‘Generals’, Georges Clemenceau is reported to have complained, ‘always prepare to fight the last war’. Clemenceau, the French leader for the latter years of World War One, certainly knew something of the dangers of ignoring present realities as militaries, geared for nineteenth century war, faced the horrors of industrial warfare.
A similar dynamic seems also to be at play in the world of ideas. It is a philosophical cliché that the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk, but it is a practical truth that the final, and crushing, argument against an ideology is often articulated only after it has long since ceased to be of any practical relevance.
Thus, conservatives and other cultural warriors on the ‘right’ continue to polish their arguments against Marxism (re-christened ‘cultural Marxism’) some thirty-odd years after the fall of the Berlin wall and, one feels, some sixty-odd years since Marxism posed a genuine intellectual threat to status quo.
Doubtless this is a simplification of affairs. And doubtless too, there is something to be gained from the dismantling of even a spent ideology. But confronting the errors of the past might not serve present needs.
The error of Marxism is materialism. The reduction, the confining, of humanity solely to its economic existence. Against this error, perhaps the most persistent opponent of Marxism, the Catholic Church, asserted the spiritual nature of humanity. And the persistence of the faithful in seeking what is spiritual, particularly in nations such as Poland, ultimately broke the lie of Marxist-Leninism.
But this brings us to Australia and to the present, over thirty years since the fall of the Iron Curtin. The spiritual understanding proposed by the Church, though compromised by scandal and sometimes hesitatingly articulated, remains intact.
But the economic vision of the Church is much less articulated. From my, admittedly anecdotal, experience in the pews, it seems that the Church leaders are uncomfortable speaking on the topics of money, business, investment, or the proper role material goods play in the life of the Christian.
Related to this state of affairs are the institutions to which the Church’s corporal works are trusted, schools, hospitals, and charitable organizations. All of these, I would argue, have been facing a crisis of mission since at least the 1970s with the creation of the welfare state. That argument must, however, be reserved for another time.
Regardless, the absence of a strong economic vision from the Church in Australia, would be of less concern if the current status quo supported a Christian understanding of the telos, or purpose, of humanity. But this is not the case.
The twentieth century Marxists explicitly denounced religion. But while contemporary liberal democracies might endorse the freedom of religion to propose spiritual truths, their economic structures act as a dissolvent on religious faith.
The economic and the spiritual man cannot be separated. This has been understood since the very beginning of the Church where it is recorded that “the company of those who believed … had everything in common” (Acts 4:32).
Conditions of the twentieth century, among them the external threat of atheistic communism, led us to a place where it seemed that to be a good Australian was (more or less) to be a good Christian. This is no longer the case, if indeed it ever were.
It is time that our critical faculties were turned towards the society and the economics in which we live.
G. K. Chesterton, the English writer and convert, prophesised in 1926 that “the madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow, but in Manhattan”. Chesterton was speaking of a war against morality, and in particular sexual morality. But this attack would not come from socialism but those whom capitalism had made wealthy and who were determined now to enjoy that wealth unrestrained by the strictures of any religious system.
We live, almost a hundred years on, in a world made much more by Manhattan than Moscow. And, if a religious humanity is to survive in this world, they will require an economic vision to sustain their faith. We are, after all, also economic animals.
