By Michael Novak

Simon and Schuster Publications

Chapter 20

A Theology of Democratic Capitalism

The industrial regime inherited from Europe has now become unrecognizable in this country. It has been superseded by new economic structures which are still in the making, and in a state of fluidity, but which render both capitalism and socialism things of the past. Free enterprise and private ownership function now in a social context and a general mood entirely different from those of the nineteenth century.

Jacques Maritain, Reflections on America (1)

1. The Importance of Ideals

The ideals a system is designed to serve, especially if they are transcendent ideals, stimulate each new generation to advance the work of its forebears. Building a humane social order is not a task for one generation merely. It is a journey of a thousand years. For democratic capitalism, barely two hundred have been traversed. To know its ideals is to be restless under the status quo and to wish to do better in the future.

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It is important to grasp the ideals of a system clearly for another j reason. There are many on the democratic left in the United States I who interpret their own experience, judge the system in which they live, and try to direct its development, according to the ideals of socialism. Democratic capitalism, which is exceedingly flexible and experimental, has learned much from their efforts. Yet in the end, it is surely better for them and for the American system to be clear about each other. Insofar as socialism is a unitary system, dominated in all its parts by a state apparatus, socialism is not an improvement upon democratic capitalism but a relapse into the tyrannical unities from which the latter has emerged. A unitary, dominant, central state authority has been tried before. The enforcement of high moral ideals by coercion of law has been , tried before.

Insofar as democratic socialism has given up the classic positions of Marxism and the collectivized state, it may now be no more than a left-wing variant of democratic capitalism. Insofar as I it separates the moral-cultural system from the state, and also separates the economy (in some degree) from the state, it preserves the pluralist structure of democratic capitalism intact. In practice, of course, the political, economic, and moral-cultural programs of democratic socialists do not run helter-skelter. Running through them is a consistent thread of statism. In general, the left wishes to strengthen the political system at the expense of the economic system and the moral-cultural system.

It is the role of socialists on the Democratic left, as Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, instruct their readers, to become the "conscience" of the Democratic Party. (2) But this conscience is not the conscience of democratic capitalism. It is the conscience of the socialist system they wish America yet to become.

My reasons for not wishing to march into the cold with them have already been given. Here I would like merely to summarize some of the important doctrines of Christianity (of which there are analogues in Judaism and other major religions) which helped to supply the ideas through which democratic capitalism has emerged in history.

It is no accident that democratic capitalism arose first in Jewish-Christian lands (or that it is imitable only in analogous cultures). Apart from certain specific views of human life and human hope, neither a democratic polity nor a market economy makes sense.

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If those who live under democratic capitalism lose sight of the moral foundations of the system, a loss of morale is likely to occur. Moral ignorance will bring moral paralysis. Necessary reforms and advances cannot be attempted when individuals within the system have lost sight of its proper ideals.

Some theologians may be dismayed that I do not more often cite Scripture in what follows. A host of texts is at my disposal. The economy of biblical nations in the Near Eastern basin was, after all, an economy of caravans and traders, a desert crossroads of active commercial life. (3) Nonetheless, writers of the biblical era did not envisage questions of political economy such as those we face today. The revelation of God which Christians and Jews (and Muslims) hold to have been given through these writings was intended for all human beings universally, in all conceivable systems, even in systems of slavery (which have dominated world history) as well as in societies of hunters, in agricultural societies, in urban societies, in primitive societies, in modern societies, in future societies. For all such contexts, Scripture has words of universal power. It is a mistake, I believe, to try to bind the cogency of Scripture to one system merely. The Word of God is transcendent. It judges each and every system, and finds each gravely wanting. Liberation theologians in the Third World today err in binding Scripture to a socialist political economy, and I do not wish to indulge in a parallel mistake.

For candor's sake, I must add that the emphasis upon Scripture studies during the past generation does not seem to have effected, as its sponsors hoped, the revitalization of Christian life and practice. There is a great gap between the Word of God and systems of economic, political, social, and cultural thought in modern societies. The human mind requires a powerful set of philosophical and theological concepts in order to relate the pure and simple Word of Scripture to the complex body of modern thought. By trying to take a shortcut around systematic philosophical and theological reflection, and by ignoring intellectual and social history, too many contemporary clergymen, theologians, and devout lay-persons have ensnared themselves in pious simplicities which falsify reality. Quoting Scripture, they do not manage to relate the Word of God incarnationally to every fiber of modern civilization. They fail to understand that Scripture applied to the real world without exact intellectual analysis echoes emptily. Those who would apply Scripture to public policy cannot take shortcuts.

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On this terrain, there can scarcely be certainty. Perhaps they are right who believe that "Christianity is the religion of which socialism is the practice." I do not think they are right, and I have tried to set forth reasons for this judgment. For my part, I do not claim that democratic capitalism is the practice of which Christianity and Judaism are the religions. That is not my view. Both Christianity and Judaism have flourished, or at least survived, in every sort of social system known to humankind. If democratic capitalism were to perish during the next fifty years, as well it may, Christianity and Judaism could still survive; according to God's promise, they will survive to the end of time. It is essential, then, not to confuse the transcendence of Christianity and Judaism with the survival of democratic capitalism. If democratic capitalism were to perish from the earth, humankind would decline into relative darkness and Jews and Christians would suffer under regimes far more hostile to their liberties and their capacities. Yet Judaism and Christianity do not require democratic capitalism. It is only that without it they would be poorer and less free. Among political economies, there may be something better than self-correcting democratic capitalism. If so, it is not yet in sight

It is, therefore, a sad commentary on the sociology of knowledge in the Christian churches that so few theologians or religious leaders understand economics, industry, manufacturing, trade, and finance. Many seem trapped in pre-capitalist modes of thought. Few understand the laws of development, growth, and production. Many swiftly reduce all morality to the morality of distribution. They demand jobs without comprehending how jobs are created. They demand the distribution of the world' s goods without insight into how the store of the world's goods may be expanded. They desire ends without critical knowledge about means. They claim to be leaders without having mastered the techniques of human progress. Their ignorance deprives them of authority. Their good intentions would be more easily honored if supported by evidence of diligent intelligence in economics.

