Made in America

By Russell Shaw
Herald Columnist
(From the issue of 5/26/05)

What does globalization look like to the average guy? Probably something like this: General Motors' and Ford's bonds have been reduced to junk status by the people who decide these things, thus making it harder for GM and Ford to borrow money when they need it. The reasoning is that the U.S. automakers have been losing market share for years. Meantime, the streets of American cities swarm with Japanese, German and Korean cars.

That's the macro side. On the micro side, when I look in my closet these days, I find that most of the clothes have labels saying "Made in China," "Made in Sri Lanka," "Made in the Dominican Republic." I've got an old jacket labeled "Made in U.S.A." that I keep for sentimental reasons.

I take this also to be—along with much else—globalization at work.

Thomas Rourke deplores it, and he explains why in A Theory of Personalism (Lexington Books), a feisty polemic written with his wife, Rosita A. Chazarretta Rourke. The author is a Catholic, a former Catholic Worker, an ardent prolifer, and chairman of political science at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. He's written an angry, free-swinging book.

Its "foundational principle," Rourke explains in the preface, "is that Western political thought and practice has for centuries been severing itself from one of its richest and morally ennobling insights, namely, that the entire political, economic and social order should be centered around the human person."

Globalization in its present form, as he sees it, is a recent, highly visible instance of that severing. At bottom, it appears to involve the transfer of economic liberalism and its free market principles to the international scene.

Not everyone thinks that's such a bad idea. A publicist for globalization like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times sees it as a spur to universal prosperity. In the long pull—who knows?—Friedman may be right.

But the short term is something else. Too often globalization seems to mean foreign laborers working for substandard wages in substandard conditions (by American standards, of course) to put cheap clothes in my closet, while American workers look for jobs in a changing economy that no longer needs their skills.

Unless you're Adam Smith, you're likely to find this immoral. "The market is for the person, not the person for the market," Rourke declares. "Free-marketers are fundamentally wrong when they measure economic progress by anything other than the actual condition and lives of people."

Reversing globalization by canceling trade agreements and raising tariff walls isn't the answer and would be grossly disruptive and destructive to boot. But reforms giving globalization a human face and putting the person before the market—why not?

Economics isn't the only sphere where Rourke urges radical rethinking along personalist lines. His critique is cultural and political. His heroes are people like Emmanuel Mounier, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, Jacques Maritain, selected liberation theologians—and, of course, Pope John Paul II.

Rourke is quirky, extreme—and bracing. He's a hopeless idealist, and what's wrong with that? He calls it "intellectually and morally demeaning" to expect people of conscience simply to accept evil situations as a given. The duty of political philosophy, he contends, is to propose a vision of society that is realistic only "in the sense that it conforms more to human dignity than the present order."

Here is a terrific book for pricking the consciences of complacent, middle-class Americans who like things as they are because they themselves aren't hurting—not too much anyway, and not just yet.

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, D.C.

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