Wokeism under increased scrutiny

Herbert Marcuse, social theorist, and Angela David, political activist — cooperative change out; political compulsion in.

Woke thought erupted upon the Western world abruptly, making an impact only when most branches of cultural influence and power had surrendered to its authority. In the United States, it was clearly in play with the 2020 riots following the death in police custody of  George Floyd in Minneapolis. 

Of course, the philosophy termed Critical Theory, of which Wokeism is the praxis, had long taken hold in the universities of the West, becoming fashionable within the academic community, thereby convincing a generation of graduates who have since become the cultural elite that there are new rules that must apply (!) in conducting themselves in social relationships. 

A penetrating discussion on the roots of the attempted cultural revolution underway in many parts of the world—but not all—occurs in a video just out in which Chris Rufo discusses his new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, with Bishop Robert Barron of Minnesota, whose study of the "new wave" philosophy shows how aggressively opposed it is to the great body of experience of what is needed for human flourishing expressed in Catholic Social Teaching.

The discussion starts with scrutiny of the history of the philosophical origins of Wokeism, a better term than Wokeness, which suggests a quality of thought or practice, and which doesn't do justice to the ambitions of what is clearly a hardline neo-Marxism. The full discussion is enlightening and practical. The following portion has been lightly edited.  

Rufo: [What] really confuses people is that woke ideology, or left-wing racialist ideology, operates at two levels. There's a level of euphemism, all of which sound very nice – diversity, equity inclusion, justice, solidarity sometimes —-  but if you dig under the euphemisms, which are marketing words, you find an ideology that is very different.

It doesn't stem from the Christian tradition, it doesn't stem from the natural rights tradition, it doesn't stem from the traditional mid-century (1960s) civil rights movement. 

Barron: It's against all those things.

Rufo: Yes, it's against all of those things and so you have to do your homework, you have to understand where it comes from. Where it comes from is, most prominently Marxism or neo-Marxism. You have someone like Herbert Marcuse, you have the black radical tradition, which is an atheist tradition, and the militant revolutionary push that sought to overturn the system of government in the United States. 

Then you have this ugly brew of post-modernism and gender theory that seeks to erase the very basic fabric of the cosmos. It rejects the world of creation in favor of a world of unlimited human manipulation. What I've tried to do with the book is essentially to say let's look at the euphemisms, but let's look underneath them to find what's really happening.

Barron: Do you find some of that neo-gnostic— the oldest heresy in the church that keeps asserting itself century in and century out with the view that the real me is hidden deep in there somewhere and the body is malleable, the body can be changed according to the whims of the real inner self. Of course the church recognized very early on—go back to Saint Irenaeus in the second century—that that's repugnant to a Christian or biblical anthropology. Do you find some of that neo-gnostic in form?

Rufo: Definitely, and I think it's most pronounced on gender because politics is largely driven in the United States by the left on race issues. That's the great mechanism by which they feel they can change the structures of society, the economy, the law, the Constitution. But there's a separate strain that has a separate lineage and we think of it as Gender Theory, we think of it as the trans activism and that's very much predicated on the rejection of any concept of human nature. Human nature is what they call a kind of normative structure, it's part of the sexual normativity that is an oppressive structure that's created by human invention. 

They actually believe that they can manipulate the physical world, the biological world, to meet any ideological demand. Men can become women, men can become pregnant. Whatever kind of such phrases you might have heard are based on this idea of a rejection of any natural limits and using technology to transcend not just the categories of male and female, which are you know embedded in the human experience, actually in our biology all the way down.

Gender, if you look at it from a scientific account, if you look at it from a Biblical account…but they actually think they can transcend the limitation of human nature as such. So it's a movement that is at the end of the day an anti-human movement. A lot of the reporting I've done recently is looking at where this leads in medical practice and you have some surgical procedures that they're doing that are far beyond Dr Frankenstein. I mean things that are so horrific it's almost hard to mention, but they really believe there is no human essence, that it's all accidental, it's all contingent….

Barron: Sartre says my existentialism means that existence precedes essence, so my freedom comes first, then I decide who or what I am. Well, that's from the French salon the 1940s and 50s. Now it's in the mind of every teenager in America. That there's a nature, that there's a givenness to our bodies, to our anthropology, that's seen as the problem—“that's oppressive!” 

We're on dangerous ground, aren't we, when we start playing that game of my existence completely trumps essence?

Rufo: Yeah, we're on dangerous ground but, most importantly, if you look at it as a practical matter, it just doesn't work.  It is disproven over and over and over, and that's really the problem with all of these revolutionary ideologies, at the end of the day, they are revolutions against nature, against human nature, against the social essence of what makes us human beings in community, and they have this romantic and idealistic notion, which is very attractive to people, especially young people, that you can overcome any limitation, that the limitations, the prescriptions of human nature, are structures of oppression that can be abolished. 

