← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Walter Yannis
Thread ID: 10476 | Posts: 4 | Started: 2003-10-14
2003-10-14 10:07 | User Profile
This appeared on the Zenit webpage recently.
[url]http://www.zenit.org/english/[/url]
It's an interview with the editor of a new publication on Catholic social thought, called IHS Press. I urge you all to check it out:
[url]http://www.ihspress.com/index1.htm[/url]
It's an idea whose time has come. Sharpe makes some interesting observations about Vichy France, and how the Catholic Center was shunted to the side last century.
Walter
Sharpe, a free-lance writer and lecturer who founded IHS two years ago, shared with ZENIT why books written decades ago can be so important to understanding and healing society today.
Q: What inspired the creation of IHS Press?
Sharpe: The Press was created to fill a gap. There are books on all kinds of Catholic subjects readily available, except for serious works on politics and economics from a Catholic standpoint. Much of the Catholic social justice writings from the 1960s and 1970s have a Marxist or materialist bent.
The clear, substantial works on what a Catholic society should look like come from the 1930s, the last decade to witness a serious movement for Catholic social principles. IHS was formed to help people rediscover those works, and to form a movement of people concerned about where society is headed. People can base their sense of what's wrong with the world on the clear thinking of Catholic social teaching.
Q: What is Catholic social teaching, and how is it an alternative to the political ideologies of today?
Sharpe: Catholic social teaching is that part of Catholic moral teaching that deals with man's social life — it suggests what society should look like in its social, political and economic aspects, based upon the ultimate purpose of temporal life in society.
The social doctrine teaches principles specific enough to identify what's right and wrong, but general enough to allow the laity to work out the details of temporal life in conformity with those principles.
Catholic social teaching bases its approach on truths that philosophy teaches and that revelation confirms; thus it differs from other political positions in that it is founded upon the truth and is not merely pragmatic. This is fundamentally different than all other ideologies — the social doctrine differs not only in its approach to sociopolitical questions but also in its underlying assumptions.
Other political positions differ equally from the social doctrine in that they tend to be: skeptical, not recognizing an absolute Truth upon which to base political action; materialist, seeing the purpose of man's life in society as mere enjoyment of this life, rather than as preparation for the next; and naturalist, not recognizing the existence of realities and truths that cannot be seen, touched and measured.
The social doctrine approaches politics in a radically different way. For Catholics, political life is a question of practicing virtue within the context of social living, and any structure of society that encourages virtue is to be praised because it helps people get to heaven. The opposite is true for societies that encourage vice — like ours — or make the practice of virtue difficult.
There are points of overlap between modern political positions and the social doctrine. Opposition to abortion, unlimited immigration, support for workers' rights and concern for the poor are all positions that the social doctrine supports.
Non-Catholics can accept the various principles of the social doctrine without accepting the Church because the principles reflect the natural law, which based upon reason. So Catholics and others can collaborate in certain specific areas for specific policies that conform to Catholic social principles.
As a complete sociopolitical creed the social doctrine really is a third way that isn't just between the Left and Right — it rather transcends both Left and Right and rises above them with its own vision of social order.
Neither Capitalism nor Liberalism
Q: Why is it important to rediscover the writings of the Catholic social thinkers of the early 20th century? What wisdom can they offer?
Sharpe: The thinkers of the 1930s were confronting the problems that we face today: unemployment, an industrialized economy, a financial system with ridiculous national debts and rampant usury. Their approach to these problems was based upon an articulation and application — without compromise or apology — of the true Catholic position.
Today, sadly, there is a tendency of some to water down the teachings of the Church, to adapt them to the world. Many works on the Catholic social vision are neutralized by a desire to not shock modern readers too much and to affirm aspects of modern society as acceptable that are not acceptable at all.
The thinkers from before World War II spoke the truth in all its purity — which is why our program takes their work as a starting point and hopes to pick up from there.
Q: The editors of IHS Press have stated that they are convinced the wisdom of Catholic social thought is, today, largely a buried treasure, relatively untapped and almost wholly neglected. Why do you think it was forgotten and has not been rediscovered until now?
