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Liberty and the Virtue of Prudence: A Catholic Perspective Introduction “The ethos of [Catholic colleges and universities] is so drenched in capitalism as to lead one to conclude, in darker moments, that the shepherding being done at these schools is the kind that raises sheep not for the Church, but for the market. But, of course, resisting capitalism is a problem we face not only in our schools. It is a problem for everyone everywhere.” 1 So said a rising Catholic theologian in a recent lecture at a major Catholic university. “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.” 2 So responded a prominent Thomist ethicist (in a quasi-jocular manner) when asked what values, as a Catholic convert, he retains from his Marxist days. “‘Scrooge,’ I teach my students. ‘That’s capitalism in a nutshell.’” So my friend, a Catholic professor of modern European history, informed me last summer. Great strides have been taken in recent years by scholars and the Roman Catholic Church’s magisterium toward differentiating authentic goods of the classical liberal tradition from stridently materialist and individualist strains of liberal theory. 3 Old habits die hard, however. For many orthodox Catholic thinkers, a free society–especially as it implies a free economy–remains a bugbear. 4 In this essay, I suggest introducing an element of Aristotelian or Thomistic prudence into the Catholic conversation about liberty, especially its economic element. I argue that it is not prudent today to attack what Michael Novak has helpfully termed democratic capitalism, and that the tradition of Catholic reflection on the virtue of prudence may be summoned to a contemporary defense of it. First, I sketch two related areas of error in current Catholic objections to democratic capitalism: (1) the attack on capitalism as being condemnable as a “system” (much as socialism is condemnable as a system); and (2) the disregard for the virtue of prudence that is entailed in opposing free enterprise today. I then suggest how prudence itself, in our time, recommends free enterprise both in providing for needs and in fostering communities of virtue. I conclude by drawing illustrations of my thesis from a novel that deservedly won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize. On Capitalism As a “System” My professor friend who identifies capitalism with the unredeemed Ebenezer Scrooge is part of a tradition epitomized by Amintore Fanfani, an Italian statesman earlier this century and significant voice in the Christian Democratic Party. Fanfani argued in Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism (1935) that there is a “spirit” characterizing capitalism that makes it incompatible with Catholicism. The capitalist spirit, he wrote,
“Fanfani describes the capitalist,” comments Michael Novak, “as if he were a tightfisted Scrooge, a miser, a possessive, crotchety, asocial individual.” 6 Even Dickens’s Scrooge, though, represents not capitalism but the vice of avarice. Avarice is coeval with man, and thus not identifiable with an economic system. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge’s redemption does not come through a disavowal of the economy within which he labors, nor does it come through a change of occupation. His redemption comes through a change of heart. Fanfani’s portrayal of the spirit of capitalism is likewise a portrayal of a complex of vices. Fanfani makes an unnecessary and unsubstantiated leap in identifying the vices systematically with capitalism. What, though, of the particular connection–also highlighted by Fanfani–of individualism with capitalism? Is not the liberal individualism of capitalist production characteristic of a system? If one identifies liberty strictly with certain materialist theorists, from Locke to Ayn Rand, it might be tempting to say yes. 7 Such theorists have been much better at thinking about the individual than about community, to the point that identifying them with a cult or ideology of individualism seems plausible. Still, one would be hard-pressed to locate very many historical examples of the purely radical-individualist homo economicus that became the whipping boy of anti-liberals and anti-moderns. Tocqueville rightly saw, for example, that liberty in America was a socializing, not an isolating, phenomenon. “The free institutions of the United States,” he wrote, “and the political rights enjoyed there provide a thousand continual reminders to every citizen that he lives in society. At every moment they bring his mind back to this idea, that it is the duty as well as the interest of men to be useful to their fellows.“ 8 As Tocqueville appreciated, practices that a free society fosters–sociability and a host of instrumental virtues–may be revealing about the character of that society quite apart from abstract theories developed to advocate or defend it. Tocqueville’s “phenomenological” study of liberty in America is an instructive case in point. Unlike Marx, for instance, Tocqueville was not satisfied to theorize about liberty from a library; he had to see it in action for himself. This phenomenological spirit informs recent developments in Catholic social thought. The free economy, as viewed in its functioning and through its historical maturation in developed countries, is not properly a “system,” nor is it simply the bastard spawn of a radical individualist ethic. John Paul II describes the proper workings of economic freedom in Centesimus Annus, a document that in its first decade has become a locus classicus of Catholic reflection on political economy. Note in the following passage how the Pope favors phenomenological analysis of human-beings-in-action and eschews abstraction:
The Pope’s description of capitalist activity as human phenomena–initiative and entrepreneurship–pointedly desystematizes it, placing it among natural functions of acting human persons. John Paul appears not to prefer the term capitalism, presumably for the very reason that the term (of Marxist origin) can cause one to mistake it for an ideological system. Consider the following, also from Centesimus Annus, about the approach to political economy most needed to benefit the world’s poor.
