. The preservation of free political space achieved by democracy and the achievement of liberation from oppressive poverty wrought by capitalism are insufficient (alone or together) to meet the human desire for truth and justice.
A Christian Social Anthropology
This overview of the whole terrain fixed in our minds, it should now be easier to grasp the inner logic of Centesimus Annus. This logic begins with concrete inspection of the human being: “We are not dealing here with man in the ‘abstract,’ but with the real, ‘concrete,’ ‘historical’ man. We are dealing with each individual. . . . The horizon of the Church’s whole wealth of doctrine is man in his concrete reality as sinful and righteous.”23
When the young Wojtyła first wrestled with modern Western thinkers such as Scheler and Heidegger, he fully expected that he would be living the rest of his life under real, existing socialism. In that ideology, the individual counted for very little. In actual practice, socialist work was wholly oriented toward the piling-up of objects, products, things, with no real regard for the subjectivity of the worker. After toiling for days on the freezing seas at the risk of their lives, fishermen would discover that the refrigeration unit of the storehouse in which their catch had been deposited was defective and that the entire fruit of their labors had spoiled. Steelworkers would see the steel beams on which they had labored pile up in huge lots and rust, because distribution systems (such as they were) had broken down. Under the economic system developed in the name of Marxism, it was in no one’s interest to see a product all the way through, from conception to execution to delivery to satisfying use. Every person felt like a cog in someone else’s machine. A new type of alienation was experienced which John Paul II described in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, precisely in contrast to a sense of personal action and initiative:
In the place of creative initiative there appear passivity, dependence and submission to the bureaucratic apparatus which, as the only “ordering” and “decision-making” body—if not also the “owner”—of the entire totality of goods and the means of production, puts everyone in a position of almost absolute dependence, which is similar to the traditional dependence of the worker-proletarian in capitalism. This provokes a sense of frustration or desperation and predisposes people to opt out of national life, impelling many to emigrate and also favoring a form of “psychological” emigration.24
Amid such sour alienation, Wojtyła’s emphasis on the acting person was entirely convincing. His emphasis on the creative subjectivity of the worker unsettled those Marxists who were assigned to do ideological battle with him. He turned the tables on them: He forced them to argue on Christian terrain. He accepted their emphasis upon work, but then asked about the meaning of work to the worker, obliging them to confront, on the one hand, the alienation inherent in socialist organizations, and, on the other, a deeper and richer humanism, Christian in lineage. While he was the Archbishop of Krakow, he had noted that the front between Catholicism and Marxism (or, more broadly, between humanism and socialism) had become a contestation over the meaning of man. In Centesimus Annus, he hit the mark exactly:
The fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order.25
“Reduced to a series of social relationships”—that was the fatal flaw: the loss of “the autonomous subject of moral decision.” In other words, the loss of a healthy respect for the individual—the acting, deciding person—and the loss of society’s subjectivity, too.
This direct confrontation with the erroneous anthropology of socialism allowed John Paul II to begin with the human individual and move to the larger context of social relations and social systems: “Today, the church’s social doctrine focuses especially on man as he is involved in a complex network of relationships within modern societies.”26 The mere individual is not what is in focus; rather, the pope’s emphasis on invention and choice obliges Western economists to deepen their understanding of work, the worker, and creativity in work.
The main lines of Centesimus Annus are clean and clear: The human is an acting, creative person, capable of initiative and responsibility, seeking institutions in the three main spheres of life (political, economic, and cultural) worthy of his or her capacities—institutions that do not stifle or distort human liberty. For God himself made human beings free:
Not only is it wrong from the ethical point of view to disregard human nature, which is made for freedom, but also in practice it is impossible to do so. Where society is so organized as to reduce arbitrarily or even suppress the sphere in which freedom is legitimately exercised, the result is that the life of society becomes progressively disorganized and goes into decline.27
This is the lesson the pope draws from the self-destruction of socialism.
