At dotCommonweal, Anthony Annett has this post, "Catholic University's Business School Again," in which -- in the course of making some entirely sensible points about the tension between certain forms of "libertarian" "individualism" and Catholic Social Teaching -- he lodges what I think are some unfounded and in places unfair criticisms of Catholic University and its President, John Garvey (full disclosure: Pres. Garvey is a friend and mentor of mine).
First, Anthony objects to the fact that, at Catholic University's Business School, there was on display a poster that included an image of the headline of this op-ed, which Pres. Garvey co-authored a little while back and which defends (quite persuasively, in my view) the University's decision to accept a $1 million contribution from the Charles Koch Foundation to hire researchers on the role of "principled entrepreneurship." The headline included this subtitle: “This Catholic university won’t cave to demands made by the liberal social justice movement.” Anthony then writes: "I am well aware that op-ed authors don’t often write their own titles and subtitles. But do Garvey and Abela seem remotely embarrassed by this title? Not in the slightest."
This seems quite unfair to me. As we all know (and many of us who have written for newspapers have been frustrated by this), the titles to our op-eds are very rarely written by us. There's absolutely no reason to think Pres. Garvey and then-Dean Abela wrote this subtitle and there's no evidence provided for the suggestion that they were or are unbothered by it. How, exactly, were they supposed to manifest their embarrassment or irritation? And, in any event, Pres. Garvey has a long and productive history as a scholar and a public intellectual (I mention him, and not Dr. Abela, only because I don't know the latter or his work) and that history does not provide any reason to think that Pres. Garvey has any reservations about the fact that -- as Anthony writes -- "'[s]ocial justice' is central to Catholic social teaching, and its tenets are non-negotiable." (Indeed, that history is rich with reasons to think otherwise.)
Anthony writes later:
And in a speech in Bolivia this summer, Pope Francis had this to say: “Working for a just distribution of the fruits of the earth and human labor is not mere philanthropy. It is a moral obligation. For Christians, the responsibility is even greater: it is a commandment. It is about giving to the poor and to peoples what is theirs by right. The universal destination of goods is not a figure of speech found in the Church’s social teaching. It is a reality prior to private property.”
This is the very antithesis of the Kochs’ ideology. It is highly traditional Christian teaching. But would Garvey and Abela view these as demands coming from the “liberal social justice movement”?
Whatever the flaws (and I concede the flaws, of course) in "the Kochs' ideology" (and putting aside, for now, the near-obsession in some quarters with "the Koch Brothers" and the tendency to allow the mere invocation of their name to function as an argument) there is, again, no reason to suggest that Garvey and Abela would dismiss the words of Pope Francis, or the traditional content of Catholic Social Teaching, as "coming from the 'liberal social justice movement.'" Again, it just doesn't seem fair. If one thinks that CUA should turn down money from the Koch Brothers because they hold some unsound views . . . fine. But the arguments that Garvey and Abela made for adopting a different conclusion are reasonable and do not remotely rest on or reflect a "libertarian" rejection of Catholic Social Teaching's tenets. (They do reflect, I suppose, an assumption that the role of "principled entrepreneurship" in a market economy is an important and worthy topic . . . and they are right. Catholic Social Teaching certainly permits, and I think it supports, what John Paul II called a "market" or "free economy" -- which is, obviously, a well-regulated, humane economy that recognizes the important limits on the domains of markets.)
Finally, Anthony takes issue with Garvey's and Abela's brief discussion of the Koch's opposition to public-sector unions' activities, and writes:
Garvey and Abela pull out the favored talking point that the Church has never spoken explicitly about unionization in the public sector. But neither has it said anything explicitly about unionization in any other sector! A natural right to association does not cease to be a natural right because the employer is public rather than private.
As I've written here at MOJ many (many, many) times, it is not, at all, the case that the Church's teachings on labor, the dignity of work, and the natural right of association entail support for, say, closed-shop arrangements and the details of collective-bargaining agreements between public-employee unions and state and local governments. Of course public employees have the right to associate and of course they and their work are dignified. It simply does not follow, though, that there are not important and policy-relevant distinctions to be drawn between the relationship between governments and public employees, on the one hand, and the relationship between private employers and their employees, on the other.
