Against the Servile State

Less than a year ago, a nearly omnipotent central government--in order to provide the "basic human right" of state-funded health care—attempted to confiscate one-seventh of our national economy and rearrange it according to the corporatist principles of fascist Italy.

Even after a political sea change which rejected such a policy, this central government still feels empowered to step in and invalidate each local political arrangement which does not suit it, regardless of the wishes of the citizens of that region. So, at the moment, the Justice Department is considering or is embarked upon lawsuits in Federal Court to impose the following interventions (among many others) on state and city governments: to gerrymander electoral districts all across the South along racial lines; to break up all-male military academies in Virginia and South Carolina; to compel taxpayer funding for abortions in Pennsylvania; to merge historically separate universities in Louisiana and Mississippi as revenge for past discrimination, over the objections of citizens black and white; I could extend this miserable list indefinitely, but why drive the gentle reader to despair? And in what name are all these abuses of the division of power imposed? Why, in the cause of "individual rights." Orwell's point in "Politics and the English Language" has never been more apt: the abuse of language makes possible the abuse of power.

What unites these abuses, tying together the apparently disparate threads of anarchic civil libertarianism and economic totalitarianism into a single noose around the neck of the American citizen? It is a rejection of the most basic principle of Catholic social teaching, the doctrine of subsidiarity. This teaching, an outgrowth of the medieval feudal order, was codified by the Schoolmen, then transmitted into English by Richard Hooker. It found its way into our own Constitution in the (sadly neglected) 9th and 10th Amendments. It has been beautifully restated by modern popes (especially Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum), and forms the basis of our current Holy Father's Centesimus Annus. It is the clear and noble doctrine which underlies Lord Acton's thought. Simply put, subsidiarity insists on the following:

Whatever power can be safely exercised by individuals or families, should be left to them. Whatever escapes their competence should be referred to the church, or the other private institutions which constitute "society." If those fail, responsibility can move to the government, starting at the local level. Whatever local government cannot accomplish may be given to state government. Only powers which cannot be prudently exercised by the states shall revert to the central government.

This doctrine, deceptively simple, is in fact a radical attack on the tyrannical power of governments and a sure defense for the rights of society and the Church against the depredations of political and financial elites. If applied consistently, subsidiarity guarantees the integrity of the individual and the family in the face of power-hungry bureaucrats and ideologues. It defends the region against the nation, the city against the region, the village against the city, and the family against the village, in every case trying to err on the side of individual liberty and social variety rather than uniformity and coercion. Its whole thrust is to leave the essential decisions of an individual's life in his own hands, rendering duly unto Caesar only what is his, and keeping power close to the local level where every citizen has direct access to the men who make decisions. For while legitimate authority comes not from the people, but from God (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei), it is the individual soul for which Christ died. Souls are created by God directly and individually, not in lots; it is to individuals which He grants the terrible freedom to accept or reject His Grace. The individual soul is "the only creature on earth which God has willed for itself" (John Paul II, Centesimus Annus). Catholics especially have every reason to respect the sanctity of the individual, and the conscience which constitutes his "opening to Transcendence" (Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis). We should tremble before depriving such a fearsome creature as the individual soul of the liberty God gave him.

But man is a social animal, as the Philosopher reminds us. Revelation confirms this, teaching that man corporately fell in the first Adam, and was corporately redeemed by the actions of the Second. God's covenants of the Old Testament, made with individuals, bound the whole of Israel and offered that nation the chance to prosper through fulfilling His law. With the Incarnation, Christ reconstituted His people, grafting the gentile nations onto the root of Israel, to create a new "People of God," a Mystical Body which at the End will rise as one to become His eternal Bride (Pius XII, Mystici Corporis). Outside the Church there is no salvation, and the soul which has adored its individuality by rejecting incorporation (by whatever means) into the Mystical Body is doomed to eternal exile (Boniface VIII, Unum Sanctam).

