The All-Caring State
Very noble ideas, very lofty principles often lead to very unwelcome consequences, while very tacky and oddly shaped experiences frequently get things done. One of the strengths of the clergy used to be that it had a lot of practical experience, which made it skeptical of cure-all ideas. Somehow it sensed that the worst tyrannies were erected in the name of the most noble goals. There are two dangers in expecting too much. One is a sort of paralysis, which gets nothing done at all. The other consists in overturning the world in the vain hope of reaching perfection. Since Plato, this latter strand has toyed with the idea that the location of this responsibility to make all things anew, all things perfect, is the state. Religion, in some sense, was what protected us from this sort of political assumption: that all would be well if we granted to the state the power and responsibility to make all things well.
Within the past year or so, we have been frequently reading that certain bishops and other religious leaders have been going before state legislatures and congressional committees, the Third Estate instructing the First Estate, to testify that religion is not capable of alleviating on a voluntary basis the various problems recommended to it in the areas of housing, welfare, food sufficiency, or education. For the first time in fifty years the government has officially wondered whether or not the real problem is that it was claiming the capacity to do too much, and, now, religion finds itself unprepared or even theoretically unwilling to admit that the state ought not to do most everything. From an historical point of view, one can wonder if this is not a loss of faith in both state and church, though it does seem to confirm Professor Leo Strauss' suggestion that the modern state does bear within itself religious objectives and expectations without the religious resources to carry them out. What seems new, perhaps, is that religion no longer seems to have its own religious sources to carry them out either, something John Paul II has been saying between the lines, over and over again, in recent years.
Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Sullivan of Brooklyn, for example, stated before a House Budget Committee Task Force that the voluntary agencies are already overworked, while government has the major responsibility to see that all needs are met. "From a practical standpoint," Bishop Sullivan remarked, "it is simply not within the realm of possibility to suggest that the voluntary sector can replace major and necessary government programs." The key word, perhaps, is "replace." Evidently, in this approach, the "natural" order is for the government to administer "major" and "necessary" programs. There is no hint of any experience that such programs may not themselves be the causes of the problems in the first place.
Meanwhile, Auxiliary Bishop James Lyke of Cleveland, before the House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, held that,
While the charitable activity of religious institutions is increasing and will continue to increase, it cannot and should not substitute for the essential responsibility that government has to play in meeting basic human needs. The harsh reality of our present economic system is that without substantial and effective government intervention, people will go without shelter. We believe that the federal government has the ultimate responsibility to see that this does not happen.
Again here, one wonders whether this role of the government is merely a substitutional one or one rooted in a belief that government ought to be the provider of housing. Furthermore, it says nothing about the vested interests of government bureaucracies to control housing markets, nor does it state a preferred principle that housing ought to be provided by the people themselves in the market.
Implications Not Indicated
The most ambitious statement was ecumenical, coming from Rev. Daniel F. Hoye, General Secretary of the United States Catholic Conference, Rabbi Bernard Mandelbaum, Dr. Claire Randall, Dr. Ronald Sider, and Foy Valentine, the latter three from Protestant organizations. Using the Constitutional phrase that it is the government's role to "promote the general welfare" in the broadest possible sense, their statement (March 31, 1982) repeated the now almost doctrinal thesis that government should be the provider of basic human needs without ever indicating the implications of this thesis either in political experience or in the American tradition of governmental rule. Indeed, this statement even seems to argue that charity is a very narrow area for what is left over, if anything, after the government "provides" everything else. In fact, for the government to suggest what "charity" ought to do is seen as a violation of church and state. The notion that "charity" is some sort of residue over and above justice is very unusual.
Made in the image of God, the human person is endowed with a special dignity, a dignity, which is protected by a fundamental set of basic human rights, not dependent on charity alone. Among these rights are the right to those basic necessities, which are required for proper human development—adequate income, food, clothing, shelter, medical care, employment and basic social services… Government must fulfill its responsibility to ensure that the basic needs of all citizens are met… Furthermore, we believe it is our duty to remind the government of its fundamental obligation to social justice —its responsibility to ensure that no citizen goes without the basic necessities for a dignified and decent human life.
Needless to say, we have here the complete formula for a political theory that would yield, in the name of human rights, all power to the state.
