A Reflection on Pope Francis
The commentary on Pope Francis’s passing indicates the extent to which the Catholic Church retains some cultural authority. I think commenters on the left have celebrated Francis’s papacy both because they can cherry-pick ideas that line up ideologically with theirs or because they see him as a “reformer” who was actually dismantling the church. On the other hand, some conservatives saw him as abandoning the embrace of democratic capitalism that, in their minds, marked the papacies of Pope John Paul II and, to a lesser degree, Benedict XVI.
I don’t want to comment on his passing in terms of what his papacy meant to the faithful or to the future of the Church. Instead, I want to suggest that we do everyone a disservice when we assess his papacy based on the faultlines of American politics. Nowhere was the tendency of both liberals and conservatives to use papal pronouncements to confirm their prejudices more noticeable than in the response to his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si.
Politics deals with standards of what a good life looks like. Aristotle suggested that the only standard genuinely worthy of a well-ordered polis is that which aims at a final telos, an ultimate good which transcends all others, which he referred to as eudaimonia, generally translated as happiness, but referring to human well-being and efflorescence. There could be, he believed, only one comprehensive existential principle in play, or else the community would devolve into disastrous factionalism. Only a polity so committed could harmonize various labors, classes, and functions into a just order.
As interested as he was in the good and its incarnations in political life, he remained equally fascinated and troubled by its deviations. Much of the Politics revolved around the question of what happens if you replace human flourishing with a different existential standard, typically one that, as he argued in Book 3, excessively focuses on one of the goods of this world. What will happen to a political community if someone offers, for example, a constantly rising standard of living as the principle of political life? Aristotle argued that a political community could not be sustained under any principle other than that of eudaimonia, and that such a principle required both deliberate choice and an avoidance of excess. Luxury and pleonexia (wanting more than your fair share and that involves a taking from others) destroyed political comity.
I believe this is the best context within which to understand Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si. Francis feared the developed nations were driven by a combination of pleonexia, artificial wealth generation (speculation and finance), and the desire to dominate nature. Much of the commentary missed the mark on this encyclical, largely because of the lack of attentiveness to the question of what good political communities should aspire to. This was true of the American left, which mistakenly read the letter as an environmentalist treatise, and also the American right, where wags such as George Will attacked the Pope for not being a modern, secular, warmongering, capitalistic, technocratic rationalist.
Conservative Catholics got in on the action as well, denigrating the pope's "bad science" concerning climate and economics, suggesting that "many conceptual problems and questionable empirical claims characterize the encyclical’s vision of contemporary economic life.” Some accused the Pope of employing "buzzwords" and mere "formal, procedural gestures" in the absence of sound analysis of what were, in their telling, merely possible environmental challenges. Francis, they claimed, avoided substantive moral and metaphysical questions in favor of "technocratic conceits" and "cheap populism" that eschewed traditional Catholic teaching about solidarity and subsidiarity.
Well, then. These were strong claims, but one can't help but wonder if the critics read the document. Pope Francis clearly delineated an ecological crisis but also drew our attention to a comprehensive crisis that includes nature, human beings, and the scope of their relations. The crisis, he claimed, resulted from a stance of technocratic mastery that views all nature, including human nature, as subject to rational and technocratic control. The result is the tendency to see the world not as Being, with its concomitant relation of awe, but as “being useful,” or as “in reserve” to be put at our disposal.
How do we orient ourselves to the world around us? We choose, Francis insisted, between dispositions of wonder versus exploitation and reverence versus mastery. The whole modern paradigm, he claimed, is predicated on choosing the latter terms. As a result, modern man is in an unsustainable and disintegrated relationship both to the natural world and to his fellow humans. The result, predictably, will be an impending natural and social catastrophe, the signs of which are already apparent.
Francis drew our attention to the resultant deformations. Catastrophic environmental degradation. The dissolution of social relations. Unjust income inequality. Financial manipulations that threaten to undermine economic stability. Poorly designed cities with their brutalist architecture. He condemned our "throwaway" culture that sees all beings, including persons, as ultimately disposable and thus not worthy of respect for their inherent dignity. We are increasingly an indebted people - ecologically, socially, financially - who no longer possess either the means or imagination to satisfy our debts. We believe our best strategy for dealing with them is to ignore them, just as we increasingly believe that the best way to owe our children nothing is not to have children.
Francis drew attention to our lack of concern for nature and our shared home, to one another, to the organization of our lives in cities and communities, and to our systems of economic organization that reward non-productive activity and skew away from genuine productivity. We are guilty of what he called a "cheerful recklessness" that ignores the basic responsibilities we have toward human well-being and our obligations to others. We demonstrate "a disordered desire to consume more than what is necessary," the consequences of which on a global scale cannot be sustained.
The emphases on immediate gratification and technological mastery, he argued, have placed humans in a bind from which they will not easily extract themselves. Indeed, for the most part we cannot imagine a solution that does not itself depend on technological mastery, further disintegrating our relations. Technology has become "an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm" which precludes alternative thinking and ways of living. Laudato Si was an attempt to go outside this paradigm, and the unwillingness of many commentators to follow him testifies both to the strength of our faith in technology as well as the boldness of Francis' position.