Since each man's destiny is to live in community in this life and in the next, he finds himself oriented to others. We only acquire our culture, practical skills, and personality in the context of family, the primal unit of society (Pius XI, Casti Connubii). It is there that each man develops his identity and learns the extent of his rights as an individual. As importantly, in the family he learns the duties of citizenship -- to obey legitimate authority and work prudently for the Common Good. Transferred to the larger stage, this principle grants the rulers of Church as State their authority, and modifies the rights of individual men.

This Common Good is emphatically not the greatest good for the greatest number of individuals, nor is it the enrichment and aggrandizement of the State. Rather, as we read in The City of God, it is twofold: the preservation of temporal order from the results of Original Sin (the minimal good sought by the City of Man), and the salvation of souls (the proper end of the City of God). St. Augustine does not mean to create a vulgar distinction between Church and State, nor to equate the visible church with the City of God (and purely spiritual ends) and the visible state with the City of Man (and purely pragmatic ends). Rather, the invisible City of God interpenetrates the fallen secular society like a divine Fifth Column, inhabiting here and there the institutions of Church or State, an apparent confusion which will only become clear at the General Judgment, when all sins and charities alike will be revealed for all to see at the "fearful Judgment Seat of Christ."

While the primary goal of the Church is to provide the sacraments, and unite the members of Christ's Mystical Body for the final Resurrection, she also has the duty to help promote public order--a natural good not despised by our Lord, and conducive to salvation. This is why the Church does not keep silent about social matters, or pretend to an agnosticism on political matters, but speaks out regularly to remind rulers and people of their rights and duties to each other and to her. The primary duty of a State is to provide its people with the maximum liberty conducive to the the protection of public order and the salvation of souls (Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos; Leo XIII, Immortale Dei). What shape will such a state take? The answer will differ according to the dictates of Prudence, regulated by the shape of each society, its cultural forms, the heterogeneity of its populace, and its cultural history. Remembering that Prudence is the highest natural virtue, regulating the exercise of all others, the Church has always avoided imposing a single cultural form upon the divers peoples amongst whom she has planted the seeds of salvation, choosing rather to "inculturate" the Gospel, to water it with the vital streams of local tradition which will nourish it, choosing the ground which is fertile and free of rocks, thorns, and weeds.

This is why the Church has never endorsed one political system, but rather allows for a diversity, approving variously of monarchy, aristocracy, and republican government, condemning the corruptions of each form: tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. The criteria by which we must judge whether a system has fallen into its corrupted form are those which the Church provides: Are the rights of men being respected, as modified by the demands of prudence, according to the principles of subsidiarity? Are the rights of God maintained in that society, namely the liberty of the Church to offer the sacraments and of men freely to accept or reject her message (Pius XI, Quas Primas)? (It is, we are taught, as monstrous an abuse for a man to be forced to accept the Sacraments as for him to be denied them. In the first case, the Sacrament is blasphemed; in the latter, his salvation is endangered.)

Within these limits, the Church does not circumscribe the liberty of nations to organize themselves in accordance with their historic natures; the results will invariably differ, producing some countries which do admirably at defending most individuals' rights, but neglect the Common Goods (such as Victorian England), and others with a lively sense of public order and the salvation of souls, but an underdeveloped notion of individual and local rights (such as Franco's government in Spain). No system will be perfect, and (pace Father Neuhaus) none will provide an exemplar which every other government will be bound by the Church to emulate. The principle of subsidiarity is not a Divine Law per se, but rather a rational scheme, endorsed by the common teaching of the Church (the Ordinary Magisterium) for the prudent construction of government systems which accord with Divine Laws concerning the rights of Man and the rights of God.

