Beauty and Desecration

Roger Scruton

At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer.

And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form. And no Romantic painter, musician, or writer would have denied that beauty was the final purpose of his art.

At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality -- however achieved and at whatever moral cost -- that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as next in line to kitsch -- something too sweet and inoffensive for the serious modern artist to pursue. In a seminal essay -- "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," published in Partisan Review in 1939 -- critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.

The value of abstract art, Greenberg claimed, lay not in beauty but in expression. This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms. We find this posture overtly adopted in the art of Austria and Germany between the wars -- for example, in the paintings and drawings of Georg Grosz, in Alban Berg's opera Lulu (a loving portrait of a woman whose only discernible goal is moral chaos), and in the seedy novels of Heinrich Mann. And the cult of transgression is a leading theme of the postwar literature of France -- from the writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and Jean-Paul Sartre to the bleak emptiness of the nouveau roman.

Of course, there were great artists who tried to rescue beauty from the perceived disruption of modern society -- as T. S. Eliot tried to recompose, in Four Quartets, the fragments he had grieved over in The Waste Land. And there were others, particularly in America, who refused to see the sordid and the transgressive as the truth of the modern world. For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty -- as Stevens reveals the beauty of "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915. But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.

The great proof of this change is in the productions of opera, which give the denizens of postmodern culture an unparalleled opportunity to take revenge on the art of the past and to hide its beauty behind an obscene and sordid mask. We all assume that this will happen with Wagner, who "asked for it" by believing too strongly in the redemptive role of art. But it now regularly happens to the innocent purveyors of beauty, just as soon as a postmodernist producer gets his hands on one of their works.

An example that particularly struck me was a 2004 production of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail at the Komische Oper Berlin (see "The Abduction of Opera," Summer 2007). Die Entführung tells the story of Konstanze -- shipwrecked, separated from her fiancé Belmonte, and taken to serve in the harem of the Pasha Selim. After various intrigues, Belmonte rescues her, helped by the clemency of the Pasha -- who, respecting Konstanze's chastity and the couple's faithful love, declines to take her by force. This implausible plot permits Mozart to express his Enlightenment conviction that charity is a universal virtue, as real in the Muslim empire of the Turks as in the Christian empire of the enlightened Joseph II. Even if Mozart's innocent vision is without much historical basis, his belief in the reality of disinterested love is everywhere expressed and endorsed by the music. Die Entführung advances a moral idea, and its melodies share the beauty of that idea and persuasively present it to the listener.

In his production of Die Entführung, the Catalan stage director Calixto Bieito set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex.

That is an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction. Hence the many works of contemporary art that rely on shocks administered to our failing faith in human nature -- such as the crucifix pickled in urine by Andres Serrano. Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino having little else in their emotional repertories. Hence the invasion of pop music by rap, whose words and rhythms speak of unremitting violence, and which rejects melody, harmony, and every other device that might make a bridge to the old world of song. And hence the music video, which has become an art form in itself and is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos.

Those phenomena record a habit of desecration in which life is not celebrated by art but targeted by it. Artists can now make their reputations by constructing an original frame in which to display the human face and throw dung at it. What do we make of this, and how do we find our way back to the thing so many people long for, which is the vision of beauty? It may sound a little sentimental to speak of a "vision of beauty." But what I mean is not some saccharine, Christmas-card image of human life but rather the elementary ways in which ideals and decencies enter our ordinary world and make themselves known, as love and charity make themselves known in Mozart's music. There is a great hunger for beauty in our world, a hunger that our popular art fails to recognize and our serious art often defies.

I used the word "desecration" to describe the attitude conveyed by Bieito's production of Die Entführung and by Serrano's lame efforts at meaning something. What exactly does this word imply? It is connected, etymologically and semantically, with sacrilege, and therefore with the ideas of sanctity and the sacred. To desecrate is to spoil what might otherwise be set apart in the sphere of sacred things. We can desecrate a church, a graveyard, a tomb; and also a holy image, a holy book, or a holy ceremony. We can desecrate a corpse, a cherished image, even a living human being -- insofar as these things contain (as they do) a portent of some original sanctity. The fear of desecration is a vital element in all religions. Indeed, that is what the word religio originally meant: a cult or ceremony designed to protect some sacred place from sacrilege.

In the eighteenth century, when organized religion and ceremonial kingship were losing their authority, when the democratic spirit was questioning inherited institutions, and when the idea was abroad that it was not God but man who made laws for the human world, the idea of the sacred suffered an eclipse. To the thinkers of the Enlightenment, it seemed little more than a superstition to believe that artifacts, buildings, places, and ceremonies could possess a sacred character, when all these things were the products of human design. The idea that the divine reveals itself in our world, and seeks our worship, seemed both implausible in itself and incompatible with science.

At the same time, philosophers like Shaftesbury, Burke, Adam Smith, and Kant recognized that we do not look on the world only with the eyes of science. Another attitude exists -- one not of scientific inquiry but of disinterested contemplation -- that we direct toward our world in search of its meaning. When we take this attitude, we set our interests aside; we are no longer occupied with the goals and projects that propel us through time; we are no longer engaged in explaining things or enhancing our power. We are letting the world present itself and taking comfort in its presentation. This is the origin of the experience of beauty. There may be no way of accounting for that experience as part of our ordinary search for power and knowledge. It may be impossible to assimilate it to the day-to-day uses of our faculties. But it is an experience that self-evidently exists, and it is of the greatest value to those who receive it.

When does this experience occur, and what does it mean? Here is an example: suppose you are walking home in the rain, your thoughts occupied with your work. The streets and the houses pass by unnoticed; the people, too, pass you by; nothing invades your thinking save your interests and anxieties. Then suddenly the sun emerges from the clouds, and a ray of sunlight alights on an old stone wall beside the road and trembles there. You glance up at the sky where the clouds are parting, and a bird bursts into song in a garden behind the wall. Your heart fills with joy, and your selfish thoughts are scattered. The world stands before you, and you are content simply to look at it and let it be.

Maybe such experiences are rarer now than they were in the eighteenth century, when the poets and philosophers lighted upon them as a new avenue to religion. The haste and disorder of modern life, the alienating forms of modern architecture, the noise and spoliation of modern industry -- these things have made the pure encounter with beauty a rarer, more fragile, and more unpredictable thing for us. Still, we all know what it is to find ourselves suddenly transported, by the things we see, from the ordinary world of our appetites to the illuminated sphere of contemplation. It happens often during childhood, though it is seldom interpreted then. It happens during adolescence, when it lends itself to our erotic longings. And it happens in a subdued way in adult life, secretly shaping our life projects, holding out to us an image of harmony that we pursue through holidays, through home-building, and through our private dreams.

Here is another example: it is a special occasion, when the family unites for a ceremonial dinner. You set the table with a clean embroidered cloth, arranging plates, glasses, bread in a basket, and some carafes of water and wine. You do this lovingly, delighting in the appearance, striving for an effect of cleanliness, simplicity, symmetry, and warmth. The table has become a symbol of homecoming, of the extended arms of the universal mother, inviting her children in. And all this abundance of meaning and good cheer is somehow contained in the appearance of the table. This, too, is an experience of beauty, one that we encounter, in some version or other, every day. We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home -- the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right -- through decorating, arranging, creating -- are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.

This second example suggests that our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

Look at any picture by one of the great landscape painters -- Poussin, Guardi, Turner, Corot, Cézanne -- and you will see that idea of beauty celebrated and fixed in images. The art of landscape painting, as it arose in the seventeenth century and endured into our time, is devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things. It is not that landscape painters turn a blind eye to suffering, or to the vastness and threateningness of the universe of which we occupy so small a corner. Far from it. Landscape painters show us death and decay in the very heart of things: the light on their hills is a fading light; the stucco walls of Guardi's houses are patched and crumbling. But their images point to the joy that lies incipient in decay and to the eternal implied in the transient. They are images of home.

Not surprisingly, the idea of beauty has puzzled philosophers. The experience of beauty is so vivid, so immediate, so personal, that it seems hardly to belong to the natural order as science observes it. Yet beauty shines on us from ordinary things. Is it a feature of the world, or a figment of the imagination? Is it telling us something real and true that requires just this experience to be recognized? Or is it merely a heightened moment of sensation, of no significance beyond the delight of the person who experiences it? These questions are of great urgency for us, since we live at a time when beauty is in eclipse: a dark shadow of mockery and alienation has crept across the once-shining surface of our world, like the shadow of the Earth across the moon. Where we look for beauty, we too often find darkness and desecration.

The current habit of desecrating beauty suggests that people are as aware as they ever were of the presence of sacred things. Desecration is a kind of defense against the sacred, an attempt to destroy its claims. In the presence of sacred things, our lives are judged, and to escape that judgment, we destroy the thing that seems to accuse us.

