What Pope Francis Gets Right

A few days ago, Pope Francis released the third encyclical letter of his pontificate. Entitled Fratelli Tutti, the letter takes “fraternity and social friendship” as its theme.

Conservatives were quick to point out the litany of economic confusion that Francis served up to the Catholic faithful in this document, and rightly so. Jesus taught His disciples that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the knowledge of the Father. If the same can be said of red herrings (and it can), then the Pope has a compelling theological reason to pick up a copy of Basic Economics before he says anything more about free markets in public.

For instance, Francis laments that “a plan that would set great goals for the development of our entire human family nowadays sounds like madness.” Such a plan would be madness, I’m afraid, if for no other reason than that, in order to make it, we would first have to get the entire species to agree upon what these “goals” are. And in trying to hash out this one-size-fits-all political agenda for the entire human race, we’d probably all end up killing one other in short order. After all, at most times and in most places across human history, political disputes have been resolved for the most part by merciless violence. We have only recently figured out how to hammer out our differences peacefully, and only in the context of nation-states, where people feel enough in common with one another to give the loser’s consent in free elections. The people of the United Kingdom, for example, decided that they would rather leave the European Union than allow it to regulate the curvature of their bananas. This fact alone forever refutes the notion that a global government of universal brotherhood is feasible this side of the New Jerusalem.

However, the pope’s shortcomings should not prevent us from giving credit where it’s due. It has been clear for some time that he isn’t the intellectual equal of his predecessor, but he nevertheless shows a few flashes of brilliance in this letter. At one point, he speaks about globalized capital’s propensity to ravage and uproot communitarian commitments and institutions. This process tends to turn people into atomized individuals, easily manipulable by the state:

This culture unifies the world, but divides persons and nations, for “as society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbours, but does not make us brothers.” We are more alone than ever in an increasingly massified world that promotes individual interests and weakens the communitarian dimension of life.

He also has a marvelous passage on the erosion of historical consciousness that is worth quoting in full:

As a result, there is a growing loss of the sense of history, which leads to even further breakup. A kind of “deconstructionism”, whereby human freedom claims to create everything starting from zero, is making headway in today’s culture. The one thing it leaves in its wake is the drive to limitless consumption and expressions of empty individualism. Concern about this led me to offer the young some advice. “If someone tells young people to ignore their history, to reject the experiences of their elders, to look down on the past and to look forward to a future that he himself holds out, doesn’t it then become easy to draw them along so that they only do what he tells them? He needs the young to be shallow, uprooted and distrustful, so that they can trust only in his promises and act according to his plans. That is how various ideologies operate: they destroy (or deconstruct) all differences so that they can reign unopposed. To do so, however, they need young people who have no use for history, who spurn the spiritual and human riches inherited from past generations, and are ignorant of everything that came before them.”

The fact that the pope’s grasp of sound economics falls lamentably short in most respects does not change the fact that these two passages are redolent of the best of Alexis de Tocqueville and his fellow Doctrinaires of the 1820s. Along with other men of genius such as François Guizot, Maine de Biran, and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, Tocqueville had as his primary intellectual preoccupation the problem of balancing centralized government with local autonomy. The mediating institutions of French society that had previously dispersed power to the regions had been razed in his time by the Revolution of 1789, and now only Leviathan remained. Royer-Collard summed up this process in a speech to the National Assembly in January of 1822:

We have seen the old society perish, and with it that crowd of domestic institutions and independent magistracies which it carried within it, . . . true republics within the monarchy. These institutions did not, it is true, share sovereignty; but they opposed to it everywhere limits which were defended obstinately. Not one of them has survived. The revolution has left only individuals standing. It has dissolved even the (so to speak) physical association of the commune. This is a spectacle without precedent! Before now one had seen only in philosophers’ books a nation so decomposed and reduced to its ultimate constituents.

From an atomized society has emerged centralization. There is no need to look elsewhere for its origin. Centralization has not arrived with its head erect, with the authority of a principle; rather, it has developed modestly, as a consequence, a necessity. Indeed, where there are only individuals, all business which is not theirs is necessarily public business, the business of the state. Where there are no independent magistrates, there are only agents of central power.

One does not need be especially astute to observe that the advancement of global capitalism has had a similar effect upon mediating institutions the world over as the French Revolution had on France. Capital is no respecter of community ties, of authority, or of tradition. It separates each of us out into individual economic agents and leads us in its merry dance around the globe. Even the associations that have been formed by free markets, such as corporations and labor unions, have been vitiated by the restless mobility of the global marketplace. The average duration of an employee’s tenure at a single firm is down from nearly two decades in the early ’70s to just over four years today. People move around with a level of frequency that prevents the consolidation of market-formed relationships over time.