Centesimus Annus applies to political economy John Paul’s customary insistence that freedom be oriented to transcendent truths about God and man. In rejecting a caricature of capitalism, John Paul shows how the human phenomena of initiative and entrepreneurship can–like any exercise of any freedom–be properly ordered to truth. Seen in this light, the free economy is simply a dimension of the possibility of ordered liberty, a possibility that inheres in the nature of man. That the possibility of ordered liberty is unrealized in many parts of the world today, and only very imperfectly realized in the West, the Pope lays down as a challenge: Christians must evangelize culture, including the cultural environment of economic activity. Centesimus Annus criticizes free economies today for being imperfectly free, but it roundly condemns socialism as being anthropologically flawed. Socialism considers the good of the human being without reference to freedom. 11 It is thus intrinsically atheistic because it counters fundamentals of theological anthropology. It is an ideological system since, grounded in falsehoods about human nature, socialist practice cannot be reoriented to the truth. The system cannot be adjusted for the better because the system itself is rooted in lies. Activists in Central European dissident movements of the 1980s knew this all too well. 12 Fundamental distinctions to which John Paul attests between free economic practice and socialism have yet to be acknowledged by many Christian ethicists. Stanley Hauerwas, among the most prominent Christian ethicists today, says the following about John Paul’s analysis in Centesimus Annus of socialism’s intrinsic atheism: “Given the pope’s own experience of Poland, it is not surprising that his analysis in this regard is primarily directed at socialism. Yet, capitalism is based on the same atheistic presupposition he finds in socialism.” 13 Hauerwas succumbs to an academic temptation to view practice as a pure derivative of theory. John Paul is not unaware of troublesome strains in the pedigree of liberalism, which he is quick to criticize. What he refuses to do is subsume practical reasoning wholly under theoretical reasoning where to do so does violence to the phenomena. To John Paul, analysis of lived experience may reveal goods to an astute observer, goods that cannot simply be derived from theory. He also appears to appreciate that where such goods are discerned in practice, positive theoretical contributions may follow. Prudence and Attacks on Liberty The Pope’s approach to studying human goods in the context of practice has philosophical antecedents. Aristotle’s method in the Ethics was to reflect theoretically on opinions about goods that could be discerned in practice. The Ethics advances considerations and refines reflections on virtues that people already have. I emphasized this simple point at a University of Chicago ethics conference recently, and some participants seemed disappointed. In accord with the academic temptation mentioned above, some seemed to prefer viewing their own abstract theorizing as essential to virtuous living. For Aristotle, the virtue of prudence ( phronesis) connects practice and theory while not reducing one to the other. Prudence is both an intellectual and a moral virtue that Aristotle presents as essential to the other virtues but distinct from them. In practical matters, prudence is a kind of intelligence that can rightly guide action amid changing circumstances. The right guiding of action demands some prior understanding of what is right for human beings according to their nature. Aristotelian prudence is not just cautious calculation about how to pursue one’s own interests, as the word prudence commonly means today. Thomas Aquinas adopted–and adapted for Christendom–Aristotle’s thinking about prudence. For Aquinas also, prudence is a kind of intelligence that guides action. “Prudence,” writes Daniel Mark Nelson in a comprehensive treatment of the subject,
Although the scope of this essay does not allow for a proper treatment of the virtue of prudence, prudence needs to be introduced into Catholic discussion about contemporary political and economic issues. Aquinas offers a precedent. He appropriated the Aristotelian understanding of prudence even as he transformed the Aristotelian ethical tradition in the context of a quite new socio-political and economic milieu. John Paul II does not expressly advert to this tradition in advancing original reflections in Centesimus Annus and other statements, yet his approach of applying intelligence to guiding action through changing circumstances is identifiably prudential in the classic sense. “Prudence,” Nelson observes, “enables us to act in the right way, for the right reasons, and at the right time. It seeks to discern what is to be done now or in the future on the basis of knowledge of the present situation and past experience.” 