Christians have inherited from Saint Augustine and from Plato the vision of this transient world as an icon of another and changeless order. They understand the sacred as a revelation in the here and now of the eternal sense of our being. But the experience of the sacred is not confined to Christians. It is, according to many philosophers and anthropologists, a human universal. For the most part, transitory purposes organize our lives: the day-to-day concerns of economic reasoning, the small-scale pursuit of power and comfort, the need for leisure and pleasure. Little of this is memorable or moving to us. Every now and then, however, we are jolted out of our complacency and feel ourselves to be in the presence of something vastly more significant than our present interests and desires. We sense the reality of something precious and mysterious, which reaches out to us with a claim that is, in some way, not of this world. This happens in the presence of death, especially the death of someone loved. We look with awe on the human body from which the life has fled. This is no longer a person but the "mortal remains" of a person. And this thought fills us with a sense of the uncanny. We are reluctant to touch the dead body; we see it as, in some way, not properly a part of our world, almost a visitor from some other sphere.

This experience, a paradigm of our encounter with the sacred, demands from us a kind of ceremonial recognition. The dead body is the object of rituals and acts of purification, designed not just to send its former occupant happily into the hereafter -- for these practices are engaged in even by those who have no belief in the hereafter -- but in order to overcome the eeriness, the supernatural quality, of the dead human form. The body is being reclaimed for this world by the rituals that acknowledge that it also stands apart from it. The rituals, to put it another way, consecrate the body, and so purify it of its miasma. By the same token, the body can be desecrated -- and this is surely one of the primary acts of desecration, one to which people have been given from time immemorial, as when Achilles dragged Hector's body in triumph around the walls of Troy.

The presence of a transcendental claim startles us out of our day-to-day preoccupations on other occasions, too. In particular, there is the experience of falling in love. This, too, is a human universal, and it is an experience of the strangest kind. The face and body of the beloved are imbued with the intensest life. But in one crucial respect, they are like the body of someone dead: they seem not to belong in the empirical world. The beloved looks on the lover as Beatrice looked on Dante, from a point outside the flow of temporal things. The beloved object demands that we cherish it, that we approach it with almost ritualistic reverence. And there radiates from those eyes and limbs and words a kind of fullness of spirit that makes everything anew.

Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words seem entirely to capture. It has fueled the sense of the sacred down the ages, reminding people as diverse as Plato and Calvino, Virgil and Baudelaire, that sexual desire is not the simple appetite that we witness in animals but the raw material of a longing that has no easy or worldly satisfaction, demanding of us nothing less than a change of life.

Many of the uglinesses cultivated in our world today refer back to the two experiences that I have singled out. The body in the throes of death; the body in the throes of sex -- these things easily fascinate us. They fascinate us by desecrating the human form, by showing the human body as a mere object among objects, the human spirit as eclipsed and ineffectual, and the human being as overcome by external forces, rather than as a free subject bound by the moral law. And it is on these things that the art of our time seems to concentrate, offering us not only sexual pornography but a pornography of violence that reduces the human being to a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting.

All of us have a desire to flee from the demands of responsible existence, in which we treat one another as worthy of reverence and respect. All of us are tempted by the idea of flesh and by the desire to remake the human being as pure flesh -- an automaton, obedient to mechanical desires. To yield to this temptation, however, we must first remove the chief obstacle to it: the consecrated nature of the human form. We must sully the experiences -- such as death and sex -- that otherwise call us away from temptations, toward the higher life of sacrifice. This willful desecration is also a denial of love -- an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture: it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable. The modern stage director who ransacks the works of Mozart is trying to tear the love from the heart of them, so as to confirm his own vision of the world as a place where only pleasure and pain are real.

That suggests a simple remedy, which is to resist temptation. Instead of desecrating the human form, we should learn again to revere it. For there is absolutely nothing to gain from the insults hurled at beauty by those -- like Calixto Bieito -- who cannot bear to look it in the face. Yes, we can neutralize the high ideals of Mozart by pushing his music into the background so that it becomes the mere accompaniment to an inhuman carnival of sex and death. But what do we learn from this? What do we gain, in terms of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or moral development? Nothing, save anxiety. We should take a lesson from this kind of desecration: in attempting to show us that our human ideals are worthless, it shows itself to be worthless. And when something shows itself to be worthless, it is time to throw it away.

We must sully the experiences -- such as death and sex -- that otherwise call us away from temptations, toward the higher life of sacrifice. This willful desecration is also a denial of love -- an attempt to remake the world as though love were no longer a part of it. And that, surely, is the most important characteristic of the postmodern culture: it is a loveless culture, determined to portray the human world as unlovable.

It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time -- I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration -- amplified now by the Internet -- drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms -- the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention -- the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber -- to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us -- the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it.

References

Roger Scruton. "Beauty and Desecration." City Journal vol 19, no. 1 (Spring, 2009). Roger Scruton is a research professor at the Institute for Psychological Sciences in Washington D.C. He is a writer, philosopher, publisher, journalist, composer, editor, businessman and broadcaster. He has held visiting posts at Princeton, Stanford, Louvain, Guelph (Ontario), Witwatersrand (S. Africa), Waterloo (Ontario), Oslo, Bordeaux, and Cambridge, England. Mr. Scruton has published more than 20 books including, Beauty, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought, News from Somewhere: On Settling, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Philosophy, Sexual Desire, The Aesthetics of Music, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, A Political Philosphy, and most recently Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life. Roger Scruton is a member of the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center. Copyright © 2009 Roger Scruton

A Day Without Yesterday

Mark Midbon

Fr. Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang

In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said, “This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened.”

In the winter of 1998, two separate teams of astronomers in Berkeley, California, made a similar, startling discovery. They were both observing supernovae -- exploding stars visible over great distances -- to see how fast the universe is expanding. In accordance with prevailing scientific wisdom, the astronomers expected to find the rate of expansion to be decreasing, Instead they found it to be increasing -- a discovery which has since "shaken astronomy to its core" (Astronomy, October 1999).

This discovery would have come as no surprise to Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966), a Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest who developed the theory of the Big Bang. Lemaitre described the beginning of the universe as a burst of fireworks, comparing galaxies to the burning embers spreading out in a growing sphere from the center of the burst. He believed this burst of fireworks was the beginning of time, taking place on "a day without yesterday."

After decades of struggle, other scientists came to accept the Big Bang as fact. But while most scientists -- including the mathematician Stephen Hawking -- predicted that gravity would eventually slow down the expansion of the universe and make the universe fall back toward its center, Lemaitre believed that the universe would keep expanding. He argued that the Big Bang was a unique event, while other scientists believed that the universe would shrink to the point of another Big Bang, and so on. The observations made in Berkeley supported Lemaitre's contention that the Big Bang was in fact "a day without yesterday."

When Georges Lemaitre was born in Charleroi, Belgium, most scientists thought that the universe was infinite in age and constant in its general appearance. The work of Isaac Newton and James C. Maxwell suggested an eternal universe. When Albert Einstein first published his theory of relativity in 1916, it seemed to confirm that the universe had gone on forever, stable and unchanging.

Lemaitre began his own scientific career at the College of Engineering in Louvain in 1913. He was forced to leave after a year, however, to serve in the Belgian artillery during World War I. When the war was over, he entered Maison Saint Rombaut, a seminary of the Archdiocese of Malines, where, in his leisure time, he read mathematics and science. After his ordination in 1923, Lemaitre studied math and science at Cambridge University, where one of his professors, Arthur Eddington, was the director of the observatory,

For his research at Cambridge, Lemaitre reviewed the general theory of relativity. As with Einstein's calculations ten years earlier, Lemaitre's calculations showed that the universe had to be either shrinking or expanding. But while Einstein imagined an unknown force -- a cosmological constant -- which kept the world stable, Lemaitre decided that the universe was expanding. He came to this conclusion after observing the reddish glow, known as a red shift, surrounding objects outside of our galaxy. If interpreted as a Doppler effect, this shift in color meant that the galaxies were moving away from us. Lemaitre published his calculations and his reasoning in Annales de la Societe scientifique de Bruxelles in 1927. Few people took notice. That same year he talked with Einstein in Brussels, but the latter, unimpressed, said, "Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable."

It was Einstein's own grasp of physics, however, that soon came under fire. In 1929 Edwin Hubble's systematic observations of other galaxies confirmed the red shift. In England the Royal Astronomical Society gathered to consider this seeming contradiction between visual observation and the theory of relativity. Sir Arthur Eddington volunteered to work out a solution. When Lemaitre read of these proceedings, he sent Eddington a copy of his 1927 paper. The British astronomer realized that Lemaitre had bridged the gap between observation and theory. At Eddington's suggestion, the Royal Astronomical Society published an English translation of Lemaitre's paper in its Monthly Notices of March 1931.