I am not disagreeing with Anthony's premise that, sometimes, the appropriate response by a Catholic university to a donation from a bad actor, or to funding that comes with unacceptable conditions, should be to say "no, thank you." This could be a good way, sometimes, to bear witness to the Truth. But I do think, again, that this post was needlessly unfair to Pres. Garvey and to then-Dean Abela.
Access to Information: Citizenship, Representative Democracy, and Catholic Social Thought
Barry Sullivan
Loyola University Chicago School of Law
November 4, 2015
From Democracy, Culture, Catholicism: Voices from Four Continents (Fordham University Press 2015)
Abstract:
This essay discusses the relationship among government transparency, human dignity, democratic theory, and Catholic social teaching. The essay argues that citizens in democratic societies such as the United States have a right to the information necessary to make informed decisions about public policy and those they elect to enact such policy. The citizen’s claim to such information is based on the belief that each citizen is respected and dignified as a human person when able to participate in this democratic form of governance and decision-making. This right, and the dignity it is based on, finds support in and through the insights offered by Catholic social teaching and in the work of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain. The difficulty arises, the essay maintains, when the Church supports human dignity and transparency as applied to others, but not to itself. That stance compromises its effectiveness in promoting the democratic right to information and the rights to respect and dignity.
Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP has denounced as “astonishing” and “alarming” the prospect of a Catholic bishop being dragged before a tribunal simply for stating the Catholic view on marriage, suggesting that it would constitute a betrayal of freedoms long valued in Australian democracy.
The archbishop made the remarks in the wake of news that Archbishop Julian Porteous of Hobart might be hauled before Tasmania’s anti-discrimination tribunal for distributing a booklet explaining Catholic teaching on marriage to families within Catholic schools. . . .
What's most "alarming", I suppose, is that it really isn't all that "astonishing" (with all respect to Archbishop Fisher), given all the givens, that some would seek to employ antidiscrimination laws in this way. I imagine we'll see more of this, even if not in the United States (given our -- for now -- more "libertarian" free-speech doctrines).
I was grateful to take part in an inspired and productive all-day meeting on "Reimagining Care for the Poor" at Ave Maria University with some really terrific out-of-the-box thinkers earlier this month. We came together to discuss--and really reconceive--parish-based solutions for caring for the poor. The day included a luncheon panel for students and the evening before featured Institute for Family Studies scholar David Lapp's keynote address, "A Poor Church for the Poor." David offered a moving reflection on the work he and his wife, Amber, are doing living among the disadvantaged in a poor town in southwest Ohio. He offered nine suggestions for accompanying the poor:
Be intentional about where you live. Truly encounter the person in need; thank those that serve you, and greet them with a look of love.
Don’t judge. The real tragedy is not the possibility that the stranger might take advantage of you, but that you would harden your heart in distrust.
Respect blue-collar culture. The sense of community and the deep valuing of family relationships are things to respect.
Advocate for the worker. We need to recover from ideologies the unity of Catholic teaching on the dignity of the worker.
“Waste” time with people. Real conversations happen when you shoot the breeze.
Honor the suffering. In the words of Gregory Boyle, we should stand in awe of what the poor have to carry, rather than in judgment of the way in which they carry it.
Look for redemption. No matter how messy a person’s life, there are places where God is at work.
Discover mutuality at the margins. As Mother Teresa said, we need the poor more than the poor need us.
Discover your own poverty. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, in a Christmas Eve homily, reminds us that Jesus calls together all who are marginalized; none of us can say that we are not marginalized.
In today's New York Times, there's this from Katherine Stewart (author of “The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children." Nice.) According to Ms. Stewart, the longstanding practice in the United States of accommodating religion through exemptions turns out, actually, to be part of a plan to create a theocracy and, maybe, commit genocide. Here's one of the more measured passages in the piece:
When they hail religious liberty, they do not mean the right to pray and worship with other believers. Instead, the phrase has become a catchall for tactical goals of seeking exemptions from the law on religious grounds. To claim exception from the law as a right of “religious refusal” is, of course, the same as claiming the power to take the law into one’s own hands.