But ultimately the theme of the book is that the process you see in this revolution, and the process you see in all these revolutions, is one of idealism turning into disillusionment, turning into nihilism, and you see that largely in the philosophical line of thought and philosophical reasoning. You see it personally in many of these stories of the thinkers of the time, but then you also see it—and this is the most tragic and devastating—in the lives of people who are manipulated by these ideologies. Those kids are suffering from it. It's not just an abstraction. 

You have to tell them quite the opposite: there is an essence, there is a human nature, there is a way that things ought to be, and as a component of that, there are limitations that you should not only respect but actually those limitations are what give us the constraints and the bounds of being human. 

Again, do it easy! Catch up with the philosophical and political theory that underpins Wokeism. View the video of Rufo's discussion with Bishop Barron, which is refreshing in that it covers the trouble Western societies are in but also how ordinary people can recover their place at the centre of their culture, instead of being serfs within a feudalism dominated by the cultural elite.

Know your opponent and you need not fear 

Rufo's book aims to provide knowledge of the enemy in the manner of Sun Tzu's admonition, and to guide that counter-revolution the times demand. He writes:

Further:

In America, Florida gives hope. In Europe, Hungary and Poland do. Societies in Asia and Africa are also on alert, as a new form of colonialism-cum-imperialism is evident as the West seeks to impose its metaphysical stance upon the "natives" abroad by tying financial aid to a required cultural performance. The pushback from the Muslim community in the U.S. and U.K., and from parents generally in many nations, is a growing element within the political mix, providing opposition to an elite who rejects objective morality in favour of unbridled self-invention. Personal disintegration is the result, as recorded in the sad explosion in the West of anxiety, depression and suicide. 

Marcuse, the Marxist stalwart, in the vanguard 

Rufo has a valuable chapter examining the role of the German-American professor of philosophy and social theory, Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), who shaped Marxist-inspired Critical Theory for consumption by the New Left. This materialist movement fomented political agitation openly or by way of indoctrination through the education system, as we see even up to the present day.

Rufo expands with direct information on Marcuse's line of thought as a Marxist loyalist:

The drive for "disintegration" of society, for a "radical change in consciousness" and for "rebellion" that Rufo identifies in his book and his video discussion, dismays Bishop Barron, who repeatedly cites the Church's understanding of social renewal as a cooperative effort, springing from love for the other, even the opponent, an effort that works, not through condemning individuals or classes of citizens, as we see in the ubiquitous "cancel culture" under the aegis of the "diversity, equity, inclusion" regime, but through adherence to respect for the dignity of the human person.

Critical Theory wants nothing to do with the freedom of classical liberalism or that of classical biblical freedom, both of which rely on the discipline of desire. Rather it talks of a "liberating tolerance" which incorporates an intolerance that would permit censorship, repression and, where deemed necessary, violence. 

The picture of the leftist mindset presented by the video and book offers motivation for prayer coupled with action in defending society's moral and cultural heritage.

One thing more:  A word from Alasdair MacIntyre from 1969, at the height of  Marcuse's prominence. Writing in The New York Review, MacIntyre points to the origin of the abuse of science among the educated elite so widespread in Western society:

Marcuse now [in his 1969 publication] aspires to provide a biological basis for his theory. His biology is in fact as speculative as his metaphysics, and Marcuse explicitly disavows any scientific basis for his speculations. This does not however lead him to be less than dogmatic in his mode of assertion.

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Zombie state: How to achieve the great escape

Alienation is a virus reducing mutual support within society 

Western civilisation marks the Judeo-Christian influence on Europe in particular and, from that source, to different degrees, the bulk of the world's nation states. The talk these days, though, is more of the decline of that system of thought and practice. If the fall of "the West" eventuates, it will be recorded in history along with the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great, or the Greek Empire under Philip and Alexander, and the Roman Empire under caesars of fame and infamy.

But such a fall will be a heavy defeat for the world, not a sign of progress as many of today's "progressives" would have it.

As political power is wielded through history there is an accompanying flow of ideas that shapes separate societies into distinct cultures. A key factor within the Western civilisation's mindset has been Christian beliefs that enriched attitudes toward birth, death and the search for the Truth, the Good, the Beautiful, all of which gave rise to a devotion to study, to science, to art—under God.

However, those who are able to stand apart from the impulses of this present age few signs of postive outcomes ahead, and more signs of a warped mentality, elements of which still hold to Christian concepts but without the transcendental underpinning and the God-given morality that guides us along the path that produces a life of meaning and satisfaction. 

The fascinating "theo-drama" of the past 2000 years has been replaced by a "ego-drama" rendered monotonous by its inspiration from the likes of Nietzsche and his nihilism, will to power and Übermensch (Superman).

Of course, from Nietzsche, via Marxism and Paul-Michel Foucault, we have the viral Critical Theory that has captured the commanding heights of Western political and cultural power, with a concerted effort under way to colonise any society remaining outside its imperial reach.  