Yet it is not economics that is our proper subject here. Our task is to cite, if all too briefly, religious doctrines which have been powerful in leading humanity, slowly and fitfully, to those formulations of institutional practices which have made economic development, political liberty, and a moral-cultural commitment to progress on earth emerge in history as a realistic force.

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I judge such doctrines most important, and will address them in their Christian form.

2  Six Theological Doctrines

1. The Trinity.

The first of these is the symbol of the Trinity. No one has seen God. What we know of God can only be inferred from our experience and from what God has chosen to reveal of Himself. These are the two sources of our knowledge: what we learn from the works of the Creator and the Lord of History, and what we learn from His self-revelation. Characteristically, therefore, humans develop a language about God, inadequate as they recognize it to be, based upon what they most value in their own experience. They seek signs of the godly in everything. "Grace,"

George Bemanos tells us, "is everywhere." (4)

The one God of Christians is also plural; appropriately, then, the mind becomes accustomed to seeing pluralism-in-unity throughout creation, even in social systems.

Some Protestants fear that any knowledge of God which arises from human experience is bound to be flawed and distorted-to be, in the final measure, idolatrous compared to God as He knows Himself. Yet in this matter experience and Scripture are at one: Community is essential to our notion of God. Jesus described Himself as the Son, one with the Father, and one as well with the Holy Spirit of love whom the Father would send. These are dark words. But they do suggest that even God is not best thought of as the Aristotelian Nous, a lonely individual in solitariness. A plural God, yet one?

No one sees God or comprehends what can be intended in speaking of God as Three-in-one. Yet it is at least clear that God is more to be conceived as a kind of community than as a solitary individual. From human experience, human beings have learned to place highest value upon communities of love, however humble and flawed.

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The image of the solitary loner, however noble and heroic, however brave in facing the darkness alone, somehow rings false as a representation of the highest of human experiences. What is most valued among humans is that community within which individuality is not lost. To build such community is to share God's life. (It is through this strong sense of community that Judaism supplies an analogous way to God.)

I do not think it wrong to hold that this lesson of experience is consistent with the teaching of Scripture. Experience and Scripture alike suggest that what is most real in human life, of highest value, most godlike, is a community of persons. Thus the creation images the Creator, and the creature is made to be in God's image, through community. When Jesus says, "Forsake all and follow me" (Matthew 16:24), he is givirig his life for the entire human community. So must we all.

It is true that socialism aims at community. It is less clear that its institutional arrangements effect, or can effect, the survival of individuality. This deficiency makes the community socialism builds suspect. In practice, it exhibits itself more as collective than as community.

The problem posed for political economy by the doctrine of the Trinity is how to build human community without damage to human individuality. How can there be one and yet many? How can all humans be united as one, yet retain personal liberty in insight and choice? This is the systemic problem which democratic capitalism has set out to solve. Its solution is remote from being perfect. Democratic capitalism is by no means the Kingdom of God. It remains in partial bondage to the world, the flesh, and the devil. Yet St. Patrick saw a metaphor for the Trinity in a shamrock. St. Augustine saw a metaphor for God in the procession of an insight (the Word) from an active intelligence (the Father), and in the procession of the choice of love (the Spirit) from both. These metaphors do not represent God adequately. They are merely arrows shot, as it were, in God's direction and fated from the beginning to fall short. Yet they do direct our attention in the direction of awe, silence, and wonder. Metaphors taken from silent nature and from the inner life of the human person are dangerous. Those taken from political economy may be even more so. Yet analogy is the air the Catholic mind breathes.

In everything I have been taught to seek God's presence. Thus also in political economy.

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I find attractive - and resonant with dark illumination - a political economy differentiated and yet one . Each of its component systems has a certain autonomy from the others; each system is interdependent with the others. Each has its distinctive operations, methods, rules. Each tames and corrects and enhances the others.

Moreover, this systemic differentiation is designed to permit '. many other sorts of communities to flourish. To be sure, the forms of each of these communities-families, neighborhoods, local agencies, interest groups, voluntary associations, churches, unions, corporations, guilds, societies, schools - are transformed under democratic capitalism into modalities unfamiliar in previous history. Less and less are they rooted in kith and kin, blood and status, propinquity and immobility. They have become more voluntary, fluid, mobile. They are nonetheless communities for that. Further, for too long the philosophers of democratic capitalism have neglected them, being hypnotized by the two dominant historical emergences, the individual and the state. Yet in fact, even if insufficiently studied in theory, these "mediating communities" make the life of individuals and the life of states possible. In Poland, for example, the clumsy state apparatus is the despair of millions, who derive their real sustenance from their families, neighbors, friends, churches, and other social institutions. Strong individuals need strong mediating structures both in order to become what they are and in order to act effectively in the world. States need strong mediating structures in order to accomplish more cheaply and efficiently and with greater love what the state either cannot do at all or can do only at prohibitive expense and badly. When mediating communities suffer and are broken, both individuals and states are crippled.

Under democratic capitalism, the individual is freer than under any other political economy ever experienced by the human race, and this fact has led some scholars to speak of anomie, alienation, fragmentation. Such abstractions move us when we imagine others as straIige, discrete objects separate from ourselves. Yet the scholars who write of such things do not appear to be particularly anomic, alienated, or fragmented; nor do their readers; nor our own families, loved ones, and mediating communities. In all societies, one meets lost souls, but there is no evidence that their number increases under conditions of modernity. It is obviously true that old forms of community die and that all forms of community become subtly different.

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It is also obvious that new forms bring their own pains, doubts, and uncertainties. But under democratic capitalism mediating communities multiply and thrive, become subject to choice, and afford enormous variety and possibility

Under democratic capitalism, each individual participates in many vital communities. The social life of each is not exhausted by the state or controlled by the state. The federal government alone presently has at its disposal an annual budget reaching $452 billion, excluding intergovernmental transfer payments. State and local governments spend another $381 billion. This communal spending averages out for a population of 225 million to about $3,072 for every man, woman, and child. (5) It does not include the communal spending of private associations, churches, guilds, unions, art leagues, schools, sporting activities, and other social institutions. In terms of money alone, the social vitalities of dem- ocratic capitalism are significant

It may seem blasphemous to some to go from the Trinity to communal patterns of monetary expenditures. Yet in the patterns of its communal and individual life, a society does reveal its highest ideals, if darkly. Ideals of community oblige it constantly to do better.

