John Paul II Australian Leaders Forum
Sydney
11 August 2012
Any healthy society, any decent society, will rest upon three
pillars. The first is respect for the human person—the individual human being
and his dignity. Where this pillar is in place, the formal and informal
institutions of society, and the beliefs and practices of the people, will be such that every member of the human family—irrespective of race,
sex, or ethnicity, to be sure, but also and equally irrespective of age, size,
stage of development, or condition of dependency—is treated as a person—that
is, as a subject bearing profound, inherent, and equal worth and
dignity.
A society that does not nurture respect the human person—beginning with the child in the womb, and including the mentally and
physically impaired and the frail elderly—will sooner or later (probably
sooner, rather than later) come to regard human beings as mere cogs in the
larger social wheel whose dignity and well-being may legitimately be
sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. Some members of the
community—those in certain development stages, for example— will come to be
regarded as disposable, and others—those in certain conditions of dependency,
for example, will come to be viewed as intolerably burdensome, as
"useless eaters, as "better off dead," as Lebensunwerten lebens.
In its most extreme modern forms, totalitarian regimes reduce the
individual to the status of an instrument to serve the ends of the fascist state or the future communist utopia. When liberal democratic
regimes go awry, it is often because a utilitarian ethic reduces the human
person to a means rather than an end to which other things including the
systems and institutions of law, education, and the economy are means.
The abortion license against which we struggle today is dressed up by its
defenders in the language of individual and even natural rights—and there can
be no doubt that the acceptance of abortion is partly the fruit of me-generation liberal ideology—a corruption (and burlesque) of liberal
political philosophy in its classical form; but more fundamentally it is
underwritten by a utilitarian ethic that, in the end, vaporizes the very idea
of natural rights, treating the idea (in Jeremy Bentham's famously
dismissive words) as "nonsense on stilts."
In cultures in which religious fanaticism has taken hold, the dignity
of the individual is typically sacrificed for the sake of tragically
misbegotten theological ideas and goals. By contrast, a
liberal democratic ethos, where it is uncorrupted by utilitarianism or
me-generation expressive individualism, supports the dignity of the human
person by giving witness to basic human rights and liberties. Where a healthy religious life flourishes, faith in God provides a grounding for the
dignity and inviolability of the human person by, for example, proposing an
understanding of each and every member of the human family, even those of
different faiths or professing no particular faith, as persons made in
the image and likeness of the divine Author of our lives and liberties.
The second pillar of any decent society is the institution of the
family. It is indispensable. The family, based on the marital commitment of
husband and wife, is the original and best
ministry of health, education, and welfare. Although no family is perfect, no
institution matches the healthy family in its capacity to transmit to each new
generation the understandings and traits of character — the values and virtues — upon which the success of every other institution of
society, from law and government to educational institutions and business
firms, vitally depends.
Where families fail to form, or too many break down, the effective
transmission of the virtues of honesty, civility,
self-restraint, concern for the welfare of others, justice, compassion, and
personal responsibility is imperiled. Without these virtues, respect for the
dignity of the human person, the first pillar
of a decent society, will be undermined and
sooner or later lost—for even the most laudable formal institutions cannot
uphold respect for human dignity where people do not have the virtues that make
that respect a reality and give it vitality in actual social practices.
Respect for the dignity of the human being requires more than formally
sound institutions; it requires a cultural ethos in which people act from
conviction to treat each other as human beings should be treated: with respect,
civility, justice, compassion. The best legal and
political institutions ever devised are of little value where selfishness,
contempt for others, dishonesty, injustice, and other types of immorality and
irresponsibility flourish. Indeed, the effective working of governmental institutions themselves depends upon most people most of the time obeying
the law out of a sense of moral obligation, and not merely out of fear of
detection and punishment for law-breaking. And perhaps it goes without saying
that the success of business and a market-based economic system
depends on there being reasonably virtuous, trustworthy, law-abiding,
promise-keeping people to serve as workers and managers, lenders, regulators,
and payers of bills for goods and services.