I suppose that the re-branding of religious freedom as "religious refusal" will be useful to the efforts and goals of some. Of course, to claim exemption is not to "take the law into one's own hands" but is instead to invoke the law's protections; it is "the law" itself which has provided for the (legal) right to claim the exemption. (To say this is not to say that religious freedom is a gift or concession or is not a human right; it's simply to point out that, again, in this country, our positive law itself provides a mechanism for claiming religion-based exemptions from the positive law. As it should.)
I'm reminded of this quote, which a friend shared with me a few days ago:
"There are many ways of bracketing the normativity of normative concepts: . . or by ironically desiccating even the values of one's own culture, putting 'scare quotes' around value terms and sucking out their normative juices so that there can be no claim on one's life."
William Lad Sessions, Honor for Us: A Philosophical Analysis, Interpretation and Defense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2010)
Randall Smith's two-part Public Discourse essay on our superficial and yet increasingly contentious civil discourse is well worth the read. His diagnosis is rich in reasoning borrowed from Alasdair MacIntyre, but even more compelling is his suggested course of remediation. He calls for a strong appreciation for "the logic of ordinary language" and the principles of classical rheteric--but also, importantly, for intellectual humility. How I wish we saw more of this across the board:
We should want to be questioned by others, the way Socrates and his compatriots questioned one another repeatedly—about the strength of our arguments, about the ways in which we are using our words, and about our presuppositions. There is no doubt that “such waltzing is not easy,” to borrow a line from the poet Theodore Roethke. It can only be achieved by instilling in our students a love of the truth and the intellectual humility necessary for fruitful argument.
We are all limited. We all have presuppositions, many of them unexamined. And we can rarely predict the full scope of the consequences any of our proposals will have. This is why engaging with others is not only helpful, it is essential. And yet, to engage with others fruitfully, we cannot begin by dismissing them as unworthy of our rational attention.
We would be better off recognizing that what so often happens with all our proposals, no matter which side of the ideological divide we are on, is that we see clearly the good we want to achieve. What we don’t see as clearly, given the finite character of human imagination and our inability to see all the consequences of our actions, are the trade-offs and unintended consequences we don’t intend. This is where our intellectual sparring partners could do us a great service, if we let them, and if we could approach each other in good will. They may see precisely the problems that our own elaborate intellectual constructions are hiding from us.
So instead of merely “unmasking” the “hypocrisy” of others, what we should be cultivating self-awareness about are the potential weaknesses and limitations of our own proposals. This sort of humility differs from the moral relativism that tries to insist my position is no better or more true than anyone else’s. That attitude merely exacerbates the postmodern obsession with unmasking....
I often wonder at people who set up a straw man only to knock it over and then declare victory. How much better to have faced your opponent at his strongest and to have convinced him by the wisdom of your arguments and your witness to the truth of your position. It is perhaps better still to have learned from him the places where your own argument was weak. Best of all would be for both to have guided one another a step closer to the truth of things.
And then this on compromise:
“Compromise” need not be a dirty word. It should involve the effort to search out what are the deepest and most important goods that one’s opponent is seeking. Compromise can be the art of seeing whether the goods that my opponent is seeking and the goods I am seeking can be reconciled and preserved, if not fully, then at least partially...
He concludes:
If we want things like “peace” and “justice,” then these words had better stop being mere slogans we use to beat our opponents over the head with. “Peace” and “justice” begin with us and how we treat our opponents. To find them, we must achieve what the poet Wilfred Owen called “the tenderness of patient minds,” and resolve to listen carefully, judge fairly, and speak charitably,especially about those with whom we disagree.
So glad Mike posted Ross Douthat's provocative piece on the university earlier today. The Atlantic published an equally insightful article in September entitled, "The Coddling of the American Mind." In it, constitutional lawyer and President/CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Greg Lukianoff, and social psychologist and NYU professor, Jonathan Haidt, look beyond the myriad ways in which "trigger warnings" and the like are short-circuiting the university's authentic mission to teach college students to search for truth among competing ideas. Instead they focus on the consequences of this new ethic to the students' emotional well-being, concluding that this sort of "vindictive protectiveness" is simply bad for mental health.