Wellsprings of social vitality have dried up

The impact at home of the cultural plague that infects more and more sectors of society are becoming plain. Jacob Howland, provost and director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, commonly known as the University of Austin, writes in Unherd and here that "America is now a zombie state":

It’s not just in politics that the wellsprings of individual and social vitality have dried up. Americans are marrying less and later, and having too few children to reproduce themselves and the families that nurtured them. What is more, our public schools have largely ceased to transmit the accumulated knowledge and civilisational wisdom of the past to the children we do have. A taste for historical repudiation has taken hold across the culture, leading curators to “contextualise” art, city governments to take down statues, colleges to rename buildings, and publishers to censor or rewrite books. But creativity withers when it ceases to be nourished by the oxygenated blood of the tradition. Little wonder that Hollywood increasingly cannibalises its legacy by pouring old films into new plastic scripts.

Technology has exacerbated our national enervation. We have become charging-stations for our smartphones, which drain psychic energy with insistent distractions and overloads of information-babble. Video calls and work-from-home limit in-person interactions with actual existing individuals, who would otherwise be together for most of their weekly waking hours. Targeted advertising, fine-tuned algorithms, and politically stratified social media sharply decrease our exposure to new ideas. We are immuring ourselves within our own private caves, watching flickering images in darkness.

AI language-learning models offer a cautionary parable of these larger cultural developments. Programs such as ChatGPT, whose writing remains formulaic and prone to errors, learn by sifting through a sea of digitalised text, a growing share of which consists of AI-generated content. The predictable result of this feedback loop is the kind of levelling we’ve seen across our institutions. Like newspapers that drink their own ink — and which ones don’t, these days? — their product can only get worse.

Cultural exhaustion, social withdrawal, and the general enfeeblement of life forces are the practical expression of a will to nothing. There is a name for this spiritual and intellectual condition, and it is nihilism. Nihilism is demonic to the extent that the will to nothing is still a will, a life force. That it is only a negative one is by no means reassuring, because it is easier and more economical to tear down than to build up. Destruction is dramatic and accomplishes the illusion of vitality with relatively little energy. And who in this apocalyptic time, including the nihilist, doesn’t want to feel even a little alive?

 Drop in community support 'very concerning'

It's not only Americans who are becoming more self-absorbed as perspectives shrink and dis-ease takes hold among the confused young especially, but not just the young. For example, the willingness of UK people to volunteer in the service of the community decreased as activity picked up after the long Covid lockdown.

In 2021/22, 34% of respondents (approximately 16 million people in England) had taken part in either formal or informal volunteering at least once a month. This is a decrease from rates in 2020/21 (41%) and is the lowest recorded by the Community Life Survey for this measure. (Source)

A BBC report on the results of a separate survey in Northern Ireland quotes Denise Hayward of Volunteer Now, which promotes volunteering across Northern Ireland. She says:

 "Mostly our volunteer population was at about 28% of our adult population and it sat at that point for years - it never really moved."

The report says the latest government statistics reveal a change:

"[They were] the first real stats after Covid [and] the numbers had gone down to 17%. That could be church-based organisations, sports, arts," Ms Hayward said.

She says Covid broke the habit of volunteering and many volunteers never came back or came back slowly.

"Now that may well change, but overall, we have seen a decline of over 10 percentage points and that is very concerning."

Ms Hayward described the impact on fundraising as huge because "volunteers are a huge driver of fundraising".

But it has also affected the delivery of organisations' services.

"Often volunteers are the ones doing things like befriending schemes. Some needs really rocketed because you saw more isolation, so what you are seeing is demand for services, in many cases, increasing but actually a decreased ability to deliver those services." 

The American experience is manifest in these headlines: 

Americans Are Volunteering Less. What Can Nonprofits Do to Bring Them Back?

Why and How Charities Should Revive a Declining but Vital Resource ... Volunteers

Nonprofit Leaders Want More Volunteers but Say It Is Tough to Recruit Them

This kind of evidence about the state of an alienated society is compelling. Accordingly, everyone in each society must scrutinise the historic forces shaping that society's future, and be prepared to take up  a countercultural lifestyle; at least, that of going on the offensive is not feasible.

Often decisions on the use of money and time, made within the family, the basic cell of society, demonstrate the presence of a generous spirit, and it is  that spirit which makes or breaks the ability of a society to thrive.

There's the challenge, to break free of the cultural brambles that choke us—the anxieties and riches and pleasures of life—and to seize life in all its difficulties, to embrace objective truth and beauty, and to sow a people-centred generosity of spirit that defeats alienation by fostering partnership and wider solidarity.

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Theise belittles the human in 'we are the planet'

Life holds so much more than what science can unfold. That's why some scientists turn to poetry to express what they have learnt, but which isn't limited to a set of mere material findings. An example is physicist Richard Feynman, who famously declared "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantam mechanics", a statement that continues to ring true.

It's not that science hasn't opened our eyes to what would otherwise be incredible information about our world, from particles preceding atoms, to busy ants, to the immensity of the universe. 

A book out this year on complexity, on how everything that makes this planet liveable is interconnected, is forthright in stating that what is being presented is a theory: Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, by pathologist and stem cell biologist Neil Theise. He is a professor at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine.

