By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
There are two ways for a publication to provide a forum for a point of view that challenges the views of its editors. One is to pick an article that casts the other side in an unfavorable light, as peevish, unenlightened, and narrow-minded, the proverbial straw man. The other is to present the opposition at its best, to be genuinely “fair and balanced,” as one popular cable news network describes itself, in the hope of stimulating a debate that will lead its readers closer to the truth about the issue at hand.
To their credit, the editors of the Jesuits’ magazine America took the latter approach in their March 24 issue. They published an article entitled “Noble Vocations” by Joseph J. Dunn, a retired business executive, that challenges the economic views of the liberal Catholics who make up a large portion of America’s readership. These folks read America because it tends to support their position on economic issues.
Is that an unfair characterization of America and its readers? I don’t think so. No one familiar with the magazine would take exception to the contention that America’s editorials and articles tend to support the economic policies associated with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. It is also safe to say that many of the dozens of academics who wrote to John Garvey, the president of The Catholic University of America, to warn him of the dangers of accepting a donation of $1 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, read America because of that stance. The Koch Foundation is encouraging the school to explore how “principled entrepreneurship can play” a role “in improving society’s well-being.”
The same can be said of the 33,000 signatories of an online petition urging Catholic University to “put academic integrity and social justice ahead of the Koch brothers’ interests.” (It is fascinating, isn’t it, to see how effectively the Democratic Party has been in making the Koch brothers household names on the American left? The Democratic strategy for the upcoming congressional elections seems to be to depict them and the Tea Party as sinister forces threatening to undermine the republic.)
Dunn describes those lining up against the Koch brothers as part of an effort to convince Catholic universities to place less emphasis on their schools of business and more on “educating students for careers in teaching, medicine, government service, and other professions whose social benefits are so obvious.” Dunn sees this as a sign of a “deep discomfort with business among many university professors.”
Dunn asks the faculty members who feel this way to weigh their words, to consider that the “top five Catholic universities, ranked by their size of their endowments, held assets totaling just over $11 billion in 2012.” The University of Notre Dame “leads the pack with $6.3 billion. The top 20 Catholic university endowments total almost $18 billion.” Those “assets” are stocks and bonds, shares in corporate profits. They are what helps these schools “keep a lid on tuition, fund faculty chairs, and deliver more scholarship aid.”
It is not just the schools as institutions that profit from the American capitalist system. Writes Dunn, “In many cases, those who condemn capitalism or for-profit business also hope that the balances in their retirement plans will grow, that their investments will be rewarded in a way that can happen only by growing after-tax corporate profits.” Precisely.
It has been my experience that outspoken left-wing faculty members pore over the statements from their 403(b) and 401(k) retirement plans with as much intensity as a stockbroker.
Dunn also chides the university liberals who protest profits and corporate greed while enjoying “the option to choose the computer on which they write their complaint (Apple, Dell, Lenovo, etc.), as they sip their Starbucks coffee or Coca-Cola, drive their Prius, Ford, or Honda and wait for a text on their choice of cell-phone.”
Dunn uses the words of the Popes to underscore his point. He cites Pope John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, who made clear that the Church’s concern for social justice does not imply a preference for socialism or a specific model of the welfare state: “The Church has no models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise within the framework of different historical situations.”
Also Pope Francis, who spoke clearly about business “as a vocation, and a noble vocation, provided that those engaged in it see themselves challenged by a greater meaning in life,” one that seeks to “serve the common good by striving to increase the goods of this world and to make them more accessible to all.”
Uh-oh! I can see the Catholic left getting ready to pounce at this point. They will protest that it is precisely that capitalism does not permit those who run businesses to consider “a greater meaning in life” and to seek to “serve the common good”; that capitalism, by its very nature, puts profits above these lofty motives.
Now, no doubt there are capitalists about whom that is true, individuals who do not care a fig for the common good, who are willing to exploit their workers and the consumers in search of profit. The question that Joseph J. Dunn asks us to consider is whether these individuals are representative of capitalists as a whole. And, more important, whether the exploiters among capitalists are that way because they operate in a capitalist system. In other words, does living within a capitalist system lead to greed and a disdain for the commonweal?
Marxists say it does. It is what they mean by “economic determinism.” They argue that capitalism leads us to pursue our self-interests and private profit. In contrast, they tell us that socialism and the end of the private property system will create a new “socialist man,” individuals who will realize that they can prosper only in cooperative efforts directed at the betterment of society as a whole.
Which is rubbish. The historical record makes that clear. If a visitor from space with no ideological axe to grind were assigned the task of coming up with the most vicious, greedy, materialistic, self-centered dirt-bags to walk the earth over the past 100 years, whom do you think they would name? I bet the party hacks in the old Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia, the Communist Chinese, and the assorted tribal potentates who rule collectivist regimes in Africa would be high on their list.
These posturing men of the people are as fond of secret Swiss bank accounts, private vacation villas, and suspect financial advisers as any shady individual on Forbes magazine’s list of wealthiest corporate executives. I would wager that half of the most expensive restaurants and hookers on the East Side of Manhattan stay in business only because of the patronage of their UN delegates.
Should we blame their money-grubbing attitudes on the collectivist societies they come from? No. But neither does it make sense for Catholics on the left to blame every greedy capitalist they see on capitalism. Bernie Madoff would have been a manipulative con man in search of a buck if he had grown up in the old Soviet Union. African leader Robert Mugabe would have been a greedy thug if he had spent his life in Chicago. It is ideological partisanship of the crudest sort to maintain otherwise.
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