2. The Incarnation.

The second great Christian symbol is the Incarnation. According to this doctrine, God stooped low to enter human history as a man in one underdeveloped country in one particular location in the world's geography. Thus, God did not overpower history but respected its constraints. He accepted for Himself the human condition, including the worst it might offer, death at the hands of the state under conditions of ridicule and hatred. (Analogous to this conception is that of the chosen people - the transcendent again revealed through the particular.)

The implications of this doctrine are many and profound: for the meaning of history and human narrative, of time and evolution, of progress and decline, of respect for the laws of the human body, of reconciliation to the world's sinfulness and its capacity for cruelty, of hope and acceptance, of mercy and justice, of love and humility. Many millions have contemplated these meanings in silence, picturing before their hearts the events which gave rise to them.

One of the most poignant lessons of the Incarnation is the difficult teaching that one must learn to be humble, think concretely, face facts, train oneself to realism.

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There are some who always imagine hope in utopian terms. Their hope depends upon the world changing: either back into the Paradise of time's beginnings or ahead into the Nowhere of the future. The Incarnation is a doctrine of hope but not of utopia. If God so willed his beloved ( Son to suffer, why would He spare us? If God did not send legions of angels to change the world for Him, why should we idly dream of sudden change for us? Christian hope is realistic, braced for darkness and cruelty, alert to the forces of unreason and of sin. In an analogous way, the diaspora of the Jewish people and the horror of the twentieth-century death camps have given Jews a profound instinct of realism, a readiness for the worst. Illusionlessness is a high form of Christian and Jewish consciousness.

Actually, both communities are also prone to escapism. In Christianity, this usually takes the form of perfectionism. Its less political form is piety kept pure from the ambiguities of political economy, a quest for personal salvation in the private recesses of the heart. Its more political form includes hostility toward merely realistic ideals, coupled with the utopian expectation of a coming time of justice and peace under socialism. In Judaism, this otherworldly strain sometimes takes the form of the separate community, as among the Hasidim. Among the more political, it sometimes takes the same form as among political Christians: the content of expectation is deliverance into socialism. Socialism has become the name for deliverance from temptation and evil, "the dream that will never die." It is a powerful mythic force.

I do not mean to employ theological reflection as an argument for or against any form of political economy. My aim is more modest. The point of Incarnation is to respect the world as it is, to acknowledge its limits, to recognize its weaknesses, irrationalities, and evil forces, and to disbelieve any promises that the world is now or ever will be transformed into the City of God. If Jesus could not effect that, how shall we? If the tears of six million victims pleading for their loved ones could not effect that, how shall we? The world is not going to become-ever-a kingdom of justice and love. This is not a counsel against hope. It is a moderate and realistic response to the questions of Kant: "Who are we? What ought we to do? What may we hope?"

We may hope that God does not abandon us (though He did abandon Jesus); and that, even in His abandonment, His will shall be done. We may hope that great deeds may be done through us, even though we in person never live to see their fruits.

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We may hope that time is God's narrative and that through its fullness yet more of His justice and mercy will be revealed. We may hope His kingdom will unfold in our midst partially and gradually, as yeast unfolds in dough or as seeds do in the ground. We may hope in modest progress but not in final victory over irrationality and sin. We may hope in revolutions if they are rooted in realism, but not in utopia. We may hope in the capacities of human decency, but not without vigilance. We may hope in common sense and in practical wisdom, in plain love and heroic virtue, but we must be ready for betrayals. There are, alas, many vices humans are prey to.

These hopes are modest hopes. Such hopes would have been necessary had we lived with Christ and seen Him die, or struggled to retain humanity in the pitiless desolation of Buchenwald. They are illusionless hopes. They are conservative by comparison with every form of utopia. They are progressive by comparison with every form of cynicism.

A political economy patterned upon the doctrine of the Incarnation or upon the bittersweet history of the Jews - those two symbols so powerful in the minds of Thomas Jefferson and others of his generation - must necessarily seem to the perfectionist mind and to the angelic temperament too limited, even reactionary, too stubbornly mired in the stuff of present perplexities. Some speak of an "eschatological break" with the past, a "new beginning" for the human race. Such utopianism was not absent among those who thought to establish in America a "New World" apart from the tangled sins and distortions of the "Old World." In the name of such utopianism, righteous intolerance and feigned innocence have not been unknown. In the coercive power of Christian love, the world has had reason to learn that there is no hate like Christian hate. (Except that every human being may fall prey to hate.) The pure fury of reformers can kill. Those who claim enlightened virtue often carry unexamined viciousness in their hearts.

Although the Founding Fathers, too, were tempted by perfectionism, they strove manfully to design institutions proportionate not to angels or to saints but to sinners. They did not try to construct utopia. They tried to check and limit vice, tyranny most of all, even tyranny in the name of morality and religion.

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They chose as their model citizen, for whom the system was designed, neither the saint nor the preacher, neither the hero of war nor the aristocrat, neither the poet nor the philosopher, neither the king nor the peasant, but the free man of property and commerce. They did that precisely because they thought such a man was more common, more visibly human both in virtues and in vices, thus cut to the size of sinfulness and plain expectation. (Not incidentally, Jesus the carpenter was such a man, and even Jesus the preacher stressed plain wisdom. ) There would be room enough within the system they designed for every form of heroism and high virtue, noble thought and brilliant deed. But the system as a system was cut to common cloth. It is easily enough subjected to ridicule and scorn. Their aim was to have it commended not for its exhilaration but for its simplicity and practicality.

They called theirs a "revolution," but in the history of the world's revolutions it was more nearly than any other designed upon common and practical lines, hardly at all pretentious, and by no means free from sin. They did not design it to be a vessel of grace and salvation, but simply as a removens prohibens within which human beings might work out such destiny as they judged themselves to be called to. They went about it not as poets build up visions but as carpenters lay a hull and set in place its beams. They designed it, like Noah, against whatever floods and hazards history might have in store for it. What dreams it sailed toward they left to each generation's crews and captains. They understood their role to be, not that of priests or philosophers charting stars the ship should follow, but that of builders whose rule was that the system as a whole be seaworthy. Paradise and salvation, peace and justice, they did not promise. The task of political economy is not to guide the ship but to make a voyage possible.

