The Weekly Review - A Distributist Manifesto VII-Justice and Order

by A. Graham Carey

Communism is the reaction of the people of all countries to the insufficiency, insecurity, and lack of freedom caused by capitalist industrialism. Capitalist industrialism is industry which has become too big to be self controlled, and is careless of the rights of the rest of society with which the directors of Big Business have lost contact. Communism threatens to destroy civilization—is destroying it. We cannot remove the bad effects unless we remove the causes. We will have Communism as long as we have its cause, industrialism. Capitalist industrialism must be replaced by a safer and more humane system of production if civilization on this earth is to survive.

We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of lining up either with the Left against the Right, or the Right against the Left. If the Right means Order, an intelligent regard for social experience, for history, then we are with the Right. If the Left means justice for the dispossessed, and a decent determination to end the miseries of the victims of industrialism, then we are with the Left. But there can be no conflict between Order and Justice. There is a terrible conflict between people. This is the war of ideologies. There is a terrible conflict between those who want order but are careless of justice, and those who want justice but are careless of order. To take sides in this war is to identify ourselves with the evils of the side we espouse and blind ourselves to the good on the other side. Distributists refuse to condone evil and condemn good in this way. They make a direct attack on the problem. They are daring enough to try to get all the good and steer away from all the evil.

In those countries where either Left or Right has come to dominate the State this detachment is no longer possible. In Russia or Germany men have to choose which army they will serve under. But we still have time. How long we will have time we do not know, probably not very long. But we have not yet lost our political rights. We are still free to fight for the Middle Way. If we do not do so, we will deserve the tyranny which will be our unavoidable lot. But it is not going to be easy.

Distributists are well aware that their programme is one which is opposed to “the present trend.” The “trend” is toward the bigger and bigger, the more and more complicated, the less and less understandable, and increasing dehumanization and increasing mental slavery. Those who believe that happiness is to be achieved by floating with the stream will not have the slightest interest in the Distributist programme. They will drift smoothly along with the stream, until they go over the cataract and down the rapids. Though their children and grandchildren may be given sufficiency and security by their masters, they will certainly not be given freedom. Freedom is not something that is given by a dictator, even if the dictator is benevolent. Freedom must be fought for and worked for and suffered for. No one will fight and work and suffer for what he does not believe in. Our ancestors saw the need for political freedom, they suffered and fought and worked for it, and they got it. Then we lost the benefit of what they had gained because we lost economic freedom. If we want to regain this, and want it enough to sacrifice for it, it may still be regained. If we do not, it will certainly be not regained. There is still a reasonable chance that an economic revolution can win back happiness for the people. It can still be done if we dare to use our intelligence and our free will.

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Distributism vs. Fascism

by Roy F. Moore

Of the few today who have heard of Distributism, some mistake it to be Socialism. And some mistake it to be Fascism. The Fascist bogeyman still taunts Chesterton’s memory and his followers even now simply because at one point in his life, Chesterton expressed certain admiration for Mussolini, being somewhat taken in by the lying charm of Mussolini, thinking him sympathetic to what Chesterton stood for. But when Mussolini enslaved Rome and Hitler was on the rise, Chesterton said clearly and without mistake: “The intellectual criticism of Fascism is really this: that it appeals to an appetite for authority, without very clearly giving the authority for the appetite." In 1999, an edition of the Chesterton Review devoted an entire issue to the question of Chesterton and Fascism and a series of scholarly articles demonstrated quite clearly that Chesterton was anything but Fascist.

Chesterton wrote about the subject in his book, The Resurrection of Rome. On its pages, he debated the pros and cons of the system Il Duce used to bruise and crush the Italian people. Some readers consider this one of his weakest books. He himself described the book as “a warning against Fascism.”

The very term “Fascist,” like its counterpart “Bolshevist,” has almost lost its meaning, becoming an all-purpose insult used to stifle debate. But the ideology behind the insult still remains a constant temptation for men in power to concoct policies based on those of the Mussolini regime. Many hold that the Patriot Acts and the recently passed Real ID Card Act, mandating a national ID card for all citizens, have that same basis in such an ideology.

The average American probably believes that Fascism is “right wing,” but Libertarian columnist Ron Mexico - better known by his pen name “Vox Day” - has recently argued that this is a fallacy. He notes that the Fascists accepted all but two of the ten points comprising Marx’s Communist Manifesto. Further, both Mussolini and Hitler were more nationalist in their focus unlike their internationalist rivals, Lenin and Trotsky.

Other than these deviations, the essential core of Fascism is Socialism. For like their Communist rivals, the Fascists also believed in centralization of finance and transportation, state control over children’s education, progressive income tax, national government control over production and distribution of goods and services and so on.

Distributism, on the other hand, advocates subsidiarity, meaning decentralizing political and economic decisions to the lowest levels in society. That means the family, the neighborhood and city or town authorities. Or in modern lingo, running things from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. Only when events get too big to handle does one turn to higher authorities, and even then, only for certain things, not for everything.

Furthermore, Distributism also believes in “class cooperation.” That is, the poor and middle classes pool their resources together to build up and strengthen the local economy and community. Hence, there is no need for state micromanagement of affairs nor for the dominance of big business or big finance. Neighbor helps neighbor for the sake of all, without - as Chesterton called them - “Hudge” and “Gudge” sticking their noses into things.

And like the Reds, the Fascists either tried to control religious authority or made up their own under state control. As William Shirer wrote in The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich, the Nazis set up their own “National Reich Church,” with the infamous Mein Kampf as their banal substitute for the Bible. And their ersatz messiah was their idea of the Nordic race as some collective divinity, come to rid the Earth of supposed “inferiors.”

Mussolini himself, in a 1925 speech, pronounced the maxim that has ever defined Fascism: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." Thus it shares with Socialism and Communism the trait of making a “god” out of the national government. A “god” who, however, was endowed with the bloodthirsty traits of a Baal, Moloch or Quetzalcoatl. As Chesterton warned us in Christendom in Dublin, "Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God."

Distributism, by contrast, knows how to do something Fascism never could: reject every pretense to be a substitute “god.” It refuses to assimilate everything into itself, like the Borg of the later Star Trek sagas. It embraces humility and sane limits, which the Hobbits embodied in Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings. It rejects every pretension to become the reason for existence. It condemns the notion that an iron-fisted rule of race, class, party or ethnicity can enliven a society better than that of Our Father in Heaven and His guiding hand.

The standard boast about Mussolini was that “he made the trains run on time.” Like Fascism, that isn’t something to boast about, as Chesterton wrote in All Things Considered:

"It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on."

Gilbert! Magazine
Reprinted with Permission

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Crucified Between Two Thieves:Catholic Social Thinking vs. Right and Left

by Anthony Basile, Ph.D

I. The Rhetoric of Freedom: "Free" Market and "Free" Sex

If I received a penny each time someone suspected me of having far Left sympathies, I would be a rich capitalist today! And why? Because I introduce considerations from Catholic social teaching into my arguments. I am sorry to add that often these accusations come from none other than my fellow Catholics! Yet, even when I point out the encyclical where the idea was first introduced, the result is predictably the same: with much guile and little critical thought, the insights of a century old Catholic tradition are dismissed outright. What is this? Are we still laboring under the spell of McCarthy's paranoia? Does questioning the justice of a market system that holds laissez-faire economics as its ideal automatically earn you the stigma of being a Marxist intellectual? What's going on here? We may be demoralized by the frequent dismissals, but if we Catholics don't speak out for economic justice, who will? It seems that "liberal guilt" has not yet moved the upper middle class to legitimate the "economically challenged" by including them in their politically correct pantheon of marginalized minorities. Certainly the rich have nothing to gain by speaking out for social justice. The media, a small set of very large corporations, reports that the economy is always getting better, but hardly clarifies the issue. Better for whom? Large corporations like the media?

Is it surprising that a profit-making company in the business of disseminating public information does not report that you're suffering while they prosper? Economic indicators are made public information by various academic or government organizations, but we hear little public debate regarding their significance. Just what do these numbers mean in terms of our everyday life? How should we act on the information they give us? Consider the following subtlety that is typical of statistical information: the price of computers goes down by 50 percent, but the price of cheese goes up 10 percent; so, on average, prices are dropping. OK, let them eat computer chips! It is difficult to respond to our current situation if we don't know the facts and we can't see how those facts are relevant to ourlives.I don't want to foster any false paranoia, but look around. We don't need an official report to let us know that the dignity of our fellow man is affronted every time he can't afford to send his children to college, or can't afford children in the first place, or has difficulty paying the gas bill, or getting decent housing, or, in the extreme, has to scavenge through garbage cans for empty bottles and half eaten bags of potato chips. This is not an exaggeration! Rummaging through garbage is a daily activity for the street people on Elmwood St. in Buffalo. And, in response to that legion of "concerned citizens" who politely inform me that I can always leave the country if I don't like it here, I remind them that these poor souls will not digest their food any better if I do. Yet, the very people that are indignant of my criticisms have no qualms complaining about how poorly they are treated when employers warn them in no uncertain terms,"well, if you don't like your job, you can work elsewhere."

