The Long View

Caritas in Veritate

I apologise for the long delay in updating this space. I had planned to have a commentary on Benedict XVI's latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, online within a day or two of its publication at the beginning of July. However, the devil immediately sent his imp to frustrate my illuminating intention. In this case, the imp took the form of a malware mail attachment that fried my home PC; at least the diligent tech who reprogrammed the machine says that is probably what happened. Whatever the problem was, it has been fixed by its erasure along with all the features the system that were not a problem; sometimes apocalypse really is a solution. I would ask anyone who has emailed me lately to please resend. The only data I lost was in Outlook: all of it, including 15 years of email addresses.

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If a Latinist were asked to translate the phrase "caritas in veritate" into English without more information, he would almost certainly reply "love in truth." In the German translation, "caritas" becomes simply "Liebe." However, in the English version of this encyclical, "caritas" is rendered "charity." The English word is derived from the Latin, but the use of one for the other is a choice that seems to me to require a little explanation. "Caritas," like "charity" as that word is used in theology, is not so much an emotion as an operation of the intellect. "Love" can cover the idea, but love in the form of a disinterested, objective benevolence. The point is important, because one of the themes of the encyclical is "gift," in the sense of how the human race responds over time to the gift of creation. In this context, gift is almost equivalent to "truth," to the non-arbitrary nature of being. Freedom is defined here as the informed response to being, to the things we don't get to make up. The notion is almost Hegelian: we are free to the extent that we understand our constraints. If we wish the human race well, then, we must know certain things about the how societies and even history function.

Caritas in Veritate is ostensibly an extension of the social teaching of the encyclical,Populorum Progressio, which was published in 1967 to the audible unhappiness of free-market enthusiasts everywhere. The 1967 document has been characterized as advocating a soft-socialist model of redistribution at the both the domestic and on the international levels. Many commentators see no more than this in Caritas in Veritate, and in fact the new document does mention redistribution. It also mentions some small-is-beautiful devices, like microlending and credit unions, which suggest that the author felt he had to make some gestures toward specificity in a document that is really about metahistory.

The pope expresses a great admiration for mechanism in the sense of technologies that ameliorate the human condition. A key point: the encyclical treats economies as just another mechanism of this class. I fear that I have more than once quoted Kipling's The Secret of the Machines in this space, but I quote it again because it does seem to express some of what Benedict is getting at:

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings-
Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!--
Our touch can alter all created things,
We are everything on earth--except The Gods!

Basically, the pope has some thought the Gods issue. Technology, and the economy, are everything and nothing. Their purpose transcends them, perhaps in the way that the purpose of history transcends historical mechanisms. And more to point from the perspective of public policy, they are not self-sustaining. Benedict notes:

In a climate of mutual trust, the market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their needs and desires. The market is subject to the principles of so-called commutative justice, which regulates the relations of giving and receiving between parties to a transaction. But the social doctrine of the Church has unceasingly highlighted the importance of distributive justice and social justice for the market economy, not only because it belongs within a broader social and political context, but also because of the wider network of relations within which it operates. In fact, if the market is governed solely by the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods, it cannot produce the social cohesion that it requires in order to function well. Without internal forms of solidarity and mutual trust, the market cannot completely fulfil its proper economic function....It is in the interests of the market to promote emancipation, but in order to do so effectively, it cannot rely only on itself, because it is not able to produce by itself something that lies outside its competence. It must draw its moral energies from other subjects that are capable of generating them.

In this and in many other respects, including the view of Christianity is a future global community, Caritas in Veritate so perfectly mirrors the logic of William Ernest Hocking that I was surprised not to see him cited in the notes. As Hocking wrote over 50 years ago:

[T]he secular state by itself is not enough...just as economics can no longer consider itself a closed science, so politics can no longer consider itself a closed art...the state depends for its vitality upon a motivation which it cannot by itself command.

Like Hocking, Benedict does not see either economics or politics as fundamental. Indeed, the encyclical expresses considerable skepticism of the state, including the welfare state as the monopoly provider of public goods. Perhaps the greatest difference between the current encyclical and Paul VI's is that Benedict believes himself to be living in a different kind of historical era. Paul lived in an age of internationalism, which was still a context in which history was largely a matter of state action. Benedict's globalism is different in kind:

Sometimes globalization is viewed in fatalistic terms, as if the dynamics involved were the product of anonymous impersonal forces or structures independent of the human will[102]. In this regard it is useful to remember that while globalization should certainly be understood as a socio-economic process, this is not its only dimension. Underneath the more visible process, humanity itself is becoming increasingly interconnected; it is made up of individuals and peoples to whom this process should offer benefits and development[103], as they assume their respective responsibilities, singly and collectively. The breaking-down of borders is not simply a material fact: it is also a cultural event both in its causes and its effects. If globalization is viewed from a deterministic standpoint, the criteria with which to evaluate and direct it are lost. As a human reality, it is the product of diverse cultural tendencies, which need to be subjected to a process of discernment. The truth of globalization as a process and its fundamental ethical criterion are given by the unity of the human family and its development towards what is good. Hence a sustained commitment is needed so as to promote a person-based and community-oriented cultural process of world-wide integration that is open to transcendence.

One of the ironies of 21st-century history is that the papacy is perhaps the last important defender of "reason" in the humanistic sense, and also of the reality and even necessity of historical progress. Catholic social theory is not the Hegelian dialectic: its necessities are moral imperatives, not coercive mechanisms. It describes things we must try to do to make the City of Man a better place; it does not guarantee that these projects will succeed. Nonetheless, as we have noted in this space, it has long been a commonplace of Catholic social doctrine that the brotherhood of man implies the long-term political unity of the species. Benedict attempts to update the point:

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, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago. Such an authority would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good[147], and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth. Furthermore, such an authority would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights[148]. Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums. Without this, despite the great progress accomplished in various sectors, international law would risk being conditioned by the balance of power among the strongest nations.

Several commentators on this passage have noted that the primary reason poor countries are poor today is that they are run by crooks, and that giving such people a role in world governance simply expands the scope for their chicanery. It's a fair point, and the encyclical has nothing useful to say about global constitutional arrangements. However, we may recall that the point of the encyclical is that even the most splendid political mechanism will not work if it is not operated by people who have been humanized in a society open to the transcendent. The pope's insistence on that openness is not a mere flouish. I think Benedict is saying that the Enlightenment project, understood as the drive to create a unified, prosperous, and free world, has intrinsic merit and could succeed. What cannot succeed is the strain of the Enlightenment that sought to make this world wholly immanent, relying on no standards beyond its own and seeking no goal but its own preservation.

That is a fair point, too.