Most scientists who read Lemaitre's paper accepted that the universe was expanding, at least in the present era, but they resisted the implication that the universe had a beginning. They were used to the idea that time had gone on forever. It seemed illogical that infinite millions of years had passed before the universe came into existence. Eddington himself wrote in the English journal Nature that the notion of a beginning of the world was "repugnant."

The Belgian priest responded to Eddington with a letter published in Nature on May 9, 1931. Lemaitre suggested that the world had a definite beginning in which all its matter and energy were concentrated at one point:

If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.

In January 1933, both Lemaitre and Einstein traveled to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his theory, Einstein stood up, applauded, and said, "This is the most beautiful and satisfactory explanation of creation to which I have ever listened." Duncan Aikman covered these seminars for the New York Times Magazine. An article about Lemaitre appeared on February 19, 1933, and featured a large photo of Einstein and Lemaitre standing side by side. The caption read, "They have a profound respect and admiration for each other."

For his work, Lemaitre was inducted as a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. An international commission awarded him the Francqui Prize. The archbishop of Malines, Cardinal Josef Van Roey, made Lemaitre a canon of the cathedral in 1935. The next year Pope Pius XI inducted Lemaitre into the Pontifical Academy of Science.

Despite this high praise, there were some problems with Lemaitre's theory. For one, Lemaitre's calculated rate of expansion did not work out. If the universe was expanding at a steady rate, the time it had taken to cover its radius was too short to allow for the formation of the stars and planets. Lemaitre solved this problem by expropriating Einstein's cosmological constant. Where Einstein had used it in an attempt to keep the universe at a steady size, Lemaitre used it to speed up the expansion of the universe over time.

Einstein did not take kindly to Lemaitre's use of the cosmological constant. He regarded the constant as the worst mistake of his career, and he was upset by Lemaitre's use of his super-galactic fudge factor.

After Arthur Eddington died in 1944, Cambridge University became a center of opposition to Lemaitre's theory of the Big Bang. In fact, it was Fred Hoyle, an astronomer at Cambridge, who sarcastically coined the term "Big Bang." Hoyle and others favored an approach to the history of the universe known as the "Steady State" in which hydrogen atoms were continuously created and gradually coalesced into gas clouds, which then formed stars.

But in 1964 there was a significant breakthrough that confirmed some of Lemaitre's theories. Workers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey were tinkering with a radio telescope when they discovered a frustrating kind of microwave interference. It was equally strong whether they pointed their telescope at the center of the galaxy or in the opposite direction. What was more, it always had the same wavelength and it always conveyed the same source temperature. This accidental discovery required the passage of several months for its importance to sink in. Eventually, it won Arno Penzias the Nobel Prize in physics. This microwave interference came to be recognized as cosmic background radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang. Lemaitre received the good news while recovering from a heart attack in the Hospital Saint Pierre at the University of Louvain. He died in Louvain in 1966, at the age of seventy-one.

After his death, a consensus built in favor of Lemaitre's burst of fireworks. But doubts did persist: Did this event really happen on a day without yesterday? Perhaps gravity could provide an alternative explanation. Some theorized that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and make it fall back toward its center, where there would be a Big Crunch and another Big Bang. The Big Bang, therefore, was not a unique event which marked the beginning of time but only part of an infinite sequence of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.

When word of the 1998 Berkeley discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate first reached Stephen Hawking, he said it was too preliminary to be taken seriously. Later, he changed his mind. "I have now had more time to consider the observations, and they look quite good," he told Astronomy magazine (October 1999). "This led me to reconsider my theoretical prejudices."

Hawking was actually being modest. In the face of the scientific turmoil caused by the supernovae results, he has adapted very quickly. But the phrase "theoretical prejudices" makes one think of the attitudes that hampered scientists seventy years ago. It took a mathematician who also happened to be a Catholic priest to look at the evidence with an open mind and create a model that worked.

Is there a paradox in this situation? Lemaitre did not think so. Duncan Aikman of the New York Times spotlighted Lemaitre's view in 1933: "'There is no conflict between religion and science,' Lemaitre has been telling audiences over and over again in this country ....His view is interesting and important not because he is a Catholic priest, not because he is one of the leading mathematical physicists of our time, but because he is both."

References

Midbon, Mark. "'A Day Without Yesterday': Georges Lemaitre & the Big Bang." Commonweal (March 24, 2000): 18-19. Mark Midbon is a senior programmer/analyst at the University of Wisconsin. Copyright © 2000 Commonweal

Benedict XVI on the Global Economy

Robert Moynihan

What Direction for the Global Economy?

Pope Benedict XVI is preparing to publish an encyclical which will speak about the global economic crisis. What will he say?

"Where God is excluded, there is a breakdown of peace in the world; without God, no orthopraxis can save us. In fact, there does not exist an orthopraxis which is simply just, detached from a knowledge of what is good. The will without knowledge is blind and so action, orthopraxis, without knowledge is blind and leads to the abyss. Marxism's great deception was to tell us that we had reflected on the world long enough, that now it was at last time to change it. But if we do not know in what direction to change it, if we do not understand its meaning and its inner purpose, then change alone becomes destruction - as we have seen and continue to see. But the inverse is also true: doctrine alone, which does not become life and action, becomes idle chatter and so is equally empty. The truth is concrete. Knowledge and action are closely united, as are faith and life." —Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Lecture in Benevento, Italy, on "Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity," on June 2, 2002.

"It is undeniable that the liberal model of the market economy, especially as moderated and corrected under the influence of Christian social ideas, has in some parts of the world led to great success. All the sadder are the results, especially in places like Africa, where clashing power blocs and economic interests have been at work. Behind the apparent beneficial models of development there has all too often been hidden the desire to expand the reach of particular powers and ideologies in order to dominate the market. In this situation, ancient social structures and spiritual and moral forces have been destroyed, with consequences that echo in our ears like a single great cry of sorrow." (Ibid.)

It is generally expected in Rome that a major encyclical letter on the Church's social teaching, which will include reflections on the global economic crisis and what to do about it, will be signed by Pope Benedict XVI on June 29, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and be published soon after.

(Note: This is not certain, and I was told yesterday that some translations of the encyclical are not yet finalized, which could mean that the publication will be delayed for some time yet; nevertheless, the essential point is that the encyclical is written, and in translation, and will be published soon.)

What will the encyclical say? Will it condemn the excesses of the globalized financial system, as immoral and fraudulent manipulations which tighter regulation and a deeper commitment to honest dealing and fair business practices might have prevented?

Perhaps. No leaks of the encyclical's contents have occurred, but the Pope has given hints in speeches in recent days, and over many years, of his general views on economic matters, which may provide a context as we prepare to read the encyclical when it does appear.

What we can say with certainty is that the encyclical will be a clarion call for justice in economic dealings, for an end to the oppression of the weak by the strong due to economic policies marked by recklessness and deception, enriching a few and impoverishing many.

From the time of the Hebrew prophets, and throughout the history of the Church, injustice in economic matters, robbing the widow, the orphan, the laborer, to supply the wealthy with ever greater wealth, has been denounced as against God's will. God, in the Judeo-Christian belief, is a God of love, but also a God of justice, and his prophets and priests have always, in season and out of season, denounced the unjust oppression of the weak by the strong.

Are we in such a situation today? Certainly there has been a tremendous development of material prosperity in the world, both in technological and monetary terms. At the same time, there is an abyss of poverty which remains, and one can see it in shanty-towns in Africa, in villages in rural Russia, and in many inner cities and trailer parks throughout the United States. As far as the world has come in developing new technologies and spreading the benefits of man's ingenuity and industry, there remains a long road yet to travel before one could say we have enthroned a just social order—an order as just as humanly possible—for all mankind.

According to the Financial Times of London, the concentration of wealth is extremely high today in the United States, with 10% of the population currently holding 72% of the country's wealth, compared to 61% in France, 56% in the UK, 44% in Germany, and 39% in Japan. Of course, concentration of wealth by itself is not proof of injustice in the economic system, but it is an indication that the playing field may be slanted, that the opportunity is not equal for all to build a prosperous life, and perhaps to find and live out a personal life vocation, as God wills.

Three days ago, on Saturday, June 13, Pope Benedict gave us a glimpse into his mind on the eve of the publication of his new social encyclical.

He addressed the members of the Centesimus Annus Pro Pontifice Foundation, which had held its annual meeting here the previous day.

The Foundation “Centesimus Annus – Pro Pontifice” is based in the State of Vatican City and governed by the Church’s Canon Law and the Civil Law of the State of Vatican City. The Foundation’s purpose is to collaborate towards the diffusion of human, ethical, social and Christian values, which are described in particular in Pope John Paul II's great social encyclical Centesimus Annus (published in 1991 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the publication of Pope Leo XII's social encyclical, Rerum Novarum in 1891). The Foundation therefore especially promotes informed knowledge of the social teachings of the Church.