The Washington Post review states this about the book as part of the ongoing human quest to understand ourselves:

It’s a theory that attempts to provide rigorous scientific underpinnings to timeless questions of consciousness, being and self — as well as our place not just in the world but in the universe.

The reviewer, Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, places this work in the company of multitudes:

Searching for “consciousness books” online yields tens of thousands of titles, ranging from old classics by Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung to a much more recent bestseller with an outrageously ambitious subtitle: Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind, by Annaka Harris. And this doesn’t even touch on the innumerable works about neuroscience, mysticism, meditation, self-help — clearly, once one starts trying to learn about consciousness, the possibilities are, appropriately, limitless.

But she finds Theise's work on interconnectedness is convincing in that it demonstrates that:

...many of the boundaries we take for granted are not just scientifically artificial but intellectually, spiritually and even psychologically suffocating.

The problem in appreciating our situation "is those of us who are products of the thoroughly atomized, self-involved Western world" have eyes that cannot see and ears that cannot hear.

Theise turns to the poetic mode in trying to encapsulate his insights:

Complexity comforts us, revealing, unequivocally, unavoidably, that however separate and alone we might feel, each one of us is — in each and every single moment — a pure expression of the entire living, conscious universe. Nothing separate, nothing left out, but true, pure, and complete, just as we are.

The reviewer, too, posits a spiritual stance in concluding her reading of the rich vein of Theise's scientific exploration: 

But even if Theise concludes that the end state of all this complexity is, inevitably, chaos, the constantly regenerative nature of complexity still offers something like hope.

Maria Popova, likewise, finds Theise's work to her taste as he delves into the mysteries of life:

The mystery has only deepened for us “atoms with consciousness,” capable of music and of murder. [...] Each day, we live with the puzzlement of what makes us and our childhood self the “same” person, even though most of our cells and our dreams have been replaced.

Popova:  

The Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality — empirical science (with a focus on complexity theory), philosophy (with a focus on Western idealism), and metaphysics (with a focus on Buddhism, Vedanta, Kabbalah, and Saivism) — to paint a picture of the universe and all of its minutest parts “as nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of which are… everything.” 

Zooming out to the planetary scale, he argues that all living beings on Earth are a single organism animated by a single consciousness that permeates the universe. The challenge, of course, is how to reconcile this view with our overwhelming subjective experience as autonomous selves, distinct in space and time — an experience magnified by the vanity of free will, which keeps on keeping us from seeing clearly our nature as particles in a self-organizing whole.

A doubt arises, here in particular, about Theise's project. Neither Szegedy-Maszak nor Popova clarify the theorist's stance in regard to the source of the consciousness that keeps the "system" functioning. Further, though Popova indulges in a reference to free will as being an illusion, Theise himself uses "can" and "creativity" in speaking of the human endeavour — are we truly creative or not? Theise:

Neither we nor our universe is machinelike. A machine doesn’t have the option to change its behavior if its environment changes or becomes overwhelming. Complex systems, including human bodies and human societies, can change their behaviors in the face of the unpredictable. That creativity is the essence of complexity.

To keep that complexity in order, a key element of quantum theory, complementarity, comes into play. Popova quotes Theise:

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a single vast body that is life on Earth. From this point of view, the passing of human generations, in peace or turmoil, is nothing more than the shedding of cells from one’s skin.

It would seem that as a Buddhist, Theise preaches a gospel akin to Sam Harris's "mindfulness", part of the multitude of self-help programs referred to above, tapping into rich concepts but lacking the ability to apply them in their original transcendental context. He is also a run-of-the-mill pantheist, costumed in scientific data but metaphysically unable or philosophically unwilling to understand what he sees.

His shallowness appears in the following quote, which is hardly "redemptive" (Popova's term), since it suggests little to elevate the human above the ant. Morality, virtue, the nobility of compassion relate only remotely to the human person in search for the common good:

While we feel ourselves to be thinking, living beings with independent lives inside the universe, the complementary view is also true: we don’t live in the universe; we embody it. It’s just like how we habitually think of ourselves as living on the planet even as, in a complementary way, we are the planet.

Theise is obviously enthusiastic about what is otherwise called quantum physicalism, a form of materialism, but it would preclude the human person living "according to the fullness of their nature, dignity, and destiny" (Spitzer 2015*). This author goes on:

Reducing ourselves to mere atoms, molecules, or quantum systems — or to a mere dimension of a universal consciousness embedded in physical processes — causes us to "underlive" our lives, undervalue our dignity, and underestimate our nature and destiny, which is a completely avoidable self-imposed waste and travesty.

Spitzer dwells on the nature of that travesty in this excerpt:

Spitzer devotes his  efforts in his text to provide recent evidence from physics and cosmology to highlight the "creation of physical reality by an intelligent transcendent cause": "For in him we live and move and have our being", as Paul told the elders in Athens, quoting the 6th Century BC poet Epimenides.

Philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart in his book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale 2013; accessible online), makes plain the direction Theise should go to advance our understanding of human existence:

God is not, in any of the great theistic traditions, merely some rational agent, external to the order of the physical universe, who imposes some kind of design upon an otherwise inert and mindless material order. He is not some discrete being somewhere out there, floating in the great beyond, who fashions nature in accordance with rational laws upon which he is dependent. Rather, he is himself the logical order of all reality, the ground both of the subjective rationality of mind and the objective rationality of being, the transcendent and indwelling Reason or Wisdom by which mind and matter are both informed and in which both participate (BS emphasis).

If indeed to exist is to be manifest—to be intelligible and perceptible—and if to exist fully is to be consciously known, then God, as infinite being, is also an act of infinite knowledge. He is in himself the absolute unity of consciousness and being, and so in the realm of contingent things is the source of the fittedness of consciousness and being each to the other, the one ontological reality of reason as it exists both in thought and in the structure of the universe (BS).

At least, according to almost all the classical metaphysical schools, East and West, the marvelous coincidence between, on the one hand, our powers of reason and, on the other, the capacity of being to be understood points to an ultimate identity between them, in the depths of their transcendent origin. God’s being—esse, on, sat, wujud—is also consciousness—ratio, logos, chit, wijdan.

As Ramanuja would have it, Brahman, as the fullness of all being, must possess immediate knowledge of all reality within himself, and so be the fullness of all consciousness as well, the “personal” source in whom being achieves total manifestation, total actuality.

Or, in the language of Plotinus, the One ceaselessly generates the eternal reflective consciousness of the divine mind, nous, from which emanates all the rationally coherent diversity of the cosmos (BS). Or, in the terms of Philo of Alexandria or the Gospel of John, God is never without his Logos, the divine Wisdom, in and through whom the world is created, ordered, and sustained (BS).

So all of creation is rationally ordered and sustained by God who made the human person in the image of himself as a being who has a personal will and the capacity to be creative, a human quality Theise lauds but fails to acknowledge as a mark of independence above everything else in creation.

Evidently, much of the knowledge—and wisdom—of ages past has been lost among practitioners in the fields of science and philosophy. Though Theise probably employs a fuzzy Buddhism-lite spirituality in his "we are the planet" metaphysics, Spitzer could be writing to him, urging him to harken to his Jewish heritage:

If we do not try to help our culture overcome [its] self-limiting, self-deprecating, and self-destructive belief in "mere materialism", we consign ourselves to be a part of it...."

In conclusion, Theise's theory is of a force within nature that directs in a self-organising manner, but one which deprives the human being of the respect due to the partner with God in fulfilling the divine plan for each person, for the common good, and for the planet. In response to that theory, the alert individual is led to follow Flannery O'Connor's example in reaction to another example of a great truth being emptied of meaning, in exploding with a hearty, "If that's the case, to hell with it!"

*Spitzer, Robert J. The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason. San Franscisco, Ignatius Press, 2015.

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Why God made me: a splendid destiny

This life, in all its passion and possibilities, is a passing thing. Photo: Tima Miroshnichenko

“God made me to know Him, love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in the next.”

That is the Catholic's deepest reality, the reality of the eternal God. In respect of that reality every other natural or intellectual fact is secondary and subordinate. Certainly he regards such natural things as real and as valuable, but he does not rest in them as in his last end. He regards them somewhat as a ship in which he is for the moment travelling, which he knows that he must presently leave.

He acts in the spirit of that saying of our Lord which is inscribed on a gateway in Northern India: "This world is but a bridge; pass over it, build not thy dwelling here". His soul tends continually forwards and upwards. 

Karl Adam, The Spirit of Catholicism.

Jesus, our Lord and God, told his apostles:

Father, I have given these little ones your word,
and the world has hated them
because they do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
15 I am not asking you
to take them out of the world,
but I do ask you
to protect them from the evil one.
16 They do not belong to the world
any more than I belong to the world.
17 Consecrate them in the truth.
Your word is truth.
18 As you sent me into the world,
so have I sent them into the world.
19 And for their sakes I consecrate myself,
so that they too may be consecrated in truth.

                                      The Gospel of John 17:14-19

It's also John, in his first letter to the early Christians, who captures that other-world principle most directly. He writes:

Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires if the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world.  

Paul has many such words of warning about the trap in the form of submission to the lifestyle of any era, this being the simplest: "But our citizenship is in heaven". 

Peter, too, sees our situation as that of sojouners/pilgrims, the task of each being to abstain from the passions of our weakened nature during our time of exile. 

Peter highlights our true destiny when he tells us: 

God has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire. 

Our goal, then, is glorious. In this life we work on making true on our existence as sons and daughters of God our creator by answering the call to deification, union with God (theosis), that is announced in the revelation of our being made in the image of God. Though we struggle during our life with those passions that belittle us, when we die we will be completely able to respond to God's energies in our face-to-face relationship with God.  

