Catholicism and the Political Ethic — II

In the first part of this investigation I exposed the tension between Catholic morality and political morality, a contradiction from which we can, nonetheless, find a way of escaping.

But first, there is one “resolution” of the contradiction that seems to me illusory. This consists, as I described at the end of previous post, in pressing on the Catholic moral conscience, while severing the link between conscience and consciousness. From the latter springs the possibility of moral autonomy; from the former, only a confused sentimentality, easily corrupted and directed towards non-moral ends. Conscience can easily become the prey of manipulative politicians, as Gobetti knew, because it rejects moral reasoning in favor of intuition, autonomy in favor of dependence and a false solidarity: “…the word of faith and love spoken by the Church springs up on its own in the solitude of the individual conscience…” and creates bonds of common suffering or agitation.

This is the modus operandi of our Catholic politicians, for instance, when they direct all the moral energy of the believers towards “culture war” controversies. The electoral and social ambitions of politicians, cloaked in Catholic moral language, incite believers to action and protest. In the belief that the ends they pursue have a moral quality, the latter give full expression to their impulses and intuitions and stifle the rational development of their moral personality.

This tendency is quite evident in the political life of Georgetown. Catholic intellectuals are drawn towards this modus operandi when they come into contact with other right-wing groups, such as the conservatives I described before (“Conservatism and Rights”). The sentiments of the two groups often fuse together in the thought of individuals, whose conservatism is delighted by the Catholic strategy which destroys individuals’ moral autonomy and enslaves them to supposedly Christian dogmata.

But there is, aside from this false route, a resolution of the conflict between Catholic and political morality. There is at least one aim common to Catholic morality and the modern morality of politics, justice. Certainly, Catholicism and the logic of political activity do not conceive “justice” in the same way. And it is also true that for Catholics, justice is one of the lesser virtues of political life. But the pursuit of political justice can establish itself as, at least, an intermediate aim for the Catholic citizen.

It seems a contradiction in itself that, to conciliate Catholicism and political morality, the Catholic should have to disavow the Catholicity of his aim, and frame it in political terms instead. But it is not a deception for the Catholic to uphold justice as the ultimate aim of his political activity, because once justice is realized there is, strictly speaking, no “politics” in the modern sense of the word. In this world beyond justice, there are no competing claims of right, requiring appeal to rules of justice; here, then, the Catholic morality of private life will face no challenges from a political morality.

The world beyond justice is a sort of messianic world, because it seems that some external, miraculous force would be needed to bring it about. But for this very reason, it has no bearing on the political ethic, grounded in realism. The Catholic citizen may contemplate this world all he likes, but in practice, it is irrelevant, except as a lofty motivation to action.

There remains a tension between Catholic morality and political morality, on an everyday basis. But deprived of the conflict between the ultimate ends of political life, we can approach this tension, if not always erase it, through the realism of moral reasoning. In this way the Catholic, too, assimilates his proximal ends to the political struggle for autonomy.

Company Lies

Corporations have always used propaganda in their battle against the unions. The companies’ enormous public relations firepower is one of the leading reasons for the weakness of the labor movement in the United States, in comparison to other industrialized nations. In the last week, the provision of card check neutrality has been removed from the Employee Free Choice Act, taking the bill from a major measure to a minor one, and this is a direct result of a corporate propaganda victory.

The fight against unions in the 1930s followed all the same patterns as today in its corporate rhetoric. As is detailed in Allan Lichtman’s White Protestant Nation, The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), a group representing mostly larger businesses and probably second in influence only to the US Chamber of Commerce among business organizations, had a 1934 internal memo written by the Employment Relations Committee, which laid out strategy for fighting labor and regulations. First it explains that “collective barganining…is a vicious menace even when it is not evil in effect.” Then it proclaims that “manufacturers should make public declaration that they believe in collective bargaining.” Similarly, “the Association has no choice but to appear to favor unemployment insurance in principle if it wants to make any fight against it.” The key is “assaulting every working plan proposed, for they are all vulnerable.” In other words, companies claim to support rights for workers and reform, but in practice tear any actual proposal to shreds. This is thoroughly dishonest and Machiavellian by any measure. In Lichtman’s words, “they would pay lip service to reform while working to kill liberal programs or shape them in their interest.”

