More Random Thoughts on the State of the World

 

 

     It is obvious to me that the cause of most of the social suffering and political malfunction is the power of sectors of the corporate economy and its most powerful individuals over the life of whole nations. The social contract post WWII of allowing capitalism but using the state to moderate its bad effects in the interest of working people has been destroyed. This has a history and it is well-known, no need to go through it. I will mention the corporate Supreme Court’s decision to allow unlimited money into influencing policy as “free speech” and the ability of corporations to destroy unions and pressure governments on taxes and regulation by outsourcing production to a number of cheap labor/no-regulation areas both in and out of the country are part of this history. The Republic goal has always been to destroy the New Deal. They have a complete victory. And the results are horrible for everyone except giant corporations, billionaires, and a small elite of indispensable productive assets.

 

    The inheritors of the New Deal – which for me is not the ideal but a minimal bar (my ideal is something like E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful, or the economic thought of Wendell Berry, or the alternative technology movement of the 1970’s) – like Bernie Sanders I thus support.  I support them in spite of the fact that I am not a liberal, do not buy into the ideology of “autonomy” in the sense that individuals define their values and identities in autonomy from any community or tradition or reality. I affirm the natural law (in the Thomist sense). I believe that human nature requires community in the strong sense, and that community in the strong sense requires responsible cooperation even between generations, and thus virtue (read Berry on community: I agree with everything he writes about it).

     I don’t just want to go back to the way it was. The tradition got homosexuality terribly wrong, for example, and I have no desire to resurrect such inhuman attitudes. I do believe that homosexual people are subject to the same kinds of sexual restraints (chastity) that heterosexual people are. I believe that life is sacred and that abortion as birth control is an evil, though I am hesitant for the state to get too strongly involved in this issue. (That it has is a function of the breakdown of community, which is a consequence of turbo capitalism. Without strong local communities, the state comes to control all kinds of things it cannot and should not control but that must still be dealt with.)

     So the people who recognize the need to end the power of capital over society and government are typically also radical individualists when it comes to moral and cultural matters of social importance, which always cause stress for me. I am anti-capitalist because I am, in a different sense, conserving, traditional in my attitudes. The Republicans used to market themselves as the party of family values while unleashing the power of the corporate economy to destroy the very fabric of family and community life.  And their image of family values seems a caricature to me.

    There parallel developments everywhere. The German CDU/CSU once stood for a compromise between capitalists, community/family, and workers. Now they stand for taking any remaining shackles off giant corporations, and to Hell with families and workers. Well, the imperatives of global capitalism almost force this on them. The one party that pushes against capitalism, die Linke, is also post-truth, post-moral on moral and cultural issues. The capitalist enablers often give lip service to natural law while the progressive who rightly challenge capitalism reject it, cutting off the branch on which they sit to criticize capitalism.

     If there were any logic in politics, the parties that enable turbo capitalism should be post-moral and post-truth while the parties challenging the power of giant corporations over society should be for an ethic of community responsibility and preserving the good from the past. Politics is a very distorted mirror of social and economic (and moral) reality.

 

    The Catholic social teaching has the resources to get it right, but the institutional Church is so intertwined with the capitalist economy it cannot do much besides abstract pronouncements. I would wish a party that translated Catholic social teaching into a concrete political agenda, moving beyond abstractions. I think the work of Berry and Schumacher are possible translations of Catholic social teaching.

 

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Nationalism is a reaction to the social breakdown caused by capitalism unleashed. There is something real in the need it serves. It replaces roots and community, something people have lost in capitalist society but still deeply need. Nationalism is a perversion, a corruption of a community that is no longer there. It helps protect turbo capitalism and dictators (and would-be dictators) by diverting attention away from the causes of social and thus personal breakdown and directing blame at some designated Other. And by giving those who are part of it, who have basically lost their minds in a quite literal sense, a fake sense of belonging.

    Nationalism is poison for international relations and thus for the peace of the world. Again, it is a direct consequence of capitalism. I remember when détente happened under Nixon and the opening to China. The conflict was between systems and ideologies, not people. Americans could cheer for Olga Korbit. The “enemy” was re-humanized. That is what nationalism makes impossible. I hate it as I hate sin.