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But humans do transcend nature

The claims of the soul...often a function of pain. Photo: Zach Dischner

The tendency of our time is to idealize nature, with its impulses and appetites, not to transcend it. While anthropological discourse since antiquity has dwelt on what sets man apart from other species, there is a strange determination abroad, these days, to evidence that we are no more than animals.

This does not mean, though, that our age is impervious to the Spirit. The claims of the soul are evident for being often expressed negatively, a function of pain. 

While moderns are loath to speak of God, they readily admit to feeling trapped in creaturely limitation. 

While giving no explicit credence to doctrines of the afterlife, they are consumed with a yearning for more. 

While determined to assume their incarnate humanity, they vaguely know that our body points beyond itself, since every apparent satisfaction is but achingly provisional.

From the forthcoming book Chastity: Reconciliation of the Senses by Erik Varden, a Trappist monk, and Bishop of Trondheim, Norway.

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Motherhood: the fear, the awe, the joy

Dorothy Day and her daughter (Tamar) Teresa.

My child was born in March at the end of a harsh winter. In December I had to come in from the country and take a little apartment in town. It was good to be there, close to friends, close to a church where I could stop and pray.

A woman does not want to be alone at such a time. Even the most hardened, the most irreverent, is awed by the stupendous fact of creation. No matter how cynically or casually the worldly may treat the birth of a child, it remains spiritually and physically a tremendous event. God pity the woman who does not feel the fear, the awe, and the joy of bringing a child into the world.

And then the little one was born, and with her birth the spring was upon us. My joy was so great that I sat up in bed in the hospital and wrote an article for the New Masses about my child, wanting to share my joy with the world. I was glad to write it for a workers’ magazine because it was a joy all women know no matter what their grief at poverty, unemployment, and class war. [Source]

Words of Dorothy Day, an American activist. She died in 1980 aged 83. Her daughter, her one and only child, was born in 1926. Day had had an abortion - "the greatest tragedy of my life" - and subsequently had thought she was unable to have any more children. The outcome, however, was a legacy of nine grandchildren and her example of social activism on behalf of the poor and world peace.

Ω See also: 

Doctors appeal to reason over abortion push

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Moral measure of the economy

                                                                                                                       (Source)

Picking up from my previous post, on the dignity of working people and the context for most being the family situation, more needs to be said about the principles each nation should use to judge its degree of success in fulfilling its obligations to all its citizens, and to the international community.

Here is a set of principles that lays a solid basis for making such a judgment:

 

1. The economy exists for the person, not the person for the economy.
2. All economic life should be shaped by moral principles. Economic choices and institutions must be judged by how they protect or undermine the life and dignity of the human person, support the family and serve the common good (see below).
3. A fundamental moral measure of any economy is how the poor and vulnerable are faring. 

4. All people have a right to life and to secure the basic necessities of life, such as food, clothing, shelter, education, health care, safe environment, and economic security.

5. All people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefits, to decent working conditions as well as to organize and join unions or other associations.
6. All people, to the extent they are able, have a corresponding duty to work, a responsibility to provide for the needs of their families and an obligation to contribute to the broader society. 

7. In economic life, free markets have both clear advantages and limits; government has essential responsibilities and limitations; voluntary groups have irreplaceable roles, but cannot substitute for the proper working of the market and the just policies of the state.
8. Society has a moral obligation, including governmental action where necessary, to assure opportunity, meet basic human needs, and pursue justice in economic life.
9. Workers, owners, managers, stockholders and consumers are moral agents in economic life. By our choices, initiative, creativity and investment, we enhance or diminish economic opportunity, community life and social justice.
10. The global economy has moral dimensions and human consequences. Decisions on investment, trade, aid and development should protect human life and promote human rights, especially for those most in need wherever they might live on this globe.

This is from “A Catholic Framework for Economic Life,” by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. For the document, see here. The document concludes:

According to Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, the Catholic tradition [Catholic social teaching] calls for a “society of work, enterprise and participation” which “is not directed against the market, but demands that the market be appropriately controlled by the forces of society and by the state to assure that the basic needs of the whole society are satisfied.”  All of economic life should recognize the fact that we all are God’s children and members of one human family, called to exercise a clear priority for “the least among us.”

What does the Church teach about the common good?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (nos. 1906-1909) explains: “By common good is to be understood the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily" (Gaudium et Spes 26 § 1; cf. GS 74 § 1).

The common good concerns the life of all. It calls for prudence from each, and even more from those who exercise the office of authority. It consists of three essential elements:

“First, the common good presupposes respect for the person as such. In the name of the common good, public authorities are bound to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person. Society should permit each of its members to fulfill his vocation. In particular, the common good resides in the conditions for the exercise of the natural freedoms indispensable for the development of the human vocation, such as the right to act according to a sound norm of conscience and to safeguard . . . privacy, and rightful freedom also in matters of religion (GS 26 § 2).

