What makes Pope Francis's attack so significant is that his position, too, is charged in moral terms.I'm not sure that position is as unusual as the gentleman portrays it to be. Generally all government action makes you poorer, and therefore has to be pitched in terms of some new capacity that you will achieve in return: and excellence of capacity is, of course, what the ancients meant by the term "virtue." Progressives promising to force you onto health care exchanges are promising to strip you of considerable wealth in return for a capacity, so far unachieved, to provide some measure of healh insurance to those the markets deem too risky to insure in an ordinary risk pool. Conservatives asking you to support the local bond referendum so they can build a new jail, and therefore lock up more criminals, are also suggesting that they will make you a little bit poorer -- in return for a society that is a little bit more virtuous, in the sense of being stronger against the presumably wicked.
What he really believes is that riches in themselves are bad for people. That is part of the reason he does not live in the papal apartments. This is not a view shared throughout the Catholic hierarchy. Nor is it really, whole-heartedly, shared by the politicians who will praise his views. I don't see any party anywhere in the world, except perhaps the Greens, running for election on the basis that they will make the voters poorer but more virtuous.
So there's always a trade of wealth for virtue, if government is meant to be the means to the end. The radical thing about Reagan's claim was that you could, by shrinking government's powers and sphere of influence, pursue wealth and virtue at once.
That "riches in themselves are bad for people" is not a position Aristotle held, nor Plato -- both held that a proper substance was necessary to pursue virtue, because it provided the leisure for contemplation. What both condemn is not wealth, but a life that focuses on wealth instead of virtue.
That riches are perilous does seem to be Jesus' position, though, and the Pope is not supposed to be neutral between these ancient thinkers.
10 comments:
Umnnhhh....
I would suggest that ATTACHMENT to riches drew Jesus' ire, not merely the possession thereof.
One can find more than a few canonized Saints of the Church who were rich (Louis XIV, e.g.)
I see no evidence that government spending typically is pitched as something that will make you poorer, but will confer non-monetary advantages. That's actually the line normally pitched by an ordinary merchant: buy this hamburger, and although you'll be poorer for it, you'll be less hungry and will have tasted something pleasant. "Stimulus" spending, in contrast, is sold as something that will magically create wealth. One resembles a conservative argument, and the other a progressive one.
"Progressives promising to force you onto health care exchanges are promising to strip you of considerable wealth in return for a capacity, so far unachieved, to provide some measure of healh insurance to those the markets deem too risky to insure in an ordinary risk pool."
The heck they did. They promised to provide me cheaper and better health insurance, not more expensive health insurance. My costs were supposed to go down, not up.
We knew that to be a lie, of course. But others didn't, and voted for the lie.
Tex & Ron:
I see no evidence that government spending typically is pitched as something that will make you poorer, but will confer non-monetary advantages.
Well, I was thinking of the example of what we call "special purpose local option sales taxes," which in Georgia have to be voted for by the public. So to raise the sales tax locally by 1%, you have to go to the public and explain why they should elect to pay the extra tax. It's a pretty good system, and both liberals and conservatives field arguments of this type: do it for the schools, do it so we'll have a bigger jail, do it so we can improve the roads, do it so we can build larger government buildings (these latter usually fail).
But you're right, of course, the official salesmen and -women of the health care law proposed some fantasies, and then called their opponents liars and extremists for opposing those fantasies. Even so, there were a fair number of liberals who did acknowledge that this would of course cost money to some, but for the benefit of others.
Dad29, I would suggest that ATTACHMENT to riches drew Jesus' ire, not merely the possession thereof.
In the passage cited, what Jesus says to the young rich man is that he's done pretty well, but if he wants to be sure of heaven he needs to give away all his wealth and devote his life to following Jesus. If he fails to do this, Jesus said, salvation is "impossible" for a human being to effect, but not impossible for God -- that is, that the salvation will be a pure miracle, like a camel passing through the eye of a needle, which is different from the case of the man who gives up everything and follows God.
It's worth remembering that Pope Francis, personally, has done just what Jesus advised here. Not especially as Pope, where his sacrifices are trivial -- and he could have them back simply by asking for them -- but in becoming a priest in the first place.
I seem to recall Jesus (?) saying that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
Now admittedly I'm relying on my memory and I don't even attend church, but I'm not seeing a whole lot of wiggle room there :p
There's another widely misquoted bible passage about the love of money being the root of all evil.
Still, you have to laugh a bit at progressives quoting that Evil, Christianist Work of Fiction as an authority for secular progressive public policy...
Heh.
It's always been an itchy passage to me. I think this makes more sense than any other explanation I've heard, though:
Jesus' hearers believed that wealth and prosperity were a sign of God's blessing (cf. Leviticus and Deuteronomy). So their incredulity is more along the lines that, "if the rich, who must be seen as righteous by God by dint of their evident blessing, can't be saved, who can be?". Later Christians have turned this around to portray wealth as a hindrance to salvation, which it can be – but no more so than many other things, when the message is that salvation is impossible for all men for it comes from God alone.
I have always made sense of it this way:
To those who have been given much, much is required.
So the bar is set rather higher for rich folk in terms of their moral obligations to the less fortunate. We used to have a similar sense (or at least I was raised this way) wrt to authority: officers in the military, by virtue of the deference paid to the rank, were supposed to be held to a higher standard than PFCs, Lance Corporals, or even staff NCOs.
For example, officers are expected to entertain at their own expense, and we did. A lot. I was constantly cooking for the entire battalion, buying kegs for various functions, finding reasons to invite both officer and enlisted wives into our home when the unit was in the field.
We were supposed to go to intercede for wives when they had problems. This is how Family Readiness started: as informal attempts to advocate for families.
We were expected to watch our mouths, not gossip about information we were privy to because of our/our husband's positions; to respect confidences and restrain our behavior in public.
I don't think that's a bad standard, but I will say that even when it is adhered to there are a lot of people who only see the privileges and overlook the duties that come with them.
The real question here is, "Do we want government enforcing private moral duties?"
I don't think it's at all inappropriate for the Church to set a higher standard. That's what the church is there for: to remind us that there IS a higher moral duty than the one civil society (or government) imposes.
It's when we conflate the two standards that problems arise (i.e., we say that government has a right to demand from us the same standard as God, or the Church).
^^^
What the Lady said.
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