The Grey Lady is a Tramp

(My apologies to Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and to the countless others who have made the same lame pun on the title of their song prior to this)

Bari Weiss’s letter to A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of the New York Times, announcing and explaining her resignation from that highly overrated organ of far left propaganda, has gone viral in the metaphorical sense of that phrase. Ordinarily, specifying the sense of gone viral would be unnecessary but in these days of pandemic-induced panic, it is probably wise not to take these things for granted. The letter has certainly generated an explosion of discussion online and it will be very interesting to watch how the newspaper handles the controversy.

Weiss was hired to be an editor and writer by the New York Times in 2017. She had previously worked for the Wall Street Journal for four years, and her recruitment was an attempt by the Grey Lady to expand its thought horizons after Donald the Orange’s rise to power demonstrated just how out of touch they were with ordinary Yanks. It was rather amusing that they thought that hiring someone from the Wall Street Journal would help rectify this. The editorial position of the Wall Street Journal is right-of-centre only in the sense that it fiscally conservative and economically neo-liberal – the elements of right-of-centre thought furthest removed from the mixture of populism, nationalism, and social and cultural conservatism that came together to elect Trump. Unsurprisingly, since their efforts to remedy their own cluelessness were themselves utterly clueless, they failed completely, bringing about the situation in which Weiss has so publicly resigned her position.

She published her letter to Sulzberger on her website, and it has been reproduced in many other places on the internet. Her indictment of her former employer basically consists of two elements. There is her charge that contrary to the paper’s stated intentions when hiring her three years ago, it has narrowed rather than broadened the spectrum of acceptable views. Then there is her complaints about how she has personally been treated at the paper as a consequence of the former element. While I would recommend reading the letter in its entirely, the first element is encapsulated in her sentence “Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else” and the second in the following paragraph:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

Lest there be any confusion about the matter among those unfamiliar with Weiss the people who called her a “Nazi” and remarked about her “writing about the Jews again” were not alluding to anti-Semitism in her writings – she is Jewish and the author of a book published last year entitled How to Fight Anti-Semitism – but rather to her ultra-Zionism. Weiss’s politics, it should be noted, are neither conservative nor centre-right, except perhaps from the perspective of the extremely anti-Zionist New Left or the ultra-Zionist American neoconservatives, but are rather moderately progressive liberal and centrist. This makes her experience at the New York Times all the more indicative of how far to the left this so-called newspaper of record has swung.

All of this, however, only addresses the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the corruption of the New York Times. Last month, James Bennet who was then the head editor of the opinion page, was forced to resign over his decision to allow an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton which expressed the opinion that the race riots which were causing so much chaos and destruction in American cities should be squashed by military force. While this incident goes further towards demonstrating how intolerant the newspaper has become of those who dissent from its party line, the responsibility the New York Times bears for creating the conditions in which the media portrayal of the death of George Floyd could spark these riots in the first place is a much more interesting story. I do not mean that the newspaper bears sole responsibility – in recent essays I have discussed how the Marxist takeover of the social sciences and the humanities and their attempts to dominate even the hard sciences in academe have brainwashed the supposedly educated classes with the lies of wokeness. It can hardly be coincidence, however, that this wave of race riots which crossed the borders of the United States and spread into the rest of Western Civilization and which quickly took on aspects which eerily resembled the Maoist Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s Year Zero, took place within a year after the New York Times launched the 1619 Project.

The 1619 Project, which premiered in August of last year in the magazine supplement to the Sunday edition of the New York Times is a re-interpretation of American history from the perspective of Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Theory is a branch of Critical Theory, which began in the 1930s when the Institute of Social Research or “Frankfurt School”, a neo-Marxist think tank, launched an ambitious project of establishing a new theoretical synthesis for both the social sciences and the humanities that would be distinguished from previous theories by its activism, that is to say, that its goal would be to unsettle, disrupt, and overthrow all of traditional society rather than to seek learning and understanding. (1) Initially blending elements of Freudian psychoanalysis with its Marxism, as it spread throughout the academic world its development was influenced by the incorporation of ideas from other disciplines, especially the deconstructive techniques of post-Saussure French literary theorists. Critical Race Theory is the branch of this diabolical technique which tries to delegitimize all of Western Civilization by reading its entire history as the oppression of other races by whites. The 1619 Project which applies this methodology to American history by making black slavery and white racism into the fundamental paradigm by which all events in that history must be interpreted, is the brainchild of Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times staff writer who apparently had a past record of combining anti-white race hatred with pseudoscience and fabricated history, even prior to taking on this project which does the same. Note that Hannah-Jones herself acknowledged and applauded the connection between her project and the riots.

In the past, the New York Times covered up for the crimes of the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty, wrote rave reviews of Stalin’s five-year plan in the 1930s, and denied that Stalin’s government was engineering the Ukrainian famine now known as the Holodomor even though he was fully aware that it was going on. He justified this cover-up – and the Stalinist atrocities he was covering up – with the infamous phrase now often attributed to Stalin himself, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Like Hannah-Jones, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his abominable Communist propaganda. This was neither the first nor the last time that this newspaper would behave like an official organ of the Soviet Union. It heaped plenty of praise on other Communist dictators such as China’s Mao Tse-Tung over the years, as well, and lionized Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara even before they became the epitome of coolness for imbecilic college kids.

Cheerleading for Communist dictators and covering up the atrocities of Communist regimes is one thing, however. Helping to incite a Communist race war and a Year Zero Cultural Revolution is something else altogether. It is hardly surprising that a newspaper that has moved in this direction, would hold its staff to a narrow and rigid party line. It merely raises the question of why they went to the bother of appearing to broaden their perspective when they hired Bari Weiss et al. three years ago.

Perhaps Bari Weiss can address these matters in either a follow up letter to Sulzberger or a column in her next journalistic venture.