This year, said the Pope, "our meeting has particular significance and importance in the light of the situation that all humankind is currently experiencing."

He went on to say: “The financial crisis that has struck the industrialized nations, the emergent nations and those that are developing, shows in a clear way how the economic and financial paradigms that have been dominant in recent years must be rethought."

He continued: "Your foundation has done well, then, to confront, in the international conference that took place yesterday, the theme of the pursuit and identification of the values and guidelines that the economic world must stick to in order to bring into being a new model of development that is more attentive to the demands of solidarity and more respectful of human dignity.”

The Pope expressed his satisfaction at the topics addressed in the Convention held the previous day, especially “the interdependency between institutions, society and the market, beginning -- in accord with the encyclical Centesimus Annus of my venerable predecessor John Paul II -- from the reflection according to which the market economy... can only be recognized as a way of economic and civil progress if it is oriented to the common good (cf. No. 43)."

He continued: "Such a vision, however, must also be accompanied by another reflection according to which freedom in the economic sector must situate itself 'within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality,' a responsible freedom 'the core of which is ethical and religious' (No. 42).”

Benedict XVI expressed his hope that the research developed by the Foundation's work, “inspired by the eternal principles of the Gospel, will elaborate a vision of the modern economy that is respectful of the needy and of the rights of the weak.”

He also specifically mentioned that his next Encyclical on the vast theme of economics and labor will soon be published.

“It will highlight what, for us Christians, are the objectives to be pursued and the values to be promoted and tirelessly defended, with the purpose of realizing a truly free and solidary human coexistence,” he said.

If one reads these words carefully, one can glimpse some of the themes which certainly will appear in the upcoming encyclical, especially the need for the "common good" to be defended even while the freedom of the individual to make economic decisions is also protected.

Published originally by Inside the Vatican Magazine. A number of Catholic thinkers have helped in the preparation of the upcoming encyclical. In coming days, we will speak with several of these thinkers here in Rome, and attempt to sketch for our readers a context within which the encyclical may be read.

The Journey Home

Roger Scruton

Two Greek words define my topic: nostos and oikos. The first—from which we have “nostalgia”—denotes return to the home, and it is the great theme of Homer’s Odyssey. The second—from which we have “economy”—denotes the home itself, conceived as a place of settlement, to be defended against marauders and also opened to friends and guests. The most basic social needs and sentiments are summoned by these words, and if we are now living in conditions of hyper-mobility, in which no one is settled deeply enough or for long enough to enjoy the sense of home, then it is not surprising that we are also living in a condition of intense nostalgia. We are constantly seeking for the place of rest, the refuge from change and stress and fleetingness, the condition in which we will be “restored to ourselves.” Some seek this place in the past, believing that we must return to a simpler and more tranquil way of doing things. Others seek it in the future, believing that the stress of competition and mobility is something to be “overcome.”

Few if any find the place of refuge in the present. When Wilhelm Röpke set out to write his defense of the “humane economy” he had fallen under the spell of the Austrian school—of Mises and Hayek especially—whose defense of the market against state planning and socialist distribution had taken on a new credibility in light of the tyranny and economic disorder of the Bolshevik experiment. At the same time, Röpke was aware that markets are not enough. They do not guarantee the goal of economic activity, which is the oikos, the place of settlement and security where people are at home with each other and at peace with their neighbors. The market mechanism may not be sufficient for social order, but for all the reasons spelled out by the Austrians, it is necessary.

Only in a market economy can prices serve as a guide to the scarcity of goods, or wages as a guide to the supply of labor. Only in a market economy can individuals plan their own budgets and make rational choices for the deployment of their assets, their labor, and their bargaining skills. The argument developed by Mises in his critique of socialism was, Röpke thought, demonstrative. The centrally planned economy destroyed the information on which rational economic decisions depend. This information is available in the form of prices and contracts in a free economy, but it is irretrievably dispersed by the attempt to dictate all economic factors from on high.

No one who has followed the careful arguments of Mises and Hayek would doubt the point. Nor was it a point that Röpke wished to belabor. Röpke’s interest was in the oikos, which he believed to be threatened from above, by the state—something that he had seen at first hand in his experiences of the Nazis—and also threatened from below, by the anarchy of unbridled self-interest.

It is fairly normal, nowadays, for left-liberal thinkers to pay lip service to the Hayekian theory of the market. Yes, they will say, the market is necessary as a transmitter of economic signals. And yes, without markets economies have no ready way to regain equilibrium in the wake of a disturbance. But markets have no respect for social order; they neither generate nor perpetuate the sense of community on which we all depend. They depend upon and encourage both self-interest and competition and regard nothing as sacred, nothing as beyond the reach of buying and selling. Is it surprising, therefore, if capitalist societies today are witnessing social breakdown on a hitherto unimaginable scale, as the pursuit of self-interest drives all concern for the community from the thoughts and emotions of consumers? Isn’t the “consumer society” precisely what we must expect, from a philosophy which makes “consumer sovereignty” into the first principle of economic life?

Röpke would have endorsed some of that, but he was determined not to draw the conclusion that left-liberal thinkers draw—namely that we need to control the market through the state. Powers exercised by the state, he believed, inevitably end up in the hands of unanswerable bureaucrats, and can also never be recaptured by society, whatever the extent of their abuse. If the market needs to be constrained for the common good, then the constraint must come from below, not from above. It must be a social constraint rather than a political constraint. Thus was born the idea of a “social market economy”—an idea which was to influence German ministers of finance throughout the period of reconstruction following the end of the Second World War.

Röpke, who had fled from Nazi Germany to Switzerland, believed that he had found a model for the social market in the Swiss forms of local democracy. He was also (although of Protestant background) strongly influenced by the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, in particular by the doctrine of “subsidiarity” expounded in the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931. Pius intended this as a description of the Church’s own organization, through the episcopate, according to which decisions are always taken at the “subsidiary” level—the lowest level compatible with unified government. Yet he also implied that economic and political life might be similarly organized, so that power was always passed up from the bottom and never imposed from above.

All that might seem like a call for the empowerment of civil society rather than the state, and so it was interpreted by Röpke, who took it as foundational for his doctrine of “decentrism.” However, it should be noted that Quadragesimo Anno marked the first intrusion of genuinely socialist ideas into the teachings of the Church. Economic freedom, the encyclical argued, does not lead of its own accord to the common good but stands in need of a “true and effective directing principle,” and that principle is “social justice.” Behind that phrase there lurks the whole egalitarian agenda which, in search of an “equality" of condition,” looks eventually to the state to impose it. Interestingly enough the first draft of the encyclical was composed by Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., professor of moral theology at the Jesuit School in Frankfurt, and a thinker deeply influenced by Marx’s theory of exploitation. And in due course the term “subsidiarity” was to enjoy a second life through the European Union, whose official documents declare that all decisions must be taken at the subsidiary level, while reserving to the unelected and largely unaccountable European Commission the privilege of deciding what level that might be.

It is not Röpke’s fault that he was thinking in a context in which socialist ideas had become common currency. But many of those whom he immediately influenced were unaware of the poisonous nature of the “weasel word ‘social,’” as Hayek was later to call it—meaning a word that sucks the meaning from every term to which it is attached, “as a weasel sucks eggs.” Social justice, as now understood, is no more a form of justice than fools’ gold is a form of gold. It is not what justice was for Aristotle and Ulpian—a matter of giving to each his due, taking account of rights, obligations, and deserts. Social justice, as commonly understood, means the reorganization of society, with the state in charge—there being no other agent with the requisite power or authority—and with equality as the ultimate goal. The social market economy is no more a market economy than social justice is a form of justice. As it has developed, in Germany and France, the social market has become a statist institution, heavily regulated from above, in the interests of powerful lobbies such as the trade unions and the welfare bureaucracy. It is suspicious of private property and free enterprise, obsessively concerned with equal partnership, and receptive to every kind of egalitarian dogma. Under the aegis of the social market, the state has expanded to the point of controlling more than half of France’s GDP and employing more than half of the working population. It has so stifled the economy of Germany that now some twenty percent of transactions in that once law-abiding country occur on the black market. And it is steadily making Europe as a whole uncompetitive.

Maybe this story needn’t be told to a reader of the Intercollegiate Review, but it is worth noting a few marginal details. Quadragesimo Anno introduced two concepts that became critical in our time— social justice and subsidiarity. Both purport to be about society, its rights, duties, and freedoms, but both are actually about the state. Their history shows how easily the concepts advanced to defend society against the state can be turned in the opposite direction, to empower the state against society. One important instance is provided by the European Union, a venture against which Röpke frequently warned, rightly seeing it as a move towards centralization and a blow to the localism that he supported.

