Lehrman American Studies Center

We have just been handed an opportunity for serious interdisciplinary scholarship in Caritas in Veritate. As an economist, I read it and I shake my head. As a dabbler in interdisciplinary thought, I’m motivated but perplexed. (As a believer, I’m enthused).

Benedict, in his summary of the encyclical, lists principles that are "indispensable for building human development in the coming years. Among these:

• In the first place, attention to the life of the person, considered as the center of all true progress;
• respect for the right to religious liberty, always closely linked to the development of the person;
• rejection of a Promethean vision of the human being, which considers him the absolute author of his own destiny."

As an economist, it is this last point that is most striking. The Pope refers it most directly to technology, but it applies most generally to the whole Enlightenment project of economics and politics. If you are of a certain persuasion, you may believe that the individual is the best judge of his own welfare, and that uncoordinated, self-willed action is bound to produce better results than any other alternative. If you are of a different persuasion, you might believe that through rational thought and planning, through coordinated, self-willed action, through deliberation and consensus, we will be able to create the world anew.

As I work through the wonders of accreditation and assessment, I am brought face-to-face with the same line of thinking: education will be better if we set out clear goals, if we assess whether we have achieved them, and if we use them for improvement. Of course much of this is true. But here you have that “unlimited trust in the power of technology,” hard at work supposedly at the service of enlarging minds and arousing desires.

To put it in a funny way, the joke goes that the economist’s preferred answer is always “it depends.” What Caritas tells us is that “we depend.” There’s much that we can do on our own. But ultimately we depend on a power that is beyond rational planning or entrepreneurial striving, beyond the clever arguments of the mathematical social scientists (of which guild I am a proud member) or the philosophes.

If this is how I see it, how am I to teach Economics? Should I eschew equations? Should I spend my ECON 201 lectures telling stories? Should I drop the textbook and read the Nichomachean Ethics?

Or should I go to the other extreme, and tell my students to hand over their future to the sui-generis faith that what is personally vicious can be socially virtuous? Should I teach them to put blind trust on the Brain Trust, on the government economic planners?

Idealizing technical progress, or contemplating the utopia of a return to humanity's original natural state, are two contrasting ways of detaching progress from its moral evaluation and hence from our responsibility (Caritas in Veritate, par. 14).

Tags: Economics