A Just Society: It Cannot Be Drawn on a Balance Sheet

The quote from Pope Pius XI’s 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, that “no one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true socialist,” has been much favored by conservative Catholics. However, Pius was also clear that sincere Catholics could and should work for legislation designed to correct the injustices of unrestrained capitalism. Nonetheless, Pius stated that Catholics must not buy into the full socialist agenda, especially the totalitarian and atheistic elements. There was no reason to become a “true socialist.”

His adjective “true” was not used in a casual manner. Pius recognized that because there were moderate socialists who had rejected doctrinaire calls for “class warfare and the abolition of private property,” there were spokesmen for the working classes, especially in the trade-union movement, who “were tending toward the truths which Christian tradition has always held in respect,” and, as a result, were advancing “opinions sometimes closely approaching the just demands of Christian social reformers.”

Indeed, he was optimistic enough to assert that if “these changes continue, it may well come about that gradually these tenets of mitigated socialism will no longer be different from the programme of those who seek to reform human society according to Christian principles.”

But there was cause for great caution in this matter. “Just demands and desires” for social legislation “contain nothing opposed to Christian truth; much less are they peculiar to socialism. Those therefore who look for nothing else, have no reason for becoming socialists” — i.e., socialists of any type. Pius knew that socialists had more in mind than government intervention in the economy. Catholics leaning toward socialism ran the risk of collaborating with a movement fundamentally hostile to the faith, one which, said Pius, is “entirely ignorant of and unconcerned about” life beyond the grave, and which believes that “human society was instituted merely for the sake of material well-being.” Indeed, when one sees how moderate socialists nowadays — and near-socialists like certain Clintonites — champion legal abortion and the ubiquitous distribution of condoms, one cannot help but note that Pius was remarkably perceptive about the dangers of socialism as a worldview.

But we should not forget that this critique of socialism was accompanied by a clear rejection of rigid laissez-faire ideology as well. The encyclical called the classical liberals the “economic individualist school.”

There are Catholics these days who are overlooking this element of the encyclical — not to mention subsequent encyclicals — in their effort to be good Republicans. Those who are critical of an earlier generation of Catholics for giving unqualified support to the Democratic machine in places like New York and Chicago should be wary of making a similar mistake.

There are those Catholics, for example, who take the position that a sophisticated understanding of free-market economics should include a willingness to accept considerable “economic dislocation” for a good number of our people.

Think of the debates over NAFTA and GATT. Now, to be sure, there may be valid reasons for favoring a free-trade philosophy, even the practice of American corporations shifting operation overseas to take advantage of lower labor costs.

But, in light of the Church’s social teachings, one would think that Catholics who make this case would give serious consideration to the possibility that these policies will result in an unacceptable level of lost jobs, uprooted families, and destroyed communities. Such things matter. A just society cannot be drawn on a balance sheet. The “bottom line” is not all that matters.

To be sure, there might be corporate directors who would disagree. Which is why the popes have stressed that there must be a role for government in this equation. They have held that there must be an agency in society able to act as a counterbalance to dangerous concentrations of corporate wealth and power.

Corporate leaders might very well find themselves in a position where they feel they must pursue the bottom line, even to the detriment of the society where their corporations are based. So there must be someone who does not let them, someone in government.

Government action must be employed if what Pius XI called “despotic economic domination” becomes a danger, a situation where wealth becomes “concentrated in the hands of a few,” where corporate elites control “the life-blood of the entire economic body…so that no one can breathe against their will.”

An economic system, put simply, is not working as it should when profits are increasing and productivity is up, but at the same time the kinds of jobs needed to support a family in decency are being destroyed as part of a “downsizing” process.

It does not matter what the Dow-Jones average is doing. In a just society, “opportunities for work” must be “provided for those who are willing and able to work,” as Pius said.

We are cautioned against assuming that Adam Smith’s invisible hand will deal satisfactorily with this problem. “Free competition,” Quadragesimo Anno asserts, “cannot be the guiding principle of economic life; this has been abundantly proved by the consequences that have followed from the practical application of these dangerous individualist ideas.”

Hence, “economic life” must be “subjected to and governed by a true and effective guiding principle.” Economic power “must be brought under the effective control of public authority…. The public institutions of the nations must be such as to make the whole of human society conform to the needs of the common good, that is, to the standard of social justice.”

Now, it bears repeating, Pius XI did not make these statements as part of a diatribe against capitalism or private property. He quoted from Rerum Novarum to emphasize that point: “The right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man; and the State has by no means the right to abolish it, but only to control its use and bring it into harmony with the interests of the public good.”

Pius did not share the socialist contempt for profits: “The employment of a large income in increasing the opportunities for remunerative work, provided the work is devoted to the production of really useful goods, is to be considered… an excellent act of liberality….”

In fact, it would not be a stretch to imagine Pius XI reacting favorably if he heard Winston Churchill’s quip: “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

But there is no room in the Catholic social tradition for those who express disdain for “losers,” lower-class “misfits,” or “superfluous” people who allegedly stand in the way of corporate profits and “the free flow of goods at market prices.” A just society is obliged to seek out a way to help those who do not “make good.” We cannot assume that they deserve their poverty, that they are morally deficient. That is the Puritan ethic, not ours.

Look: Economic “losers” are not determined by the natural order. They are not self-evidently worthless or unproductive. The economic system goes a long way in determining who will be the successful members of society. Societies deliberately, consciously, through the allocation of resources and capital, and often by policy decisions at the highest levels of government, make decisions that arrange the pecking order of its citizens. There are no “natural” aristocracies.

Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates might have been left to die as an infant on a hillside in Sparta. Certainly that would have been Stephen Hawking’s fate. The strapping crack-head welfare cheats in a Chicago slum might have been revered hunters and warriors if they had been born in a 19th-century Zulu village.

The “losers” in modern America are those who do not adapt well to the requirements of employment in the technological society we are creating. But the well-oiled media moguls and Wall Streeters — the “Masters of the Universe,” as Tom Wolfe called them — who emote all over each other in the society page pictures of their AIDS fundraisers would have been considered noisy trash in a French village raising an army to fight the First Crusade.

The point is that if our society makes decisions that transform the skills and energies of certain of our citizens into something “unmarketable,” and leave them unable to support themselves with some level of dignity, then we have an obligation to make policy decisions about how to deal with their plight. We can argue about whether it should be federal programs, state programs, private initiatives, about whether a particular program will do more harm than good, but not about whether they deserve our active concern. We are a people, a community, not a collection of consumers.

About a year or two ago, one of those investment shows on cable TV featured a scene of assembly-line workers leaving a GM plant somewhere in the Midwest on their final day of work. The plant was being closed down. Whether accurately or not, the men blamed jobs being sent to Mexico.

But whatever the cause, men who considered themselves productive members of our society, with their lunch pails and cloth caps, men who had successfully supported their families, who had fought in America’s wars, had just been told that they were no longer needed. They became detritus.

Most of them had those faces that Norman Rockwell used to love to place in diner scenes. But now they looked as if they had been hit with a maul. Some were close to tears. They had gone from being the shoulders of industrial America to losers — in one day.

Their fate came up in the discussion that followed. “What should we do about these men?” the moderator asked. One of the members of the panel, a stock-market guru, a dainty man who might have survived as a court jester in medieval England — if he were lucky enough to find a warlord to serve as his patron — shrugged and responded: “Nothing. It’s their problem. Times change. Tell them to move on. They’re grownups. They’re no longer needed there. Life isn’t fair.”

Leo XIII and Pius XI, not to mention John Paul II, have much to say to Catholics who would concur with such a sentiment without some very serious qualifications.