I find economics very difficult to understand. By ‘economics’ I do not limit myself to the field or discipline of economics pure and simple. I am referring to the ways people in the modern world think and feel about money, capital, and themselves.
In many ways, I am more comfortable thinking about an ‘economy,’ about transactions that boil down to relationships between people and things that they care about. There is no doubt that many economists understand ‘economics’ in this way, and more, but there is something about the stranglehold that economics seems to have over the political imagination that not only confuses me, it frustrates me.
I get the need to survive. I mean, if ‘economics’ is simply ways of living and surviving, then, this is all beside the point. But economics seems to have acquired some value added from itself that is much more than the primal need to survive and flourish.
As Bill Clinton via James Carville reminded us: “It’s the economy, stupid.” The driving question of politics now-a-days on both sides of the aisle is the question of economics.
In many cases, this is for good reason. After all, money is a powerful means. What is alarming is not the mere use of money or capital as a means. What becomes problematic is when the means itself becomes more than merely instrumental. When the means becomes the end. Subsequently, when the ends are disfigured and inverted as means towards the new “end” of economics; when economic well-being becomes an end in itself and human persons (and all of creation for that matter) become means towards the economic end.
The darkest part might be when an entire culture begins to believe that economic well-being is the good life.
To be more specific, think about the back-and-forth between degrees of capitalism and socialism. All too often, it is an economic argument. What is left out is this: Both parties seem to want more than money—they often declare freedom as their end—even as they lack the vocabulary for speaking about anything but economics. What if they were to rediscover what they want to use money for and treat it as the raison d’être?
I suspect that one of the reasons that economics has such a monopoly over the modern political imagination is because modernity has moved from the Age of Science to the Age of Economics, from the Age of Reason to the Age of Money. In other words, while the secular replaced the sacred as more “reasonable” and “scientific” in early modernity, we find that the current momentum towards economics reveals an even more radical shift away from the sacred. We are two gods removed from God.
The political imagination has been severely decoupled from its primal, sacred engine: Love. Now we are left with cheap, destructive substitutes and many will kill—and certainly won’t elect!—the person who threatens to take them away.
This is where a Catholic vision of politics differs. It is not only an idealistic vision, it is a historical one. Sadly, even in Catholic political disputes, the imagination is thoroughly colonized by economics as an end in itself.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In