The Moral Imagination - Michael Matheson Miller

There is No Technical Solution to Poverty - My interview on the Prosper Podcast

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:56:43 GMT

Here is a link to my interview on the Prosper Podcast with and Rebecca Teti. We discuss a wide range of things including

Rethinking our approaches to social and material poverty
A different way of thinking about dependency
The role of work
The importance of relationships

We discuss various themes and stories from new film I am directing called POVERTY TRAP: How Big Plans to Solve Poverty Broke the American Dream. The film highlights how large-scale, expert-led, distant, technocratic planning ended up weakening the natural communities that enable people to flourish — and how community leaders are finding local solutions to generate opportunity and foster social flourishing.

We also discuss various books including, Quo Vadis Chastity and the Shattering of Loneliness and Chastity by Bishop Eric Varden, Dreamland by Sam Quinones, and some of the amazing things that people are doing across the US working with homeless, generating economic opportunity, and more.

Listen on Apple Spotify YouTube

Episode 61: Magatte Wade on Rethinking Poverty, Prosperity, and What Africa needs to Flourish

Michael Matheson Miller — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:40:17 GMT

In this episode of the Moral Imagination Podcast I speak with about her book, The Heart of Cheetah, her personal journey, entrepreneurial ventures, and her vision for a free and prosperous Africa.

Magatte was key voice and important influence in the film I directed, Poverty, Inc. She is a force for promoting freedom, the dignity of the person, and entrepreneurial solutions to poverty in Africa and throughout the world. I’ve know Magatte for many years and am delighted to have her on the podcast.

We discuss the misconceptions surrounding African poverty and the need for economic freedom and institutions of justice – private property, rule of law, and ability to participate in the formal economy - for fostering opportunity and human flourishing for the poor.

At the end of our conversation we also talk about poverty in America, the American dream from the perspective of an immigrant, emphasizing the need for a balance between material prosperity and moral values. Magatte emphasizes that Africa will only thrive through entrepreneurship, political and economic freedom, and a commitment to rule of law and human dignity.

Biography

Magatte Wade is founder of SkinIsSkin, and Senior Fellow at Atlas Network, the leading organization of African free-market think tanks. She was listed as a Forbes “20 Youngest Power Women in Africa,” a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, and a TED Global Africa Fellow. You can learn more about her work at MagatteWade.com

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Magat Wade and Her Work

12:47 The Path to Prosperity: Entrepreneurs and Free Markets

39:52 The Reality of Poverty in Africa

45:02 Devotion to Prosperity in Africa

50:50 Cultural Identity and Entrepreneurship

57:54 The Complexity of Labor Laws

01:08:24 The Informal Economy and Its Consequences

01:15:12 The Aha Moment: Economic Freedom and Wealth Creation

01:25:09 The Correlation Between Property Rights and Prosperity

01:30:09 The Anthropological Error of Socialism

01:36:30 The Threshold of Flourishing

01:45:48 Virtue, Character, and Economic Freedom

01:54:12 The Teaching Power of Law

02:06:11 Creating Conditions for Prosperity

02:11:21 Misdiagnosis of Poverty and Its Consequences

02:19:00 The Cheetah vs. Hippo Generations: A Call to Action

02:29:08 Flourishing vs. Prosperity: A New Paradigm

Resources

Artificial Intelligence & The Human Person

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 15:26:07 GMT

Artificial Intelligence & The Human Person

Overview

Digital Revolution - we are in living within the Digital Revolution. Like Industrial Revolution it is difficult to predict what will happen – both negative and positive.

Like all technology there are trade-offs

This talk is broad and thematic. I will focus the actual (and potential)negative impacts of the digital revolution and AI

Brief Caveats and Distinctions

1. Technology vs. Technological Society / Technological Paradigm

a. See Pope Francis, Pope Benedict, Augusto Del Noce

2. A critique of technology / technological society does not equal anti-technology

3. Some worry that AI will lead to Apocalypse – maybe -maybe not – this is far above my paygrade – but Because NOT Apocalypse does not mean there is nothing to worry about

AI & The Human Person

Potential benefits in many areas: productivity, research medical diagnosis, education, access for poor excluded.

Focus of this talk is on actual and potential negatives impact on human person.

DISTORTION OF THE PERSON

1. Seeing the Man Through the Machine: Starting with Consciousness

Consciousness is an element of who we are, but the human person is much more than a conscious being. This starting point gives too little to the person – it interprets the person through the lens of the computer-it tries to understand the person through the lens our creation –man through machine.

What Catholic anthropology begins with the person as an individual substance of a rational nature so we are created in the image of God, with reason that seeks the good, true, and beautiful a will with freedom, made out of the dust Of the earth - we are embodied persons with a social nature born into families born into cultures embodied and embedded -- our bodies are not an accident of our personhood.

This does not deny consciousness, John Paul II speaks about it – he also speaks about interiority, yet we are not simply consciousness driving around in a body like we drive in a car.

Don’t limit person to consciousness

2. Reductionism in Thinking and Intelligence

Related to what Iain McGilchrist describe as Left Hemisphere dominated way of thinking.

Left and right hemispheres attend to the world very differently the left hemisphere as a mechanistic technical detailed way of seeing the world whereas the right hemisphere attends to the big picture to the explicit to meaning.

Parallel between the ratio and the intellectus in Saint Thomas Aquinas – See for example Antiqua et Nova

One concern: with AI is more reflective of left hemisphere thinking this will further solidify this type of approach to the world.

Related to Benedict XVI Regensburg Address and the problem of limiting reason to the empirical.

McGilchrist: The Master and His Emissary

· The master sees the big picture – emissary sees only part. Will AI be the emissary who leads the master instead of the master leading the emissary?

Digital Bureaucratization of Bureaucracy

· Benefits to Standardization

· Potentially abdicating our decision making to algorithms

· A bureaucratic rigidity could create injustice and undermine rule of law which is grounded not only in rules, but in the virtues of prudence, temperance, and justice.

Denigration of the Body

· These are pre-existing problems of the technological paradigm and recurring theme in history Gnosticism.

· Reductionist view of the person

· The body is seen as accidental to the person

· This has profound impact on relationships, self-understanding, sexuality, marriage, children,

Amplification of the Technological Paradigm

· Efficiency highest goal

· Primacy of the Technical

o Technical solution to all problems
o If technically possible then we can should do it

· Commodification of Persons

· Everything an Object of Trade (See Del Noce)

PART 1 B – AMPLIFY CURRENT PROBLEMS

There is a lot of worry about alignment -- we already have aspects of the digital revolution that are not aligned with human flourishing and are harming ourselves, our politics, our economies, and our relationships. AI will amplify that mis-alignment

Loss of Privacy, Surveillance, and Social Credit

· We already have serious problems with loss of privacy, surveillance by states, and what Shosana Zubuf has called “surveillance capitalism.”

· Free services resulted in widespread data collection and intrusion into our private lives.

· The recent developments in AI only exacerbate this problem.

· Political, Social, Economic, and Personal Threat

· Personal Privacy matters because it reflects who we are as persons. We are personal subjects with a social nature. The most personal of those relationships are private and should not be open to data collection. But Big Tech, because of its materialist, instrumental view of the world cannot see any intrinsic value in these non-utilitarian, intimate, personal relationships. It’s only data that can be used.

Behavior Modification

One of the most dangerous aspects of this is behavior modification. And your personal information is sold and used to craft specific, targeted ads, social media posts, and videos to influence us.

“We’re being tracked and measured constantly and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now.”[i]

We still have freedom or agency, but it does mean that we are being influenced in ways we do not understand and by processes of which we are unaware.

Commodification of Persons

· Persons are cogs for state or business

· Everything becomes and object of trade

RELATIONSHIPS

· Loneliness, meaningless, and anxiety are at epidemic highs as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge and others have documented.

· Increasing numbers of young people especially in relationships with AI chat-bot

· Undermine embodied, face to face relationships will only exacerbate loneliness.

Transhumanism

· Underlying much of AI development is transhumanism

· The idea of Combination of Biology and Technology

“If we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like …Only hi-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the world.”
David Pearce- Humanity+

Genetic Engineering an AI

An immediate worry is the combination of AI and Genetic Engineering – Combination of CRISPR with LLM and incredible computing power is a real threat. As Bill Drexel writes in the New Atlantis

AI is to “genetics what calculus was to physics, providing the tools necessary to harness the full power of biology and making earlier efforts appear primitive by comparison.

Designer Babies is not something in the future.

· This has social, anthropological, and theological impact

· It creates great confusion about God, creation, and who we are.

Responses

Innovations in Commerce and Technology

• Rule of law

• Build digital technology that servse the person and family and church

• Build commerce that serves families and communities

• Build de—centralized technology

• Digital subsidiarity

Ultimately, we are in an anthropological struggle –what does it mean to be a human person? And a debate about metaphysics and eschatology.

For this there is no technical solution. The solution to the crisis of our times is not found in the technical world.

Key Response: We must escape the technological paradigm and present the gospel of Jesus Christ the good news about the human person.

· We are embodied, embedded persons endowed with freedom and reason – with a social nature directed to deep loving relationships.

· Technology cannot be a substitute for in-person relationships with other people in families in friendship in religious communities.

· Ultimately at the highest level in the church, the Ecclesia in Divine liturgy and worship where we commune with our creator it is only here that the goodness and unique and unrepeatability of the person is affirmed.

BRIEF READING LIST

John Paul II: Redemptor Hominis Benedict XVI – all encyclicals especially Deus Caritas Est, Spe Salvi, Regensburg Address

Joseph Ratzinger - Values in a Time of Upheaval, Joseph Ratzinger in Communio – Anthropology and Culture

Pope Francis especially on the Technocratic Paradigm

Pope Leo homilies and messages on AI
Antiqua et Nova - Note on the Relationship BetweenArtificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith / Dicastery for Culture and Education

Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, The Problem of Atheism, The Age of Secularization

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and its Emissary, The Matter with Things, Ways of Attending

Jaron Lanier: 10 Arguments to Delete your Social Media Right Now

§ C.S. Lewis

o The Abolition of Man (Short)
o Mere Christianity (Medium Length)
o “The Poison of Subjectivism” (Essay)
o The Four Loves
o Space Trilogy
o Till We Have Faces

Bill Drexel: “The AI Genetics Revolution is Coming”

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-ai-genetics-revolution-is-coming

§ Dietrich von Hildebrand

o The Heart
o Nature of Love

§ Robert Spaemann

o Love and the Dignity of Human Life (Short)

Christian Vision of the Person Long Form Handout

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 02:28:58 GMT

Here is the longer version of the Handout for Christian Vision of the Person. You can read it here or download the attached PDF

The Christian Vision Of The Person Long Handout

224KB ∙ PDF file

Download

The Christian Vision of the Person and Society

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.”

C.S. Lewis: The Weight of Glory

Introduction: The Person at the Center of Society and the Economy

How we understand the nature and destiny of the human person shapes everything else: Politics, Economics, Society, Morality, Family, Marriage, Sexuality, Life and Death

“The primary fault of socialism is anthropological in nature”—John Paul II

· Genesis: Adam and Eve and the nature of the person

· If we are going to live like Christians—we have to think like Christians.

· Secularism is not neutral.

· Prudence vs Doctrine

Christian Vision of the Human Person

Coherent
Reasonable
Recognizes the Complexity of the Person (not reductionist)
Beautiful
Exciting

Approach is to Think:

· Biblically

· Philosophically

· With the Tradition

· Phenomenologically: Lived experience, biologically, sociologically

One of the Key Themes of this lecture: Go back to your experience

Many things we are told about the person are incoherent on their own terms, do not resonate with the way with live, and do not match with common sense.

“But common sense is unable to find itself any more in what the official interpreters of reality want us to believe. They want us to believe that we are not what we think we are. They want us to believe that what we understand truth to be does not exist and likewise what we mean by the world “love.” Robert Spaemann

7 Characteristics of The Human Person

1. Intelligence and Reason

This is an overarching characteristic of the person that impacts everything else

· Discursive Reasoning

· Conceptual Thought

· Self-reflection

· Interiority

· Intellect is Oriented to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

· Speculative Intellect—directed to “what is”

· Practical and Moral Reasoning

Good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided.

· Poetic Knowledge – Connatural Knowing – Inarticulate Rationality

Primer on Reason

o Modern Reason limited to the Empirical is incoherent on its own terms

o Serious consequences for Politics

Removes justice and reduces politics to power / efficiency

o Serious consequences for fundamental human questions and how we understand the person

Love, justice, beauty, goodness, truth, compassion etc. all pushed outside the realm of reason

2. Free

Connected to Reason
Moral Agent
Responsible
Capacity for self-donation sacrifice
Human Person vs. Animal
Choices vs Free Decisions
Genesis: Man is designed to protect, teach, serve (sacrifice) for women and children
Requires Freedom

Dominant views of Freedom

Materialism: Deterministic and rejects free will. Determined by genes, biology, neurology, environment

Radical Autonomy: Freedom is exercise of will with no end or limit

“An irrational will is not a free will”- Truth and Tolerance

Christian vision—Freedom is complex and influenced by a number of factors. But freedom has a purpose.
Freedom is for love.

3. Good but Fallen

We are created in the image of God and are good, but because of original sin we are fallen

Capable of heroic goodness and sacrifice, but also capable of profound evil
Concupiscence—St. Paul: Do what I hate….
- There is a need for coercion.
- There must be limits on the rulers:
  - Augustine: “Libido dominandi”
  - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” –Lord Acton

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. –James Madison, Federalist Papers #51

Contrast with Human Perfectibility: Key difference between Christian and most modern visions of the person and society is over the issue of sin and human perfectibility.

4. Social Beings

Persons achieve human flourishing in relationships with others.
Not simply an “individual”
Dominant secular idea of individual in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are myth.
Intentional alternative to Genesis Narrative

The Family is the fundamental unit of society. The family is a natural community and pre-political unit. It is not merely a construct of society but reflects the social nature of the human person and is a reflection of the Holy Trinity.

State redefinition of marriage is totalitarian act.

5. Embodied, Embedded Persons

We are not souls floating around in a body--or a soul driving our body like a person drives a car.

We are embodied persons.
We are made from the dust of earth.
What we do / happens to us in our bodies impacts our soul/spirit/emotions and vice versa.

We are animals—but rational animals with a nature that is both material and spiritual.

Our soul is not a bit in our body--it is the animating principle.

2 Dominant Fallacies

Materialist: We are just our bodies. Matter is all that matters.
Spiritualist: Our Bodies are distinct from our personhood

6. Spiritual Emotions

We have the capacity for spiritual emotions.

Passions are not opposed to reason per se—they must be ordered and integrated by reason.

Anger
Lust
Disordered response to a person
Unreasonable – offense against reason
Purity: Reasonable and proper response to sexual values

Karol Wojtyla/JP II: Spiritual Emotions

C.S. Lewis: “Reasonable Emotions”

Dietrich von Hildebrand “Intelligible Spiritual Affectivity”

Through the intellect and in conjunction with the will we say yes or no
These are things like love, mercy, compassion.
- Love is not blind; it sees clearly and is creative.

7. Everlasting: “Eternal Destiny”

Image and Likeness of God
Theosis—Deiformity

“In the long run we are all dead,” but in the longer run there is what CS Lewis calls a “deeper magic” We have an eternal destiny; we are called to eternal life with God and the resurrection of the body. In our flesh we shall see God.

Our eternal destiny matters right now: All our political, economic, charitable, and social decisions need to be made in the light of our eternal destiny.

You’ve Never Met a Mere Mortal

“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.” C.S. Lewis The Weight of Glory

Benedict XVI

“…only where God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.

Blackstone Fellowship - Handouts for Christian Vision of the Person & Government

Michael Matheson Miller — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:31:07 GMT

The Christian Vision of the Person and Society

Introduction: The Person at the Center of Society and the Economy

How we understand the nature and destiny of the human person shapes everything else: Politics, Economics, Society, Morality, Family, Marriage, Sexuality, Life and Death

“The primary fault of socialism is anthropological in nature”—John Paul II

· Genesis: Adam and Eve and the nature of the person

· If we are going to live like Christians—we have to think like Christians.

· Secularism is not neutral.