Sharpe: World War II and Vatican II. These were two major events of the 20th century that somewhat eclipsed the work being done in implementing the Church's social principles.
World War II seemed to confirm the triumph of capitalism and political liberalism, so that it became difficult, if not ungrateful, to oppose them. Laissez-faire economics and secular democracy — never mind that it was allied with militant, atheist Communism — triumphed over the Axis.
To many people, that physical triumph suggested that capitalism and political liberalism were in fact morally right, though the conclusion doesn't follow at all. The position of papal teaching is that neither capitalism nor liberalism is an ideal social system.
Following World War II, criticisms of them could be dismissed as either totalitarian, politically; or socialist or communist, economically. Today, however, in the era of stock market bubbles, Enron, Wal-Mart, the Patriot Act and a tendentious war on terror, it is easy to see that the triumph of liberalism and capitalism in the 1940s was not an unmitigated blessing for humanity.
Nevertheless, the movements that flourished in the 1930s were decimated, at least ideologically, by the war.
The Distributist League, founded in 1926, fizzled away. The Scottish and English Catholic Land Movements, founded in 1929, ended in the middle 1940s.
And the Catholic schools of thought in France — theirs was corporatism — and Germany — the solidarism of Heinrich Pesch — were respectively discredited with the fall of the Vichy government in France, which had implemented a good bit of Catholic social doctrine, or drowned out by the din of the rise and fall of the Third Reich.
Meanwhile, the confusion accompanying the implementation of Vatican II throughout the world was later to do as much damage to the theoretical prospects of the social doctrine as World War II did to the practical prospects.
It has to be admitted — as many prominent churchmen including Cardinal Ratzinger have said — that the interpretation of the truths of the faith were, in some circles, watered down during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The social doctrine suffered a similar fate.
Even though the council documents suggest that the Catholic layman has the duty of implementing Catholic principles in social life, some reinterpreted those principles in a worldly context.
The Distributist School
On the Left were the liberation theologians and Marxist priests who lost all sense of the otherworldly destiny of man and thought that Christian social action consisted in initiating a material paradise on earth. On the Right there was — and still is, in a bad way — a tendency to shy away from criticizing capitalism for fear of seeming reactionary. So, the Church's clear stance against economic liberalism was and is watered down into a kind of Catholic capitalism that doesn't square with the faith.
If in some circles Vatican II was used to try to appease the modern world by meeting it on its own terms — that, too, undercut any attempt to conform the world to the faith according to Catholic principles.
Everyone now admits that the effects of Vatican II weren't all marvelous. That, along with the realization that the post-World War II triumph of liberalism and capitalism weren't unmitigated blessings, provides the opportunity for a restatement, re-appreciation and implementation of the integral social doctrine.
Q: Why does your press highlight the writings of thinkers who call themselves "Distributists"?
Sharpe: The Distributist School was the main group of English thinkers from the 1930s who enunciated the vision of Catholic social doctrine with the most clarity and vigor. They wrote in English and are accessible to us. G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both famous in their own right, were among their numbers.
Most important, though, is their clear articulation of the Catholic position in the face of the twin evils confronting it — capitalism and socialism. They understood that position fully, enunciated it in excellent prose and acted upon it by founding leagues, movements and journals that attempted to conduct an effective propaganda for the social doctrine and to make it a reality in the world.
One example is a book by Harold Robbins, a leader of both the Catholic Land Movement and the Distributist League, called "The Sun of Justice — An Essay on the Social Teaching of the Church." That book is one of the best on the Distributist case for the social doctrine.
The Distributists are a very good place to start in beginning to reconstruct and re-popularize the social doctrine, and in attempting to implement the solutions it offers to the manifold problems facing the modern world.
(This article courtesy of ZENIT.)
2003-10-14 11:29 | User Profile
I've thought about these things for a long time, and I've come to one firm conclusion: much (although certainly not all) of our current predicament stems from the corporate form of property.
Adam Smith was very suspicious of joint stock companies, and for very good reason. All the things that he liked about the institution of property rights - ensuring the upkeep of material things and their frugal use, facilitating the psychological connection of the individual to society and state, guaranteeing a measure of individual dignity against larger forces - is attenuated in the corporate form.