Not every dream of political economy is equally credible. Among the limited possibilities, one must choose. Before abandoning ship, moreover, one would wish to observe the other ships a little.

The single greatest temptation for Christians is to imagine that the salvation won by Jesus has altered the human condition. Many attempt to judge the present world by the standards of the gospels , as though the world were ready to live according to them. Sin is not so easily overcome. A political economy for sinners, even Christian sinners (however well intentioned), is consistent with the story of Jesus. A political economy based on love and justice is to be found beyond, never to be wholly incarnated within human history.

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The Incarnation obliges us to reduce our noblest expectations, so to love the world as to fit a political economy to it, nourishing all that is best in it.

3. Competition.

The great Catholic spiritual writer Tanquerey once observed that on the whole, candidates attracted to the priesthood and religious life tend to be drawn disproportionately from those of passive, sweet, and noncompetitive temperaments. This was, he thought, a fair enough distribution of temperaments, given their role and function in the Mystical Body. Wide experience of life teaches one the astuteness of this observation. Religious professionals are expected, in the main, to be conciliators and reconcilers. They counsel those in grief and in perplexity. They tend the sick and dying. They teach the unruly and the stubborn. Men and women of peace, they are not expected to display a flagrant will-to-power, self-assertion, a bold pride of person. Many exceptions test the generalization but do not invalidate it.

But the danger this tilt in temperament presents to religious communities, as communities intended for all personalities of every type, is plain enough. Given the work they have to do, chaplains and ministers, church workers and nuns, teachers and nurses, professors and canon lawyers are lucky if they have temperaments to match their duties. To try to impose upon the Christian people at large, however, the style that works for them is bound to make other kinds of Christians ill at ease. Apolitical economy needs bold political leaders who thrive in contests of power and willful dreamers and builders who delight in overcoming economic difficulties in order to produce. The will-to-power must be made creative, not destroyed.

In this respect, Judaism and Christianity are religions of narrative and liberty. In every story in the Bible, attention is focused upon the moment of decision. In any given story, dramatic interest is aroused because the outcome remains in doubt until the closing lines. King David might, or might not, betray his closest friend. In some episodes, David is virtuous; in others, vicious. The same human being, in his liberty, may say yes to grace, or like the rich young man turn sadly away in declination. Judaism and Christi- anity, in other words, envisage human life as a contest. The ultimate competition resides in the depths of one's own heart. Much is to be gained, much lost. "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?" (Mk. 8:36).

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The stakes are real; there are winners and losers. "Many are called, few are chosen" (Mt. 20:16).

The Jewish and Christian view shows that God is not committed to equality of results. One steward differs from another in his performance; some virgins are foolish, some wise. The faithful son receives no celebration comparable to the one given by his father for the prodigal. Workers who arrive at the eleventh hour receive the same wage as those who bore the whole day's heat. St. Paul bids all to compete, to measure themselves as he measures himself, and to outdo him if one can: God will be the judge. Religious compassion does not entail leveling.

It is altogether natural within a Jewish and Christian civilization for autobiography to enter the world as a literary form, and to accept as its natural dynamic the image of "pilgrim's progress,"

a journey, a race, a combat, a struggle against the self and the world and the devil. Implicit in such a life form is not only the possibility of failure but standards of more and less. Life is under judgment. All are not equal. Some who receive many talents do little with them, squander them, or bury them; some produce from them more even than they were given. Human dignity, as Jews and Christians understand it, depends upon the power of such inequalities. Otherwise, human responsibility is empty. Granted that even those who are "elected" are so through God's grace, not through any initiative or power of their own, still, each is free to say yes or no. Success may be due to God alone; but failure is due to self. For God made this world a world of liberty, gave each the capacity freely to choose, and nourishes each in a multiplicity of ways, so that even the power to say yes is given as a gift.

To jump from the laws of the life of the spirit to the laws of political economy is a big and inappropriate jump. Success in this world is often entirely the opposite of success in the life of grace. "Many who are now last will be first, and many who are now first will be last" (Mt. 20:16). God regards not the worldly success of man but his response to God's Word in his heart and deeds. There is, therefore, much reason to be skeptical of Max Weber's view that the Calvinist world view of election through grace led to the worldly pursuit of success as a confirmation of such grace. God did not give Job such a confirmation; he took everything away. The Bible is replete with warnings that worldly success is not only not the same as salvation, and surely no sign of it, but even a common obstacle to grace. "It is as difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven as for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle" (Mt. 19:24).

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There is reason to believe that Calvinist preachers in Great Britain were as likely as any other preachers to inveigh often and sulphurously against worldly success.

One might imagine, though, that those virtues which arose from the worldly asceticism of the plain Christian life turned out, under specific conditions in the urban markets of eighteenth-century Great Britain and North America, to result in hard work, thrift, savings, prudent investments, and, in short, worldly success. It may even have seemed obvious that lewdness, profligacy, laziness, gluttony, intemperance, pride, envy, and other habitual sins were costly, not only in expenses paid but also in investments lost. I have heard corporate leaders even today say that those with factories among present-day Mormons - perhaps our nearest equivalent to the sound people Weber described - have one of the most faithful, honest, hardworking, and self-reliant work forces in the country.

It would be odd if the virtues recommended by the Creator were entirely out of keeping with the laws of creation. One recalls that the Rule of St. Benedict instructed monks to rationalize their hours, to work as if to work were to pray, and to attain not only communal self-reliance but a surplus to share in open hospitality. Still later, the great Cistercian abbeys were very factories of productivity-transnationals, at that in the heart of early-medieval Europe. Virtue can hardly help bearing material fruit, when conditions are right. The relation of Creator to creation would otherwise seem odd.