(1) I gave a brief introduction to Critical Theory in my essay “It is Time to Criticize Critical Theory” and called for a new Christian apologetical approach to addressing it in my essay “A New Apologetics is Needed.” Anyone who is looking for an overview of it from a perspective far less hostile to it than my own can consult Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) by Stephen Eric Bronner, Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University. Anyone interested in the history of the think tank that started it can either consult Martin Jay’s The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (University of California Press, 1973) or, for the most exhaustive treatment of this history, Rolf Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance (Polity Press, 1994, German original, 1986). Anyone looking for a response to it from the perspective of conservative Christian apologetics is again referred to Dr. Neil Shenvi. For other interesting critiques of it from the right, see William C. Lind’s 2000 speech “The Origins of Political Correctness”, the two sequels Dr. Paul Gottfried, formerly Horace Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and now editor-in-chief of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, wrote to his After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton, 2001) which are Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards A Secular Theocracy (University of Missouri, 2002) and The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (University of Missouri, 2005), and, for a much more controversial critique, chapter five of Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Praeger Publishers, 1998), which is the third in a trilogy, following A People That Shall Dwell Alone (1994) and Separation and Its Discontents (1998) by Dr. Kevin B. MacDonald, retired Professor of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. Also of interest is the aforementioned Dr. Paul Gottfried’s autobiography Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers (ISI, 2009), in which he discusses attending the lectures of the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse when the latter was a visiting lecturer at Yale prior to his move to the West Coast to become the guru of the Student Revolutionaries and the interesting trajectory that the Critical Theory journal Telos followed after its founding editor, the late Paul Piccone, became largely disillusioned with the New Left and invited contributions from right-of-centre thinkers such as Alain de Benoit and Gottfried himself.

What’s so Social about Justice?

That which the Greeks called dikaiosyne and which we call justice has been sought after by men for millennia. But what is justice? A great deal of thought has been directed towards answering that question since the days of Socrates. It was the subject of Plato’s most important dialogue, The Republic, and lay at the heart of Aristotle’s Ethics as well. It has been considered no less important by the great thinkers of the Church, from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas. While there can hardly be said to be a consensus among Western thinkers, classical and Christian, on the subject, it is generally agreed that the essence of justice lies in everyone receiving that which is due him.

In Christianity there is another concept which exists in tension with justice but which is regarded as being of equal importance. That concept is the concept of mercy. In evangelical Sunday Schools, mercy is frequently linked with grace, and the two are distinguished by saying “mercy is when you don’t get what you deserve, i.e., punishment” and “grace is when you get what you don’t deserve, i.e., God’s acceptance and favour”. While this is a nice way of showing the positive and negative sides of God’s saving work in Christ, it does not reflect Scriptural usage and can produce a serious misunderstanding of the concept of mercy. To define mercy as “not getting the punishment you deserve” is to define mercy as the negation of justice. Throughout Scripture, however, we find the concepts of mercy and justice linked together.

Take, for example, the sixth chapter of the book of Micah. In this chapter, in the midst of an indictment against His people, God reminds them of the incident of Balak and Balaam. The former was a king of Moab and the latter a prophet. The Book of Numbers records how Balak sent for Balaam to curse Israel. God warned Balaam against doing so, and Balaam refused to go. Balak insisted, however, and God told Balaam to go, but to speak only the words God would give him. He emphasized the point in the famous episode involving the angel and the donkey. When Balaam finally came to Balak, he did the opposite of what Balak asked and blessed Israel instead of cursing them. In Micah, God refers to a part of the story that was not recorded in the book of Numbers. Balak is said to have inquired of Balaam as to how he should approach the Lord – with sacrifices of calves, rams and “rivers of oil”? Balak even offers to sacrifice his firstborn son. God’s answer to this question, given to Balak through Balaam, and here quoted by Micah as a message for God’s people is:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (verse 8)

This is pretty much the opposite of what Balak had in mind. In this verse, however, which concisely sums up what God demands of people, justice and mercy are listed together. If the one meant “giving people what is due them” and the other means “not giving them what they deserve” this verse wouldn’t make much sense.

The Greek word for mercy is eleos. This word can also be rendered “loving-kindness” and has the basic meaning of doing good to other people out of love, particularly to those who are suffering or in need. Clemency – the granting of forgiveness or pardon to someone who has done wrong, and therefore is in need of forgiveness and pardon – is obviously included within mercy. It is, however, but one aspect of mercy and is merciful because it is an act of kindness towards someone who needs it, not because it is a negation of strict justice. (1)

If clemency is but one aspect of mercy, what others are there?

In the Pio Monte della Misericordia, a church in Naples, Italy, there is a painting at the high altar by Caravaggio, the early 17th Century master who in his brief, tempestuous life introduced techniques of chiaroscuro and realism that influenced painting for centuries after him. This painting is called “The Seven Works of Mercy”, a common religious theme but one which is usually painted as a series rather than as a single painting. The acts in question are the corporal works of mercy – feeding the hungry, giving the thirsty drink, clothing the naked, visiting the prisoner, healing the sick, sheltering the homeless, and burying the dead. Caravaggio borrows stories from the Bible, classical history, and the lives of the saints to illustrate these works. The concept of the “works of mercy” is an old one, and the works themselves are for the most part taken from the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25.

In the ancient concept of the “seven works of mercy” there is an important revelation about how the Christian faith regards help for the needy. These acts are not called “works of justice”. What this tells us is that Christianity has long regarded helping the needy as something that should be done out of Christian love – charity (2) and not out of a sense that need equals entitlement. If a person were entitled to receive whatever he needed from other people then giving him what he needed would be considered justice and not mercy.

It is important that we keep this in mind when we consider the notion of “social justice”. As we shall see, justice and mercy are often confused with each other in the ideas of those who speak of “social justice”. This was not, however, the case with the first people who first thought up the concept of social justice.

