The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.
Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force.
No social system can stand for long without a moral base. Project a magnificent skyscraper being built on quicksands: while men are struggling upward to add the hundredth and two-hundredth stories, the tenth and twentieth are vanishing, sucked under by the muck. That is the history of capitalism, of its swaying, tottering attempt to stand erect on the foundation of the altruist morality.
It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.
Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism—the same goal, global rule by force—the same enemy, man’s mind.
There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.
The encyclical was endorsed with enthusiasm by the communist press the world over. “The French Communist party newspaper, L’Humanit6, said the encyclical was ‘often moving’ and constructive for highlighting the evils of capitalism long emphasized by Marxists,” reports The New York Times (March 30, 1967).
Those who do not understand the role of moral self-confidence in human affairs, will not appreciate the sardonically ludicrous quality of the following item from the same report: “The French Communists, however, deplored the failure of the Pope to make a distinction between rich Communist countries and rich capitalist countries in his general strictures against imbalance between the ‘have’ and ‘have-not’ nations.”
Thus, wealth acquired by force, is rightful property, but wealth earned by production, is not; looting is moral, but producing is not. And while the looters’ spokesmen object to the encyclical’s damnation of wealth, the producers’ spokesmen crawl, evading the issues, accepting the insults, promising to give their wealth away. If capitalism does not survive, this is the spectacle that will have made it unworthy of survival.
The New York Times (March 30, 1967) declared editorially that the encyclical “is remarkably advanced in its economic philosophy. It is sophisticated, comprehensive and penetrating . . .” If, by “advanced,” the editorial meant that the encyclical’s philosophy has caught up with that of modern “liberals,” one would have to agree—except that the Times is mistaken about the direction of the motion involved: it is not that the encyclical has progressed to the twentieth century, it is that the “liberals” have reverted to the fourth.
The Wall Street Journal (May 10, 1967) went further. It declared, in effect, that the Pope didn’t mean it. The encyclical, it alleged, was just a misunderstanding caused by some mysterious conspiracy of the Vatican translators who misinterpreted the Pope’s ideas in transferring them from the original Latin into English. “His Holiness may not be showering compliments on the free market system. But he is not at all saying what the Vatican’s English version appeared to make him say.”
Through minute comparisons of Latin paragraphs with their official and unofficial translations, and columns of casuistic hair-splitting, The Wall Street Journal reached the conclusion that it was not capitalism that the Pope was denouncing, but only “some opinions” of capitalism. Which opinions? According to the unofficial translation, the encyclical’s paragraph 26 reads as follows: “But out of these new conditions, we know not how, some opinions have crept into human society according to which profit was regarded (in these opinions) as the foremost incentive to encourage economic progress, free competition as the supreme rule of economics, private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right which would accept neither limits nor a social duty related to it….”
“In the Latin,” said the article, “Pope Paul is acknowledging the hardships … in the development of ‘some kinds of capitalism.’ But he puts the blame for that not on ‘the whole woeful system”—i.e., the whole capitalistic system—but on some corrupt views of it”
If the views advocating the profit motive, free competition, and private property are “corrupt,” just what is capitalism? Blank out. What is The Wall Street JournaTs definition of capitalism? Blank out What are we to designate as “capitalism” once all of its essential characteristics are removed? Blank out
This last question indicates the unstated meaning of that article: since the Pope does not attack capitalism, but only its fundamental principles, we don’t have to worry.
And for what, do you suppose, did that article find courage to reproach the encyclical? “What might have been wished for in the encyclical was an acknowledgment that capitalism can accept, and in the United States as well as other places does accept, a great many social responsibilities.”
Sic transit gloria viae Wall.
A similar attitude, with a similar range of vision, is taken by Time magazine (April 7, 1967). “Although Pope Paul had probably tried to give a Christian message relevant to the world’s contemporary economic situation, his encyclical virtually ignored the fact that old-style laissez-faire capitalism is about as dead as Das Kapital. Quite clearly, the Pope’s condemnation of capitalism was addressed to the unreconstructed variety that persists, for example, in Latin America.”
If this were a competition, the prize would go to Fortune, the businessmen’s magazine (May 1967). Its attitude is aggressively amoral and a-philosophical; it is proudly determined to maintain the separation of economics and ethics. “Capitalism is only an economic system,” it says.
First acknowledging the Pope’s “praiseworthy purpose,” Fortune declares: “But despite its modern and global vision, Populorum Progressio may be a self-defeating document. It takes a dated and suspicious view of the workings of economic enterprise. . . . The Pope has set up a straw man that has few defenders—if this passage [paragraph 26] is taken literally. Unalloyed laissez-faire in fact governs no significant part of the world’s commerce…. ‘Ownership,’ in advanced countries, has evolved in a way that subsumes ‘social obligations.’… ‘Absolute’ private rights are irrelevant in advanced industrial societies.”
After conceding all that, Fortune seems to be astonished and hurt that the Pope did not find it necessary to include businessmen among the “men of good will” whom he calls upon to combat global poverty. “In omitting any specific reference to the businessman, he slights a natural and necessary ally, who, indeed is already deeply committed in many parts of the world to the kind of effort that Paul urges. Perhaps the businessman is taken for granted, as a kind of primordial force that can be counted upon to provide motive power, and that needs only to be tamed and harnessed and carefully watched. [And isn’t that Fortune’s own view of businessmen in their “unalloyed” state?]
“The Vatican has seldom seemed able to look at capitalism as other than a necessary evil, at best, and Populorum Progressio suggests that a better understanding still comes hard. This is not to suggest that capitalism is a complete formula for social enlightenment and progress; it is only an economic system that men of good will can use—more successfully than any other system yet conceived—to attain the social goals that politics and religion help to define.”
Observe the indecency of trying to justify capitalism on the grounds of altruistic service. Observe also the naivete of the cynical: it is not their wealth nor the relief of poverty that the encyclical is after.
Militantly concrete-bound, equating cynicism with “practicality,” modern pragmatists are unable to see beyond the range of the moment or to grasp what moves the world and determines its direction. Men who are willing to swim with any current, to compromise on anything, to serve as means to anyone’s ends, lose the ability to understand the power of ideas. And while two hordes of man-haters, who do understand it, are converging on civilization, they sit in the middle, declaring that principles are straw men.
I have heard the same accusation directed at Objectivism: we are fighting a straw man, they say, nobody preaches the kind of ideas we are opposing.
Well, as a friend of mine observed, only the Vatican, the Kremlin, and the Empire State Building* know the real issues of the modern world.
•This publication moved its offices to the Empire State Building in September.
APPENDIX: MAN’S RIGHTS
BY AYN RAND
If one wishes to advocate a free society—that is, capitalist one must realize that its indispensable foundation is the principle of individual rights. If one wishes to uphold individual rights, one must realize that capitalism is the only system that can uphold and protect them. And if one wishes to gauge the relationship of freedom to the goals of today’s intellectuals, one may gauge it by the fact that the concept of individual rights is evaded, distorted, perverted and seldom discussed, most conspicuously seldom by the so-called “conservatives.”