Spero Consulting

Posts Tagged ‘Western Civilization’

And a Brief Men­tion about the Decline in Num­bers of Reli­gious Personnel

“Inter­fer­ing with people’s prop­erty, labor, and exchange – except where nec­es­sary to uphold jus­tice and sus­tain soci­ety – is a vio­la­tion of the sacred­ness of the person.”

That’s from an essay by Greg Forster, “Sacred Enter­prise,” in the Clare­mont Review of Books, Sum­mer 2009. (Unfor­tu­nately, it’s only avail­able on-​line to sub­scribers.) He goes on to write, “And increas­ing the total amount of avail­able wealth is morally good, so it is wrong to sti­fle eco­nomic growth or to force poten­tially pro­duc­tive assets to lie waste­fully dor­mant…” (Think the Para­ble of the Tal­ents (Matthew 25:14 – 30) as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the first clause, and Cash for Clunk­ers as an exam­ple of the second.)

We only wish that Mr. Forster had cho­sen a dif­fer­ent word instead of “jus­tice,” because that loaded term is too often used to ratio­nal­ize the med­dling and inter­fer­ence that he is condemning.

In the essay, Mr. Forster is mak­ing a moral case for cap­i­tal­ism and mar­kets. It’s an argu­ment that cur­rent Church lead­ers could make, which would be con­sis­tent with their tra­di­tions and cat­e­chism, if they thought about eco­nomic issues a lit­tle more clearly than they do (and had a bit more train­ing in both eco­nom­ics and his­tory). In fact, for quite some time, Church doc­tors , e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas, and oth­ers – the Scholas­tic econ­o­mists – did make such argu­ments. And those argu­ments had a tremen­dous and long-​term influ­ence on many – both reli­gious and irre­li­gious – includ­ing the founders of this great nation.

Mr. Forster men­tions the book, The Vic­tory of Rea­son, by Rod­ney Stark, which pro­vides a good, gen­eral his­tory of the Church’s pos­i­tive influ­ence on West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion, includ­ing its role in the devel­op­ment and defense of cap­i­tal­ism. How the Catholic Church Built West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. is a sim­i­lar and fine book, too.

Those look­ing for more spe­cial­ized books on eco­nom­ics and Catholi­cism should con­sider The Church and the Mar­ket, also by Mr. Woods and Faith and Lib­erty: The Eco­nomic Thought of the Late Scholas­tics by Ale­jan­dro A. Cha­fuen. Both of these show the con­gruity between Catholi­cism and pri­vate prop­erty and free enter­prise. (We’ve men­tioned all of these books at one time or another and highly rec­om­mend all of them.)

We wish that America’s Catholics bish­ops would con­sider the argu­ments found in such books before sup­port­ing gov­ern­ment poli­cies like nation­al­ized health-​care. In fact, we view such sup­port for gov­ern­ment aid (ver­sus Catholic char­i­ta­ble aid and ser­vice) to be an abdi­ca­tion of the Church’s tra­di­tional role and respon­si­bil­i­ties. More­over, we think that as the Church veers from that role (as char­ity provider) it loses much of its vital­ity because it can­not recruit young, spir­i­tual, ide­al­ists who are will­ing to serve those in need. (It’s a long, multi-​part argu­ment that we promise to make in the near future.)

Part of our argu­ment is based upon our view that the sub­sti­tu­tion of government-​provided aid for pri­vate char­ity is a social ser­vice ana­logue of Gresham’s Law, i.e., bad money dri­ves out good money, and gov­ern­ment man­dates make the anal­ogy rather com­plete. (As you may recall, Gresham’s Law states that when both pure and debased coins must be accepted as legal ten­der, the debased ones are cir­cu­lated. It’s not much dif­fer­ent than keep­ing the crispy new bills in your wal­let and pay­ing with the greasy, dirty old ones, except in Pitts­burgh where it is rare to find crispy new ones.) By the way, the late Scholas­tics also knew and wrote about such cur­rency debase­ments and viewed them as theft by the rulers and vio­la­tions of the sacred­ness of the per­son, too. (There’s not much that is new.)

Finally, we’d argue that the dif­fer­ence in qual­ity of ser­vice can be addressed with a sim­ple ques­tion: who would you pre­fer to treat you: a mem­ber or employee of a char­i­ta­ble, reli­gious orga­ni­za­tion or a mem­ber of the fed­eral bureau­cracy? Where’s the love, man? Yeah, it seems rather rhetor­i­cal, doesn’t it?

Approx­i­mately ten days ago, after his release from jail, we caught a brief glimpse of Bernie Mad­off on the tele­vi­sion news. 

He was walk­ing along the side­walks of New York, pre­sum­ably near his apart­ment, and he was sur­rounded by a swarm of news reporters and cameramen.

It seemed that some­one accosted him – pushed him – but the episode didn’t last very long. We didn’t think much of it at the time and fig­ured that it was a dis­grun­tled neigh­bor who was also an investor in Mr. Madoff’s funds who had hap­pened upon him and his entourage, and that was that.

Upon fur­ther reflec­tion, we had our tit­u­lar thought: what a civ­i­lized coun­try we live in! 

Many very rich, clever, and rel­a­tively pow­er­ful peo­ple seem to have lost sub­stan­tial sums of money by invest­ing with Mr. Mad­off. Yet, he was arrested and arraigned and released on bail – all accord­ing to our laws – and upon his release he felt safe enough to ven­ture into public.

To date he has suf­fered noth­ing worse than a push.

Thus, so far, it seems that his investors have been con­tent to let the gov­ern­ment take the lead in pros­e­cut­ing him, and they have not imple­mented or acted on any vendet­tas or thoughts of revenge.

Now, this is the same coun­try that responded quite aggres­sively to 9/​11 – some say too aggres­sively – so, we don’t believe that we live in a sis­si­fied, effete country. (And it’s cer­tainly not that way out­side of the gun-​controlled cities and states where our media tend to reside.) So, we’d argue that it is sim­ply self-​control (of oth­ers) that per­mits Mr. Mad­off to walk the streets.

Of course, the future could prove us wrong and per­haps some folks are patient and want to serve their revenge cold. Until that time, we’ll mar­vel over the fact that West­ern Civ­i­liza­tion seems alive and impulses seem to be well-​controlled.