Social conflict—blaming one group for why something’s wrong in a given society—is a phenomenon old and new. There have always been proclivities to fault a particular group when things go wrong in a society. One reason Nero persecuted the early Christians is that they were convenient scapegoats.
Such skullduggery usually doesn’t like to admit what it’s up to, at least openly. That changed in the last century and a half, when political philosophies explicitly incorporated blaming social conflict into their theoretical assumptions. The Nazis, for example, insisted that “Aryans” were victims, so their victimizers—pre-eminently the Jews—had to be eliminated.
The worst example of in-built scapegoating in a political system was socialism. Karl Marx’s entire theory is built upon the assumption of conflict: one social group fights another, victim becoming victimizer, until the “proletariat” prevails and . . . with no explanation, suddenly, social conflict as the engine of change sputters out. Note, however, that socialism actually maintains that conflict among people is a good thing; it’s what makes history “progress.”
That is utterly not the Catholic view of society. It’s a view of human society no Catholic can ever subscribe to, because it predicates that some of your neighbors necessarily have to be your enemies.
There may be other flaws in the socialist worldview that fuel that thinking. One of them is its materialist foundations: by focusing on worldly goods, whether theoretically (we focus on the material because that’s all there is) or practically (do your spiritual stuff on your own; we’re talking “practical living” here), socialism marginalizes (if not denies) the spiritual.
The problem is that material goods, unlike spiritual goods, necessarily diminish by division. That is in stark contrast to spiritual goods, which do not. Four people can be loved as much as three, because love is infinite; four people don’t get as much pizza as three, because the pie is finite.
If you act in practice as though those are all the goods in which a society might be interested, you will unavoidably focus on fighting over “my piece of the pie.” And you are going to think that is how a society changes.
Catholic social thought, however, would say this is wrong. The force that moves a society is not conflict, but rather love. Love does not mean we have warm, fuzzy feelings for everybody we encounter, much less that we agree with everything people say and do. But it does mean that we recognize that, made in God’s image and likeness, everybody else has as much a seat at the table as I do. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Luke 6:31).
A focus on conflict locks a person in his interests, in what’s in it “for him.” A focus on love frees a person to focus on the other and the other’s good. Getting outside the prison of one’s “I” is the indispensable first step toward embracing a “common good.”
This is romantic and pretty, you say, but does it work? Well, Christ enjoined love of neighbor on us two thousand years ago. The “glass half empty” folks would say the results have at best been a mixed bag; the “glass half full” guys would say it could have been a lot worse without that teaching. But hopefully no Christian on either side would say to chuck the teaching!
The realization of a society of love will always be imperfect because human beings are imperfect. Their openness to love of neighbor will always run up against the friction of self-interest, self-love, and selfishness. That’s not going to change before the Second Coming, so neither should one expect a social order that is heaven on earth.
That said, a social vision that starts from the assumption that everybody has a place at the table in search of the common good is at least theoretically open to the quest for a more loving (or at least more just) society. A high-flying social vision that starts with everybody “hustling and fighting, scratching and biting” is not going to get to love. At best, it’s going to get stitches from the mutual chomping.
That’s why Catholic social thought opposes the stoking of social conflict in politics. Almost never is it driven by genuine love of neighbor, even if it pretends to be. Usually it is driven by a desire to be one of the “haves” instead of “have nots” in a competition that’s assumed to be zero sum. And if material goods are all there are, maybe. Or maybe you expand the pie?
In America, such social conflict is often pursued on economic lines: the “rich” versus everybody else, often with little clarity as to who’s who. And when that’s the case, the class conflict is not just divisive, but cynical. It’s really driven not by truth, but by winning.
These ideas aren’t new. I first encountered them in a series of twenty articles Karol Wojtyła (the future St. John Paul II) wrote in the 1950s under the collective title “The Ethics Primer.” They were written for adults, taking leading ideas from philosophy and showing how they fit (or didn’t) with the Catholic worldview.
“The Ethics Primer” was no theoretical head trip for Wojtyła; the consequences of those philosophical ideas was very real, very tangible. He was writing in a communist country where the official ideology taught people to hate because class conflict would speed the “revolution” and “let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24).
Except Wojtyła recognized it was a recipe for a lot of drowned people . . . which is why he wanted to buck up Polish Catholics against social conflict.