Apparently, injustice is easier to recognize when it happens to you than when it happens to your neighbor. But, this is not a question about the American way vis-a-vis other ways of life. Indeed, it has been a growing global problem ever since the early '80s when First World leaders like Reagan, Thatcher, Mulroney, among others, began to implement polices in their respective countries which, if they did not actually send us down our present economic path, certainly did little to prevent it. Nor should we limit our vision to the First World only; the Third World has suffered far greater injustices at the hands of the same economic system that now hits close to home. Economic exploitation knows no national boundaries.Let me begin by characterizing the problem, grosso modo. In a nation as rich as the US (or any First World country), it is difficult to believe that the economic hardship encountered by the average person and his family is due to scarcity. A more reasonable explanation points to the process by which the wealth is distributed. That is, it is not the case that the nation lacks the natural and human resources to, say, provide good housing for everyone; rather, these resources, as they are allocated by the economic rules of "fair play," are not directed towards addressing human needs, but towards increasing profit margins, and these two ends are not necessarily compatible; in fact, they are often blatantly contradictory.

Trickle down economics would have us believe otherwise, but it is hard to understand exactly how this would work. What magic connects the individual's needs to the profit margins of large corporations? Lower cost for products and services is the answer offered. But, consider the otherside, namely the now famous scenario of corporate downsizing-famous because it offers an excellent example of why trickle down economics fails. It is perfectly legitimate in the business world for a company to lay offworkers in order to increase its profit; however, doing so means that someone will have to pay by loosing his job. If these unfortunate individuals have a mortgage or other financial commitments, hardships are sure to follow. The lower price of computers will make little difference in their lives if they don't have a steady income; although, it may make a big difference in the pockets of other companies that do use computers. So the "magic" of trickle down economics does not benefit the workers; indeed, the environment created when every company simultaneously tends towards downsizing is an economy which is capital intensive and labor scarce. How can this possibly meet the need to include more people into the labor force? We can't just fool ourselves into some fantasy by saying, "well, somehow things will work out," because they don't. We can easily produce counter-examples and so can banks which foreclose on mortgages. There is no "invisible hand" within the system miraculously making things work out.

We must resist deluding ourselves with non-existent phantoms that transcend the sphere of human activity and appear just in time to save the day. The economic system in place is a result of the human actions, and any injustices to be found there point to individuals and the decisions they make. God promised us a world that could sustain us. The rest is our doing. Economics is essentially a matter of morality. If, then, the problem is not scarcity, but how the wealth is distributed,why are so many people resistant to questioning the "free" market system?

If things are really rough, and it seems to me that they are because many of my hard working friends and colleagues are experiencing similar financial hardships, albeit to varying degrees, why is there this uncritical commitment to the very system which they find oppressive? This is a difficult question with a very complex response. I cannot pretend to answer it completely, but there is this vague sense among the general public that the "free" market forms part of the "freedom" of the "Free World" which opposes itself to the totalitarianism of the old Soviet bloc, and now even the Muslim nations-the old good guys versus bad guys theme which still finds its expression in popular cinema. So, to question the "free" market is to question "freedom". I am well aware that this is just a caricature, and many people rise above it. Nonetheless, at the unconscious level, there are some very strong associations connected to the word "freedom" which have much more formative value than they should. In this way, many questionable cultural habits can be justified by simply affixing the word "free" in front of them, like "free" sex. But anyone who justifies the "free" market solely on the basis that it is "free" can have no argument against "free" sex; one wonders at times how different the political Left and Right really are in the US. Once the notion of a "free" what-have-you has entered the popular imagination, the logical argument is an uphill battle against people's emotional responses. Try to convince them that this sort of "freedom" is an illusion which, upon closer examination, reveals itself as enslavement, and you will see what I mean!

Catholic morality grows out of a wisdom that understands why "free" sex is really enslavement to passions and a loss of something very precious to our humanity, just as it can see why a "free" market is tantamount to near slavery. But do either criticisms get a sympathetic hearing? (Incidentally, if you doubt the second statement, that a "free" market tends to enslave, please read "Rerum Novarum" by Pope Leo XIII.) The remainder of this article is not aimed at expounding Catholic social teaching.

For this, I refer the reader to Rupert J. Ederer's fine book, Economics as if God matters, published by Fidelity Press. In it, the author comments on six major papal encyclicals that were central in forming the teaching, and he makes them accessible to the lay reader who wants togain an appreciation for their spirit. For those who want to jump directly into an encyclical, I recommend Centesimus Annus by John Paul II, since it commemorates the 100th anniversary of the incipient encyclical, Rerum Novarum, and refers back to important earlier work.

Rather, in this article, I want to limit myself to clearing a path for Catholic social teaching by showing that it is radically different from either Marxist or Liberal social theories. In doing so, I hope to resolve any scruples the reader might have, for reasons stated above or for other reasons, and assure him that the teaching does indeed grow organically out of Catholicism. In sum, I will show below that both the Marxist and Liberal traditions,which have their origin in the Enlightenment, share a defect that Catholic social teaching not only avoids, but addresses directly. Namely, both attempt to give an account of society on the basis of some underlying "amoral" dynamics, and in so doing, eclipse moral considerations from economic and political decisions. Historically, this has left a moral vacuum in society which has been filled by all sorts of injustices and resulted in countless suffering. We still live one particular version of that disorder today, what below I call "consumer-driven capitalism."

This unfortunate state of affairs came about because the Enlightenment reacted against Catholicism, and religion in general, and attempted to exclude morality from the public sphere, either by restricting it to the private sphere in the case of Liberalism, or by eliminating all together in the case of Marxism.

This unfortunate state of affairs came about because the Enlightenment reacted against Catholicism, and religion in general, and attempted to exclude morality from the public sphere, either by restricting it to the private sphere in the case of Liberalism, or by eliminating all together in the case of Marxism. Instead of moral reasoning, Enlightenment thinkers opted for procedural reasoning which they believed was morally neutral in the same way that the laws of physics are morally neutral. Their unlimited love for the natural sciences led them to appropriate scientific reasoning far beyond its proper limits and extend it to humans in society.

This project was bound to fail because humans are irreducibly moral creatures, and no amoral theory can possible describe them or prescribe norms for them. The only effect an amoral theory has if it is taken on as a complete understanding of our nature, is that it obscures moral awareness and leads to disordered behavior.

For this reason, I will call Marxism and Liberalism "theory" because they purport to be positive sciences like physics, and I will call Catholic social teaching a "teaching" because it unabashedly integrates a normative prescription with our social and economic world. In fact, Catholic social teaching, properly understood,belongs to moral theology and aims at responding to the mess created by the Enlightenment. My scope here is limited. If I succeed in awakening in the reader, especially the reader who has a position of responsibility within the community, a desire to seriously understand what scholars and popes have said about economic justice and to integrate that teaching into their lives, then this article has fulfilled its purpose.

II. Orthodox Marxism: The Material Dialectic and Morality Lost

It is important to distinguish Communism as the actual political movement that took power in Russia under Lenin in 1918 from the social theory that was invoked to justify it, namely Marxism. The relationship between what Marx said and what the Revolutionary Party picked up as the jargon for its propaganda is an uneasy one at best; so, I will take the accusation that some people have made against me, namely that Catholic social teaching is close in spirit to Communism, to mean that it is close to Marxism.

Otherwise, comparing theory and teaching on the one hand with an historical event on the other would be like comparing apples and oranges. But even with this distinction, Marxist social theory and Catholic social teaching are so different that the whole project of contrasting the two seems a little silly. In truth, the people who made the accusation did not know what they were saying; still, it was sufficient to hear any criticism of the "free" market for them to jump to conclusions, so I want this response to go on record. Moreover, my discussion of Marxism will bring out its essential defect so that its similarity to Liberal economics, despite the popular belief that these are polar opposites, will become obvious. The central doctrine of orthodox Marxism, the sine qua non, if you will,is the doctrine of the historical dialectic which aims at giving a total understanding of the human condition through an understanding of our history. Curiously enough, this aspect of Marxism ultimately derives from Christianity, if not in content, then at least in form. St. Augustine, in the City of God, gave Christians our lasting understanding of history as the succession of ages in which God's plan for the salvation of mankind unfolds. Unlike the mythical sense of time that the ancient Greeks possessed, in which archetypal events inaugurated by the gods in illo tempore were forever repeated, Christ came once and for all, and he came in history, as one who dwelt among us.

