Christian Paternalism

Why it Supports Human Flourishing

I just finished reading a controversial, intelligent, and mordantly funny new novel from France’s most famous contemporary author, Michel Houellebecq.  It is called “Submission”, and explains to no small degree the political and social upheaval currently being played out in that country, and indeed throughout much of Europe and the West.  The police in France have all but declared war on Islamic drug lords who drive stolen German cars with Polish license plates and engage regularly in shootouts with police and competing criminal factions.  The result is an increasing sense of social disorder, anarchy, and nihilism.  This is of course all the product of the same policies so familiar to us in Canada, which can be best described in one simple word: globalism.

The story is set in Paris, 2022.  The protagonist, an intellectual named Francois, is bored.  He is a middle-aged lecturer at the Sorbonne and an expert on J.K. Huysmans, the notoriously decadent 19th century author.  Francois lives in a France that has lost its Christian faith.  His own decadence is smaller in scale, but no less hedonistic.  He beds his students, consumes microwave dinners, queues up YouPorn, and consoles his broken soul by reading the classics.

Meanwhile, it is election season in France.  Although Francois feels about as politicized as a hand towel, things are getting pretty interesting in his country.  In an alliance with the socialists like Macron, France’s new Islamic party sweeps to power.  Sharia law comes into force.  Women must be veiled, men are expected to take a minimum of two wives each, and Francois is offered a tempting, perhaps even irresistible academic advancement.  There is but one hitch:  he must convert to Islam. 

The point which the author seems to be making here is the same one noted by Dr. Viktor Frankl in his seminal work, “Man’s Search For Meaning”, i.e. that beyond basic physical survival, our greatest need is a sense of meaning in our lives.  In France, secularism has so vacated the Judeo-Christian moral code from the scene, that it is only natural for Islamic migrants from the Middle-East to fill the vacuum.  Francois is part of the elite, intellectual, WOKE class largely responsible for the moral despondency of his nation.  Ironically, taking this brand of liberalism to its logical conclusion, Francois is so miserable that he is prepared to adopt a foreign religion with values alien to his own culture, just to fill the void.  In other words, having created a situation of moral and social chaos, Francois and his countrymen crave the moral order of an entirely paternalistic society in which men are exalted and women are reduced to the level of mere chattels. 

The question left unanswered by the author is:  why would a highly educated, privileged member of French society like Francois turn to Islam, rather than attempt to restore the ancient Christian paternalistic traditions native to France?

The most obvious answer to this question is fear and greed.  Recently, I saw a depressing article entitled “U.N. issues famine warning”, sounding the alarm that up to 80 million people will be plunged into hunger if U.N. climate targets are not met.  The situation, we are told, is dire.  According to the article:

“The world is advancing toward a catastrophic future where tens of millions of people will be at risk of famine unless climate change is adequately addressed, the United Nations human rights chief warned at a debate on Monday.  Speaking to officials at the U.N. Human Rights Council event in Geneva, Switzerland, Volker Turk said that ‘extreme weather events are having a significant negative impact on crops, herds and ecosystems, prompting further concerns about global food availability….More than 828 million people faced hunger in 2021, and climate change is projected to place up to 80 million more people at risk of hunger by the middle of this century…our environment is burning.  It’s melting.  It’s depleting.  It’s drying.  It’s dying and that these factors will combine to lead humanity towards a dystopian future unless urgent and immediate action is taken by environmental policymakers.’”

What is not immediately evident is how famine can be averted by producing less food; yet this is precisely what governments around the world are imposing upon farmers in order to meet globalist climate goals.  Here are but a few examples.  After forcibly changing the nation’s agriculture to fully organic, 90% of Sri Lankans now face starvation after their entire agricultural system collapsed.  Irish farmers fear that they will be forced to cull up to 1.3 million cows to meet draconian climate targets.  A government plan to cut agricultural emissions by 25% to satisfy UN Agenda 2030 will drive many farms into bankruptcy, making the families who run them entirely dependent upon government support.  Holland is the world’s second biggest exporter of farm produce, but the Dutch government is sabotaging their own farmers.  Proposals for tackling nitrogen emissions mean an estimated 11k farms will close.  This is so controversial that it brought down the coalition government there, bringing the entire nation into political upheaval.