This practice is still current. The Center for Union Facts, one of the primary propaganda engines for companies, claims to “support employees who elect to join a union,” and is simply against “union officials’ abuse of power.” The furor over the “secret ballot” is a perfect example of the companies’ tactics of dissimulation and watering-down. The companies are convincing the voting public that companies want workers to have the right to form a union in the most-democratic possible fashion. In reality, they understand card check neutrality as a means for a rapid increase in unionization, while the secret ballot (the current system) is so greatly in favor of the companies that unionization will likely continue to decrease.

The great historical success of company propaganda is having convinced many Americans that the foremost obstacle to a democratic process of unionization is that unions deploy coercive power. A worker, or anyone who has spent much time with workers, would consider this idea ludicrous, because the overwhelming characteristic of the distribution of power in the workplace is the massive concentration of coercive power in the hands of management. To a worker, the union organizer is a like a fly, while the company, especially a multinational corporation, is like Godzilla. The company controls everything – the job (and hence survival, in a recession), the working conditions, the scheduling, the pay, raises and promotions. I would have put benefits on that list, but most blue-collar workers don’t receive benefits unless they are organized. Companies can also embarrass and humiliate workers. During the unionization process, if an election is called, companies use the period of several months before the election occurs to use every tool of coercion implied above. They harass workers, they threaten them, they force them to attend captive-audience meetings, they even fire them. This is all of course in violation of the law, but the law is not enforced. The Labor Board, which adjudicates these allegations, is stocked with Bush appointees. This is why majority sign-up is more democratic than a National Labor Relations Board election: the card-signing process happens with only the normal degree of company pressure on workers, but the election happens after the company has deployed all the fury it has locked away, disguised by bland assertions of support for the right to collectively bargain.

Company propaganda is powerful, but it has not conquered those who experience these conditions. An easy way to tell whether someone has had any experience with working-class people (with the exception of managing them) is if they consider the secret ballot to be preferable because it is more democratic. This is why I call it propaganda: that idea is radically out of touch with the actual world. It is designed to destroy workers’ efforts to organize themselves to stand up for their rights.

Catholicism and the Political Ethic — I

Since the Pope has recently released a new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (“Love in Truth”), which deals with the Church’s social teaching, this seems a good time to comment on the idea of a Catholic political culture. This will be the mainly theoretical part of the inquiry, with the practical applications (Catholic life at Georgetown University) following later.

First of all, we might ask ourselves: is a Catholic political culture even possible? In modern times politics has asserted its independence from religious doctrine, not only formally, but also substantially in terms of culture and morals. As I have described in the past, the political ethic of modern times is a kind of “enlightened” or long-view utilitarianism. The sources of this ethic can be traced back to the birth of realism in Western political thought, and its incompatibility with Christian morality is obvious: one need only read Machiavelli advising the Prince “to use or not to use his goodness as necessity requires” (ch. XV). Thus the idea of a Catholic politics, at least when we understand “politics” in the modern sense, that of an activity requiring moral freedom and a concern for earthly justice, seems to be fraught with contradictions.

Yet despite this there is a Catholic politics, or at least, a politics organized by Catholics. Is it really both Catholic and political? Setting aside, for the moment, the Catholic politician, let us think of the Catholic citizen. The Catholic citizen can be roused to political action, certainly, by certain kinds of moral appeal: to charity, to love, to human dignity, even to justice — which, in Catholic morality, is always just a stepping-stone on the way to charity, to love (caritas). But we should note that to adhere to these appeals, framed in the language of Catholic morality, the Catholic citizen must embrace the rules and conventions of political life. This is not exactly the same as accepting the ethic of political life, but it is a step in that direction.

If the Catholic is going to pursue the aims of charity and dignity through political means, then his struggle, whether he understands this or not, will become a fight for autonomy, for liberty. He will overstep the bounds of the Christian concept of freedom, which is a mainly inner freedom, as the Catholic theologian Oswald von Nell-Breuning described it: “the freedom to decide in my inner conscience what seems just for me to do, taking into account my responsibility before God” (“Neoliberalismus und katholische Soziallehre,” in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft heute, p. 90). This freedom presupposes, certainly, the mental and moral capacity to think of oneself as an autonomous actor, but it does not put the Catholic’s autonomy to work in the service of outer freedom, the concrete liberties of a human community.

Thus a tension will have to remain in his action: the tension between the Catholic morality of private life and the political morality of public life. As soon as the Catholic citizen begins to pursue political aims, even if framed in the moral language of Catholicism, these are progressively assimilated to a single end: autonomy.