So, whereas pagan time was cyclical, Christian time is linear, with a definite beginning at Creation and the Fall, a definite middle with the coming of Christ and a definite end at the Final Judgment. This historical structure was first appropriated by Hegel, who emptied it of its Christian content and put in its place a pantheistic version. He saw history, not as the unfolding of God's plan, but as the unfolding of the World Spirit, and incarnations of this spirit were to be seen in the historical events and people of his day, like Napoleon. Linear history was next appropriated by Marx who turned Hegel upside down and said that it was not spirit, but matter and its impersonal, amoral laws that underlay history. But not the laws of physics; Marx was referring to the laws of economics.

Linear history was next appropriated by Marx who turned Hegel upside down and said that it was not spirit, but matter and its impersonal, amoral laws that underlay history. But not the laws ofphysics; Marx was referring to the laws of economics.

On this account, human history is driven forward by the interplay of a society's natural resources, means of production and means of distribution. From a primitive state, we evolved first into a slave economy, then a feudal economy, and now, a capitalist economy. But, there will be one final stage to the dialectic, the revolution, after which we will enter our socialist phase, history will end and we will live in the workers' paradise. That the dialectic must inevitably reach this critical point is demonstrated as follows: as capitalists get richer, the competition between them becomes fiercer, and the weaker members of their rank are forced into the working class, which in turn gets poorer. (Incidentally, if you hear something of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" in this, you may not find it surprising that Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to him. One wonders just how different Marx's thought is from that of a good bourgeois Victorian!)

Eventually, the suffering of the working class leads them to realize their common condition and a class consciousness forms where the workers begin to act cooperatively. In one final decisive moment, the workers simply take over the means of production and private ownership is abolished. The creativity of the worker, which was once alienated from him in the form of wage-labor, is unleashed and becomes reintegrated into his life; he lives blissfully ever after, spontaneously producing and sharing wealth. I think the similarities to Christian eschatology are obviouse nough to not need comment. Since Marx was aiming at a total understanding of our social condition, he had to account for other institutions, like politics, law, philosophy, art, literature, religion and so forth, besides economics. To include these in his system, he posited a duality in society between the economic infrastructure, which is made up of the natural resources and the means of production and distribution, and the superstructure, which comprises the politics, laws, and so forth. The former is the material base which essentially drives society forward, while the latter, the conscious activity of society, is simply the "after effect." This has very important implications in terms of our nature.

For Marx, man is not homo sapiens, a reasoning creature, but homo faber, man the producer, an economic automaton whose functioning merges with the blind dynamics of material dialectic. On this view, one should not think of the poor working conditions of late capitalism as offending some "natural" sense of justice which is grounded in "reason"- that's Catholic talk - rather, these conditions are simply the origins of the workers' consciousness.

(The comparison can be made to the picture of the mind arising from the material functioning of the brain. Individuals in a Marxist society are like neurons in the brain: no single individual has much awareness, but collectively they do.) The class consciousness of the workers, as it is emerges from the material dialectic in the late stages of capitalism, results in a consciousness of the revolution; in contrast, bourgeois consciousness is the system of philosophy, religion, art, politics, laws,etc., which serves to justify the privileged position of the capitalists.

These are the so-called "ruling ideas" of society which, in Marx's language, attempts to instill a "false" consciousness in the workers so that they are distracted from a "true" consciousness of their condition and of the revolution.

III. The Opium of the Masses

It is at this point that the fatal flaw of Marxism reveals itself in full force. In his endeavor to develop a theory which would be truly "scientific," Marx separated the dynamics of society, which he represented as amoral and impersonal laws, from the living individuals who make up that society and are moral beings. Let me expand on this. Impersonal laws are fine in physics. It is absurd to think of the underlying constituents of a table, say, as deliberating over their condition, weighing their possible choices, considering the consequences of each, and paying the price for any immoral behavior afterwards. The dynamics of electrons is totally determined by the laws of physics which constrain them to behave in one and only one way, and they have no "choice" in the matter. Because of this, we would hardly think of treating electrons as moral creatures. We would not appeal to their freedom, discuss possibilities with them, feel that they should be punished for doing the "wrong" thing, and so on. It is simply the case that electrons cannot do the "wrong" thing, because they blindly follow set rules; so, one is justified in talking about them in an amoral fashion. But, humans do have an inner freedom and they can consciously choose among different possibilities. So, in so far as Marx reduces society to amoral laws, his theory can no longer speak to moral creatures.

Marx can no more tell an individual what he should or should not do than a physicist could tell an electron what it should or should not do. Or, put another way, I, as an individual, have no idea what to do with Marxism because nowhere does Marx ever say what I ought to do, only what I will do as an integral part of my class and its place in the dialectic. But this offends my sense of inner freedom. Do I not have some awareness of my situation and of the possibilities it entails? Can I not freely choose among these possibilities? And if I can, how should I choose? On the moral question, Marx is absolutely silent. As far as he's concerned, my behavior is determined like that of an electron.This problem manifests itself most forcefully in terms of the question of the revolution. First, consider it from the workers' perspective. Since the material dialectic proceeds to its critical point by an impersonal dynamic, the revolution is inevitable. But then, the workers might reasonably conclude that they need not work to bring it about because, after all, there is no possibility that it will not happen. Thus we arrive at an absurdity where the workers will inevitably revolt, but need not do anything for that revolution to occur! A similar absurdity is encountered when one consider the effect that Marxism would have on the capitalists. Now that they are aware of the material dialectic and the coming crisis,they could work towards resisting the revolution or even preventing it.

Either way, one could argue that the workers are better off if the dialectic is kept secret, not only from the capitalists, but also from themselves! In fact, pushing this ironic twist of reasoning further, one might speculate that we are not living in the workers' paradise today because awareness of the dialectic has already undermined the dynamics of the dialectic itself! Marx never considered what consequences an awareness of his theory might have because consciousness for Marx was only an "after effect" and had no causal efficacy. But, as we can see, only absurdity follows from such a position. In sum, we might find Marxism an elegant and sophisticated social theory, but what, pray tell, do we do with it?! How do we act on the basis of the knowledge it imparts? Do we sit by our windows and watch the inevitability of history unfold itself, or do we go into the streets and participate?

This is a subtle, but serious, flaw that is not limited to Marxism. As soon as one tries to construct any social theory based on an amoral dynamic, one succeeds in producing a theory which not only has no normative value for us, but is meaningless because we cannot resolve how it fits into our lives. How can an essentially amoral theory speak to essentially moral creatures? Nonetheless, the mind can fall under the spell of this amoralism, and when one does, it is not the case that one begins to act amorally, which is impossible for moral creatures; rather,one loses touch with the moral law and begins to act in a disordered fashion. So, in so far as Marxism aims at being purely an amoral description of society, it is utterly useless as a normative prescription for action. And in so far as one tries to internalize it as such, one looses touch with one's moral nature and acts in a disordered fashion. Injustices are sure to follow. Is it any wonder that Marxism was so easily picked up by the Communist party as propaganda and used to justify anything? As ideology, it lulled people into a moral slumber that allowed Stalin to commit atrocities against the people in the name of the People!

But I will not dwell on these sins because the media in the West has neverlost an opportunity to discredit Communism with them and we are all well informed about Soviet atrocities. But much to the media's chagrin, a proper analysis of the situation shows that Liberalism is equally implicated in the sins of its Enlightenment sibling! Below, I will turn my tactics around. Rather than dwell on Liberal economic theory, I will quickly expose the principle of amoralism in it and then turn to a longer discussion of just how that moral vacuum has been filled by disord in theWest. Whereas Marxist theory is little known here, but its effects well known, the situation with Liberal theory is somewhat reversed: the connection between its amoral principles and the resulting disordered social practices has not been brought to the foreground. Just how Liberal economics lulls us into moral slumber in our world is not discussed, or if the criticism is raised, it is easily dismissed as not worthy of serious consideration in the public forum.

IV. Liberal Economics: The Commodification of Everything and Morality Sold

Let me begin with a distinction similar to the one I made above. On the one hand we have Liberal economics, the exponent for which below will be Adam Smith who is considered its father, and on the other hand, we have the historical event which we are living today and which I will call capitalism (or the "free" market). Again, the relationship between theory and practice is a difficult one because, although the former is taken as the justification for the latter, the degree to which the practice truly reflects Smith's intentions is a matter of scholarly debate. But, it is not important for us to sift through this relationship because it will suffice to show that the theory is based on a central principle of amoral dynamics and so, regardless of what Smith intended, in so far as it is taken as justification, it eclipses moral awareness and leads to disorder; all else is just details. Below, I will show precisely what this principle is and how it has led first to labor-driven and now to consumer-driven capitalism. The second manifestation of this monster has succeeded to an historically unprecedented degree in absorbing life into economics. If the celebration of the life God gave us begins when economic necessity ends, it is little wonder that capitalism contributes to a growing cultural malaise. We have forgotten that work is for man and meant to dignify him, not vice versa.

