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Making Life More Human
Helen Alford
Gaudium et Spes was a
path - breaking document when it was published forty years ago, so it is
not surprising that it still inspires interest and comment. When a “Call
for Papers” went out about a year ago for a conference organised in Rome
in March 2005 by a group of universities including ourselves, in
collaboration with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, we were
amazed to receive five times as many paper proposals as could be
presented at the conference itself. Three of the most interesting papers
are published here in this number of OIKONOMIA.
Philippe Bordeyne’s paper on the influence of the Dominican Louis -
Joseph Lebret (1897 – 1966) on the document itself is interesting for a
number of reasons. Studies such as these bring out the importance of the
particular characters involved in the drawing up of an official text,
giving the text itself more of a “human face”. Indeed, Lebret himself
would have appreciated this since perhaps it is not too much to say that
his whole life and work could be summed up as one great effort to “make
life more human”. Unsurprisingly, this concern is very clear in his
influence on the Council document. From Bordeyne’s text, it emerges that
one of his main preoccupations was that the text should emphasise the
aspiration of the human person of today to go beyond “having more”
towards “being more”. Just as technology and economic growth begin
offering unheard-of possibilities for acquiring new wealth, it is at
that very moment that human beings begin to see in a new way that these
things in themselves cannot satisfy. Only if they can be used towards
the higher or intrinsic good of “being more human” can they really be
what they are meant to be – useful, and essential in so far as they are
useful, but not any more than that. These goods are to a human life what
foundations are to a house – without foundations, the house falls, and
without enough economic goods, human development is arrested. However,
foundations without the house built on them are, literally, useless, and
a human life that focuses only on acquiring economic goods is perhaps
the one to be pitied most of all. Elsewhere, Lebret argues that the
success of communism can be partly explained on the basis of the
aspiration to be more human, even if it is misplaced in the form it
takes.
For Lebret, the force of love is what will bring about change regarding
the great injustices in the world, especially those regarding economic
and human underdevelopment. Christians even more than others should be
filled with anguish at the sight of the misery of so many human beings,
if they love God. Love impels us to inform our minds and to use our
intelligence and willpower to act in response to these situations. If
this affirmation is true, then perhaps it is the motivation generated by
a deep love of others that is lacking in today’s society. We have ever
more means at our disposal to resolve the grinding poverty of so many
members of the human race, but we do not have the impulse and the
sticking power of love to drive us to make use of these means. On the
other hand, an “uninformed love” is what we often see in concerned
people trying to “do something” to help the poor and excluded. Being
unclear about what to do can sometimes mean that their very campaigns
can contribute to the exclusion of the poor. It is perhaps the
combination of the impulse of love with an informed mind that we lack
today.
Making life more human means at the very least having attention both to
the good of each person and to the good of all, or what is often called
the “common good”. Margaret Atkins aims to take the term “common good”,
one of the key ideas of Gaudium et spes, and put it under the
microscope. This is a term that is both very important and very loosely
used – a recipe for confusion in need of the clarification she aims to
give. The analysis considers first how goods can be common, and to whom
they are common, and then looks at various types of common good under
two main headings: those that are “enjoyed” in common and those that are
“produced” or “secured” in common. Also useful and interesting is the
way she relates her analysis to that of the economists’ idea of a
“public” good, showing that public goods can be a subset of common
goods, and that the economists’ analysis of such goods can help those
using the term “common good” to be more precise.
As is usual when we are talking about anything other than relatively
simple physical facts or relations, thinking about the common good
depends to a significant extent on the basic assumptions from which
one’s analysis starts. Christian starting assumptions, like the belief
in the goodness of creation and that human beings develop in relation
with each other, help to support a relatively full and complete idea of
the common good, compared, say, to a set of liberal philosophical
principles where the starting point and ending point is the individual
and the common good could not be more than the sum of the individual
goods of all individual members of the group in question. We see here
again that often our main disagreements with each other are not over
what is the meaning of a term like “common good” but over our basic
Weltanschauung, our set of philosophical principles or starting
points that lead us to give different content to an idea like that of
the common good.
Sheila Hollins asks in her article on “Forgotten People” whether we
really think people with intellectual disabilities are fully human?
If so, why are their rights and needs so routinely ignored? As she
points out in her article: “people with intellectual disabilities are
often aware from infancy that their very existence may provoke feelings
of rejection and hostility, and even that their families may wish they
were dead”. Here we are getting to a very concrete issue brought up in a
general way by Lebret: how are our modern societies helping
intellectually disabled people to “become more human”? If we are honest,
I think it is a question that not many of us ask ourselves, perhaps
because it seems to be a “minor” problem. Furthermore, while the issue
is fundamentally one of principle, putting those principles into
practice in the case of intellectually disabled people requires changes
to infrastructure, different kinds of policies and therefore investment
in economic and human terms. However, she also provides some hopeful
signs from the UK where she is based, in the form of the government
policy document “Valuing People”. It turns out that this policy has been
developed with the contribution of intellectually disabled people
themselves, and that the Minister of Health overseeing its production is
a father of an intellectually disabled child.
Similarly, positive stories come from Africa where a religious order has
greatly increased the participation of disabled children in their
schools. This is especially important since most of the world’s disabled
children are in poorer countries. On the other hand “care in the
community” initiatives, where disabled people who could have been
institutionalised for many years have been placed in more or less
“normal” accommodation in local communities has not been all that
successful and indeed has more often than not lead to people with
intellectual disabilities becoming homeless.
Sheila Hollins makes us think about those we often do not think about,
as Lebret made us think about the poor in most of the world and about
whom we did not think much before that time. The way the Western
cultures deal today with disability could well be compared to the way in
which those same countries dealt with underdevelopment in Lebret’s time.
The celebration of the fortieth anniversary of a document like
Gaudium et spes calls us first to look again at what are the
pressing social issues of our time. Then, on the basis of an “informed
love”, it calls us to respond to them as Lebret and the Council Fathers
did in their day. We often criticise those in the past for not having
responded sufficiently well to the issues they had to face – what will
people be saying forty years from now about our response?
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