Is It Not Time For Us To Stop Being Donald Ducks in America?

Cardinal Pell, the outspoken, and often controversial, Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, is known by many for using his faith to engage the contemporary Australian political debate. He often writes upon or speaks out for what Catholic teaching has to say on a given issue; he makes it clear, however, political analysis is difficult, and often there are many differing positions which Catholics can have on given political issues. For this reason, he contends that there is no need for any special Catholic organization to provide strict guidelines to citizens as to where their political loyalties should lie:

There are some within the Church, of course, who disagree with this approach. These people prefer a model where an agency is authorized to provide “guidance” on how to apply principles enunciated by the bishops, arguing that without such guidance ordinary Catholics are hard-pressed to come to an informed assessment of their own on difficult political and social questions. This is not an approach I favor. When no basic questions of faith and morals are at stake, a certain level of confidence in the ability of Catholics to think for themselves is appropriate, perhaps even necessary.

— Cardinal George Pell, God and Caesar: Selected Essays on Religion, Politics, & Society(Washington, DC: CUA Press, 2007), 29.

Contrary to the caricature that has been given to the Catholic Church by her critics, Catholicism has always understood this. Catholics are endowed with an intellect to use whenever they employ the freedom of their will. Moreover, she believes that human freedom is a good which must be nourished, and to respect human dignity is to respect this freedom.

There is, however, a problem which needs to be addressed. While we are created in the image and likeness of God, our freedom is not the unlimited freedom of God; it is an analogous but limited freedom which can only exist by God’s unlimited freedom. Whatever the initial state of humanity was in its creation, we no longer find ourselves in perfect harmony with the unlimited freedom of God, and we find ourselves walled up in and of ourselves, through the prison of our inordinate passions and desires. We build up a wall between ourselves and God and from each other as we actively engage them, and they become, as it were, addictions which limit the freedom which we were meant to have. Our good nature has been corrupted, and we are incapable of achieving that which we would like it to do when we act alone and entirely by ourselves. We cannot perfect ourselves without help; and when we try, as an individual or as a society, we must realize such facile, utopian dreams will end in disaster: while by nature humanity is good, we find ourselves less than what we should by our fallen mode of existence. When left to ourselves, we will mess things up. This is true for individuals and societies: and both are in constant need of reform.

This truth, however, seems to be forgotten by many. Cardinal Pell points this out in his discussion of the “Donald Duck heresy” (following Felipe Fernandez-Armesto):

Donald Duck is warm-hearted and well disposed, believes in the natural goodness of man, and has an unshakable conviction of self-righteousness. He means well and he is likable, despite his indulgence in all the vices of individualistic excesses: he knows it all; he is noisy and often bad-tempered at the incomprehension surrounding him. His activity is often disastrous, for himself and for others, but he means well. In the comic strips this is sufficient for all to be forgiven as we go on to the next episode. But in real life this is a recipe for calamity.

— ibid, 119.

Notice, the Donald Duck heresy is individualistic in heritage, and those, like Donald Duck, who want little to no outside intervention telling them what to do, because they believe it is not needed. Yet, the outcome is always obvious: disaster strikes again and again. Moreover, when left to themselves without any societal direction, such people will end up living selfish, uncharitable lives, and this is why a society needs a government to know that it is its duty to work for the welfare of its people and not just rely upon the generous spirit of its people. “It is easy to assume that people will always give to the poor and be concerned about social justice. But this does not happen by itself. Many great civilizations have shown no regard for these values at all and have even considered them weaknesses” (ibid., 32).

Traditional conservatism from Aquinas and Bossuet to de Maistre and Pobedonostsev understood this: government was a relative but justified good because it works to prevent the evils that fallen humanity bring to the world when living out an ideology of unbridled individualism. Power itself is a good (because God possesses power, and whatever God possesses must itself be good); true, it might be corrupted, but that does not justify its outright rejection. They opposed the libertine mentality which one finds in the United States under the characterization of conservatism but in reality is as classical a liberalism as there ever has been.

Strange enough, when it comes to many moral issues, these so-called conservatives channel classical conservatism after all, and want governmental regulation and high government to regulate what options one can actively pursue in a given society. But because they have forgotten what government is and what it is for (the just ordering of society and for the welfare of its citizens), they sometimes go overboard here and express a desire for greater governmental control than is necessary. The Church is to give guidance for moral choices above and beyond the dictates of the nation, for the higher virtues, while the government is to create just laws following a more generalized morality (but a morality nonetheless) while it creates agencies and institutions which are to work for the benefit of the people being governed. Hence, “Catholics acknowledge that the role of government and government agencies is different from the role of a church, just as Catholics acknowledge that not every immoral activity should be illegal” (ibid., 31).

Sadly, it seems the “Donald Duck heresy” infects the American psyche as a whole, because so-called American conservatives are not the only one who believes it. The general distrust for the government and its intervention finds itself within American liberalism as well, but at least this is an understandable position, because it follows through with the liberal project which is at the foundation of American politics. Hence, when Cardinal Pell discusses some of the problems of having too man “Donald Ducks” in a society, it sounds what one expects from classical liberalism, however it is expressed:

Too many Donald Ducks produce the “feel good” society, which works to remove personal guilt, anything that would make people feel uncomfortable, so that complacent self-satisfaction becomes a virtue: confession is replaced by therapy and self-reproach by self-discovery.

–ibid., 119.

Do we not see this truth within the full spectrum of the American political system? Do we not see so-called conservatives try to remove any sense of shame or sorrow or personal guilt for the consequences of their actions, such as in the rejection of human responsibility to the environment? Do we not see the same within so-called American liberals as they try to calm their screaming conscience such as when another child is killed in the womb?

Is it not time for us to stop being Donald Ducks in America?