Much of the Enlightenment can be understood as the appropriation of Medieval thinking, made "scientific." Marxism, as we have seen, takes the idea of linear history, empties it of God and puts in His place the material dialectic. Similarly Liberal economics adopts Natural Law from moral theology, but empties of its moral content, and applies it to economics. Natural Law, as it is generally understood, is God's intention for how man and society ought to operate. If a society goes against this law, then harm follows of its own accord, that is, it follows naturally and not as fire and brimstone from heaven. For instance, if the members of a society have made their peace with theft, then they must also pay the price because wherever there are thieves, there are also victims, and the society's collective misbehavior becomes its own punishment. But, this state of affairs can lead people to an awareness of their error and so there is the possibility of self-correction: when people start to realize that stealing is not such a good idea, laws are enacted, enforced, and so forth.

Adam Smith, in his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, appropriated this structure to explain the dynamics of the marketplace. According to Smith's account, the market is guided by laws of its own that naturally adjust the production and exchange of goods so that everyone in society benefits in the maximum way possible. These are not legislated laws, but in analogy to Natural Law, they are the "invisible hand" that guides the economy to meet the needs of society. The worst of all possible sins, then, would be to interfere with their workings; rather, one should always follow the rule of laissez-faire, "leave it alone". When a society acts against the Natural Law, it puts into play its own punishment; similarly when a society interferes with the free market, it falls short of meeting the needs of the people. The central principle operating here is the law of supply and demand which Smith formulated as follows:

1) If there is a demand for a particular product, then there will be a market for it. The product is at first scarce and its price high. But this will attract other manufacturers which want to compete and the net effect will be to reduce scarcity and bring down the price to a "fair" range.

2) If there is no demand for a particular product, then there will be no market for it. The product is in abundance and its price low. Manufacturers producing it will switch to producing other products for which they get a better return.

So, both the human and natural resources of society are shifted away from products not in demand to ones that are and any scarcity is alleviated. The system isself-correcting.The law of supply and demand, as it has been sketched out so far, is the amoral dynamics of Liberal economics and it aims at describing how the economy will adjust itself through the workings of an "invisible hand" (by"invisible" read impersonal, unconscious and amoral); but, again like the material dialectic or the laws of physics, it does not give us any normative prescription for action. Smith, as a good bourgeois, was not as radical in this respect as Marx, and he did recognize that there must be some deliberations going on in the decision making process of individuals.

To flesh out his theory, then, Smith described this behavior as the enlightened pursuit of self-interest and so implicitly prescribed it as normative-enlightened because the reasoning individual would recognize that violating the common good was not to his benefit. This pursuit leads to the law of supply and demand because, in pursuing their own self-interests, manufacturers are continuously competing to get ahead, and so adjusting the supply side to match the demand side. But it is rather clear that Smith's moral prescription is custom-tailored to fit his law, and is only secondary to it.

He simply answered the question of how to make his amoral law have the semblance of normative prescription by constructing that prescription which would make it work; so, like Marx, he put the amoral dynamics before any moral considerations and came up with a formula that can be summarized as "private vice equals public virtue."

But how does one sympathize with such a norm? How is the dignity of man guaranteed if this consideration is not brought in from the start? One answer Smith might put forward is that the protection of our dignity emerges as collective behavior through his law; but, it does not take much to construct scenarios which are consistent with the law, and yet affront our dignity. The history of capitalism is the history of such refuting scenarios. He might add that the pursuit of self-interests must be enlightened, that it must take into consideration the common good. But then he will not be able to justify the rule of laissez-faire. If the pursuits are not "enlightened," are we justified in interfering with the free market? Despite Smith's poor attempt to make his theory prescriptive, it remains essentially amoral, and in so far as it is used by our society to justify the "free" market, it leads to disorder. The suffering of marginalized individuals is explained away, or worse, simply dismissed on the premise that the law of supply and demand guarantees "fairness," and these individuals have no right to complain. In sum, it becomes ideology.

First in the history of capitalist disorders is the one that is now best understood. It set in around the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and by the 1840s was inspiring Marx to formulate his theory. By the turn of the 19th century it had reached revolutionary fury and in 1918 this fury burst forth in Russia. In the US, it did not entertain a revolutionary hope, but it still manifested itself in the formation of labor unions and the violence that attended them, especially because of the involvement ofthe Mafia which remained a problem well into the '50s and early '60s.

Smith's laissez-faire economics was a naive hope at best,but when it was combined with the bourgeois dogma of absolute property rights (the belief that one can do whatever one wants with one's own property), it became downright immoral and an immediate danger to the average worker. Not factored into Smith's considerations was the fact that at least one way in which manufacturers could operate in their own self-interest was by lowering labor costs. Individuals were not only the agents in society that created demand by purchasing products, but they were also the labor force and, thus, a integral element of the supply side that could be purchased at an ever decreasing price as labor became available in abundance. And far from competing for labor resources, manufacturers quickly discovered that people were quite desperate for money and were forced to sell themselves at less than a just wage-a dramatic instance of Smith's law failing to set a "fair" price.

Collective exploitation of this situation by the capitalists led to inordinately poor working conditions, long hours in sweatshops, child and woman slave labor, and a general degradation of the masses of humanity that had nothing other than their labor to sell-we enter here the world of Charles Dickens. The advent of unions and collective bargaining somewhat protected the worker who otherwise stood naked before these industrial giants; but, the problem remains with us today and shows no sign of relief. Once again, we have an instance of the impossibility of founding an economic system on an amoral principle and expecting the dignity of man to be protected. The origin of the second major event in the history of capitalist disorders, at least here in the US, is located with Calvin Coolidge and his generation. If we call the first phase of capitalism labor-driven in that exploitation was concentrated on the labor force, we may call the second phase consumer-driven because attention was shifted onto the consumer. Although we inherit both problems today, each surfacing in turn, consumer-driven capitalism is much more insidious in that it has been largely successful in absorbing our culture and churning it into mush.

Let's see how this has come about. The '20s saw the first industrialists who realized that the very factory workers they employed were also the consumers of their products. So, the industrialists were undermining their own interests by paying the workers too low a wage: if the workers could not afford the products, the markets would remain restricted. Instead, the industrialists calculated that by increasing the workers' wages by a certain amount, the latter would have a surplus income and want to own items of "luxury." If wages and prices were balanced just right, and the workers instilled with a desire for these luxuries, the industrialists would increase their overall profits. Overnight, the mass consumer was born, caught in a vicious circle where still more labor was needed to obtain the very items the worker desired. As time progressed, society became dependent on these "luxuries," like the automobile, and we became enmeshed in our present economic monster.Advertising was instrumental in this shift. Beginning in the '20s and with increasing frequency, advertisements were used to entice consumers by presenting them with a vision of the good life as one with filled with luxuries. Fashion magazines gave the public the latest designs which, ofcourse, were always changing; and, for the first time, women were shown as obsessing over their looks in the mirror. The depression disrupted much of the economy's activity, as did the war, but as the US recovered, capitalism became ever more consumer-driven.

In the '50s, the business of advertising became a major industry in its own right, shaping our culture through the icons it injected into the popular imagination. When one considers that the mere symbol of a soft-drink, Coca-Cola, has won international recognition, one is struck by the absurdity of the situation! Today, there is a certain cultural current which ridicules the emptiness of these icons and recognizes their facile attempt at manipulation, but this has not stopped manufacturers from finding other ways of exploiting consumers. We are told that marketing surveys are for our benefit, so that manufacturers know what the public wants and can better serve us. But, this is just a front; what they really want to know is our spending impulses. Frugality is not a capitalist virtue.Thus, the brave new idea of consumerism expanded Smith's amoral law to cover, and hence disorder, a whole new dimension of society. When Smith proposed his law of supply and demand, he did not consider the possibility that demand could be generated out of whim by the enticement of manufacturers; rather, he was thinking of average needs and wants.

Of course, with the moral nature of human beings eclipsed, this sort ofconsideration is no longer available to the exponent of Liberal economics who is forced to respond that it is the individual's "free" choice and responsibility whether or not to consume a particular product. This, of course, presupposes that the individual's sensibilities are formed in the private sphere previous to his becoming a consumer in the public sphere, and that he has the moral strength to avoid continuous temptation; but, as we well know, this is exactly what advertising aims at undermining. It wants to form a consumer that acts on whim as often as possible and is given over to impulse. Here we must resist the tendency to put the blame squarely on the individual and his lack of frugality. Remember, as fallen creatures, we are all weak to some extent. A more charitable outlook recognizes that guilt also lies in the hands of those who take advantage of that weakness without shame. Individuals in a society depend on one another when moral strength fails them. Consumer-driven capitalism betrays such a trust. So, whereas labor-driven capitalism preyed on those who only had themselves to sell on the labor market, consumer-driven capitalism preys on our moral infirmities. Either way, the weakest member of society always pays the most.