· Prudence vs Doctrine

Christian Vision of the Human Person

Coherent
Reasonable
Recognizes the Complexity of the Person (not reductionist)
Beautiful
Exciting

Approach is to Think:

· Biblically

· Philosophically

· With the Tradition

· Phenomenologically: Lived experience, biologically, sociologically

One of the Key Themes of this lecture: Go back to your experience

Many things we are told about the person are incoherent on their own terms, do not resonate with the way with live, and do not match with common sense.

Part 1: 5 False Anthropologies

Plastic Anthropology
Transhumanism
Person as Cog
Person as Scourge
Person as Commodity

You can read a detailed version of that lecture here: Against Anti-Human Philosophies of Despair

Part 2: Christian Anthropology

Overarching themes

1. Being is Good

2. Persons as Subjects not Objects

7 Characteristics of The Human Person

1. Intelligence and Reason

This is an overarching characteristic of the person that impacts everything else

· Discursive Reasoning

· Conceptual Thought

· Self-reflection

· Interiority

· Intellect is Oriented to Truth, Beauty, and Goodness

· Speculative Intellect—directed to “what is”

· Practical and Moral Reasoning

Good is to be done and pursued and evil avoided.

· Poetic Knowledge – Connatural Knowing – Inarticulate Rationality

Primer on Reason

o Modern Reason limited to the Empirical is incoherent on its own terms

o Serious consequences for Politics

Removes justice and reduces politics to power / efficiency

o Serious consequences for fundamental human questions and how we understand the person

Love, justice, beauty, goodness, truth, compassion etc. all pushed outside the realm of reason

2. Free

Connected to Reason
Moral Agent
Responsible
Capacity for self-donation sacrifice
Human Person vs. Animal
Choices vs Free Decisions
Genesis: Man is designed to protect, teach, serve (sacrifice) for women and children
Requires Freedom

Dominant views of Freedom

Materialism: Deterministic and rejects free will. Determined by genes, biology, neurology, environment

Radical Autonomy: Freedom is exercise of will with no end or limit

“An irrational will is not a free will”- Truth and Tolerance

Christian vision—Freedom is complex and influenced by a number of factors. But freedom has a purpose.
Freedom is for love.

3. Good but Fallen

We are created in the image of God and are good, but because of original sin we are fallen

Capable of heroic goodness and sacrifice, but also capable of profound evil
Concupiscence—St. Paul: Do what I hate….
- There is a need for coercion.
- There must be limits on the rulers:
  - Augustine: “Libido dominandi”
  - “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” –Lord Acton

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. –James Madison, Federalist Papers #51

Contrast with Human Perfectibility: Key difference between Christian and most modern visions of the person and society is over the issue of sin and human perfectibility.

4. Social Beings

Persons achieve human flourishing in relationships with others.
Not simply an “individual”
Dominant secular idea of individual in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau are myth.
Intentional alternative to Genesis Narrative

State redefinition of marriage is totalitarian act.

5. Embodied, Embedded Persons

We are not souls floating around in a body--or a soul driving our body like a person drives a car.

We are embodied persons.
We are made from the dust of earth.
What we do / happens to us in our bodies impacts our soul/spirit/emotions and vice versa.

We are animals—but rational animals with a nature that is both material and spiritual.

Our soul is not a bit in our body--it is the animating principle.

2 Dominant Fallacies

Materialist: We are just our bodies. Matter is all that matters.
Spiritualist: Our Bodies are distinct from our personhood

6. Spiritual Emotions

We have the capacity for spiritual emotions.

Passions are not opposed to reason per se—they must be ordered and integrated by reason.

Anger
Lust
Disordered response to a person
Unreasonable – offense against reason
Purity: Reasonable and proper response to sexual values

Karol Wojtyla/JP II: Spiritual Emotions

C.S. Lewis: “Reasonable Emotions”

Dietrich von Hildebrand “Intelligible Spiritual Affectivity”

Through the intellect and in conjunction with the will we say yes or no
These are things like love, mercy, compassion.
- Love is not blind; it sees clearly and is creative.

7. Everlasting: “Eternal Destiny”

Image and Likeness of God
Theosis—Deiformity

Our eternal destiny matters right now: All our political, economic, charitable, and social decisions need to be made in the light of our eternal destiny.

You’ve Never Met a Mere Mortal

Benedict XVI

Christian Vision of Government Handout

Part I. The Historical Role of Christianity in Limited Government

A. Pre-Modern Roots of Limited Government

Origins predate Enlightenment and modern period
Development through medieval period (800-1500)
Commercial revolution and market economies emerged in Christian Europe

De-sacralization of the state
Separation of religious and political authority
Resistance to totalitarian control

Part II. Key Elements of Christian Vision of Government

1. The State is not Divine
2. State not Arbiter of Truth
3. Family
4. Justice and Rule of Law & Institutions of Justice
5. Private Property
6. Free Association
7. Common Good
8. Subsidiarity
9. Cannot do Evil to Obtain Good -- Limits of Law and Morality
10. Avoid Utopianism

1. State is Not Divine

Christianity de-sacralizes and de-divinizes the state
Church inherently limits state power
· Lord Acton

"When Jesus said: 'Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what it God's' his words were revolutionary. Not everything belonged to Caesar."
“in religion, morality, and politics, there was only one legislator and one authority”
“The vice of the classic State was that it was both Church and State in one.”

“It is not the task of the state to create mankind’s happiness, nor is it the task of the state to create new men. It is not the task of the state to change the world into Paradise. Nor Can it do so…If it behaves as if were God…this makes it the beast from the abyss, the power of the Antichrist.”

Joseph Ratzinger – “What is Truth, The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values in a Pluralist Society”

2. State is Not the Arbiter of Truth

State is custodian of order – but not source of truth

Natural Law and Justice

State bound by moral law
Positive law subordinate to natural law
Rule of law and due process

3. Family as Fundamental Unit

Family is a pre-political society. It is not a construct of the state.
Christian Vision: Balance between Roman paterfamilias and modern individualism
Importance of civil society and intermediary institutions

4. Justice and Rule of Law

Legal Justice: Rule of law
Distributive Justice: What community owes individual
Commutative Justice: Justice in exchange

5. Private Property

Material foundation of freedom
Not absolute but essential right
Connected to family stability
Sources: Genesis 23, Exodus 22, 2 Samuel 12, Acts of Apostles, Fathers, Doctors, Modern Teaching

6. Free Association

Derives from social nature of man
Foundation for civil society
St. Thomas Aquinas: Contra Impugnates
Buffer between state and individual

7. Common Good

"Sum total of social conditions which allow people to reach fulfillment"
Not reducible to efficiency or utilitarianism
Common Good does not equal greatest good for greatest number

9. Subsidiarity

Higher bodies should not usurp lower bodies' functions

"gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative"

“gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community”

So also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.

For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social and never destroy and absorb them.” Pius XI Quadragesimo anno

9. Moral Limits

Cannot do evil to achieve good
Law should not attempt to forbid all evil

10. Anti-Utopianism

Rejection of political perfectionism

“Within this human history of ours the absolutely ideal situation will never exist and a perfected ordering of freedom will never be achieved. An ordering of things that is simply ideal; that is all around right and just will never exist. Wherever such a claim is made, truth is not being spoken. Belief in progress is not false in every respect. But the myth of the liberated world of the future in which everything is different and everything will be good is false. We can only ever construct relative social orders which can only ever be relatively right and just. Yet this very same closest possible approach to true right and justice is what we must strive to attain. Everything else, every eschatological promise within history fails to liberate us, rather it disappoints and therefore enslaves us.” –Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance

“Love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness…The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become…incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which…every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need…” –Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est

Six Ways to Combat Consumerism

Michael Matheson Miller — Wed, 21 May 2025 16:10:40 GMT

In the Gospel parable of Lazarus and the rich man St. Augustine notes that it was not wealth that sent the rich man to hell, but his indifference. He just didn’t care. He was too attached to the world and his own comings and goings to notice Lazarus. Pope Francis wrote in Evangelii gaudium,

Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor…as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us (EG 54).

Being thrilled by the market can distract us – we can all become easily attached to material things, to comfort, and the newest gadget. At its worst it becomes consumerism.

Consumerism is a Spiritual Problem

We tend to think of consumerism as an economic problem because this is how it manifests itself to us, and because we live in a consumerist society surrounded by advertising and behavior modification.

There is no doubt that a market economy and the advertising culture is one of the causes of consumerism. Yet the economy alone is insufficient to explain the problem of consumerism. At its core it is a spiritual and cultural problem, related not only to economic but to philosophical and theological issues. There are a number of social and philosophical influences that I will explain in more detail in a longer piece. But some some of these influences include:

philosophical materialism
the residue of 19th century atheism
the sexual revolution
what Augusto Del Noce calls “pure bourgeois” and the triumph of Yuppie Culture where everything becomes an object of trade; and happiness can be purchased
what Rene Girard calls “mimetic desire”
Tocqueville’s insight that equality and democracy create love of comfort
widespread relativism, and the resulting nihilism

All of these and more contribute to an absence of meaning and purpose in life beyond acquisition.

While it is certainly the case that an efficient capitalist economy can encourage consumerism, I think it is an error to view consumerism as fundamentally an economic problem. The reality is that consumerism has been a problem in non-capitalist, communist societies. And throughout history there have been some capitalist societies that have shunned consumerism and valued thrift, saving, and long term thinking, which demonstrates that we can’t simply identify consumerism and capitalism. Though capitalism clearly exacerbates consumerism, it is primarily a crisis of the soul and loss of meaning.

Consumerism is more than simply buying things or the newest gadget. At its core, it is a way of seeing the world. As Benjamin Barber put it in his book Consumed:

“brands have replaced families, religion, and communities as a source of identity.”

Consumerism sees everything, every experience, and ultimately everyone as an object to be used for my pleasure or liberation. Marriage is merely to serve the emotional needs of the people involved, and is disconnected from children and the common good. Babies are not gifts to be reverenced, but simply choices that can be aborted at will if they are not convenient.

Pope Francis described the situation well in an address to bishops at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia on September 28, 2015.

“Today consumerism determines what is important. Consuming relationships, consuming friendships, consuming religions….Whatever the cost or consequences….
“The result is a culture which discards everything that is no longer ‘useful’ or ‘satisfying’ for the tastes of the consumer….
“I would say that at the root of so many contemporary situations is a kind of impoverishment born of a widespread and radical sense of loneliness….Loneliness with fear of commitment in a limitless effort to feel recognized.”

6 Ways to Combat Consumerism

Consumerism, culture, and the economy are complex topics and there is much to discuss and debate. But what I’d like to do here is suggest several practical ways to address the problems of philosophical materialism and consumerism.

Here I will not focus on economic policy, not because it is unimportant, but because most of us can’t really do much about the structure of the economy. But we can do some things about our souls and our ways of living.

I think it is essential to recognize that we can’t simply stop consumerism in ourselves and others without providing an alternative way of life – a higher vision of life and nobility that inspires us. So here are six suggestions that will help

1. Most Obvious - Reduce social media, don’t watch commercials, and reject the behavior modification that encourages consumption and addictive behavior.

For a good summary of this, read Jaron Lanier’s 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Here is a review of the book I wrote.

2. Stress the Reasonableness of the Faith in Contrast to the Just-So Stories of Materialism.

This may sound surprising, but if people believe they live in a materialist world with no meaning and no possibility of transcendence, what else would they do but eat, drink, and seek pleasure before we return to cosmic dust? Don’t underestimate the impact materialism has on consumerism. Nor should we underestimate the great intellectual and emotionally attractive power that Christianity has in a materialist world. As Benedict XVI wrote:

“Christianity must always remember that it is the religion of the logos. It is the faith in the creator Spirit from which proceeds everything that exists. Today this should be precisely a philosophical strength….”

Materialism is insufficient to explain the deepest question of human life. It gives no satisfactory explanation of consciousness. It gives no satisfactory explanation of free will or our lived experiences as moral and responsible agents. It cannot explain or give voice to our deepest emotions. Materialism and its counterpart – empiricist rationality – cannot give an account for our most profound human experiences of love, justice, anxiety, sadness, hope, mercy, etc. Empiricism — the theory that the only things that matter and are true are those which can be empirically verified — can’t tell us why empirical facts are valuable in the first place. Rationalism can’t tell us why reason and rationality are better and more valuable than non-reason and irrationality. They both fall prey to Godel’s theorem of incompleteness. Benedict XVI deal’s with the problem of empiricist rationality in the Regensburg Address which I highly recommend reading.

In contrast to a culture of meaningless acquisition and an incoherent and irrational world of randomness, Christianity offers a call to nobility, sacrifice, and the highest values. Materialism gives us neither a coherent explanation of the world nor a plan to live our lives. In the end it gives us simply this: consume today for tomorrow you die.

3. Clarity on Moral Norms

Related to (true) religion providing a clear explanation about faith’s reasonableness is clarity on moral teaching. Christian morality is not simply a set of rules, but a positive vision of human life that promotes human flourishing.

To quote Benedict XVI again:

“Morality is not man’s prison but rather the divine element in him…the Christian faith is the advance-post of human freedom.“

This is especially evident in the area of sexuality and family. The sexual revolution failed, and has brought nothing but unhappiness. As notes, women are not happier now, they are just more medicated. Women and children are suffering, and men are turned into predators instead of protectors.

The Theology of the Body of John Paul II is an antidote to sexual revolution. It’s not merely academic – it has had profound influence on many families and continues to do so.

4. Encourage Ascetic Practices

These include small acts of mortification and denial where we discipline our passions, desires, and will to attain higher goals. The practice of fasting is is not only a spiritual discipline or a way to lose weight. It is a good first step against consumerism.

Fasting also fights against consumerism by helping to create community. It can help create, what the late Oxford anthropologist Mary Douglas calls, “a condensed symbol”. She explains in her excellent book Natural Symbols that when abstinence regulations were removed in England, the Irish Catholic community of Liverpool was almost completely assimilated and lost much of its Catholic identity within only a number of years. Communal ascetic practices can help create a sense of belonging and community that fight loneliness, which, as Pope Francis said, is one of the causes of the consumerist attitude.

Even avowed secularists see the value of aesthetic practices. Think of all the books and essays on dieting, exercise, and meditation. The German philosopher Peter Sloterjdik has gone as far as to say that we need to recover a monastic secularism – he wants a Christian ethos of self-sacrifice without Christ. I think this is a futile attempt, but again it points to the philosophical and practical strength of traditional Christianity.

For a good introduction on prayer and fasting - and how to fast without getting headaches- I recommend Jay Richards’s book Eat, Fast, Feast as a good place to start. You can also listen to my podcast - Fasting, Prayer, and Ketosis - with Jay about this

5. Attend Beautiful Liturgy

Another thing that helps fight consumerism is good liturgy. Why? Because consumerism profanes everything that’s reverent and sacred and good. Sacred and beautiful liturgy says to the world that there are some things that are sacred, that this is different from everything else you experience. The core of divine liturgy is the proper worship of God as Dietrich von Hildebrand develops in his book Liturgy and Personality. But it also shapes and teaches us. Liturgy is non-linguistic catechesis. It teaches us about the sacred and deeper meaning in our lives - not verbally or explicitly, but implicitly —even if we are unaware or unable to articulate what is happening. Beautiful liturgy lifts us beyond the daily, and reminds us that we are not a commodity to be traded or a consumer to be pleased - a baptized Christian is “priest, prophet, and king”.

6. Sabbath Rest: Encourage Observance of the Lord’s day

This is a powerful force against consumerism. It sets one day apart with no work and no rushing, time set apart to be with the family and for contemplation, and should have no use of or at least minimal use of technology. The Sabbath and Sunday is a gift of time given to all for worship, spiritual reading, weekly family reconstitution, rest, and performing corporal and spiritual acts of mercy. There is a lot to say here; I address this issue further in my lecture on What is the Moral Imagination and in some other lectures I have given on “Sabbath to Lord’s Day” (which I will publish later.) I highly recommend Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s The Sabbath, John Paul II’s Dies Domini (The Lord’s Day) and Joseph Pieper’s Happiness and Contemplation and Only the Lover Sings to gain a deeper appreciation of why the sabbath matters.

But more important than reading is doing. Try to go for several Sundays with no work, no e-mail, no paying bills, no chores, little to no use of technology, building relationships with our family, and giving time for charitable works as a family or community including visiting the sick and home bound.

We are Created for More

Consumerism has economic causes and we need to think and address them, but the notion that the economy is the driving force of culture and consumerism is a false diagnosis of the problem. Consumerism is, at its heart, a philosophical and spiritual problem that no technical or economic policy can solve. It is ultimately about the deepest meaning of human life.