That's because the corporate form of property separates management of property from its ownership. The essential bargain of a joint stock company is that the owners/stockholders give up management of their property and (usually) hire management personnel to oversee it in exchange for increased efficiency in the property's use, and hence an increase in its overall value to the stockholder.
In small companies (like incorporated family farms, mom and pop stores, other small businesses) the separation of management and control is a tolerable problem, because the management and ownership aspects of property largely overlap. Uncle Bob might own half the shares of a corporation holding a small bakery, but mom and pop own the rest and they own/manage the property.
However, in very large public companies, the connection between ownership and management is severed completely, which creates a moral hazard for management to use the stockholders' property for thier own use. When an owner/stockholder holds a few hundred dollars of, say, Tyco, paying any attention at all to Tyco management is a dead waste of time (Time = Money), and so the stockholders look the other way as management runs amock. The attenuation is stretched even further where the management of these small blocks of stock is turned over to enormous pension funds. Since they are so huge, they are the economy, and it pays them doubly nothing to invest significant time and resources in managing any particular company.
Tyco, Enron, Waste Management and others are part and parcel of the dilemma of the corporate form. While we could (and should) take steps like requiring of public companies independent audits (this is an absolute must if the system is to be saved - no more Big Four auditors who make their real money consulting on the deals they audit), enhanced reporting, and independent directors, none of these additional steps will fix the problem and are sure to raise as many questions and they answer.
Another problem is that this separation of management and control just begs for infiltration by high-IQ Tribal elites who use nepotistic connections to infiltrate the ranks of management and turn it to their Tribal use. This was the real story of "barbarians at the gate" of the 1980's - Tribalists like Millken and Boesky took over management from the WASP whiteshoes, not that they'll ever tell you that in B-school.
Tribalist Michael Eisner of Disney took about $600 million in stock options a single year a while back. Nice work if you can get it. This Tribal connection explains also, I might add, the strange phenomenon of Holocaust museums in places like Houston - corporate Tribalists are paying their club dues to an institution that ensures the access of Tribal children to the same corporate resouces in years to come. I mean, why would the Tribal CFO of Enron give sooooo much money to a Holocaust museum in FREEKING TEXAS??!! The answer is that it's a payback for the Tribes support in getting there in the first place.
You get the picture.
Taking a step back, the problem in our Constitutional system was that incorporation statutes belong to the states, creating a "race to the bottom" moral hazard as each state vied with others to get the most management-friendly statute. Delaware won, by the way. No doubt about that. Management rules in Delaware.
Anyhoo, I buy this argument, and I believe that we must curtail in general the use of corporations. Limited liability is greatly abused, and with the availablity of liability insurance to all there is no sound argument allowing anybody to limit their liability for any reason after paying a few state fees to buy a paper that says the business is a separate "person." I don't doubt that some very large enterprises should be incorporated, but it shouldn't be easy and it should be allowed only after careful public discussion as to the social costs.
Catholic social thought, I think, shares this suspicion of the corporate form generally, and of large capitalistic public companies in particular. We need to move away from the corporate form, and back toward family owned business.
In a very real sense I am arguing for the re-institution of property - that body of rights that united title with management in a way that benefited both the individual and society. I think that the Catholic Church argues for the same thing: genuine private property
Anyway, I hope you will check out the website and order a few of the books. Most of these are classics that deserve to be at the center of the debate, and not relegated by corporate types (Randian Freepers and their ilk) to the peripheries.
End of rant!
Walter
2003-10-14 11:31 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Walter Yannis]There are points of overlap between modern political positions and the social doctrine. Opposition to abortion, unlimited immigration, support for workers' rights and concern for the poor are all positions that the social doctrine supports. [/QUOTE] Walter, maybe you should send them your excellent vdare letter.
2003-10-14 11:43 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Leveller]Walter, maybe you should send them your excellent vdare letter.[/QUOTE]
Thanks, Leveller.
I'll try to do that.
Walter