But, consider how unique an historical situation this is. Unlike most social orders in the past or elsewhere in the world today, which require a certain amount of self-restraint and sublimation of base desires, capitalism is a social order which thrives off of the opposite! Not "private vice equals public virtue", but "private vice equals public resilience" - injustices abound, but the system is too rigid to allow for correction. Capitalism only bottoms out at dangerous decivilizing forces which are curtailed either by our innate sensibilities or by intervention of the state. Other than this, consumer-driven capitalism seems able to pick up any aspect of human life, make it into a commodity, and sell it back to us as a product, a simulation of the real which becomes the only reality we know. We enter the world of Andy Warhol; life becomes a stroll through the department store, with the isolated narcissist at the center and all of life as commodity stretched out before him. Like an infant which still identifies the whole world as an extension of itself, the consumer experiences pain when his wants are withdrawn and numbness when he is satiated.

The highest and best in man, his God-given existence and the celebration of that life in art, literature, spirituality and so forth, is swallowed up in the abyss of consumerism. Our senses are packaged and sold back to us: taste is commodified in the mass-produced food we purchase at supermarkets, sight is commodified in TV images, and sound is commodified in pop music. Even Gregorian Chants are no longer the special occasion of a religious celebration; they are the digitized sounds whose aura has been striped; they are spliced in with alternative music, as the group Enigma did, and even make the top 40s list. Love is commodified in sex and sex in its mechanical reproduction as pornography. Children are commodified in artificial contraception or abortion; there is a whole money-making industry around the elimination of the "unwanted." World events are commodified in the news; you won't see it if it doesn't sell commercial time. Time is commodified in interest rates; if you want today what you can only afford tomorrow, you must pay for the intermediate time. Health is commodified in medical insurance; peace of mind carries a cost.

Spirituality is commodified in therapy and self-fulfillment. The mind is commodified in skills that are sold on the job market; gone are the days when education was "food for the soul." The freedom these various activities and entities once had, to be for their own sake, has been taken up within an economic system which only returns them to us for a price, and then only as a simulation of their original reality. In consumer-driven capitalism, economics strives for ontology: an entity exists only to the extent that it can be made into a commodity and sold on the market. It is difficult to minimize the extent to which consumerism has chewed up our culture and spit it out as mush. An interesting illustration is afforded by the fate of certain counter-cultural movements in our society.

Consider the hippies, which began as a reaction against the materialism of the '50s and preached an anti-establishment gospel. Yet, while their music aimed to create a new consciousness of "peace and love" which would "overthrow the establishment," the sale of their records turned the music industry to a political force mandating the very things the music protested. It seems that even attempts at overthrowing consumer-driven capitalism are co-opted by it and sold back to the"revolutionaries"! Today, the "counter-culture," or "alternative" as it is called, is a well-established market. To be clear, I have little sympathies for the hippies; it was before my time and the whole affair strikes me as something short of pure silliness, but neither do I sympathize with what they were reacting against. Nor am I preaching asubversion of the system-heaven knows what injustices will follow. But failed attempts at subversion do reveal the resilience of the system: one wonders if other cultures would have survived the level of decadence introduced by the hippies into ours. Today my students bring me the lyrics of popular alternative, rap and heavy metal bands. One of them, Rage against the Machine, has for its album cover a collage of various revolutionary books, like The Anarchist Cookbook. The lyrics are filled with misdirected anger and incite us to "rage," to "fight the system," and so forth. This is not a danger to capitalism, it is a celebration of it!

The CDs and related cultural fetishes, like body piercing, sell; there is a market to be exploited here. Alternative is the mainstream. If these students are really seeking an alternative to the culture of death theyhave inherited, they might try Catholicism.The same resilience and ability to deflect criticisms is found in our public domain discourse, in particular, as it is carried out in the media. Economic concerns encompass a major portion of our public debates, to besure, but these remain so far in the abstract as to be of little value to us; that is, we cannot act on the information we are given.

Why are economic injustices not reported as such? Why doesn't the media tell us what particular decisions were taken by what particular companies and what effect these decisions had? (We hear lots of noise when it comes to issues of ecology. Why not the same volume when it comes to the concerns of the workers?) We know companies downsize, but why is there no follow-up on just what happens to those individuals who have the misfortune to experience it? Do they find a new job? If they do, does their pay decrease? Or, work hours increase? Do they find it harder to make ends meet? And just where are we going with all this economic activity? Where do we want to go? How does it all fit into what constitutes a good life, a life worthy of the existence God has given us? These essentially moral questions are generally excluded from our public discourse. The question of why this is the case and the role the media plays is profoundly complex and I cannot pretend to answer it here.

Nonetheless there are at least three criticisms which are worth mentionining because each has enough truth in it as to alert us to the dangers. The first comes from the political Right and is not always very probing in its analysis. It simply points to the fact that the news has a certain Left-wing bias and tends to set the agenda for public discussion accordingly. There is some truth to this, particularly when it comes to issues of sexuality, but less so when it comes to economics per se. For instance, it is not often that we hear a debate about how couples are punished economically for having a family.

The sacrifices parents must make today are substantial given that they must guarantee their children will properly integrate into society; among other things, they must worry about giving them a college education. At a cost about $50,000 per child for college alone, this is not a trivial expense, and it is sufficient to put a real economic wedge between DINKS and families. DINKS (couples with Double Incomes and No Kids) live in a different economic world, and therefore cling to different values, than families with children. Yet, one often hears arguments in accord with their values: it is the responsibility of the couple to limit their family within their economic means. This is true; but what limits the economic means of families? An economy of mass consumption and profit margins. Is it any wonder that so many of our youth feel displaced in a world that puts such a heavy price on their heads?

Their very existence is pitted against the profit margins of companies and the consumerism of the previous generation. But how often is this argument put forward in the public arena? Its mere elimination shows a biasing of certain values.The two other criticisms of the media are more probing because they show precisely how the media has merged into the functioning of consumer-driven capitalism: in effect, even our perception of the world as it is given to us by the news is caught up in commodification where what counts as the reality of our situation is only its simulation, packaged and sold back to us. The first criticism comes from Chomsky and other Leftist critics. As capitalism discovered its new vocation in advertising, newspapers increased their profits by augmenting returns from sales of the paper with returns from advertising. Soon newspapers became dependent mostly on the latter,and were co-opted by consumer-driven capitalism. Papers which resisted sales of advertising could not compete and folded. The Daily Herald affords an example of this. As a Left-wing British paper, it once had more than twice the circulation of The Times, The Financial Times and The Guardian combined; but, refusing to sell advertisements for ideological reasons, it collapsed in the '60s.

So, asks Chomsky, what kind of news would one expect to come out of a media that is comprised of, and responsible to, large corporations? Clearly, it would be dedicated primarily to their interests and act as an effective filter for challenging ideas. Chomsky gives a disturbing example of this filtering process. Two simultaneous and comparable atrocities occurred in the mid to late '70s in the South East Pacific; one in Cambodia, the other in East Timor. While the first was intensely covered by The New York Times, the other was not. Why? Because the first was committed by Communists (the Khmer Rouge), who were not very good business allies of American companies, and the second by the Indonesians, who were, especially when it came to the sales of arms. East Timor, a largely Catholic and egalitarian country, was simply expendable. Only "off-beat" media, like those run by Catholics committed to social justice, reported much about East Timor. They still do. The December 1996 edition of The Catholic Worker has a short article on the small island; it reports that the Nobel Peace Prize this year is shared by Bishop Carlos Belo of Dili, capitol of East Timor, and Jose Ramos-Horta, the foreign minister in exile.The final criticism of the commodification of the media comes from radical pessimists, like Baudrillard, and does not look to vested capitalist interests as an explanation. On this view, the commodification of everything has reached such a critical degree in our society that reality itself has been leveled. We see this in a totally apathetic society which simply absorbs whatever is thrown at it. After years of simulated reality on television, commercials of happy people with fake smiles, implicit promises of outrageous proportions, the general public has totally succumbed-its only reality is the commodity. For instance, given the choice between watching a political debate or a football game on TV, most people opt for the latter. Both are judged strictly as commodities for consumption. And why not? Watching the evening news, we see daily stories about famines in Africa juxtaposed with stories about how Scruffy the dog saved Fluffy the cat from mortal peril: one naturally wonders just what the reality of television is! Unlike Chomsky's account, critical discussions in the public sphere do not happen, not because it would upset those who control the means by which the discussions would occur, but because such discussions simply do not matter. The only reality such debates have is their value as commodity, in which case, Scruffy and Fluffy are on par with major famines, and both are equal to one minute of air time. This is a rather hopeless view of things, but again, there is some truth in it. And the extent to which it is true, is the extent to which Adam Smith's amoral law of supply and demand has absorbed our world.

