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What’s Wrong with the George Will Column Excoriating the Pope?
Begin with the title: “Pope Francis’ fact-free flamboyance.“
The Pope is fact free? He knows nothing? He’s flamboyant? How so? The article doesn’t tell us. It evidently relies for its persuasiveness on anti-Catholic or anti-papal prejudices and presuppositions.
The first paragraph piles on the slurs. The Pope comes to the US “trailing clouds of sanctimony.”
With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary.
What those “demonstrably false and deeply reactionary” ideas of the Pope’s are, we aren’t informed. The first quote Will offers to substantiate his charges is an example not of the Pope’s ideas or “policy prescriptions,” but rather his “wooly sentiments” and “vacuity,” viz., “People occasionally forgive, but nature never does.”
Let him who has never said anything wooly or vacuous cast the first stone.
Next he quotes the Pope committing hyperbole.
And the Earth is becoming “an immense pile of filth”?
Only Will exaggerates a bit (not a great tactic for someone chastising someone else for hyperbole). What the Pope actually said (in a Tweet, where hyperbole is not unknown) is somewhat more modest and defensible: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”
Call me hyperbolic, but I’ve uttered the same cri de coeur myself many and many a time driving through urban sprawl or the endless strip malls of modernity. You don’t have to be a leftish environmentalist wacko to see and suffer from the fact that we are trashing nature left and right — especially the parts of it where most of the poor live out their whole lives. Rich people can at least vacation in the mountains or at the shore. The poor aren’t so lucky. (Try searching Google images for pictures of the slums of Buenos Aires. Bergoglio used to travel there regularly to say Mass because the people there couldn’t afford transportation to the cathedral.)
Read the Letters from Lake Como of Romano Guardini (one of Francis’s favorite authors), and you’ll realize that the pain and sorrow the Pope is expressing goes far deeper than mere sentiment, never mind political fashion. It has everything to do with a profound concern for the good of man, who urgently needs intimate contact with the beauty of nature for his happiness and spiritual well being.
The next direct quote we get is of the Pope offering an important caveat: “The Church does not presume to settle scientific questions.” Will apparently interprets this as rank hypocrisy, while I take it as characteristic modesty and basic catechesis. If the science on which the Pope bases, say, his call for “international collective action” on climate change turns out to be false, then forget that. His real concern isn’t with policy prescription, but with fundamental moral attitudes.
Consider this parallel. When Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, the scientific consensus of the day indicated that overpopulation was a major concern. Hence the encyclical mentions worry about overpopulation as a valid reason a couple might choose to limit their family size. It turns out (surprise!) that the scientific consensus was wrong. We’re in more danger from demographic implosion than a population explosion. Has the encyclical thereby been discredited? No. The science has been, but not the moral thrust of the papal teaching.
Then Will flings another gratuitous and ill-informed smear: “The church that thought it was settled science that Galileo was heretical.” Never mind that heresy is determined canonically, not scientifically. And never mind that the Church has since apologized for the error (albeit belatedly), proving that her temporal judgments are subject to revision.
Then comes more sneering:
Francis deplores “compulsive consumerism,” a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire. He leaves the Vatican to jet around praising subsistence farming, a romance best enjoyed from 30,000 feet above the realities that such farmers yearn to escape.
The poor aspire to “compulsive consumerism?” I thought they wanted a decent standard of living. The Pope “jets around” — like Al Gore, perhaps — living a life of luxury and moral preening? Is that a just description of this Pope?
Please note, all you critics who think the Pope is a leftist: “Compulsive consumerism” is not a synonym for “free markets” (which the Church considers the best means of equitable wealth distribution), just as “crony capitalism” is not a synonym for “capitalism.” It’s possible to condemn one without condemning the other. Note this too: material poverty is not the only kind of poverty; it’s possible for a person or a people to gain economically and lose spiritually at the same time. This is a real danger of the industrial revolution and global markets, as everyone who has suffered in the epidemic of depression and alienation in our society knows existentially.
The Pope is not wrong to point to the moral hazards of our system; it’s what moral leaders do. Solzhenitsyn did the same, you may recall. So did John Paul II and Benedict XVI. So did Jesus, when he said, “Man does not live by bread alone.” To point out the moral hazards of capitalism is not to endorse socialism, which has more and worse hazards of its own (all duly noted in the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church.)
Next we get two paragraphs extolling the benefits of fossil fuels without any evidence whatsoever to indicate that the Pope opposes them.
Then Will writes: “Francis grew up around the rancid political culture of Peronist populism” — as if to suggest that the Pope approves of the system he grew up in, when, in fact, he was a staunch critic of it (and the US interventions that kept its elite in power and riches, while its masses languished in poverty and misery).