As Benedict XVI explains well:

Man needs transcendence. Immanence alone is too narrow for him. He is created for more. The denial of an afterlife led initially to a passionate glorification of life…The lust for life, the lust for all kinds of fulfillment, was intensified to the utmost.
But at once, an enormous devaluation of life came from this: life is no longer surrounded by the seal of the holy; one throws it away when it no longer pleases…Lust for life changes into disgust with life and into the emptiness of its fulfillments. Here, too, the abolition of man is the consequence.
Without the good news of faith, human existence does not survive in the long run. The joy of faith is its responsibility: we should seize it with new courage in this hour of our history.

An earlier version of this appeared at Religion and Liberty, September 2019

Photo Credit: Jacob Vizek on Unsplash

Pope Francis - Requiem Aeternam

Michael Matheson Miller — Wed, 07 May 2025 17:56:44 GMT

This is a short reflection on Pope Francis that I wrote with my colleague, John Pinheiro, and published after his death last month.

On behalf of our colleagues, families, and friends at the Acton Institute in the United States and Rome, we express our heartfelt sorrow and the pledge of our prayers for the eternal repose of the soul of Pope Francis, the 266th Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, who passed away today at the age of 88 during the 13th year of his papacy, which began March 13, 2013. We also pray now for the cardinal electors that they may discern wisely with the Holy Spirit when choosing a wise and holy successor of Peter during the ensuing conclave.

In February 2013, Benedict XVI stunned the world by announcing he would soon retire. This act had few precedents in the history of the Church. The last papal resignation occurred in 1415, not as a singular act of humility but as the solution to the Great Western Schism, during which three men claimed the Chair of Peter.

The 2013 conclave also had a surprise, reaching beyond Europe for the first time in many centuries, and, for the first time ever, to the Americas. The choice was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, who was unknown to most Catholics, despite having been a front-runner during the 2005 conclave that elected Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. In another first, Cardinal Bergoglio was a member of the Society of Jesus, more commonly known as the Jesuits.

It is, of course, too early to measure the legacy of Pope Francis. But we can identify three key areas of emphasis, each of which touches on the freedom and dignity of the human person: the special attention he paid to poverty, his critique of “ideological colonialism,” and his continuity with Benedict XVI in connecting the dignity of the human person to his natural environment.

Care for the Widow and the Orphan

One of the key contributions of Pope Francis’ pontificate was to rekindle among Catholics an awareness for the poor, the excluded, and the downtrodden.

St. James writes in his epistle that “pure religion” is to “care for the widow and the orphan in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” St. John Paul II challenged communist ideology and the sexual revolution, and called the Church to “be not afraid” and to be not “conformed to the world.” Benedict XVI in his defense of reason and human freedom and his critique of scientism and technocracy called us to renew our minds. Pope Francis stressed that pure religion must include care for the excluded and the downtrodden. He wanted to include the marginalized in the economy so they might flourish spiritually and materially.

In 2009, as archbishop of Buenos Aires, Francis said we

“cannot truly respond to the challenge of eradicating exclusion and poverty if the poor continue to be objects, targets of action by the state and other organizations in a paternalistic and aid-based sense, instead of subjects.”

Inclusion would mean that “the state and society create social conditions that promote and safeguard their rights and allow them to build their own destiny” as free persons created in the image and likeness of God.

As pontiff, Francis continued to speak clearly about the need for justice—giving people what is their due. He worried about the negative impacts of capitalism, going so far as to call it “the dung of the devil.” We at the Acton Institute have a much more positive view of market economies than did Pope Francis, but as our colleague Alejandro Chafuen, an Argentine and staunch supporter of free markets, has explained, Francis’ critiques of capitalism had some merit. His experience of capitalism was that seen in his native Argentina, where large international corporations received special privileges and favors from the government. He had seen the economic stagnation and poverty caused by this state-corporate alliance that excluded the poor, crowded out civil society, and led to an unequal distribution of wealth and economic freedom.

Here Pope Francis echoed Pope St. John Paul II in Centesimus Annus, who wrote

If by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

This “capitalism” dismisses private property rights, ignores the rule of law, commodifies everything, even the human person, and excludes people to keep them poor.

No doubt Francis was less enthusiastic about the potential of free, competitive markets than was St. John Paul II. This is unfortunate, because free, competitive market economies that are grounded in the rule of law, respect for private property, human creativity, and individual initiative create the conditions for inclusion that Francis desired. Nevertheless, Francis’ warnings about consumerism, economic injustice, and a “technocratic paradigm” that prioritizes material acquisition over other goods were necessary. As St. John Paul II said, the main failure of socialism was not economic or political but “anthropological in nature.” Its flawed understanding of the human person saw individuals as atoms in a collective: manipulatable, discardable, and unfree. These are the same challenges—the loss of what it means to be a human person—that threaten capitalism today.

We may have some frank critiques of how Pope Francis understood market economies, but those are in the area of prudence. Good Christians can disagree about the best way to organize an economy or alleviate material poverty. The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church are clear on this point. We can debate ways to accomplish our shared goal. But what Christians cannot debate is whether we are to care for the poor, because doing so is part of the evangelical mission of the Church.

Ideological Colonization

Pope Francis also spoke eloquently about the dangers of “ideological colonization.” In an address in the Philippines in January 2015, he said:

There are forms of ideological colonization which are out to destroy the family.… While all too many people live in dire poverty, others are caught up in materialism and lifestyles which are destructive of family life and the most basic demands of Christian morality. These are forms of ideological colonization. The family is also threatened by growing efforts on the part of some to redefine the very institution of marriage, by relativism, by the culture of the ephemeral, by a lack of openness to life.… Every threat to the family is a threat to society itself. The future of humanity, as Saint John Paul II often said, passes through the family (cf. Familiaris Consortio, 85). The future passes through the family. So protect your families!

And at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, Francis warned of

“ideological colonization by the imposition of anomalous models and lifestyles which are alien to people’s identity and, in the end, irresponsible.”

The human person needs freedom to exercise his initiative and creative capacities; freedom to worship God in spirit and in truth; freedom to care for his own family and to educate his own children. In other words, as Lord Acton famously said and as St. John Paul II was fond of repeating, freedom to do what one ought.

Care for Our Common Home

Even more famously perhaps, Pope Francis urged us to care for “our common home,” as he called the earth in Laudato Si’. The green movements want to make this Francis one of their own. Their chief mistake, however, is in thinking about the pope in political categories. Unlike the secular, often zero-growth green parties, but like his predecessors in the Chair of Peter (remember that Benedict XVI was also called the “Green Pope”), Pope Francis never treated human persons as scourges upon the earth. He called abortion “homicidal” and compared having an abortion to “hiring a hitman.”

As he wrote in Laudato Si’:

It is troubling that, when some ecological movements defend the integrity of the environment, rightly demanding that certain limits be imposed on scientific research, they sometimes fail to apply those same principles to human life. There is a tendency to justify transgressing all boundaries when experimentation is carried out on living human embryos.

This integrated human and environmental ecology continued the work of Benedict XVI, who linked concern about the environment to the dignity of the human person. In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict XVI wrote:

“If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology.”

Francis argued in Laudato Si’ that we need “an integrated approach to combatting poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”

The acceptance of our bodies as God’s gift is vital for welcoming and accepting the entire world as a gift from the Father and our common home, whereas in thinking that we enjoy absolute power over our own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation.

Man is neither scourge nor savior nor demon. He is a sinner who can do great harm or great good. Most important, he is created to be a blessing who completes creation and adds value through intellect and labor. In the words of Pope St. Paul VI, in Populorum Progressio, the creation story in Genesis “teaches us that the whole of creation is for man, that he has been charged to give it meaning by his intelligent activity, to complete and perfect it by his own efforts and to his own advantage.”

Pope Francis condemned what he called the “technocratic paradigm” in part because its vision of the human person leaves no room for the co-creator and intelligent actor described by St. Paul VI. This paradigm ignores human dignity as well as the reality of sin by treating all challenges as immanent, technical problems to be solved and persons as objects to be engineered and manipulated.

This same “dominant technocratic paradigm” insists we can transcend nature and even our own bodies. That is why Pope Francis singled out “gender ideology” as “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations … because it blurs differences and the value of men and women.”

Pope Francis could no doubt create confusion and “make a mess,” as he called it, but he spoke with the best of intentions if not necessarily with the mind of a systematic theologian or a philosopher. But he was a pastor who exhorted us as individuals and communities to integrate the gospel into how we treat the poor, each other, and our natural environment.

Eternal memory. May he rest in peace.

Originally appeared April 21, 2025 at Acton Institute Religion and Liberty

You can follow the writing of John Pinheiro at his Subtack

Photo Credit By Aleteia Image Department - Canonization 2014-The Canonization of Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48981290

A Christian Vision of Time?

Michael Matheson Miller — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 16:26:29 GMT

A profound influence on Western political, economic, and cultural development and the idea of progress is the concept of linear time. The idea that time is linear — that it has a beginning and is going somewhere may seem obvious, but the idea of time as linear is a unique aspect of the Bible and an understanding of the world created by God. Time begins with creation. The concept of linear time comes from the Hebrew Bible andJudaism, and was spread through Christianity to Europe and the Western world.

Even Nietzsche, who was no friend of Christianity, admitted this.

Most cultures throughout history viewed time as cyclical. Cyclical time was as common among the Chinese as it was among the Mesopotamians, Hindu civilization, and the Greeks. The Greeks also thought that the world was eternal and had always existed.

In contrast, Judaism and Christianity teach that the world is not eternal or cyclical. Time has a beginning. It is also moving toward an end. Not just a finality, but a purpose: the coming of the Messiah and the new heavens and earth. As St. Paul writes in the Letter to the Ephesians:

“…this was the plan in accord with the will of the eternal God, to be carried out when the times were fulfilled—to gather up all things, both in heaven and on earth, in Christ".

This idea has profound implications for the Western understanding of progress and development. The idea of linear time - and the resultant idea of progress - falls between pagan cyclical fatalism and the secular utopian promise of heaven on earth.

As Ismar Schorsch explains in his essay "Judaism and Linear History":

Judaism replaces nature with history as its basic category of religious experience. … The consequences of this shift from nature to history reinforce the idea of ethical monotheism. Judaism develops a linear concept of time as opposed to a cyclical one and sanctifies events rather than places. … Time becomes for Judaism the realm in which humanity and God join to complete together the work of creation.

From Progress to Utopianism

When we lose Christian theology, but retain linear time, we create the conditions for utopianism.

Contemporary, secular concept of progress is a distorted derivative of the Jewish-Christian understanding of time. Linear time encourages innovation and hope, but when detached from its religious context, it can become a utopian view of progress, either technological or political. This can tend toward something like the optimistic English Whig theory of history where the world is on an inevitable trajectory toward liberty and material progress, or to darker authoritarian and materialist schemes as the 20th century demonstrated.

Twentieth-century utopianism was an example of what the late political philosopher Eric Voegelin called the "Immanentization of the Eschaton" - that is it makes immanent or brings inside of history the resolution to the problems of this world promised by the coming of the Messiah at the end of time. It builds upon the the Christian idea of the second coming of Christ, but secularizes the idea of paradise as something to be attained by politics or technology. It replaces the New Jerusalem coming from heaven that only God can bring about with the idea that man can create heaven on earth through technical means. Examples of this include:

The Nazi thousand-year Reich
Communist idea of perfect equality and the withering away of the state
Contemporary transhumanism which envisions a technical solution to the problem of death by combing biology with technology. These ideas animate much of Silicon Valley and are popularized in the works of people like Yuval Harari.
We also see it in more moderate scientistic ideologies that think there is a technical solution to all of our problems.

Can Science Redeem Us?

Benedict XVI explains in the encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved in Hope), the origins of this modern idea and the shift to a technical messianism are found in the work of the English philosopher, Francis Bacon, and the idea that nature can be conquered and dominated through the tools of science. He writes that with Bacon's idea of the "triumph of art over nature" a major shift took place. He writes:

…up to that time, the recovery of what man had lost through the expulsion from Paradise was expected from faith in Jesus Christ: herein lay "redemption."
Now, this "redemption", the restoration of the lost "Paradise" is no longer expected from faith, but from the newly discovered link between science and praxis. It is not that faith is simply denied; rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world.
This programmatic vision has determined the trajectory of modern times and it also shapes the present-day crisis of faith which is essentially a crisis of Christian hope.
Thus hope too, in Bacon, acquires a new form. Now it is called: faith in progress. For Bacon, it is clear that the recent spate of discoveries and inventions is just the beginning; through the interplay of science and praxis, totally new discoveries will follow, a totally new world will emerge, the kingdom of man[16]. He even put forward a vision of foreseeable inventions—including the aeroplane and the submarine. As the ideology of progress developed further, joy at visible advances in human potential remained a continuing confirmation of faith in progress as such.

But this leads to a number of problems. What is progress for? Why is progress better than no progress? As Benedict XVI notes in Spe Salvi, while progress is good, it is not an end in itself. C.S. Lewis argued in Mere Christianity, progress is not going forward if you are going in the wrong direction. Unless it is connected to morality, progress can become a threat to man. Benedict XVI writes:

Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope. Given the developments of the modern age, the quotation from Saint Paul with which I began [Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, excluded from the community of Israel, and foreigners to the covenants of promise. You were in the world without hope and without God (Ephesians2:12)]— proves to be thoroughly realistic and plainly true.
There is no doubt, therefore, that a "Kingdom of God" accomplished without God—a kingdom therefore of man alone—inevitably ends up as the "perverse end" of all things as described by Kant: we have seen it, and we see it over and over again.

We can not put our faith in progress or technology or the state. Only God can bring about perfect justice, and any attempt to create the perfect society always results in disappointment or enslavement and death.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his essay "Jewish Time," echoes this point: the Jewish and Christian sense of time is not simply linear, it is "covenantal."

"Tragedy gives rise to pessimism. Cyclical time leads to acceptance. Linear time begets optimism. Covenantal time gives birth to hope. These are not just different emotions. They are radically different ways of relating to life and the universe."

This concept of a universe with a purpose and meaning found in the Bible shaped the Western idea of progress and impacted science, technology, innovation, and economic development.

Covenantal, linear time gives us the sense of agency that we are not simply ruled by fate, but that in partnership with God. We have agency and something to do. We are called to complete creation, to build, innovate, solve problems, overcome injustice, “redeem the time, and create a civilization of love. We cannot create heaven on earth, but neither are we bound to fate without agency. We cannot understand this message of hope—nor its distorted utopian derivatives that brings destruction—without understanding the idea of linear time and its foundation in the Jewish and Christian vision of the world.

This is a selection on the Jewish and Christian sources of justice from my forthcoming book, Excluded: How the Poverty Industry Excludes the Poor from Justice and Prosperity Forthcoming from Herder/Crossroad Press

Photo Credit: The Triumph of Eternity on Death, from The Triumph of Petrarch, Georg Pencz, Public Domain, MetMuseum.org

Episode 60: Augustine Wetta, O.S.B. St. Benedict's 12-Step Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 17:41:23 GMT

In this episode of the Moral Imagination Podcast I speak with Fr. J. Augustine Wetta about his book Humility Rules: Saint Benedict's Twelve-Step Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem.

The world teaches us to assert ourselves, to follow our passions, to speak up, talk back, “get yours,” don’t let anyone stand in your way. But it doesn’t really work. As Tyler Durden proclaims in Fight Club: “We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact.”

In contrast to the world’s and Fight Club’s response (which we won’t talk about), Fr. Augustine looks at the Rule of St. Benedict and his ladder of humility as a guide for real happiness and true self-esteem, which comes not from self-assertion, but from self-denial, selflessness, serving others, and not being a slave to one’s own will and desires.

We discuss Fr. Augustine journey from a lifeguard, surfer, and rugby player to a Benedictine monk, and some of his stories teaching high school students, and throwing himself into a rosebush.

In his Rule for monks, St. Benedict explains that any progress toward holiness, happiness, and relationship with God and others must be grounded in humility. He describes humility as a ladder – with one side as the soul and the other as the body.