The Eurocrats told us, when British Prime Minister John Major weakly agreed to the Maastricht Treaty, that it was all right, that national sovereignty would not be sacrificed, that the principle of subsidiarity applied, and that all decisions pertaining to the nation and its specific interests would be taken at the national level, by elected parliaments. But then comes the catch: it is the European Commission, not the national parliament, which decides that a given issue pertains to the specific interests of a given nation-state. National sovereignty is therefore delegated from above, by an unelected Commission which is in the hands of its permanent staff of bureaucrats rather than in those of the sheepish politicians who have been shunted there from parliaments where they are no longer wanted. The principle of “subsidiarity,” which purports to grant powers to local and national bodies, in fact takes them away, ensuring that powers that were once exercised by right are now exercised on sufferance. “Subsidiarity” confiscates sovereignty in the same way that “social justice” confiscates justice, and the “social market” confiscates the market.

So what is the alternative? What was Röpke getting at, and how should we respond to the problems that he wished to address—the problems of social fragmentation and the loss of community feeling, in a world where the market is left to itself ? There are those—Milton Friedman, for example, or Murray Rothbard—who have powerfully argued that a genuinely free market will ensure the good government of human communities, through the self-restraining impulse that comes naturally to us. But their arguments, however sophisticated, are addressed to Americans, who live among abundant resources, free from external threat, surrounded by opportunities, and in communities where the volunteer spirit survives. They do not confront the central question, which is how communities renew themselves, and how fundamental flaws in the human constitution, such as resentment, envy, and sexual predation, are to be overcome by something so abstract and neutral as consumer sovereignty and free economic choice.

Röpke’s own idea, if I understand him rightly, was that society is nurtured and perpetuated at the local level, through motives that are quite distinct from the pursuit of rational self-interest. There is the motive of charitable giving, the motives of love and friendship, and the motive of piety. All these grow naturally and cause us to provide for each other and to shape our environment into a common home.

The true oikos is not a cell shut off from the world, in which a solitary individualist enjoys his sovereignty as a consumer. The true oikos is a place of charity and gift, of love, affection, and prayer. Its doors are open to the neighbors, with whom its occupants join in acts of worship, in festivals and ceremonies, in weddings and funerals. Its occupants are not consumers, except obliquely, and by way of replenishing their supplies. They are members of society, and membership is a mutual relation, which cannot be captured in terms of the “enlightened self-interest” that is the subject matter of economic theory. For extreme individualists of the Rothbardian stripe, life in society is simply one species of the “coordination problem,” as the game theorists describe it—one area in which my rational self-interest needs to be harmonized with yours. And the market is the only reliable way that we humans know, or could know, of coordinating our goal-directed activities, not only with friends and neighbors, but with all the myriad strangers on whom we depend for the contents of our shopping bags. Membership, if it comes about, is simply another form of quasi-contractual agreement, whereby we freely bind ourselves to mutual rights and duties.

Who is right in this? Well, the position that I have attributed to Röpke is to me transparently obvious, whereas that which I have attributed (for the sake of argument) to Rothbard is to me profoundly mistaken. But two questions arise: how do we spell out, in terms appropriate to modern societies, the implications of the idea of membership that I have attributed to Röpke? Is the dispute here to be defined and fought out in economic terms? In referring to a social market, economists leave a large hostage to fortune. For they express the view—endorsed by their socialist opponents—that the “social question” demands an economic solution, and to some extent Röpke should be criticized on this score. He believed that a form of economic order could be developed which would deliver—as a benign byproduct— the kind of social cohesion which he had found in the Swiss villages and which to his mind expressed the communal heart of European society. This was already to accept one of the most damaging of Marx’s ideas, which is that social institutions are the byproduct, rather than the foundation, of the economic order. For if Marx’s view is right, then the cure to social ills must be framed in economic terms. Specifically, if the free market delivers a fragmented society, then the solution is to replace the free market with another economic system. And how is that to be done, if not by state action, directing the economy towards defined social goals? All this is contained in that troubling expression “a humane economy,” seeming to imply that it is through economic organization that a society becomes humane, and not—for example—through love, friendship, and the moral law. Röpke intended no such implication, but his style everywhere conveys the tension in his thinking between de-centrism as a social movement and as an economic policy.

Let us return to the first of my questions: how to spell out the picture of social membership that is implied in Röpke’s argument. Röpke advocates a community of attachment, in which people take an altruistic interest in each other’s situation, in which distress summons help and success congratulation, in which primary bonds of love, desire, and friendship find an easy and socially endorsed pathway to fruition, and in which the pursuit of self interest is circumscribed at every point by a concern for the common good. Insofar as Röpke gives any indication of what a “humane” society is, those are the kinds of consideration to which he seems to refer. So understood, social membership cannot be achieved without settlement, meaning a relation among neighbors who are united less by shared ambitions or shared ways of earning a living than by shared territory and all the obligations that go with that. A small and localized community is able through its own vigilance to guide people towards honest dealing, both to prevent the exploitation of the weak by the strong and to direct the profits of the wealthy towards the relief of the poor.

This happens not because the community is organized economically in some way other than the spontaneous way of the market. It happens because people know each other, share each other’s fortunes, and recognize the penalties of defection. They are subject to common moral pressures, often preached at them in church, mosque, or synagogue, and wish to see virtue rewarded and vice punished and cast out. Their self-perpetuating equilibrium occurs, when it occurs, because conflicts are resolved by the customs and laws which arise spontaneously among neighbors. If they also enjoy a market economy, then this is a benefit which operates all the more effectively against such a background of shared moral order.

The Communist Manifesto contains many half-truths. Yet it also makes an important observation about capitalism, which is that it has an inherent tendency to set human communities in motion, to detach people from the place and status into which they are born, to dissolve all traditional arrangements and replace them with new relationships based on contract rather than inheritance, rendering transitory what had been permanent, and replacing destiny with choice. The picture that Marx and Engels drew was true to the experience of nineteenth-century observers, who saw all around them the crumbling of traditional arrangements and the unsettling of previously settled communities. What was causing the disruption was not, as Marx and the socialists supposed, private property and the market economy— both of which had existed, if truth were told, from the beginning of history, slavery and feudalism being merely local warps in an unbroken continuum. The cause of the disruption was the very same factor that confronts us today, namely, globalization—one person’s ability to contract with another, regardless of the physical, moral, and spiritual distance between them. Industrialization was the first step in this direction, enabling rural workers to move to the towns and exchange their labor for a wage. Imperialism was a further step, enabling industries to outsource many of their inputs and to distribute their goods among distant strangers. The modern multinational corporations like Benetton, which outsources everything and owns nothing save a brand, are simply the latest move in the same direction—towards an economy in which everything is exchanged in response to demand and where locality and attachment are discounted.

We should be honest and recognize that we are not, on the whole, happy about this. The anonymity of the global economy goes hand in hand with a spectral quality—a sense that the agents behind every transaction are not creatures of flesh and blood who live in communities but unlocated corporations, who take no real responsibility for producing what they sell but who merely stick their brand on it, so claiming a rent on producer and consumer alike. It is difficult to articulate this complaint, though it has been made, with varying degrees of sarcasm, by Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class [1899]), David Riesman (The Lonely Crowd [1953]), Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders [1957]), J. K. Galbraith (The Affluent Society [1969]), and Naomi Klein (No Logo [2000]) —the argument advancing step by step in order to accommodate the latest move towards the global economy. This economy is not dislocated, as the nineteenth-century socialists imagined, but unlocated—but it is for this very reason that it troubles us. Economic activity has become detached from the building of communities. We do not know the people who produce our goods; we do not know under what conditions they work, what they believe in, or what they hope for. We do not know the people who distribute those goods to us, except as celebrity CEOs of Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Calvin Klein—people who seem miraculously to escape all liability for the goods that they sell, so as to float on clouds of profit above the stock exchange. Local stores and local producers are successively bought up or driven out of business by the anonymous chains, and when a community tries to defend itself against the intruding giant it finds that all the cards are stacked against it, and that yet another anonymous agent, the abstract “consumer,” has already declared a preference for the shopping mall on the doorstep.

And there is another complaint that people make, or which they feel in their hearts even if they haven’t the knowledge to make it, which is that the anonymous corporation, which invests all its capital in a brand, thereby escapes liability for the long-term costs of its products. To put the point more exactly, the anonymous corporation can effectively externalize its costs. The cost of producing soya beans in Brazil—the cost in terms of environmental damage, devastation of the landscape, aesthetic pollution and so on—is not witnessed by consumers in the United States nor controlled by American legislation (itself responsive to lobbying from consumers). It is a cost that can be, as it were, left in Brazil—and left to the future generations who will have to bear it. This is a simple example of a practice that is in fact ubiquitous. The real cost of producing packaged food on the supermarket shelf includes the enormous long-term cost of non-biodegradable packaging, which constitutes twenty-five percent by weight of the shopping bag. This cost is not borne by the supermarket or its suppliers. It is borne by all of us, and by our descendants over the next thousand years or so. You don’t have to travel far outside a city to know what this particular cost means, and you can read about it in any study of plastic pollution in the oceans. But it is a cost that has been externalized. The personal factors that would compel a trader, in local conditions, to behave properly in this matter are absent. There is no reward for good behavior, and the costs of bad behavior can be passed on. It is surely no longer possible to doubt that this is a blatant feature of the global market economy, and one that is seemingly intrinsic to it.