15 The Pope, reasoning about practical matters in late modernity, proceeds from deep prior understandings of history, of theological anthropology, and of the perennial nature of the human person. This Aristotelian and Thomistic approach of applying intelligence to circumstance is not adopted by those contemporary Catholic thinkers who condemn democratic capitalism. A renowned example is the Catholic ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre, who views Aristotelian virtue as being embedded in an historical “tradition of enquiry” of which most today are not a part. MacIntyre, a self-styled Thomist, is prone to sweeping condemnations of the free society and market economics in particular. It is unsurprising that, in order to condemn concrete arrangements that have brought unrivaled benefits to untold masses, MacIntyre’s arguments tend to abstract from the phenomena under consideration. This abstraction has the unintended effect of alienating MacIntyre from the Aristotelian/Thomistic tradition whose mantle he claims. MacIntyre’s tone is so far from Aquinas when he addresses political and economic realities that it smacks of Marxist revolutionary brashness. Consider two representative passages of MacIntyre concerning “Aquinas on Practical Rationality and Justice.” Notice how MacIntyre seizes the opportunity to use Aquinas’s work, written in the context of thirteenth-century practice, for the sake of lambasting twentieth-century practice:
And this:
MacIntyre’s polemical intentions leap off the page: He would have us believe Aquinas would say today that business people who produce, buy, and sell in free markets are the moral equivalents of shysters, and that modern liberal regimes (i.e., MacIntyre’s abstract account of them) are the moral equivalents of tyrannies. I cannot help but be reminded how certain strict Aristotelians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries similarly utilized Aristotle’s work for the sake of rejecting current practice. Of course, medieval Christian feudal societies bore little resemblance to the ancient city, so strict Aristotelians could score debaters’ points. Yet, practicing prudence as he preached it, Aquinas realized that applying intelligence constructively to present realities enabled him to light candles where others cursed darkness. Prudence and Defense of Liberty MacIntyre and John Paul II share a commitment to virtue and to social justice; the Pope’s approach, however, puts more stock in the notion that human nature transcends differences in theoretical horizons. John Paul is no Pollyanna when it comes to dangers that beset free societies, but he realizes that the soil of the virtues is richer there than enemies of the free society think. A society’s moral fertility has more to do with ongoing lived experience of the virtues–and with religion, as thinkers as diverse as Aquinas, Tocqueville, and John Paul each appreciate–than with abstract theories of a given age. A critic such as MacIntyre “tends to take modern society at the face value of its own dominant theories, as headed for runaway atomism and break-up,” writes the social theorist Charles Taylor. We are, though, Taylor continues,
Taylor is right. The practice of virtue does survive in our free societies. Most of us could probably verify this from our own experiences with virtuous, and even holy, people among our own acquaintances. Moreover, free societies properly grounded actually foster the practice of virtues. John Paul made a similar point in a passage quoted above: “Important virtues” are involved in the processes of forming communities of work and productivity in free societies. John Paul’s advocacy of broadening participation in the international “circle of exchange” suggests that a free society, in addition to being best able to feed and clothe people, is best able to educate citizens in certain virtues. The Pope naturally takes religious principles to be essential for education in other virtues, and necessary to well-informed exercise of freedom. The Christian Church, in this view, must be a significant presence in a truly free society. It is, in fact, the sine qua non of a genuinely free society because it bears the truth about why, and for what, human beings are free. During the current pontificate, when the Catholic magisterium has moved to a fuller embrace of the free society, the secular intellectual world has proved itself less and less able to mount a compelling defense of freedom. The noted French Catholic political scientist Pierre Manent has suggested that Catholicism, which had resisted political and economic liberalism for so long, can now make unique intellectual and moral contributions to liberalism because the Church has for the first time “a dialectical advantage” in the liberal conversation. Today, Christianity offers the most compelling defense of freedom because it offers the only fully convincing articulation of what freedom means. 18 To bring a dialectical advantage to the table of contemporary liberal conversation is to be prudent in the older sense. The Church brings wisdom about God and man into dialogue with political and economic sciences that have brought the world much good, but that must be augmented or altered by more substantive accounts of the human person. Conclusion: The Thesis Illustrated I have argued that attention to the phenomena of lived experience in a free society reveals the character of that society in ways that abstract theorizing does not. John Paul’s analysis of the nature of human work conveys this reality convincingly. In applying an intelligence informed by a theological anthropology and a philosophy of human nature to concrete phenomena today, his analysis can itself be considered a work of prudence. He applies perennial verities to circumstances of the times. He places our late modern situation in continuity with what