|
|
|
|
A 'moral ecology' for free markets"The Year in Review" section of Encyclopedia Britannica Almanac 2003 featured eight topics covering significant events, trends, and developments for the period of July 2001-June 2002. The table of contents opens with "Remembering September 11" and closes with "Association Football (Soccer) World Cup 2002." But, almost at the top of the hit parade was "Enron ---What Happened?" by Christopher O'Leary. In the space of a year, O'Leary observes, the "Enron Corp. has gone from being considered one of the most innovative companies of the late 20th century to being a byword for corruption and mismanagement." In the same vein, the headline on the cover of the January 21, 2002 edition of Newsweek blazed ---"Burned! How Greedy Execs and Clueless Accountants Left Enron Bankrupt and Little Guys in the Lurch." The story ---"Who Killed Enron" by Allan Sloan --- noted that Enron's meteoric rise as a "New Economy company" with substance suddenly imploded in mid-air. In that moment of exposure, Enron's apparent "real profits and real revenues" had become a fiction. Yet Enron's hype had promised that "it would improve the planet by substituting the efficient hand of the market for the clumsy hand of government regulation." In retrospect, it is clear that "the efficient hand of the market" was not Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of equity but an invisible hand of larceny and greed. Allan Sloan's metaphor of the "efficient hand of the market" versus the "clumsy hand of government regulation" recalls Pope John Paul II's criticism in Centesimus Annus (On the Hundredth Anniversary of Rerum Novarum, 1991) about the depersonalizing effects generated by a "winner-take-all" economy or by Marxist collectivism. In reality, both political and economic extremes destroy the social fabric of solidarity among persons and reduce society to "an anonymous and impersonal mass." The logical implications of such systems appear to view men and women as if they were merely producers and consumers of market goods ("laissez-faire capitalism") or were only as objects of state administration (Marxism). (CA n.49) Pope John Paul II warns that men and women "lose sight of the fact that life in society has neither the market or the state as its final purpose, since life itself has a unique value which the state and market must serve." Ultimately, the human being "seeks the truth and strives to live in that truth, deepening his understanding of it through a dialogue which involves past and future generations." (CA n.49) Furthermore, the Holy Father reasons that an open search for truth and values in each generation is a force that invigorates the culture of a nation. (CA n. 50) A moral ecology is an indispensable element in the formation of a given culture since it animates and permeates all dimensions of human activities. In particular, culture should engage a person's "capacity for self-control, personal sacrifice, solidarity, and readiness to pursue the common good." (CA n. 51) Accordingly, the Church's claims the capacity for a distinct contribution to building an authentic culture that promotes human dignity, solidarity, and the common good. For example, in its vision of a culture of peace Church social teaching opposes "models in which the individual is lost in the crowd, in which the role of his initiative and freedom is neglected, and in which his greatness is posited in the arts and conflicts of war." (CA n. 51) The doctrines of creation and redemption establish the foundation for the responsible development of the earth and its resources as well as living together in solidarity and with accountability for the common good of society, including the international common good. (CA n.51) In a paper "Centesimus Annus and the Renewal of Culture," Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., has graphically paraphrased the insight found in section 49 of that centenary encyclical. Pope John Paul II spoke of the danger of reducing a person to the status of being either "a producer and consumer of goods" or "an object of state administration." According to Cardinal Dulles, that charge applies to this country's fluctuating romances with "the seductions of the welfare state and libertarian capitalism." Libertarian capitalism (laissez-faire) moves society into "the anarchic jungle of Social Darwinism." At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum stands the "'animal farm' of state socialism," a stark contrast to the "survival of the fittest mentality" of unbridled capitalism. Cardinal Dulles makes reference to Michael Novak's suppositions about the waning of a religiously defined culture in relationship to democratic capitalism and democratic government. According to Novak, the burgeoning loss of virtue and values needed for a thriving free enterprise economy multiplies larger numbers of "uncivic-minded hedonists on the one hand, and clients wanting to be supported by society on the other." In Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II indicts "the entire sociocultural system," not simply the economic system in itself, as the culprit for enshrining the production and consumption of goods as an absolute ideal. Thus, when the ethical and religious dimensions of culture are suppressed, the ensuing moral and spiritual void sunders the essential relationship of economic freedom to the dignity of persons. Rather than serving the integral good of persons, the economic sphere then becomes a source of alienation and oppression. (CA n. 39) Again, the words of Michael Novak confirm the impact of the moral-cultural system's conflation of human freedom with economic freedom: "...the central debate of our time has switched increasingly from politics and economics to culture."
|
|
Catholic Conference of Kentucky 1042 Burlington Lane Frankfort, Kentucky 40601
502-875-4345
Last modified: November, 2008 |
502-875-2841 Fax