“Second, the common good requires the social well-being and development of the group itself. Development is the epitome of all social duties. Certainly, it is the proper function of authority to arbitrate, in the name of the common good, between various particular interests; but it should make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on (cf. GS 26 § 2).

“Finally, the common good requires peace, that is, the stability and security of a just order. It presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defense.” (Source)

💢 For a splendid examination of the intellectual history underpinning the ideologies that present themselves as liberal and progressive but are, as a consequence of their principles, truly limiting and oppressive, go to:

Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture by Matthew R. Petrusek, 2023,Word on Fire, Park Ridge, IL. 

💢 See also:     

Economy of Communion - people before riches,

Pay inequality highlights broken world of work

CRT: The Church's teaching on how to reform society 

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, go to my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified by email when a new post is published. 

Dignity of work: The worker - and family

Work must be adapted to the needs of the person. Photo Source

First, work. Then we will examine wider issues relating to the creation of a society where the well-being of the least of its members is the measure of its success.

Most of the world devotes one day each year to honour the struggle of working people to gain conditions of work that reflected respect for them as human beings. May 1 is often the day selected to pay tribute to these ordinary people who united their concern for each other and became heroes. And are forced to continue to do so.. However, the U.S. is one of those countries choosing another date, and this year it's today, Monday September 4.

The importance of work for each individual's exercise of their God-given capabilities on the one hand, and the danger on the other hand that managers of capital, and investors themselves, submit to greed and abandon a good faith relationship of fairness in the employment relationship, makes it imperative there is constant review of business practices and outr attitudes to work.

There was a story in the news about 5 years ago that can teach us a little about the Catholic view on work. A Catholic website gives us this account:

A shopper named Karma Lawrence spied former Cosby Show actor Geoffrey Owens working scanning groceries at a Trader Joe’s in New Jersey and took a picture of him. On social media, Lawrence lamented what she thought was the bad, uh, karma life had doled out to Owens.

Owens, a Yale graduate, explained that decreasing royalties from Cosby reruns had put pressure on him to earn a regular living to support his family. Many of the tweets in support of Owens asked the question, “What’s wrong with someone doing an honest job?” At least, they wrote, he was working to support his family—no shame in that. In fact, it’s quite honorable.

When interviewed, Owens said to Good Morning America host Robin Roberts, “There is no job that’s better than another job. It might pay better, it might have better benefits, it might look better on a resume and on paper. But actually, it’s not better. Every job is worthwhile and valuable.”

This is straight out of the Catholic playbook on its social teaching with regard the dignity of work and worker. The website adds:

Any honest job can be a means of worship and a means of personal holiness for the worker. The micro-marvel of tiny ants, dutifully working, carrying many times their body weight, gives God just as much glory as do the macro-marvels, like majestic mountain peaks piercing the clouds.

It’s like that with our work, too. As St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, wrote: “Before God, no occupation is in itself great or small. Everything acquires the value of the love with which it is done.” 

One might say that the greatest job, then, is the one that is done with the most love, for the glory of God.

Workers and the wider society

Catholic social teaching on how to support those who encounter the systemic obstacles to a full life, those obstacles that are the legacy of American history, is the subject of a statement just issued by the American bishops' conference to mark Labor Day. Its title is: Radical Solidarity with Working Families.

The statement points out that while there are positives in the US economy, there are elements of a structural nature that restrict and distort the lives of large numbers of families:

Three out of ten mothers report that there have been times in the past year when they could not buy food. Millions have been priced out of homeownership while rental housing becomes even less affordable. Healthcare is yet another expense that is becoming out of reach for too many. Roughly one out of two adults have difficulty affording medical care, causing many to delay or forgo care.

The previous statement had focused on "mothers, children, and families, sharing the bishops’ vision for an authentically life-affirming society that truly prioritizes the well-being of families and generously welcomes new life".

The Church had joined in offering nutrition programs, affordable housing, access to healthcare, and safety net programs. Now it saw the need to call for sustained attention to:

[...] justice for workers – including things like just wages, support for organized labor, and safe working conditions regardless of immigration status – and policy solutions to support all children and families.

Fundamental to this kind of discussion is our understanding of the priorities involved: "Economic activity and material progress must be placed at the service of the person and society" (Source #326). The economy and business activity are for the person and the basic cell of society, the family. The bishops' statement puts it this way:

The purpose of the economy is to enable families to thrive. This notion is deeply rooted in Catholic social teaching. The Church teaches that “it is necessary that businesses, professional organizations, labor unions and the State promote policies that, from an employment point of view, do not penalize but rather support the family nucleus” [See * below]. Similarly, the Second Vatican Council concluded that “[t]he entire process of productive work... must be adapted to the needs of the person and to his way of life, above all to his domestic life, especially in respect to mothers of families....”[See ** below] Are we meeting these standards?  There is much more we can do.

Gaps in American society's care for working families

Congress enacted important laws at the end of last year that the U.S. bishops had supported including the PUMP Act and a permanent option for states to extend postpartum Medicaid coverage for one year after birth. While these are promising steps, there remains much to be done to advance policies that help women, families, and children.    

