Did Leo XIII's "rights" & common good ambiguities lead to the Francis/Leo push for infinite "human dignity", illegal immigration, blessings for "same-sex couples" & monadic individualism according to prominent philosophers?
"According political philosopher and theologian Father Ernest Fortin, the concept of the monadic individual is the defining blueprint of modern rights. Fortin famously wrote that 'the modern rights doctrine in its original and still most powerful form amounts to nothing less than a proclamation of the sovereignty of the monadic individual.'" - Google AI
"According to French political philosopher Pierre Manent, the monadic individual is an isolated, asocial, and apolitical figure produced by modern democratic individualism and the unbridled expansion of human rights. Rather than viewing human beings as naturally relational political animals, modern democratic ideology treats the individual as a self-contained unit whose bonds and obligations are valid only if voluntarily chosen." - Google AI
Fr. Ernest Fortin, who was a prominent scholar of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, thought that Pope Leo XIII by adopting the language of saying that "rights" were "sacred and inviolable" unintentionally let the modern "monadic individual" through the back door. Leo's writings diluted the Thomistic concept of the common good, reducing it to a mere checklist of conditions required to guarantee individual "rights" and so-called liberities:
The trouble is that the encyclical speaks in the same way of rights, which, as we have seen, it likewise labels "sacred,"53 and to which in other instances it seems to accord a certain priority over duties. It mentions rights roughly twice as often as it does duties and usually ahead of duties when the two appear together.54 Elsewhere, it asserts that rights become "stronger" (ualidiora) when considered in connection with duties, thereby implying that they are already strong apart from any relation to duties (no. 12). It calls self-preservation a duty in one place and a natural right in another, again without specifying whether it is first a duty and then a right or vice versa (nos. 7 and 44). On one occasion, what the Bible expresses in the form of a commandment it inexplicably translates into the language of rights. Thus, the injunction to "increase and multiply" (Genesis 1:28) becomes the "natural and primeval right to marry" (ius coniugii naturale oc primigenum; no. 12). In a text devoted to moral matters, details of this sort are not without significance. Wittingly or unwittingly, the message conveyed is that at the very least rights are to be placed on more or less the same footing as duties. It is not an unimportant message.
One runs into similar ambiguities when one tries to combine prepolitical rights with the notion of the common good. The modern rights doctrine in its original and still most powerful form amounts to nothing less than a proclamation of the sovereignty of the monadic individual. The common good, on the other hand, presupposes the subordination of the individual to the community to the extent that, lacking self-sufficiency, he is dependent on it for the attainment of his end or perfection. If in some respects he transcends civil society, it is not qua individual but qua member of another society, called by Augustine the "city of God," whose good surpasses that of any temporal society. Thomas Aquinas's often repeated dictum still holds: the good of the whole takes precedence over the good of the part.
Leo had good reason to decry the individualism of the age, but in the long run his case against it was bound to be weakened by his acquiescence, however cautious, in the principle that anchors modern individualism at its deepest level, the inviolability of natural rights. What we are left with is a diluted version of rights as well as a diluted version of the common good, which will soon be conceived as nothing more than the sum of the conditions required to insure the free exercise of one's individual rights. The common good ceases to be the proper (albeit not the private) good of the individual members of society, as Thomas thought it was and as it must be if it is to be truly common; it becomes an alien good, for which there is no natural inclination to sacrifice oneself. The logical outcome is the characteristically modern phenomenon known since Rousseau as the "bourgeois," the man who lives for himself in the midst of people on whom he depends for his well-being and in whom he must therefore pretend to be interested— in other words, the man who distinguishes his own good from the common good, as opposed to the citizen, who identifies the two.
The difference between the two positions comes out most clearly when one considers the encyclical's assertion that the individual is "older" (senior) than civil society and endowed by nature with the right to life and the protection of his body "prior to his entry into any civil society."56 Such is not the view put forward by Thomas, who saw no reason to disagree with Aristotle's statement that civil society is prior to the individual.57 For him, there was never a moment when the human being was not subject to a higher authority and hence in principle a member of a community governed by that higher authority. The Garden of Eden bears no similarity whatsoever to what the early modern political theorists called the "state of nature," by which they meant essentially the Hobbesian "war of every man against every man" or, in Locke's polite reformulation of the same doctrine, a state in which every individual, having the "executive power of the law of nature," was free to take the law in his own hands and do whatever he personally deemed necessary to insure his self-preservation.58 The original natural rights theory is of a piece with this teaching and unintelligible without it...