The third pillar of any decent society is a fair and effective
system of law and government. This is necessary because none of us is perfectly
virtuous all the time, and some people will be deterred from wrongdoing only by
the threat of punishment. More importantly, contemporary philosophers of law tell us the law coordinates human behavior for the sake of
achieving common goals — thecommon good — especially in dealing with the complexities of modern
life. Even if all of us were perfectly virtuous all of the time, we would still need a system of laws (considered as a scheme of
authoritatively stipulated coordination norms) to accomplish many of our common
ends (safely transporting ourselves on the streets, to take a simple and
obvious example).
The success of business firms and the economy as a whole
depends vitally on a fair and effective system and set of institutions for the
administration of justice. We need judges skilled in the craft of law and free
of corruption. We need to be able to rely on courts to settle disputes, including disputes between parties who are both in good faith,
and to enforce contracts and other agreements and enforce them in a timely
manner. Indeed, the knowledge that contracts will be enforced is usually
sufficient to ensure that courts will not actually be called on to
enforce them. A sociological fact of which we can be certain is this: Where
there is no reliable system of the administration of justice— no confidence that the courts will hold people to their obligations
under the law
— business will not flourish and everyone in
the society will suffer.
A society can, in my opinion, be a decent one even if it is not a
dynamic one, if the three pillars are healthy and functioning in a mutually
supportive way (as they will do if each is healthy).
Now, conservatives of a certain stripe believe that a truly decent society
cannot be a dynamic one. Dynamism, they believe, causes instability that
undermines the pillars of a decent society. So some conservatives in old Europe
and even the United States opposed not onlyindustrialism but the very idea of a commercial society, fearing that
commercial economies inevitably produce consumerist and acquisitive materialist
attitudes that corrode the foundations of decency. And some, such as some Amish
communities in the U.S., reject education for their children
beyond what is necessary to master reading, writing, and arithmetic, on the
ground that higher education leads to worldliness and apostasy and undermines
religious faith and moral virtue.
Although a decent society need not be a dynamic one (as the Amish
example shows) dynamism need not erode decency. A dynamic society need not be
one in which consumerism and materialism become rife and in which moral and
spiritual values disappear. Indeed, dynamism can play a positive moral role and, I would venture to say, almost certainly will play such a
role where what makes it possible is sufficient to sustain it over the long
term.
That is, I realize, a rather cryptic comment, so let me explain what I
mean. To do that, I will have to offer some thoughts on what in fact
makes social dynamism possible.
The two pillars of social dynamism are, first, institutions of research
and education in which the frontiers of knowledge across in the humanities,
social sciences, and natural sciences are pushed back, and through which
knowledge is transmitted to students and disseminated to the public at large;
and, second, business firms and associated institutions supporting them or
managed in ways that are at least in some respects patterned on their principles, by
which wealth is generated, widely distributed, and preserved.
We can think of universities and business firms, together with respect
for the dignity of the human person, the institution of the family, and the
system of law and government, as the five pillars of
decent and dynamic societies. The university and the business firm depend in
various ways for their well-being on the well-being of the others, and they can
help to support the others in turn. At the same time, of course, ideologies and practices hostile to the pillars of a decent
society can manifest themselves in higher education and in business and these
institutions can erode the social values on which they themselves depend not
only for their own integrity, but for their long-term survival.
It is all too easy to take the pillars for granted. So it is important
to remember that each of them has come under attack from different angles and
forces. Operating from within universities, persons and movements hostile to one or the other of these pillars, usually preaching or acting in the
name of high ideals of one sort or another, have gone on the attack.
Attacks on business and the very idea of the market economy and
economic freedom coming from the academic world are, of
course, well known. Students are sometimes taught to hold business, and
especially businessmen, in contempt as heartless exploiters driven by greed. In
my own days as a student, these attacks were often made explicitly in the name
of Marxism. One notices less of that after the collapse
of the Soviet empire, but the attacks themselves have abated little. Needless to say, where businesses behave
unethically they play into the stereotypes of the enemies of the market system
and facilitate their effort to smear business and
the free market for the sake of transferring greater control of the economy to
government.
