On the Encyclical:
Disingenuity
23 June 2015

My plan for yesterday’s entry was to begin by thanking Paul Krugman — but there was nothing to thank him for, because I had neglected to publish entries for last Thursday and Friday. The entries had been written, proofed, copied (in HTML) to Notepad, everything but published. So it would have been odd to thank Paul Krugman for providing structured support, in yesterday’s column, for the mere assertions that had swept from my fingers in furious response to the Charleston massacre, but that had not yet actually appeared on this site. Krugman refers to two academic papers that demonstrate the link between Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and the race (and poverty) problems that we have today. Nixon and Cheney — it baffles me that such men can make any headway at all in a democracy. That two such extravagantly unattractive and politically repulsive figures have reached top offices forces me to conclude that our democracy is the opposite of enlightened.

I understand that a Miami Herald contributor tweeted that Charleston shooter Dylann Roof “doesn’t look white.” It sounds ridiculous — it is ridiculous. But it is not very different from Joseph Brooks’s assertion, in today’s Times, that the economic forces that Pope Francis allegedly deplores in the latest encyclical, Laudato Si, (I haven’t read it) have actually been of great benefit to the world’s poor.

No commentator excites more scrupulous attention than Joseph Brooks. I go through each column with a fine-toothed comb. Almost everything that Brooks says is genial and plausible. Much of it is even true. But today’s piece is arrant sophistry. In the second paragraph — that quickly! — Brooks is taking issue with the Pope’s claim that “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.” This, according to Brooks, is “overdrawn,” ” 1970s-style doom-mongering.” I would argue, on the contrary, that His Holiness is wrong to say that it’s beginning. I don’t know what else to call the Great Pacific Garbage Patch but “an immense pile of filth.”

Next, Brooks expresses something like “shock, shock” that the Pope disparages self-interest and competition.

He is relentlessly negative, on the other hand, when describing institutions in which people compete for political power or economic gain. At one point he links self-interest with violence. He comes out against technological advances that will improve productivity by replacing human work. He specifically condemns market-based mechanisms to solve environmental problems, even though these cap-and-trade programs are up and running in places like California.

This is the fatuity of the self-made man who can finally put his feet up and take all the credit for his achievements, blandly overlooking the countless boosts that he has had not only from luck but also from a robust political infrastructure that, among other things, protects his private property from the self-interest of crooks. The simple truth is that competition and self-interest are destructive. That is their natural effect. As Brooks points out in his next breath, lust leads to children. Bad things can have good consequences! But let’s be honest: this good consequence (children) would not be on any man’s mind if it were not for the institution of marriage, which, in the absence of better contraceptives, was designed to channel lust quite narrowly (and, many argue, unnaturally). So it is with competition and self-interest. Unless countervailed by social cohesion and common purpose, self-interest leads straight to violence: it’s a default, inherent setting — and everybody who hasn’t drunk the Kool-Aid of business-speak knows it. Even with as much regulation as we have imposed on commercial affairs, we are still preyed upon by rapacious men with no credentials, no social interest, and no commitments to anything but self-interest: developers.

“Within a constitution, the desire for fame can lead to political greatness,” Brooks argues. Yes, it can. But it usually leads merely to the exercise of power, and to the fiercely entrenched resistance to any reform that will reduce that power by so much as iota.

You would never know from the encyclical that we are living through the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. A raw and rugged capitalism in Asia has led, ironically, to a great expansion of the middle class and great gains in human dignity.

I’ve come across this argument several times since the encyclical was leaked. It is true that the gross metrics of short-term material well-being suggest that today’s poor are relatively rich. But Brooks’s “poverty reduction” is both unevenly distributed and environmentally unsound. Access to modern medicine aside, neither India nor China is healthier to live in, for most inhabitants, than it used to be. In India, the problem is sewage; in China, air pollution. Any connection between the expansion of the middle class in these countries and gains in human dignity are accidental: both middle classes exhibit an ironclad indifference to the plight of their economic inferiors. It goes without saying that neither India nor China resembles the United States in being principally middle-class.

Finally, fracking. A fiesta of prestidigitation!

You would never suspect, from this encyclical, that over the last decade, one of the most castigated industries has, ironically, produced some of the most important economic and environmental gains. I’m talking of course about fracking.

Two great things about fracking! Less air pollution (because of less coal burning)! More well-paying jobs! One bad thing about fracking that Brooks overlooks: seismic side-effects! Those well-paying jobs turn out to be physically corrosive and temporary. No one has ever built a safe and stable economy of jobs on resource extraction. And it doesn’t matter how low pollution gets, so long as it still exceeds the earth’s capacity to absorb and neutralize it. Large-scale fracking has no history, so promises and guarantees about its long-term implications are absolutely empty.

The very worst thing about Brooks’s piece is its failure to recognize the encyclical’s time-frame, which is timeless. This is a characteristic weakness of market-oriented thinking. Given short-term referents, most environmental policies appear to be impracticable. This brings us back to the self-satisfied self-made man. He measures out success in lifespans, and his only concern is his own success. Environmental issues must be worked out in terms of decades, if not centuries, and they must take into account and reconcile many, yes, competing interests. By which I mean that the competing interests are not to be permitted to duke it out among themselves. Are market forces going to provide a mechanism for solving disagreements between East and West (China and the United States) on automotive emissions? I don’t think so.

How marvelous it would be if heavy industry were operated by secular Franciscans (praised in Laudato Si), or, even better, by worldly counterparts of the Pope’s own order, the Jesuits, for the greater glory of creation.