Here’s a passage from Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium that could serve very well as a pivot point of mutual agreement with Christian free-marketers:

It is vital that government leaders and financial leaders take heed and broaden their horizons, working to ensure that all citizens have dignified work, education and healthcare. Why not turn to God and ask him to inspire their plans? I am firmly convinced that openness to the transcendent can bring about a new political and economic mindset which would help to break down the wall of separation between the economy and the common good of society.

The question is how leaders can most effectively create such a society and how, as a functional matter, we should expect God to operate within our society.  Much of the wall that the pope’s essay creates between himself and Americans who hold fast to principles of economic freedom is built of habits of thought pervasive throughout the world, with great intellectual currency in Western Europe and South America.  Within the United States, it’s a general differentiation between Democrats and Republicans, with a sharp differentiation between the Washington establishment and the grassroots Tea Party.

I’m referring to the idea of classes of people operating as more or less steady states of existence.  American conservatives reject that view, which is why they’ll be quick to point out that “the poor” is a changing group, as some families climb out of poverty and other slip into it.

Standing on the watchtower of small-government populism, it’s difficult not to conclude that what we’re really observing, in the mainstream public discourse,  is an internal debate among the global ruling elite.  In that perspective, a nation is represented by its rulers (however chosen), and some sort of balance is necessary between the self-determination that the people are allowed and the charity that their internationalist betters know to be moral imperatives.  Defining this balance is the tension between factions among the elite, but it’s a dignified discussion over tea in the Alps.

If our leaders are capable of “inspired plans” and the deep knowledge of humanity necessary to concoct and implement them, then the most expedient way to alleviate the plight of the Third World would be to use the wealth of the West to massacre oppressive regimes one by one and impose colonies under exactly the same benign, paternalistic totalitarianism progressives seek to impose on their neighbors at home.

Christians rightly recoil from this sort of ends-justify-the-means violence, so move one step away from expediency to remove it.  Travel from dictator to dictator and find each one’s price.  Buy every nation out from under its oppressor and impose exactly the same level of protections against coups that we have in the West, with a further backstop to ensure that only well-meaning, Western-style, technocratic totalitarianism can fill the void.

Even then, the Christian and the politically correct rightly recoil from the stark denial of rights of self determination. It is clear, in other words, that those rights supersede mere efficacy.

Keep in mind, though, that those who speak of the responsibilities of leaders and the moral obligation that they have to “the poor” tend to see self determination as a communal thing.  France has sovereignty and a right to determine its direction; so does Saudi Arabia; so does Venezuela.  And the community of nations appeals to them through their leaders.  Implicit in this vision is that the rulers are in their positions by some kind of right, and it is our duty as outsiders to persuade and negotiate, but never push, them toward our ideals.

The vision that arises of social structure is that “the state” has certain rights owing to its position as the seat of the ruling elite and therefore has responsibilities, which more-enlightened elites must persuade it to acknowledge.  This structure is evident in Pope Francis’s calling politics “one of the highest forms of charity,” which evokes the notion of “public service.”  And the point of contention appears when he complains that those who “defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation…. reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control.”

Surely, the pope would agree that there is, in reality, no segment of society that is not “charged with vigilance for the common good.”  A preferable social structure, I’d propose, begins with the notion that a community enacts certain of its shared responsibilities through the state, which therefore has limited rights necessary to fulfill those responsibilities.  The distinction may seem fine, but it makes all the difference whether our vision begins with a missionary government that has a certain calling or with a limited range of tasks that the society can only accomplish via government.

The latter view much more readily allows for one to wonder: If the self determination of nations is desirable, then why not the self determination of individuals?

There is altogether too much compartmentalization in the thinking of progressives and of more-benign mainstream liberals.  Pope Francis asserts that “our world is being… wounded by a widespread individualism which divides human beings, setting them against one another as they pursue their own well-being.”  To the extent that’s true, however:

• It is so because of a modern focus on the responsibilities of groups (like governments) to answer people’s needs and the obligations of those who are more fortunate to (as Francis quotes Paul VI) “renounce some of their rights.”  In that focus, it becomes the compartmentalized task of the individual, as an individual, to look after him- or herself.
• It is so because statists aren’t satisfied with persuasion as the appropriate means to prod business and social leaders to acknowledge their social responsibilities, preferring the force of law, with the implied violence of arrest if they do not comply.  This makes of society a battlefield in which our well-beings are implicitly “set against one another.”
• It is so because of a modern hesitance to appear to be piling on the troubles of the less fortunate by pointing out their own responsibilities as autonomous human beings formed in the likeness of God — who are indeed charged with pursuing their own well-being, including their spiritual well-being.

The habit of thought that develops when the conversation becomes too insulated among those with academic and financial advantages is ultimately dehumanizing. There is the business owner who acts autonomously, and there is the low-income worker, who can only be exploited and who needs the righteous and the government to step in and fight on his behalf.

Along that path, it becomes too easy to begin phrasing responsibilities in a way that devalues people, rather than elevates them as spiritual beings.  The wealthy are implied not to have done anything to make themselves worthy of their gains, giving those gains the patina of ill-gotten contraband, however they were acquired, leaving no moral difference between acquiring wealth by offering valuable services or by simply confiscating it through power.  And the poor are not encouraged to realize their own value and to fulfill their own responsibility to strive for its realization, in part by finding ways to serve others.

A better path would phrase all people in terms of their value, insisting that the wealthy and poor, alike, are more valuable than their possessions can possibly express, and all share a responsibility to approach each other as human beings to be helped.  Conscience is an individual affair; ultimately, God speaks to us as individuals, then reaching out to others through our communities.

The “invisible hand” of the market should not be taken as a replacement for that force, but neither should it be seen as in opposition to it.  Limiting individual autonomy by force of law too easily becomes a means to silence that quiet voice that speaks to all of us equally, giving opportunity to our worst instincts and the darker forces that would manipulate them.

 

1. Introduction
2. Autonomy