But it is possible to press on his conscience without awakening deep feelings of responsibility, interest, and commitment to the rules of political life. This, indeed, is the practice of many of our Catholic politicians today; and it is a strategy that very often succeeds. We will examine this case, and its implications, at a later time. For now I leave you with a few words of Piero Gobetti: “An integrist declaration of dogma and faith in the context of the modern world might cause a scandal, but the word of faith and love spoken by the Church springs up on its own in the solitude of the individual conscience…The Church can prevail still by relying on the fear of individuals faced with a crisis of conscience.”

Conservatism and Rights

There is a particular brand of conservatism, sometimes called traditionalist conservatism — but which we prefer to call real conservatism, the conservatism of throne and altar, of de Maistre and Bonald — which is staunchly opposed to the idea of “rights”. This conservatism is particularly hostile to any assertion of natural rights, which are viewed as forming the abstract ideology of the “demagogues” of the Enlightenment. The reasons for this opposition are worth investigating, if for no other reason than that it is quite iconoclastic in our time, our “age of rights,” as Norberto Bobbio has called it.

Perhaps the most unusual fact about this variety of conservatism is that it has its devotees even in the United States. Traditionalist conservatism, in this country, originated during the 1950s and ’60s, as a reaction to the growth of new social movements and the democratic and egalitarian energies they represented. Against this tendency towards “leveling” in moral and political life, the traditionalists declared equality anathema and expressed their desire to restore “the permanent things”: traditional social institutions such as the state, the church, and the family.

“The permanent things,” for conservatives, incarnate the allegedly ineradicable oppositions that structure life: the rich versus the poor, law versus opinion, and so on. Universal and inalienable rights, and particularly the extension of rights to groups that had previously been denied them, do not fit into this schema of oppositions. Conservative denunciations, apropos of this subject, can be quite starting. Thus, for instance, Thomas Fleming:

Among the most dangerous of our theoretical illusions are the political fantasies that can be summed up in words like democracy, equality, and natural rights; the principle of one man, one vote and the American tradition of self-government. No one who lives in the world with his eyes open can actually believe in any of this.

Most conservatives defend their opposition on the grounds that “rights” are nothing but the fictions of an abstract ideology, the sterile rationalism of the Enlightenment. I have a different explanation. Conservatism, so far as I can discern, rejects the idea of rights not because it is suspicious of a priori claims — it is all too happy to make these with regard to religious topics and human nature — but because rights represent real, and successful, historical challenges to the conservative idea of a society fonded upon immutable oppositions.

“The permanent things” are not the state, the church, and the family. At most, these are the empirical incarnation of ideal concepts: the concepts of a just society and of a free society. In human social life, the permanent things are not institutions, but exhortations: the will to realize justice and the need to preserve liberty. Around the tension between these two ideal concepts, social and political life takes shape.

To defend rights does not necessarily mean to think of them as “natural,” or as God-given. It is also possible to conceive of rights as the guarantees of liberty that condition any possible attempt to realize justice. This is a possibility, certainly, that the conservatives do not admit. And since it undermines the foundation of the conservative idea, we can understand why.

Another AIG bonus package hits public scrutiny

AIG has quietly stepped into some of the spotlight again with a recent announcement of bonuses. Over the past year, “AIG” itself has become somewhat of an explosive keyword, guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of the average American taxpayer.

Article here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/09/AR2009070902702.html

This recent move, however, shows some much-welcomed restraint from the insurance giant. These bonuses total only $2.4 million for 40 top-ranking executives, or 0.0013% of the $180 billion federal bailout package they received — a figure far lower than the $165 million in bonuses responsible for the last public outrage.

Let’s do the math: $2.4 m for 40 executives comes to an average bonus of $60,000. In the world of finance, this is tiny considering what a first- or second- year investment banker was making just a couple of years ago. It truly does represent the troubled state of AIG. They even went far enough to seek approval from the government when not legally obliged to do so in an effort to forgo as much public disapproval as possible.

I think it’s a safe bet, however, that AIG will never receive good publicity for bonus-giving, no matter what the amount.

