To Reclaim Our Nature
To Reclaim Our Nature
by Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone Institute
On May 8th, the pastor and I gathered in the living room of our rectory to await the announcement of a new pope. After what seemed like forever, the cardinal protodeacon announced the words we had been waiting for:
Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus papam: Eminentissimum ac Reverendissimum Dominum, Dominum Robertum Franciscum, Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalem Prevost, qui sibi nomen imposuit Leonem Decimum Quartum.
My reaction was twofold. First, I had no clue who Cardinal Prevost was. I was, however, excited that the new Pope was named Leo, for it was the words of his predecessor Pope Leo XIII that I used to argue against lockdowns in April of 2020:
“The preservation of life is the bounden duty of one and all, and to be wanting therein is a crime. It necessarily follows that each one has a natural right to procure what is required in order to live, and the poor can procure that in no other way than by what they can earn through their work” (Rerum Novarum 44).
Under the guise of executive powers reserved for short-term disasters such as hurricanes, leaders across the West have done the previously unthinkable: they have FORBIDDEN entire segments of the population from working. Using a nonsensical distinction between essential and non-essential (as if providing for one’s family is ever non-essential) our entire workforce has been divided into three groups: 1.) The upper class with jobs that can be performed in their pajamas at home, 2.) Laborers lucky enough to still be able to go to work, and 3.) Those intentionally rendered unemployed.
Just two days later, Pope Leo XIV referenced the encyclical Rerum Novarum is his address to the College of Cardinals:
Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
I’ve been pondering the phrase “rerum novarum” a lot in recent days, which literally means “new things.” At the recent Brownstone Polyface Farm event, I was having a dinner conversation with Bret Weinstein where he mentioned the urgent need to address the problem of new things such as artificial intelligence. I responded that “new things” in Latin has an extremely negative connotation, and that these words, when translated into English in Leo XIII’s encyclical, are rendered as “revolutionary change.”
This prompted me to go back and reread the opening paragraph of the 1891 encyclical:
That the spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics is not surprising. The elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable, in the vast expansion of industrial pursuits and the marvelous discoveries of science; in the changed relations between masters and workmen; in the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses; in the increased self-reliance and closer mutual combination of the working classes; as also, finally, in the prevailing moral degeneracy. The momentous gravity of the state of things now obtaining fills every mind with painful apprehension; wise men are discussing it; practical men are proposing schemes; popular meetings, legislatures, and rulers of nations are all busied with it — actually there is no question which has taken a deeper hold on the public mind.
I was astounded by how these words, written over 130 years ago, sound as if they could have been written today, especially after the massive redistribution of wealth and power which occurred throughout the world beginning with lockdowns in 2020, the explosion of the cult-like devotion to “The Science” which occurred in the upper classes, and the growing working-class and populist revolt against these oligarchs which is taking hold in various nations.
“New things” came to mind again as Jeffrey Tucker recently reshared his words from 2024 on how technology has enabled corporatism to replace capitalism in the United States:
How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets.
What immediately came to my mind was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, a book about poor farmers who are evicted from their farms because of severe drought and the predatory actions of banks and landowners who seek to mechanize agriculture. When this 1939 book was published, it was interpreted as left-wing, even to the point of it being banned in some places under suspicions of encouraging socialism.
Yet, as Joel Salatin reflected at the Polyface event, the story of opposing large corporate interests that are conspiring to put small farms out of business has become a right-wing talking point: “Thirty years ago, 80% of the visitors here at our farm were lefty greeny, earth muffin, tree hugger, liberal environmental, wackys. Today, 80% of our visitors are conservative, faith-based, right-sided. Wackos.”
What I think we are seeing is a radical realignment of the political landscape. In former days, the battle lines were drawn between individualism and collectivism, with laissez-faire governmental minimalism on one side and socialistic governmental control on the other. What has happened is that the monopolistic capitalism enabled by the former has merged with the corrupt oligarchy of elected and non-elected government officials enabled by the latter and declared war on the common man and even reality itself, making use of the disorientation of “new things” at every possible opportunity.
At the panel, which I participated in at the Polyface event, I attempted to address the revolutionary change of these “new things” as a continuation of what was proposed by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. At the moment of creation, man experiences himself in perfect integration of body and soul, as well as perfect unity not merely between the man and the woman but also with all of creation. The serpent, in a sense, invents transhumanism, suggesting that they can surpass what their bodies tell them about themselves and thus become a threat to the Creator himself.
What follows is interior disintegration and exterior dominance and subservience, both between the man and the woman as well as between humans and the rest of creation. The religious project, though unable to restore original solitude and unity, aims to foster reintegration and mutual submission.
Both monopolistic capitalism and collectivist socialism are rooted in a materialist worldview, which proposes to dominate creation rather than live in harmony with it. They have no solution for the question of “What is a man?” and instead enable further disintegration within the hearts of individuals and the destruction of the natural relationships that keep a human grounded in the natural world.
Both wokism and public health utilitarianism appear to propose that we perfectly embrace “revolutionary change” through the embracing of “new things” that promise to allow us to be more than what we were created to be. It is the promise of the serpent in its most radical form: we can build our own paradise in spite of God if only we reject him as Creator and declare ourselves the source of reality. On the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II observed in his encyclical Centesimus Annus that the error of socialism begins with a wrong answer to the question of what a man is:
[T]he fundamental error of socialism is anthropological in nature. Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil. Man is thus reduced to a series of social relationships, and the concept of the person as the autonomous subject of moral decision disappears, the very subject whose decisions build the social order. From this mistaken conception of the person there arises both a distortion of law, which defines the sphere of the exercise of freedom, and an opposition to private property…
In contrast, from the Christian vision of the human person there necessarily follows a correct picture of society. According to Rerum novarum and the whole social doctrine of the Church, the social nature of man is not completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary groups, beginning with the family and including economic, social, political and cultural groups which stem from human nature itself and have their own autonomy, always with a view to the common good (13).
May I suggest that if “new things” are what have brought us to this point of revolutionary crisis, then it is precisely “old things” that become the weapons of the counter-revolution. Things like faith, family, community, and nature itself are what ground us in the reality of who we really are as humans.
In a world where everything from food to gender to intelligence has become artificial, we need to reclaim our nature as men and women created in the image and likeness of God.
To Reclaim Our Nature
by Rev. John F. Naugle at Brownstone Institute – Daily Economics, Policy, Public Health, Society