Capitalism, Socialism and Theological Anthropology

My friend, Matthew Anderson at Mere Orthodoxy, has a post discussing the recent debate between Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute and Jim Wallis of Sojourners at Wheaton College in which he marvels at how similar the two of them sounded. He writes:

The real story of the evening, though, was how similar Wallis and Brooks sounded throughout the night. Wallis was clear he did not want to destroy capitalism, but called it a “tool” that should be evaluated by its fruits. He spoke positively of the importance of trade at lifting countries out of poverty, and suggested he wanted a multi-faceted approach to solving income inequality. Throughout the evening, he positioned himself as a pragmatist who simply wanted to do what works. If he is opposed to capitalism, it is entirely on those grounds.

At the same time, Brooks was able to affirm that equal opportunity sometimes required intervention by the government in order to level the playing field, particularly (and maybe exclusively) in the realm of education. At that point, he took over the pragmatic mantle and suggested that government simply hasn’t done a good job in that sector. The clearest moment of agreement came when Brooks hammered subsidies for the way they give America and Europe an unfair advantage in sectors like cotton, a critique that Wallis gave full-throated affirmation to.

Not finding any great philosophical of theological difference between the two worries Anderson. He suspects that the bigger questions are ones of theological anthropology rather than economics:

I have reservations that beneath Wallis’ positions lie an anthropology that treats humans as primarily consumers, rather than creators and producers. I haven’t read enough (though I’m changing that) to know that for sure, so I register it simply as a worry. Either way, it would have been interesting for the conversation to move into those deeper questions. The question “what “works?” begs a gigantic “for what?” and that latter question is not properly the realm of economics, but is rather the sphere of theological anthropology.

On this point I heartily agree with Anderson and think that he is moving in exactly the direction we need to go. But his (admittedly tentative) conclusion somewhat surprised me.

Finally, I have become increasingly convinced that the central problems of our global society are not tied to whether our society is capitalist or socialist, but whether it is consumerist and materialist–which everyone seems to be. I am not suggesting that capitalism and socialism are equally productive of human flourishing. I happen to think they are not. But capitalism tied to materialism and consumerism may be far more destructive to society than when socialism is so tied. That doesn’t mean that we should solve the problem by substituting socialism instead. That would be simply to try to remove the symptom without curing the disease. But it does mean that we need to reflect deeply about the best ways to eliminate materialism and consumerism from our structures of thought and our habits of life.

What does it mean for society to be "consumerist" or "materialist"? What do these terms even mean? They do have a certain meaning when used within a Marxist analysis of the evils of capitalist society, but is that the same as their meaning within a Christian analysis of sin and sanctification? I suspect not. Many people use a Marxist approach to link economic growth, free enterprise, materialism and consumerism together as part of one great evil called capitalism. This seems to me to confuse matters greatly because the last two items on that list are sinful distortions of the first two items, which themselves are necessary to human flourishing.

I agree that we cannot eliminate consumerism and materialism by implementing socialism; the Eastern Europeans were highly materialistic and consumerist under Communism and one of the main things they wanted after throwing off the Soviet yoke was Western consumer goods. Where I think Matthew loses his focus a bit is in the final sentence where he seems to yield for a moment to the Utopian temptation by writing:

But it does mean that we need to reflect deeply about the best ways to eliminate materialism and consumerism from our structures of thought and our habits of life.

Capitalism is an economic system designed for a fallen world in which Christianity has great influence and part of that influence in the cultivation of a healthy skepticism about the degree to which fallen human nature can be overcome in this age between the first and second comings of Christ. Capitalism can be viewed as a set of institutional arrangements designed to civilize greed in much the same way as marriage is designed to civilize lust. A system that understands that (1) humans are selfish and (2) humans are social and need each other to flourish and then comes up with a plan to make #1 contribute to #2 is ingenious. Admittedly, this is not a very Utopian view of the world; but that is not a bug, as they say, but a feature.

I understand the impulse that leads one to throw up one's hands in despair and pronounce a plague on the houses of both the capitalists and the socialists. Truly, both are less than the kingdom of God. But the difference is that one knows it and the other doesn't and that is the whole difference in a nutshell.

Capitalism is an economic system that can be demonic if it functions without any moral limits, but if it is kept in check by natural law, limited government, the division of powers, etc., it helps us create wealth and contributes to human flourishing. Socialism, on the other hand, is a Utopian scheme which does not recognize that human nature is fallen and is therefore dangerous.

What my argument comes down to is this: socialism has an inherent theological anthropology that is heretical and anti-Christian while capitalism has an inherent theological anthropology that is partially right (it recognizes fallen human nature as inherently greedy) yet incomplete (because it does not recognize or specify norms for human flourishing inherent in human nature). But on the whole, Christianity is far more compatible with capitalism because it is a matter of supplying the missing positive human telos to a system that at least recognizes the fallen character of human nature. In the case of socialism, by contrast, Christianity has to start out by challenging its fundamental presuppositions about human nature right from the start.