... I began by suggesting that the teaching and the language oí Rerum novarum stem from two distinct traditions, one premodern and the other modern. The first is teleological and stresses duties. It holds that human beings are naturally political and directed to some preestablished end in the attainment of which they find their perfection or happiness. The second is nonteleological and stresses rights. It denies that there is any supreme good to which human beings are ordered by nature and views them from the standpoint of their beginning or the passions by which most of them are habitually moved, namely, the desire for security, comfort, pleasure, and the various amenities of life. For the same reason, it denies that they are natural parts of a larger whole whose common good is superior to the private good of its individual parts.60 In the course of the discussion, I pointed to some of the difficulties involved in any attempt to blend the two approaches. At this juncture, two alternatives come to sight. The combination can take the form of an eclectic compromise that remains on the plane of the original positions and splits the difference between them, or it can take the form of a genuine synthesis, effected on the basis of a principle that transcends the plane of the original position. [https://theologicalstudies.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/53.2.1.pdf]
Renowned political philosopher Pierre Manent in his scholarship presents how the humanitarianism of Francis and Leo sever us from the common good of families and societies which should ultimately be directed to loving God above all things and working for the salvation of ourselves and others.
Manet's has argued that Francis's focus on universal borderless rights threatens to replace authentic Christian faith with a abstract secular humanitarianism. He contents that the Leo/Francis interpretation of the Good Samaritan in Fratelli Tutt is a quasi-humanitarian secular parable, whereas the Samaritan fundamentally represents Jesus Christ healing a mortally wounded humanity.
Sadly, he thinks abstract "human dignity" humanitarianism replaces acting moral people choosing the good with abstract, disembodied individuals choosing subjective desires unrelated to anything, but themselves and the ideological abstractions of so-called universal "rights".
He makes the case that individual "rights" and "human dignity" are artificially constructed to protect supposed subjective "rights" and self-interest where the individual is defined by himself and his desires rather than his relationship with others and God or by what they he owes to others and God.
The pushers of rights language seem to see "human dignity" as self-relation narcissism with the self according to Manent despite sometimes using religious language to couch or soften their message. Seemingly obscuring the real agenda underneath complex religious jargon and reinterpreted biblical parables.
"Human dignity" ceases to be about fulfilling one's obligations to God and His created order (reality) or to the family as well as to the community. The right to the pursuit of happiness becomes a closed-loop "self-relation" to the individual's concupiscence (their sinful fallen nature desires).
That's why it appears the Francis and Leo Vatican seem obsessed with James Martin blessing of individuals who define their individual identity with sinful desires and the right to self-preservation in their sin. Manet explains:
[N]ew order... deduce all of society’s rules from the individual’s relation to himself. This self-relation refuses the introduction of any human law that might inform, regulate, or elevate it. Because the individual alone possesses the authority of nature, it is the sovereign self who rules over the law...
... This view is the source of the 2013 French law that made marriage available to same-sex couples... Those dismissed as “conservatives” are told: if you want to base the law on a natural tendency, you cannot exclude same-sex couples from the benefit of the same law. Once again, the argument is based exclusively on the natural inclinations of individuals as individuals...
... If society is not natural, then its conservation or reproduction cannot by themselves justify or motivate the foundational law of human communities. In sum, for us, the common good does not exist in such a way as to justify the law’s positive concern for its preservation or continuation. Only the individual’s self-preservation (or his “will” or “autonomy”) can be the source of what is right by law because only the bare individual is truly natural. [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/why-natural-law//]
Likewise, Manet appears to say the new illegal immigration humanitarianism seems to give the narcissistic "sovereign self" migrants no natural law obligations or respect for others, for communities or for the countries they enter:
[W]e have been led to see migratory movements as the most significant phenomenon of the present world... They represent the movement from the particular to the general, or to the “universal,” as we now prefer to say... migrations are thought to be the carriers of the new justice, and migrants, as a distinct human group, symbolize in our eyes the union of force and justice, a privilege that had always been reserved to self-governing peoples organized politically into communities of citizens.
The phenomenon that I have just briefly described makes no sense unless it is linked with the idea that is the leitmotif of my argument, the idea of justice that sees its principle entirely in the self-relation of the individual human being... since it is no longer either tempered or counterbalanced by any principle of association, or any articulation of the civic common good. If there is no justice but that of the general, of humanity in general, that is, of the individual set in his unassailable self-relation, then the individual who presents himself at the border, or who crosses the border, in the name of his humanity understood as indistinguishable from that of any other, and who thus represents all of humanity—this individual is the carrier of a right that can prevail in opposition to the will of any political body.
The political body then appears as a mere particular association, one ultimately lacking moral legitimacy. The puny individual, who in many cases has already crossed so many borders, is seen to represent humanity in toto, while the political body, within the borders it claims to defend, is only a circumscription of humanity, a fraction that separates itself—particularly if it refuses access to the human being who presents himself in the name of human rights.
It is not too difficult to understand the logic of the argument, or how it is that the legitimacy of the general has moved from the democratic political body—from the general will or the common good—to the individual qua individual, as simply a member of humanity in general... the representative regime in the framework of the nation—and which had derived such pride from this effort—emptied themselves so abruptly of their sense of self and their confidence in their legitimate rights, to the point of seeing in the self-regard of the political community a kind of crime against humanity. [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/why-natural-law/]
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