Today’s post begins to examine Rerum Novarum - that most magnificent contribution to the history of ideas - and the eighth encyclical of the Catholic Social Teachings.
WHAT IS MEANT BY “RIGHTS” AND “GOOD”?
This post is a sort of preface to the encyclical. As the Catholic Social Teaching insists on the Common Good and the defence of natural rights, I thought it would be useful to the reader to examine what is meant today, in the secular liberal world, by “rights” and “good”.
By contrast, the Social Teachings of the Church assert the natural rights of Man which derive from God. These nine encyclicals show how the simple principle of Aquinas can correct the false idols on which modern “human rights” propaganda is founded.
A full summary of Rerum Novarum will follow this primer next week.
The insistence on natural justice is one of many gems buried in this text, which glitter from its dazzling treasures. So numerous are these precious stones of wisdom in the Catholic Social Teachings that they can be easily overlooked.
In my next posts I will examine the more commonly known themes of Rerum Novarum - which recommend the harmonisation of capital and labour, and stress that the political economy must defend and promote human dignity.
I hope that all these parts will suggest some of the whole of Rerum Novarum, which is one of the most remarkable documents in the defence of civilisation ever written.
REPLACING EVIL WITH THE COMMON GOOD
I like to say the Catholic Social Teaching shows us how to replace the Common Evil of modern life with the Common Good. Evil seems an almost glib term to apply today, because we are immersed in it.
The Catholic Social Teaching warned us of the total moral collapse of our societies which would flow from the defection from Christ and His Church.
This post is an attempt to justify the claim that modern society is in fact a death cult - a cult whose idols are created from the death of meaning and morality in the modern and postmodern condition.
RIGHTS AND DUTIES OF CAPITAL AND LABOUR
If people know anything of the Catholic Social Teaching, they think of Rerum Novarum.
It is titled in English - On the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour.
This is by far the most famous of all the nine encyclicals - and for good reason.
If you seek a manifesto to restore order from the chaos we inhabit, here it is.
Rerum Novarum is also, as is said above, a sort of summary of the position of the Church on social matters as expressed elsewhere by Pope Leo XIII.
The Catholic Social Teaching describes the problems of modern society and prescribes the remedy.
Rerum Novarum is not confined to the rebalancing of the State, nor of harmonising Capital with Labour. It is sometimes subtitled as
“On the Condition of the Working Classes”
Rerum Novarum is also more than a manual as to how to restore the human dignity of labour and rightfully enshrine the ownership of property at all levels of social class.
It also speaks of rights and duties - towards the promotion of the Common Good.
Before we look at how the Church teaches the harmony of the social classes, we must understand what is meant by “good” and” rights” today.
The Catholic Social Teachings remind us that rights proceed not from Man but God. Natural rights flow from the Divinely created natural order.
This is Natural Justice.
St Thomas Aquinas (for example) explains natural justice in detail. In brief, the basis of natural law relies on the pursuit of virtue and the rejection of vice.
As Aquinas said, the Church teaches that:
“Good is to be done and pursued, and evil avoided”
Here we will examine what rights have come to mean since Rerum Novarum was published in 1891 - the fourth year of the pontificate of Pope Leo XIII.
As we shall see, the modern concept of justice reverses the definition of St Thomas.
What is commonly today called good is often evil, and this is a consequence of a theory of human rights which protects, promotes and prioritises human wrongs.
HUMAN RIGHTS FOR HUMAN WRONGS
The liberal system which is dissolving today advances “human rights”.
These rights were derived from the reduction of mankind first to a purely materialist condition, and then from the pure abstraction of the theories of people like John Rawls. This is called reductionism.
Reductionism is the attempt to discard the Divine and to explain the human condition in purely material or phenomenological1 terms. This means it tries to reduce life to things and the fantasies we have about them.
MORAL INVERSION
As I explain in a forthcoming video, the work of Michael Polanyi explains this point in some detail2. He said the reductionist project of secular liberalism created a void in humanity, which in turn promoted moral inversion.
How does everything bad become good? How was our morality inverted?
Polanyi explained that removing God from the pinnacle of the meaning of life left Man with homeless moral passions.
This means when we stop loving God, we infuse other things - practically anything else with intense moral fervour bordering on hysteria.
I think this process of moral inversion explains why so many people so often furiously support things which are wicked, insane, or even meaningless.
The common crazes mocked online as The Current Thing are examples of periodic crazes, mass produced through media, into which people pour intense feeling - and to which they attach, however briefly, their sense of identity.
Covid “vaccines”, the masks, the rituals of the lockdown, George Floyd, the Ukraine war, abortion, Net Zero - from the harmful to the criminal, every Current Thing is a feverish celebration of some form of destruction.
It is the deletion of God from the secular script of human life which makes chapter and verse of anything and everything which makes life worse.
The reason millions of people sing from the same deranged hymn sheets is because the rejection of God has cut off the head of the body politic, and the headless chickening of mass hysteria is the result. Our system is mad because it has supplied an insatiable hunger in deleting Christ from our lives.
This is extremely convenient to an economic system which relies on ever increasing demand for consumer trash, as a population starved of meaning will be forever desperate for anything to fill the hole within them.
This is how the political economy of consumer liberalism is secured. The liberal system replaces wisdom with folly, cuts off the head of reality and replaces it with an endless series of fever dreams. Its chief product is hunger, and its marketing strategy is the presentation of sin as liberation.
How is this advertised? As the promotion and progress of “human rights”.
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