…if we want to reach the highest summit of humility, if we desire to attain speedily that exaltation in heaven to which we climb by the humility of this present life, then by our ascending actions we must set up that ladder on which Jacob in a dream saw angels descending and ascending (Gen 28:12). Without doubt, this descent and ascent can signify only that we descend by exaltation and ascend by humility.
Now the ladder erected is our life on earth, and if we humble our hearts the Lord will raise it to heaven. We may call our body and soul the sides of this ladder, into which our divine vocation has fitted the various steps of humility and discipline as we ascend. (St. John’s Abbey)

Fr. Augustine goes through each of the steps on the ladder of humility

Fear of God
Self-Denial
Obedience
Perseverance
Repentance
Serenity
Self-Abasement
Prudence
Silence
Dignity
Discration
Reverence

The book is excellent. It is morally and spiritually serious and entertaining. I laughed out loud several times.

Fr. Augustine offers apparently outlandish advice to to people struggling with anxiety, worry, and broken relationships

Don’t speak up
Be someone’s doormat
Don’t follow your dreams
Put your worst foot forward

And gives “homework” to practice each of the steps including:

Make no excuses next time you are reprimanded
Clean a toilet
Say thank you next time someone tells you something you already know
The next time you see something not done your way - leave it be if it works

In addition to Humility Rules we discuss a number of topics including:

· His book on decision making called , Pray, Think, Act: Make Better Decisions with the Desert Father

· Joy cannot be grasped, but is the fruit of love and self-denial.

· St. John Cassian and his writings on the eight vices – including the vice of self-esteem, and why focusing on ourselves prevents us from building good relationships and finding happiness.

· Challenges of modern life, particularly the impact of digital distractions on mental health and spiritual well-being

· The difference between contemporary meditation practices with traditional Catholic contemplative prayer.

· The importance of cultivating an attitude of reverence and gratitude

· The role of obedience in spiritual growth – and why it’s probably not a good idea to throw oneself into a rosebush.

· How chastity requires us to see others as persons and subjects, not objects for use

· St. Benedict’s rule on Silence, how silence increases mental clarity and attention to others, and the magnificent quote from Dom Paul Delatte OSB Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict

“The fundamental purpose of silence is to free the soul, to give it strength and leisure to adhere to God.
It delivers us from the low tendencies of our nature and of fixing us in the good.“

Biography

Augustine Wetta is a monk of Saint Louis Abbey in Saint Louis Missouri. He has two degrees in Theology from Oxford University, a BA in Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations from Rice University, and an MA in English from Middlebury College. For twenty years, he has taught English, Classics, and Theology at the Priory School, in Saint Louis, Missouri, where he also coached rugby and served as Director of Chaplaincy. In 2019, he was named a Portsmouth Institute Senior Fellow. He writes for Our Sunday Visitor, and hosts a blog entitled "Disagreement" with Islamic social activist Umar Lee, and frequently appears on EWTN and Saint Joseph Radio.

In 2014, he was awarded the Judson Jerome Poetry Award and the Bill Baker Award for Fiction at the Antioch Writers Workshop (the first author in the history of the conference to win both). In 2015, he was awarded the Taliaferro Award for Memoir Writers at the San Francisco Writers Conference, where he was also a finalist for the Emerging Writer Award.

He is the author of several books:

Pray, Think, Act a book on decision-making based on the sayings of the Desert Fathers
The Eighth Arrow, a fantasy prison-break set in Dante’s Inferno
Saving Grace, an illustrated children’s book about a three-legged turtle.
Humility Rules: A 12 Step Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem which has sold over 100,000 copies and has been translated into five languages

The son of an artist (Jean Carruthers Wetta) and a historian (Frank Wetta), Father Augustine was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1971, but grew up in Galveston, Texas. There he learned to surf and developed an enormous ego as a lifeguard on the Galveston Sheriff Department Beach Patrol. During this time, he also worked as a professional juggler (“The Flying Fettuccinne Brothers”) and as an archaeologist (at the Agora in Athens). He remains an avid surfer. In fact, if you Google “surfing monk” his is the first name that comes up—along with a news report about how he was nearly eaten by a shark.

Themes/Chapters of the Interview

00:00 Introduction to Father Augustin Weta
03:07 Exploring Humility and Self-Esteem
05:55 St. Benedict’s Ladder of Humility
09:13 Fr. Wetta’s Journey to Monastic Life
12:03 The Role of Self-Denial
14:52 The Importance of Silence
18:11 Art, Beauty, and Truth
21:04 Fear of God and Genuine Self-Esteem
30:06 The Struggle with Digital Distractions
34:12 The Importance of Silence in Modern Life
37:29 Meditation vs. Contemplation: A Spiritual Perspective
41:39 Understanding Lust and Chastity
49:00 The Role of Reverence in Spiritual Life

Resources

J Augustine Wetta: Humility Rules: St. Benedict’s 12-Step Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem

J Augustine Wetta: Pray, Think, Act: Make Better Decisions with the Desert Fathers

Philokalia Volume 1 - This is an amazing collection and it includes St. John Cassian on the Eight Vices

Other Books related to the rule of St. Benedict

Dom Paul Delatte, OSB —his Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict is long and detailed but incredibly impressive and deep. Honestly it is probably not worth it unless you Here is the quote on silence from Dom Delatte that I refer to in the episode and I use a lot - especially in thinking about cultivating silence, but also in our age of over-information.

I also recommend a visit to a Benedictine Abbey if you can. I have not visited St. Louis Abbey, but I have visited Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma several times. You can learn more about them here and get CDs of their chanting if you are interested.

Photo Credit: Courtesy Augustine Wetta OSB

Obstacles for the Poor

Michael Matheson Miller — Fri, 21 Mar 2025 12:31:01 GMT

I am working on a new documentary on social and material poverty in the United States, and have been traveling, interviewing, and talking to a lot of people - plus doing some speaking on the problem of social engineering the poor - so it has been a while since I’ve posted anything.

We are covering a lot of topics in the film including some of the challenges and obstacles that poor people face. Here are a few of the things we have been researching and working on. I’ll have more detailed updates in the coming weeks and months.

The Big Picture - Social Engineering the Poor

The dominant way we have tried to address poverty in the United States and around the world over the last century has been a top-down, technocratic approach that tries to scientifically manage people and societies. There are a number of sources of this including the success of industrialism, and the optimism of what could be done with social engineering and large-scale industrial plans. This combined with the military victory in World War II led to the idea that we’ve won the war — let’s use social engineering to “win the peace” and fight poverty. These ideas were the inspiration of foreign aid and large-scale projects in the developing world, and urban renewal, welfare states, the Great Society, and the War on Poverty in the US.

Despite great hopes and good intentions, this technocratic approach has not only failed to deliver its promises, it has weakened the natural communities where people flourish. It has led to a decrease in social capital, and it weakened families and communities. State and private charity projects often create dependent relationships that create financial, social, and psychological obstacles to get out of poverty

Family Formation

Urban renewal and state welfare programs have especially had negative impact on lower income families by creating incentives not to make and save more money, and not to get married. Out of wedlock births have increased to the point where 4 out of 10 babies in the United States are not born into intact families.

There are many reasons for the breakdown of marriage that go beyond the welfare state: the sexual revolution, feminism, no fault divorce, party culture, film, television, luxury beliefs and more have played a role in declining marriages. But whatever the causes, the decline of marriage and family has had a negative impact on fatherhood participation in children’s lives - and this has especially harmed the poor. Fathers have been discounted as dispensable. Men have also failed to live up to our responsibilities. It is important to note that there are men who are not married, but involved in their children’s lives - and some married men who neglect their children. But there is no doubt that fatherhood participation is one the most important factors in preventing poverty and creating the condition for children to flourish. This data below from the National Fatherhood Initiative demonstrates the power of a father in a child’s life.

Reducing Recidivism + Obstacles to Work

One of the key problems related to fatherhood participation is incarceration and recidivism (where people end up going back to prison). Over 80% of men in prison had either no relationship or a bad relationship with their father - and 70% of men in prison are fathers. When I was in Atlanta I interviewed Pastor Lee Robbins who is working with formerly incarcerated people to readjust to society and rebuild their lives. I also interviewed Tony Kitchens, who was incarcerated at the age of 16 and now works for the Georgia Department of Corrections and serves on the board of the Georgia Center for Opportunity. Tony is also working on the problem of re-integration. He explained that one of the biggest challenges for formerly incarcerated men and women is what he called a “mental prison”. He said that when he got out of prison in 1985

“the toughest challenge for me was not doing the 11 years that I did in prison. The toughest challenge for me for breaking free from the mental prison I had created myself. And so for me, that's why I focus a lot on reintegration…most of reentry focus[es] a lot on what I call transitional services, which is food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and employment. While those things are important, those things not necessarily help you to move from survival to a state of thrive. And reintegration has to do much more with a mindset to help you move to a space of thriving rather than just survive.”

Another major obstacle faced by formerly incarcerated men and women is the difficulty in getting jobs with a felony record. Most job applications ask if you have ever been convicted of a felony - and if the answer is“yes” - it becomes a major hindrance to finding jobs. One man told me the only place that would hire him was the Golden Corral. He didn’t want to work there his whole life so he ended up starting his own business. In some cases it is impossible to get a job, because the license to work in a specific industry cannot be obtained if one has has a previous felony conviction. For example, Tony Kitchens had originally wanted to become a counselor to help others, but knew he’d be unable to get a license to practice. Institute for Justice is working on a case in California to help formerly incarcerated men who worked as firefighters while in prison, but are unable to become firefighters when they get out, because former felons are prohibited from getting their EMT licenses, which is required to become a firefighter.

“Benefits Cliffs” - It Doesn’t Pay to Strive

Another challenge for low income people if they are receiving welfare benefits is the problem of what is called “Benefits Cliffs.” I had the chance to interviewed Eric Cochling, also of the Georgia Center for Opportunity who has been working on this for years. For people receiving government assistance, just a small increase in income can cause a person trying to get out of poverty to lose a huge portion of their welfare benefits. These “benefits cliffs” create an incentive not to work more hours, not to get a raise and not to get married They keep people trapped in a cycle of dependency on the state. I spoke to a woman in Missouri who is helping mothers and children escape homelessness. She explained to me that when she was working at a gas station and receiving government benefits, when she got a raise and was promoted to manager her rent almost tripled and she was going to lose so many othe benefits that it made no sense for her to take the promotion and work harder. She said: “Either I can go back to barely making any money and know that I have food for my kids and a secure place to live, or I could take the better paying job and not be able to feed my kids or have a place for them to live because I couldn't afford to do it.” The current welfare policies create the incentive to stay in poverty and punishes those who strive.

The Erosion of Meaning and Identity

I later went to DC/Virginia where I met up Chris Arnade, author of the excellent book, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America and author of the Substack: Chris Arnade Walks the World

We talked about key themes from his work on poverty: how the left can often fail to recognize enough agency in poor people, and the right can ignore some of the obstacles the poor must overcome, and take for granted tools that help people succeed. We talked about how poverty is not simply an economic problem, but a cultural and moral problem, and how the state doesn’t have the tools to solve this. This echoes much of what I have learned in speaking with people who were formerly homeless and help homeless people get back on their feet.

We also talked about the de-valuation of what Chris calls “non-credentialed forms of meaning.” In his book Dignity, Chris used a classroom analogy to divide American society into what he called “Front Row” and “Back Row.” His argument is that that the “biggest division in the U.S. is not race, it's not class, it's education.” And the front row is “extraordinarily highly educated, very geographically mobile, very transactional, very career-oriented, very secular.” He said:

“The ‘front row’ has found its meaning or finds its meaning through careerism and through book learning. The ‘back row’, traditionally, the traditional forms of meaning and community are what I call non-credential forms of meaning - places that you don't need a resume to enter - so the ones gifted to you at birth. So it's family, place, race, ethnic identity, nation, and religion.
These are things that accept you based on simply who you are and your birth order. And they're the naturally occurring ones all throughout the world, all throughout history. These are the communities that societies have bound around for millennia, since we've been civilized. And those are the ones that traditionally provide both regulatory frameworks for people but also moral order.
And I believe that the front row, for the last however many years…has been slowly eroding those forms of meaning, those forms of identity, and replacing them by, again, “you create your own identity.” So it used to be … someone could identify themself by faith, place, race, nation, family, kin. There was kind of a knowable number of variables. That's who I am, that's how I make order of myself. And that's been replaced by whatever. You define your own.

This erosion of meaning has left people untethered, and led to a crisis of meaning which also plays a role in drug use, despair, and increasing poverty.

The “front row” problem can be seen beyond poverty. I think there is an overlap of the “front row” with what Augusto Del Noce calls “pure bourgeois” and how the Hippie became the Yuppie. Yuppie culture - including the ideas: happiness can be acquired or purchases, everything is an object of trade, rejection of tradition, denial of transcendence, “follow your passion,” radical autonomy, and plastic anthropology - have all led to a lack of meaning and alienation among rich and poor. As describes, feminism is also a very “front row” idea that has particularly harmed poor and working class women.

Chris’ book is well worth reading. He writes about his journey from doing a PhD in physics to working on Wall Street where he began to take long walks, which led him into Hunts Point in the Bronx and to building relationships with people living in one of the poorest places in the United States. He writes how he went into Hunts Point an atheist and a vegetarian, and left going to church and eating McDonalds.

I first interviewed Chris in 2019 on my podcast, The Moral Imagination — you can listen to it here.

So far we have done over 100 interviews and have filmed in a number of places including Detroit, Grand Rapids, Jackson, Mississippi, Patterson New Jersey, Hazard Kentucky, Portsmouth, Ohio, Colorado Springs, Atlanta, California, and more. I’ll be writing more about some of the people and places, and the many incredible and inspiring people I have met. We are still in production and editing and the film will be done later this year and be released in 2026 and 2027.

Poverty, Inc and Foreign Aid

Finally, this is the 10th Anniversary of a film I directed on poverty in the developing world: Poverty, Inc. It is a critique of global humanitarianism and the foreign aid model that is as relevant today as it was ten years ago. We will be doing screenings in various cities, and our team has been re-activating our social media, which has posted short clips on Instagram critiquing foreign aid a couple of weeks ago that has 2 million views. I will be writing more about foreign aid, charity, and development in the coming weeks as well.

If you are interested in learning more about our film, you can follow us on Instagram at povertyincmovie

Photo Credits: Wingman Visuals

Work, Creativity, Economics, and the Social Nature of the Person

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 13:46:40 GMT

At the center of the economy is the human person. If we are going to get economics right we need to begin with a proper and robust vision of the human person. If we reduce the person to homo-economicus, a rational maximizer, or in some materialist vision to a consumer, producer, or commodity to be traded we will have a distorted vision and work, commerce, and economics. Economics has a technical aspect, but it must first be a human discipline before it can be a technical one.

One of the essential characteristics of the human person that is essential for economics is that we are social beings with a social nature.

While each of us is a subject and a unique and unrepeatable person, we achieve human flourishing and moral perfection in relationship with others. We cannot do this alone. We are neither radical individuals, nor are we indistinct parts of a collective.

We are individual substances, yet we are also in relationship with and dependent upon others right from the beginning or our existence. We are born into a family and into a society, and a culture. But we don’t exist solely for the family or the society. As the late Jesuit philosopher, Norris Clarke describes in his book Person and Being, we are more properly understood as “substance-in-relationship”

This is complex and requires thoughtful reflection. Because we like things simple, we tend to stress one side or the other.

At the social extreme we see the person as merely part of a collective who exists for the good of society or the state. We can see this in ancient civilizations and in modern totalitarianism.
The individualist extreme is to see ourselves as radically autonomous individuals with no nature who can invent and create ourselves according to our desires. This is a common mistake today that has been called “expressive individualism.” Follow your passion, do what you want, “get yours,” let nothing stand in your way!

Neither of these does justice to the subjective and social dimensions of the person. While the idea of radical autonomy appears to affirm individuality, the rejection of any nature or purpose creates the conditions for social engineering and ultimately totalitarianism. If the person has no nature, then whose to say that the social engineers can’t try to manipulate it as C.S. Lewis explains well in the Abolition of Man.

But the Jewish and Christian tradition gives us a more nuanced understanding of the person, and one that reflects our lived experience. We are both unique subjects and we have a social nature.

We see this social nature in Genesis when after Adam names all the animals and yet is unsatisfied. God says “it is not good for man to be alone.” He then puts Adam in to a deep sleep and from his rib creates Eve. When Adam sees Eve he says “at last” and “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

Man is meant to be in deep relationship with God and others. Each person is subject and flourishes in intersubjective relationships. The individual and social nature of the person has profound consequences for how we understand the deepest human relationships and experiences from love, joy, mercy, and forgiveness to marriage, family, and all the way up to the largest political and economic questions.