V. Towards a Culture of Life: Catholic Social Teaching and Morality Restored

It is time to move past the Enlightenment's vision of the human being as the duality of private and public sphere, the latter being merely the nexus where impersonal and amoral laws meet. This distorted view of our nature has opened up a crack in our world that has been filled by the monsters described above. The rise and fall of Communism and the present disorder in the East, the culture of death in the West, these are not trivial matters and they reflect the devastating effect of the amoral view we have adopted towards ourselves and our society. (Even Fascism and Nazism can be understood in this context, but as reactions against the Enlightenment rather than offsprings of it.) And the danger is still with us. The next round of economic nightmare may be just around the corner. Today, multinationals operate beyond any nation's power to curtail their excesses and truly are Titans that need not have any concern for us ordinary mortals. We tolerate them to the extent that we hope that, in their indifference to our humanity, it is our neighbor they will step on, and not us. Even our citizenship and the rights it entails cannot effectively protect us; multinationals intimidate their host countries with economic retaliation by threatening to withdraw to countries where labor or natural resources are cheaper. There are some very real dangers here in terms of the dignity of man, both in the First and Third Worlds.

The first step, then, towards addressing this problem is to regain what was lost by the Enlightenment, namely the view of ourselves as essentially integral moral creatures. We have lost sight of the fact that it is we who make the decisions that have repercussion on ourselves and on our fellow man. We are responsible, not some impersonal force like the law of supply and demand; and, we must not give credence to conclusions based on the workings of these ghosts, like the injunction not to interfere with the "free" market. The place of Catholic social teaching in all of this should now be clear: it is directed squarely at the eclipsed moral questions that are not being asked by our society and it unabashedly puts forward norms for the limits of economic, political and social decisions in the aim of protection our dignity. Needless to say, this approach is sorely opposed by our society, with its gut reaction that any moral considerations, especially if these originate in religious thought, are partisan and would unfairly privilege one set of values over another. It is not considered possible that such considerations might benefit all. Rather, the preferred modern solution is to lull ourselves into slumber with the belief that there can be some morally neutral procedural rules in the public domain which guarantee "fairness" to everyone. The evidence is now in, and we can safely conclude that nothing of the sort has occurred: the "system" does not insure justice, people of good will do.

Finally, I would like to end with a caveat. Today, there is a very negative sense associated with the word "morality" and the criticisms made above do little to bring out its positive side. (Sometimes the word "ethics" is used, but this does not always help.) It is true that much of our concern in economic justice regards the responsibility of those who have power before those who do not; for instance, it can be concluded that capitalists act immorally when they take advantage of desperate workers by offering them less than just wage. But there is a positive sense to "morality" beyond the self-restraint we are expected to take on ourselves to do right by our neighbor.

As Catholics, we look to the next world as our true home, but not at the expense of degrading this one. We value the life God has given us and the wonderful things in it that make it meaningful and worth living. There is deep satisfaction the many walks of life and we are called to these things for our own fulfillment, each in his own way. When we are young, we are educated and take on the wisdom of our society; we express our creativity in work; we marry, raise our children and grandchildren and see that they pick up where we left off; some of us dedicate ourselves to the service of others and God in various ministries. All these things are good; they make life worth living and the moral law is meant to guarantee them for us. It is not some empty legalistic code which renders life dreary, but the means by which we may have a culture of life.

Instead, having lost sight of this end, we now have a culture of death, one in which life is mostly a dreary matter of survival-just ask the GM worker who screws in the same bolt eight hours a day, six days a week. To the extent that morality has been vanquished from the social sphere, economic concerns have returned with a vengeance to frustrate life and fill it with needless anxiety. If we are to surpass our culture of death and regain life, we must reintegrate morality in our public sphere. Against the Enlightenment's social theories, we need Catholic social teaching.

Culture Wars
©Copyright 1998

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Communism and Woman

by Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen

The sixth in a series of addresses entitled LIGHT YOUR LAMPS delivered in the Catholic Hour on March 2, 1947, by Rt. Rev. Msgr. Fulton J. Sheen of the Catholic University of America, produced by the National Council of Catholic Men in cooperation with the National Broadcasting Company. After the series has been concluded on the radio, it will be made available in a pamphlet.

The proudest boast of Communism is that it has finally emancipated the woman. Marx writes: "Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity. All are instruments of labor." The key word here is instrument which reduces a human being to the dignity of a monkey wrench. The assumption was that woman was free as soon as she became available for production. One of the paradoxes of our irrational world is that woman today is glorified when she produces an Atomic Bomb, but not when she can produce life. It is like praising violinists for producing sewer pipes instead of melodies.

At the very beginning of the Communist Revolution in Russia a decree was passed declaring that all women between the ages of seventeen and thirty-two became the property of the State, and that the rights of husbands were abolished. (Novaia Zhizn, No. 54, 1918 p. 2.) In keeping with the idea that liberation means working in a factory rather than in a home, we read in a Soviet book published in 1935: "Women's labor has become one of the main sources from which industry could draw fresh supplies of workers. During the earlier years of the first Five Year Plan, there were about six million housewives in the towns. All the local Communist organizations received orders to call up these reserves and attach them to production." (Shaburova, Woman is a Great Power, 1935 edition, p. 32) The women refused to accept what the Communists called "the emancipation for women from depressing domestic atmosphere" but they were ultimately forced into "emancipation" and began working in mines, sewers, and in the manipulation of pneumatic drills. A few years ago twenty-three percent of the miners were women. The Soviet poets composed ballads for the women to sing as they were "released from socially unprofitable and exhausting domestic toil." (Shaburova, Ibid, p. 36)

"Formerly women only knew how to cook soup and porridge,
Now they go to the foundry — At the foundry it is nicer." (Ibid, p. 38)

This idea of the emancipation of women through industrialization is not altogether a Communist idea, but like many others has been derived from Western bourgeois capitalistic civilization which thought of the liberation of woman in terms of equality with men. The only difference is that the Communist merely carried the idea to its logical extreme, and if it scandalizes us now it is because our bourgeois world never understood the full implication of its error.

The two basic errors of both Communism and a capitalistic liberal civilization on this subject were: 1) Women were never emancipated until modern times. Religion particularly kept them in servitude; 2) Equality means the right of a woman to do a man's work.

First, it is not true that women began to be emancipated in modern times and in direct proportion to the decline of religion. The fact is that woman's subjection began in the seventeenth century with the break-up of Christendom and took on a positive form at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Under the Christian civilization women enjoyed rights, privileges, honors and dignities which have since been swallowed up by the machine age.

In eighty-five Guilds in England during the Middle Ages, seventy-two had women members on an equal basis with men in such professions as barbers and sailors. They were probably just as outspoken as men because one of the rules of the Guilds was that "the sistern as well as the brethren" may not engage in disorderly or contumacious debates. In Paris there were fifteen guilds reserved exclusively for women, while eighty of the Parisian guilds were mixed. Nothing is more erroneous historically than the belief that it was our modern age which recognized women in the professions. The records of these Christian times reveal the names of thousands upon thousands of women who influenced society and whose names are now enrolled in the catalogue of saints, Catherine of Sienna alone leaving eleven large volumes of her writings. Up until the seventeenth century in England, women functioned in business perhaps even more than today. In fact, so many were in business that it was provided by law that the husband should not be responsible for her debts. Between 1553 and 1640 ten percent of the publishing in England was done by women. Because the homes did their own weaving, cooking and laundry it has been estimated that women in pre-industrial days were producing half the goods required by society. In the Middle Ages women were as well educated as men and it was not until the seventeenth century that women were barred from education. Then at the time of the Industrial Revolution all the activities and freedom of women were curtailed as the machine took over the business of production and men moved into the factory. Then came a loss of legal rights by women which reached its fulness in Blackstone who pronounced woman's "civil death" in law.

As these disabilities continued woman felt the loss of her freedom, and rightly so, because she felt she had been hurt by man who robbed her of her legal rights, and she fell into the error of believing that she ought to proclaim herself the equal of man, forgetful that a certain superiority was already hers because of her functional difference from man. Equality then came to mean negatively, the destruction of all privileges enjoyed by specific persons or classes, and positively, as absolute and unconditioned sex equality with all men. These ideas were incorporated into the first resolution for sex equality passed in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848: "Resolved that woman is man's equal, was intended to be so by the Creator,1 and the highest good of the race demands that she be recognized as such."