Still, one must insist that Christian grace is never measured either by virtue or by worldly success. Indeed, Christians some- times bear down on this point so hard - I remember many such sermons in my youth - that success typically makes a Christian feel guilty. Indeed, Weber's theory would be much more plausible if he were trying to explain why Western Christians are so uniquely susceptible to guilt feelings. One could not. make Attila the Hun feel guilty for sacking cities. Christian teaching runs in so many ways counter to worldly success that its appearance - in Protestant nations, at least; the wealthy of Latin America do not seem so easily moved to feelings of guilt - is almost certain to generate moral anxiety

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Nonetheless, onward Christian soldiers are called, bound to daily combat with the self, inspired to noble competition by the example of the saints who have gone before, hearts burning in emulation of Abraham, Sarah, the good David, Jesus, Paul, Stephen, and the others. The competition is relentless. Judgment is constant. Critics sometimes suggest that competitiveness is foreign to a religion of love, meekness, and peace. They have no idea how hard it is to be meeker than one's neighbor. There are abuses of the competitive spirit, of course, as there are of love, meekness, and peace. But to compete-com + petere, "to seek together although against each other"- is not a vice. It is, in a sense, the form of every virtue and an indispensable element in natural and spiritual growth. Competition is the natural play of the free person. All striving is based upon measurement of oneself by some ideal and under some judgment. When that judgment is omniscient and omnipotent, such measurement is keener than any scalpel. Human sports, lotteries, and contests of every sort-in oratory, song, drama, horsemanship" the arrangement of flowers, the winning of tenure-would make no sense if the competitive spirit were foreign to human nature and learning. Most humans rejoice in it.

Furthermore, it is unlikely that individuals could ever discover their own potential unless they were blessed with good friends and rivals, whose exploits teach them how to push themselves harder than they yet have. To live in a slack age of low standards is a curse upon self-realization. To live among bright, alert, striving rivals is a great gift to one's own development. De Tocqueville much admired the distinctive and widespread spirit of competition that he found in Americans of every station. It made the nation seem alive. Ralph Lerner summarizes John Adams's views as follows:

Whereas in other lands, he thought, "ambition and all its hopes are extinct," in America, where competition was free, where every office - even the highest - seemed within one's grasp, the ardor for distinction was stimulated and became general. In America, "the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest." The farmer and tradesman pursued their dream of happiness as intensely as any man. Most revealing, however, were the objects of those dreams. "The post of clerk, sergeant, corporal, and even drummer and fifer, is coveted as earnestly as the best gift of major general." No man was so humble but a passion for distinction was aroused; no object so small but it excited somebody's emulation. (6)

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It does not seem to be inconsistent with the gospels for each human being to struggle, under the spur of competition with his fellows, to become all he can become.

It is absurd to believe, as some sentimentalists will have it, that the world knew no competition before the advent of democratic capitalism. Earlier, it is true, hopes of bettering one's own condition were vain; immobile status was inherited at birth. Yet competition was vital among the Greeks, as it is among all awake and advancing peoples. Otherwise discoveries by genius would not be studied and imitated by others, and progress would stop. The soul of the spirit of progress is the desire to do better. A noncompetitive world is a world reconciled to the status quo .It is further absurd to suppose that the competitive spirit dies in a socialist society. Among zero-sum games, the struggle for power is the most deadly. This is why there are so many disappearances, exiles, and jail sentences in socialist experience.

Among the things for which humans compete, money is neutral and may be used in wise stewardship or foolish. Since it is impersonal and instrumental, its possessors may accept it with an infinite range of human attitudes and use it for a vast range of choices. More to the point, those who have money are obliged by it to become careful stewards, under pain of losing it or cutting foolishly into their capital. Their natural interest lies in investing it soundly and well. This interest leads them to produce more of it than there was in the first place. Thus a money economy is inherently dynamic. What one wins in the competition is not, as in the zero-sum game of political allocation, taken from others, for the original sum is invested so as to be added to, and its investment opens new opportunities for others. In such an economy, it is in the real interest of those with money to see others prosper along with themselves. Those who earn power or honor cannot make their rewards multiply as can those who earn money. Power and honor, widely shared, are diminished. Not so with money.

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Money has value only within a system. The soundness of the system is its only protection. Thus de Tocqueville observes that in "the doctrine of self-interest properly understood," private interest and public interest are fused in such a way that' , a sort of selfishness" obliges the individual to "care for the state." (7) Only the soundness and dynamism of the society as a whole permits investments to retain their value; otherwise money becomes as worthless as "a Confederate dollar" or a German mark before and after World War II. Money seems to be 'a material thing. But it is actually only a symbol, whose value is entirely upheld by social health. In a healthy society, its certificates are as broadly distributed as possible to bind the loyalty of all to a common enterprise. Few societies have invented an incentive so innocent in itself, so self-multiplying, so socially binding, and so utterly dependent upon the common social health.

For all these reasons, it seems wrong to imagine that the spirit of competition is foreign to the gospels, and that, in particular, competition for money is humankind's most mortal spiritual danger. Under God, a wealthy nation faces an especially harsh judgment, but that judgment will not be aimed so much at the existence of wealth as at the character of the uses made of it. On Judgment Day, the rich may find it especially hard to get through the eye of the needle, but this will not be because they had money but because their use of it will be subjected to an accounting on different ledgers from those scrutinized by the Internal Revenue Service. The rich have reason to tremble. If their wealth has been productive for others, though, the world has reason to be merciful to them even if God's standards are higher.

4. Original sin.

The fourth doctrine is original sin, which we have already explored under a more general heading in Part One. The force of the word, "original," may, however, need exposition . Its effect is to deflate human pretensions of unambiguous virtue.

Some among the Greeks, some rationalists of the Enlightenment, and some socialists and other utopians seem ready to imagine healthy, normal, moral, reasonable human beings coming into existence somewhere or someday under stipulated favorable conditions. This is either because they think that the evils and inconstancies of the human heart are superable, or because they think that individuals are evil only through living within evil structures. In the latter case, they try to imagine anew society which will enable men to stand taller, achieve a nobility never before achieved, give spontaneous expression to altruistic and creative impulses, and, for good measure, have only pure and reasonable thoughts. (8)

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The force of the doctrine of original sin is to steel the gullible mind against such illusions. Human liberty is subject to evil expression as well as to good. Human intelligence is not only limited but often biased and distorted. The human passions are subject to common disorders. Those who believe in original sin believe that it is cruel, in such circumstances, to expect too much of other human beings. They believe, furthermore, that the root of evil does not lie in our systems but in ourselves.