Economics and the Social Nature of the Person

So how does the social nature of the person relate to the study of economics? Nineteenth-century developed the idea of the person as an autonomous individual, homo-economicus. While this can help in helping to understanding the role of incentives, utility-maximization and human action, it has its limits, as many economists will readily affirm.

Behavioral economics has shown some of the weaknesses of this method. Yet behavioral economics has its weaknesses as well. It does not have a robust enough concept of reason. While behavioral economics can correct some of the excesses of the focus on homo-economicus, they too have relied on a constricted vision of the person and our rationality.

A better starting point is the person as substance-in-relationship—an embodied person, an individual subject with a social nature. This helps us understand the relationship of man to the nature and to other people. It also highlights the social nature of markets and economic exchange. We can often think of markets as an inanimate force. This is understandable in a global economy. And even more so since we are plagued by a corporate-state alliance where the economy is often rigged in favor of the rich and well connected.

Yet, markets are not simply inanimate forces. They are networks of human relationships where people get together to trade and buy and sell to meet human needs and wants.

This short video I directed on Work, Creativity, and Exchange that was part of the Acton Institute The Good Society series discusses work, creativity, and exchange and how markets are a reflection of our social nature. Man is an embodied person endowed with reason and freedom, and called to work. We cooperate with nature and transform it whether it is cultivation of fruit, making wine, or intellectual work.

The video examines how men and women cooperate and interact with others to help satisfy their needs and the needs of others. We cannot survive on our own and division of labor, trade, and markets are the primary way that we cooperate with one another to build civilization

Economics is complex and there are no simple answers to the problems that face us. There is no perfect technical solution to the problems of scarcity, human desire, poverty, and wealth. But a beginning is to think about economics within the context of our individual agency and our social nature called to complete creation.

An earlier version of this appeared at the Acton Institute’s Transatlantic blog.

Photo Credit Jay Fitzgerald / Acton Institute

10 Habits of Mind to Avoid Ideological Thinking

Michael Matheson Miller — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 13:25:46 GMT

In an earlier essay - Clear Thinking in an Age of Ideology, I wrote about the challenge of ideology and it’s sources.

Here are some habits of mind we can develop to avoid the trap of ideology.

Don’t look for a “Theory of Everything.”

The world is complex. No theory is going to exhaust all of reality. If Aristotle, Plato, and Aquinas couldn’t do it, neither can we.

As a professor of mine once said—reality comes from God‘s mind, and philosophical language comes from ours, so there is no way that one system will explain or exhaust all reality. This doesn’t mean there is no truth or good theories that help explain the world. There are great thinkers, ideas, and principles that can be a guide to life and to understanding the world. But there is no theory of everything. Search for wisdom and leave the theory of understanding reality to God.

In summary: Philosophy > Ideology Wisdom > Theory.

Cultivate intellectual humility.

Be humble in the face of complexity. Be willing to listen and learn. Even when we think we understand something, there is more to learn and refine. Cultivate wonder, reverence for being, and the virtue of teachability. This disposition also increases happiness.

We can know the truth, but that doesn’t mean we always do.

Truth, says St. Thomas Aquinas, is conforming the mind to reality. It is not the conforming of reality to our minds. Experiencing correction is difficult and humbling. We should not grudgingly accept correction but actually cultivate an attitude of rejoicing when we learn we have made an error. Correction can feel bad in the moment, but it means we are growing. A strong commitment to the truth should keep us humble.

Relativism is a gateway to ideology.

This step might sound counterintuitive. We might associate relativism with open-mindedness and even with the opposite of absolutism. However, as I explained, relativism closes the door to philosophy. “Our minds and our ideas become the arbiter of truth and reality. If there is no truth, ideology is all that is left…”

5.“Everything You Thought is Wrong!” Be wary of contrarian counter-narratives.

There are no doubt serious problems with many standard, establishment narratives, and it is important to rethink our assumptions, especially the most foundational ones. That was a key theme of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address where he challenges the dominant vision of scientism and empiricist rationality as false. (This is the position that rationality is limited to what is empirically verifiable. It is incoherent and leads to scientism.)

And speaking of scientism - there’s justified suspicion of standard narratives that come from the state-corporate-media alliance. The deceit and suppression of credible scientists like during Covid is a prime example. So it’s good to be skeptical of dominant narratives.

And yet - it’s important to be careful. Because we are inundated with propaganda and false narratives, new, contrarian, revelatory takes can be very compelling.

Sometimes the contrarian narratives are right - A lot of the standard nutrition is wrong. The Standard American Diet promoted by the government really does make you fat.

But sometimes they are wrong-Churchill was NOT the real villain of World War II no matter what Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson may want you to believe. Hitler was a killer who destroyed the lives of millions of people and families.

Both blind adherence to the standard narratives AND getting sucked into counter-narratives can be an error. We can easily get boondoggled. Don’t just assume a story is right because it’s making all the right people mad. Don’t buy into the idea that the enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend or right about this theory.

Don’t be a Reactionary – Don’t reject something simply because your opponent supports it.

Related to the above - sometimes we can end up taking a position just because our opponent holds the opposite. Now, this is not necessarily a bad heuristic. I am often skeptical of many ideas and theories simply because people who tend to be wrong on almost everything else hold to it. And my suspicions often prove correct!

This approach can be helpful, but it can also make us reactionary. An example I have been using for years now is how we think about organic food and metabolic health. Twenty years ago it was a left-wing position for hippies, so conservatives didn’t like it. Now with a growing concern among conservatives about processed food metabolic disorder the left is labeling it a right-wing issue. But organic food and health don’t have to be right or left. In fact, the debate is much more about technocracy and crony capitalism.

Make Distinctions

We must be careful not to overlap or conflate two or three different things. Making distinctions is a hallmark of clear thinking, but it isn’t easy, so we have to work at it. Many arguments proceed in a confusing, chaotic, and ultimately unproductive manner because people fail to clarify the terms of the debate.

For instance, I am generally opposed to foreign aid for poor countries, and I believe that one of the key things we can do in the United States to fight poverty is encourage marriage and discourage single motherhood. Before someone accuses me wanting poor people to starve or being heartless, judgmental, or disrespecting women, let’s make some distinctions.

Foreign aid can be necessary in response to natural disasters and war, but emergency relief should not be the model for addressing chronic poverty in foreign countries because it politicizes development, funds corruption and cronyism, and delays of business.
Fatherhood participation is a key factor in children’s success and mental health. We should stop policies penalizing marriage, and we should discourage single motherhood. At the same time I also believe we should encourage single mothers who need help and are working hard and making sacrifices for their children.

You may still disagree with these statements. But hopefully these further distinctions would allow us to have a civilized conversation rather than a shouting match. Making distinctions is difficult, but it is essential for clear thinking and intellectual honesty. We like to be passionate; we like to be “hardcore,” not “squishy.” But that can easily become an excuse to excite our passions and dull our intellects.

Making careful distinctions about what something actually means not only help us think more clearly it will improve our relationships and help us avoid unnecessary conflict.

Avoid the “technocratic mindset.”

This is the idea that there is a technical solution to every problem. This is a classic pathway to ideology. There is no solution to the problem of evil, sin, suffering, tragedy, poverty, or man himself. Evil does not come from the system, but as Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains, “the line between good and evil runs through the human heart.”

Just think about how complex it is to run a business - small or large - or even all the decisions, knowledge, and information required to manage a project or organize your household. We can’t even get a cup of coffee without relying on the skill, talents, knowledge, and intellectual insights of others. Seemingly simple things require a lot more work and skill than we may realize.

There is no way we can solve the problem of man, end poverty forever, make everyone healthy, or come up with the perfect political solution for society. If we start to think: if only we could do x, y, or z, then everything would be fine, it is a sign to pull back, and re-examine.

Don’t politicize religion

Christianity is not a political program. Benedict XVI warned us that when religion becomes politicized, the result is often unbelief. Politicizing religion also undermines evangelization.

Religion is the driving force of culture, and religion (or lack thereof) impacts politics whether we think it or not. But we need to be careful not to conflate them. Secularists have the temptation to divinize the state - Christians the temptation to politicize religion. Both are errors, and both end up creating ideologies.

Read Widely

It is important to read people with different visions - and not just about politics. Read history, literature, and poetry. As C.S. Lewis recommends, reading old books is especially important.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.”

I saw that is running a program of reading through the humanities that would be a good way to engage old books, poetry, and music.

Ultimately, Ideology is a False Promise that Never Delivers.

We all struggle with ideological tendencies - and it is understandable. We need solid ground to make sense of the world, but there is a difference between philosophy and ideology. Ideology fails to explain the world; it only delivers disappointment and creates havoc on the way.

So once we start thinking we’ve finally figured everything out - that we finally understand the world in all its complexity - that’s a good sign we are probably on the wrong track.

Photo Credit: Photo by Soviet Artefacts on Unsplash

Yes, They Know it's Christmas

Michael Matheson Miller — Tue, 24 Dec 2024 19:14:47 GMT

This year British radio and the BBC are celebrating the 40th anniversary of Bob Geldof and Band Aid’s Christmas Song to raise money for the Ethiopian famine. The anniversary has created some stir among the British pop celebrity class. British-Ghanian rapper Fuse ODG and others have critiqued the song as demeaning and ultimately harmful for Africa.

And there won't be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they'll get this year is life
Where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it's Christmas time at all?

Others defended the song and accused the Ghanian rapper for being ungrateful. How could you possible critique a celebrity for such goodwill?

The Critique is not about the Goodwill

Good will is important. I believe that Bob Geldof, who wrote the song and organized Band Aid, did it with the intention to help others. For a rock star celebrity he sure could do a lot worse. But the defense of Geldof and “Do They Know it’s Christmas” is missing the point of the critique. As explains in our film, Poverty, Inc.

The Christmas song raised awareness and it was in response to a particular crisis, I understand that. But it also perpetuates a false image of Africa as barren and a sentimental image of Africans as helpless and dependent.

The problem with songs like “Do They Know it’s Christmas” and “We are the World” is not only that the create a reductionist vision of Africa, but they fuel public support and sympathy for the poverty industry, and the idea that if we could just transfer large amounts of aid and charity to Africa, we can end poverty. So when someone like Magatte critiques foreign aid, the immediate assumption is that they are selfish, uncaring. The sentiment overwhelms the possibility of rational discussion.

Benedict XVI summarizes the problem:

Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word 'love' is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.

These songs evoke strong feelings, and while they can rouse people to action and think outside themselves, they also can amplify the tendency of seeing poor people as objects of our charity, compassion and pity, instead of seeing people as subjects, and the protagonists of their own story of development.

The music and images provide an emotional backdrop to humanitarianism. Humanitarianism stops at providing comfort, but fails to address the problems of chronic poverty and exclusion from the institutions of justice like clear title to land and ability to participate in the formal economy. In fact, foreign aid and the poverty industry often creates incentives for local government not to build these institutions of justice.

They also create resentment. It was revealing that people were actually mad at an African rapper for pointing out the silliness and condescending nature of the song. Celebrities regularly scold people about bigotry and tolerance, but when it comes to their short-sightedness, they become defensive….”Can’t you see we are just trying to help?”

Yes, but sometimes “help” hurts and sometimes it causes injustice. As we explain in Poverty, Inc, the dominant model of humanitarianism undergirded by foreign aid has “delayed the development of business in Africa, and kept Africa behind.”

Aid often subsidizes dictators and unjust regimes. If a leader is receiving aid from foreign countries, they don’t need to worry about creating a commercial society with a strong tax base to build roads and other infrastructure projects.

Aid politicizes development and encourages crony capitalism. When millions and millions of dollars are coming into a poor country (since 1962 the west has sent (not including military aid) over 5 trillion dollars to developing countries) everything begins to revolve around it, and economic development and business becomes connected with political connections.

Aid and charity delays the development of business in Africa. This was a point we made in Poverty, Inc and something that FUSE ODG emphasized. If we think of Africans as poor helpless people who need our help, then we don’t think about them as potential business partners.

But as the late Ghanian entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse said in Poverty, Inc,

I have never heard of a country that developed on aid, if you know of one let just me know. I know of countries that developed on trade, and innovation, and business.

Africa has an Ancient Christian Culture

Finally, beyond portraying Africa as a land without rivers, there is also the irony of Western, secularized pop stars asking whether Africans know it’s Christmas.

Not only is Christianity a force throughout Africa.
Not only is the Catholic Church flourishing and African priests and bishops doing essential work to uphold ancient Christian teaching, often against Western capitulation.
Not only are African priests all over the west filling in for the lack of vocations in Europe and America.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the song was about Ethiopia - an ancient Christian church that celebrated Christmas centuries before Christianity came England.

It is good to want to help. And when an emergency comes using pop music to raise awareness and money is not bad, but charity requires that we think beyond the immediate emotion and make sure that our help is not creating harm.

Forty years ago, before globalization, young celebrities getting together promoting stereotypes about Africa is understandable. They didn’t know much. But they are older now, and as Magatte Wade notes, “by now, Bono should know better”

Re-Thinking Charity & Restoring Dignity

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 14:45:00 GMT

This is the forward I wrote for Ismael Hernandez new book Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief. The book is published by the Acton Institute — you can order a copy here and read amore about Ismael’s work and training at the Freedom & Virtue Review edited by

Forward to Re-Thinking Charity

In our desire to help those in need, we can often turn poor people into objects of charity, pity, or compassion instead of seeing people as the protagonists of their own development and flourishing. Ismael Hernandez has been a consistent voice and reminder that we must never lose sight of the agency, potential, and creative capacity of each person no matter their circumstances. His life and work are examples of true charity and solidarity – that is, seeking the good of the other and helping to create the conditions for human and social flourishing. Over the last decades a shift has taken place from charity to humanitarianism. It is a subtle shift, but the impact is profound.

As distinct from charity, which takes into account long-term flourishing, humanitarianism focuses primarily on providing material comfort. As Hernandez explains, this has led to cultures of dependency on state relief that robs people and communities of their self-reliance.

A backdrop to Hernandez’s book is a long debate over two competing visions of how to address poverty in the United States. One is associational, community-led, and decentralized, rooted in mutual aid and enterprise. The other sees large-scale, government-led social programs as the necessary means to solve such a pressing problem.

The dominant model of poverty alleviation over the last century has been this large-scale, expert led, government-centered approach. In a sense, this was understandable. Inspired by the achievements of the physical sciences, the industrial revolution, and management ideas of people like Fredrick Taylor, and especially the impressive technical and social engineering accomplishments that led to military victory in World War II, the idea was: we’ve won the war, now let’s apply all that energy, money, and technical expertise to end poverty. This vision came to full fruition in the 1960s with the Great Society, the War on Poverty, urban renewal, massive housing projects, and a multiplicity of government welfare programs to assist those in need.

Despite great optimism, this scientific approach to the management of people—specifically poor people—led to the breakdown of natural communities and relationships that enable people to flourish. Poverty became more concentrated in certain areas, creating a kind of multiplier effect for existing cultural and social weaknesses. To be sure, we cannot blame federal government programs for all the social ills of our time; but the social engineering of people, combined with regulations and policies that undermined local organizations and weakened family ties, led to a breakdown of relationships in poor communities and what Seth Kaplan has called “fragile neighborhoods.”[1] As Hernandez writes:

The legacy of the Great Society was not the elimination of poverty but the institutionalization of welfare and the definitive federalization of poverty alleviation efforts. Long gone was the initial residualist conception of welfare, whereby helping those in need was a function primarily of families, churches, and private charities. The institutional conception, where the nation-state provides a broad range of social services and economic protections, was here to stay.[2]

Urban Renewal

A prime example of this was the combination of new highway construction, urban renewal, housing projects, and welfare regulations that discouraged marriage and saving. There were communities—poor no doubt, but filled with neighborhoods, families, shops, churches, schools, and community life—that were leveled to make room for new highway construction or other urban renewal projects. The area known as “Black Bottom” in Detroit is just one example of a vibrant community that was destroyed as a part of transportation policy and urban renewal. Displaced people were often moved into high density towers in park projects inspired by modernist architects and planners like Le Corbusier. Examples include Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green in Chicago, the infamous Pruitt-Igoe apartments in St. Louis, the Forrest Houses in the Bronx, and Brewster-Douglass Housing Projects in Detroit. Many have since been demolished. These housing projects became centers of crime, drugs, and other social pathologies. And if that was not enough, housing and welfare benefits were often tied to income and a woman’s marital status. If a woman saved too much, she could lose her benefits. Social workers would visit to make sure there was no man in the house. This incentivized the breakdown of marriage which is a prime predictor of poverty. These programs concentrated the poor into isolated communities, and compromised family cohesion which had an especially negative impact on poor African Americans.