Finally, there is our very own Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is slated to impose a 30% reduction in fertilizer emissions, sparking intense backlash from farmers who argue that the insane target will decrease crop output, hike prices and cost farmers billions in lost revenue.

There are many such examples, but you begin to get the picture.  This excludes wartime interruptions of food production, such as the Russian-Ukraine proxy war.  It is clear that any impending famines predicted by the U.N. are being orchestrated.  This is rationed abundance.  Why else is food production being foreclosed so aggressively in the name of saving Gaia?

While food prices will undoubtedly continue to soar—despite any of Trudeau’s fake grocery rebates—Canada is unlikely to see famine.  Instead, this dire scenario is certain to be played out in many Third World countries, devastating their populations.  There are few things conceivably more heartless than condemning people to die via starvation.  Famines are cruel, capricious things.  In ancient times, crop failures could happen for countless reasons:  locusts, plant diseases, floods, droughts, wars, etc.  But in modern times, the vast majority of famines have been man-made.  It is impossible to understate the horror of such events. 

So here we are, staring into the yawning chasm of an uncertain future, and being threatened that famine is once again on the horizon.  If this should come to fruition, it will once again be a manufactured event—and not because of climate change, but because of meddlesome, grasping, avaricious governments hungry for power.   As journalist Leo Hohmann notes:

“It is curious to me that, at the very time the globalists are warning about food shortages and famine, their mouthpieces at the World Bank, the U.N., and within the administrations of the U.S. and its allies (notice China and Russia are nowhere to be found in these preposterous anti-food policies), are talking about converting over to a new and unproven form of ‘sustainable’ farming that is based more on reducing methane than it is on producing the highest yields of food.”

Those in power will make the resulting famines look like an accident or innocent mistake (remember Covid 19 lockdowns and their crushing aftershocks), or the result of climate change—but digging through the dross will reveal the deliberate and orchestrated nature of food shortages.  While leftists pay lip service to the dangers of food shortages, they support policies creating such shortages in the first place.  Create an emergency, then address it by increasing government power over the people.  That is the tried and true process described by Albert Nock in his 1935 opus “Our Enemy:  The State”.  Since those shortages happen far away on distant shores, what do the elites care?  It is not as if they are the ones who will ever starve, after all.  In fact, a recent Reuters article points out:

“The European Union is divided on how to help poorer nations fight a growing food crisis and address shortages of fertilizers caused by the war in Ukraine, with some fearing a plan to invest in plants in Africa would clash with EU green goals.”

Drink that in for a moment.  They are saying that if taking steps to save starving Africans clashes with EU green goals, then we should not do it.  This is the very epitome of evil.  Government usurpation of farms is increasingly common, as are resulting famines.  The Soviet collectivization of farms ultimately led to the Ukrainian Holodomor.  The Great Chinese Famine, directly caused by the “Great Leap Forward” and “people’s communes”, is regarded as one of the greatest man-made disasters in recorded human history.  Is it any wonder then that Dutch farmers are fighting the same takeover agenda by their government?  It is hardly difficult to see how this will play out in the end.

As Dr. Henry Kissinger, close friend to the Davos crowd, once famously remarked: “whoever controls the food controls the people.”  The weaponization of food is nothing new in the annals of history, except that this time it is being done on a far more international scale.  Globalists and their useful idiots like Trudeau and the climate activists have been desperate to reduce human population for generations.  If they cannot do it indirectly, then they will do it directly by actually creating food shortages.

But is there another way to organize society, one as ancient as Islam, which has the potential to remove such fears and that is also conducive to global human flourishing?  One which is native to the West but which provides the same sense of meaning and security craved by Francois in 21st century France?

