February 17, 1991

PREFACE: THE SCIENCE OF CHRISTIAN ECONOMY

On the 100th Anniversary of Rerum Novarum

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in EIR, Vol. 18, No. 20, May 24, 1991.

May 15—The following is the preface to Lyndon LaRouche’s book, The Science of Christian Economy.

This preface celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first great encyclical on the Catholic Church’s social teachings, Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Mr. LaRouche wrote this preface from his prison cell in Rochester, Minnesota, where he was held as a political prisoner, on Feb. 17, 1991.

During the course of these next several pages, we shall come to the point at which we shall turn the attention of our ecumenical readership to numbered section 72, of the famous 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), Rerum Novarum.[fn_1] We shall then focus upon the concluding sentence of that section, and also upon the passage from Thomas Aquinas’s (1225 ca.-1274) Summa Theologica which the author of the encyclical has footnoted there.[fn_2] The referenced sentence of the encyclical’s text reads thus: “For laws are to be obeyed only insofar as they conform with right reason and thus with the eternal law of God.”

The footnoted passage from St. Thomas’s Summa Theologica reads: “Human law is law only in virtue of its accordance with right reason: and, thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And insofar as it [man-made law—LHL] deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is not law at all, but rather a species of violence.”

A hundred years ago, Rerum Novarum treated the remedying of the evil then being run by a “devouring usury,” which, “although often condemned by the Church, but practiced nevertheless under another form by avaricious and grasping men, has increased the evil” effected by the handing over of workers, “each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors.”[fn_3]

At the time of the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, at the end of 1963, approximately three-quarters of a century had passed. It appeared to most observers then, that the pleas for economic justice in Rerum Novarum, if not yet successful, were assuredly on the way to becoming so.

In the so-called “industrialized capitalist” sectors of this planet, the trade-union movement and other meliorist agencies had won, and were continuing to win, cumulatively invaluable and putatively permanent gains in human rights for most strata of the populations. Although a vicious form of neo-colonialism had been established at the end of the 1939-45 World War, the spirit of the United Nations Organization’s First Development Decade Project, and the U.S. Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress, suggested a commitment to global justice paralleling and perhaps echoing the rise of the civil rights movement inside the U.S.A. itself.

During the middle of the 1960s, that hopeful direction of development was reversed. During the recent quarter-century, social conditions in most parts of the world are far worse, on the average, than during the 1960s, and threaten to become soon far worse than one hundred years ago.

The impulses for evil which have caused this recent calamity are not altogether new. A conspicuously leading cause of the greatly increased immiseration and endangerment of the human species, during the past quarter-century, has been the willful murderousness with which such forms of the old “devouring usury” as so-called “International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities” have been so widely, so murderously, so shamelessly applied to the precalculable effect of rapid and large-scale increases of death rates by means of malnutrition, disease, and related mechanisms.

The most striking of the various included features of the new evil, is the dominant influence of the so-called “New Age.” This feature includes such presently pandemic expressions of this as the “rock-drug-sex counterculture,” and increasingly irrationalist mass-murderous expressions of self-styled “ecologism,” or “neo-Malthusianism.”

The “New Age” is not itself an entirely new form of evil. It is as old an evil as the pagan roots of gnosticism. Prior to the 1963 launching of the “New Age” as a mass movement within the United States, this form of New Age satanism was an endemic cancer in such forms as the theosophical existentialism of the followers of the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and the pro-freemasonic satanists of Aleister Crowley’s networks.

What is notable on these accounts is the increasingly emboldened way in which the two evils, the “New Age” and usury, have exhibited their natural affinities for one another, combining their forces in even the highest places of Anglo-American power, to demand, in the misused name of “freedom” and “ecology,” the rapid extermination and global outlawing of every scientific and moral barrier which has hitherto existed as impediments to rampaging immiseration and dictatorial oppression of mankind.

Such are the leading characteristic distinctions between the problems immediately addressed 100 years ago, and today.