The expression “social justice” is a fairly recent one, having been first coined in the 19th century. Since it was originally used to express a concept that had been formulated in response to conditions brought upon by modernity and the Industrial Revolution it would be fair to say that the concept is quite recent as well, although its proponents would point to ancient antecedents of their ideas.

What do the words “social justice” mean? If we take the “justice” in “social justice” to be the “justice” that has been a recognizable subject of discussion for thousands of years, then what kind of justice is indicated by adding the word “social”?

One possibility is that “social” has a contextual sense – “social justice” is justice within society rather than justice outside society. If this is the case it would appear to be an unnecessary redundancy as it is difficult to conceive of what this justice outside of society would look like.

Another possibility is that “social justice” is justice between societies rather than between individual persons.

Then there is the possibility that “social justice” is justice between social groups within a society.

This last possibility corresponds best with how the words “social justice” were originally used. The first people to speak of “social justice” were Roman Catholic priests in the 19th Century. The concept was introduced in the context of criticism of capitalism, i.e., the modern economic system brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Their concern was that certain classes, in particular the new class of industrial laborers, were not being treated with justice under this new system. This would seem to indicate an overlap between the idea of social justice and that of socialism. It is important, therefore, to note the difference between the two concepts. Even in the 19th Century socialism had many forms but these all shared the common idea that the private ownership of productive property was the source of injustice between social classes, and should therefore be replaced by a form of collective ownership. The Roman Catholic theologians who first thought in terms of “social justice” did not share this idea. The importance of private property had always been recognized by the Christian Church (the commandment “thou shalt not steal” would be meaningless without it) and so the theologians who called for “social justice” in the 19th Century, were careful to say that socialism is not justice. The most authoritative statement the Roman Catholic Church put forward on this subject was Rerum Novarum, an encyclical by Pope Leo XIII. In this encyclical, socialism was condemned as vehemently as capitalism.

The concepts of social justice and of socialism have both evolved since the 19th Century and in the late 20th Century the line of distinction between them began to get rather blurred. Marxists and other socialists now often express their demands in terms of “social justice” and Marxism has tainted the thinking of many within the Church. Today, the words “social justice” are often understood to include any number of crack-brained ideas such as “affirmative action” (3), “foreign aid” (4), “the welfare state” (5), and “fair trade” (6). It is notable that many of these concepts, when put into practice, actually have negative consequences for the very class of people the original socialists and original “social justice” theorists were concerned for, the industrial working class (7).

T. S. Eliot, in a footnote to the introduction to his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, warns us against precisely this sort of thing:

I must introduce a parenthetical protest against the abuse of the current term ‘social justice’. From meaning ‘justice in relations between groups of classes’ it may slip into meaning a particular assumption as to what these relations should be; and a course of action might be supported because it represented the aim of ‘social justice’, which from the point of view of ‘justice’ was not just. The term ‘social justice’ is in danger of losing its rational content—which would be replaced by a powerful emotional charge. I believe that I have used the term myself: it should never be employed unless the user is prepared to define clearly what social justice means to him, and why he thinks it just.(8)

This is sound advice. If social justice is “justice in relations between groups of classes” that means that each group or class would receive from the others that which is due them, that which they legitimately have a claim to. This, of course, raises the question of what claims different classes legitimately have on each other or on society as a whole.

The original social justice theorists clearly felt that industrial workers were not receiving what was due them under capitalism. A new class had been formed, of people dependent upon a factory wage for their living. Their wages were low, in some cases barely enough to sustain their existence, and they had little security against the threat of unemployment.

The concern was that this would become a permanent arrangement and that this new class – the proletariat – would become the largest class in society. These conditions are to violent revolution what the meeting of hot and cold air fronts are to violent storms, and the 19th Century saw the fomenting of violent revolutions all across Europe. This is the historical backdrop against which Karl Marx – who welcomed revolution as the means to a paradise on earth – formed his theories. Against that same backdrop, the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum was written.

The root of the problem, for Leo XIII, was not the private ownership of property but that “the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place” (9). The socialists’ proposed solution to the problem is such that “carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer” because the motive of the worker in entering into paid labour is “to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own”. Therefore socialists “by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner”. Worse, their proposals are “manifestly against justice”, because “every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own”. After several paragraphs of arguments in favour of this position he writes “The first and most fundamental principle, therefore, if one would undertake to alleviate the condition of the masses, must be the inviolability of private property.” (10)

In Rerum Novarum, the distinction between justice and mercy is clear. Calling upon the historical teachings of the Church, Leo XIII distinguishes between the ownership and use of property. Christianity upholds a man’s right to own property – but also insists that there is a right and a wrong use of it. Christianity insists that the wealthy are to share with the needy, but adds qualifications. It is to be done out of charity rather than obligation enforced by the state, for example.

That the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, as presented in this encyclical, are incompatible with socialism, and vice versa, should be obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, it has not been.

Ludwig von Mises, for example, after acknowledging that “the most recent development of Christian social theory has led the Church to recognize the fundamental rightfulness of private property in the means of production” declares that “the Church desires nothing but State Socialism of a particular color”. (11) In a footnote to this Mises refers to Rerum Novarum saying that in it Catholicism “has recognized the origin of private property in Natural Law; but simultaneously the Church laid down a series of fundamental ethical principles for the distribution of incomes, which could be put into practice only under State Socialism”.

Who was Ludwig von Mises and why did he bizarrely misinterpret a vehemently anti-socialist document as being pro-socialist?