Similarly, attacks on the family, and particularly on the institution
of marriage on which the family is built, are common in the
academy. The line here is that the family, at least as traditionally
constituted and understood, is a patriarchal and exploitative institution that
oppresses women and imposes on people forms of sexual restraint that are
psychologically damaging and inhibiting of the free expression of
their personality. As has become clear in the past decade and a half, there is
a profound threat to the family here, one against which we must fight with all
our energy and will. It is difficult to think of any item on the domestic agenda that is more critical today than the defense of
marriage as the union of husband and wife and the effort to renew and rebuild
the marriage culture.
What has also become clear is that the threats to the family (and to
the sanctity of human life) are at the same time and
necessarily threats to religious freedom and to religion itself—at least where
the religions in question stand up and speak out for conjugal marriage and the
rights of the child in the womb. From the point of view of those seeking to re-define marriage and to protect and advance what they
regard as the right to abortion the taming of religion, and the stigmatization and marginalization of religions that refuse to be
tamed, is a moral imperative. It is therefore not surprising to see that
they are increasingly open in saying that they do not see disputes about sex
and marriage and abortion and euthanasia as honest disagreements among
reasonable people of goodwill. They are, rather, battles between the forces of "reason" and "enlightenment," on one side, and
those of "ignorance" and "bigotry," on the other. Their
opponents are to be treated just as racists are treated—since they are the
equivalent of racists. That doesn't necessarily mean imprisoning them or fining them for expressing unacceptable opinions—though "hate
crimes" laws in certain jurisdictions raise the specter of precisely such
abuses; but it does mean using antidiscrimination laws and other legal
instruments to stigmatize them, marginalize them, and
impose upon them and their institutions various forms of social and even civil
disability—with few if any meaningful protections for religious liberty and the
rights of conscience.
Some will counsel that commercial businesses and business people
"have no horse in this race." They will
say that these are moral, cultural, and religious disputes about which business
people and people concerned with economic freedom need not concern themselves.
The reality is that the ideological movements that today seek, for example, to redefine marriage and abolish its normativity for
romantic relations and the rearing of children are the same movements that seek
to undermine the market-based economic system and replace it with statist control of vast
areas of economic life. Moreover, the rise of ideologies hostile to marriage
and the family has had a measurable social impact, and its costs are counted in
ruined relationships, damaged lives, and all that follows in the social sphere
from these personal catastrophes. In many poorer places in
the United States, and I believe this is true in many other countries, families
are simply failing to form and marriage is disappearing or coming to be
regarded as an optional "life-style choice"—one among various optional ways of conducting relationships and having and rearing
children. Out of wedlock birthrates are very high, with the negative
consequences being borne less by the affluent than by those in the poorest and
most vulnerable sectors of society.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Harvard
professor who was then working in the administration of President Lyndon
Johnson, shocked Americans by reporting findings that the out-of-wedlock birth
rate among African-Americans in the United States had reached nearly 25%. He warned that the phenomenon of boys and girls being raised
without fathers in poorer communities would result in social pathologies that
would severely harm those most in need of the supports of solid family life.
His predictions were all too quickly verified. The widespread failure
of family formation portended disastrous social consequences of delinquency,
despair, violence, drug abuse, and crime and incarceration. A snowball effect
resulted in the further growth of the out-of-wedlock birth rate. It is now over 70% among African-Americans. It is worth noting that at
the time of Moynihan's report, the out-of-wedlock birth rate for the population as
a whole was almost 6%. Today, that rate is over 40%.
The economic consequences of these developments are evident.
Consider the need of business to have available to it a responsible and capable
work force. Business cannot manufacture honest, hard working people to employ.
Nor can government create them by law. Businesses and governments depend on there being many such people, but they must rely on the
family, assisted by religious communities and other institutions of civil
society, to produce them. So business has a stake—a massive stake—in the
long-term health of the family. It should avoid doing anything to undermine
the family, and it should do what it can where it can to strengthen the
institution.