The former hegemony of scientific and technological progress, upon whose continuation the existence of our populations depends, is being suppressed by both the loss of simple rationality in the education of the young, and by the spread of the paganist cults of anti-science, irrationalist “ecologism.” Concomitant with such specific, catastrophic effects as this one, those European and American forces which are committed to calculated mass-murder of populations of all developing nations, and which are committed to the extermination of the Christian faith and conscience, have come plainly into the ascendancy in the policy-making processes of most of the governing international and national governmental institutions which have gained leadership and dominance over this planet today.[fn_4]

The Ecumenical Standpoint

We propose that it is necessary, but not sufficient, to view the referenced state of affairs from a Christian standpoint; for practical reasons, it is essential that even the Christian standpoint itself be presented here from an ecumenical standpoint, as ecumenical is typified by Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa’s (1401-1464) dialogue, his De Pace Fidei.[fn_5] On that account, we have considered it most important to reference the explicitly cited sentence and attached footnote from the encyclical.

Different faiths, religious and/or secularist, can be brought to principled agreement only in two possible alternate ways of manifesting mutual good will. In the one case, they may agree on a common point of taught doctrine, such as the principle of monotheism, as in opposition to the pantheistic pluralism of pagan Babylon, Rome, or the Apollo Cult at Delphi. Or, otherwise, differing faiths may reach coincidence of principled views by the means indicated in the referenced features of the encyclical’s Section 72. It is the latter alternative upon which we concentrate attention here.

It is the obvious intent of the author of the encyclical that his own intention and that of the referenced passage from the Summa Theologica, respecting reason, should be received as identical. We adopt that intent here.

Faith may read those writings it deems sacred, or authoritative commentaries on such writings. Or, faith may “read the bare book of universal nature,” a book which plainly has been written directly by none other than the Creator Himself. It is certain to all men and women of ecumenical good will, that the two kinds of books—the written ones, and the book of nature—cannot contradict one another, on condition that the written one be true, and that both the written and the natural one be read by means of the inner eye of true reason.

So, where doctrinal writings differ, we may turn the eye of ecumenical reason to the common book of nature.

Let us argue the point in the following, twofold way. We emphasize, on the one side, the ecumenical notion of intelligible representation of a principle of knowledge of cause-effect in our universe, a means by which all men and women, despite differences in profession of monotheistic faith, may be brought by their own powers of reason to agreement upon a common principle of law. Second, we emphasize the importance of stressing Christian principles of Christian civilization as Christian, even within the framework of a monotheistic ecumenicism.

Consider next this simple illustration.

The most ancient among known astronomies, that of the ancient Vedic peoples of Central Asia,[fn_6] illustrates the obvious manner in which a so-called “primitive” people may construct a reliable solar astronomical calendar from scratch. Observe successively the position of the Sun, at dawn, mid-day, and sunset. Mark these observations each in stone. At night, observe the constellations and their stars, to which each of the respective three day-time observations point. After five years, we have thus the data on which to base a solar astronomical calendar of approximately 365 days per calendar year, measuring the year either from the winter solstice to winter solstice or from the vernal equinox to vernal equinox.

By the same method, the long decimillennial equinoctial cycle is adduced. So, a system of solar astronomy, free of the whore-goddesses Shakti’s and Ishtar’s lunacies, is built up by aid of reason. So the book of nature may be read—God’s book of nature.

In such successive revolutions and related ways, reason reveals to us that our universe has the apparent form of a unified cause-effect process of Becoming, a process of Becoming which is subsumed by an indivisible, Supreme Being, who embodies, among other qualities, what Plato (427-347 B.C.) admired as the Good.[fn_7] Of such matters of principle, in such a manner, do the very stones cry out.[fn_8]

Consequently, when we demonstrate, by access to reason, that a certain universal or approximately universal principle must be true, a monotheistic ecumenicism has gained a two-fold advantage. Since all of human knowledge is finally supplied by reason, there can be no valid teaching presented by any religion which contradicts true reason, as we define reason in the following chapters; there can be no valid objection to this principle which is to be tolerated on premise of secularist rejection of religious precept.