Ludwig von Mises was the most important 20th century theorist of the Austrian School of Economics (12), a school of thought within liberalism. Liberalism was the idea that each distinct human being was an “individual”, that the individual in his rational powers possessed all that he needed to bring him to truth, and that society is the contractual creation of individuals which exists only to serve the interests of free, equal, individuals. It had been born out of Cartesian rationalism, Lockean social contract theory, and the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mills, all unsound ideas. Liberalism’s theory of economics was centred around the idea of the “free market”. The “free market” was not a literal marketplace but a way of describing what takes place when people who have goods or services they wish to sell enter into voluntary exchanges with people who wish to buy those goods and services. Without government interference (taxes, price-fixing, subsidies, etc.), liberalism argues, the market, governed by the forces of supply and demand, will produce the outcome is for the best for everybody – buyer, seller, and the community in general.

What reasons did liberalism give for this confidence in the market?

When a seller and a buyer come to a voluntary agreement about a sale, the former receives a price that he has agreed to sell for and the latter pays a price that he has agreed to pay. In a voluntary transaction the seller has the right not to sell for a price that he feels is too low and the buyer has the right not to buy at a price he feels is too high. Both therefore, enter the transaction believing that they will be better off for having made it than they would be if they had not.

The Austrian School called this the “subjective theory of value”. Each party to a voluntary transaction exchanges something he has for something else he needs or wants more. He therefore exchanges that which he values less for that which he values more. This is true whether he is a seller or a buyer - and these terms are relative and interchangeable because a seller is “buying” money with some other commodity. Both sides, therefore, gain from the transaction.

These arguments for the free market are obviously valid in a general sense. They are rather simplistic, however. There are needs and there are needs. Suppose a man is in dire and urgent need of something, and the only way he could afford it is by selling his house. There is only one prospective buyer and he takes advantage of the man’s desperate situation by offering him just the amount of money he needs and not a cent more, although this is considerably lower than the house is appraised at. Would this transaction be a non-zero sum affair where both sides gain?

How about if the man’s house is a farm which has been in his family for generations and which is the sole source of income for him and his family?

A possible answer to these questions is to suggest that this situation is not really describing a voluntary transaction. If someone were to place a gun to a man’s head and order him to sell his house for next to nothing the sale would not be regarded as a voluntary transaction. Yet the only difference between that situation and the one described above is that the one man uses a gun whereas the other uses his victim’s desperate circumstances.

Now lets ask the important question. Is there anything morally wrong with the way the one man took advantage of the other?

Most of us would not hesitate to answer with “Yes, of course there is, what on earth is the matter with you?”

Mises, however, would say that the question is inappropriate. He makes it absolutely clear in Human Action that it is not just state interference with the market that he objects to. He maintains that morality should not be allowed to interfere with the market either. (13) Moral distinctions between “right” and “wrong”, he argued, are arbitrary and irrational. The market involves rational people coming to rational terms about material transactions. “Irrational” considerations, such as morality, are an intrusion into the market which keep it from functioning at its best.

One of Mises’ colleagues radically disagreed with him on this. Wilhelm Roepke was born in Germany in the last weeks of the 19th Century. He was brought up in the country of his birth, for which he fought in WWI. Shortly after the war he was led, through reading Mises, to abandon the socialism he had initially been attracted to. He became an economist of the Austrian School and for the rest of his life championed the free market against socialism and collectivism of all sorts. This led to his flight from Germany after the Nazis took control. In exile, he taught economics first in Instanbul, then in Switzerland where he settled and lived for the rest of his life.

In 1942, Roepke published the first volume in a trilogy of books about the decay of culture and civilization in the modern Western world.. It was published in English under the title The Social Crisis of Our Times in 1950. (14) In these works Roepke lamented the exodus of people from farms and rural areas to large cities, the way production was becoming concentrated in large industrial factories, and how, as a result of these trends, a large part of the population of Western countries was becoming proletarianized – i.e./ transformed into a large class of individuals, alienated from each other and their society, and permanently dependent upon wages from large companies rather than property of their own for their living. Roepke called this mass society.

Roepke argued that there was an intrinsic trend towards socialism in mass society. In 1960, he followed up this trilogy with A Humane Economy. (15) In this book Roepke argued that it was best to “entrust economic order, not to planning, coercion, and penalties, but to the spontaneous and free co-operation of people through the market, price and competition, and at the same time to regard property as the pillar of this free order”. (p. 3). He also argued, however, that:

[T]he market economy is not everything. It must find its place within a higher order of things which is not ruled by supply and demand, free prices, and competition. (p. 6)

In this, Roepke is not contradicting himself, although he is certainly at odds with his mentor Mises. Where Mises regarded moral and social concerns as irrational intrusions that distort the free market, Roepke understood that the market could only properly function within the framework of a moral and social order. While Roepke opposed every form of economic collectivism that Mises opposes – communism, socialism, nazism, welfarism, etc., Roepke understood where the real problem lay:

Now nothing is more detrimental to a sound general order appropriate to human nature than two things: mass and concentration. (pp. 6-7)

These things were characteristics, not just of totalitarian regimes, but of modern liberal democracies as well:

In all fields, mass and concentration are the mark of modern society; they smother the area of individual responsibility, life, and thought and give the strongest impulse to collective thought and feeling. The small circles—from the family on up—with their human warmth and natural solidarity, are giving way before mass and concentration, before the amorphous conglomeration of people in huge cities and industrial centers, before rootlessness and mass organizations, before the anonymous bureaucracy of giant concerns and eventually, of government itself, which holds this crumbling society together through the coercive machinery of the welfare state, the police, and the tax screw. (p. 7)

In his condemnation of mass society and his championing of decentralized government, localism, small-scale economics, and a moral and social framework for the free market that includes Christian ethics, strong local communities, and healthy social institutions, Roepke was echoing the social concerns of Pope Leo XIII. It was a deliberate echo, for although Roepke was a Protestant, a faithful Lutheran, he was influenced by and an admirer of such writers as G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc who popularized the Pope’s social ethics.