This brings us to the second error in the bourgeois-capitalistic theory of women, namely, the failure to make distinction between mathematical and proportional equality. Mathematical equality implies exactness of remuneration; for example, two men who work at the same job at the same factory should receive equal pay. Proportional equality means that each should receive his pay according to his function. In a family, for example, all children should be cared for by the parents, but it does not mean that because sixteen year old Mary gets an evening gown with an organdy trim the parents should give seventeen year old Johnnie the same thing. Women in seeking to regain some of the rights and privileges they had in Christian civilization thought of equality in mathematical terms or in terms of sex. Feeling themselves overcome by a monster called "man" they identified freedom and equality with the right to do a man's job. All the psychological, social and other advantages which were peculiar to women were ignored until the inanities of the bourgeois world reached their climax in Communism where a woman was emancipated the moment she went to work in a mine. The result has been that woman's imitation of man and her flight from motherhood has developed neuroses and psychoses which have reached alarming proportions.

The Christian civilization never stressed equality in a mathematical sense, but only in the proportional sense, for equality is wrong when it makes the woman a poor imitation of man. Once she became man's mathematical equal, he no longer stood when she came into a room, no longer gave her a seat in a bus, and no longer took off his hat in an elevator. The other day in a New York subway a man gave a woman his seat and she fainted. When she was revived she thanked him, and he fainted.

Modern woman has been made equal with man, but she has not been made happy. She has been emancipated from a clock and thereby no longer free to swing, or as a flower has been emancipated from its roots, only to wither and die. She has been cheapened in her search for mathematical equality in two ways: by becoming a victim to man by becoming only the instrument of his pleasure, ministering to his needs in a sterile exchange of egotism. A victim to the machine by subordinating the creative principle of life to the production of non-living things, which is the essence of Communism.

This is not a condemnation of a professional woman, because the important question is not whether a woman finds favor in the eyes of a man, but whether she can satisfy the basic instincts of womanhood. If it were the man that made a difference to a woman and all that wifehood and motherhood entail, then the least womanly of all women would be found in convents. The fact is, however, that nowhere else are more normal, and certainly more happy women to be found on this earth. One might add also, that nowhere else are there so many young women,2 for a peculiar quality about the spiritual life is that it keeps a woman young. Cosmetics, mud baths, sneezeless soaps are lacking, but they manage to keep young and unwrinkled because they are at peace.

What makes the difference in woman is not therefore a man, but whether a certain God-given qualities which are specifically hers are given adequate and full expression. These qualities are principally, devotion, sacrifice and love. They need not necessarily be expressed in a family, nor even in a convent. They can find an outlet in the social world, in the care of the sick, the poor, the ignorant —in a word— in the seven corporal works of mercy. It is sometimes said that the professional woman is hard. This may in a few instances be true, but it is not because she is in a profession, but because she has alienated her profession from contact with human beings in a way to satisfy the deeper cravings of her heart. It may very well be that the revolt against morality, and the exaltation of sensuous pleasure as the purpose of life, are due to the loss of the spiritual fulfillment of existence. Having been frustrated and disillusioned, such souls first become bored, then cynical, and finally, suicidal. Wherein lies the solution? In a return to the Christian concept wherein stress is placed not on equality but equity.

Equality is law. It is mathematical, abstract, universal, indifferent to conditions, circumstances and differences. Equity is love, mercy, understanding, sympathy — consideration of details, appeals, and departures from the fixed rules of courts which law has not yet embraced. In particular, it is the a application of law to an individual person. It places its reliance on moral principles and is guided by an understanding of the motives of individual families which fall outside the scope of the rigors of law. In the old English law of Christian days the subjects in petitioning the court for extraordinary privileges, asked for them "for the love of God and in the way of charity." For that reason the heads of courts of equity were the clergy who drew their decisions from Canon Law. In vain did the civil lawyers with their exact prescriptions argue against their opinions. The iron ring outside a Cathedral door, which a pursued criminal might grasp, gave him what is known as the "right of sanctuary" and while giving him immunity from the prescriptions of civil law, made him subject to the more merciful law of the Church.

Applying this distinction to women, we are saying that equity rather than equality should be the basis of all the claims of women. It goes beyond equality by claiming superiority in certain aspects of life. Equity is the perfection of equality, not a substitute. It has the advantages of recognizing the specific difference between man and woman, which equality does not have. As a matter of fact, they are not equal in sex; they are quite unequal, and it is only because they are unequal that they complement one another. The violin and the bow are not equal. Each has a superiority of function. Man and woman are equal inasmuch as they have the same rights and liberties,3 the same final goal of life and both have been redeemed by the Blood of Our Divine Saviour — but they are different in function. It is that truth which solves the problem. One of the greatest of the Old Testament stories reveals this difference. While the Jews were under Persian captivity, Aman, the prime minister of King Assuerus, asked his master to slay the Jews because they obeyed the law of God rather than the Persian law. When the order went out that the Jews were to be massacred, Esther was asked to approach the wicked King and plead for her people. There was a law that no one should enter the King's presence under the penalty of death, unless the King extended his scepter as a permission to approach the throne. That was the law. But Esther said: "I will go in to the King, against the law, not being called, and expose myself to death and to danger." (Esther 4: 6) Esther fasted an prayed and then approached the throne. Would the scepter be lowered? The King held tout the golden scepter, and Esther drew near and kissed the top of it, and the King said to her: "What wilt thou, Queen Esther? What is thy request? (Esther 5:3)

This story has been interpreted through the Christian ages as meaning that God will reserve to Himself the reign of justice and law, but to Mary, His Mother will be given the reign of mercy. During the Christian ages, Our Blessed Mother bore a title which has been forgotten, but it is revived in two modern non-Catholic writers, Henry Adams and Mary R. Beard. Adams described the Lady of Equity in the Cathedral of Chartres. Stretching through the nave of the Church are two sets of priceless stained glass windows, the one given by Blanche of Castile, the other by Pierre de Dreux which seems to "carry across the very heart of the cathedral" a kind of civil war. Over the main altar however sits the Virgin Mary, the Lady of Equity, with the Holy Child on her knees, presiding over the courts, listening serenely to pleas for mercy in behalf of their sins. As Mary Beard beautifully put it: "The Virgin signified to the people moral, human or humane power, as against the stern mandates of God's law." And we might add, this is the woman's special glory — mercy, pity, understanding, intuition of human needs, call it anything you please. When women step down from the role of the Lady of Equity and her prototype Esther, and insist only on equality, they lose their greatest opportunity to change the world. Law has broken down today. Jurists no longer believe in a Divine Judge behind Law. Obligations are no longer sacred. Even peace is based upon the power of Three Nations rather than on the Justice of God. Shall women, in this day of the collapse of justice equate themselves with men in rigid exactness, or shall they rally to Equity, to mercy and love and give to a cruel and lawless world some something that equality cannot give? Whence shall come a devotion to causes, if women who are capable of greater devotion then men, insist on a cold equality? How shall wars be stopped and the taking of young life, if women, like men, trust only in law?

But if women, in the full consciousness of their creativeness say to the world: "It takes us twenty years to make a man, and we rebel against wars every generation snuffing out that manhood in war." Such an attitude would do more for the peace of the world than all the covenants and pacts that have no other basis than expediency and deceit. Did women but recognize the truth hidden in the Lady of Equity, love might be restored to homes and families. The reason there is little love now is because in the human order there is never any love between equals. There may be justice, but no affection. If man is the equal of woman, then she has rights, but what heart ever lived on rights. All love demands inequality or superiority. The lover is always on his knees, the beloved must always be on a pedestal. Whether it be man or woman, the one must always consider himself or herself as undeserving of the other. Even God humbled Himself in His Love to win man, saying He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. And man, in his turn approaches that loving Saviour in Communion with the words: "Lord, I am not worthy."

Not then because women enter professions do some harden and become frustrated. Professional careers do not of themselves defeminize women, otherwise the Church would not have raised political women to sainthood, as was the case with St. Elizabeth and St. Clotilde. The cause of tragedy in woman today is that by stressing equality, they have lost those specifically feminine qualities which have given her superiority of function. These qualities are devotedness and creativeness. No woman is happy unless she has someone for whom she can sacrifice herself, not in a servile way but in the way of love. Added to the devotedness is her love of creativeness. A man is afraid of dying, but a woman is afraid of not living. Life to a man is personal; life to a woman is otherness. She thinks less in terms of perpetuation of self and more in terms of perpetuation of others — so much so that in devotedness she is willing to sacrifice herself for others. To the extent that a career gives no opportunity for either she becomes de-feminized. If these qualities cannot be given an outlet in a home and a family, they can nevertheless find other substitutions in works of charity, in the defense of virtuous living, in the defense of right as other Claudias when their political husbands as Pilates rely only on expediency, Then her work as a money earner becomes a prelude and a condition for the display of equity which is her greatest gory.