The Ethical Value of Politics

Politics deals with actions aimed at utility, and utility is not morality. But it is not simply egoism either, so there is a need to defend the spiritual, and fundamentally valuable, nature of political engagement against all those who dismiss it as completely immoral, the preserve of crooks. (“Croce oppositore,” La Rivoluzione liberale 4, no. 31)

These words were written in 1925 by Piero Gobetti, an Italian intellectual and critic, who rose to prominence in the years immediately after the First World War. A radical liberal, editor of the newspaper La Rivoluzione liberale (“Liberal Revolution”) and intransigent opponent of Mussolini’s Fascist Party, he died in exile in Paris in 1926, at the tragically young age of twenty-five.

Gobetti’s claim is exceedingly relevant to our time, in which the prevailing tendency seems to be to dismiss political life as “the preserve of crooks” and nothing else. We have good reason to expect little from our politicians, of course, but Gobetti in his time was equally critical of the parliamentary bargaining and dealmaking that did nothing to address the real problems of his country. By “politics,” he meant not just the affairs of the legislature, or the activity of the parties, but politics in a broad sense, comprising social movements and public intellectuals as well as state institutions. Among the latter is where idealistic commitment, the demand for autonomy, and the will for justice can be found, and it is due to the latter that we are justified in assigning an ethical value to politics.

In his association of politics and utility, but an “enlightened” utility, a utility that serves some further — moral — purpose, Gobetti calls to mind Max Weber. (See, in particular, Weber’s lecture on “Politics as a Vocation.”) Gobetti’s thought owes much to Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher, who divided practical activity into the ethical and the economic (to be understood in a broad sense, as matters dealing with utility). Indeed, the above quotation comes from Gobetti’s essay on Croce, in which he also writes the following:

But the political man is not relegated to, or confined within, the boundaries of the utilitarian field on which he makes his first moves. Politics creates new relationships, becomes an instrument of moral life, goes to the sources of knowledge.

We should not fall in, of course, with those who identify politics and morality tout court. But neither should we accept the assessment of our low-grade Machiavellians and false realists, who think of politics as a mere exercise in rhetorical skill, or even more simply as plunder and corruption. We cast our lot with those who can indeed see, in politics, a form of emancipation. Political activity presupposes a strong consciousness of one’s interests and one’s developed convictions, but also the acceptance of rules of the game, which safeguard the convictions of all from external predation. Politics, through a long and arduous process, allows us to arrive at a consensus, even if provisional, and to acquire some consciousness of our common interests. Briefly: it makes civil life possible.

In this sense, in the field of subjective life, politics — when we approach it with conviction, with intransigence, and with respect — has the ethical value of a form of emancipation.

Democracy in Honduras

The international community has unanimously condemned the recent military coup in Honduras. The OAS and UN both passed resolutions calling for the reinstatement of President Manuel Zelaya. President Obama unequivocally declared the coup “not legal,” with Secretary of State Clinton adding that it “should be condemned by all.” Even Hugo Chavez has suspended oil shipments to Honduras until the exiled leader is returned to power.

Last week I argued that Sarkozy’s “burqa ban” missed the big picture—that it would barely make a dent in overcoming the subjugation of Muslim women. Similarly, while the international community is focused on peacefully reinstating Zelaya, it currently is not, and historically has not, provided a means for what should be the ultimate goal in Honduras: a stable and sustainable democracy.

Preemptive War is not Wilsonian

Most commentators compared President Bush’s foreign policy to that of President Woodrow Wilson. There is a similar emphasis in both on liberal ideals. However, for the neoconservatives, the overarching ideal was democracy (with implications of capitalism and free trade), while Wilson had a more complex commitment to all the various tenets of international relations liberalism, including self-determination, democracy, and a League of Nations to enact collective security and eliminate aggression. President Wilson pursued these goals consistently and single-mindedly; he went to great lengths to see them manifested in the Treaty of Versailles, which constructed a new international order after World War I. I think comparing this legacy to the neoconservative project is unfair.

Neoconservatism paid lip-service to liberal ideals, but in practice it was something far more sinister. For example, the supposed commitment to democracy is not especially convincing when the United States props up authoritarian regimes such as that of Mubarak in Egypt and Karimov in Uzbekistan, just because they are enemies of Islamists. This selective idealism suggests the ideology was more a justification, or perhaps a mask, for the real objectives of the neoconservatives. This ideology is, by its practitioners’ own admission, an ideology of unipolar American hegemonic power. This is the ideology that claims the United States can and should control all important events in the world. The United States is perfectly justified in invading Iraq in defiance of the very institutions envisioned by Woodrow Wilson, even if the public justifications of Weapons of Mass Destruction and collusion with terrorists are known by much of the administration to be false or unlikely, because the United States is the “good guy,” the liberal democratic Christian nation battling the evil forces of antidemocratic fundamentalism.