These earlier writers condemned mass society in both its capitalist and socialist forms and understood that the former leads inevitably to the latter. In 1912 Hilaire Belloc argued that capitalism and socialism were both converging towards a new form of social organization that he called the “servile state”. (16) Capitalism, he argued, was unstable and the only alternatives to it were collectivism (public ownership of the means of production), distributism (the means of production privately owned by a large number of small property owners), and the servile state. The second was the option he promoted, the third was the one he predicted. In the servile state, there would be no middle class to speak of. A large working class would work for the small propertied class but would also be maintained by the government in periods when there is not enough work for full employment. Belloc’s book in many ways is a remarkably accurate description of the “welfare state” of today.

Austrian School liberals such as Mises identified the free market and private property they defended on paper with “capitalism”, the social/economic reality of the late 18th to early 20th centuries that was produced by the Industrial Revolution. This was a mistake, a mistake the liberals shared with the Marxists and with Pope Leo XIII. Neither the Industrial Revolution nor 19th century capitalism was brought about by central governments, influenced by liberal theory, setting aside economic regulations and controls and introducing free market reforms. Indeed, interference in the economy had been required to make the transition to capitalism. If Marx was right about anything it was that liberal theory was an ex post facto rationalization and justification of capitalism and not either an honest description of it or the cause of it.

In the 20th Century however, when several countries tried to put socialist ideas into practice, the merit of the liberal argument for economic freedom and private property against central planning became apparent. The miserable conditions that existed in the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites under Communism justify Leo XIII’s prediction that under socialism “the working man himself would be among the first to suffer.”

Historically, the entire period including the capitalist era of the 19th century and the welfare/socialist era of the 20th should be looked upon as a continuous era in which modern mass society developed. It was characterized, in both the capitalist and socialist periods, by the concentration of political power in the hands of the central state, by the concentration of productive property into large centrally administered conglomerations (whether privately or publicly owned), and by the reorganization of society away from a loose network of families, communities, and other organic social entities into a large mass, of indistinguishable, equal, “individuals”.

If justice is when everyone receives that which he is entitled to, mass society is massively socially unjust. This is not because there are huge discrepancies in wealth between “the rich” and “the poor”. It is because human happiness depends upon a lot more than material goods. This is something, neither the liberals nor the socialists, have ever been able to understand. Human beings require individuality (which is erased in the mass society that treats them as generic “individuals”), roots, and the security which only family and community can provide. The wealthiest man in the world would be miserable without these things. The poorest man in the world would be happy with them.

If mass society, in which political power and economic control are increasingly concentrated and centralized, is the enemy of families, local communities, and an organic social network, the justice opponents of mass society seek, will only be found in the combination of political and economic decentralization with economic liberty and the security of private property. It will also require the resurrection of traditional, religious, moral and ethical restraints on human behavior.

Today’s advocates of “social justice”, insist that a man’s need alone entitles him to resources that must be taken from other people or provided from the common purse of society. Biblical and traditional Christianity does not teach this. Orthodox Christian ethics teaches that need by itself, makes a person an object of the mercy which God commands Christians to practice. This does not amount to an entitlement because mercy can only be practiced voluntarily out of the motivation of charity – Christian love.

St. Paul, in his epistles, both condemned free-riding of the kind which modern welfarism/socialism encourages (2 Thess 3:10-12) and declared that a man has a moral duty to provide for those of his household (1 Tim. 5:8). In the first passage we see that need is not an entitlement and that even mercy is to be withheld in certain situations, in the second we see that social relationships generate social duties.
It follows from this, that a Christian concept of “social justice” must be based upon the duties that exist within the relationships in the family, community, and church and not upon the idea that the “have nots” are entitled to something from the “haves” on the basis of sheer need alone.

Those within the Church who preach a “social justice” that resembles socialism, usually rely upon the Old Testament more than the New. Even there, however, they will find little support for their ideas. The justice, the prophets demanded for widows and orphans, was protection from the law against being defrauded by those who would take advantage of their vulnerable situation. It was not an entitlement to the resources of strangers. The requirement that sold land be returned to its original owners in the Year of Jubilee was based upon the feudal relationship that existed between God and Israel. God was a feudal lord, the Israelites His resident-tenants. They therefore had only leasing rights, not selling rights. The provision that the land would return to the original holder or his heirs in the Year of Jubilee was not guaranteed to benefit the poor at the expense of the rich. It was conceivable that the man who “sold” the land would get richer and the man who “bought” the land would get poorer, before Jubilee.

A truly Christian concept of “social justice” cannot be based upon the idea that one stranger owes something to another stranger on the basis of the one being wealthy and the other being needy. Wilhelm Roepke’s “humane economy”, his “third way” in which private property and economy liberty are secure in the context of a politically and economically decentralized, social framework, in which a healthy, large middle class exists in strong local communities, would be far more just in every sense of the word, than the socialism proposed by most people who talk about “social justice” today.





(1)The relationship between a mercy that includes clemency and justice will obviously be one of tension, but not necessarily of contradiction. In the Book of Romans, St. Paul famously addresses this question by explaining how Christ’s atoning death as the propitiation for our sins is the way in which God can be both just Himself, and at the same time declare righteous sinners who trust in Christ. Christ’s atonement is an act of mercy, in which God does not just set the demands of justice against sinners aside, but meets those demands Himself out of His love for people who would otherwise be doomed to perish.

(2)Hence the current non-theological meaning of the word “charity” as “helping the needy”. Note that the Latin charitas, which translates the Greek agape, is related to the Greeks words for grace and gifts. Christian love is to be, like the love of God Himself, a giving love.

