Personal Choice, Sin, and the Collective
A number of vegetarians justify their lifestyle because they don’t want to be responsible for the death of another living creature. When this is offered, there will sometimes be the reply that being vegetarian isn’t enough. Vegetables are most often and most economically harvested via mechanization. These machines often kill small rodents. The piece of tofu you eat has the blood of mice on it is the claim.
Eating is a collective act. Even the farmer himself eats the harvest of someone else. Food does in some cases go straight to the harvester’s mouth. My garden for example will provide about a tenth of a percent of my caloric needs. One might through a diligent search find a person providing for all their caloric needs by their two hands. Having done this though, one hasn’t found an alternative to the collective eating system. One has merely found an anomaly. The presence of anomalies is not a proof that the collective system can be abandoned or that remaining in the collective system is an illicit choice.
This can be very difficult. The person who is prudent in seeking material possessions and generous in charity is acting holy. One who has taken a vow of poverty being in witness of that person does not change that. Both are holy acts, even if different in kind. The temptation is to create a strict dichotomy: one act is supporting the oppression of the poor and the other is not. Of course the problem with this dichotomy is that widespread adoption of poverty does not make the impoverished less impoverished. The reason people take vows of poverty is to have solidarity with the poor; they aren’t engaging by that act in a scheme to relieve the poor of their burdens. The ultimate path to more humane treatment is mediation through the collective, something those who take vows of poverty tend to understand.
With little to no proof or foundation, demagogues will take anomalies to be alternatives. They will forcefully argue that the only real alternative is isolation and disengagement with the collective. They will insist mediation is a compromise with evil. To follow their logic would require one to eschew all community so as not to be corrupted. Of course in practice this doesn’t occur. By virtue of being really troubled by the sin and being vociferous about the sin, the demagogue self-grants an exemption from being a part of the collective sin, or at least does not share the degree of sin of the person who engages the collective. Rube Goldberg-type schemes are envisioned for how the person engaging the collective is personally accountable for the sin. This will be done at the same time as honors and adulation is given to people who actually did personally engage in the sin in question but have had later ideological conversion, a conversion that more often than not costs nothing.
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An interesting point you make and one we should take pains to avoid. The isolation and detachment as you’ve described it can be a fraud. Again it’s not a true change but instead an attempt to shield oneself from the common condition rather than enhance the common good. However one can work to create collective alternatives (or alternatives within the collective) but the key is conversion: first individually and then socially to remove what the catechism calls ‘structures of sin’.
I do want to comment on your paragraph regarding the vow of religious poverty (and why some take that vow). I know many religious who have taken this vow and as a Secular ‘lay’ Franciscan I myself have made a promise of poverty decades ago. This evangelical counsel takes various forms depending on one’s state in life but the main meaning is that we love God above all things and use things only insofar as they help us love and serve God. Its purpose in application, as I see it, is keeping one out of material entanglements and providing freedom to serve God. Sometimes spoken of as a ‘spirit of detachment’, this also fosters a more direct sense of dependency on God. Now we may at times speak of our ‘solidarity with the poor’, but that would be a more remote meaning. Others may disagree.
And, as I think you are saying, the vowed religious understands that he or she is not promoting an alternative lifestyle or economic system. Rather they desire to create a climate of human dignity (which takes into account the poor) based upon a right relationship with God and neighbor. I only say this to avoid confusion and I don’t want to take away your main point. Also, I don’t want to disparage or discourage any of us from uniting ourselves with the poor in meaningful ways. In fact all of us should seek to be in communion with souls who find themselves in the throes of material poverty.