Posted earlier in the BENEDICT NEWS thread:
Is Benedict in favor of world government?:
A more careful look at what he wrote in CIV
by Douglas A. Sylva
August 20, 2009
From the FIRST THINGS symposium this week on CIV - a much-needed corrective to prevailing snap interpretations. Douglas A. Sylva is Senior Fellow at the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute.
As observers continue to decipher the meaning of Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, all appear to agree that the passage of note, the passage that may prove historic in its implications, is the one that is already becoming known as the “world political authority” paragraph:
In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth.
One also senses the urgent need to find innovative ways of implementing the principle of the responsibility to protect and of giving poorer nations an effective voice in shared decision-making.
This seems necessary in order to arrive at a political, juridical and economic order which can increase and give direction to international cooperation for the development of all peoples in solidarity.
To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority. . . .
Could Benedict be in favor of world government, as many now believe?
Taken in the context of papal writings since the dawn of the UN, as well as Benedict’s own opinions, recorded both before and after his election as pope, the passage gains another meaning.
It is in reality a profound challenge to the UN, and the other international organizations, to make themselves worthy of authority, of the authority that they already possess, and worthy of the expansion of authority that appears to be necessary in light of the accelerated pace of globalization.
It is true that Benedict believes that a transnational organization must be empowered to address transnational problems. But so has every Pope since John XXIII, who wrote in 1963:
Today the universal common good presents us with problems which are worldwide in their dimensions; problems, therefore, which cannot be solved except by a public authority with power, organization, and means coextensive with these problems, and with a worldwide sphere of activity. Consequently the moral order itself demands the establishment of some such form of public authority.
But such an authority has been established, and we have lived with it since 1948, and in many ways it has disappointed.
So Benedict turns John XXIII’s formulation on its head: Morality no longer simply demands a global social order; now Benedict underscores that this existing social order must operate in accord with morality.
He ends his own passage on world authority by stating that “The integral development of peoples and international cooperation require the establishment of a greater international ordering, marked by subsidiarity, for the management of globalization. They also require the construction of a social order that
at last conforms to the moral order. . . .” Note the phrase “at last.”
What went wrong? According to Benedict, a world authority worthy of this authority would need “to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth.” The obvious implication is that the current UN has not made this commitment.
To understand how the UN has failed, we must delve into the rest of the encyclical. According to Benedict, the goal of all international institutions must be “authentic integral human development.” This human development must be inspired by truth, in this case, the truth about humanity.
Pursuit of this truth reveals that each human being possesses absolute worth; therefore, authentic human development is predicated on a radical defense of life.
This link is made repeatedly in
Caritas in Veritate.
Openness to life is at the center of true development. . . . The acceptance of life strengthens moral fiber and makes people capable of mutual help. . . . They can promote virtuous action within the perspective of production that is morally sound and marked by solidarity, respecting the fundamental right to life of every people and individual.
To some, it must seem startling how often Benedict comes back to life in an encyclical ostensibly dedicated to economics and globalization.
But this must be understood as Benedict’s effort to humanize globalization. It can be seen as the global application of John Paul II’s own encyclical on life,
Evengelium Vitae.
Without this understanding of the primacy of life, international development is bound to fail:
Who could measure the negative effects of this kind of mentality for development? How can we be surprised by the indifference shown towards situations of human degradation, when such indifference extends even to our attitude towards what is and is not human?
Throughout the encyclical, Benedict is unsparing in the ways in which the current international order contributes to this failure; no major front in the war over life is left unmentioned, from population control, to bioethics, to euthanasia.
But none of this should come as a surprise.
Since at least as far back as the UN’s major conferences of the 1990s — Cairo and Beijing —Benedict has known that the UN has adopted a model of development conformed to the culture of death. He no doubt assisted John Paul II in his successful efforts to stop these conferences from establishing an international right to abortion-on-demand.
At the time, Benedict said, “Today there is no longer a ‘philosophy of love’ but only a ‘philosophy of selfishness.’ It is precisely here that people are deceived. In fact, at the moment they are advised not to love, they are advised, in the final analysis, not to be human. For this reason, at this stage of the development of the new image of the new world, Christians . . . have a duty to protest.”
Now, in his teaching role as Pope, Benedict is not simply protesting but offering the Christian alternative, the full exposition of authentic human development.
Whether or not the UN can meet the philosophical challenges necessary to promote this true development remains uncertain. But
it should not be assumed that Benedict is sanguine; after all, he begins his purported embrace of world government with a call for UN “reform,” not expansion.
This one was an eye-opener for me on 'Catholic economics' in the context of the secular economics I was taught in university college (the two years of humanities and liberal arts that underpin the basic university education even for those who pursue a science degree).
A return to Augustinian economics
by John D. Mueller
August 20, 2009
John D. Mueller is director of the Economics and Ethics Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and president of LBMC LLC, an economic and financial market forecasting firm, both in Washington, DC.
Despite belonging to an organization that recently celebrated its founder’s two thousandth birthday, some American Catholics exhibit the attention span of fruit flies when their faith impinges on their politics.