Physical Economy

By the nature of the case, there is no field of inquiry which unites all subjects of human reason—law, science, art—as directly, as immediately, as the science of Physical Economy, which was founded by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). That is a special standpoint of the work we preface here.

As is to be seen in summary in the appended document, Physical Economy is the science of successful change, a study of the dependency of the continued existence of a society upon successful forms of successive generation, transmission, and efficient assimilation of fundamental scientific progress. The measure of that effective progress is an increase in what Physical Economy defines as the rate of increase of the potential population-density[fn_9] of that society as a whole. That thus serves as an efficient empirical measurement of both the appropriateness of the society’s way of changing its method of reasoning, and, therefore, the appropriateness of the principle of change adopted for that practice.

Any society which defies those considerations, is threatening its own continued existence, and, a society implicitly becoming an abomination in God’s eye; a society which is not only losing the moral fitness to survive, but which, by God’s clock, will not long survive in its present form.

Historically, to date, the closest approximation of a form of political economy consistent with Christian principles is the so-called mercantilist form growing out of Colbertism in France, and the far-reaching influence of Leibniz. This outgrowth came to be known by the name given to it officially by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), “the American System of political economy.”[fn_10] This name came to be associated with the work of the U.S. economists Mathew (1760-1839) and Henry Carey (1793-1879), and of Germany’s Friedrich List.[fn_11]

The deadly adversaries of the so-called “mercantilist,” or “American” system, were the Anglo-French-Swiss, known in the early Eighteenth Century as the “Venetian Party.”[fn_12] This was the political faction allied against Leibniz and his friends, and allied with the first Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), allied with the networks of Voltaire (1694-1778), with the physiocrats, and with so-called Eighteenth-Century “British liberalism” of Hugh Walpole, David Hume, Shelburne, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) generally. These physiocrats and liberals were the chief guise for the pro-usury faction of that century.

That issue of the Eighteenth Century is more efficiently understood by emphasizing that the liberals and illuminati of Voltaire’s Eighteenth Century were committed to a return to the model of a pagan Imperial Rome. Hence we call them “Romantics.” These Romantics were dedicated to the overthrow of Christianity for the purpose of advancing their Romantic imperial utopianism. That is the root of the structures of sin[fn_13] in Western European and North American civilization today. These were then, and are still today, both the pro-usury faction and the utopian cultural form from which the present-day satanic “New Age” utopianisms have sprung.

The ‘American System’ Model

We do not uphold the Leibniz-Hamilton-List form of “American System” to be a perfect model. We do not propose that the American leading stratum of 1776-1789 was a pure embodiment of Christian principles.

We make two modest claims for that system. First, it was, in the domain of political economy, the only significant resistance at the time to the evils of Eighteenth-Century British imperialism, and for as long as it did resist that evil thereafter. Second, that, relative to the British liberal and communist systems, the Leibniz-Hamilton-List form of American System is the only historically notable form of modern political economy which is a proven successful alternative to the twin, catastrophic moral failures of British liberalism and communism. Thus, historically, this American System is the only significant approximation of a modern agro-industrial system which tends to afford the means to satisfy the requirements of Rerum Novarum. In contrast, British liberalism, intrinsically, implicitly fosters even in the worst degree all of the principal evils addressed by that encyclical.

In the relatively shorter or even the medium term, sweeping changes in general practice can be successful only if much of the population can be induced to regard innovations as bearing the historical authority of a successful precedent.

So, in the United States of America, for example, nearly every person over 40 years of age today has a vivid recollection of the moment and circumstances when they first heard the news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. So, it is relatively easy to recall the happier economic policy trends of the Kennedy administration, relative to the comparably depressing trends of the adjacent Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson administrations. So, the idea of reviving anti-recession policies referencing successful precedents from the 1961-1963 period, is one which must tend to enjoy support under the rudest economic circumstances of the United States today.

Similarly, it requires only a slightly longer reach of the American or European mind to recall the happier “mercantilist” policies of the American System: Friedrich List, Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, or Italy’s Enrico Mattei.