If we take those complaints seriously, as we should, we will recognize the strength in Röpke’s intellectual starting point—the small local community, in which economic activity takes place under the vigilant guardianship of the moral sense. But we also recognize that we cannot return to that community through anything that resembles the “social market,” as adopted by the postwar consensus in Europe. For what the social market amounts to in practice is the intrusion into the economy of another big anonymous entity—the state—which is quite as capable of externalizing its costs as any other. Not only that, but the state can silence its critics as no corporation can.

Thus the social market, as practiced in Europe, requires the state to step in and provide for those without work and to provide for the mothers of children who have no resident father. These are inevitable results of transferring the responsibility for charity from the community to the state, which is itself an inevitable result of the attempt to make a humane economy, rather than a humane society.

Here are some of the costs: the growth of an underclass of people who do not work but who find every means to avoid work in order to enjoy the benefits provided by the state; the growth of illegitimacy, as women find an easy way to provide for themselves and their babies, and men an easy way to abandon the women they have impregnated; the growth of anti-social behavior, as fatherless children are released from the dysfunctional households that produce them; and so on and on. The facts have been effectively documented by Charles Murray and others. And the result is clear: that Charles Murray and those like him could never hope to be employed in the state educational system in Europe and would be subject to official condemnation by any politician called upon to consider the matter. The state has externalized the costs of its “social market” policies onto society, and the greater the costs, the more the state expands with fictitious plans to reduce them. Never has a better machine for expanding the rentier class of bureaucrats been devised than this one, which constantly amplifies the problem that it is established to solve. Hence, as educational achievement declines in Europe, state expenditure on education increases—to the point where, in Britain, there are nearly two bureaucrats for every teacher, appointed to deal with the social problems that they themselves make a living by producing.

These problems are not unknown in the United States, of course. But they have here led to a far-reaching skepticism towards statist solutions, and even, in the case of the Friedmanites, to a certain “free-market fundamentalism,” which insists that the market is the solution to these social ills and not their cause. The least we can say is that, as things stand, the “social market,” as practiced, is very far from producing the “humane economy” for which Röpke hoped. It may produce a more equal distribution of goods than a totally free economy, but it also produces its own brand of social disintegration, as the state, by expropriating the charitable motive, also extinguishes it. The world of the underclass, as described by Theodore Dalrymple and others, is a world with little in the way of attachment and compassion, where the virtue of charity is unknown.

What, then, is the real solution to the market-induced disorders of modern society? How do we prevent the globalization of everything and the fragmentation of our loyalties and attachments? How do we recover the small platoon, which shapes the moral sense of its members? The answer to these deep questions, it seems to me, is not to be found in any new economic order but in a restoration of the moral foundations of a market economy. This is something that Röpke saw, and it is why he viewed the emergence of mass society and the atheist norm as such a disaster. The disorders of the global market come about for the same reason as the disorders of the welfare state—because people seize every opportunity to externalize their costs. They do this because there is no vigilant community which compels them to behave in any other way. We have an instance of this before us today, as the habit of consumer credit, which Röpke abhorred and which in earlier epochs would have been condemned as the most irresponsible form of indebtedness, has finally begun to deliver its inevitable consequences. Conduct which, in the still-vigilant communities of Röpke’s day, would have been sufficient grounds for social ostracism is now regarded as a kind of enviable cleverness—a successful way of putting the cost of your life entirely onto someone else’s shoulders and, if necessary, filing for bankruptcy when the going gets tough. There is no way forward for mankind that does not involve the restoration of that kind of vigilant community. And it can be restored only at the local level, by rebuilding the forms of social membership.

Can localization become a policy? Does that suggestion not merely reproduce the problem, by giving a new and overmastering project to the state? This, it seems to me, is the problem that we now face. We Europeans—victims of the “social market”—have no means to replace statist policies without involving the state. Rather than end on that gloomy note, however, I will make a positive observation. When the great rush to the global economy began, in the late eighteenth century, the state did not have the power or the will to help the victims. Instead they helped themselves. A thousand social initiatives began at the turn of the nineteenth century—friendly societies offering nonprofit loans for house purchases, charitable hospitals and networks of doctors, church schools and village schools funded by subscription, mechanics’ institutes (later to become universities), not to speak of the clubs and societies of enthusiasts devoted to communal leisure. The reality of this is known to us full well from nineteenth century novels. In America, in the heart of the global economy, these initiatives still exist. They exist because the state has not expropriated the charitable motive, because people can give freely what they freely earn, and because there are still local loyalties which are the foundation of social hope. These initiatives should be the model for the “humane economy,” which will be humane not because of the economy, but in spite of it.

Published originally by The Intercollegiate Review

About the Author
Roger Scruton’s most recent books are Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (2007) and A Political Philosophy (2006). This essay is adapted from a lecture delivered at ISI’s National Leadership Conference in Indianapolis, April 2008.

Look Who's a Believer Now

Timothy Larsen

Have you ever heard the one about the Christian who started to study calculus and ended up losing his faith?

Of course you have. Such "conversion" to atheism is supposed to be the story of all modern, thinking people. But imagine it happening the other way around. Moreover, imagine the convert being a well-informed, public intellectual who had long made it his business to argue that faith is irrational?

Just such a conversion has happened to A.N. Wilson, the 58-year-old British biographer, novelist and man of letters. He was once an observant Anglican and, later, a Roman Catholic, but in the 1980s he lost his faith and began skewering the supposed delusions of the faithful. His antifaith stance was expressed in books such as God's Funeral (1999) and Jesus: A Life (1992). A few weeks ago, however, Mr. Wilson confessed that Christ had risen indeed. He attributed this to "the confidence I have gained with age." He now says he believes that atheists are like "people who have no ear for music or who have never been in love."

Mr. Wilson's story matches that of other skeptical authors who became convinced by Christianity, not least in Victorian Britain, when Darwin and various modern ideas shook the foundations of faith among the educated classes. Among the notable examples from Victorian Britain are Thomas Cooper, the most popular free-thinking lecturer in London in the 1850s; George Sexton, the most academically accomplished secularist intellectual of the time; and Joseph Barker, a well-respected leader of the mid-19th-century free-thinking movement. The 20th century also had its share of writers and intellectuals who rediscovered Christianity as mature thinkers, including T.S. Eliot, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, C.S. Lewis, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and W.H. Auden.

Our modern assumption that thought and faith are incompatible can be traced to the Victorian atheists. As one of them snidely remarked when a fellow secularist came to faith: "I find it hard to believe that someone could progress backwards."

For his part, A. N. Wilson had denounced as dishonest every leading Victorian intellectual who maintained a commitment to orthodox Christianity. Indeed, in God's Funeral he did not just go after the usual targets, such as John Henry Newman, but savaged even Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. They were not presented as simply mistaken, but rather as downright "dishonorable."

Secularist leaders were usually raised religious. As clever youths, they would begin to handle the Bible critically. They prided themselves in being "rational" and would decide that Christian beliefs did not meet this standard. They would then go on to find intellectual satisfaction in picking apart the beliefs of others. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, a book beloved by free-thinkers in the 19th century, systematically went through the Bible, gleefully mocking each book in turn.

Those who later recanted their atheism went on from this common start to begin to doubt their doubts. They gradually decided that their rationalistic method was too narrow: It could pick holes not only in Christianity but in any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong or to articulate the meaning of life. They came to realize that they could only tear down and thus were left intellectually with no habitable place to live. John Henry Gordon, who held the only full-time, salaried secularist lecturer position in England, came to believe that secularism was a creed of "mere negations."

Having realized that their method was flawed, they then began to reconsider faith. Christianity, they discovered, spoke to the deepest realities of human experience. George Sexton, for example, decided that Jesus as presented in the Gospels was so compelling and haunting that only a historical original could account for this: "If Christ be simply an ideal picture, the man who sketched it will be as difficult to account for as the Being himself."

Their skeptical pasts did leave a permanent stamp on their thought. Joseph Barker believed as a young man that the Bible was error-free. As a free-thinking lecturer he specialized in highlighting problem passages. As a convert, he conceded that the Bible was not perfect but went on to argue that it was perfectly suited to speak to the human condition. The Swiss Alps are not perfect cones, he observed, but this does not detract from their grandeur. Thomas Cooper declared that his newly rediscovered faith did not include a belief in eternal punishment.