Recent responses to Benedict XVI’s
Caritas in Veritate closely parallel those that greeted the last economic encyclicals: John Paul II’s
Sollicitudo rei socialis (On the Church’s cocial concern) and
Centesimus Annus (On the hundredth anniversary) [of Leo XIII’
Rerum Novarum].
Caritas in Veritate was originally intended for 2007, the fortieth anniversary of Paul VI’s 1967 encyclical
Populorum Progressio(The development of peoples), which first noted that “the social question has become worldwide” (PP, 3).
John Paul II promulgated Sollicitudo rei socialis in 1987, the twentieth anniversary of PP. Partisan contention about John Paul’s encyclical crystallized around a single paragraph: “The Church’s social doctrine is not a ‘third way’ between liberal capitalism and Marxist collectivism nor even a possible alternative to other solutions less radically opposed to one another: Rather, it constitutes a category of its own” (SRS, 41).
Catholics on both the left and the right have analyzed Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical with the same dichotomous logic they applied to SRS: The Church says there is no Third Way. If not, we must choose between the First Way of Adam Smith and the Second Way of Karl Marx.
But, by emphasizing in his new encyclical the central role of gifts in the divine economy of creation and salvation, as well as in personal, domestic, and political economy, Benedict XVI (like John Paul II before him) poses a very different choice.
Following that neglected economic realist St. Augustine (whom the Pope has called “my great master”) and Augustine’s contemporaries the Cappadocian Fathers, Benedict XVI says the choice is among the same three world views that confronted one another in the marketplace of Athens when the Apostle Paul (probably in a.d. 51) prefaced his proclamation of the gospel with a biblically orthodox adaptation of Greco-Roman natural law and “some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him” (Acts 17:18).
As Benedict XVI succinctly summarizes, “For believers, the world derives neither from blind chance, nor from strict necessity, but from God’s plan . . . living as a family under the Creator’s watchful eye” (CV, 57).
The First Way of biblically orthodox natural law is irreconcilable with the Second Way of pantheist Stoic necessity and the Third Way of Epicurean “matter and chance” because the latter two exclude Creation.
Yet this natural-theological difference also has important economic consequences, because the three worldviews are expressed in scholastic, classical, and neoclassical economics, respectively.
In both his earlier
Deus caritas est (God is Love) and
Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI employs scholastic economic theory, following the pattern set by Leo XIII.
In scholastic natural law, economics is a theory of rational providence that describes how creatures who are “rational,” “matrimonial,” and “political” animals choose both persons as “ends” (expressed by our personal and collective gifts) and scarce means that are used (consumed) by or for those persons, which we make real through production and exchange.
Thomas Aquinas was the first to integrate these four key elements of scholastic economic theory: Aristotle’s theories of production and justice-in-exchange, Augustine’s theory of utility (which describes consumption), and the scholastic theory of distribution (which comprises Augustine’s theory of personal distribution — gifts and their opposite, crimes, and Aristotle’s theory of domestic and political distributive justice).
By emphasizing the last element, therefore, Benedict isn’t inventing something new. Scholastic economics was taught at the highest university level for more than five centuries before Adam Smith effectively dismantled it.
Its adherents included all major Catholic and (after the Reformation) Protestant thinkers, notably the Lutheran Samuel Pufendorf. It was Pufendorf’s Protestant version that was taught to Smith, widely circulated in the American colonies, and recommended by Alexander Hamilton, who penned two-thirds of
The Federalist.
Smith “de-Augustinized” economics by dropping both distribution and utility, launching classical economics with production and exchange alone. In effect, Smith was reverting to Stoic pantheism, which views the universe “to be itself a Divinity, an Animal” (as Smith put it in an early but posthumously published essay) and conceives of God as the immanent World Soul, manipulating humans as puppets who choose neither their ends nor means rationally, since every individual . . . intends only his own gain . . . and is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”
Liberal capitalism as described by Smith and Marx’s communism are thus obverse sides of Stoic pantheism. The main difference is that
Smith tries to reduce all justice to justice-in-exchange while Marx tries to reduce it to political distributive justice.
Neoclassical economics superseded classical economics by reinventing Augustine’s theory of utility in the early 1870s. But by stopping there it expressed the Epicurean materialism that claims humans evolved by chance in an uncreated world as semi-rational or merely clever animals, highly adept at calculating means but having no choice of ends but self-gratification, since “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” as Smith’s friend David Hume put it.
Because Augustine placed the fact of scarcity squarely at the center of moral decision-making, Catholic claims from the left (and fears from the right) that Caritas in Veritate portends some utopian global political scheme or endorsement of President Obama’s economic policies are likely to prove equally unfounded.
In the American context, the issue most likely to quiet those claims and fears is the combined impact of legal abortion and vastly expanded social benefits, which has been the recipe for “demographic winter” throughout Europe and Asia, but now advocated by President Barack Obama for this country.
In Latin
bene dictus means “well spoken” and
benedictus, ”a blessing.”
Especially if it helps America avoid its own “demographic winter,” Benedict XVI’s Augustinian “Charity in Truth” will prove to be both.