[I’m not going to post more than once per day very often, I promise.]
1. There’s a big difference between blocking traffic and civil disobedience. The anarcho-globo-poverty protestors in Washington today are breaking perfectly just laws, not unjust laws. The civil rights protestors were willing to go to jail for breaking laws that should not have existed in the first place. They were not challenging the idea of the rule of law (that every citizen is subject to the civil authority). They just wanted some laws to be changed. So they sat at whites-only lunch counters and allowed themselves to be arrested, in order to call attention to the injustice. They wanted everybody to know that they were otherwise law-abiding citizens who would not obey human laws that were grossly and scandalously at odds with natural law.
By contrast, the globos are breaking laws that apply to everybody and benefit society at large. They aren’t agitating for the abolition of traffic obstruction laws. I’d say that many of them are protesting the idea of the law itself: and if you look at a lot of their writings, you’ll see the contempt they have for the very idea of “the law” — they sneer at it because to them, the law is just a tool of oppression. They’re fascists in natural fibers, and if they ever gained power anywhere, they’d be a lot scarier. (Want to see a society where there’s no rule of law? There are plenty of them: Cuba, Iraq, Sudan, and Russia, to name a few.) If I were black, I’d be deeply insulted at the comparison between the two groups. On second thought, I might just think it was really funny.
2.This is hardly an original insight, but these protestors should actually visit the Third World. Not as part of some politicized tour group, but just traveling around and talking to regular people. Hopefully, they’d go someplace that reflected their utopia: burning non-fossil fuels, consuming very little animal meat, and not a McDonalds in sight. I spent a couple of weeks in just such a place earlier this year, and everything I saw convinced me that what they needed (economically, at least) was more capitalism, not less.
The average wage there is about $2.50 a day. That’s not a typo — workers could buy a Happy Meal for an entire day’s work. If Nike or the Gap sets up a factory there and pays the workers $10 a day, they’re “exploiting” the workers to the tune of a 300% pay raise. (I wish somebody would exploit me like that!) With rising wages, communities can afford to pay for better education, which means workers can work more efficiently. More efficiency means the companies can afford to pay them more, because they’re more productive. Think that’s wishful thinking? It’s how America became the leading industrial power in the 19th century. You can look it up.
One of my major complaints about Catholic social teaching is not what’s there, it’s what isn’t there. As one Catholic intellectual put it, “The Church has much to say about how goods should be distributed, and not much to say about how the goods are created in the first place.” (I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember who said it.) There has been a lot of great work in the last two decades on economic matters, especially by Michael Novak and Fr. Neuhaus (and let’s not forget the Holy Father), but more needs to be said. On one side, you have throngs of Catholics who buy into the consumerist mentality that we are defined not by our status as children of God, but by what we purchase; on the other, you have Catholics for whom faith is merely a means to achieve social justice, and are more interested in confiscating and redistributing wealth than figuring out how wealth gets created in the first place. We need to hear more from people who see that capitalism, with all of the evils to which it is prone, is currently the best way to feed, clothe, and house the greatest number of people.
Personally, I think I can live with consumerism as a temptation if I don’t need to worry about where my family’s next meal is coming from. All these globos seem to think they know what’s best for the poor and oppressed of the world — why don’t they ask actual poor people what they think? I’m betting that given the choice, the poor would prefer to grapple with consumerism than starvation.
And don’t get me started with the people who want to keep the Third World poor because wealth would disturb their quaint little cultures….