The Pope In Our Ear

    It is common to suppose that human progress, if represented on a graph, would be a steadily ascending line.  But some writers say otherwise. They say the line would be a curving one, sometimes ascending and sometimes descending along a horizontal axis.
    They see matters this way: Smarter machines and bigger buildings don't amount to human progress, because machines and buildings aren't human.  If we consider, instead, modes of thought and systems of values, we see that  some ancient societies were quite sophisticated -- and were already so at the earliest moments we are able to discern.  Yet the value systems of some later societies have been crude.  On the whole, we have not become better human beings. We have only become better equipped human beings.  If our modern tools and methods have empowered us to achieve great good, they have also armed us to do great harm. Our instinct for the latter has not diminished as we've achieved what we call progress.
    All of which brings me to a major treatise by Pope Francis. ( Full disclosure: I have never been a member of the Roman Catholic Church.)  Commentators of various persuasions have cherry-picked his long message for validation of their own views. At the admitted risk of doing the same, I would make these points:
    Only one part of the Pope's message was devoted to his much-discussed condemnation of trickle-down capitalism.  In it, he denounced a financial system that "rules rather than serves." He cautioned against "crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."  He warned that our times are  "pervaded ... by consumerism" that produces " ... a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience. "
    Viewed whole, the Pope's treatise is a blueprint for the role of the Catholic Church in the world. It touches on a sweeping variety of topics: economics, politics, poverty, technology, racism, gender equality and more.  It is a thoughtful and balanced work.  It is notably well informed on the ways of the secular world.
    He cautions us against abdicating personal responsibility in favor of institutional norms.  He begins, of course, with the Roman Catholic Church. He challenges the church to channel its customs and methods more effectively toward service "rather than for her self-preservation."  He worries that the church "is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security."
    Pope Francis clearly means these admonitions for other institutions as well, so let me now borrow them for application to American government and, in particular, the Congress.
    There, members sworn to govern in the interest of all the people have abdicated this responsibility in favor of intramural struggles for partisan sway.  Republicans are -- at the moment -- in the forefront of this dereliction.  Demographic and attitudinal tides  in the country are turning against them. They've tried to delay the arrival of the future by turning the Republican Party into a labor union for the well-to-do.
    Prominent in their strategy has been a fevered campaign against the President's new health care program. This opposition is manifestly nourished  by fear that the program will work, and will thus create a grateful larger constituency for Democratic policies.  Republicans in Congress first tried to keep people who needed the program from having it.  Then they and allies have tried to dissuade people from using it.  Party has mattered more than public needs.
    In the larger scheme, if free-market nostrums from the political right can be come-ons to the credulous, nostrums from the left can be as well.   To borrow phrases, they may invite crude and
naive trust in the goodness of those wielding political power and in the sacralized dogma of
government as problem-solver.  Even as our leaders differ on policy they are, at their worst, united on
one point.  They are Tweedledum and Tweedledee in wanting voters to think in bumper stickers and toe the party line.  Political careerists benefit from this approach.  The public does not.
    In  some of his thinking Pope Francis has an unlikely bedfellow:  The late anthropologist and writer Loren Eiseley.  Though his writing was not religious, Eiseley was keenly attuned to the concept of a natural order.  He thought we humans have learned to change it faster than we have learned to understand the consequences of changing it.  He saw us becoming  people who believe -- naively -- that everything worth knowing or having can be defined by technology and consumer economics. He had a term for this latest form of evolved Homo Sapiens:  Asphalt Man.
    The Pope used different language for similar concerns. Here is what he said about material advances not matched by human advances: " ... Epochal change has been set in motion by the enormous qualitative, quantitative rapid and cumulative advances occurring in the sciences and in technology, and by their instant application in different areas of nature and life.  We are in an age of knowledge and information, which has led to new and often anonymous kinds of power."
    To my ear, Pope Francis is concerned that robots and rocket ships could become our golden calf.
     He is manifestly concerned about the state of the Roman Catholic Church.  A discussion of the many good reasons for this would require more time and space than are here available.  Perhaps useful evidence can be seen in reactions to the Pope's treatise.  Conservative elements of his church grumbled that he did not tread heavily enough on their favorite issues of abortion and the like. (They were joined by presumptuous voices on the American political right.) Institutional norms were challenged, and the challenge was not welcomed.
    Meanwhile, some of us feast in life while others starve.  Rich men have tried to buy the presidency for one of their own, and they promise to try again.  The Congress has brought itself into public disgrace.  And the Pope has become controversial by proclaiming an ethic of love and service.
    Like fish perceiving water, we cannot be certain where we are on that rising and falling curve of human progress.  But we can guess.  Mine is that, when history makes a list of societies whose value systems could have been better, we will be on it.