Mercy and the Bottom Line

I know I seem to be quoting a lot from Richard Rohr lately, but this is so striking that I couldn't help but post it here. What Rohr says about American individualists might not have been so true when I was a boy, and the old social order still had some importance in English people's thinking, but increasingly it is now true of this country...

Jesus used the image of the Kingdom; Paul, the image of the body of Christ; John, the vine and the branches. But it's all the same sense of mystical union: that, first, we are one; secondly, we became separate.

I don't suppose that most of us can think that way. I want to think that way, and I try to let the Lord convert me, but I'm still an American individualist. I wish I were not. Such an exaggerated sense of the private self breeds competition: your good becomes a threat to my good.

Do you know what the Greeks called a private person? They called someone who had no sense of the common good an idiot. The original meaning of idiot is one who simply thinks of himself and has no sense of the city-state.

Paul said the Spirit is given "for the sake of the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:7). We cannot make any claim to being people of the Spirit if we do not have that profound commitment to the common good first.

from Why Be Catholic?

"Your good becomes a threat to my good." What more startling indictment of the philosophy of the free market, that has now so deeply infected the UK Labour Party, under the name of New Labour, and which has caused such deep damage to that immense monument to mercy, the National Health Service? Back in 1948 - the year I was born - the (old!) Labour Health Minister Aneurin Bevan unveiled the NHS and stated, "We now have the moral leadership of the world." We long ago lost that leadership, and lost the dream that went with it, of a just and open society where ethics and consensus would always triumph over greed, profit and expediency.

The capitalist romantics are idiots, and their dreams of free-market forces and private-sector efficiencies reforming public health and education have surely by now been shown to be the fantasies of idiots. Even on their own terms, healthcare in say the United States is vastly more expensive, and fails to deliver better, if as good, health care as the NHS, and the "lower" sector of poorly-paid, disabled and unemployed people have far worse health than the equivalent people in the UK. (See Wikipedia here, and here.)

We need as Christians to be looking, surely, at the moral results of political and economic decisions, not at the theories claimed to underpin them. I am nothing like an old-fashioned post-war Socialist, but I look at the results of their policies, and I see Christ's mercy reflected more clearly than I do in the shiny black paintwork of any corporate limousine.