answer to say “political leaders” or “public authorities” or, weaker still, “politicians.”
Yet it is an imperative given us by the Lord God Creator that we must move the whole commons forward, including every human being without exception, no one left behind. The historical problem is to figure out methods by which smaller human communities can build toward this goal, one small platoon at a time, then in larger coagulations, until a worldwide community can be served, and each part serve the other. Many wandering trials and errors attend that painful journey.
The common good is not for happy talk. Ways to get there are scarce and difficult to uncover, except by repeated efforts (or if I may use the distinctively American term, stick-to-itiveness). One must expect human duplicity, cruel manipulation, corruption, the naked will-to-power, and abundant self-destructiveness. We have already experienced all that. We have seen “the common good” used as a club against the personal dignity and personal liberty endowed in us by our Creator. In the Soviet Union, Soviet citizens who married foreign spouses were forbidden to join them, in the name of the common good; they owed their whole lives to socialism, and had a duty to serve it in return. The common good trumps individual choice. Such shortcuts to the common good end badly.
3. The Cause of Wealth
If incentives to ingenuity and skill in individual persons were to be abolished, the very fountains of wealth would necessarily dry up.
(Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, §15.)
The source of wealth lies principally in the human spirit—its wit, its disciplines, its creativity, its reliable habits. The cause of wealth is a certain kind of humanism, a humanism that includes special virtues and trained inclinations, put into practice through institutions supportive of personal responsibility.
Many people ask the question: What are the causes of poverty? But that is a pointless question, a useless question, as one can instantly see by asking a follow-up question: What good would it do to learn the causes of poverty? Do we want to make more of it?
No, the fruitful question is this: What are the causes of wealth? Learning the answer to that question would set us upon a creative path toward generating more wealth in a systematic way, by designing the most practical incentives that inspire all humans to create new wealth and share its fruits.
For much of human history, agriculture was the main source of wealth, and wealth creation was dependent on good weather. Famines occurred in regular waves during long periods of drought (or flooding), under perduring freezes or relentlessly scorching summer days. Nature has not been overly friendly toward human beings. Through diseases and natural calamities (some of long duration) nature almost succeeded in making man extinct, as it did a very high proportion of all other formerly living species. Nature is not always a kindly presence.
But once humans learned that wealth could be created by human invention and enterprise, the prospect of a world of universal affluence came into view—and came to be desired. In earlier times, whole peoples were subject to suffering bitter want. Most were reduced to passivity and weary patience. Once the causes of wealth were mastered, the human race could begin removing poverty—and with accelerating speed it began doing so.
Once humans discerned a way to break the chains of poverty, a new moral obligation arose. Poverty shifted from being an irremediable condition to being steadily reducible. In more and more nations, majorities exited out of penury and poverty to better health, greater opportunity, and steadily higher education. Nations came to be labeled as “less developed,” “developing,” and “developed.” In many, this progress was achieved within twenty years. China and India, for example, witnessed the fastest mass movement ever, raising more than 500 million of their citizens out of poverty between 1980 and 2000. The rise of Europe from the ruins of 1945 to measurable affluence in 1965 was also rapid. And so was the vault between 1945 and 1970 of the four “Asian Tigers”: Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan.
In a word, the cause of wealth has been uncovered during the past 200 years. That cause lies primarily in the creative habits of the human mind, in invention, know-how, and disciplined work with others. That discovery has generated a new moral imperative: All the world’s poor must be helped out of poverty. They must be helped in the most vital way: to make the discovery of the cause of wealth (their own human capital) in their own lives, so as to experience a freedom from penury never known before.
4. Creativity
The modern business economy has positive aspects. Its basis is human freedom exercised in the economic field, just as it is exercised in many other fields. Economic activity is indeed but one sector in a great variety of human activities, and like every other sector, it includes the right to freedom, as well as the duty of making responsible use of freedom. But it is important to note that there are specific differences between the trends of modern society and those of the past, even the recent past. Whereas at one time the decisive factor of production was the land, and later capital—understood as a total complex of the instruments of production—today the decisive factor is increasingly man himself, that is, his knowledge, especially his scientific knowledge, his capacity for interrelated and compact organization, as well as his ability to perceive the needs of others and to satisfy them.
(John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, §32.)
The Jewish/Christian narrative of the human project casts humans as images of God the Creator. Humans create not only beauty in the arts and goodness (with its own beauty) in their moral lives, but also new, never-before-seen wealth in their working world.
Instead of following Marx’s lead in seeing value solely in human labor, this narrative also proclaims the values to be found in the human mind, in its inventiveness and creativity. It is not always the man who labors with more arduous physical efforts who adds most value even to his own labor, but often the one whose labor is infused with the most originality, creativity, efficiency, and organizational skill. There are certain qualities in labor that spring from the subjectivity of the human person, that is, the laborer himself. He puts part of his own self into his work, his own originality, his own hopes, his own touch.
Another way of putting this is that the laborer who is creative adds a certain personal and human infusion from his own spirit into the work of his hands. To allow the fruit of his labor to rust outside in a yard—the iron girders fresh from his assigned furnace—is to injure something in him, his heart, his soul. He does not labor simply to produce useless waste, which nobody wants. He wants to contribute some good to the human community. A laborer is not simply an object, but also a subject, a being with imagination and creativity and zest of spirit.
This line of reflection, reportedly passed on to the pope by Mirosław Dzielski, the great Krakow journalist and thinker known as the “Polish Hayek,” led Wojtyła to muse on the subjectivity of both labor and capital. Whereas in Laborem Exercens (1981) the pope spoke of capital as if it consisted just of material things, ten years later in Centesimus Annus he had come to grasp the human factor in capital. He saw the wealth enlocked in human capital, in the subjectivity of the laborer himself. The term “capital” is not well identified solely with things (iron, automobiles, even gold bars and bank accounts) but also points to treasures in the human mind and spirit (such as outstanding work habits, spiritedness, teamwork, education, expanded and refined tastes, and capacities for design).
The scientists who isolated quinine, and the one who first produced penicillin, may have reduced more human pain and probabilities of imminent death than all the previous humanitarian efforts in history. As Abraham Lincoln pointed out in Wisconsin in 1858, the person who discovers a new way to produce five grains of wheat instead of the previous expectation of one or two has more than doubled the output of the same amount of physical labor. Such an inventor contributes to doubling the agricultural wealth of peoples everywhere who use that method. John Locke made a similar observation about the new wealth produced by painstaking cultivation of a field of berries, compared with the low yields of uncultivated fields.8
There is in each human laborer the potential of generating creative human capital, that is, learned skills of mind, heart, and hand. And it is a great thing for each nation to invest a