has been. His mode of thought is at odds with those who see a radical disjunction between present and past, and who call for radical political and economic measures. To illustrate my thesis, let us turn to a novel that gives insight into the phenomena of lived experience in a free society, namely, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, which was awarded the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 19 David Horowitz, on whose recommendation I read the book, views it correctly as a powerful portrayal both of the potential beauty and order of a life of free initiative, and of the potential for grotesqueness and chaos of ideologies that reject freedom. The book’s hero is the workaday owner of a ladies’ glove factory in mid-century Newark, New Jersey. Seymour “Swede” Levov’s Jewish family has produced gloves for many generations, and the work has come to symbolize truths about the nature of things for each successive generation: An excellent glove, properly made, reflects an excellent world, properly made; perfection must be striven for, because humans are prone to disorder, and the threat of imperfection is omnipresent. Human beings can find fulfillment through common efforts; each worker in the manufacturing process makes an indispensable contribution to the corporate activity; the efforts of all are needed, and each experiences the pride and satisfaction that attends the meritorious performance of a function. Listen as the father, Lou Levov, instills the principles of the trade in his son when Swede is a boy. Attend to how the formation of the son in the father’s trade is, in microcosm, a fuller formation of the son in the possibilities of excellence, order, and beauty.
Lou Levov teaches his son every aspect of his trade, and also a profound respect for every person who has expertise in each process. “You’re watching a genius and you’re watching an artist,” Lou tells Swede as they observe the work of an old Neapolitan leather cutter. “And this is the master of them all,” he declares. Swede comes to appreciate that each craftsman possesses skills that he himself will never match, that the contribution of each is essential to the business. Lou Levov’s account of the glover’s trade could be a primer in John Paul II’s approach to human work and initiative. The Levov family emigrated to the United States early this century in pursuit of the longed-for American dream of liberty, hence the “American pastoral” of the book’s title. But in the 1960s, Swede, who by then had assumed ownership of Newark Maid, is wrenched from the American pastoral by radical movements that threaten his factory and his family. Roth compellingly illustrates how the 1960s radicals who saw the Levovs as “capitalist dogs” did not understand the Levovs; their ideology made them incapable of understanding the human truths that the Levovs’ way of life manifested. The radicals viewed Swede’s employees not as craftsmen but as slaves of the capitalist system, and, during the Newark riots of 1967, they would have succeeded in burning Swede’s factory down were it not for the valiant stand of a black employee. Vicky, the veteran foreman of the sewing floor, pleaded with rioters and police for cool heads to prevail. She put handmade signs in windows for the rioters to see: “Most of this factory’s employees are NEGROES.” During the two worst days of rioting, Swede urged Vicky to avoid danger and go home, to leave him alone to face the onslaught. Her response: “This [factory] is mine too. You just own it.” 21 Vicky’s words are pregnant with meaning about capital, human work, the society of the workplace, and human dignity. Words incomprehensible to one like the radical who screams at Swede, “You’re nothing but a [expletive] little capitalist who exploits the brown and yellow people of the world and lives in luxury behind the nigger-proof security gates of his mansion.” 22 American Pastoral made a significant impression on David Horowitz because Horowitz knows from his own past what it is like to be an ideologue, to be incapable of attending to the stuff of life on a human scale–to be dispositionally unable to apply a prudential intelligence to the exigencies of circumstance. A prudential approach to the free society, and to the possibility of free enterprise and initiative that it encompasses, puts a thinker in the shoes of the Levovs of the world. To wear these is not to be naive about greed, corruption, consumerism, or other troubles that plague free societies (and not only free societies). It is not to confuse exemplary practice of free enterprise with the reality that much practice in a fallen world is not exemplary. It is to see that the soil of virtuous living may yet be fertile, and that the soil may be enriched through rightfully informed exercise of freedom rather than through freedom’s eclipse. At the novel’s end, the Levovs’ life is in tatters, and those who contemn Swede’s family laugh and relish the fact. Philip Roth concludes by asking a question worth our effort to ponder: “And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?” 23 Such a question should be posed to my professor friend, to Alasdair MacIntyre, and to any Catholic thinker who articulates, as did the theologian lecturing at the Catholic university, a “Catholic radicalism from a Catholic radicalist perspective.” Notes
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