In modern times, the Catholic Church has stood for a notion in social philosophy that, while government was indeed legitimate and necessary, there ought to be very large areas of economic, cultural, religious, educational, and even political independence. These areas should have their own sources and institutions. The so-called "voluntary" society was seen to be a normal, even preferred arena for most of the usual human activities. The family in particular had its own justifications, rights, and autonomy. The family and voluntary organizations needed economic and political capacities to defend themselves, including property or its moral equivalent. The Christian distinction between the things of God and Caesar suggested the idea of a limited state wherein Caesar did not control everything, especially the most important things. The legitimacy of Caesar was not to be a substitute for handing all of society over to him.
Recently, as we have indicated, the whole tradition seems to have been tending to a downplaying of the voluntary side of society, which from a spiritual aspect is its most important side. Formerly, it was the state, which was more likely to try to "take over" other voluntary organizations, including the family. Today, it seems, the state would like to get out of the business of running many things, only to find itself handed everything by religion on the grounds of the general welfare, which ironically means that the state has a moral duty to provide and guarantee just about everything. A worldwide recession, moreover, seems to obscure what is going on and makes this widening of state power more palatable. The Wall Street Journal, in an article on European economic pessimism, cited a Dutch construction worker lamenting, "The world is saturated—there's no buying power anymore," with a German machine-fitter adding, "Nobody has any solutions anymore" (May 10, 1982). Such contexts suggest a return to the "human rights" positions, which seem to justify the idea that it is the state that is responsible for guaranteeing not only the general conditions of justice and law, but just any chance gambit of what people might want.
What has happened, of course, what religious sources seem to have embraced without much questioning, is a kind of "rights inflation" which magnifies the expectations of the people, who are subtly told that they are less than human if they do not possess from the state a whole host of "rights," including leisure, food, housing, work, and a wondrous list of other things, the provision for which is consigned to the state as its primary moral duty. To be comes to be identified with to be taken care of. The cost of such "rights," of course, especially when they are to be "provided" by the state, never seems to have occurred to the proponents to this sort of approach. Yet not only is the cost a factor, almost always greater because the state becomes a primary agent, but the unattended and unexpected result is that by a process of "concern" and "care," we are left with a state which has no reason not to control everything. This too is ignored.
Religious Domain Abandoned
What seems to be new, then, is that the traditional bodies that have served the function of limiting the state, of warning of its overreaching tendencies, have themselves lost most of their spiritual vitality. They do not even claim to have "any solutions anymore," except to turn problems over to the state. We are dealing not so much with an aggrandizement on the part of the state, which has itself an inkling of what is at stake, but a bankruptcy in the moral and religious area which is willing to initiate little and is content to recommend to the state the "duty" of providing whatever the public wants. This, no doubt, may bring us back to the central problem that religion traditionally claimed was its sphere of competence, namely, what we ought to want and whether our wants are themselves disordered. This kind of discourse, except in certain areas of political theory, where we are beginning to hear talk of virtue again, has almost totally disappeared from religious conversation, to be replaced evidently by bishops and clerics who testify to the various legislative and administrative bodies that "the state" ought to do most of the care and providing. Citizenship becomes the "right to receive from" not the freedom to do.
Who Is To Save Us?
In his book, What Are Human Rights?, Professor Maurice Cranston wrote:
The traditional human rights are political and civil rights such as the right to life, liberty, and a fair trial. What are now being put forward as universal human rights are economic and social rights, such as the right to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, medical services, and holidays with pay. There is both a philosophical and a political objection to this. The philosophical objection is that the new theory of human rights does not make sense. The political objection is that the circulation of a confused notion of human rights binders the effective protection of what are correctly seen as human rights.
Anyone who follows the ins and outs of the human rights questions must be struck by the accuracy of this insight, that we are busy replacing what are human rights basic to our political freedom and protection with an understanding of "rights" that implicitly gives all power and control to the state in the name of these very rights themselves, which are at best privileges and results of largely voluntary activities. The "totalitarian" side of modern natural rights theory, in other words, is now appearing almost unattended in the churches. What we can best hope for, in this eventuality, then, is that the "Third Estate," the clergy, return to its primary task, not of encouraging the state to solve our problems by rather one-sided political activism and narrow political options, but of reminding the people of their own personal resources, which are not exclusively political, but which, when operative, have the effect of properly defining the state by limiting our desires and activating our initiatives. The state need not be our "enemy," no doubt, but who is to save us when even the clergy seems to suggest it is our salvation?
Reverend James V. Schall, S.J., is now teaching at Georgetown University after having taught at the University of San Francisco and the Gregorian University in Rome for twelve years. The author of many books and articles, his most recent books include Christianity and Politics (St. Paul Editions, 1981) and Christianity and Life (Ignatius Press, 1981). Father Schall's last article in HPR appeared in the August-September 1982 issue.
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