How I Think

In another effort to get at what I mean by the “hierarchy of goods” and what I believe to be primary (the good of persons and families) and what I believe to be secondary (everything else), I offer the dangerously un-American conclusion of Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World, which really does run through my mind as I behold the spectacle of allegedly “conservative” attempts to say “Health Care is not a Right“.

Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl’s hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race. If other things are against it, other things must go down. If landlords and laws and sciences are against it, landlords and laws and sciences must go down. With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom I have just watched toddling past my house, she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered; her hair shall not be cut short like a convict’s; no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit her. She is the human and sacred image; all around her the social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs of ages come rushing down, and not one hair of her head shall be harmed.

I think that the key to Catholic social teaching is “What helps the person and the family?”, not “Who wins? Gigantic corporation or All-Consuming State?” If it’s good for the person and the family, it’s good. If it harms the person and the family, it’s bad. Both gigantic corporations *and* all-consuming states are bad for the family, so I don’t take much stock in either party since they labor to serve both in their own ways.

Of course, I’m quite ready, willing and able to say (as does the Catechism) that the right to medical care is not an absolute or unqualified right and that the right to it has to be observed in keeping with a country’s institutions. I commend and applaud Amy Welborn’s sage counsel to remember that:

there is no necessary and assumed relationship between the current Democratic party proposals for health care reform and Catholic Social Teaching.

Please read that carefully. I didn’t say that there is no relation. I said that there is no necessary relationship – that is, just because it’s called “reform” and proclaims lofty goals does not necessitate a participant in the discussion to accept the presumption that because of this, the proposals are, of course, without question, the best embodiment of the goals of Catholic Social Teaching.

Indeed, Amy seems to me to complement very well what I was getting at by reminding tribalists of the Left to listen to the Church over the nostrums of their Tribe, just as I am urging the same thing tribalists on the Right. She’s dead right to warn lefty tribalists of assuming an instant identification of their agenda with the teaching of Holy Church. I agree with her (and with critics of the “reform”) that there are huge dangers and problems with what is proposed and the rush is unnecessary and unwise. I am especially suspicious that this will all end in killing the expensive to cut costs.

I’m just not willing to say that the bleedin’ obvious teaching of Holy Church which reiterates again and again and again and again and again that “medical care is a right” is best interpreted to mean “medical care is not a right”. In this, I exhibit that same crude fundamentalist tendency which forbids me to understand “He rose again on the third day” to mean “His corpse was eaten by wild dogs”, to interpret “This is my body” to mean “This is just a piece of bread” and to read “Torture is intrinsically and gravely immoral” to mean “Torture is perfectly compatible with Catholic moral teaching.”

When I criticize the first two forms of violent torque placed on obvious Catholic teaching, I am routinely commended by my readers. When I speak of the equally obvious distortion of equally obvious teachings of the Church with respect to social teaching, I am perpetually told “I like what you say about apologetics, but I can’t stand your political remarks.” Sometimes, people will even tell really quite plain and deliberate lies in order to discredit what is, after all, a fairly straightforward regurgitation of some elementary language from the Church’s teaching instruments. So my reiterating the fact that the bishops and Pope say “Health care is a right” gets transmogrified by some right wing ideologues into the claim that I’m saying “you’re going to hell if you don’t support hell care reform”, much as saying “torture is gravely and intrinsically immoral” morphs (in the hands of the same liars) into “45,000,000 abortions – that’s okay as long as the dems pay for his hell care and let terrorists kill a couple thousand of us”. It’s that sort of despicable libel that illustrates the mindless tribalism I’m talking about.

Happily, the vast majority of readers and respondents in the combox yesterday did not stoop to such vile stuff. Quite a number *feared* what they thought I was really saying or implying. So I heard from quite a number of people who thought I was “supporting” the current reform plan or agitating for free this or government that. I made clear I wasn’t. I was making a very narrow point: namely, that flatly denying health care is a right is out of step with Catholic teaching. Most people got this. And they mostly got that was maintaining that the heirarchy of goods says that the good of persons has primacy over such goods as property, the civil order, and so forth. In short, the law is made for man, not man for the law. Saying that, I really did exhaust all I was trying to say in the post.

I have no Big Plan for Health care reform. Way above my pay grade. Demanding that I answer the question “What do I suggest be done at a practical level?” is a pointless exercise. I never claimed to propose the nuts and bolts of how to fix our broken system. I simply noted that, on the Right, people (including some Catholics) are starting the whole discussion from a disastrously false premise: that there is no right to medical care. As a secondary point, I was basically (inspired by the Chesterton passage above) maintaining that any attempt to fix health care which subordinates the good of the person to some other good is not Catholic. It does not follow from this that all possible resources should be devoted to saving each life. It emphatically does not follow that the current Dem plan embodies Catholic social teaching. But it does follow that a system in which a family is forced to watch a child die from a treatable disease or live with chronic pain that could be healed or go without necessary treatment due to inability to pay is a system that is based on an inversion in the heirarchy of goods which privileges something over the good of the person.

My personal lack of any competence in the nuts and bolts department means you should look somewhere else (really several somewhere elses) if you want to pursue the matter beyond the queztion of establishing whether Catholic teaching says “health care is a right.” I think that point is well established and that GOP talking points which deny it are wrong. As far as “what now?” one nifty spot I found yesterday (and very Chestertonian in its analysis) is this essay which applies the principles of Distributism to think outside the box.

Check it out. Gave me stuff to think about.