The encyclical is essentially about human development, albeit in a less narrow way than the common discourse of human capital or the workplace idea of "career development". Its notion of human development is, inevitably, rooted in religion, "because Jesus Christ, who loves us, is concerned with the whole person."
What is interesting is what Benedict takes aim at. Given his history - as a Cardinal he played a key role in repressing Latin America's left-Catholic liberation theology, and as a Pope he has mainly made the news condemning birth control and abortion - I expected a screed against reproductive freedom. Caritas in Veritate is nothing of the kind. After reviewing the contents of the last encyclical, written in 1967 by Pope Paul VI, it turns its gaze towards capitalism. The tone is set early on in the second chapter:
We recognize, therefore, that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty. [...] The technical forces in play, the global interrelations, the damaging effects on the real economy of badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing, large-scale migration of peoples, often provoked by some particular circumstance and then given insufficient attention, the unregulated exploitation of the earth's resources: all this leads us today to reflect on the measures that would be necessary to provide a solution to problems that are not only new in comparison to those addressed by Pope Paul VI, but also, and above all, of decisive impact upon the present and future good of humanity. The different aspects of the crisis, its solutions, and any new development that the future may bring, are increasingly interconnected, they imply one another, they require new efforts of holistic understanding and a new humanistic synthesis.
This sort of passage could have easily have been written by, say, a Marxist like David Harvey. In fact, Giovanni Arrighi said something quite similar. Benedict, meanwhile, appears to be channeling Naomi Klein as he lays out the fundamental problems:
The world's wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging. In poorer areas some groups enjoy a sort of “superdevelopment” of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation. “The scandal of glaring inequalities”[56] continues. Corruption and illegality are unfortunately evident in the conduct of the economic and political class in rich countries, both old and new, as well as in poor ones. Among those who sometimes fail to respect the human rights of workers are large multinational companies as well as local producers. International aid has often been diverted from its proper ends, through irresponsible actions both within the chain of donors and within that of the beneficiaries. Similarly, in the context of immaterial or cultural causes of development and underdevelopment, we find these same patterns of responsibility reproduced. On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care. At the same time, in some poor countries, cultural models and social norms of behaviour persist which hinder the process of development.
The Pope goes on to indict (in not so many words) the global neoliberal order for causing or exacerbating these social ills - the smashing of organized labour and nations' race to the bottom with respect to environmental, health, and labour standards. It rips the veil off the harsh vicissitudes of contemporary capitalism, rising at times to a critique of its ideologies. (Such as the idea that market exchange is always isomorphic with the public good. Benedict ripostes: "Economic activity cannot solve all social problems through the simple application of commercial logic. This needs to be directed towards the pursuit of the common good, for which the political community in particular must also take responsibility." In short, he's calling for the subordination of capital to human needs, rather than vice versa.)
I found two aspects of Caritas in Veritate particularly interesting. First, it looks outside of capitalism for solutions - something that most institutions are today incapable of doing. Second, it puts forth the notion of "human development" as a serious challenge to the hegemonic discourse of money-value.
First: the externality to capitalism. There are few contemporary organizations with an institutional memory that extends back before capital. No corporations predate capitalism, obviously, and few governments retain a connection to pre-capitalist social formations. Today, both of these types of institutions are intimately tied to capital - in fact, they cannot imagine existing without it.
However, the Catholic Church is to a large extent still engaging with issues that predate the origins of capital in the Italian city-states of the 15th century, and its rise to global preeminence with the Industrial Revolution and British Empire. They've been around for almost two millennia - seen the Roman Empire fall and the world slip into the Dark Ages, seen feudalism come and go, assimilated successive waves of invaders and outsiders, and I suspect that they conceive of capitalism as a passing fad as well. The Church expects to continue existing, regardless of how the economy is arranged. (Naturally, the Church has been embedded within particular economies throughout the ages - so the separation is not as clear as they might believe.)
Second: alternative values. The Church, which operates in a different time-scale than any other currently existing institution, occupies a position of (relative) externality to capitalist relations. Intellectually, probably more so. This enables it to put forth a quite radical critique of capitalism that flows from those values.
Here, the Pope is humanist, broadly speaking. He emphasizes a broad view of human development, one that gives primacy to the "immortal soul". (The young Marx would have said "species-being".) This alternative value structure, which must in his view flow through all parts of human society, is ultimately rooted in divinity - but it is no less of an alternative for that:
God is the guarantor of man's true development, inasmuch as, having created him in his image, he also establishes the transcendent dignity of men and women and feeds their innate yearning to “be more”.
This is the part of the encyclical that is most seductive, yet it slips away like a bar of soap from an atheist like me. The Church has kept a relative distance from capital, which enables it to level a critique and present an alternative structure of value, an alternative notion of human dignity. Leftists can generally do the first, but are poor at thinking through the second. Perhaps this is why so many old Marxists seem drawn to religion today - witness Terry Eagleton's recent book on religion, or Jurgen Habermas's 2007 dialogue with the then-Cardinal Ratzinger.
Afterword: At times, the encyclical is almost Benjamin-esque:
"Without the perspective of eternal life, human progress in this world is denied breathing-space. Enclosed within history, it runs the risk of being reduced to the mere accumulation of wealth; humanity thus loses the courage to be at the service of higher goods, at the service of the great and disinterested initiatives called forth by universal charity.
Benjamin, I believe, was trying to think his way out of the trap Social-Democracy and Communism had painted themselves into. Both failed parties fell into the thrall of technocracy - they saw their political work as a matter of tactics, or inevitable improvement. In doing so, they defeated themselves - by turning a blind eye to the Nazis, or turning their weapons against the working class they claimed to represent.
Benjamin's difficulty was that he wasn't willing to take "eternal life" as his premise. He sought to derive an ethical solution or alternative view of progress without looking outside of time, or forward to Utopia. As he says in the last of his "On the Concept of History" theses, "We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future..."
Perhaps this is a task for when I am smarter: Work through the implicit challenge of Caritas in Veritate, which is to instantiate values outside of value, with Walter Benjamin.
Postscript: Yes, I discussed this with my 87-year-old Catholic grandmother. She approved.
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