Theology of the Body #4: Scripture and Metaphysics

This is #4 in an occasional series on John Paul II's Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body.

One of the distinctive features of John Paul II's theology of the body is the way he combines philosophical sophistication in both contemporary phenomenology and also Thomism with expertise in biblical theology. John Paul II occasionally engages in detailed exegesis in TOB but he constantly engages with the text of Scripture; his method is more synthetic than analytical.

He is doing biblical theology by interpreting texts in the context of Scripture as a whole, rather than focusing on placing the text against the backdrop of the historical situation in which it was written (or edited). He is not against historical exegesis, the literal meaning or the historical-critical method, but his goal is to understand the canonical witness as a whole in terms of what it says about human sexuality and marriage. In this respect he stands very clearly in a tradition that extends back through Barth, Calvin, Luther, Thomas, Augustine and Athanasius.

Genesis 1-2 as Basis for a Philosophical Anthropology
In Part I, John Paul begins with Christ's words in Matt. 19 in reply to the Pharisees' question about divorce in which he directed them back to Gen. 1-2 to discern the truest and deepest intention of God concerning marriage. In this post, I want to examine how he grounds a Thomistic metaphysical doctrine of the human person in Gen. 1-2. Protestants may not be used to using biblical theology to under gird a metaphysics, and certainly not a Thomistic one, but that is the Pope's project here.

The second (older) creation narrative is the Yahwist account (named thus because it uses the covenant name for God revealed to Moses in Ex. 3:14)

“One can say that this depth is above all subjective in nature & thus in some way psychological. . . When we compare the two accounts, we reach the conviction that this subjectivity corresponds to the objective reality of man created ‘in the image of God’” (TOB, p. 137)

So JP II is saying that Gen 2 explains what Gen 1 means by our having been created in God’s image. What JP II is doing here is seeking to root his Christian anthropology in metaphysical reality, rather than in human reason or will. The truth about marriage is thus rooted in the ontological nature of man as created in God’s image. He is saying that Jesus, in appealing to ‘the beginning’ was rooting the truth of historical man (i.e. our experience of fallenness) in the boundary between primeval innocence and historical man’s consciousness of sin. Gen. 2 deals with the boundary (and connection) between original innocence & original sin, the state of integral nature and the state of fallen nature.

Modern Subjectivity
In his penetrating study of Wojtyla, Kenneth Schmitz argues that the most significant challenge to which Wojtyla’s personalism responds is a certain understanding of personal subjectivity and interiority that gained wide currency in the modern age. A particular emphasis on subjectivity, Schmitz shows, emerged from the sixteenth century onward together with the rise of a mechanistic account of nature.” (At the Center of the Human Drama, p. 131-7) Schmitz writes:

“The mechanistic account of human nature in the wake of Bacon & Descartes denied the interiority of material beings and consequently the kinship of the human person with the subrational natural cosmos. Alone in an inhospitable world that had been deprived of inner meaning, the freedom of the conscious subject becomes ‘absolute,’ detached from sources of meaning: ‘This, then, is the genesis of the modern sense of self as subjectivity. We might say that subjectivity is the self-defense by which consciousness fends off a world either hostile to its inhabitation or at least without companionate room for it, even while consciousness subverts the integrity of that world by its imperious demands. The modern shift gave to the human subject an absolute status precisely in its character qua consciousness; for human consciousness not only sets its own terms but the terms for reality itself.” (Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama, pp. 135-6)

JP II versus Modern Subjectivity
He is saying 2 things in response to modern subjectivity:

1. That metaphysics cannot be rejected so easily as modernity thinks because man is a being whose historical existence is rooted in revealed, pre-historical theological truth

2. That the metaphysical truth of who man is is rooted in Genesis, (i.e. in the Word of God), not in mere philosophical speculation, which means that Christians cannot accept modern subjectivity with its starting point in the autonomous subject. This is so because Jesus drew a normative conclusion about our historical existence from our original state.

So we have a biblical-theological basis for a philosophical anthropology which is identical with the Thomist view of man. John Paul II rejects the modern dualism of mind and body and roots his understanding of subjectivity, not in the mind as opposed to the body as modern Cartesian philosophy does, but in the body itself, which speaks a language of its own and is not merely the tool of the person, but is the person.

This rooting of anthropology in biblical theology allows John Paul II to transcend the modern dualism and yet, at the same time, to give a personalist account of the human being that incorporates what is good about the modern emphasis on subjectivity and what we could call the integrated personhood of the human person.