In “Submission”, the French intellectual Francois is prepared to accept the alien form of Islamic paternalism in order to assert some semblance of order over his chaotic, meaningless existence.  But what about the ancient Christian Paternalistic Ethic?

The feudal lords, secular as well as religious, needed an ideology that would reflect and justify the status quo.  This ideology, which provided the moral cement holding feudal Europe together and protecting its rulers, was the medieval version of the Judeo-Christian tradition.  This tradition evolved a moral code sometimes called the Christian corporate ethic, reflecting the fact that all of society was considered a single entity or corporation.  This Christian paternalist ethic can be understood most easily by comparing society with a family.  Those with positions of power and wealth can be likened to the father or keeper of the family.  They have strong paternalistic obligations toward the common people—the poor or, in our analogy, the children.

The Old Testament Jews quite literally regarded themselves as the children of one God.  This relationship meant that all Jews were brothers; the Mosaic law was intended to maintain a shared sense of membership in one big family.  This brotherhood was one of grown children who acknowledged their mutual obligations, even though they no longer shared possessions.  From the confused mass of duties and regulations governing the early Jews, the most salient feature is the large number of provisions made for the prevention and relief of poverty.  Their humane treatment of debtors was also notable.  Each Jew was to be his brother’s keeper; indeed, his obligations extended to caring for his neighbour’s animals should they wander.  The first duty of all, however, and particularly of the wealthy elites, was to care for the poor:

“Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto my brother, to the poor, and to the needy, in the land.” (Deut. 15:7-11)

An important element in this paternalistic code was the sanction against taking a worker’s tools as a means of satisfying debt (Deut: 24:6).  The same point is made elsewhere in the Old Testament:  “He that taketh away his neighbour’s living slayeth him” (Eccles. 34:22), which would seem to explain the position of Dutch farmers vs. their government and Alberta’s reaction to the Justintransition plan to cease fossil fuel production in Canada’s richest Province.

All Jews did not, of course, live up to these lofty professions.  Great extremes of wealth and poverty existed that would have been impossible had the Mosaic law been strictly observed.  Many of the prophets, who were often radical champions of the poor, eloquently denounced the rich for abuse of their wealth, for their wicked, slothful luxury, and for their general unrighteousness.  The important point is not that they failed to live up to the Mosaic code but that the moral code of this small tribe left so indelible an imprint on much of subsequent history. 

The teachings of Christ in the Gospels carry on part of the Mosaic tradition relevant to economic ideology.  They taught the necessity of being concerned with the welfare of one’s brother, the importance of charity and alms giving, and the evils of avarice and covetousness.  His emphasis upon the special responsibilities and duties of the rich is even more pronounced than that of earlier Jewish writers.  In fact, on the basis of reading the Gospel of Luke, one might conclude that Christ condemned the rich simply because they were rich and praised the poor simply because they were poor:

“Woe unto you that are rich!…Woe unto you that are full! For ye shall hunger.  Woe unto you that laugh now! For ye shall mourn and weep.”

There are warnings in the other Gospels that wealth may be a stumbling block to entering God’s kingdom, but there is no condemnation of wealth as such.  The most important passages in this regard deal with a wealthy young man who wants to know what he must do to attain eternal life.  Christ’s first answer amounts to nothing more than a brief statement of the Ten Commandments.  It is only after he is pressed that Christ goes beyond the binding, universal moral requirements to a counsel of perfection.  “If thou wilt be perfect” begins the statement in which he tells the young man to sell whatever he has and give it to the poor.

The Christian paternalist ethic, with its obligations of the wealthy toward the poor, was developed more specifically and elaborately by most of the early Christian fathers.  The writings of Clement of Alexandria are a reasonable reflection of the traditional attitudes of the early church.  He emphasized the dangers of greed, love of material things, and acquisition of wealth.  The wealthy were under a special obligation to treat it as a gift from God and to use it wisely in the promotion of the general well-being of others.  Imagine for a moment application of this principle to global starvation in the modern context.  Instead of imposing famine in order to reduce the world’s population, the elites would be under a positive, sacred duty to feed them all—every single one.  The important distinction here is that the motivation to be charitable comes from within, rather than without.  It is a personal compunction, not the oppressive power of the state imposing prescribed action aimed at empowering and enriching itself at the expense of others.

