I can just about remember 2015 when I first had a real “oh shit” moment. I was on the tube travelling alone, musing. A few things clicked together as I thought through the implications of some psych and economic research.

The result sounds a bit ridiculous, even now, but I’m increasingly convinced it’s the heart of the problem the West is facing: Capitalism is a racist system, in that it leads to racially unequal outcomes and probably always will.

These unequal outcomes aren’t acceptable to a society that (rightly) strives to acknowledge the universal value of all humans, but which has now lost the Christian understandings on which the universal value of human life was originally based.

The people who pass for “public intellectuals” in the English-speaking world are making lots of statements like the below (via @edwest)

Inherent in these statements is that the value of different people depends on where they end up in society - in terms of institutional prestige or wealth or both - this shows an inherently materialistic measure by which human lives are valued.

This should be no great surprise: most people’s way of thinking about the world is now entirely grounded in material reality, without any sense of transcendent reality. However, this clearly leads to a problem if our current system leads to unequal material outcomes.

By contrast, the Catholic response is simple and an awful lot less destructive: all the material world is passing away, so material outcomes in this life cannot be of the highest importance to humanity.

What matters is how we behave in the world, co-operating with the grace we are given, and in accordance with the talents and position we have been given. We will be judged on that basis: from those to whom much has been given, much will be expected.

Political, economic, and cultural systems, meanwhile, are all subject to the mark of original sin. Thus, we cannot take “all means necessary” to achieve utopian visions of this material world, because we’ll lose ourselves in the process. This has happened many times.

So, this will all pass away, under the weight of its many contradictions. We shouldn’t feel the loss too hard though, because by the grace of God, what is truly important will survive.