Emphasizing the "use-value" of all things has led, Francis claimed, to degrading nature and society. Our cities have become unlivable, our architecture unattractively monotonous, our environment dangerously unstable, and our social relations hopelessly fragile. As a result, we have become vulnerable in ways we never have before and – here’s the key -- dispossessed of our natural freedom to make deliberative choices concerning our futures. In short, we, and the world around us, have become subordinated to impersonal forces. We are imprisoned in our own cages and foolishly believe that painting the interiors with shiny colors will somehow make us happy.
Many commentators on Laudato Si expressed sympathy for Francis' identification of the symptoms of our illness, as well as his diagnosis concerning mastery, technology, disposability, and the loss of freedom and dignity. But they insisted he offered no workable cure, nothing along the lines of the power of markets to lift the poor out of their condition, or the power of technology to solve our ecological crises, or the power of democratic institutions to insure equality.
All these readings miss a central contention of the encyclical: the Pope responded to the social and ecological crises by referencing the traditional principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Granted, some problems are on such a scale they required a corresponding authority, and the absence of such authority would speed the pace of decline. Had his analysis stayed there, however, it would possess only an abstract and dreamlike quality.
For all the chatter about the encyclical, Francis spent only a very small percentage of it on issues of climate change and corresponding forms of governance. Instead, he looked at actually existent institutions and practices, with a properly understood sense of the value and moral dignity of labor as the pivot point.
Our problems have in no small part arisen, he argued, from our tendency to see things on the wrong scale. Economies of scale have destroyed small businesses, family farms, and sustainable labor practices. Our whole transportation system as well as our finance system, Francis argued, is geared to favor large businesses. "Civil authorities have the right and duty to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers and differentiated production” was his response to crony capitalism and the increasing concentration of ownership, rather than ownership's widespread distribution. He decried "the disappearance of small producers," who alone, in his judgment, have the capacity to see problems as they really are. The right kind of economic growth would be one that emphasized personal work and action, not one that expanded a cash nexus making wealth portable and hoardable.
The concentration of capital and its homogenizing tendencies also has been destructive of our cultural life. Just as it is a tragedy for species to become extinct, so also is it a tragedy when local particularity is compromised. "Together with the patrimony of nature, there is also, an historic, artistic, and cultural patrimony which is likewise under threat. This patrimony is part of a shared identity of each place, and the foundation upon which to build a habitable city." Consumerism levels and homogenizes while an emphasis on personal dignity creates a rich and rewarding diversity and particularity, each place and locality having its own irreplaceable value. The disparaging of these small places is one of the most damaging and morally repulsive standards of the day. These are places where for generations people have lived and loved and worked and played and died, and they deserve the kind of respect we would offer to each person.
People in these places should always be cautious of allowing outside capital and outside political authority in, for both attenuate that place's vitality and freedom, that is, the capacity of persons to make deliberate choices concerning how they actually live. It is a grave injustice, he argued, to externalize the costs of development without taking into account the effects of “progress” on the lives of those who pay its costs. One man's progress is another man's catastrophe, but those who enjoy progress' benefits seem to occupy the heights, until they are again made low.
Francis argued we have a moral obligation to preserve things distinctive to a place that keep us connected to it, for only such rootedness can resist the storms of capital and consumption that otherwise tear things apart or erode them and make barren the natural and social landscapes. This is the only way to make the world inhabitable, both for ourselves and our progeny (should we decide to have them).
Indeed, large organizations have failed in addressing our crises; rather, they've only deepened them. Instead, it is "local individuals and groups" who have "shown creativity and responsibility generated by intimacy," both among one another and toward the land they inhabit. Thus: "What happens with politics? Let us keep in mind the principle of subsidiarity, which grants freedom to develop the capabilities present at every level of society, while also demanding a greater sense of responsibility for the common good from those who wield greater power. Today, it is the case that some economic sectors exercise more power than states themselves. But economics without politics cannot be justified, since this would make it impossible to favour other ways of handling the various aspects of the present crisis."
Francis offered localized structural solutions. His larger solution was to address the problem of the existential core of politics, particularly in the so-called developed world. Here Francis admonished us to abandon our "compulsive consumerism" in favor of simplicity, "a lifestyle capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption." These acts are "acts of love" that, when performed by many persons, "could bring healthy pressure to bear on those who wield political, economic and social power."
No politician on either side of the aisle in America has either the courage or wisdom to help Americans address the crisis at the existential core of our politics. No politician offers any vision that incantates anything other than more economic growth and consumption. No one has been held accountable for the failed financial policies that led to a worldwide economic meltdown. No one has the guts to tell Americans they can't keep getting more while paying less, and forever externalize the costs of their overconsumption onto poor nations and future generations. As Wendell Berry likes to say, we've become very adept at counting apparent benefits while ignoring actual costs - financial, environmental, and cultural.
I think the Pope was largely right, that the solution lay in a change in the way we consume as well as a turn away from large-scale bureaucratic and capital organizations to a deep concern for maintaining the integrity of our own places. We can begin by engaging in the single-most important act of civil resistance: saying "leave us alone” to the interlopers who come in waving cash and armed with empty promises and unsustainable dreams.
Photo courtesy Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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