As an advocate of dynamic societies, I believe in the market economy
and the free enterprise system. I particularly value the social mobility that economic dynamism makes possible. Indeed, I am a beneficiary
of that social mobility. A bit over a hundred years ago, my immigrant
grandfathers—one from southern Italy, the other from Syria—were coal miners.
Neither had so much as remotely considered the possibility of attending
a university—as a practical economic matter, such a thing was simply out of the
question. At that time, Woodrow Wilson, the future President of the United
States, was the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton. Today, just two generations forward, I, the grandson of those
immigrant coal miners, am the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at
Princeton. And what is truly remarkable, is that my story is completely unremarkable. Something like it is
the story of millions of Americans. I daresay it is the story of many, many
Australians. Perhaps it goes without saying that this kind of upward mobility
is not common in corporatist or socialist economic systems; but it is very
common in market-based free enterprise economies.
Having said that, I should note that I am not a supporter of the
laissez-faire doctrine embraced by strict libertarians. I believe that law and
government do have important and, indeed, indispensable roles to play in
regulating enterprises for the sake of protecting
public health, safety, and morals, preventing exploitation and abuse, and
promoting fair competitive circumstances of exchange. But these roles are
compatible, I would insist, with the ideal of limited government and the principle of subsidiarity according to which government must
respect individual initiative to the extent reasonably possible and avoid
violating the autonomy and usurping the authority of families, religious
communities, and other institutions of civil
society that play the primary role in building character and transmitting
virtues.
But having said that, I would warn that limited government — considered as an ideal as vital
to business as to the family — cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these
things happen, the health, education, and welfare functions of the family will
have to be undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or
later be the government. To deal with pressing social problems,bureaucracies will grow, and with them the tax burden. Moreover, the
growth of crime and other pathologies where family breakdown is rampant will
result in the need for more extensive policing and incarceration and, again,
increased taxes to pay for these government services. If we want
limited government, as we should, and a level of taxation that is not unduly
burdensome, we need healthy institutions of civil society, beginning with a
flourishing marriage culture supporting family formation and preservation.
Advocates of the market economy, and supporters of marriage and the
family, have common opponents in hard-left socialism, the entitlement
mentality, and the statist ideologies that provide their intellectual
underpinnings. But the marriage of advocates of
limited government and economic freedom, on the one hand, and the supporters of
marriage and the family, on the other, is not, and must not be regarded as, a
mere marriage of convenience. The reason they have common enemies is that they
have common principles: namely, respect for the human
person, which grounds our commitment to individual liberty and the right to
economic freedom and other essential civil liberties; belief in personal
responsibility, which is a pre-condition of the possibility and moral desirability of individual liberty in any domain; recognition of
subsidiarity as the basis for effective but truly limited government and for
the integrity of the institutions of civil society that mediate between the
individual and the centralized power of the state; respect for the rule
of law; and recognition of the vital role played by the family and by religious institutions that support the character-forming
functions of the family in the flourishing of any decent and dynamic society.
The point was made well by a man who will, I predict, in a few hours be one of the most famous people in the world, U.S. Congressman Paul Ryan, chairman of the budget committee in the United States House of Representatives. He recently observed that a "libertarian" who wants limited government should embrace
the means to his freedom: thriving mediating institutions that create the moral
preconditions for economic markets and choice. A "social issues"
conservative with a zeal for righteousness should insist
on a free market economy to supply the material needs for families, schools,
and churches that inspire moral and spiritual life. In a nutshell, the notion
of separating the social from the economic issues is a false choice. They stem
from the same root . . . . They complement and complete
each other. A prosperous moral community is a prerequisite for a just and
ordered society and the idea that either side of this current divide can exist
independently is a mirage.
The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of
poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy and the
institution of marriage. These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall
together. Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both of these institutions, and they fully understand the connection between
them. We who believe in the market and in the family should see the connection
no less clearly.