This looks nothing like the ideas of President Wilson. He would have been horrified to find his own country conducting an illegal preemptive war on an independent nation-state. The former university professor, no matter how flawed he was, would know that it is vital to obey one’s own precepts. He would have called upon the nations of the world to confront the United States and protect Iraq from its depredations. This is what liberalism in international relations really looks like.

Bush administration foreign policy is reminiscent of the foreign policy of a different turn-of-the-twentieth-century presidency. I consider Theodore Roosevelt to be a more relevant precursor to neoconservatism. Theodore Roosevelt was a boyish imperialist, a man who believed that war made you a man. He gained colonial possessions for the United States, such as Cuba and the Philippines, in which the US fought a long and brutal counterinsurgency campaign. He added what is known as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, by which the US could intervene in the domestic affairs of Latin American countries if those countries could not pay their debts, and frequently did. He created Panama by force from Colombia in order to construct the Panama Canal. It is in this tradition that I would place neoconservatism: a mask of idealism to fulfill a belief in the superiority of America, and its God-given right to force its will upon others, especially others who don’t look like Americans. Every administration since Wilson’s has followed his ideas in some way, but I think the Bush administration was a step away from Wilson rather than a step toward him.

Reasoning About Secularism

I want to approach a different aspect of the burqa and Islamic veil controversy in France, the question of jurisdiction: who, if anyone, should be responsible for determining whether the wearing of the burqa constitutes a breach of laïcité?

According to Nicolas Sarkozy, the wearing of the burqa is “a sign of subservience,” because it represents the inferior status of women. It is uncertain exactly what he means to say here: for Sarkozy, does the wearing of the veil, in and of itself, constitute a degrading act? Or is the wearing of the burqa degrading, rather, because it is forced upon women by their male counterparts? Regardless of what Sarkozy means, I’m going to proceed by following the latter interpretation, which to me seems to be the only tenable position. If we were certain that wearing the burqa was not forced upon Muslim women, but was indeed entirely voluntary, we would not consider it degrading.

At this point, then, we can distinguish two questions: 1) Is the wearing of the burqa forced upon Muslim women by males? 2) Does the wearing of the burqa in, say, a public school, constitute a breach of laïcité? It’s the latter question that I’m interested in answering.

The French rule of laïcité currently prescribes, first, that the state is to remain neutral in matters of religion, and second, that “conspicuous religious symbols” are not to be worn in public institutions. The burqa is clearly a conspicuous religious symbol. But isn’t it merely an accidental feature, or happenstance, that the burqa which symbolizes Islamic devotion is far more conspicuous than, say, the cross necklace which, though it may be almost unnoticeable, symbolizes a parallel devotion for Christians? If we take this fact into account, then by banning the veil from schools, the French state may seem to be violating its own principle of neutrality. Indeed, we may think it guilty of designing a law specifically to ban the symbol of Islamic devotion from public spaces, while allowing Christian symbols to pass by unnoticed.

My position is, basically, that for the state to ban the wearing of the burqa would represent a violation of laïcité – transforming it from a principle of non-discrimination into a militant secularism. Or, rather, for the political arm of the state (Sarkozy and his ministers, or the French parliament) to issue such an edict would violate the principle of neutrality. If Sarkozy wants to preserve laïcité, then he is best off not taking action on the question at all. Rather, he should delegate it, leaving the decision up to the various public institutions involved, such as schools, where it can be determined on a more specific basis. This solution has the advantage of not implicating the state in a legal expression of (what I consider) non-neutrality. The decisions made by public institutions would have the status, not of national laws, but of simple regulations or conventional norms, more flexible and less official.

As a final note, Sarkozy’s heavy-handed language certainly does not strengthen his case. It only implicates the state further in non-neutral acts — acts which are clearly against the spirit of laïcité.

New Contributor

Hello to all — I’m Brendan McElroy, a Georgetown student alongside Erik and Sam, who’s invited me to contribute here. I plan to write mainly on European politics and history, along with, on occasion, some thoughts on what I’m reading at the time. Looking forward to getting to work!