Here is the list of "cognitive distortions" they analyze throughout the article, offering plentiful examples from universities across the country. (This list is included at the end of the piece.)
1. Mind reading. You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
2. Fortune-telling. You predict the future negatively: things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”
3. Catastrophizing.You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
4. Labeling. You assign global negative traits to yourself and others. “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
5. Discounting positives. You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
6. Negative filtering. You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
7. Overgeneralizing. You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
8. Dichotomous thinking. You view events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
9. Blaming. You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
10. What if? You keep asking a series of questions about “what if” something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?,” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”
11. Emotional reasoning. You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
12. Inability to disconfirm. You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought I’m unlovable, you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems. There are other factors.”
The authors offer a few solutions, one of which is to educate incoming students in methods of cognitive behavioral therapy. Those with a Catholic imagination who are teaching in and leading Catholic universities would, I think, be able to come up with far better.
But the formation in mind and character that college students need to respectfully engage and evaluate competing ideas must start much earlier. Classical schools today--Catholic and Protestant, primary and secondary--are taking this effort very seriously. Here's the aspirational list we offer in our Academic Vision at St. Benedict's, a K-6 Catholic classical school I helped to found in South Natick, MA.
So, what might children educated in the Catholic classical tradition look like?
They are able to discern beauty—in writing, in art, in music.
They are captivated by great books and the engaging characters and stories therein, rather than feel the need always to be entertained by electronic stimuli.
They can engage and take interest in ideas and principles, and the lifelong search for truth, rather than being consumed only by the acquisition of things.
They have an understanding of the historical context in which they live, instead of a bias toward the present and a false idea that moral progress is inevitable.
They can stand up and articulate the bedrock principles of Western civilization and of the American experiment in ordered liberty, rather than believing that assertion of feeling constitutes authentic argument.
They understand how characters are formed and good leaders borne, rather than being pulled by cultural trends and what’s popular.
They can disagree with others without being disagreeable.
In a word, classical (or “liberal”) education helps one become free to pursue the truth and so become the person God intends them to be.
If schools like St. Benedict's can really do this--indeed, they are springing up across the country and showing excellent results--we will be offering to the Western world the building blocks of a cultural renaissance. It is one that is much needed.
I thought this "student-protesters-have-a-point" piece in the New York Times yesterday by Ross Douthat was especially insightful amid these fraught times on campuses. As Douthat puts it in his quick summary of the history of American higher education:
Over this period the university system became increasingly rich and powerful, a center of scientific progress and economic development. But it slowly lost the traditional sense of community, mission, and moral purpose. The ghost of an older humanism still haunted its libraries and classrooms, but students seeking wisdom and character could be forgiven for feeling like a distraction from the university’s real business.
Fast forward to the contemporary university, Douthat writes, and "the university’s deeper spirit remained technocratic, careerist and basically amoral."
But it seems to me there is an opportunity here for Catholic universities to respond to this challenge. Some of the most interesting passages (in Chapter Three, for example) of Laudato si' speak to the concern about technocracy run amok, and--at their best--Catholic universities maintain a commitment to the liberal arts and humanistic learning (even in professional schools of law and business!) that leavens the loss of moral purpose of the university. It may be that Catholic universities can help give the university back to itself. To do so would entail discerning those trends in the modern university that have been destructive of the aims of higher education (pick your favorites) and providing a witness to the possibility of something better--a stronger sense of community, moral and intellectual seriousness, and student formation for a life worth living.
I am fortunate to be spending this academic year on leave at Notre Dame as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow in the Center for Ethics and Culture and teaching a seminar in the Law School. This weekend features the Center for Ethics and Culture's annual conference, and the theme for this year is freedom. Highlights include plenary talks by Remi Brague, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas Pink, Father Martin Rhonheimer, and Father Julián Carrón. The undercard includes a panel on religious freedom with Father Thomas Joseph White, OP, Rick Garnett, and yours truly. Full details are here.