Every form of political economy necessarily begins (even if unconsciously) with a theory of sin. For every system is designed against something, as well as in favor of something. Every system nourishes, every system inhibits. That is why some types of persons do particularly well within one system, others within another. The system of democratic capitalism, believing itself to be the natural system of liberty and the system which, so far in history, is best designed to meet the premises of original sin, is designed against tyranny. Its chief aim is to fragment and to check power, but not to repress sin. Within it every human vice flourishes. Entrepreneurs from around the world, it appears, flock to it and teach it new cultural specialties, of vice as well as of virtue, of indelicacy as well as of delicacy. Nil humanum mihi alienum, such a system might well say: "Nothing from the world's cultures is alien to me." Outsiders like Solzhenitsyn are often shocked by such a nation's public immoralities: massage parlors, pornography shops, pickpockets, winos, prostitutes, pushers, punk rock, chambers for group sex - you name it, democratic capitalism tolerates it and someone makes a living from it.

One can imagine a form of democratic capitalist society which would put an end to public vice. The United States used to be stricter than it now is. Halfhearted measures in this direction are still sometimes made. But the heart of most citizens is clearly not in the wholesale legal repression of all sinful behavior. Socialist societies repress sin much more effectively. They begin by repressing economic activities.

If there is to be reform concerning the public exhibition of vice in the modern United States, such reform will probably have to emanate from the moral-cultural system rather than from the political system. But the present ethos is still in an anti-bourgeois phase, in which some forms of decadence are not only not ridiculed, but are admired as "liberation." The wheel may turn again, more than once.

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The denizens of Playboy eventually inspire a "moral majority," whose own errors and decline are inevitable. Sin is where the majority is. Its fashions change from time to time.

A free society can tolerate the public display of vice because it has confidence in the basic decency of human beings, even under the burden of sin. The concept of original sin does not entail that each person is in all ways depraved, only that each person sometimes sins. Belief in original sin is consistent with guarded trust in the better side of human nature. Under an appropriate set of checks and balances, the vast majority of human beings will respond to daily challenges with decency, generosity, common sense, and even, on occasion, moral heroism.

5. The separation of realms.

The classic text is: "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's" (Mt. 22:21). In earlier chapters, we have already explored the importance of structural pluralism to democratic capitalism. This pluralism renders the mission of Christianity uniquely difficult. Some traditional societies imposed Christianity upon their citizens. Some socialist societies could conceivably do so. Under pluralism, no democratic capitalist society has a right to do so.

This means that the political system of democratic capitalism cannot, in principle, be a Christian system. Clearly, it cannot be - a confessional system. But it cannot even be presumed to be, in an obligatory way, suffused with Christian values and purposes. Individual Christians and their organized bodies may legitimately work through democratic means to shape the will of the majority; but they must also observe the rights of others and, more than that, heed practical wisdom by respecting the consciences of others even more than law alone might demand. On the question of abortion, for example, no one is likely ever to be satisfied with the law, but all might be well advised not to demand in law all that their own conscience commands.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has written about the impossibility of a Christian economy. (9) For one thing, a market system must be open to all regardless of their religious faith. Economic liberty means that all must be permitted to establish their own values and priorities. The churches and other moral-cultural institutions may seek to persuade persons to avoid some actions and to take others. Public authority properly forbids some practices, regulates others, commands others.

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Nonetheless, a wide range of economic liberties remains. This liberty is valued as the atmosphere most favorable to invention, creativity, and economic activism. To repress it is to invite stagnation.

For another thing, Christian values in their purity command a high level of charity that is not of this world. Christians are urged to moral behavior that seems counter-natura1: to love enemies; to do good to those that hate them; when struck, to turn the other cheek. Such counsels are high standards by which to fault even our best daily practice. They are not rules cut to the expected behavior of most persons most of the time. Again, it is said: "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Lev. 19:18). It is not easy to love oneself. Escape from too much self often affords sorely needed relief. Often it is easier to love the poor and the oppressed than to love one's next door neighbor. Part of the attraction of Christianity derives from the moral heroism to which such counsels call. Christianity in this sense is like a mountain peak. There is danger in such mountains. Christians who are not alpinists easily deceive themselves about their virtue.

No intelligent human order-not even within a church bureaucracy -- can be run according to the counsels of Christianity. Not even saints in company assembled can bear such a regimen. Monasteries are designed for sinners, beginners, and backsliders. In the world at large, moreover, the consciences of all Christians are not identical. An economy based upon the consciences of some would offend the consciences of others. A free economy cannot - for all these reasons - be a Christian economy. To try to run an economy by the highest Christian principles is certain to destroy both the economy and the reputation of Christianity. Each Christian can and should follow his or her conscience, and cooperate in coalitions where consensus may be reached.

Liberty is a critical good in the economic sphere as well as in the sphere of conscience. Yet the guardians of the mora1-cultural system are typically less concerned about liberty in the economic system than about their own liberty. Intellectuals insist upon a free market for their own work, but easily endorse infringements upon the liberty of economic activists. Journalists are quick to resist encroachments upon the laws which protect their own liberties; they are slow to protest - if they do not themselves encourage - infringements upon the liberties of industry and commerce. So it is and always was.

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These different interests and different concerns illustrate the systematic distortions in human perception to which the doctrine of original sin draws attention. The perception of each of us is regularly more self -centered than our ideal selves can plausibly commend. We are not often as objective as we would like to be. That is why the separation of systems is appropriate to our weakness. At the heart of Judaism and Christianity is the recognition of sin, as at the heart of democratic capitalism is a differentiation of systems designed to squeeze some good from sinful tendencies.

