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by Craig Carter
Everywhere you go today, at least in most theological circles, the cry is raised against capitalism as an evil, oppressive system that must be smashed violently or at least overcome and abolished by peaceful, democratic means. The means by which we resist it may be debated, but the evil of capitalism itself is seldom questioned. The recent recession and global debt crisis have given the anti-capitalist crusaders more ammunition and motivation to renew the attacks on market based economic systems as harmful to the environment, unjust to the poor and full of systemic violence.
This ideological conviction is often found to be closely associated with a number of other verities of the left, such as a deep suspicion of and harshly judgmental attitude toward Western civilization, a sympathy for Marxist or neo-Marxist ideas, feminist attitudes toward patriarchy, and the belief that equality is a higher value than freedom.
Capitalism is a modern ideology that arose at the time of the European Enlightenment on the basis of a Deistic worldview and a naïve faith in the power of human reason to penetrate the nature of reality unaided either by revelation, which was dismissed as superstition, or by tradition, which was patronized as the attitudes of the human race in its relative infancy. Capitalism was developed as a totalizing system of thought in which vices like greed no longer had to be overcome because they could be managed in such a way that even a race of devils could preside over a just society providing that they used reason to discover and implement a capitalist system of economics.
It all sounds too good to be true and, of course, it is too good to be true on several counts. First, human reason was never regarded as having such a high degree of autonomy by classical Augustinian-Thomist Christianity and it is no longer regarded in this way even by the postmodernist heirs of the Enlightenment. If St. Augustine would regard Adam Smith as a Pelagian, Foucault would unmask him as the ideological spokesman for the rich and powerful. Secondly, when the undoubtedly valid insights of capitalism into methods of economic organization are generalized or elevated to a level of a total world view, they fail because they are not grounded in a metaphysics that is capable of supporting a world view that accounts sufficiently for human nature. The Christian understanding of humans as being created for love cannot be contained within capitalism as a total world view or system. Thirdly, both classical Christians and modern Christian socialists are aware of the fact that human nature is in need of change and that any just and humane economic system requires a new kind of human person. St. Augustine, of course, would speak of the problem of original sin and St. Aquinas would advocate the necessity of virtue, while even the ideologues of the old USSR spoke often of the “new Soviet man.” Christian democratic socialists believe that it is Christian love, working through politics that is the needed inspiration for a democratic socialist society and for overcoming capitalism.
But to criticize capitalism as inadequate is not the same as throwing out every aspect of capitalism as if it were safe and reasonable to swing over to capitalism’s opposite – namely socialism. In many ways, socialism is capitalism’s evil twin and shares a lot of its DNA with its sibling rival. Socialism is also a modern ideology that is totalizing in its intentions, utopian in its aspirations and Pelagian in its anthropology. Socialism suffers from the same defect as Nineteenth century robber baron capitalism in that it places too much power in the hands of a small elite. Applied to the modern state, socialism takes the form of a bureaucratic rationality which stifles individuality and human dignity in the name of an equality of outcome imposed arbitrarily from above. In my opinion, the main problem with socialism is not that it is inefficient (although it is that), but rather that it undermines the dignity of the individual and the responsibility of the individual to choose to obey the natural law and the moral law. If reason and conscience make us uniquely human, our very humanness is at stake in modern, bureaucratic, state socialism. My argument is not that we must retain elements of capitalism (as the Communist Party of China does) because capitalism is efficient in stimulating production of needed goods and services. (A socialist government must have goodies to dole out or it collapses. This is the lesson China learned from the events of 1989.) My argument is rather the more counter intuitive one that capitalism contains within itself certain ideals that are necessary to a just and humane society – all questions of economic efficiency aside.
If we are seeking for a model of economics that may point the way forward for us, I believe we have to work our way free of modernist, Enlightenment assumptions about human nature, reason and the nature of God. The question I want to highlight here is “What pre-modern assumptions are embodied in at least some versions of capitalism that are worth keeping precisely because they representative alternatives to the modern ideologies that many of us regard as failures today?” I would make a list as follows:
- Individual liberty
- Religious freedom
- Free enterprise
- Personal responsibility
- Limited government
- The division of powers
- The rule of law
- Natural law
I could go on about each one of these points in detail but space does not permit. My point in mentioning these ideas is that each one of them is pre-modern, each one is a necessary good for a just and humane society in a fallen world, and each one is threatened by socialism.
What I am suggesting is that any just and humane economic system that Christians could approve of in this fallen world would need to include these ideas in it and that, therefore, simply to reject capitalism and to embrace socialism is not an adequate response in the contemporary situation. We should not throw out the babies of liberty, religious freedom, free enterprise, personal responsibility, limited government, the division of powers, the rule of law and recognition of natural law in throwing out the capitalist (and modernist) bathwater because, if we do, we will likely end up with something that looks more like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, than the kingdom of shalom described by the ancient Hebrew prophets.
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