Today, we give a brief overview of our impressions, and re-introduce the main theme of the conference:

“It was an altogether strange but rich experience, to find myself for the first time inside the Vatican, for four full days. The event was organized by the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, an august body that has received distinguished researchers, both as members and outside experts, including numerous politicians and Nobel Prize winners. At the meeting were present the Nobel Prize economist Stiglizt, but also a former President of Columbia (Betancur), at least two former prime ministers (one from Poland). Nevertheless, it remains a largely ‘white European’ gathering, with few women, and very few Asians or Africans, though Latin-America was well represented. I also met two fellow Belgians. But the women who are present, have important roles and contributions, with Margaret Archer, a ‘critical realist’ sociologist and author of a very ‘p2p’ theory of ‘morphogenetic society’, being the co-organizer of this year’s gathering, along with Pierpaolo Donati, who has been working for years on a explictely ‘relational’ social theory.

Here are some general remarks about the meeting. First of all, the place. The Vatican is a lot smaller than I thought it would be, I was told no more than 350 people live and work there, but it remains an overwhelming experience to be totally immersed in a medieval city-state that has no overt aspects of modernity in its entire architecture. It really seems to operate on a different temporal modality, and if you stay in the Domus Maria, a kind of internal hotel, there is no television or radio. The meeting took place in the Casina Pio, a Renaissance villa built for the last pope of the Medici family. It is a beautiful surrounding (the garden, the eating place with marvelous fresco’s, etc…) but the meeting room is cramped and leaves little room for taking notes or moving the legs. Using a computer would even be more difficult, so I didn’t bother. The days were quite long, starting at nine a.m. and we would never be back in our rooms before 9 pm.

The participants are a very varied lot, mixing U.S. neoconservatives, European continental ‘classic Catholic conservatives’ who are still very much immersed in Aristotelian and Thomist thinking, but also grassroot activists from the Philippines who work with local communities, and progressive Catholic economists and social science thinkers. In addition, the PASS is very open in its invitations to outside experts which included 2 protestants, French and Belgian secular thinkers, including ‘associational socialists’. What is interesting is the high value of the intellectual contributions, none of them were superficial or superfluous, and the trans-disciplinarity of the proceedings, something still very rare in the official scientific world (as I was told by several of the scientists who were present). In short, this is a gathering which takes thought and dialogue seriously.

Now as to the theme. Pursuing the Common Good: can solidarity and subsidiarity go together?

The social doctrine of the Church, though only developed in the 1870’s, was a reaction to the devastation that its institutions experienced through the French Revolution, when the majority of its buildings and personnel were lost, and it faced a doctrine of full state sovereignity which denied the independent existence of intermediary bodies. Though it recognizes the importance of the state, it’s aim is really to preserve a autonomous place for civil society organizations such as itself. Originally, a reaction, this turns out to be a prescient choice, especially after the world system has experience both the negatives of state totalitarianism (the giant factory of the Soviet system), and of ‘there is only the market’ neoliberalism. The doctrine is centered around four principles. Imagine first a vertical axis, with as polarities human dignity and the common good. Human dignity is a given, since we are at the image of God, and does not proceed from society. Society on the other hand is a ‘unity of order’ with the purpose of creating common goods. Then imagine a horizontal axis, with the following two polarities. One is subsidiary, and is directed as balancing mechanism against state power. It’s a way to allocate resources at the ‘appropriate’ level of civil society, and the state should only intervene as both meta-regulator, i.e. protector of the common good ‘as such’, but mostly as making sure that every individual and organization can produce its own common goods. The appropriate level is not necessarily the lowest one, since some problems should be addressed globally, but they do not need to be addressed by a global state form. Donati distinguished vertical subsidiarity (between hierarchical levels), horizontal (between organizations on the same level, i.e. national state and national NGO for example), and lateral, between the subjects of civil society proper.

What is important for me is that the social doctrine confirms the primacy of civil society, just as peer to peer theory does, and that it is anti-utilitarian in its understand, hence it goes beyond dominant market thinking and the view of the human as a homo economicus exclusively determined by his selfish interest.

Some ‘christian social thinkers’, like Donati, go further by pushing for a more radical relational understanding of the common good. That will be for tomorrow.