There is a further lesson about human capacities for evil. A good Calvinist joke roughly expresses the pope’s views: “The man who said that man is totally depraved can’t be all bad.” Analogously, the pope: “Man tends toward good, but he is also capable of evil. He can transcend his immediate interest and still remain bound to it.”28
Thus, respecting man’s limited but genuine goodness, the pope urges us not to stress an opposition between “self-interest” and the “common good.” He urges us, rather, to seek a “harmony” between “self-interest” and “the interests of society as a whole,” wherever this may be possible: “The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact [man’s two-sided nature] into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony.”29
In The Federalist, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton caution against allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. They resisted utopic theorists and appealed to a basic realism about human beings rooted in a sober consideration of historical experience. In a spirit not altogether dissimilar, John Paul II recognized the claims of legitimate self-interest:
In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a “secular religion” which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society—which possesses its own autonomy and laws—can ever be confused with the kingdom of God.30
In politics, Aristotle wrote, it is necessary to be satisfied with a “tincture of virtue.” The pope displayed a similar sobriety. In this direct way, Pope John Paul II grasped the horns of the contemporary problem of free persons and the common good.
It was relatively easy to determine what the common good was when a single chief was charged with pointing it out. It is far more difficult when the freedom of each person to discern the common good is respected. Moreover, many aspects of the good of a whole people are not achieved in concert or by single-minded direction from above; on the contrary, they are achieved by a large number of persons and groups independently performing their own tasks with excellence. A sound family life is not achieved in a society by dictate from above, for example, but by each pair of parents independently doing their best. And individual small businesses do not await commands from planning boards, but achieve their purposes within their own markets and in their own particular niches in their own various ways. Thus, in asserting the principle that the coincidence of private interest and public good, as often as it can occur, achieves an outcome not at all bad for society, John Paul II was being more than world-wise. He was not only taking account of both the good in humans and its ordinary limits; he was also assuming a more subtle view of the common good than was possible in the less pluralistic past.
There is a difficulty here, of course. Many societies today are entrenched in “culture wars.” Large and important factions hold radically different views about which way the society as a whole ought to go. What one faction finds good, another finds evil. In the last chapter of Centesimus Annus, the pope pointed out that cultural issues are the most important of all—and perhaps the most neglected by thinkers and doers. So much energy has gone into earlier conflicts over which political and economic order is most suited to human nature that for more than two centuries, the West has been living off of cultural capital. Concern over the physical climate has not yet been matched by concern over the moral climate. The ecology of liberty needs as much attention as the ecology of air, water, and sea.
Since personal action always entails risk, fault, and possible failure, the universe of freedom must be open, indeterminate, contingent. Some new things appear in it; some old things disappear. Pope John Paul II regularly stressed the new things that happen, such as the new ideas that emerged in the years before Rerum Novarum and the many changes that occurred in the world between 1891 and 1991. For him, history was a realm of trial and error, of costly mistakes and lessons hard-earned. Moreover, the human person seldom experiences societies worthy of his or her capacities for freedom, for love, for truth, for justice—and these are the things that the human race seeks.
Here John Paul II is not focusing solely on the individual. He is pointing out that the fully developed person is social, collaborative, and sharply aware of what she owes to others—and of how, in some ways, all depend on all. He is at once the pope of the person and of solidarity. Would there have been a Solidarność with a lesser person than Lech Walesa to lead it? Would Walesa be the person he now is—the historical person—if he had not acted in and through Solidarno
ć? Person and community are mutually defining. Neither is wholly developed apart from the other.
For human progress in history, moreover, new free associations need to be formed continually from the creative acts of some few individuals. Collaborating together, even just a few individuals can become an arrowhead of advance for their whole society, even the whole world. Could there have been contemporary Poland—free and prosperous and more virtuous (more responsible and cooperative than ever before)—without the small band that persevered in that new free association called Solidarity? Could there be a united Europe if Solidarity had not cut a path through the Iron Curtain, and in the aftermath brought down that barbarous Berlin Wall? Both individual persons—hugely brave and admirable persons—and the communions they formed were necessary to the task. John Paul II told both: “Do not be afraid!”