So, those of us looking at today’s global conditions from the standpoint of an ecumenical reading of Rerum Novarum, are compelled to take a practical historical view of available meliorative measures, whose employment represents a philosophically unobjectionable tactic for furthering the cause of principles. Thus, we are obliged to inquire, formally and historically, why the American System of Hamilton, List, et al. is consistent with Christian principles, when British liberalism is adversary to those principles. We are not thus adopting the American System as a point of Christian or ecumenical doctrine.

Nonetheless, although we are obliged to recommend such attention to historically proven methods, that required work does not allow us to descend into the moral mediocrity of mere pragmatism. It does not free us from the duty of setting forth principles which are fully consistent with the eternal laws which reason may make accessible to our knowledge. So, if we recommend the American System as an historically proven precedent for modeling short-term and medium-term remedial policies today, we must also set forth the lawful principles which must guide us through the medium term into the long term, which may be different than those of the American System precedent.

Endnotes

[fn_1] Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of the Working Classes), N.C.W.C. translation (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1942). [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2] Ibid. p. 44n; St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), I-II, Q. 93, Art. 3 ad 2. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3] Pope Leo XIII, op. cit., p. 7. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4] As early as 1975-76, this author had warned of the genocidal policies of the neo-Malthusian faction centered around Henry A. Kissinger and the faction he represented within the United States government. On Nov. 3, 1976, the author, in an election eve broadcast, warned of the genocidal intent of the Paddock Plan, which called for closing the Mexican borders and “let them scream,” and the similar policies of George Ball.

Newly declassified National Security Council documents reveal that from 1974 to 1977, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft (successive national security advisors) outlined a strategic plan to reduce the population of the Third World. The plan was forwarded to then CIA director George Bush, among others, for implementation.

The 1974 Kissinger-supervised National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests,” argues that U.S. national security interests demand the imposition of population control or reduction on the LDCs—the least developed countries, otherwise termed the Third World. Thirteen of these states are defined as “key countries” in which there is “special U.S. political and strategic interest,” which requires special emphasis. The primary reason these states are so defined, is that the effect of their population growth is judged likely to increase their relative political, economic, military, regional, and even world power. These key states are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia, and Colombia. The countries on this special target list, as well as the LDCs generally, are ones which the author and his associates have fought to defend against precisely those population control policies over the years.

Among Kissinger’s biggest fears is that leaders of the least developed countries might realize that international population reduction programs are designed to undermine their development potential. As he puts it: “There is also the danger that some LDC leaders will see developed country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.” He adds: “It is vital that the effort to develop and strengthen a commitment on the part of the LDC leaders not be seen by them as an industrialized country policy to keep their strength down or to reserve resources for use by ‘rich’ countries. Development of such a perception could create a serious backlash adverse to the cause of population stability.”

Consequently, one of the major concerns of NSSM 200 is to check the spread of ideas which are hostile to population control and which demand economic development as the solution to Third World problems. According to Kissinger’s definition, such LaRouche-associated ideas are a threat to U.S. national security.

To highlight the dangerous growth of such ideas, the document presents the case of the World Population Conference in Bucharest in August 1974, where Helga Zepp (now Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche) intervened to denounce the Club of Rome’s population control policies and John D. Rockefeller III in particular. The document complains that the conference’s proposed World Population Plan of Action was rejected by many of these states, because of the spread of such anti-Malthusian ideas. The failure of the conference is one of the cited reasons for the drafting of the NSC memorandum.

Referring to this conference, the document states: “There was general consternation, therefore, when at the beginning of the conference, the Plan was subjected to a slashing, five-pronged attack led by Algeria, with the backing of several African countries; Argentina, supported by Uruguay, Brazil, Peru and more limitedly, some other Latin American countries; the Eastern European group (less Romania); the P.R.C. [People’s Republic of China]; and the Holy See.”

Kissinger reports that the objections to the Plan were based on the idea that a “New World Economic Order” could be a basis for social and economic development of the former colonial sector. Related NSC memoranda from the period define the “wishful thinking that economic development will solve the problem” generated by supposed over-population, as the thinking necessary to eradicate. The reference is clearly to the Zepp intervention at Bucharest and the author’s influence more broadly.

