Does Mr. Zmirak consider himself to be a student of Wilhelm Röpke? He offers some appropriate criticisms of Dawson's essay; Dawson goes to one extreme in reacting against modern capitalism. But Dawson's critique is salvageable.
Then Mr. Zmirak writes this:
Dawson clearly follows the Classical, pagan preference for soldiers and noblemen, who make their living employing force against their fellow men, over businessmen who traffic in voluntary exchange. While soldiers sometimes fight justly, nobles can rule fairly, and businessmen can engage in evil trades (like slavery), surely it’s deeply perverse to prefer force to persuasion, serfdom to salesmanship, and conquest to commerce. The Church sees war as evil in itself, allowing it only in narrowly circumscribed cases, setting standards that very few wars waged even by Catholic monarchs ever fully met. Conversely, she sees ordinary business and commerce as the means by which most men earn their bread by the sweat of their brows—though she marks off certain methods of business which are evil. But sins of business are the exception, not the rule. For a war to be good, it must climb through the eye of a needle. So why should we as Christians prefer soldiers to salesmen, militaristic empires to bourgeois republics? Because the former are more romantic, and leave in their wake such poignant ruins?
It is not so much a concern with sin but the good that is the object of each role or function. The soldier is properly concerned with the defense of the polity, the aristocrat with its rule (and by extension the common good). But what is the object of the bourgeois? Making a living through commerce or facilitating some other exchange. (Or worse, profit.) I don't think St. Thomas differs that much from Confucius in their evaluation of the status of merchants in comparison to other classes (roles) in society - it's rather low. Dawson does not have in mind a degraded aristocracy, but one which lives up to its duties and is cultivated accordingly. A businessman's success does not indicate that he will be a good ruler, and yet many had pretensions to that part of political life.
As for Baroque Spain - yes, its cultural achievements may have been possible only because of its empire, but let's not miss Dawson's point, which is about priorities and orderings - or the end of society and how leisure is practiced. Is it ordered to something beyond itself or not?
1 comment:
Yes, I am a follower of Wilhelm Ropke, whose life work was one long affirmation of the virtues of the burghers, bourgeois, Mittlestand, however you choose to style it. He recognized the limitations of the market economy, but rightly saw it as the only system ethically worthy of free men and children of God. This particular Dawson essay, unlike the rest of his work which I've read, betrays moral blindness and crassly partisan narrowness, and deserved every molecule of the vitriol heaped upon it. Cheers,
John
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