It is often said that these were unintended consequences of well-intended social planners. Perhaps. But a better description is they were unpredicted consequences, because they were based on reductionist and mechanistic theories and models of the social planners that ignored the complexity and nature of human society and relationships.

Part of it was an error, part was hubris and failure to listen to critics. These planners were, in the words of anthropologist James C. Scott, “seeing like a state.” They focused on “formal order,” looking at society from the outside and missed the layers of complexity, relationships, tradition, and informal order. He writes in Seeing Like a State

“These rather extreme instances of massive, state-imposed social engineering illustrate, I think, a larger point about formally organized social action. In each case, the necessarily thin, schematic mode of social organization and production animating the planning was inadequate as a set of instructions for creating a successful social order. By themselves, the simplified rules can never generate a functioning community, city, or economy. [3]

Another important contribution of Rethinking Charity is the combination of theory and practice. Hernandez pays special attention to theory and the proper mental models of how to think about poverty. This is not simply an academic debate. Theory impacts practice. The proper vision of the human person as a unique, unrepeatable individual with a social nature, born into a family and community; the proper role of government; the importance of local communities and charities; economic incentives; the proper division of social responsibilities are ideas that—whether you get them right or wrong—have real world consequences. Hernandez is not simply a theoretician. He has spent years helping people in a variety of situations and has seen first-hand the results of how good or bad theory helps or harms real people, families, and communities.

Solidarity and Subsidiarity

Two key themes in Hernandez work are the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity.

Solidarity and subsidiarity are often presented as opposing principles where solidarity is viewed as responsibility of the state while subsidiarity is the practice of local, smaller scale activity. But this is incorrect. They are mutually reinforcing principles. Every part of society, from the largest state to the individual, has responsibilities of solidarity and subsidiarity. These duties come from the nature and function of the particular group or community. Solidarity is the inspiration for the practice of subsidiarity, and subsidiarity is the arena where solidarity is lived out and grows.

Solidarity is social charity. It is Christian love played out in society where we treat our neighbors as ourselves. Indeed, the state has a role in promoting solidarity, but it is through the practice of subsidiarity that solidarity is primarily lived out. One way to understand subsidiarity is the division of social responsibility. Those closest to the problem should handle it. The federal government has specific responsibilities that a local township does not. A local township has responsibilities that a church or community organization does not. The church has responsibilities that the family does not, and the family has responsibilities that the church or the state cannot claim. There are times when smaller associations need assistance. This should always be temporary and with the goal of reestablishing independence. It is a breakdown of subsidiarity when a larger association takes to itself the rights of another. Hernandez quotes a famous passage from Quadragesimo Anno:

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.[4]

It is essential to note that subsidiarity is not the devolution of power. Families do not receive their authority from the state but have authority and responsibility that derive from their nature and function. Similarly, while it is true that those closest to the problem are generally the most efficient at handing it, efficiency alone is not the determining value. An inefficient family or community center is better for the common good than a hyper-efficient, distant bureaucratic approach that undermines natural communities.

Subsidiarity as a Guide for Practice

These theories may sound academic, but they have profound practical impact. As Hernandez stresses, solidarity cannot be outsourced to someone else. Neither can self-reliance. A community grows in solidarity when it works together to solve problems and create the conditions for flourishing. Analyzing our work through this lens can be very instructive from the family to the federal government. This has special relevance and practical application for working with people in poverty. Every charity, government agency, church, and non-profit should be asking whether their projects align with the principle of subsidiarity and respect human agency.

Are we doing for someone what they can and should be doing for themselves?
Are we helping people become self-reliant, or creating the conditions for dependency?
Does our work or service usurp the role of someone else who should be the main person helping our client?
Who are the most important relationships in the life of the person we are trying to help? Are we engaging with those people or perhaps standing in their way?
If we are running an after-school program tutoring children, how involved are the parents or the extended family of the child?
Are the fathers invited to participate? Are there programs that might involve and benefit the whole family?
If we are building homes in a poor area, are we hiring or at least involving people in the neighborhood?

Using the principle of subsidiarity as a guide can help avoid weakening social solidarity and harming the common good by alienating people from their friends, families, neighbors and others who have the potential for the most long-term positive impact.

I am grateful to Ismael for his work and insight over the years on effective compassion, self-reliance, mutual aid, and the entrepreneurial spirit. I have learned a great deal from him, and he has been an inspiration to the PovertyCure initiative and the formation of the Acton Institute’s Center for Social Flourishing which promotes local, participatory, and enterprise solutions to material and social poverty, the principle of subsidiarity, and encourages and supports locally-led institutions and enterprise solutions to poverty.

Rethinking Charity is essential reading for anyone who wants to help people create prosperity, opportunity, as well as human and social flourishing in their own families and communities.

[1] See Seth D. Caplan, Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023).

[2] Ismael Hernandez, Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief (Grand Rapids: Acton Institute, 2024), 115.

[3] See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 310.

[4] Pius XI, encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno (May 15, 1931), §79.

Register for the 2024 PovertyCure Summit: Join us online Tomorrow November 19th Noon-4pm

Michael Matheson Miller — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 17:47:43 GMT

There is still time to register for the 2024 PovertyCure Summit, “Dignity, Agency, & Charity.”

The conference runs from Noon to 4 pm EST. See Schedule Below

Like all our work at PovertyCure, this two-day virtual event is focuses on putting the human person at the center of thinking about society, the economy, and global development and promoting the conditions where people can create prosperity and flourishing in their own families and communities.

I will be moderating the conference and interviewing some of our speakers and panelists. This is really an excellent line-up of speakers and topics so if you have time I encourage you to register and watch

Some of the key questions our presenters and panelists will answer include:

Are material living standards the only metric for progress in the developing world
Who is the “protagonist” of a family’s journey from poverty to prosperity?
How can the United States alleviate its housing shortage?
Why does social disorder seem to be getting worse, not better, in a country as wealthy as the United States, and what can be done about it?

Speakers and topics include

William Easterly, Professor of Economics at New York University and the author of The White Man’s Burden, The Tyranny of Experts, and The Elusive Quest for Growth
Seth Kaplan, the author of Fragile Neighborhoods
Martin Burt, founder of Poverty Stoplight and the author of Who Owns Poverty
A panel on housing, homelessness, and the general housing shortage in the US with James Burling, author of Nowhere to Live, and Charles Mahron, the founder of Strong Towns and the author of several important books on housing and building healthy communities.

Registration for the Online Conference is Free

Schedule

All times Eastern Standard Time

12:00pm: Michael Matheson Miller: Opening and Welcome - PovertyCure - From Aid to Enterprise

12:10 - 1pm: Keynote Address: Professor William Easterly: Beyond Material Progress: Markets and Dignity in the Fight Against Global Poverty

Will material living standards improve in the developing world, are the people there better able to pursue their own aspirations and desires—or less?

1:00pm-2:00pm Martin Burt: Who Are the Changemakers of Global Development?

2:00pm-3pm James Burling and Charles Marohn: Finding Solutions to America's Housing Shortage

3:00pm Closing Lecture: Seth Kaplan Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time

You can learn more about the PovertyCure Summit and see the full schedule here - including regional panels on Latin America and Africa, and country panels on India and Brazil.

I hope you’ll be able to join us for part of all of the 2024 PovertyCure Summit.

Thinking Clearly in an Age of Ideology

Michael Matheson Miller — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 14:16:53 GMT

We live in an age of ideology. The world is complex and hard to understand. We are bombarded with information and propaganda. This can lead us to look for a grand theory to help make sense of things. It is understandable. In the past we made sense of the world through cultural and religious traditions, but the world has become simultaneously more more secular and more connected and complex. Our awareness of complexity has increased while religious and cultural traditions have weakened. People feel unmoored. The internet, constant information, and social media only make it worse. We exist with a heightened sense of uncertainty and insecurity. This insecurity can create a desire sure footing, for something to hold on to. All of this creates the conditions for ideology.

Ideology, of course, is not new. The 20th century was a battlefield of competing ideologies such as Nazism and Communism. And while ideological fervor was quelled for a time, many of the conditions that foment ideology remain and infect us all—right, left, secular, or religious. We find ourselves only one generation after the end of the Cold War and the supposed “end of history,” and people are still grasping for some theory of everything.

What is Ideology? People will often use the term “ideology” to refer to a a set of beliefs or guiding principles. But that’s not exactly right. We all need principles and ideals to go through life. By ideology I mean a theory that purports to explain all of reality — a lens through which to see everything in life - and an inability to consider different perspectives.

If, for example, all life and relationships are defined by power, then marriage, friendship, work and religious belief are simply a facade for power and manipulation.

If everything is about self-interest then even a mother’s love or a stranger’s act of kindness, mercy, or even heroic rescue is reduced to what self-interest and making us feel good.

Ideological thinking blinds us to ideas, experiences, reasons, or interpretations that do not fit within our vision. Ideology ultimately prevents us from engaging reality because every experience has to pass through our preconceived filter. This is not only an error. It makes our little selves or our group the arbiter of reality. And it creates the conditions for unhappiness, and even violence.

How sad it is to think that marriage is not a partnership for life; not a call to communion, self-donation, and mutual love, but just a power play - a trap for the man or “legalized prostitution” to control the women. What joy and opportunities we miss if we think everything is determined, and we are prisoners to random evolutionary forces. The more committed to our ideology we become, the more our vision gets narrower and narrower.

There are only good guys and bad guys - and at some point it all begins to make sense: the bad guys must be eliminated because they are the source of all that is wrong with the world. Alexander Solzhenitsyn explains the danger that lurks when one succumbs to ideology.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination….

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, not suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers to not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago."
Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago - “Bluecaps”

Ideology vs Philosophy

One way to understand ideology is as the opposite of philosophy. Philosophy—philo-sophos—is the love of wisdom and the pursuit of truth. A philosophical attitude approaches reality and tries to understand it. The goal of philosophy is wisdom and truth, which Aquinas defines as “conforming the mind to reality.” Philosophy has a reverence before being and is open to being shaped by reality.

Ideology, on the other hand, tries to fit reality into its preconceived idea. The Greek myth of Procrustes provides a good image of ideology. Procrustes was a monster who had a hotel with a one-size bed. If the guest was too short for the bed, Procrustes would stretch him out to make him fit; if he was too small, he would cut off his head or his feet to make him fit. Nassim Taleb uses this same image to explain vision of many contemporary social planners.

This is not to say that ideology has no philosophical basis. Often it begins with an insight into a problem. Karl Marx, for example, saw the problems of the working classes and tried to understand them. But his ideology locked him in an intellectual cage. Everything was explained by his theory. There could be no dissent from his “scientific socialism.” With ideology, philosophy is ultimately dispensed, and theory trumps reality. Anything that undermines or conflicts with the theory is ignored. A hallmark of ideology is the suppression of questions. Intellectual coherence is unimportant when ideology reigns. As Eric Voegelin and others have noted, when pressed with questions about parts of his theory that did not cohere, Marx argued that this was no longer a question for “socialist man.”

G.K. Chesterton uses the image of the maniac—the man who moves from a genuine insight, which is why ideology is so attractive — to seeing this insight as the key to all of reality. This idea becomes a dogma that cannot be challenged. Though it may appear highly rational and internally coherent like Marxism or Darwinism, it ultimately rests on an erroneous premise — for example philosophical materialism or class struggle — that is no longer held by reason and the intellect. It becomes an attachment of the will and desire.

An obvious example of ideology is racism. The idea that one race of people is inferior simply because of skin color is clearly irrational when seen from the outside. But for the racist, it all makes sense. He will use anything and everything to bolster his position.

The same is true with communism. All problems can be traced to the evils of capitalism, private property, the family as an oppressive institution, and religion as an opiate to distract the people with promises of the afterlife. This is why, no matter how much we show someone that communism fails; no matter how we much we explain the mass murder, the suffering, and the crimes committed by communist regimes, it does not matter, because the theory—the idea—is an attachment of the will. Reason cannot reach the ideologue, and ideology ultimately becomes violent because it cannot withstand questions. This is why the East German communists had to build a wall in Berlin to keep everyone inside the workers’ paradise.

Philosophy in contrast always remains open to truth. This does not mean that philosophy never comes to solid conclusions about reality. Aristotle argues in his Metaphysics for the immutable law of noncontradiction:

A thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.

But where a philosophical attitude can lead us to firm views about the nature of reality, its openness to being, and the search for truth always allows for refinement and the encouragement of questions.

It is important to note that a philosophical attitude is different from being a skeptic. Taken to its conclusion, skepticism holds that knowledge is impossible. Philosophy in contrast, holds that we can know things with certainty, but that we must be humble in recognizing that our knowledge may be partial, whereas with ideology there is a hubris that claims it has discovered the key to reality.

The Temptation of Ideology

Western man is especially susceptible to ideology because of the deep influence of the Jewish and Christian traditions. This is quite complex, and it would take too long to develop in detail, but one example is the idea of linearity of time —that time has a beginning and an end, and it is going toward an eschaton where the Messiah will set everything aright. This idea has penetrated deep into the Western psyche. Even when the West became secularized, this idea of the perfect kingdom remained, but instead of being realized by the Messiah, it will now be realized through a technical, political solution. The kingdom of God can be realized by man. Eric Voegelin calls this the “immanentization of the eschaton.” We saw it its most virulent forms in communism and Nazism.

We can tend to focus on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union and think that ideology is gone, but strong ideological tendencies still remain in the West. Alexander Solzhenitsyn identified a deep-seated philosophical materialism that was not radically different from its Soviet counterpart in its view of man and God. In the early 1990s, Joseph Ratzinger already argued that though the Soviet Union fell, relativism did not die but combined with a desire for gratification to form a potent mix, and that

“we must of course be aware that Marxism was only the radical execution of an ideological concept that even without Marxism largely determines the signature of our century” (Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe, Ignatius Press, 129-130).

What Enables Ideology?

How does ideology emerge? What are the conditions that enable ideological thinking?

One, as I have noted, is complexity. The world is complex, and human beings don’t like complexity, Ideology provides the comfort of a sure answer. A second is the temptation of hubris - especially of the social critic and the public intellectual: a genuine insight becomes the key to understanding everything. And third, in our contemporary world with social media we don’t want to discount money and the financial benefit from becoming a guru.

Other important influences that may sound counterintuitive include empiricism, moral relativism, and of course the influence of thinkers such as Freud, Marx, and Darwin, whose singular explanations of the world normalized the idea of a theory of everything. Let me address each of these in turn.

The Dictatorship of Relativism

In a homily just before he was elected Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, said that we live under what he called a “dictatorship of relativism.” At first glance, this can seem the opposite of ideology. After all, relativism seems to be a theory of tolerance and lack of hubris in the face of absolute questions. But it does not turn out that way. Relativism is a rejection of truth, So it ultimately closes the door to philosophy, that is, to the love of wisdom. Because there is no truth outside the mind, it is no longer possible to quest for wisdom. Relativism closes us off from being shaped by reality, from conforming our minds to reality. Our minds and our ideas become the arbiter of truth and reality. If there is no truth then ideology is all that is left. Education becomes reduced to indoctrination. Relativism can only be a dictatorship, because instead of liberating the mind, it closes us off from truth and traps us in ideology which allows no dissent.

Empiricism

Similar to the problem of relativism is that of empiricist rationality or positivism. Empiricism holds that in order for something to be reasonable—within the realm of reason—it must be empirically verifiable. This creates two major problems: First, the empiricist position is incoherent on its own terms. The claim itself cannot be empirically verified. It is merely an assertion that, when questioned, has no answer. Nor, on a deeper level can it demonstrate why reason or empirical evidence is good in the first place, or why rationality is better than irrationality.