The reason for this is to be found in the spirit of comparison that capitalism fosters. In an aristocratic society, the economic fortunes of each individual are fated; they’re determined by the class one is born into. A peasant girl in such a world is under no illusion that she might one day be a princess. In a free-market society, this isn’t the case. Because the only limitation to one’s prospect in the free market are one’s own abilities, everything is theoretically (if not practically) attainable by anyone. Thus every other person becomes a point of comparison for everyone in society, which can generate a great deal of restlessness and despair. This is what Tocqueville was getting at when he wrote:

In certain areas of the Old World, . . . the inhabitants are for the most part extremely ignorant and poor; they take no part in the business of the country and are frequently oppressed by the government, yet their countenances are generally placid and their spirits light. In America I saw the freest and most enlightened men placed in the happiest circumstances that the world affords; it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung upon their brows, and I thought them serious and almost sad, even in their pleasures. The chief reason for this contrast is that the former do not think of the ills they endure, while the latter are forever brooding over the advantages they do not possess.

He goes on to write that “the same equality which allows every citizen to conceive these lofty hopes renders all the citizens less able to realize them. It circumscribes their powers on every side, while it gives freer scope to their desires.” This spirit of comparison loosens the hold of communities over individuals. Each person’s frame of comparative reference extends ever wider beyond home and hearth to include the ostensibly attainable lives of others. Social media dial this ethic of comparison up to eleven. When the pope writes that “we are more alone than ever in an increasingly massified world,” he is drawing attention to an increasingly pressing social problem — a problem that free markets appear to aggravate.

What’s more, in such a society as this, wherein individuals are increasingly detached from communal institutions, the one institution to which we all “belong,” government, becomes ever more powerful as it steps into the void. This is what Royer-Collard is getting at in the extract above. Without mediating institutions, individualism and collectivism feed off one another. Free markets and big government become mutually reinforcing phenomena as they conspire to separate people out from one another into easily exchangeable economic units: Rather than coins bearing the image of a man, man increasingly comes to bear the image of a coin.

If we really want to make headway in limiting the scope of government, we’ll have to find a way of rebuilding voluntarily the dense, local habits and institutions of association that alone concretely check the power of the state. Capitalism, as Tocqueville foresaw and the Chinese Communist Party has proved, offers hardly any effective resistance to the growth of government in and of itself. If the agents of the state are wise enough to resist the temptations of full-tilt socialist oppression and the concomitant national suicide it involves, they can usually utilize the market in order to generate profits to confiscate and spend on state enterprises. Once again, China is scarily instructive in this regard. As the pope himself wrote elsewhere, “an innate tension exists between globalization and localization. We need to pay attention to the global so as to avoid narrowness and banality. Yet we also need to look to the local, which keeps our feet on the ground. Together, the two prevent us from falling into one of two extremes.”

I write all this as an unabashed enthusiast for free markets. The problems that they cause are infinitely preferable to the ones they solve, like starvation, disease, and serfdom. As an anti-utopian, however, I’m convinced that every arrangement or system devised by the mind of man on this mortal coil is bound to throw up its own intractable problems. In the midst of all the many shortcomings of his latest encyclical, Francis has put his finger on a problem endemic to capitalism: one that those who care about limiting government need to be aware of. The ability of free markets to generate phenomenal material wealth and standards of living will not prevent us from throwing it all away in the long run. As Tocqueville himself wrote, “the ten or fifteen years which preceded the French Revolution were, all over Europe, years of great prosperity.” Those who orchestrated the Revolution and the subsequent terror were not the oppressed benighted underclass but “wealthy people, surrounded by literary society in their drawing rooms, passing their time in endless philosophical discussions which affected, excited, and inflamed them until they shed torrents of imaginary tears most of the time.”

The greatest threat to free markets and to freedom more generally comes from bored, disillusioned, middle-class people of middling intellect: ’Twas ever thus. Capitalism makes tremendous promises to people about their physical well-being — and keeps all of them. But once these same people have grown accustomed to physical comforts, they always try to extract metaphysical promises from free markets as well. Finding that these are not promises that dollars and cents can keep, this alienated class then proceeds to vandalize each and every engine of prosperity in the economy, destroying lives and livelihoods unnumbered in the process. So it went in 1789, and so it will go in the future if we delude ourselves into thinking that markets alone can consummate the most fundamental human desires.

This is the inevitable endpoint of capitalism unconstrained. Without the ascendency of authority, tradition, home, hearth, and altar in civil society, this great economic run the human race is on simply cannot last. Francis deserves credit for pointing this out, hapless though he may be when it comes to the finer points of economic theory. If markets are allowed to metastasize to the point where they cease to sell materials and start to sell materialism, we should not be surprised to find image-bearers of God, hungry by nature for transcendence and communion, ready to burn it all to the ground in a desperate attempt to drag Heaven down to Earth with the guillotine’s blade.