Subsidiarity will be differently applied in different circumstances; the construction of centralized bureaucratic power might be necessary for national security in times of crisis (such as the Cold War). In such times, it could be treasonous to exercise one's freedom to sell technology abroad, or promote certain political ideas. Outside of such emergencies--which must be real, immediate, and exceptional, not manufactured by the propaganda apparat of a managerial state--such bureacracies generally become tyrannical. The inertia of governance tends to leave accumulated power in the hands of those who have grasped it, without reference to current circumstances. This is precisely why division of power is essential to preserving limited (that is, subsidiary) government. In a system which counterbalances executive power against legislative, or which grants elites (such as the House of Lords, the French First Estate, or the pre-Jacksonian U.S. Senate) the power to veto or resist popular or executive initiatives, or which allows a certain independence to the judiciary, there is reason to hope that power will eventually devolve, once a crisis has past, back down to the lower levels at which it ought to be exercised.

This is precisely what has ceased to happen in the American government, and not because of any particular fault in our admirable system. No, the degeneracy of American virtue and liberty grows from a collapse in the understanding throughout the West of human nature itself, and therefore of the proper role of the State. With the growth of secularism, and the displacement of the Christian notion of the Common Good (as order in this life, salvation in the next) by sentimental utilitarianism, we have come to view man quite differently from our ancestors. They saw an individual endowed with Reason, responsible for working out his salvation in fear and trembling, responsible for providing himself and his children with material needs and spiritual education, for whom suffering was an inevitable part of life which could conduce to his own salvation or that of others. The flawed image of God.

The modern sentimentalist, the partisan of mass democratic totalitarianism sees in man something very different, and much inferior. For him, man is a frightened, victimized, feckless "adult child," the puppet of economic and cultural realities far beyond his control, hampered and wounded by the sharp edges of inequality, in desperate need of protection and step-by-step guidance by benevolent "policy wonks" towards secular salvation--in the form of a comfortable, circumscribed life enjoyed according to the lowest common denominator of popular culture, furnished with quantities of mass consumables, cushioned from suffering and God's Providence by cheap contraception and abortion at one end of life, and painless euthanasia at the other. A lowing steer, with the right to vote.

This image of man denies the reality of evil, replacing the pathos of the moral struggle recognized by pagans and Christians alike with the bathos of therapy and recovery. The "new man," loaded down with rights to regular feeding, shelter, health care and self-esteem, is woefully light of responsibilities, free of the yoke of conscience which makes him civilized and a man. He is half-god, half-ape--an angel trapped inside a machine (Maritain, The Dream of Descartes). His macrocosm, the State in which such a chimerical creature lives, is equally grotesque: a nightmarish managerial machine, manipulated by "angels" whose technical expertise elevates them above the human cogs and belts that whir mindlessly beneath them, regularly spewing out taxes and votes.

The monster state in its current incarnation cannot last long. Liberal tyranny runs up bills it cannot afford to pay, and they are pouring in: Generations of fatherless children feeding at the public trough and training themselves for years of violence and promiscuity; reams of regulation guaranteeing each dying drug user or homosexual free medical care; classrooms full of resentful children educated equally -- at the level of the dullest child in the room; legions of poor and old people whose sole function is to vote themselves new subsidies; soon all these will break the back of the therapeutic state, revealing at last that individuals cannot forever enjoy these liberties while shoving their responsibilities onto the state. At that point, two options will emerge:

A conservative tyranny, which confiscates the last remnants of individual autonomy, using mass sterilization, militaristic discipline, budget-driven rationing and euthanasia to make the monster state sleek and fearfully efficient.

A return to ordered liberty, in which citizens demand a return of both their rights and their duties, and insist on acting and being treated as adults.

It is too early to predict which way our society will drive the state. One thing is clear: without a rebirth of Christian Faith, manifested publicly and privately, in the pomp of Eucharistic processions and the quiet of the family hearth, it is very unlikely that men will choose the narrow and difficult road that leads to liberty. They will prefer to live as bees, neutered and regimented, for the sake of a little honey.

John Patrick Zmirak (honorable mention) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English, Louisiana State University. A graduate of Yale University, Mr. Zmirak received several academic awards including a Richard H. Weaver Fellowship and an Alumni Federation Fellowship. He served as assistant and associate editor of Success magazine, 1992-93.