The following text is an excerpt, somewhat adapted, taken from the lecture I gave "On the politics of human dignity" at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, last spring. The excerpt deals particularly with the impoverishment of moral and political discourse, and how this poverty has thus far prevented us as a nation from formulating a coherent national immigration policy. +df
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Pope Benedict XVI said the following in Caritas in Veritate no 7:
The more we strive to secure a common good
corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors, the more effectively we love
them. Every Christian is called to practice this charity, in a manner
corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influence he
wields in the pólis. This is the institutional
path — we might also call it the political path — of charity, no less excellent
and effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbor directly,
outside the institutional mediation of the pólis.
The political world Catholics in the United States inhabit
seems to have no room for the kind of political
path of charity Pope Benedict wrote about. Charity has been privatized, and
as a result, our pursuit of adequately just solutions to contingent social
circumstances has become truncated. Further, moral judgment, as an act of
prudential reason, has also been privatized, and this has impact on the
character of political judgment in the wider public sphere.
Part of the problem is that individuals' relations to
the world outside ourselves are increasingly difficult to account for, apart from willing
them. Our wider culture has no basis to talk about mutual concern and
compassion apart from the language of purely willed associations. These willed
associations resolve to the isolated individual who tends to view relations
suspiciously. When social relations are conceived as fundamentally voluntary,
they are subject to severance for whatever provocation an encounter might
unpleasantly cause. The “I do not want to deal with you” that is an ever
present temptation to fallen nature becomes a normative and politically acceptable
response.
Catholic moral teaching, including the Social Justice
magisterium, presumes a metaphysics of human nature in relation, and proposes a
healing and strengthening of these relations by faith, hope, and charity. The
Church stubbornly insists that human political judgment cannot prescind from a
metaphysically prior existential relatedness of all human beings. When there is no intellectual
respect within public discourse for the given of human relatedness, we end up
with what Pope Francis calls the culture of indifference. Indifference
perceives no moral claim based on relation, and it kills by neglect. In the
Church's life this breakdown of relationality is
reflected in the privatization of charity, the loss of the sense that in addition to being an individually willed act of selflessness, it is also a robust gift of
social cohesion.
The eclipse of human relationality as a fundamental
given of politics and law is the legacy of a post-Kantian search for an
expression of law that serves as a kind of imperative derived a priori and applied universally. The tragedy
of our age is that the a priori universal that
seems to govern our moral/political discourse is that of individual autonomy
and the radical freedom of the will. Limitation of freedom by secondary laws is
permitted only in so far as the freedom is perceived to cause injury to
another. At present the “perception of injury” that society permits to be legally
prohibited capriciously excludes vast swaths of the population, from the unborn
to the comatose patent, with the poor and the immigrant standing temporally
somewhere in between.
In our current social predicament law is conceived as
primarily a matter of discerning how to avoid the evils that unrestrained
relationality might cause to the good of national sovereignty, community safety
and personal rights. This state of affairs is precisely the result of the
dropping out of our political consciousness a sense of legally expressed
positive norms that govern the prior good of human relationality. Law as
aimed at promoting the good ordering of relations, so that goods can be
achieved by individuals and families within a community, seems to have passed
out of our perception of social order.
We seem also to have lost the public habitual ability
to derive principles and then discern their applicability within contingent
historical circumstances. Politics, and by extension, law, are increasingly
perceived as ahistorical. This is to say, the principles, or facts, once
assembled, are treated as universal imperatives that admit of no adaptation to
particular historical circumstances. The law is the law. If we seem to
be facing a choice between extremes, between high border walls on one side and
open borders on another, it is because the discourse does not have room for
integrating principles. Only in a political universe where law is conceived as
essentially a collection of universal norms that are prohibitive of evil—evil
understood minimally as causing obvious injury to another-- and not also aimed
at promoting the good of human relationality, is this impasse possible.
Catholic moral life and thought is essentially
integrative, that is to say, it assembles relevant aspects of a human situation
and in so doing begins the work of forming an evaluative judgment about how
particular situations do or do not attain to the more universal human goods
like life, family and work. The move to the particular application is a move of
practical reason that assesses goods and circumstances in a prioritized way.
This way of thinking and speaking is essentially dialogical and integrative. It
flows from a tradition of moral discourse that finds exemplary, though not
exclusive, expression in Saint Thomas. The move from the reality of historical
humanity, to the consideration of prioritized universal human goods, and then a
renewed consideration of how to support these goods among particular peoples is
the social analogue to the Thomistic return to the phantasm. Such
dialogical movement is a necessary and always needed verification of a rational adequatio
ad rem socialem. The move from the particular to the universal back to the
particular again is basic in Catholic social teaching. This way of reasoning
recognizes that at times particular laws need to change because human circumstances
have changed to such an extent that human goods are no longer protected and are in fact imperiled.
The papacy in contemporary times, from Pope Pius XII
to Pope Francis, has spoken with increasing urgency about the phenomenon of
human migration, and what a Christian and politically responsible response
looks like. Most people migrate not because they want to but because the sense they have to in order to survive. The development of the Magisterium on this issue has been largely a
matter of expressing how a theological anthropology rooted in the Scriptural
tradition lived in the Church (presupposing as it does a metaphysics of human relationality) impacts good political judgement about the social order as it develops and
changes. Obviously this teaching precludes an attitude that says "every country is on its own". This aspect of the Social Magisterium responds to a recognition that the primordial goods of human
life, family and social cohesion have been radically affected by the
development of the modern nation-state and the emergence of post-modern global
economic structures. The papal magisterium thus expresses principles, and then
asks that the principles be applied by the responsible political authorities in a practical way to the particular, and
often shifting conditions on the ground.
The attempt to formulate a cohesive immigration policy in the United
States-- a goal that has to date eluded us-- is by its nature an attempt to move toward the particular application of principles. But there is at present no political consensus on principles, nor is there a will to craft a practical policy that aims to integrate human goods. The Church in the United States talks about these principles and proposes the need to integrate them in a practical way that both respects our national sovereignty and also lives up to our responsibilities to peoples beyond our borders in great, often life-threatening distress. Yet, it
is at this more particular level of seeking to integrate principles politically that the Church is often told she
has no relevance to the conversation. Often our own people do not know what to
make of what bishops say about the application of principles to the issue of
immigration. And this is because there is no longer much awareness that Church teaching does in fact impact prudential judgment about the public order and is thus relevant to the moral life of a Catholic.
It is important that we understand, however, that if
the Church as teacher, and if Catholics in general, cannot engage actively in
the articulation of norms that require careful prudential application in law
and in practice, then we are, de facto, limiting
ourselves to the poverty of the post-Kantian search for ahistorical universal
norms I spoke about earlier. The Church does indeed teach norms that admit of no
exceptions, but she teaches much more. The culture suffers and persons suffer if we do not also teach
about human goods that must be balanced politically in a prioritized way.
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