Reading doctrine through ideological glasses
The most pervasive problem facing the Catholic Church in
America today is our predilection for reading both Scripture and Tradition
through ideological glasses. If bad
philosophy leads inevitably to bad science, it leads even more quickly to
bad theology.
The left has a history of trying to reconcile Catholicism
with socialism, even Marxism, despite the explicit condemnations of various
popes beginning with Bl. Pius IX (cf. Syllabus of Errors).
The right’s version sometimes goes so far as to baptize Randian objectivism — to
which Ayn Rand herself would have
objected — but more often settles for its own version of the “health and wealth
gospel”; i.e., invocation of free-market capitalism.
As
I’ve outlined before, “cafeteria Catholicism” on the right tends to play a game
I call the “appeal to theological weight”. If a citation of pope or dicastery
runs counter to a free-market position, the tactic is to claim it sits on a
level of theological certainty low enough that a Catholic of good conscience
can dispute or ignore it.
Even when the authority of a document, such as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, is treated as
authoritative, it’s creatively interpreted so that all the troublesome bits get
ignored. For example, read
this post in Ethika Politika, in which Gabriel S. Sanchez takes Joe
Hargreaves to task for his sins of omission.
Scientific determinism explained
The remark about bad philosophy leading to bad science isn’t
irrelevant. The materialism assumed as a part of classical socialist theory,
especially in Marxism, is irreconcilable with Christianity: either the
immaterial exists, in which case socialism is faulty, or it doesn’t, in which
case all religions are faulty. Economics holds itself out as a science, and as
such relies on the cause-effect thinking of determinism. And that may be a
bigger problem than you might think.
Determinism, where physical interactions are involved, is
pretty obviously true. The cue ball strikes the 6 ball; the momentum the 6 ball
gains will exactly equal the momentum lost by the cue ball, and the 6 ball will
travel in the direction opposite the angle at which the cue ball struck it.
Material cause and effect are also at work in our bodies,
particularly our brains, where thoughts, feelings, memories and commands to
various body parts zap back and forth across our synapses in a miniature
electro-chemical storm. Damage the brain by any means, and those thoughts,
feelings, memories and commands can be impaired.
The fatal fallacy of strict determinism
So much can be granted so long as one doesn’t insist that
this is all that’s going on in the
brain. When determinism, especially combined with materialism, goes so far as
to deny the human power to make and act on choices, it goes too far: it turns what we normally mean
by “reason” into an artifact of chemical and neural interactions over which we
have no control. That reason appears
to work is simply another illusion created by our programming, which we can no
more resist or disbelieve than we can sprout wings with a wish.
Social science attempts the same thing — a wholly
deterministic universe — using social influences rather than neurochemistry.
However, it suffers from the same drawback: eliminate choice, and you eliminate
reason. What we call “conscious decision-making” is merely the outcome of
different social influences fighting over our responses. Of the two, the
neuroscientist’s determinism is the more complete and tyrannical because more
concrete.
The odd thing is, scientists talk about the absence or
“death” of free will as if the illusion of choice were simply a survival
mechanism. Ali
Mazaheri of the University of Amsterdam told Live Science’s Tia Ghose, “The
idea is that you have the illusion of free will as an artifact to be able to
get through life.”
However, if such a strict construction of determinism is
true, then not only is reason an illusion, but so also is determinism as a
reasoned conclusion. Whatever we think to be true, we “think” it because we literally have no choice not to do so.
So, for that matter, is science — we think it works, not because we observe
that it’s produced so much knowledge and so many neat gadgets, but because physical forces beyond our control make us
think so. Free will, then, is a necessary initial condition for reason qua reason to be anything but a
neurochemical farce; Mazaheri’s explanation is merely the babble of a
philosophically untrained mind.
One possible source of this confusion is failure to keep the
material cause-effect relationship of physical determinism distinct from the
ground-consequent relationship of rational thinking. Another neuroscientist,
Jesse Bengson at UC-Davis, told Ghose that “purposeful intentions, desires and
goals drive our decisions in a linear cause-and-effect kind of way …”, which is
simply sloppy language use. Intentions, desires and goals are grounds, not causes, especially not causes
in the sense that the cue ball’s impact on the 6 ball is the cause of its movement; they have neither
the regularity nor the inevitability of physical causes.
Is economics really a science?
At first glance, it would seem that economics is all about
choices: whether to buy product A or
product B, whether to raise or lower
taxes, whether to invest or consume. Study it a bit, though, and its
determinist colors show: the “free market” isn’t really free.
For instance, every conservative talking head who’s ever
trashed a proposed minimum wage hike takes it for granted that, if it’s passed
into law, the resulting increase in prices will
cause people to stop buying hamburgers and hiring janitors, which will cause massive unemployment, because
people always act in their own
self-interest. The implicit argument, the subconsciously understood premiss,
is: “People can’t help it; this behavior is encoded into their genes. They
don’t really have a choice.”
Then we read about the
thirteen states which experienced greater than average job growth after passing
minimum-wage increase laws, and wonder whether economic determinism is
really that well-founded in empirical fact. For while the job growth can’t be
attributed to the minimum wage hikes, neither can the predicted massive
unemployment.
If
French entrepreneur and writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry is correct, then economics
as it is practiced is not only compromised by class bias but ill-founded as a
science. As a “broken clock”, it occasionally produces useful results and
correct predictions; in other respects, however, it tries to explain a round
economic world from a body of flat-earth theory.
Economic determinism isn’t Catholic
Catholic doctrine, needless to say, is built on the premiss
of free will, from the Fall to the Final Judgment (cf. Catechism of
the Catholic Church 1730 – 1742). A reasonable determinism — that’s to
say, a determinism that allows for some degree of free will — is both
philosophically and doctrinally acceptable; indeed, the Church accepts the
validity of the social sciences so far as they accurately describe how people do behave.
It’s only when social scientists assert that people can’t act any other way that they come
into conflict not just with the Church but with the reasonable limits of
determinism. However, the only point of referring to economic theory is to
assert that “the economy can’t work
any other way”.
This is not only wrong but wrong-headed. If you believe in
free will, you believe that people can change their behavior, which includes
their economic behavior. The last argument a Catholic should ever turn to is an
appeal to economic determinism.