(3) Affirmative action is a euphemism for what is often called “reverse discrimination”. See Frederick R. Lynch’s Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action (Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishing, 1991), Jared Taylor, Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America (New York: Carrol and Graf, 1992), and Steven Farron’s The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character, and Other Lies, (Santa Ana: Seven Locks Press, 2005) for an extensive description of just how unjust this policy actually is. The last two have been released in second editions by the New Century Foundation in 2005 and 2010 respectively.

(4) Foreign aid is when the government of one country gives money to another country (which generally means to the government of the other country). While this is done for a number of reasons, in the post-WWII era it has been common for political leftists to call for foreign aid as a form of relief for poverty and other forms of suffering in the part of the world that is called the “Third World” or “developing world”. In recent decades it has become common for the left’s demands to be expressed in terms of “justice”. An obvious example of this is to be found in the nauseating drivel we hear from celebrity spokesmen for the left, like Bob Geldof and Bono, in favour of their pet causes. What they do not mention to the crowds hanging on their every word, is that the money they are demanding that Western governments take from their own people, to give to other countries, nearly always ends up in the bank accounts of the military dictators, “presidents for life”, and other irresponsible, kleptocratic governors who are themselves a significant part of the problems people in that part of the world face.

(5) See Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003) for a description of the USA’s first welfare state programs introduced in the Great Depression, and how harmful they were to the people they were supposed to be helping. Also see Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984, 1994) for a documentation of how the social programs that expanded the American welfare state in that period of time just made the problems they were supposed to alleviate worse.

(6) “Fair trade” means deliberately paying more for a commodity than its market price so that the producers of the commodity will receive a “living wage”. As with all subsidies, it helps out a few producers, while harming many more (it drives the market price of the commodity down).

(7) An interesting study of how the left has switched its alliances and betrayed its original base is found in Dr. Paul E. Gottfried’s The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millenium (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2005).

(8) T. S. Eliot, Notes toward a Definition of Culture (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1962) pp. 16-17. The first edition of this book came out in 1948.

(9) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum_en.html

(10) You are all undoubtedly as shocked as I am that these quotations from this classical papal encyclical on “the rights and duties of capital and labour” are never brought up by the priests whom American left-wing propagandist Michael Moore interviews in his “Capitalism: A Love Story”.

(11) Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1981), p. 226. This is a reprint of the translation, by J. Kahane, of the 2nd edition of Mises’ Die Gemeinwirtschaft which was published in 1932. The quotations are taken from the last page of the subsection “Christian Socialism” in chapter 15 “Particular Forms of Socialism”. On the first page of this subsection (p. 223) Mises writes “Simple faith and economic rationalism cannot dwell together”.

(12) The Austrian School goes back to Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in the 19th Century but its principle figures were active in the 20th Century. A popular introduction to Austrian economics is Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way To Understand Basic Economics (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1979) originally published by Harper and Brothers in 1946. The most famous Austrian volume is undoubtedly Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1944).

(13) Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, (San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1996). This is the 4th revised edition of a work originally published by Yale University Press in 1949. See page 724 and following for an example of what I am talking about. In the first paragraph of the section “Righteousness as the Ultimate Standard of the Individual’s Action” Mises’ brings up advocates of social reform “accomplished by compliance with the principles of Christianity” in which “conscience should also guide well-intentioned people in their dealings on the market”. Such people believe “a return to the Lord’s commandments and to the precepts of the moral code, a turning away from the vices of greed and selfishness” will make it “easy to reconcile private ownership of the means of production with justice, righteousness, and fairness”. As a result “People will dethrone the Moloch capitalism without enthroning the Moloch state”. Mises then launches into a hysterical rant against such sensible suggestions, equating them with collectivism and coercion, and insisting that the decision of the individual is absolute and above such arbitrary judgments as morality.

(14) This trilogy consisted of Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart (1942), first published in English as The Social Crisis of our Times by the University of Chicago Press in 1950, Civitas Humana (1944) published in English as The Moral Foundations of Civil Society by William Hodge and Company in 1948, and Internationale Ordnung—heute (1945), published in English as International Order and Economic Integration by D. Reidel Publishing in 1959. The first two volumes were reprinted by Transaction Publishers of New Brunswick, New Jersey, U.S.A. in 1992 and 1996 respectively. All three volumes can be found online in .pdf format at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s website: http://mises.org/literature.aspx?action=author&Id=448

(15) Wilhelm Roepke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Chicago: Henry Regnery & Co., 1960). Quotations in this essay are taken from the 3rd edition, published by ISI Books, the book publishing arm of the Intercollegiate Scholastic Institute of Wilmington, Delaware in 1998.

(16) Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (London & Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1912).

The Progressives’ Penance

What is immigration? While that question may seem rather basic a proper definition of immigration goes a long way towards clarifying our thoughts on the subject. Immigration is the noun we use when we wish to speak of the act of immigrating as if it were a concrete thing. Immigrate is the verb that describes the act of moving into a country/society/community, not as a tourist or guest, but with the intention of taking out long-term or permanent membership in that country/society/community.

I wrote society and community alongside country, because a) nobody can move into a country without moving into a society and a community within that society, and because b) immigration affects society and community even more than it affects a country. A country is a geo-political entity, a territory under a common law and a sovereign government. A community consists of families who live as neighbors, usually with common schools, recreational facilities, etc., and who therefore have social ties to one another. A society, in the sense in which I am using the term here, is usually coterminous with a country in size, but is organic like a community in nature.

By definition, to immigrate you require a pre-existing country to immigrate to. From this fact we see that the oft-heard “we are a nation of immigrants” argument for liberal immigration policies is wrong. There is no such thing as a nation of immigrants. It is a contradiction in terms. What the people who mindlessly repeat this mantra are referring to is that the people who founded countries like Canada and the United States moved to North America from Europe and the UK. As true as that is, those people did not move to North America to become members of pre-existing societies that were already here. The founders of the societies that would become English and French Canada, and of the United States of America, were not immigrants, they were settlers or colonists. For that matter, the people who were already living in North America when the English and French settlers arrived, were not immigrants either when their ancestors crossed what is now the Bering Strait.

