Work and Its Meanings

THAT POPE JOHN PAUL II's contributions to the rich tradition of Catholic social teaching would be important, indeed remarkable, was evident with his first "social encyclical," Laborem Exercens, "On Human Work." In the tradition of his great predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, John Paul's powerful insight is that you cannot separate work and its meanings from anthropological concerns; that is, while thinking about work one must always bear in mind the dignity of the human person and the nature of the person constituted by that God-given dignity. Laborem Exercens shares the basic assumption of Catholic social thought that God created human beings as brothers and sisters, not as enemies, and that God gave the earth to all equally to be cultivated. Various nations are communities who ought to try to achieve cooperation for the common good.

In contrast to such masters of Western political thought as Machiavelli and Hobbes, who assume worlds of enmity, treachery, manipulation, and conflict, or of Karl Marx, who presumed historically constructed eternal antagonism between two opposing classes, one of which was destined to disappear in a revolutionary cataclysm in order to make way for the classless society, Catholic social teaching begins from very different presuppositions and, unsurprisingly, arrives at startlingly revolutionary conclusions in contrast to the power-machinations of Machiavelli, the mechanistic reductionism of Hobbes, and the econometrism and determinism of Marx. Despite their impoverished understanding of the human person, the perspectives of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Marx have worked their way into much contemporary social science and academic discourse. Alas, it is also the case that, in secular institutions, certainly, but also to a certain extent in Catholic institutions of higher learning, the contrasting tradition of Catholic social teaching is not as familiar as it ought to be. Indeed, Catholic social thought has been called a hidden treasure of the church.

Surely it is time to bring that treasure out of hiding and Pope John Paul II has helped to show the way. He demonstrates just how robust and compelling are the categories Catholic social teaching offers us as we reflect on the many dilemmas currently facing modern, affluent, technological, consumer societies. He asks us to resituate our thinking and to come up with more generous and capacious solutions to our many social concerns and problems, from abortion and euthanasia to the length of the workweek, to medical insurance, on and on. Catholic social teaching resists all econometric and materialistic doctrines, whether utilitarianism, so-called rational choice models, functionalism, and structuralism, that either obliterate the human subject or offer a reductionistic, thin treatment of the human subject because they fail to credit human agency and free will. As a result, their account of human motivation is very thin; indeed, in rational choice models the claim is that our sole and only motivation for every activity we undertake is a narrow calculation of marginal utility. During the course of a debate with a representative of this school of thought I was told, for example, that "reading a bedtime story to a grandchild" was, in principle, no different from trying to make a killing on the stock market—these are just two different ways people use to achieve an identical end, namely, to satisfy the requirements of utility maximization.

Thus, many of the theories and models with which we now think and work are deeply flawed because they offer inadequate or flawed accounts of the man or woman who is the subject of work. Instead, Catholic social thought begins by asking: Who is this creature who mingles her labor with a task? Pope John Paul II has urged us to consider that when we face another human being we find ourselves "pausing at the irreducible." But dominant trends and tendencies in today's ways of thinking about work, workers, and the meaning of work do not pause at the irreducible. Instead, the requirements of their model of...