Kissinger outlines various formulations to counter these ideas. For example: “The U.S. can help to minimize charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with: (a) the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly their number and spacing of children … and (b) the fundamental social and economic development of poor countries.”

On November 26, 1975, Brent Scowcroft (who had succeeded Kissinger as National Security Advisor, while Kissinger remained as Secretary of State), issued National Security Decision Memorandum 314, which endorsed NSSM 200, making it the official, if covert, policy of the Ford administration.

In May 1976, the NSC released its “First Annual Report on U.S. International Population Policy,” which examined the progress made over the previous year in implementing Kissinger’s memorandum. The classified report was forwarded to then-Director of Central Intelligence George Bush for implementation.

Among the findings of the report was, that it was difficult to implement population reduction in Third World states without the appropriate form of draconian government: “Prerequisites for real success are likely to involve three approaches that are interrelated and have proved highly effective, as follows: 1) strong direction from the top; 2) developing community or ‘peer’ pressures from below….

“With regard to (1), population programs have been particularly successful where leaders have made their positions clear, unequivocal, and public, while maintaining discipline down the line from national to village levels, marshalling government workers (including police and military), doctors, and motivators to see that population policies are well administered and executed. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program. In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilizations, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing and schooling to larger families.”

Although relevant population policy documents from the subsequent Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations remain classified, information in the public domain indicates that the approach outlined in the 1974-77 NSC memoranda remains U.S. government policy. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5] Cf. Nicholas of Cusa, On the Peace of Faith (De Pace Fidei), William F. Wertz, Jr., EIR, Vol. 18, No. 1, Jan. 4, 1991, pp. 19-39; or by Jasper Hopkins, transl. (Minneapolis: A.J Banning, 1990), pp. 33-70; for the Latin text, cf. Nicholas of Cusa, Philosophical-Theological Writings, Vol. 3, (Vienna: John Herder & Co., 1982). [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6] Cf. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas (Poona, 1893; repr. Poona: Tilak Brothers, 1972); and The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends (Poona, 1903; repr. Poona: Tilak Brothers, 1956). [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7] Plato distinguishes between the hypothesis of the higher hypothesis and the Good. The hypothesis of the higher hypothesis is typified by the kinds of transfinite orderings referenced within the chapters of the following text. This is the Becoming, a Becoming which is a notion of a transfinite ordering of changes moving toward increasing perfection or decreasing imperfection. The Good, by contrast, is the state of perfection. It efficiently is the changeless idea of perfection which governs the process of change in the direction of increasing perfection or lessening imperfection. For one reading Plato, for example, we can say that the Good has the ontological quality of being, as distinct from the quality of Becoming. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8] Luke 19:40. [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9] Cf. LaRouche, In Defense of Common Sense, Chapters III-V. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10] Nancy Spannaus and Christopher White, The Political Economy of the American Revolution (New York: Campaigner Publications, 1977), p. 380. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11] Cf. Mathew Carey, Autobiographical Sketches in a Series of Letters Addressed to a Friend Containing a View of the Rise in Progress of the American System, The Efforts Made to Secure its Establishment, The Causes Which Prevented Its Complete Success (Philadelphia: John Clark, 1829); and Henry C. Carey, Principles of Political Economy, Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965); and The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing and Commercial (Philadelphia: J.S. Skinner, 1851, reprinted by A.M. Kelley, 1967).

For Friedrich List, Cf. Outlines of National Economy (1827), National System of Political-Economy (1837) (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1966). Also: by Prof. Dr. Eugen Wendler, Friedrich List—Politische Wirkungsgeschichte des Vordenkers der Europäischen Integration (Germany: Oldenburg-Verlag, 1989). Although this history defends the idea of a single European Market in 1992, Dr. Wendler’s work was written to give new stimulus to the discovery of List’s life and his ideas of national economy. [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12] Cf. H. Graham Lowry, How the Nation Was Won, America’s Untold Story, Vol. I, 1630-1754 (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1987), Chapters 5-8. [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13] Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concern) (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1987). [back to text for fn_13]