This leads to irrational rationalism - to scientism. As Harry Ballan explained people say they follow the science – but they are not open to an argument about what is true. Again, questions must be suppressed. This became very evident during the Covid debates. The passionate calls to “follow the science,” and “I believe in science” were combined with the suppression of of any dissent. Scientists using data an empirical evidence like were labeled “fringe” and silenced in the name of science.

Second, empiricism takes the most fundamental human questions—love, beauty, goodness, right, wrong, forgiveness, mercy, and justice—and relegates them to outside the realm of reason because they are not empirical. Love is thus reduced to a chemical reaction. Mercy is simply self-care. And as Ratzinger has noted, this causes a major problem for politics. Politics, he argues, is “in the realm of reason,” with the goal of creating a just society. But if justice is just an ephemeral feeling separated from reason, then politics is reduced to efficiency and ultimately power. Empiricism mixed with relativism sows the seeds of ideology and ultimately violence, since any objection must be suppressed through coercion and force.

Theories of Everything

The third major influence in our ideological age is the predominance of theories of everything, especially in thinkers like Marx, Freud, and Darwin. These are some of the most influential intellects of the modern period, and each of them presented the world with powerful tools that purport to explain reality. Marx’s theories explained politics, economics, and human action though class and power. He promised a perfect society of equality and the withering away of the state. Freud’s theories explained human relationships as manifestations of subconscious sexuality and desire. And Darwin explained not only the origin of man, but psychology and society through evolution and natural selection. Today there are major disciplines like evolutionary sociology and psychology that use Darwinian and neo-Darwinian frameworks to explain everything from love, marriage, and family structure to economics, art, and culture. Each of these theories captivated the minds and imaginations of modern people and provided a framework of how to understand the world.

The power of the theory of everything is so captivating that even those who reject such explanations almost feel the need to provide their own theory of everything to refute it. As a Catholic, I have seen this ideological tendency manifest among serious Catholics. Several times I’ve proposed the idea that while I believe Catholicism to be true and a reliable guide to operate in the world, it is not a theory of everything. The reaction was a reticence and discomfort to admit this. “But Catholicism does give us the answers …”

Well, it gives us some, but it surely does not explain everything. And I don’t just mean chemistry or mathematics. It doesn’t give the answers to a lot of things including complex political and economic problems. It gives us guidance and principles to be sure, but no program or policy document. There exists a resistance among some Catholics to the idea Catholicism has limits. I feel it too. I think it is the sense that if we do not have our own theory of everything, we can’t compete in the tournament of ideas. Critiquing Marx or evolutionary psychology is not enough. We feel we need to have our own full-fledged alternative. This is how the ideological nature of our age can infect us. But we don’t need to compete in a false game. We can put ourselves at ease. The world is complex. There are lots of trade-offs, and we can never establish perfect justice. There is no theory of everything. Not even the Bible promises that. Jesus is not a technical messiah.

Is Religion Ideology?

This leads to a serious question. Is religion different from ideology? Couldn’t one argue that religion is just a type of ideology that purports to explain the world? There is always a temptation for religion to become an ideology - especially when it gets connected to politics. The politicization of religion is an ever-present danger. It is harmful for many reasons, and as Ratzinger has noted, ultimately leads to unbelief. But properly understood and practiced, religion is not ideology, because by its very nature, it is open to revelation. Religion is a response and an attempt to address reality. The religious response may not be correct, but like philosophy, religion is a response to something outside itself, whereas ideology is a closed system. As John Paul II wrote:

The truth made known to us by Revelation is neither the product nor the consummation of an argument devised by human reason. It appears instead as something gratuitous, which itself stirs thought and seeks acceptance as an expression of love. (Fides et Ratio)

Second, religion - (and here I am specifically addressing Christianity and Judaism) does not claim to explain everything. God creates us, and calls us to participate in, and complete creation. We are in a covenant with Him; He gives us commandments, sacraments, and instructions how to worship. We also get key insights about life, marriage, family, government, business from the Bible and the tradition. But we also have to figure things out on our own. We have to use our intellects to engage in philosophical and scientific discovery. There is no pre-made solution to the problem of life.

Third, it is not utopian. Jesus does not proclaim to be a technical messiah who solves all the problems of evil, sin, suffering, and death through political means. Indeed, the message of the gospel is that Jesus dies for our sins and defeats death. But as we see in the Gospels, he had to rebuke his disciples numerous times for their attempt to make him king, for their attempt to make him a political messiah. The Gospels do speak of the final times when Jesus will come again and establish the Kingdom of God. But this is the key. It will not be political victory of man. Jesus will establish the new heavens and the new earth. But in the meantime, we are called to participate in his redemptive work. There is no perfect ordering of society that will solve the problems of life. That is only something that God himself can arrange. From the builders of the Tower of Babel, the French Revolution, the Nazis, and the communists, to the transhumanists of today, the desire to create heaven on earth is a recurrent theme. But Christianity rebukes the idea of a utopian political order.

As Ratzinger observed in Truth and Tolerance:

Within this human history of ours the absolutely ideal situation will never exist, and a perfected ordering of freedom will never be achieved. An ordering of things that is simply ideal; that is all around right and just will never exist. Wherever such a claim is made, truth is not being spoken. … Everything else, every eschatological promise within history fails to liberate us, rather it disappoints and therefore enslaves us.

Fourth, while Christianity does proclaim certain absolute truths, dogmas, and doctrines, and requires submission of the intellect and will, it does not suppress questions, something Eric Voegelin identifies as one of the marks of ideology. The asking of questions and wrestling with complexity is embedded in the Jewish and Catholic traditions, from Abraham’s and Moses’ discussions with God to the debates in the Talmud, as well as the disputation method of medieval theologians such as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas. While religious compulsion has no doubt been practiced, the attempt to compel belief is a departure from the original vision of Christianity and its intrinsically voluntary character. As I noted in another essay, Benedict XVI explains how the Enlightenment critique of religion was in part related to Christianity’s failure to live up to its standards.

In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin, and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith, whenever Christianity, against its nature, and unfortunately, had become tradition and religion of the state.

Faith and Reason

At its core, ideology is an attachment of the will to an error that will admit no challenge to it. While it can be highly “rationalist” in a self-contained manner, it rejects truth and a broad vision of reason, that Christianity affirms. John Paul II explains the relationship between faith and reason in Fides et Ratio

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.

So, yes, we must always be on guard against making religion into an ideology. We must be careful not to politicize religion or conflate it with politics. This is a persistent danger. But if we avoid the allure to politicize religion, it is precisely Christianity’s openness to reality and revelation, its affirmation and defense of reason, and its rejection of “man as the measure of all things” that can be the antidote to the ideological temptation that poisons our time.

A shorter version of this originally appeared in Religion & Liberty Volume 33.3 at Acton.org

Photo Credit: Simon Scionka

My interview on the Capital Record Podcast

Michael Matheson Miller — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 12:49:06 GMT

I was honored to be invited to speak with David L. Bahnsen on his podcast, Capital Record at National Review, about my essay The Wonder of the Ordinary, the moral and religious foundations of markets, culture, justice, entrepreneurship, innovation, the importance of trade-offs, and more.

You can listen online, at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Online at National Review (with a much younger picture of me)

Here’s the description of the episode:

David is joined by Michael Matheson Miller of the Acton Institute for what will be a two-part discussion on the very essence of this podcast. Here in Part 1, we unpack the fact that so many of the structures and artifacts that enhance our quality of life, that make market activity possible, are invisible, often becoming “out of sight” and “out of mind” for many of us. But these structures, systems, and conventions are no small thing, as you shall soon see. An absolute core episode that deserves the words, “must listen.”

We discuss a number of things including:

Complexity of seemingly ordinary things
The invisible foundations, institutions, and ideas that make life possible.
Why entrepreneurs emerge in some places and not others — it’s not simply education, a talent for innovation, or some mysterious entrepreneur gene.
The moral foundations of markets — specifically the importance of the Institutions of justice like clear title to land, access to justice in the courts
Hernando de Soto on how the legal systems are simply unfriendly to poor people.
Roger Scruton’s critique of Karl Marx’s idea of freedom
Marianna Mazucatto on the origins of the iPhone + her ideas on the entrepreneurial state and the moonshot economy
On not taking markets for granted
The goodness of being, matter, the de-divinization of nature and hoow this relates to innovation
How Christianity de-sacralizes the state, creates the secular realm, and limits state power.
The impossibility of perfect justice
The importance of recognizing the reality of trade-offs
Joseph Ratzinger Benedict XVI on Jesus’ temptations in the desert
CommutativeJustice
Distributive Justice
A discussion/debate with David about negative impacts of markets and cultural critiques of capitalism and natural law that we will continue in a future episode

"The Empire of Ugliness" - The Desire to Tear Down Everything that Stands Above Us

Michael Matheson Miller — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 14:28:11 GMT

One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Anthony Daniels, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion over 20 years ago. He is a prolific writer and the author of a number of books including Life at the Bottom. I had the chance to interview him for the documentary, Poverty, Inc. Dalrymple wrote that one of his favorite writers was the essayist and critic Simon Leys, who died in 2014.

The Hall of Uselessness

Simon Leys was the pen name of the Belgian Sinologist and literary and cultural critic, Pierre Ryckmans, who spent the last forty years of his life in Australia. He wrote on Chinese culture, translated the Analects of Confucius , and wrote The Chairman’s New Clothes, a severe critique of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution when most others were fawning over Mao.

A 2013 collection of Ley’s essays The Hall of Uselessness is a great place to begin. The title comes from a line from the Taoist philosopher Zhuang Zi

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

“Everyone knows the usefulness of what is useful, 
but few know the usefulness of what is useless.”

The collection has essays on various topics: China, the sea, and several on literature including essays on George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Victor Hugo, and a wonderful essay on G.K. Chesterton. Leys writes:

“In Chesterton’s experience the mere fact of being is so miraculous in itself that no subsequent misfortune could ever exempt a man from feeling a sort of cosmic thankfulness.”

On Christopher Hitchens & Mother Teresa

One of my favorite essays - and related to the theme of cosmic thankfulness and the goodness of being - is his essay “The Empire of Ugliness,” a critical review of the late Christopher Hitchens’ 1997 book on Mother Teresa. Leys called the essay an “epistolary review” because it included some of the correspondence between Leys and Hitchens, two very rhetorically gifted writers. Their correspondence began after Leys critiqued Hitchens’ portrayal of Mother Teresa in the New York Review of Books ( Leys is the second letter to the editor)

Hitchens was one of the Four Horsemen of the “New Atheists” along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Daniel Dennett. Hitches was very critical of Christianity and argued that Mother Teresa was a fanatic, and “not a friend of the poor, but a friend of poverty,” that she took money from corrupt sources, and that she kept her hospice in bad repair while she herself received special medical treatment in California. While Hitchens was generally against abortion, he was critical of her opposition to contraception writing:

“She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

Leys was critical of both Hitchens’ argument and his tone. He said the title of the book was obscene and that

“Bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or stylish thing to do”

Leys wrote that Hitchens’ book was filled with so many errors he would need a longer review to address them, and within days he received a personal letter from Hitchens which included his mailing address asking Leys to send the review when it was finished. In his reply to Hitchens in a letter to the New York Review, Leys wrote:

If Mr. Hitchens were to write an essay on His Holiness the Dalai Lama, being a competent journalist, he would no doubt first acquaint himself with Buddhism in general and with Tibetan Buddhism in particular. On the subject of Mother Theresa, however, he does not seem to have felt the need to acquire much information on her spiritual motivations–his book contains remarkable howlers on elementary aspects of Christianity…
In this respect, his strong vehement distaste for Mother Teresa reminds me of the indignation of the patron in a restaurant who, having been served caviar on toast, complained that the jam had a funny taste of fish.

The Desire to Tear Down Everything that Stands Above Us

At the end of the essay “The Empire of Ugliness,” Leys turns to a fundamental problem that underlies not only Hitchens’ assessment of Mother Teresa, but that plagues every one of us: a desire to tear down everything that stands above us -whether it is beauty, goodness, or truth, courage, nobility, self-sacrifice. Leys described how he was writing in a cafe when this revelation hit him.

Like many lazy people, I enjoy a measure of hustle and bustle around me while I am supposed to work–it gives me an illusion of activity and thus the surrounding din of conversations and calls did not disturb me in the least. The radio that had been blaring in a corner all morning did not bother me either: pop songs, stockmarket figures, muzak, horseracing reports, more pop songs, a lecture on foot-and-mouth disease in cows–whatever: this audio-pap kept dripping like lukewarm water from a leaky faucet and nobody was listening anyway.
Suddenly a miracle occurred. For a reason that will forever remain mysterious, this vulgar broadcasting routine gave way without transition (or if there had been one, it escaped my attention) to the most sublime music: the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet began to flow and with serene authority filled the entire space of the cafe, turning it at once into an antechamber of Paradise.

(If I am not mistaken, it is this clarinet quintet that Shinichi Suzuki wrote in Nurtured by Love that was one of his favorite piece of music and that opened him up to transcendent beauty.)

Leys relates that at the moment Mozart’s quintet began everyone stopped, “all faces turned around frowning with puzzled concern.” Almost immediately someone got up and changed the station to some banal series of songs and chatter “which everyone could again comfortably ignore.”

At that moment the realization hit me–and has never left me since:
true Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognizing beauty. They recognize it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flare as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete — but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness.
Ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge, obscurantism does not result from a dearth of light, bad taste is not merely a lack of good taste, stupidity is not a simple want of intelligence: all these are fiercely active forces, that angrily asserts themselves on every occasion; they tolerate no challenge to their omnipresence rule. In every department of human endeavor inspired talent IS AN intolerable insults to mediocrity.
If this is true in the realm of aesthetics it is even more true in the world of ethics.
More than artistic beauty moral beauty seems to exasperate our sorry species. The need to bring down to our own wretched level, to deface, to deride and debunk any splendor that is towering above us is probably the saddest urge of human nature.

The power of Leys’ essay was not simply his critique of Hitchens, which though polite, was brutal. That’s the easy part. Especially if you are a Christian and enjoy seeing someone like the rhetorically gifted and witty Hitchens put in his place and bested by someone even more rhetorically talented. This is where is where the danger lies - and even more so in our age of memes, cleverness, and one-upmanship. If we stop there, we can miss the deeper point.

More important is the warning about the power of envy, ressentiment, sour grapes, and tearing down the good because it exposes our own moral, intellectual, physical, and spiritual mediocrity. This is the true challenge - to respond to all excellence, especially moral and spiritual with appreciation, proper admiration, and with zealousness to make the most of the talents and opportunities we have been given.

Addendum

One note on the late Christopher Hitchens. While I am deeply critical of Hitchens’ materialism and atheism, Leys noted that Hitchen’s letter was “naturally most amiable and good humored.” He was willing to engage in debate as evidenced by the letter he wrote to Leys inviting further critique - a virtue often missing today. I had the chance to meet Hitchens twice, and while he could be rough and provocative in a debate, he was also very kind and attentive to others. Once in the middle of a conference many years ago my elderly mother got an irritation in her throat and began to cough. Mr. Hitchens, who was speaking on a panel, stopped to inquire if she was ok and needed any help. Several years later we met in Palo Alto before his debate with my friend Jay Richards. I told him about the incident and thanked him. He remembered, and I was impressed. After the debate he invited Jay and me to join him for dinner, but to my regret we had another commitment. I would have enjoyed a dinner conversation with Mr. Hitchens. But I did have the chance in a small way to return his favor of kindness to my mother by giving his father-in-law a ride home. Eternal Memory. May he rest in peace.

A shorter version of this appeared at Acton.org

The Wonder of the Ordinary, Ignoring the Invisible, and Gratitude as an Antidote to Ideology

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 13:37:25 GMT

We are embedded in deep layers of complexity and surrounded by invisible foundations - traditions, processes, institutions, and ideas that that make life go on and that undergird our economic, political, and social life. Because these things don’t immediately manifest themselves to our attention we can forget about them or even worse, think they don’t matter and that life will go on as normal even if we get rid of them. This is an error that has terrible consequences.

Look around the room you are in and think about all the things that are making your reading this essay possible. The computer or phone; a table and chair if you are sitting at a desk. Electricity and the electric grid, plus all the people, businesses, and materials required to maintain it. Think about the house or building you are in and the architect, builders, bricks, wood, rebar, concrete, and of course the mathematics that make it sturdy.

