Pope Francis is often praised for forthrightness and vision. He is often criticised for mixing high rhetoric with conceptual oversimplification. Fratelli Tutti, the pope’s latest encyclical, shows both tendencies. In this post, I will go through one example, the ambiguities of his usage of the concept of exploitation, which he refers to 12 times in widely scattered parts of the document.
What is exploitation?
Fratelli Tutti does not offer a simple definition or detailed exposition of exploitation, but I think that Francis has something quite specific in mind. It starts with a basic religious claim about human nature: “God has created all human beings equal in rights, duties and dignity, and has called them to live together as brothers and sisters” (no. 5, quoting his joint statement with the Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb).
Francis obviously does not mean that we are called to live as siblings so often do, in the discontent and hatred that led Cain to kill Abel. The divine call he has in mind is prelapsarian, or perhaps post-redemption. In the actual fallen world, it is an aspiration.
Francis notes and rejects two widely endorsed approaches to approximating the open-ended fraternal love to which all people are called. The first is individualistic: “an abstract proclamation that ‘all men and women are equal’” (no. 104). “Abstract” is generally an insult in Francis’s vocabulary, and so it is here. The bare statement of equality amounts to a cold universalism, not a warm and loving fraternity. The equal exercise of rights tends to isolate people, not to unite them.
However, Francis seems to be almost as hostile to what might seem to be the direct antithesis of individualism: identification with communities. His objection to this second approach to fraternity is expressed in his exegesis of the parable of the Good Samaritan in the encyclical’s second chapter. One of the morals he draws is that “social groups clinging to an identity that separates them from others” (no. 102) are not good neighbours.
Because of the separation, “one is a neighbour only to those who serve their purpose. The word ‘neighbour’ loses all meaning; there can only be ‘associates’, or partners in the pursuit of particular interests”(no. 102, citing Paul Ricoeur). In other words, as members of closed communities – Francis’s examples example inward looking nations, economic and social elites, and falsely understood religions – we can have apparently friendly relationships with outsiders, but the relations are never truly fraternal, because we are always trying to use the separated other for our purposes: insofar as you are an outsider from our group, we can only treat you as someone to exploit.
As I read the text, Francis sees no middle ground between fraternity and exploitation. Unlike Aristotle, he does not accept that practically useful relations of negotiated mutual advantages could be morally neutral. For the pope, the choice is between fraternity, which brings the “something greater” of “reciprocity and mutual enrichment”, and the anti-fraternity of exploitation. The duality is inevitable because, in the Pope’s understanding of fallen human nature, fraternity is needed to recognise the equal dignity of people outside our community. Without it, we inevitably consider ourselves free to use these outsiders, both individuals and groups, for our own advantage. The only constraint to our power over them is their power over us.
The false and non-fraternal idea of freedom as the lack of constraint is crucial to the argument. It inevitably leads to exploitation in politics, economics, family life, and, by a close analogy, ecology. In the Pope’s words, “Liberty becomes nothing more than a condition for living as we will, completely free to choose to whom or what we will belong, or simply to possess or exploit. This shallow understanding has little to do with the richness of a liberty directed above all to love” (103, emphasis added). When freedom is detached from selfless fraternal love, the strong will always exploit the weak.
Unlike Aristotle, Francis does not accept that practically useful relations of negotiated mutual advantages could be morally neutral. (Image by Michael Brace: Flickr)
Exploitation in the world
In my judgement, the stark division that Francis proposes between fraternity and exploitation can clarify the analysis of some contemporary challenges. Migration, which has been a central theme in his pontificate, is probably the best example.
Defenders of strict limits on migration often talk about the value of preserving national unity. In the understanding of Francis, such a “populist” and excluding unity is non-fraternal, and thus inherently exploitative of would-be migrants. However, Francis also rejects the false freedom of a purely individualistic approach. Migration is necessarily a communal affair, with multi-sided responsibilities.
Receiving countries should “offer a generous welcome to those in urgent need, or work to improve living conditions in [potential migrants’] native lands by refusing to exploit those countries” (no. 125). Conversely, Frances declares that there is a “right not to emigrate”, by which he means that trading partners, investors and domestic governments are obliged to reduce the lure of emigration by making life in the homeland more appealing. Not to live up to this obligation is “a sort of exploitation” (no. 38).
In short, potential and actual migrants are our brothers and sisters. Treating them with anything less than true fraternity is exploitative. That, in my judgement, is a powerful argument, one of the best in Fratelli Tutti.
However, this broad understanding of exploitation also gives Francis a possibly dangerous sort of intellectual freedom. He can describe almost any behaviour he does not like as exploitative.
Consider the economy. Francis is full of fury at what he describes as “transnational economic powers” (no. 12), “the opportunism of financial speculators and raiders” (no. 52), the “empire of money” (no. 116), and “the dictates of finance” (no. 168). In his mind there is a chasm between business as such, “a noble vocation” (no. 123, quoting Laudato Si’ no. 129), and “a profit-based economic model that does not hesitate to exploit, discard and even kill human beings” (no. 22). He ties the exploitative model directly to “reductive anthropological visions” (no. 22) – the treatment of outsiders as having less dignity than insiders.
In my judgement, this heated rhetoric, which also resembles traditional anti-Semitic tropes for example the financial takeover promised in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), is vastly exaggerated. I do not think the contracts, regulations, bureaucracies, gigantic workforces, and long global chains of production of the current economy would have flourished if they were purely exploitative. The undeniable exploitation exists in the midst of much respectful and life-enhancing cooperation. Yet this complexity is lost amidst such statements as, “When one part of society exploits all that the world has to offer, acting as if the poor did not exist, there will eventually be consequences” (no. 219). This kind of writing perhaps warrants the accusation of mixing high rhetoric and conceptual oversimplification: under this dualism – either fraternity or exploitation – the target of the condemnation is unclear, and the crime is implausibly grandiose.
In my judgement, a similar arbitrary dualism lurks in Francis’s attack on the villainous populists who exploit the vulnerable (no. 155), the people’s culture (no. 159), and popular political enthusiasm (no. 232). The list covers so many potential ideas and policies that there is no objective way to differentiate a populist who is “not talking about a true people” (no. 160) from a truly fraternal leader who sees the people as a “mythic category” (no. 158).
Exploitation is also mentioned in Fratelli Tutti in the condemnations of the sexual abuse of impoverished children for profit (no. 108) and of the propaganda found in contemporary media (no. 188, quoting the Australian bishops). I think Francis’s ability to see such behaviour as a failure of fraternity is a good example of the forthrightness and vision for which he is praised, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
Nevertheless, as the examples above show, perhaps Francis’s dualism blinds him to the fruitfulness of mixed motives in the postlapsarian world. Perhaps these fervent and unrealistic condemnations of the economic system even bring Francis uncomfortably close to the unfraternal populists he so fiercely criticises for using a “senseless and myopic strategy of sowing fear and mistrust” (no. 127).
Edward Hadas is a research fellow at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford University and a regular contributor to Reuters Breakingviews, a financial commentary service. His most recent book, Counsels of Imperfection: Thinking Through Catholic Social Teaching, is now available from Catholic University of America Press.