6. Caritas.

The highest of all theological symbols for Judaism and Christianity is the one closest to the personality of God: compassion, sacrificial love, caritas. Caritas is the proper name of the Creator. (10) Thus this symbol is the highest, but also the most difficult to penetrate. Consider such passages as these: "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mt. 22:39). "Love your enemies"

(Mt. 5:44). "Love is the highest law" (Rom. 13:10). "The greatest of these is love," (I Cor. 13: 13) .Such passages make clear that something considerably more profound than feelings is involved. A certain conquering of feelings -- a disciplining and tutoring of the feelings -- is required. Indeed, something larger, more powerful, more profound than the love of one's own heart, mind, and soul is involved: the very love of God flowing through human lives and shaping the world of history - "the Love," Dante saw, "which moves the sun and all the stars."

The distinguishing feature of Jewish and Christian conceptions of love is that love is realistic. It is the very energy of reality itself. For centuries, it was expressed in the philosophical language of "being" and "the existent." It is love that makes things "to be," to "stand out" from nothingness (ex + sistere).

Moreover, even in human relations, true love is distinguished from its counterfeits by its realism. "To love," Aquinas wrote, "is to will the good of the other as other. "11 This means that the lover must not be possessive, reducing the loved one to an adjunct of the self. The loved one is other-an autonomous person. Furthermore, the lover must will the good of the other, not simply illusions about that good. In a word, such love, like God's love, is realistic.

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The ideal of "willing the good of the other as other" represents a profound and complex insight. It suggests to the lover that he (or she) must be wary both of the illusions of the self and of the illusions of the other. It means that the lover must not be led solely by desire, pleasure, or the wish to please, but must attempt to activate a more difficult capacity for realism and judgment. The question a true lover faces is not What do I want? and not What does my beloved want? but What is the good of my beloved? In this way, true friends give each other correction, lead each other beyond their own infantile fantasies, and grow together in wisdom and friendship.

There are, then, many counterfeits of love. True love is experienced like a clearing of the eyes. It teaches one to see what one did not at first see, and what one usually cannot see without struggle and trial and error. "Hell," Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, "is other people. " For Aquinas, love is exactly the reverse: to learn to see the good of another, precisely as other, and to cherish and pursue that good together with the other. In this sense, love is a teacher and leads two friends beyond one level of development after another. Ultimately, the good of each of us is to become all each can become. For someone to love that good latent within us is to call us to grow as we might otherwise not. Friends give each other the most precious gift humans can, not so much the comfort of sympathy as the call to self-realization. They do this, often enough, through painful candor, puncturing our cramped self- images, freeing us from those petty tyrannies to which self-love blinds us.

Love, then, is a great teacher of realism about ourselves. Marital love, in particular, the most intimate and noble of all human friendships, is ruthless in destroying the illusions of each about each.

In this sense, too, love is the inner form of all the virtues. (12) In teaching the self a certain realism, it teaches wise judgment about human frailties and hidden possibilities. Love clarifies the intelligence and the heart, disciplines the merely self-loving emotions, corrects the aberrations of personality, brings one down to earth, teaches one respect for the other as other. Love listens. Yet love can hardly afford to be sentimental; so many vices lurk where good judgment is left at the door. Love is demanding, a disciplinarian, although it brings such sweetness as poetry sings of (in its disciplined meters).

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In English, the word "love" is used in so many vulgar ways, to express so many self-centered sentiments, that one instinctively feels a better word is needed. For this reason, I have headed the present section with the Latin word caritas. For Thomas Aquinas, whom I here follow, amor refers to physical attraction, even of the sort involved in the "desire" of a stone for earth, the motions of the sun and all the stars, the movement of a kitten toward a saucer of milk, the flutter of the heart at the striking presence of another of the other sex. Dilectio, as in our English "predilection," suggests a further and more complex activity, the exercise of choice or election. In a sense, one loves one's parents instinctively, but one chooses friends. (It is a happy event when one begins to choose one' s parents as one' s friends, passing with them from amor to dilectio.) Next comes amicitia, or friendship, the form of dilectio that is reciprocated, the circuit which is complete when two independent persons each begin to love the other as other. Courtships begin in amor, proceed to dilectio, only gradually develop-many quarrels shared, many illusions shattered-into amicitia. (13) Finally, caritas appears in the recognition that the good which one loves in one's friend, and the good one's friend loves in oneself, is God. Then the recognition arises that, of all things known to human experience, the love of friends for one another is not only the most like God, but in fact the way by which humans participate in the - life of God. "Ah! The fire that breaks from thee, then! (14)

To look upon human history as love-infused by a Creator who values others as others, who sees in those originating sources of insight and choice which we have come to know as "persons" the purpose of his creation; and who in loving each as an individual creates of the contrarious many an unseen, hidden, but powerful community, is to glimpse a world in which the political economy of democratic capitalism makes sense.

n order to create wealth, individuals must be free to be other. They are not to be understood as fragments of a collective, members of a kinship group or ethnic enclave, but as individual others; originating sources of insight and choice. Such persons are not isolated and alien from one another. Sympathy, cooperation, and association are to them as natural, and as necessary, as breathing air. Yet when they form communities, they choose them, elect them, contract for them. The natural state of political community for persons is arrived at not by primordial belonging but by constitutional compact. Before the human race chose its communities, it had only a form of pietas, a type of amor, love of country.

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It had not yet glimpsed the possibility of dilectio. Even primordial love of country is good. But choice, compact, election, is better.

In this scheme, the individual is not atomic. Although the individual is an originating source of insight and choice, the fulfillment of the individual lies in a beloved community. Yet any community worthy of such love values the singularity and inviolability of each person. Without true individualism, there is no true community.

In the economic sphere, creation is to be fulfilled through human imitation of the Creator. Creation is no morality play. Nor is it a Panglossian perfect harmony. Many species perished in its evolutionary emergence, and within each species countless individuals have been untimely stricken. Winds have eroded fertile lands. Ice has covered the earth. Rushing waters have eaten away entire territories. Earthquakes, tornadoes, and volcanic ash have wreaked their havoc. The earth bears many scars that antedate the emergence of humankind. The beasts of the jungle are hardly kind to one another. Yet in the caves one is right to imagine that human beings loved one another as well as slew one another. Not so high as the angels, not so low as the beasts, the creation of humans is the most wondrous act of the Creator. Respecting liberty, the Creator allowed sin.