Go further and reflect on all the things that make our security and safety possible. If you live in the United States or Western Europe, you most likely are not wearing a sidearm (apologies to those in Texas). Why? Because generally we have stable political and social institutions grounded in justice and rule of law that enable us to go about our daily lives and do our business without worrying for our safety. Rule of law also enables us to buy and sell our homes, start a business, and get our court case heard if someone cheats or doesn’t fulfill a contract. And we can’t forget the cultural artifact that we inherited that makes our communication possible - the English language.

Even apparently simple things require great complexity. If you are drinking a cup of coffee or you’ve visited a coffee shop lately, consider all the people, processes, and tools it took to get a simple cup of espresso: coffee beans, roasters, grinders, espresso machines, steel, plastic, petroleum, plastic and burlap bags, shipping containers, the networks of relationships and contracts (that means lawyers) between farmers, transporters, suppliers, roasters, shop owners, and baristas - and don’t forget the currency and banking and the cultural trust that the coffee wouldn’t make you sick. Here’s the full version of a video on the global supply chain of a cup of espresso that I directed as part of the Acton Institute’s Good Society Series that highlights how embedded in complexity we really are.

Invisible Institutions

If there is a lot going on in a single cup of coffee, it’s hard to imagine all the complexity going around us. One of the characteristics of invisible structures that support us, is that they are, well invisible. This is especially true for those of us who live in advanced industrial societies, but it applies to everyone. No single person could hold all the details that make our daily lives possible. In fact it would be impossible to do so even if we wanted. Spending all our time thinking about everything that makes our daily life possible would paralyze us and drive us mad. However, the danger occurs when we forget, or fail to realize their importance; and in our failure to recognize the complexity, we find ourselves in profound trouble.

In the realm of economics and politics, there are foundational institutions of justice that we discuss in Poverty, Inc. These enable economic development, a commercial society, and civil society. These are things like

property rights and clear title to land
access to justice and courts of law
the right of free association
ability to register a business in the formal economy
ability to engage in free exchange without unreasonable burden

Without these things entrepreneurship is stifled. But many entrepreneurs don’t even think about these things until they are gone. At the Acton Institute we did a very informal survey of business leaders and entrepreneurs asking them what issues they thought were the most important for people to understand about business and entrepreneurship. These “invisible” conditions came in at the bottom. I doubt it would be much different among students and professors of business and entrepreneurship.

Intellectual Rebar

The institutions of justice only scratch the surface. Think of all the deeper invisible concepts that we take for granted and rarely articulate: ideas like freedom, honor, justice, and equality. We simply assume them as part of the fabric of our thought.

But what is justice? Where does the concept of justice that dominates Western thought and institutions come from? And why do we think that justice better than injustice? It surely doesn’t come from biology. It is not a materialist, empirical concept that can be measured. Yet certain ideas of justice, right and wrong, sacred and profane permeate our thinking and view of the world. In the West they come from a number of sources including Greek, Roman, and most important Jewish and Christian ideas. They are such a part of our lives that we even use them when we critique religion or Western civilization.

Sam Harris, the well known materialist and critic of faith argues that “there is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.” But what does Sam Harris mean by “sacred” and why is it a “high purpose?” Is high better than low, and what in fact is “purpose” in a purely material universe? Even Harris is relying on a host of “invisible” concepts and ideas to even make his so-called materialist argument.

Even the Enlightenment rejection of religious “superstition” still relies on key ideas that come from Jewish and Christian civilization: the de-divinization of nature, the de-sacralization of the state, both of which create the secular order, the intelligibility of nature, scientific method, and much more. This was a central part of Edmund Burke’s critique of the Enlightenment and especially the French Revolution. Too often Enlightenment thinkers looked at the surface of something, and in their re-articulation they hollowed out traditions, mores, habits, and ideas that made that something possible in the first place. This I think applies to John Locke’s vision of social contract. Social contract in actual practice long preceded Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government. It existed throughout medieval and renaissance Europe, and even existed in the America with the Mayflower Compact in 1620 - seventy years before Locke wrote. It didn’t come out of a mythical state of nature, It came out of rich cultural and religious sources about the nature of the person and society. As Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) explains

In this connection, the Enlightenment is of Christian origin, and it is no accident that it was born precisely and exclusively in the realm of the Christian faith, whenever Christianity, against its nature, and unfortunately, had become tradition and religion of the state. Notwithstanding the philosophy, in so far as search for rationality — also of our faith – was always a prerogative of Christianity, the voice of reason had been too domesticated. It was and is the merit of the Enlightenment to have again proposed these original values of Christianity and of having given back to reason its own voice. In the pastoral constitution, On the Church in the Modern World, Vatican Council II underlined again this profound correspondence between Christianity and the Enlightenment, seeking to come to a true conciliation between the Church and modernity, which is the great heritage that both sides must defend. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger - Subiaco Address

“Who Gives you the Fishing Rod?”

Roger Scruton gives a good example of the problem of ignoring the invisible and taking things for granted in his critique of Marx’s concept of freedom in Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands. Marx famously argued that in a communist society man would be free to engage in

“hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, tending cattle in the evening and engaging in literary criticism after dinner.”

The problems with this idea of freedom are many. First, freedom as liberation - as a simply mere act of the will - is a false promise. If at a dinner party I started to bang my head at the edge of the table, and blood spurted over everyone, no one would think “Wow - He’s so Free!” They would think I had lost my mind. As Joseph Ratzinger notes in Truth and Tolerance, “an irrational will is not a free will.” This he says is a “diabolical freedom,” the sort of radical liberation that ends up enslaving us.

A second problem with Marx’s dream of freedom is directly related to complexity and taking things for granted. As Roger Scruton points out, Marx fails to account for how all those things —leisure of fishing, hunting, reading and education — are going to be accomplished if the state (and culture with it) has “withered away.”

Marx is like the young college student sitting in a coffee shop, pounding on his keyboard, railing against global trade while drinking Tanzanian espresso made in an Italian machine. He takes the invisible development of a complex culture for granted and assumes it will remain no matter what we do. He claimed that his socialism, unlike the “utopian socialists” he critiqued was “scientific.” But as Scruton writes:

To say that this is ‘scientific’ rather than utopian is, in retrospect, little more than a joke. Marx’s remark about hunting, fishing, hobby farming and lit. crit. is the only attempt he makes to describe what life will be like without private property – and if you ask who gives you the gun or the fishing rod, who organizes the pack of hounds, who maintains the coverts and the waterways, who disposes of the milk and the calves, and who publishes the lit. crit., - such questions will be dismissed as ‘beside the point’, and as matters to be settled by a future that is none of your business…such questions are too trivial to be noticed.
Or rather, they are too serious to be considered, and therefore go unnoticed. For it requires but the slightest critical address, to recognize that Marx’s ‘full communism’ embodies a contradiction:
it is a state in which all the benefits of legal order are still present, even though there is no law; in which all the products of social cooperation are still in existence, even though nobody enjoys the property rights which hitherto have provided the sole motive for producing them.
The contradictory nature of the socialist utopias is one explanation of the violence involved in the attempt to impose them: it takes infinite force to make people do what is impossible

Scruton echoes Eric Voegelin who noted that when Marxists were pressed on fundamental questions, the answer was “that’s not a question for socialist man.” Augusto Del Noce too identified one of the hallmarks of ideology as the “suppression of questions.” As Voegelin and others have noted, a closed ideological system that has shut itself from the truth sows the seeds of violence. This is just one reason why relativism always becomes a “dictatorship” as Benedict XVI so aptly described.

The Wonder of the Ordinary: Gratitude as an antidote to ideology.

We are all tempted by ideology. We are tempted to create the world in our image. Tempted to ignore things we don’t understand or find interesting or just don’t like. Tempted to find the one story or one theory that explains the woes of the world. Reflecting on complexity and how we rely on the invisible - and the work and effort of millions of other people including those who have come before us - can help us avoid this type of thinking. Awareness of complexity does not mean we cannot understand anything or that we cannot have theories to help explain reality. But it helps keep us humble in our approach.

We could never pay constant attention to all the ideas, inventions, and actions that maintain the cultural, institutional, and physical infrastructure that surround and uphold us. But what we can do is cultivate the habit of gratitude. Gratitude is a reverence before the wonder of being. Gratitude as a foundational approach to reality keeps us attentive to the innumerable gifts we have including our lives. We did not bring ourselves into existence.

Gratitude opens our eyes to the gift and character of life. It opens us not only to blessings and opportunities, but to possibilities and pathways that we would not be able see without gratitude. When things are going well, gratitude keeps us grounded that we did not succeed on our own; when things are difficult, gratitude protects us from seeing ourselves simply as victims - and from the poison of “ressentiment,” of sour grapes and transvaluation that Max Scheler describes so well. Avoiding resentment and victimhood is not only helpful in our daily lives and relationships. Resentment and victimhood is fertile ground for ideology.

Gratitude helps us remain attentive to all the wonderful complexity and layers of invisible culture that surround us. It helps us avoid the mistakes of the ideologue who identifies his theory with reality. It could also help us become more appreciative o our ancestors and for the wonder of the ordinary, which when we reflect just a bit, isn’t ordinary after all.

Photo Credit:Simon Scionka

Episode 59: Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D - A Life Marathon: On having a large family in a consumerist culture amidst declining marriage and birth rates

Michael Matheson Miller — Thu, 25 Jul 2024 14:04:00 GMT

In this episode of the Moral Imagination Podcast I speak with Catherine Pakaluk about her book Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth

Over the last 200 years, we have seen a decline in birth rates in the United States and abroad, especially in Western countries. Most European countries are no longer at replacement rates and face serious population decline. Reuters reported that Japan’s population will decline by a staggering 30% in the next fifty years.

In the United States, in the year 1800, the typical woman would have about 7 or 8 children. By 1900 that number was cut in half to 4. By 2000 the number cut in half again to about 2 children, which is just about replacement rate. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on the the record-low birthrate in the US, and how increasing numbers of people plan to have no children.

In the midst of declining marriages, childlessness, and low birthrates, Pakaluk studied the increasing minority of women in the Western world who have chosen to have five or more children — the top 5% of childbearing.

Her book is a mix of ethnography, sociology, and economics, and includes a critique of the dominant model of social and economic research.

One thing that stands out with many of the women she interviews is how at some point a shift took place in their attitude — from seeing children as a choice, like a consumer good among other choices, to a different attitude of receptivity and openness to having another child, and then another.

She talks about the many forces that promote small families — the cost of children, overpopulation propaganda, education, feminism, environmentalism, consumerism and more. But Pakaluk emphasizes that encouraging women to have more children cannot be addressed simply by implementing pro-family policies like some countries have tried to do. Good policy is not insignificant — for example in most US states parents who want to send their children to religious schools have to pay twice for school through tax and tuition. But she argues that the real problems go much deeper. They are religious, spiritual, and metaphysical: a vision of life that sees being as good, children as a blessing, and family as essential for a good life.

Pakaluk compares having a large family to running a marathon—except longer, harder, and more fulfilling. Government family policy would be like giving everyone a pair of good running shoes for the marathon. That could help, but it won’t get most people to run. There must be a deeper motivation, and this almost always comes from religious belief and the virtues of faith, hope, the goodness of being, and the value of generosity and sacrifice that come from it.

Themes and Topics we discuss include:

Demographics and Population Decline
Family policies
Feminism
Education
Career vs Family and Children
Conflicting Desires
Difficulties and Advantages of a Large Family
The Role of Religious Schools
Community
Plausibility Structures
Consumerism
Individualism
Social Pressure
Religious Freedom
Fortitude, Patience
Boys and Girls Sports
Novak Djokovic and Kobe Bryant
Voting Patterns
Climate
Creation and the Goodness of Being
and more

Biography

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk (Ph.D, 2010) joined the faculty at the Busch School in the summer of 2016, and is the founder of the Social Research academic area, where she is an Associate Professor of Social Research and Economic Thought. Formerly, she was Assistant Professor and Chair of the Economics Department at Ave Maria University. Her primary areas of research include economics of education and religion, family studies and demography, Catholic social thought and political economy. Dr. Pakaluk is the 2015 recipient of the Acton Institute’s Novak Award, a prize given for “significant contributions to the study of the relationship between religion and economic liberty.”

Pakaluk did her doctoral work at Harvard University under Caroline Hoxby, David Cutler, and 2016 Nobel-laureate Oliver Hart. Her dissertation, “Essays in Applied Microeconomics”, examined the relationship between religious ‘fit' and educational outcomes, the role of parental effort in observed peer effects and school quality, and theoretical aspects of the contraceptive revolution as regards twentieth century demographic trends.

Beyond her formal training in economics, Dr. Pakaluk studied Catholic social thought under the mentorship of F. Russell Hittinger, and various aspects of Thomistic thought with Steven A. Long. She is a widely-admired writer and sought-after speaker on matters of culture, gender, social science, the vocation of women, and the work of Edith Stein. She lives in Maryland with her husband Michael Pakaluk and eight children.

Resources

Hannah's Children

Flight from Woman

Neil Postman: Technopoly

Joseph Ratzinger: Homilies on Genesis

On the Jewish - Christian Idea of the Goodness of Being

The Moral Imagination - Michael Matheson Miller

There is No Technical Solution to Poverty - My interview on the Prosper Podcast

Listen on Apple Spotify YouTube

Episode 61: Magatte Wade on Rethinking Poverty, Prosperity, and What Africa needs to Flourish

Biography

Chapters

Resources

Artificial Intelligence & The Human Person

Christian Vision of the Person Long Form Handout

The Christian Vision of the Person and Society

Introduction: The Person at the Center of Society and the Economy

Christian Vision of the Human Person

7 Characteristics of The Human Person

1. Intelligence and Reason

Primer on Reason

2. Free

Dominant views of Freedom

3. Good but Fallen

4. Social Beings

5. Embodied, Embedded Persons

2 Dominant Fallacies

6. Spiritual Emotions

7. Everlasting: “Eternal Destiny”

Suggested Reading and Listening

C.S. Lewis

Joseph Pieper

John Paul II

Dietrich von Hildebrand

Benedict XVI

Audio: Podcasts Related to the Christian Vision of the Person

Blackstone Fellowship - Handouts for Christian Vision of the Person & Government

The Christian Vision of the Person and Society

Introduction: The Person at the Center of Society and the Economy

Christian Vision of the Human Person

Part 1: 5 False Anthropologies

Part 2: Christian Anthropology

1. Being is Good

2. Persons as Subjects not Objects

7 Characteristics of The Human Person

1. Intelligence and Reason

Primer on Reason

2. Free

Dominant views of Freedom

3. Good but Fallen

4. Social Beings

5. Embodied, Embedded Persons

2 Dominant Fallacies

6. Spiritual Emotions

7. Everlasting: “Eternal Destiny”

Suggested Reading and Listening

C.S. Lewis

Joseph Pieper

John Paul II

Dietrich von Hildebrand

Benedict XVI

Audio: Podcasts Related to the Christian Vision of the Person

Christian Vision of Government Handout

Six Ways to Combat Consumerism

Consumerism is a Spiritual Problem

6 Ways to Combat Consumerism

1. Most Obvious - Reduce social media, don’t watch commercials, and reject the behavior modification that encourages consumption and addictive behavior.

2. Stress the Reasonableness of the Faith in Contrast to the Just-So Stories of Materialism.

3. Clarity on Moral Norms

4. Encourage Ascetic Practices

5. Attend Beautiful Liturgy

6. Sabbath Rest: Encourage Observance of the Lord’s day

We are Created for More

An earlier version of this appeared at Religion and Liberty, September 2019

Pope Francis - Requiem Aeternam

This is a short reflection on Pope Francis that I wrote with my colleague, John Pinheiro, and published after his death last month.

Photo Credit By Aleteia Image Department - Canonization 2014-The Canonization of Saint John XXIII and Saint John Paul II, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48981290

A Christian Vision of Time?

From Progress to Utopianism

Can Science Redeem Us?

This is a selection on the Jewish and Christian sources of justice from my forthcoming book, Excluded: How the Poverty Industry Excludes the Poor from Justice and Prosperity Forthcoming from Herder/Crossroad Press

Photo Credit: The Triumph of Eternity on Death, from The Triumph of Petrarch, Georg Pencz, Public Domain, MetMuseum.org

Episode 60: Augustine Wetta, O.S.B. St. Benedict's 12-Step Guide to Genuine Self-Esteem

Biography

Resources

Photo Credit: Courtesy Augustine Wetta OSB