Will’s sarcasm and anti-Catholic vitriol go on:
Francis jauntily makes his church congruent with the secular religion of “sustainability.” Because this is hostile to growth, it fits Francis’s seeming sympathy for medieval stasis, when his church ruled the roost, economic growth was essentially nonexistent and life expectancy was around 30.
Attention Mr. Will: The Pope can’t make the Church anything; the Church (following the ancient Judaism on which it’s founded) has always preached “sustainability,” i.e., responsible stewardship of the environment. Further, “economic growth” is as susceptible as environmentalism to being pursued with religious zeal, as if it were an absolute good. It’s the kind of thing that happens when true religion is abandoned in favor of one false god or another.
The concluding paragraph too is pure, lying slur:
He stands against modernity, rationality, science and, ultimately, the spontaneous creativity of open societies in which people and their desires are not problems but precious resources. Americans cannot simultaneously honor him and celebrate their nation’s premises.
I personally am in favor of the goods of modernity, rationality, science, free markets, and human creativity. (I just don’t worship them.) I believe with all my heart in the preciousness and dignity of each and every human being. (I’ve learned a lot about how it looks in the concrete by watching the Pope.) I also endorse the premises of the American founding, and, I honor this Pope as the Vicar of Christ on earth.
Anyone who says it is impossible to honor both the Pope and America’s founding principles is either ignorant or bigoted or both.
Published in Culture, General, Religion & Philosophy
We live in the best of all possible worlds and not the best of all imaginable worlds.
The Pope strikes me as the type who found John Lennon’s Imagine to be uplifting and inspiring – whereas I found it to be simplistic, utopian twaddle. We have an irreconcileable difference in that regard.
It’s a good, just not an absolute good. So, for instance, if I gain it in an immoral way (by prostituting myself, say, or selling porn), then what I’ve lost in terms of benefit-to-self is greater than what I’ve gained monetarily.
Suppose I got a job offer in New Zealand. Taking it would mean more money. But it would also mean uprooting my life and moving far away from everyone I love. Not worth it. Being richer doesn’t necessarily mean being better off.
Now suppose I live in a town where the mine or factory that used to be its economic heart has shut down. I may be able to move to a city and find work that pays well enough, but I’ve lost a lot too, humanly speaking.
Take a hypothetical African country with a tin pot dictator and an impoverished population. Suppose a western country enters into a contract with that dictator to harvest the country’s timber or collect its ivory or mine its diamonds. For a short time, the natives have employment. GDP is way up!
Then the trees are gone, the elephants are dead, and/or the mine is depleted. The dictator has a fat bank account in Liechtenstein, and the western capitalist move on to the next venture.
This happens.
It’s not curious at all. It’s a basic principle of Catholic Social Teaching that the goods of the earth are given by God in abundance and for the whole world.
So, when we find extreme disparities in wealth (google images of the slums of Mumbai or Calcutta or Buenos Aires), we perceive that something is badly out of whack.
A more equitable distribution of goods is called for, as a moral imperative. It is especially incumbent on those who have power to address the problem.
That does not mean what leftists take it to mean, viz. that governments therefore can and should seize wealth and redistribute it via the centralized state.
CST is explicitly opposed to socialism. A just distribution of wealth is best achieved through free markets (which is not quite the same as capitalism) and subsidiarity. It’s the opposite of socialism.
We do not live in the best of all possible worlds. We live in an imperfect world that we are capable of improving or degrading through freedom on both the individual and a collective level.
You think the Pope is speaking utopian twaddle because you’re intent on reading leftism into him. He’s not a leftist. He’s a Christian.
I think a specific hypothetical is really useful here. A few thoughts:
BTW, I get and appreciate that Francis’ emphasis is on the spiritual and moral realms. Personally, I found nothing objectionable in those section on Laudato Si, especially not in the context of treating each other as ends within themselves, etc.
My trouble is his factual errors (rising poverty, implication that the world is only getting dirtier, assumption that climate change is all bad, the idea that air-conditioning is a luxury, etc.), his consistent conflation of capitalism with exploitation. As I said some months back, Francis seems painfully unaware and uninterested in the amazing fact that we’ve figured out how to sustain 7B people at all, or that standards of living are improving so much at the very bottom.
One problem is the dictator. He concerned to enrich himself, not improve the lives of his people. Another is the western capitalists whose sole interest in the venture is profit (and lawfulness). They can justify their acts on capitalists grounds, viz. “It’s legal” and “I employed the locals and paid them the going rate.” “Thanks to me, their standard of living improved.”
That the locals’ environment and culture and way of life were radically disrupted, even destroyed, is not his concern. That the standard of living they’d had temporarily cannot be sustained now that the forest is gone, the elephants dead, and the mine depleted, is not his concern.
The Pope would say that both the dictator and the capitalists who dealt with him in this matter acted unjustly, viz. without due regard for real good of the people they were dealing with. Those people were exploited. The basic injustice cannot be compensated for in economic terms merely.
