John's post makes a number of excellent points, as does the article in Commonweal (25 February) by J. Peter Nixon. I agree completely with his caveat abut the extent to which the Democratic Party has tied itself to the abortion rights movement as well as with his statement that pro-life Republicans need to be held to the same standards relative to other parts of basic morality. Senators Santorum and Brownback should be held accountable in the matter of their attitudes towards torture.

I want to raise another issue about Nixon's article related to John's last point concerning the author's lumping the torture question together with other standard concerns of the political left. Nixon argues that the Bush administration's position on torture is part of a more general approach to public policy:

If there is a unifying theme to the foreign and domestic policies of the Bush administration, it is contempt for any mechanisms of collective action--progressive taxation, Social Security, labor unions, the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations--that seek to level the laying field between the strong and the weak. With the exception of the administration's efforts to protect human life in the womb and to defend the traditional definition of marriage, it is hard to imagine an ideology that is farther removed from the mainstream tradition of catholic social thought.

That the Republican Party tends towards a kind of individualism is doubtless true, although individualism as a public policy goal doesn't explain some of those items listed above. Even Social Security, which would seem to highlight Bush's individualism is a bit more complicated than it might appear at first. The stock market is certainly a collective enterprise and investing money in personal accounts would seem, at one level, to connect more people to more collective enterprises (that's what businesses are) than they are now. I realize that businesses aiming at maximizing profits are not ordered by the common good in the same way that other human enterprises are (one can argue that they have more to do with interdependent private goods), but that doesn't mean they aren't "collective" in some sense. Moreover, there's no tenet of Catholic social teaching that mandates that a social insurance program like Social Security need be run the same way forever. Whether or not the Bush administrations proposals for reforming it should be adopted is a matter for prudential argument. We are only at the start of that.

Moreover, and more importantly, I don't see why it's an imperative of Catholic social teaching that the state as such be elevated as the only guardian of the common good. The prohibitions on taking innocent human life and on torture apply most often to states and the actions of those claiming to act for states. Catholics should be no more impressed by the claims of the state with respect to regulating the economy than they should with the claims of the state about what immoral acts may seem necessary to defend us from terrorists.

The collective nature of the United Nations is no more a blank check than that of the state. The UN has often proved a useful institution for coordinating international effots to mitigate human suffering. But it's also often been incompetent, dilatory, ignorant, and, most recently, astonishingly corrupt.

It seems to me that the basic problem here is to see politics in the categories of individualism and collectivism and to identify the Catholic tradition with collectivism. Individualism run amok (as sometimes seems to be the goal of many political "conservatives"--an odd thing on its face: what's "conservative" about that?) is often vicious, but so is collectivism. The question one should ask from the perspective of the Catholic intellectual tradition is what protects and promotes the common good, understanding the adherence to basic moral norms as itself partly constitutive of that very common good. This leaves a great deal for Catholic citizens and politicians to argue about when it comes to policy, without confusingly assimilating questions of doctrine to those of prudence.

lewisb@cua.edu