As is the case with Mr. Wilson, intellectuals often pursue long, drawn-out love affairs with Christian thought. Next time you hear someone fume that God is the most contemptible being who never existed, keep in mind that you just might be watching the first act of a divine romantic comedy.

Acknowledgement

Timothy Larsen, "Look Who's a Believer Now." The Wall Street Journal (May 29, 2008). Reprinted with permission of the author and The Wall Street Journal © 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Timothy Larsen is the McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. His intellectual interests are in the areas of British history, historical theology, Christian thought, and intellectual currents and controversies. His research and writing tends to explore theological and intellectual ideas as they were appropriated and wrestled with in specific cultural, social, and historical contexts. He is the author or editor of numerous books including Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England, Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries: From the Early Church to John Paul II, Reading Romans through the Centuries: From the Early Church to Karl Barth, Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition, and Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology.

Et Tu, Caritas Christi?

Philip F. Lawler

Will Caritas Christi Be Involved in the Abortion Business? The Archdiocese of Boston’s health care agency refuses to answer that question.

In February, the Boston Globe revealed that Caritas Christi, the health care arm of the Boston archdiocese, was a leading contender to win a lucrative contract from the Massachusetts state government. Under the terms of the contract, Caritas Christi and a secular partner in the bid, the Centene Corporation, would provide medical coverage for low-income Massachusetts residents. The terms of the contract explicitly stipulated that coverage must include provisions for abortion, contraception, and sterilization.

The involvement of Caritas Christi in the bidding for this government contract drew careful scrutiny from both the pro-life movement and the abortion industry. Pro-lifers in Massachusetts asked for assurances from Church leaders that the Catholic health care system, which operates six hospitals and enlists the services of 2,000 physicians in the Boston area, would not perform abortions or make abortion referrals. Abortion advocates, on the other hand, demanded assurances from state regulators that the Catholic agency would not interfere with women’s unrestricted access to abortion. The abortion advocates soon received the guarantees they wanted. Pro-lifers did not.

Caritas Christi and Centene Corporation won the government contract, and barring some sudden change in plans, on July 1 their joint venture—called the Commonwealth Family Health Plan (CFHP)—will begin administering state health care benefits. Although the exact workings of the plan have not yet been revealed, women covered by CFHP may receive taxpayer-subsidized abortions, contraceptive services, and voluntary sterilizations on request. Concerned Catholics in Boston are nervously hoping for some sign that the program is not what it appears to be: a deliberate surrender of moral principle for the sake of financial gain.

A troubled history

That Caritas Christi needs a financial boost is beyond dispute. Years of rising costs and questionable management have taken their toll, forcing the Catholic health care agency to sacrifice its independence and pushing it to the brink of bankruptcy. Dr. Ralph de la Torre, the president of Caritas Christi, has told hospital employees that without an infusion of cash—of the sort that the partnership with Centene and the Massachusetts state government would provide—the organization could quickly go out of business.

Until recently Caritas Christi was unambiguously owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Boston, with the archbishop serving as chairman and the chancellor and vicar general also sitting on the board. But in the early years of the 21st century the agency’s troubles drew unwanted attention from a paternalistic state government.

In April 2004, Archbishop Sean O’Malley dismissed the president of Caritas Christi, Dr. Michael Collins. Although no explicit reason was given for the ouster, it was generally understood that the new archbishop was dissatisfied with the doctor’s management style. But the first replacement for Dr. Collins, Emmett Murphy, brought no relief; he stepped down hastily after reporters questioned the accuracy of his resume. Next came Dr. Robert Haddad, who was forced out in 2006 amid accusations of sexual harassment of female employees.

Meanwhile, the financial losses were mounting and Caritas Christi was actively seeking a buyer. By 2007, the agency was involved in serious talks with Ascension Health, the nation’s largest Catholic health care system. But those talks trailed off, in part because accountants discovered that Caritas Christi had overstated its revenues by $10 million.

At this point the attorney general of Massachusetts, Martha Coakley, announced that she could no longer watch the archdiocesan health care system flounder. Citing her duty to supervise the affairs of non-profit groups, she announced an investigation of Caritas Christi. In March 2008 the attorney general released a highly critical report, and recommended major changes in the agency’s governance. She strongly recommended that the Boston archdiocese “relinquish direct and indirect control over strategic, operational, and financial matters, and focus only on moral and ethical issues.”

The archdiocese quietly acceded to the proposed reforms. In a sweeping reorganization announced a few weeks later, the archbishop of Boston lost his traditional place as chairman, and the archdiocese was allotted only three seats on the 16-member board. The archdiocese announced that its control over the affairs of Caritas Christi would henceforth be “limited to matters pertaining to Catholic identity, mission, and the implementation of the religious and ethical directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and any transaction that would involve the sale or transfer of the system.”

In a highly unusual policy for a non-profit organization, the reconstituted Caritas Christi has declined to identify the members of its board of directors. The latest official papers filed with state regulators do not reflect the organizational changes of May 2008. So when Caritas Christi became involved in the controversial bid for the state health care contract, Catholics hoping to influence the agency’s policies—or to express their concerns about the moral dimensions of the government contract bid—did not know where to address their concerns.

Just three members of the 16-member board of Caritas Christi have been publicly identified, and none of them has a background that would reassure pro-life activists. Dr. Ralph de la Torre, who as president is an ex officio board member, has been a forceful advocate for an independent hospital system, and the primary force behind the contract bid. James Karam, the chairman of the board, is a businessman whose political sympathies are evident in his generous contributions to liberal Democratic candidates such as Barack Obama. And the only identified cleric on the board, Father J. Bryan Hehir, has been the bête noire of conservative Catholics nationwide since the 1980s, when he emerged as a major architect of the US bishops’ pastoral letter on nuclear weaponry and an apologist for the “seamless garment” approach that saw abortion as only one among many critical issues in political campaigns. Father Hehir, Caritas Christi told inquiring Catholics, served on the board as Cardinal O’Malley’s representative, to ensure that the health care system protected its Catholic identity. If that message was intended to ease the concerns of pro-life activists, it failed badly.

No reassurances

In answer to questions from inquiring Catholics, Caritas Christi officials said that the Catholic hospitals would not perform abortions, even if the Commonwealth Family Health Plan (CFHP) won the government contract. Nevertheless, in response to similar questions from the secular press, the joint venture issued a terse statement that the CFHP “will contract with providers, both in and out of the Caritas network, to ensure access to all services required by the authority, including confidential family planning services.” How could these two claims be reconciled? No explanation was forthcoming.

Caritas Christi, Centene Corporation, and the Archdiocese of Boston have all refused to disclose exactly how CFHP would respond to patients’ requests for abortions. Caritas Christi has assured the public that Catholic hospitals would not perform abortions. Nevertheless the abortions would be performed under the terms of the contract the Catholic agency sought to win.

Centene Corporation was identified as the majority partner in the CFHP contract bid. But Centene is a Missouri-based corporation, which owned no hospitals or clinics in Massachusetts, and employed no physicians in the state, at the time the bid was filed. Thus it was evident that abortions could not be performed at Centene facilities, unless Caritas Christi offered space to its secular partner for that purpose.

How, then, could Caritas Christi maintain that it would not be involved in the abortion business? Again, the Catholic health care agency refused to answer that question. In fact, when the Boston Globe followed up with a series of inquiries about how the Catholic identity of the Caritas Christi hospitals affected their current medical practices, officials declined to answer those questions as well.

“A great disservice”

When the CFHP proposal first came to light, informed sources at the Boston archdiocesan chancery offices reported that Cardinal O’Malley had been caught off guard by the Caritas Christi bid for the state insurance contract. In the first confused hours after the controversy arose, as Caritas Christi refused to answer questions about its policies, the archdiocese declined to make any public comment.

Eventually the cardinal broke his silence, with a statement that offered very little encouragement to those who were appalled by the CFHP bid. “Caritas Christi Health Care has assured me that it will not be engaged in any procedures, nor draw any benefits from any relationship, which violate the Church’s moral teaching as found in the Ethical and Religious Directives,” the cardinal said. He did not explain how the CFHP effort could comply with both the Church directives and the requirements of the state contract. Instead Cardinal O’Malley chose to emphasize that the CFHP would be providing health care services for needy families. “If it can happen without compromising the Catholic identity of the system it would benefit both civil society and especially the poor in our community,” he said.

Local Catholic activists were not convinced. C.J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League observed: “The cardinal refuses to acknowledge in his statement what Caritas has already admitted—that it will contract with other providers in making referrals for abortions.”