“But isn’t that just quibbling?” someone might ask. No, actually, it is not. What proposition are those who think that “we are a nation of immigrants” constitutes a legitimate argument arguing for? They are arguing that our country/society has no right to turn immigrants away today, except perhaps if a particular immigrant can be shown to be a criminal or terrorist.

The implications of that proposition, however, are that no country has a right to be a country. An essential part of the definition of a country is political sovereignty and that concept is meaningless if a country does not have the right to decide who they will accept as immigrants or even whether they will accept any immigrants at all (some countries don’t). It is in the immigration debate that we most clearly see that liberalism is the enemy, not of tyranny and the abuse of state power as it purports to be, but of society.

Now demonstrating that a country has the right to decide for itself whether it will allow immigrants in or not, is not in and of itself an argument that a country should restrict immigration. If you have the right to do something it does not necessarily follow that you will be right or wise in doing it. If a country has the right to determine its own immigration policy why would it be wrong to decide upon a liberal policy of basically letting whoever wants to come in?

Before answering that question, lets take a look at what a liberal immigration policy consists of.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the governments of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and virtually every other Western country embraced “liberal” immigration policies.(1) While these policies were different from each other, they had the following characteristics in common: a) more immigrants would be let in than in previous waves of immigration, b) the immigrants allowed in would be further removed ethnically and culturally from the societies they were immigrating to than in previous waves of immigration, c) this wave of immigration would be accompanied with efforts to change the country and society to accommodate the immigrants rather than with the expectation that the immigrants would assimilate into the existing society.

The governments of these countries never had popular support for any of these policies. Instead they silenced debate by loudly condemning their critics as “racists”, a tactic that was soon picked up by progressives in the media and academy.

What on earth was the purpose of all this?

It is important to remember that these policies were introduced in the era of anti-colonialism. Britain, France, and other European countries, devastated politically and economically by two World Wars, and under pressure from the new superpowers that had emerged from WWII to contend with each other for control of the world, were closing their colonial and imperial offices overseas. Progressives, who a century earlier had regarded European imperialism as a vessel to spread the blessings of modern science, technology, and reason across the globe so as to create a new and better world of the future, now saw colonialism and imperialism as being morally wrong and the cause of all the suffering and poverty in the Third World.

Against this backdrop liberal immigration looks suspiciously like a secular, collective act of penance. (2) Our countries either practiced imperialism or were established by colonists of an imperial power, therefore to make restitution, we will turn our own countries into colonies of the world. We will bring in people from all over the world and tell them they don’t have to adapt British ways to become British, Canadian ways to become Canadian, or American ways to become American. Instead we will adopt “multiculturalism” and change the definition of what it means to be British, Canadian or American, to include the newcomers.

So what exactly is the problem with this?

First of all, it involves a betrayal on the part of the governing elites of our countries, of the people whom they govern. Canada was founded in the 1860’s as a country united under a single political identity – a North American country, with a British-style parliament, under British Common Law, loyal to the British Crown. Within that unity, were a number of particular cultural societies - English Canada (English speaking, Protestant), French Canada (French speaking, Catholic), and Aboriginal Canada.

When the Liberal Party of Canada, under the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau changed Canada’s immigration policies in the 1960’s, they did not ask English Canadians if they wanted English Canada to disappear and be replaced by “multicultural Canada”. They did not ask French Canadians if they wanted French Canada to disappear and be replaced by “multicultural Canada”. French Canada is famous (or infamous depending on who you ask) for its attempts to preserve its cultural identity. English Canadians were and are no less opposed to the Liberal Party's efforts to dissolve the cultural identity of English Canada into their multicultural “mosaic”.

At this point someone might object “but shouldn't the government do what is right rather than what the majority want”? Yes it should, but we are not talking here about allowing the majority to vote away a minority's property or life. We are talking about a government dissolving its own people's cultural identity against their own wishes. This is a major betrayal on the part of government. One of the most basic purposes of government is to protect a society against foreign invaders. People who live in any given society wish to preserve its culture, traditions, religion, language, customs and ways intact for future generations. They expect foreign conquerors to try and take these things away from them and impose a foreign culture on them. It is a role of government to try and stop it. Yet in liberal immigration and multicultural policies, government has taken upon itself the role of foreign invader, towards its own society.

A second problem with liberal immigration policy is that it ignores the importance of cultural homogeneity within a society. “Diversity is our strength” the multiculturalists chant. Is it, however?

In one sense the answer is obviously yes. A society where everybody was a policeman, or where everybody was a doctor, or where everybody was a fireman, would not function very well. A society needs farmers, doctors, policeman, firemen, teachers, and people who specialize in all sorts of other work as well.

However, there are other senses in which diversity is a weakness not a strength. The story of the Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis provides one obvious example. People need to communicate if they wish to cooperate and communication requires a common language. Language is vitally connected to culture. The national identities of continental Europe are largely distinguished by language – French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, etc. Why do we often say “England” when we mean “The United Kingdom”, which consists of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland? Because English is the language spoken there. It is through language that a people passes down to future generations the stories, songs, poems, history, and other traditions that comprise their cultural identity.

Clearly a society and a country need both unity and diversity. The question is what kind of unity and what kind of diversity? The modern progressive answer is that cultural diversity is what is needed. As we have seen above, however, the kind of cultural diversity the progressive has in mind is the diversity least likely to strengthen a society and most likely to weaken it. There is another kind of cultural diversity. Within a larger English speaking society, for example, regional and local dialects of the common tongue will develop as will local and particular variations on the common culture. This kind of cultural diversity is good for a society but it is not the product of immigration.