The bishops urge bipartisan solutions on these issues among others:

💢 Congress should strengthen the Child Tax Credit. The credit is a powerful pro-family and anti-poverty program, yet it currently excludes too many children in need. Congress can better support families by structuring the credit so that it is fully refundable in order to have the biggest impact on the lowest-income families. It is also vital that the credit continue to serve all families with U.S. citizen children regardless of their parents' immigration status, be made available for the year before birth, not undermine the building of families, and not be paid for by cutting programs that serve those most in need.

 

💢There should be national support for paid family leave. The policy should be crafted in a way that does not unduly burden lower-income organizations or individuals, does not penalize larger families, and will not destabilize existing social service programs. The United States is one of only a handful of countries that does not guarantee paid family leave. It is pro-life to support families as they welcome new life and care for loved ones.

Workers as victims of suppression of unions 

💢There needs to be better access to affordable, quality child care and pre-kindergarten, which also ensures just wages for child care workers and teachers. In addition, families that choose to care for children at home should be supported. Faith-based child care and early education programs have served families for decades and should be included as part of the solution, in a manner consistent with their freedom to retain their religious character. Child care is one of the biggest expenses in many families’ budgets, and it is causing many families to have fewer children than they would like. At the same time, the child care sector itself is plagued with low wages for workers, making it difficult for them to meet the needs of their own families. Working families need a solution to this child care crisis.

Finally, the essential role labor unions can and often do play in society must be acknowledged and affirmed. As Pope Francis stated when meeting delegates from Italian trade unions,  “… one of the tasks of the trade union is to educate in the meaning of labor, promoting fraternity between workers… Trade unions… are required to be a voice for the voiceless. You must make a noise to give voice to the voiceless.” Unions should continue to be supported in their work that supports healthy, thriving families, especially those who are most in need, and encouraged in maintaining and increasing their focus on performing that critical role. Indeed, as Pope Francis has suggested, “there are no free workers without trade unions.”

As an outsider, I suggest that as such a wealthy country the U.S. should be ashamed of itself that it promotes economic and social inequality by withholding statutory paid leave of the type most advanced countries have had for many years. The threat of a rail strike in the U.S. last year on issues such as this highlighted the low regard given to working people in much of the American economy. By way of comparison, "The European Union Member States adopted four weeks of paid leave per year as a minimum European-wide standard in 1993". Four weeks of paid leave. In 1993! That ILO source also provides a chart showing how emerging nations such as Algeria and Brazil reveal the fact that American workers often remain victims of employer theft of family time.

Privatised profits versus socialised costs

One can justifiably extend that to wage theft as well. From the Economist magazine in 2019:

The OECD, a club mainly of rich countries, compares minimum wages around the world by adjusting for inflation and the cost of living, and converting them into American dollars. On that basis Australian workers pulled in at least US$12.14 an hour last year, up by nearly 4% from 2017. That puts them narrowly ahead of their peers in Luxembourg, ranked second, and a whopping two-thirds better off than federal minimum-wage earners in America (my emphasis). 

Many business leaders take an amoral perspective of their role. They are among those still bound to Milton Friedman's principles of economic freedom for investors and managers (privatised profits) within a low-tax environment, of a sentence of submission for workers, with the government (or philanthropists) picking up the social cost of business activity. Therefore, as a final dip into the rich source of understanding of our human predicament that is the Church's social teaching, here is a statement from the Compendium of Social Doctrine (see below no. 332): 

The moral dimension of the economy shows that economic efficiency and the promotion of human development in solidarity are not two separate or alternative aims but one indivisible goal. Morality, which is a necessary part of economic life, is neither opposed to it nor neutral: if it is inspired by justice and solidarity, it represents a factor of social efficiency within the economy itself. The production of goods is a duty to be undertaken in an efficient manner, otherwise resources are wasted.

On the other hand, it would not be acceptable to achieve economic growth at the expense of human beings, entire populations or social groups, condemning them to extreme poverty. The growth of wealth, seen in the availability of goods and services, and the moral demands of an equitable distribution of these must inspire man and society as a whole to practise the essential virtue of solidarity,[***] in order to combat, in a spirit of justice and charity, those “structures of sin” [****] where ever they may be found and which generate and perpetuate poverty, underdevelopment and degradation. These structures are built and strengthened by numerous concrete acts of human selfishness.

The care for working families is the responsibility of society as a whole, but directly, each business corporately and each leader within the enterprise. For society to take such a stance, the political system must be oriented to social support, which, in turn, involves on the resources and good will of those with the means to help those in need of support, from life at its beginning to the point of a natural death.   

* Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 2004, no. 294 (Quoting Laborem Exercens, no. 10; Familiaris Consortio, no. 23).

** Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World), 1965, no. 67.

*** Pope Pius XI, Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, on the ethical implications of the social and economic order, 1931, no. 694.

**** Ibid., no. 695.

Society needs to espouse the essential virtue of solidarity. Photo Source

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