Tom (pardon my bluntness), this strikes me as hopelessly unreal. That is not how it goes in the kind of cases I’m talking about.
Not all increases in wealth are increases in welfare or power. It’s possible to get a little more money and be much worse off than you were before.
If the extra money they had gotten was completely dependent on a foreign company that has now left the region, what chance do they have? For the vast majority in such cases, their only chance is to leave home and go to a city.
I’m not romanticizing primitivity here. I’m not saying no western economic interventions in Africa ever, because it might disrupt their ancient way of life.
I’m saying rather (what the Pope also would say) that those interventions have to be governed by more than just the profit motive. They have to also be governed and constrained by a genuine, practical concern for the good of all the people. Not just their economic good, but their absolute good.
Capitalism as such has no interest in that, ergo, capitalism is not enough.
I haven’t ever seen him conflate capitalism with exploitation. His criticisms seem to me always carefully qualified to indicate that he refers to capitalism uninformed by a genuine humanism.
Factual errors are incidental and unimportant.
For instance, whether poverty is increasing in absolute terms or not, it’s definitely increasing in some places. And in places where huge wealth is also being created through capitalism (I’m thinking of China and India), the poverty that remains becomes a still more pressing ethical problem.
I agree. Which is why I said this isn’t really the best example because the normal means of ensuring such things — individual and property rights — aren’t in effect in the hypothetical country in question.
Perhaps it needs clarification and reiteration on our part, but what most of us mean by capitalism here presumes those sort of cultural institutions which we believe are very important (as, I know do you). If people aren’t trading goods, services, and property freely — by which I include the sort of protections mentioned above — it shouldn’t count as capitalism.
I realize this has the potential to cause a “No True Scotsman” fallacy, but I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to restrict capitalism to discussions of voluntary exchange within the context of personal rights. Would that clarify?
I’d be more inclined to agree with that if the benefits of capitalism weren’t so clearly throw-away lines, or if Francis seemed better informed about what is actually helping people in poverty.
But even then, I’d point out that capitalism often works toward human flourishing and well-being even absent genuine humanism (which, of course, I encourage regardless). At the risk again of citing myself, if you want to become fabulously wealthy, the best way to do it is to provide some kind of useful good or service to others, again, in the context of the rule of law and the protection of individual rights. Even if you’re a weirdo or kind of a jerk about it, it still works.
Individual and property rights don’t do the trick. They can (and often do) coexist with injustice of other kinds and varieties. They are part of the capitalist system. The kind of constraint capitalism needs (if it’s going to do good, not harm) is extra-capitalist.
In the hypothetical above, we don’t at all need to assume violation of individual rights or property rights. The ivory and trees and diamonds didn’t belong to any individual. And the workers were paid for their labor, which was voluntary, not coerced.
If a housing developer puts up a development on what had been the common, no one’s individual or property rights have been violated.
“Freely” isn’t enough of a condition either.
And while you and I may take the cultural and moral and philosophical and religious framework of the west for granted when we think of how capitalism works in practice, other societies don’t.
I deny it. In the absence of a genuine humanism, capitalism may create wealth—which may do some good—but it will also do great harm, just like medicine practice in the absence of genuine humanism will do harm.
Then you don’t understand how capitalism works. Capitalism has lifted more people from squalor and poverty and created more opportunities for human advancement than any other force in human history. Period. Regardless of any external morality you try to force on it. This is part of its design. Free people interacting tend to engaging in activities together that create mutual benefits.
That evil rapacious capitalism you and the Pope like to lambaste has lifted 400 million Chinese from abject poverty between 1981 and 2001. It has reduced the incidences of starvation to a point where we can truly envision casting the very concept to the dustbin of history. If this trend continues global extreme poverty will be virtually eliminated by 2030. As for the environment – the world is a cleaner and greener place today than it was 100 years ago.
These are just facts and the one underlying concept to thank for all of it – global free market capitalism.
Can you deny it two more times? Just for symmetry?
Individual and property rights are not a complete solution to life. They are the best response we have to the scriptural command to feed the hungry and heal the sick, but if you think that capitalism is the answer to “preach the word”, you’re probably a little over enthusiastic. Individual rights in the form of religious liberty are important to that, though.
That all capitalism does is respond effectively to some biblical injunctions doesn’t make it morally neutral, though, since, with some exceptions (Sunday trading, for instance), it is not negative from the point of view of any biblical injunctions.
Even if it were true that capitalism were neutral, the alternatives are worse and, particularly when he is speaking in places like Bolivia, Francis arguing for the rejection of government austerity pushes for increased poverty with no compensating virtue. When he holds his masses under images of Che, the alternative to capitalism that he promotes is not morally neutral.
If no one’s done it, yet, I’ll add Uncle Walter’s I Love Greed.