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success. There are two or three exceptions. Free-market economics
translated into goods as popular as McDonald's hamburgers or bubble
gum, into psychedelic skate boards or jeans or jogging shoes, are a cul–
tural tide that seems almost unstoppable, not because it's riding on bay–
onets or because it is following shock troops, but because people like
these things. It is perhaps a cultural phenomenon of an affiuent working
class.
I could say all sorts of offensive things about this phenomenon, but
in fact it is simply a result of the democratic onslaught. Bubble gum is
not an aristocratic product. Nor can a ministry of finance that sets aside
funds for the production of bubble gum have any redeeming reason to
do so. This is a democratic consequence of a special economic, social
and cultural disposition. The national sport in Russia is soccer. Who
forced the Russians to play soccer? Where is the English invasion whose
fleet master has proclaimed: "You play soccer or else"? The
Iinglla franca
of the world is English. Who enforced this? I am told the number one
subject at all universities in China is philology, which means English.
Who enforced this? No one. It is the way of things. It is the disposition
of the world, the world of the Gothic fox. The free market is a cultural
artifact, and we in Spanish America have become fairly efficient con–
sumers. We imitate the manner of consumption of the prosperous na–
tions of the North. Although we have been doing it for a long time,
we have yet to become efficient producers. We produce at a lower level:
we are not absolutely inept, but we are not efficient. The free market is
another consumer good that we are consuming now.
Pope John Paul has a lot in common with the Spanish philosopher
Jaime Balmes of the 1820s, who wrote a book proving that Catholicism
has within itself a dynamic principle that would make it more efficient,
more dynamic in the achievement of economic progress than
Protestantism. He argued this very intelligently. My observations have
nothing to do with what is going to happen in the future, which I
can't predict. But in the past Balmes's argument has not borne itself out.
I agree with Lord Macaulay, who argued the opposite of Balmes's thesis.
Macaulay's view of the relation between Catholicism and economic
backwardness is too facile. This is not simply a matter of finding exam–
ples of poor countries that are also predominantly Catholic: the correla–
tion is vastly more complex, and it has to do with the presiding cultural
experience of two different peoples, who are bound together not only
by religion, but also by language, legal institutions, and political disposi–
tions. You are right: the Counter-Reformation and the Industrial
Revolution are not synchronic. It would be a strange world indeed, in
