ChristianWeek

Markets&Morality

This issue, ChristianWeek continues the series entitled “Markets and Morality” with a column by Gregory Baum. Baum is professor emeritus of theological ethics at McGill University, was a theological advisor at Vatican II, awarded the Order of Canada in 1990 and was editor of the The Ecumenist—a review of theology, culture and society.

The pope’s disputed comment about Islam earlier this year was cause for many to read his Regensburg address and find out what the Roman Catholic church teaches about the relation between faith and reason.

As some evangelicals find puzzling, the Benedict XVI is an enemy of postmodernism and its popularized tendency toward compromised liberalism. Why does this matter in a column about economics?

Economics is the benevolent behemoth that passes under the radar of fashionable post-modernism. “We cannot go back to modernity” our culture seers tell us, in their new best-selling works.

Jean Francois Lyotard, one of our French guides into the new emerging strangeness of the 21st century, defined our age as one with an incredulity toward meta-narratives, or universal claims. Strangely, that skepticism about ultimate ends has left no recognizable dent in the global market economy. Popular post-modern skepticism is very much at home in a world based on the fulfillment of individual desires.

We hope Christian leaders will continue to take these questions seriously, as we address the lack of discussion between economists and theologians today.

—Andrew Siebert

The social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church has always been critical of the free-market economy. This was true prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) when the Church rejected all modern institutions, including the liberal State, parliamentary democracy, human rights, religious liberty and the unregulated market system; and this remains true after the Vatican Council when the Church supports—on its own terms—democracy, pluralism, human rights and religious liberty.

The Church continues to reject the process that allows an economic system to detach itself from ethical principles. That the production and distribution of goods necessary for the survival and well-being of society—in other words, the economy—should be guided simply by the laws of the market without reference to ethical norms, is a novel idea without precedent in human history. This is the thesis defended in great detail in Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944). That separating the economy from ethical norms is outrageous is a verdict also found in the rabbinical and Islamic traditions.

Markets useful to a degree

Roman Catholic social teaching recognises the importance of markets. Needless to say, the Church had no sympathy whatever for communist collectivism and the command economy. Markets are marvellously useful institutions: modern society could not do without them. But according to Roman Catholic teaching, markets must be constrained to serve the common good of society. They must be guided by 1) government legislation, 2) a strong labour movement and 3) a culture of cooperation preventing competition from becoming the dominant value in society. This social teaching has a certain affinity with the economic ideas of the British economist John Maynard Keynes, an advocate of welfare capitalism steered by government.

The recent popes have repeatedly criticized what they called “liberal capitalism,” or, the free and unregulated market system. They recognised moreover that the laws of the market lead to the creation of giant corporations that devour smaller companies, acquire economic control, regulate prices, blackmail governments and exercise what Pius XI in 1931 and Paul VI in 1968 called “international economic imperialism.”

John Paul II lamented the shift to monetarism that occurred in the early 1980s and denounced the subsequent globalization of the neo-liberal economy. In his three social encyclicals, On Labour (1981), On Social Solicitude (1987) and After Hundred Years (1991), this pope emphasized even more than his predecessors that the economy—including private and public property—must serve the common good of society. He even advocated that factory workers be co-responsible for the organization of labour and the use of the goods produced by them, and that they eventually become the co-owners of the giant work-bench on which they labour.

The idea of the common good is a central idea of Roman Catholic social teaching. It is defined as the laws, institutions, customs and values that help all members of society without exception to develop their potential. The common good protects the freedom of individuals, yet it summons them at the same time to see themselves as partners in a common project. Persons are always person-in-community, an idea that recalls the social philosophy of the Protestant thinker, John Macmurray.

Transcending individualism

Implicit in the idea of the common good is a substantive ethics, an ethics of virtues, transcending individualism and utilitarianism. The laws of the market, the popes remind their readers, do not protect the poor and the weak, nor do they protect the natural environment. Committed to an all-inclusive justice, the citizens must create a society that sustains the poor and the weak and manages the environment in responsible fashion. Even the daily labour that people perform is here seen not only as a way of helping themselves, but also as a service offered to society as a whole. In this context, taxes are not seen as the tribute imposed by an empire on its colonies, but as the contribution of citizens to enable their society to render the public services they deem necessary.

From the Roman Catholic perspective, liberal capitalism is not simply an economic system, it is at the same time a cultural project, promoting certain values and attitudes, such as individualism, self-promotion, utilitarianism, indifference to the common good and the increasing commodification of human relations. Conservatives lament the instability of family values, the high divorce rate and the neglect of children, without acknowledging that these are products of liberal capitalism.

Capitalist culture even transforms political democracy: instead of a governing system open to the co-responsibility of all citizens for the common good, democracy is increasingly becoming a system used by the powerful to pursue their own interests. In recent years, even the style of driving in Toronto and Montreal has changed: people increasingly drive competitively, speeding ahead as the traffic light changes and twisting in and out to their lane to move faster than others. Liberal capitalism is generating societies of winners and losers. Social scientific studies demonstrate that neo-liberal globalization has widened the gap between the rich and poor countries, and between the rich and the poor in each country. I am not suggesting that, according to Roman Catholic teaching, markets produce the decline of virtue! No! Markets are marvellous institutions that distribute the products of labour to the possible benefit of all and are thus able to serve the well-being of society as a whole. Markets in a culture that promotes social solidarity operate as useful agents promoting prosperity. What Roman Catholic teaching denounces is liberal or neo-liberal capitalism, also called the unregulated market system, which refers not to the institution of markets as such, but rather to their integration into an entire economic system, independent of ethical norms, opposed to government control and indifferent to the common good.

Most Catholics know nothing of their Church’s social teaching; and even if they did, they would not embrace it, affected as they are by the dominant culture. And yet the globalization of neo-liberalism is presently making society and the world as whole a territory of competitors where the powerful actors grab as much as they can of the planet’s limited resources, producing an obscene inequality that produces despair in some and revolt in others. This in turn demands the military intervention of the powerful. Competition as a dominant value destroys humanity and the earth on which it lives; only solidarity can save us. Many Christians find inspiration in God’s undeserved and irrevocable solidarity with humanity in Jesus Christ.

Gregory Baum is professor emeritus of religious studies at McGill University in Montreal.