Clement’s “The Rich Man’s Salvation” was written in order to free the rich of the “unfounded despair” they might have acquired from reading passages in the Gospels like those found in Luke.  Clement began by asserting that, contrary to anything one might find in Luke, “it is no great or enviable thing to be simply without riches.”  The poor would not for that reason alone find God’s blessings.  In order to seek salvation, the rich need not renounce their wealth but need merely “banish from their souls its opinions about riches, its attachment to them, its excessive desire, its morbid excitement over them, its anxious cares, the thorns of our earthly existence which choke the seed of the true life.”

Not the possession of wealth but the way in which it is used was important to Clement.  The wealthy were given the responsibility of administering their wealth, on God’s behalf, to alleviate the suffering and promote the general welfare of their brothers.  In decreeing that the hungry should be fed and the naked clothed, God certainly had not willed a situation in which no one could carry out these Commandments for lack of sufficient material prerequisites.  It followed, thus, that God had willed a fortunate few to have wealth but also be given important duties to paternalistically care for the well-being of the rest of society.

In a similar vein, Ambrose wrote that “riches themselves are not blamable” as long as they are used righteously.  In order to use wealth righteously, he wrote:

“We ought to be of mutual help one to the other, and to vie with each other in doing duties, to lay all advantages….before all, and….to bring help one to the other.”

The list of Christian fathers who wrote lengthy passages to the same effect could be greatly expanded here.  Suffice it to say that the Christian paternalist ethic was once thoroughly entrenched in Western European culture.   Greed, avarice, materialistic self-seeking, the desire to accumulate wealth—all such individualistic and materialistic motives—were sharply condemned.  The acquisitive, individualistic person was considered the very antithesis of the good man, who concerned himself with the well-being of all his brothers.  Lay this archetype against the character of modern robber barons like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and their ilk.  It is not difficult to see how far short such men fall from the Judeo-Christian ideal, or to understand why powerful elites today seek to hoard the world’s wealth and to starve billions rather than spend money to feed them.

Thomas Aquinas was the pre-eminent spokesman of the Christian paternalist ethic.  Tradition was upheld in his insistence that private property could be justified morally because it was a necessary condition for Christian charity.  The rich held wealth and power for God and for all society.  They administered wealth for God and for the common good of mankind.  Wealth that was not properly used and administered could no longer be religiously and morally justified, in which case the rich were considered no better than common thieves. It was the lust for wealth that the Christian paternalist ethic consistently condemned.  The desire to maximize monetary gain, accumulate material wealth, and advance oneself socially and economically through acquisitive behaviour was to become the dominant force of modern capitalism.  This radical change rendered the Christian ethic inadequate as a basis for a moral justification of capitalism.  This is however not to say that it need be rejected completely in order to elaborate a defense for a new system.  My point is that when we consider the case of Francois, who has so completely lived out the hedonistic, materialistic deep dive into nihilism that he turns with hope to the alien religious paternalism of Islam, we might ask whether it would be better to instead look to the lost Judeo-Christian ethic of our not too distant past and of our ancient ancestors in the Western canon.

The wealthy have the potential to do either great good or great evil with their wealth and power, and the worst evils result when wealth is used either exclusively for self-gratification or as a means of continually acquiring more riches and power for their own sake.  The righteously wealthy are those who realize that their money and power are God’s gift, that they are morally obliged to act as its stewards, and that they are to administer their worldly affairs in order to promote the welfare of all.  This Christian paternalist ethic necessarily imposes upon the wealthy the same duty to feed the poor which compels a loving father to nourish and protect members of his very own family.  Only such a Judeo-Christian approach to morality and to solution of global problems, real and imagined, can inspire mankind to feed rather than starve the hearts, minds, and bodies of his brethren—be they next door or on the far side of the world.