The problem for a system of economy is how to unleash .human creativity and productivity while coping realistically with human sinfulness. To love humans as they are is to accept them in their sinfulness, while seeking a way to transform such sinfulness into creative action for the commonweal. Some argue that the best way to do this is to appeal to social solidarity and high moral ideals. They erect economic systems accordingly. Others hold that the common good is better served through allowing each individual to work as each judges best and to keep the rewards of such labor. For them, the profit motive is designed to inspire a higher level of common benefit by respecting the individual judgment of economic agents. The more the latter risk and invest, the greater return they may gather in. Most will not be selfish with this return; most will share it liberally. If they bury their talent, or squander it, that is their choice; they will hardly be thought to be good stewards. The idea is that greater incentives will stimulate greater economic activism. The more economically active most citizens are, the greater should be the common prosperity.

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According to socialist theory, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The implication is that the poverty of the poor is caused by the wealth of the wealthy. The theory of democratic capitalism is quite different. It holds that economic activism creates wealth, and that the broader the stimulation of economic activism the greater the wealth created. It does not hold that economic activists are equal in talent, judgment, exertion, or luck, nor does it expect equal outcomes. Yet it does hold that economic activism, whether on the part of a few or on the part of many, benefits not only its agents but the entire community.

A system of political economy imitates the demands of caritas by reaching out, creating, inventing, producing, and distributing, raising the material base of the common good. It is based on realism. It respects individuals as individuals. It makes communal life more active, intense, voluntary, and multiple. An economic system which makes individuals dependent is no more an example of caritas than is a lover whose love encourages dependency. A collectivist system which does not respect individuals as originating sources of insight and choice is no more an example of caritas than is a beehive or a herd of cattle.

The highest goal of the political economy of democratic capitalism is to be suffused by caritas. Within such a system, each person is regarded as an originating source of insight, choice, actio, and love. Yet each is also a part of all the others. The goal of the republic is to inspire in each and every citizen the desire to become all that each can become, as the motto of New York State -"Excelsior!"- succinctly expresses. A cognate goal is to inspire the disciplines of realistic judgment: "Confirm thy soul in self-control!" as the hymn puts it. The vision is that of a republic of independent, self-reliant, fraternal, and cooperative citizens, each of whose interests includes the interests of all in brotherhood "from sea to shining sea."

Under external assault and adversity, citizens forget petty contentions and are naturally drawn together. It is less easy for a pacific republic to maintain its unity. Under conditions of prosperity, the same diverse interests that defend all against the tyranny of the few tend to block the full unity of the many. Hence a democratic capitalist republic, in its pluralism, is nearly always in disequilibrium.

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Neither its political system nor its economic system nor its moral-cultural system can function as they are intended to function without the leadership which draws on the ideals of fraternity and community and inspires all to self-sacrifice for the common good .

Caritas is at one and the same time an ideal of individual autonomy-respecting the good of the other as other - and an ideal of community. It is the spiritual ideal which attracts from afar the only approximating drives of a democratic polity, a capitalist economy, and a liberal pluralist moral-cultural system. It is the spiritual ideal whose betrayal most injures the system in its every part. It is not an easy ideal to realize. That is why the institutions which try to approximate it in practice are best guided by the motto "In God we trust," for no lesser source suffices for its full self-realization. Renewal, reform, and self-transformation are, in the light of that transcendent ideal always called for.

3 Under God

All things considered, democratic capitalism will carry a heavy burden to Judgment Day. Its fundamental structure has proved to be productive, its liberties are broad; consequently, its responsibilities are many. Had the experiment failed, had the United States remained a primitive country, badly governed, surly and anarchic, the world might love it more. If the United States were unable to govern itself, the world could scarcely look to it for leadership. If the United States were still poor, no others could blame it for their own poverty. A former colony like other former colonies, it might be eligible for help from the World Bank.

But the United States is not stricken weak with poverty. Its system has been productive beyond compare. Its experiment has (so far) worked. Its people are free. Its burden of responsibility is, therefore, higher.

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In this book, I have not been concerned to pass judgment on the practice of capitalism. I have been concerned to grasp the ideals latent in its practice. This procedure seems to me legitimate. There are hundreds of books about the ideals of socialism, many of them written before there was even a single instance of socialist practice, many others written by ignoring socialist practice. If it is legitimate for socialists to dream and to state their ideals, it is also legitimate for democratic capitalists to dream and to state our ideals. One must compare ideals with ideals, practice with practice.

Some will retort that the real world of democratic capitalism is harsher and more evil than I describe. The question is, By which standards should we judge harshness and evil? In order to judge the practice of democratic capitalism severely but fairly, the first step is to judge it in the light of its own ideals. These must first be stated. They are latent in its own practice; they don’t have to be pulled out of the sky.

To say that democratic capitalism does not meet the ideals of socialism is plainly inadequate. It does not even attempt to do so. It has its own ideals. Whether in practice it achieves, as well, the ideals of socialist and does so better than any extant socialist state - is an empirical question. Someone should assemble the evidence to answer it.

Nor does it suffice to say that democratic capitalism does not measure up to the full standards of Jewish and Christian visions of the Kingdom of God. It does not pretend to do so. No political economy dares to pretend that it measures up to that Kingdom. Yet democratic capitalism does welcome judgment under that Kingdom's clear light: For it is a system designed to be constantly reformed and transformed, and it alone of all known systems has within it resources for transformation through peaceful means.

In the light of its own ideals, criticism of democratic capitalism is both possible and necessary. Undoubtedly, the system has failed its own. ideals, in large ways and in small. It is designed to be a free system within which individuals, interest groups, and moral minorities may try to direct it according to their lights. "Many things," Shakespeare writes in Henry V, "may work contrariously."

Almighty God did not make creation coercive, but designed it as an arena of liberty. Within that arena, God has called for individuals and peoples to live according to His law and inspiration.

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Democratic capitalism has been designed to permit them, sinners all, to follow this free pattern. It creates a non coercive society as an arena of liberty, within which individuals and peoples are called to realize, through democratic methods, the vocations to which they believe they are called. Under God, they may expect to meet exact and just judgment.