As the days passed, and the deadline approached for a decision on the state government contract, many loyal Catholics clung to the hope that Cardinal O’Malley would derail the CFHP proposal if convinced that the contract could not be fulfilled without violating Catholic moral principles. A week before state officials were to announce their final decision, the cardinal slammed that door closed with a clear statement of support for the contract bid:

Caritas Christi will never do anything to promote abortions, to direct any patients to providers of abortion, or in any way to participate in actions that are contrary to Catholic moral teaching and anyone who suggests otherwise is doing a great disservice to the Catholic Church.

While that statement seemed definitive, Cardinal O’Malley issued it along with a curious additional note. He revealed that he was asking the National Catholic Bioethics Center to study the proposed arrangement, to assure him that the CFHP plan was compatible with Catholic moral teachings. If the moral purity of the proposal was so evident that anyone who questioned it was doing a “great disservice to the Catholic Church,” why was any such assurance necessary?

John Haas, the president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, told CWR that any opinion his group submitted to the cardinal would be confidential. He refused to offer any hint about his own thinking on the CFHP proposal, explaining that his recommendations could be made public if and only if the archdiocese chose to take that step. Two months later, Catholics in Boston still had no indication of how the proposal could be reconciled with Church teachings—if indeed it could be reconciled at all.

A fig leaf?

The facts available on the public record offer no hint of a justification for the Caritas Christi involvement. Abortions will be performed, and the Catholic health care agency is a key partner in the venture that will—through some undisclosed mechanisms—ensure that they are performed. The people of Boston are being led inexorably to the conclusion that the Catholic agency will become a willing partner in the slaughter of the unborn. If there is something wrong with the logical sequence leading to the conclusion, one would expect the archdiocese to correct the public record, in order to avert scandal. Yet the public record is uncorrected.

C.J. Doyle of the Catholic Action League did not flinch from what seemed to be an obvious inference: “It appears that the Caritas Christi/Centene Corporation partnership was established as a fig leaf to give Caritas Christi plausible deniability while seeking a state contract which would require them to violate Catholic moral teaching.”

On March 13, the state government formally awarded the health care contract to CFHP. Before making their final decision, the officials responsible for the selection extracted further assurances that women would have “ready access” to all family-planning services—including contraception, sterilization, and abortion—under the terms of the proposal. The CFHP applicants explained that if particular medical facilities (such as, perhaps, the Caritas Christi hospitals) did not offer those services, the subscribers would be given a toll-free number to call for a referral to another provider, and transportation would be arranged to an alternative facility.

But who would provide the pregnant woman with that toll-free number? Who would make the abortion referral, and arrange the transportation to the clinic? By providing any of those services, CFHP would become involved in the abortion business.

Power to the people?

In his public statement of support for the CFHP venture, Cardinal O’Malley emphasized that the new health care system would be serving the poor of Massachusetts. When the Boston Globe conducted a survey of Catholic theologians, and found several liberal professors willing to justify the venture, they too concentrated their arguments on service to the needy. Lisa Sowle Cahill of Boston College remarked that it would be “an appalling scandal if the Archdiocese of Boston refuses to participate in Massachusetts’ cutting-edge health care reform program.”

But the CFHP proposal is not a venture in Christian charity; it is a government program. With or without the involvement of the Boston archdiocese, the poor people of Massachusetts would receive government-subsidized health care; that much was already established by state law. The only question at issue, when CFHP submitted its bid, was whether or not an archdiocesan agency would reap the benefits of this lucrative government contract.

Moreover, any attempt to justify this venture in terms of Christian service to the poor runs directly into the moral problems associated with abortion, sterilization, and contraception. If CFHP is a Catholic apostolate, then any involvement in these procedures is unacceptable. If CFHP is not a Catholic venture, and the involvement of Caritas Christi is purely coincidental, then the venture cannot be described as an effort by the Church to serve needy families.

After the CFHP proposal was submitted to the state, Caritas Christi embarked on a publicity campaign. A new logo and letterhead for the agency emphasized “Caritas” while putting “Christi” in smaller type. Public advertisements began to appear, advancing the slogan: “Quality to the people.” Posters in Caritas Christi hospital wards featured a clenched fist—of the sort made popular in 1960s radical imagery—holding a stethoscope against a rainbow background. The publicity seemed deliberately calculated to emphasize the organization’s claim to serve a needy public—and at the same time to downplay its Catholic identity.

The government contract will undoubtedly bring a critical infusion of revenue for the Caritas Christi system. The alliance with Centene Corporation in the CFHP may even lead to a successful sale of the troubled Caritas Christi system. But the apparent involvement of Catholic hospitals in a system that provides subsidized abortions—and the steadfast refusal of the Boston archdiocese to explain how that involvement could possibly be justified—is an astonishing setback for the culture of life. And it bears emphasis that this situation did not arise because the state government forced Caritas Christi into a morally untenable position; the Catholic agency deliberately sought to be involved. The Catholic Action League called the development “a significant defeat for the pro-life movement, inflicted not by secular society, but by the Catholic Church in Boston.”

Philip F. Lawler is editor emeritus of Catholic World Report.

What We Fight For

David Warren

Although this phrase is not part of David Warren's article, I thought it could be useful to remember it in a day like this, in this space: "Liberalism is a delivery system for tyranny." I heard it during a conversation a few days ago and I thought it was worth sharing it. CCR

We have two important anniversaries this week: tomorrow is the 20th of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Saturday will be the 65th of D-Day. Both events retain "educational value," and today I shall try to remember why.

I was not around for D-Day. Recently I buried a father who was, and at an age to make me realize that the Second World War will soon exist only as book knowledge. Include, in that book, what was incised in stone over the battlefields of France, where Western leaders will gather on the weekend for verbal tributes, and where a few surviving veterans will recall the comrades of their vanished youth.

Much is forgotten, but nothing is lost. The whole history of the world is inscribed in God's living memory. We will, according to this religious view, again glimpse that record on a Day of Judgement. I do not believe for one moment that what is forgotten therefore disappears. For that is the ostrich view of space and time, suitable only for those who are in hiding.

Everything that has happened, has happened, irreversibly, down to the little sparrow singing in the vine leaves, which we heard on waking, decades ago. And the loves and longings, the vain hopes and terrors, the poignancy in every heartbeat of lives lived under the death sentence, remain -- everything as and when it was. God knows the name of every soldier who fell for freedom, on the beaches of Normandy, and on the pavement at Beijing.

I am saying something that would have been understood, generally, in my father's generation. It would have been understood in the prison camps of Europe, where news of the D-Day landings travelled, with the exhilarating wind: "Our liberation is at hand!"

D-Day was the herald of a very great victory, over very dark forces. It was a moment when huge cosmic truths were stated in the language of historical time; and it happened among people still overwhelmingly Christian, in their understanding of things.

But the acts of the heroic are eventually forgotten, in this world. The battle against dark forces continues, and will continue indefinitely.

On battlefields and off, the front line between good and evil will continue to pass through every human heart. No final victory is ever won down here; nor any final defeat suffered. It is not in the dispensation of time, to deliver what lies outside time.

Which is why I mentioned the memory of God, in relation to acts of true heroism.

The Second World War ended in split decision. There was victory in the West, and nominal victory in the East, but as Churchill said, an Iron Curtain fell, and those to the east of it were abandoned to a Communist tyranny little different from the daily Nazi tyranny that had preceded the war; indeed, worse for being prolonged. Two generations were condemned to slavery: whole lives passed under the twitching thumbs of party apparatchiks, with only the briefest respites, in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Prague. And each of those respites, bloody.

It was a mixed result also within the West, for it seems today that we learned nothing, and the principles for which men and women once died have been progressively abandoned in our public life. Yes we have democracy, of a sort: mass democracy, and rule in the name of numbers. But the numbers have been used to establish Nanny States that deeply impinge our freedom, and to advance the very cause of atheist materialism that once marked Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes as exceptional.

The people of China are now passing out of the third generation of Communist tyranny. Outwardly, it has eased. The Red Chinese state has relaxed its controls over minor arrangements in everyday life, to the extent of permitting the kind of "capitalist" consumerism that can enhance its own power.

We have been left with less to choose than we think, between the two systems, for we now have centrally-administered materialism in both East and West.

The soldiers who fell in Normandy were not fighting for swimming pools and home entertainment centres. They had before them a view of the dignity of man: of things worth more than life itself. The students who stood in Tiananmen Square -- who raised the home-made statue of Lady Liberty -- did not die for the sake of cellphones, and skyscrapers in Shanghai. They faced the tanks and bullets of the "People's Revolutionary Army" with something more substantial in their hearts.

Yet the generation after them, there as here, has been largely bought off with the false promise of material prosperity. There, as here, we have agreed to become a kind of indentured labour, on the promise that we will be taken care of, cradle to grave.

Let us at least celebrate, for a moment in time, men and women who were better than we are.