This brings us to our third and final objection to liberal immigration. It undermines community. Community requires more than just living in proximity to other people. Imagine six houses on both sides of a street facing each other, all occupied by families, none of whom ever socialize with the others or even know their names. Are they a community? No. To make a community out of a neighborhood requires knowing the people with whom you share sidewalks, streets, schools, playgrounds, and churches. This requires a degree of trust. The strongest communities are communities where the families have long roots, where families have lived together as neighbors for many generations.

Now a strong community will be open to newcomers. A closed community is not healthy for a number of reasons. There is a difference, however, between what happens when the son of a family long established in a community, comes back home and brings his new wife from out of town with him and what happens when a large number of families from a foreign country that nobody knows anything about or has any connections with, move into a neighborhood all at once. The latter undermines the basic sense of trust which binds the families in the neighborhood into a community. As John Derbyshire puts it:

Diversity seems to affect every kind of social connection. In places with more ethnic diversity, people have fewer friends, watch more TV, are less inclined to vote, trust local government less, and rate their personal happiness lower. (3)

Community is essential for society – and a healthy country must first be a healthy society.

To recap, the case against liberal immigration has been made on the grounds that it a) involves governments breaking faith with and betraying their own people, b) increases the wrong kind of diversity, diversity which weakens rather than strengthens a society, and c) undermines the trust needed to generate the social ties which keep communities together. (4) I will conclude by answering two objections that advocates of liberal immigration raise against restricting immigration.

The first objection is the compassion objection. “These people are just looking for a better life for themselves and their children, isn’t it cruel to turn them away?” The answer to this is that a liberal immigration policy which appears to show compassion to masses of immigrants is in fact unfair to them as individuals and families. Lets say a family is considering moving to Canada because prospects appear better for the future of their children here than in their home country. They are willing to come here, to become part of Canada, to integrate into our society, and work to better their condition and that of their children. It is easy to see how letting this family into Canada would be compassionate and would improve their circumstances without harming our country and society in any way.

Suppose however, that we admit the family, not on the merits of their own case, but as part of a flood of immigrants that are being admitted because their culture and ethnicity are different from that of Canadians, as part of a government policy designed at dissolving the traditional identities of “English Canada” and “French Canada” and replacing them with “multicultural Canada”. If we do that, then what we are saying to the hypothetical family of immigrants in this illustration, that we will admit them, but not to the Canada they were hoping to move to and become a part of. That Canada we are dissolving and tearing apart. This is not compassion. It is as unfair to prospective immigrants as it is to English Canadians and French Canadians.

The second objection is “Isn’t it racist to oppose immigration policy on the grounds that it weakens cultural homogeneity and increases diversity?” This objection is never raised in good faith but rather as an attempt to poison the well. It does not deserve an answer but I will give it one anyway.

No, it is not racist for English Canadians to want English Canada to remain English Canada. It is not racist for French Canadians to want French Canada to remain French Canada. It is not racist for the British to want the UK to remain British. It is not racist for the French to want France to remain French, or for the Germans to want Germany to remain German. It is natural and right and normal for people to form ties of loyalty to their own people and culture and society and to want their children and grandchildren to grow up and become part of the same society that they are attached to. It is immoral to accuse people of being racist for wanting these things.

“Racist” as most people understand the word, means disliking someone else because they are different from you in skin color and ethnic background. Wanting your own society to remain essentially the same is not about disliking other people and wishing them ill.

(1) In Canada, the Liberals under Pearson and Trudeau, introduced these policies in a most underhanded manner. They made a big show of bringing in the “points system” in 1967, a system which on paper looks pretty good – it awards points to prospective immigrants for knowing English and French, for education and skills, and for other things the government should be looking for in prospective immigrants. They stuck some pretty big loopholes into the system, however, and quietly relocated Canada’s visa officers to High Commissions and consulates in the Third World where they launched a recruitment campaign for immigration to Canada.

(2) In Christian theology, a repentant sinner is supposed to confess his sins and make restitution to those he has wronged if it is possible. If he has stolen something, for example, he is supposed to return it. In sacramental branches of the Christian tradition (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, etc.) the term “penance” refers to these things and an outward rite in which sins are confessed before a priest and the priest pronounces absolution (forgiveness). In lay language, however, the term “penance” is most often used in a limited sense to refer to the acts a person does to “make up” for what he has done wrong. It is in this sense that I use the term here. In chapter 2 of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward A Secular Theocracy (University of Missouri Press: Columbia and London, 2002), Dr. Paul Gottfried, the Professor of Humanites at Elizabethtown College, argues that liberal Protestantism is the religious worldview which “gives direction to the managerial state’s progress toward a therapeutic regime concerned with the self-esteem of victims” (p. 66). It is interesting therefore, to read his remarks on page 65 of that book about the absence of the sacrament of penance from the branches of Protestantism that developed into “liberal Protestantism” and about the public rituals of repentance that these churches developed to fill the vacuum.

(3) John Derbyshire, We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, (New York: Crown Forum, 2009), p. 19. This quotations is from chapter two entitled “Diversity: Nothing to Celebrate”. In this chapter, Derbyshire discusses among other things the findings of political scientist Robert Putnam regarding the impact of ethnic diversity on social capital. It is in the context of that discussion that this quotation appears. Derbyshire’s book is both informative and witty, and chapters two and ten are especially relevant to those seeking more information on the subject of this essay.

(4) Other objections could be raised, on a wide variety of grounds. Diane Francis’ book Immigration: The Economic Case (Key Porter Books: Toronto, 2002) provides economic objections to Canada’s immigration policy, for example. Last year the Fraser Institute published The Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society, a collection of essays edited by Herbert Grubel criticizing the immigration policies of Canada (primarily – there are two essays devoted to France and the United States) from a number of standpoints (economic, demographic, social, and political).