The level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. This is because there is a basic difference between knowing and loving. In knowing something you bring it down to the level of your understanding. An abstract principle of physics can be understood by an ordinary mind only by examples. But in loving we always go up to meet the demand of the one loved. If you love music you have to submit to its laws and disciplines. When man loves woman, it follows the nobler the woman the nobler the love, the higher the demands by the woman, the more worthy a man must be. That is why a woman is the measure of the level of our civilization. It is for our age to decide whether woman shall claim equality in sex and the right to work at the same lathe, or whether she will claim equity and give to the world that which no man can give. In these pagan days when women want to be only equal with men, they have lost respect. In Christian days when men were strongest, woman was respected. As the author of Mont. St. Michel puts it: "The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such intelligence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of history — these Plantagenets; these Scholastic philosophers; these architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and Robin Hoods, and Marco Polos; these crusaders who planted their enormous fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield harvests — all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the woman. Explain it how you will! Men rushed like sheep to escape the butcher, and were driven to Mary; only too happy in finding protection and hope in a being who could understand the language they talked, and the excuses they had to offer . . . Society has invested in her care nearly its whole capital, spiritual, artistic, intellectual and economical, even to the bulk of its real and personal estate." As Abelard said of her: "After the Trinity you are our only hope . . . you are placed there as our advocate; all of us who fear the wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge's mother who is logically compelled to intercede for us and stands in the place of a mother to the guilty." To the Lady of Equity once again modern women must look, as even those who have the Faith must see fulfilled in her those spiritual functions which no priest can perform; queen, mother and woman. Christianity does not ask the modern woman to be exclusively a Martha or a Mary; the choice is not between a professional career and contemplation, for the Church on the Feast of the Assumption of the Lady of Equity read the Gospel of Martha and Mary to symbolize that she combines both the speculative and the practical, the serving the Lord and the sitting at His Feet. If woman wants to be ever a revolutionist , then the Lady is her guide for she sang the most revolutionary song ever written — The Magnificat, the burden of which was the abolition of principalities and powers, and the exaltation of the humble. She breaks the shell of woman's isolation from the world and puts woman back into the wide ocean of humanity as she who is the Cosmopolitan Woman gives the Cosmopolitan Man, for which giving all generations shall call her blessed.

But she was the inspiration to womanhood, not because she claimed there was equality in sex, for peculiarly enough this was the one equality she ignored, but because of a transcendence in function which made her superior to a man inasmuch as she could encompass a man, as Isaias foretold. Great men we need like Paul with a two-edged sword to cut away the bonds that tie down the energies of the world, and men like Peter who will let the broad stroke of their challenge ring out on the shield of the world's hypocrisy, and great men like John who with a loud voice will arouse men from the sleek dream of unheroic repose. But we need woman still more; women like Mary of Cleophas who will raise sons to lift up white hosts to a Heavenly Father; women like Magdalen who will take hold of the tangled skeins of a seemingly wrecked and ruined life and weave out of them the beautiful tapestry of saintliness and holiness; and women, above all, like Mary, the Lady of Equity, who will leave the lights and glamours of the world for the shades and shadows of the Cross where saints are made. When women of this kind return to save a world with equity, then we shall toast them, we shall salute them not as the modern woman, once our superior now our equal, but as the Christian woman — closest to the Cross on Good Friday, and first at the tomb on Easter Morn.

God love you!

National Council of Catholic Men – Washington, D. C.

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The Modern Phase

by Hilaire Belloc

Communism (which is only one manifestation, and probably a passing one, of this Modern Attack) professes to be directed towards a certain good, to wit, the abolition of poverty. But it does not tell you why this should be a good; it does not admit that its scheme is also to destroy other things which are also by the common consent of mankind good; the family, property (which is the guarantee of individual freedom and individual dignity), humour, mercy, and every form of what we consider right living.

Well, give it what name you like, call it as I do here "The Modern Attack," or as I think men will soon have to call it, "Anti-Christ," or call it by the temporary borrowed term of "Bolshevism" (which is only the Russian for "whole hogger"), we know the well enough. It is the revolt of the oppressed; it is not the rising of the proletariat against capitalist injustice and cruelty; it is something from without, some evil spirit taking advantage of men's distress and of their anger
against unjust conditions.

Now that thing is at our gates. Ultimately, of course, it is the fruit of the original break-up of Christendom at the Reformation. It began in the denial of a central authority, it has ended by telling man that he is sufficient to himself, and it has set up everywhere great idols to be worshipped as gods.

It is not only on the Communist side that this appears, it appears also in the organizations opposed to Communism; in the races and nations where mere force is set in the place of God. These also set up idols which hideous human sacrifice is paid. By these also justice and the right order of things are denied.

First, we are witnessing a revival of slavery, the necessary result of denying free will when that denial goes one step beyond Calvin and denies responsibility to God as well as lack of power in man. The two forms of slavery which are gradually appearing and will as time goes on be more and more matured under the effect of the modern attack upon the Faith, are slavery to the State and slavery to private corporations and individuals.

Terms are used so loosely nowadays; there is such a paralysis in the power of definition, that almost any sentence using current phrases may be misinterpreted. If I were to say, "slavery under capitalism," the word "capitalism" would mean different things to different men. It means to one group of writers (what I must confess it means to me when I use it) "the exploitation of the masses of men still free by a few owners of the means of production, transport and exchange." When the mass of men are dispossessed_own nothing_they become wholly dependent upon the owners; and when those owners are in active competition to lower the cost of production the mass of men whom they exploit not only lack the power to order their own lives, but suffer from want and insecurity as well.

But to another man, the term "capitalism" may mean simply the right to private property; yet to another it means industrial capitalism working with machines, and contrasted with agricultural production. I repeat, to get any sense into the discussion, we must have our terms clearly defined.

When the reigning Pope in his Encyclical talked of men reduced "to a condition not far removed from slavery," he meant just what has been said above. When the mass of families in a State are without property, then those who were once citizens become virtually slaves. The more the State steps in to enforce conditions of security and sufficiency; the more it regulates wages, provides compulsory insurance, doctoring, education, and in general takes over the lives of the wage-earners, for the benefit of the companies and men employing the wage-earners, the more is this condition of semi-slavery accentuated. And if it be continued for, say, three generations, it will become so thoroughly established as a social habit and frame of mind that there may be no escape from it in the countries where State Socialism of this kind has been forged and riveted on the body politic.

In Europe, England in particular (but many other countries in a lesser degree) has bound itself to this system. Below a certain level of income a man is guaranteed a bare subsistence should he be out of employment. It is doled out to him by public officials at the expense of losing human dignity. Every circumstance of his family is examined; he is even more in the hands of these officials when out of employment than in the hands of his employer when employed. The thing is still in transition; the mass of men do not yet see to what goal they are tending; but the neglect of human dignity, the potential, if not actual, denial of the doctrine of free will, have led by a natural consequence to what are already semi-servile institutions. These will become fully servile institutions as time goes on.

Now against the evil of wage-slavery there has been long proposed and is now working hard, in actual function, a certain remedy. The briefest name for it is Communism: slavery to the State: far more advanced and thorough than the first form, slavery to the capitalist.

Of modern "wage-slavery" one can only talk by metaphor; the man working at a wage is not fully free as is the man possessed of property; he must do as his master tells him, and when his condition is that not of a minority nor even of a limited majority, but of virtually the whole population except a comparatively small capitalist class, the proportion of real freedom in his life dwindles indeed_yet legally it is there. The employee has not yet fallen to the status of the slave even in the most highly industrialized communities. His legal status is still that of a citizen. In theory he is still a free man who has contracted with another man to do a certain amount of work for a certain amount of pay. The man who contracts to pay may or may not be making a profit out of it; the man who contracts to work may or may not receive in wages more than the value of what he produces. But both are technically free.

This first form of social evil produced by the modern spirit is rather a tendency to slavery than actual slavery; you may call it a half slavery, if you like, where it attaches to vast enterprises_huge factories, monopolist corporations, and so on. But still it is not full slavery.

Now Communism is full slavery. It is the modern enemy working openly, undisguisedly, and at high pressure. Communism denies God, denies the dignity and therefore the freedom of the human soul, and openly enslaves men to what it calls "the State"_but what is in practice a body of favoured officials.

Under full Communism there would be no unemployment, just as there is no unemployment in a prison. Under full Communism there would be no distress or poverty, save where the masters of the nation chose to starve men or give them insufficient clothing, or in any other way oppress them. Communism worked honestly by officials devoid of human frailties and devoted to nothing but the good of its slaves, would have certain manifest material advantages as compared with a proletarian wage-system where millions live in semi-starvation, and many millions more in permanent dread thereof. But even if it were administered thus Communism would only produce its benefits through imposing slavery.

These are the first fruits of the Modern Attack on the social side, the first fruits appearing in the region of the social structure. We came, before the Church was founded, out of a pagan social system in which slavery was everywhere, in which the whole structure of society reposed upon the institution of slavery. With the loss of the Faith we return to that institution again.

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