The Federal Budget this year coincided with the release of Pope Francis’ Encyclical Fratelli Tutti. Both are preoccupied with the shape that society will take after COVID-19. It is tempting to compare their different approaches.
Budgets are rightly concerned with the economy and deal with economic relationships. This year the Federal Budget has been brought down in extraordinary circumstances. It follows a year in which the prevailing economic orthodoxy proved to be threadbare, and comes towards the end of a year in which the economy and society have been disrupted by the coronavirus. Those responsible for drawing up budgets in such circumstances deserve sympathy and encouragement, particularly from people as innumerate as I am. By all accounts this Budget seems to be prudent in its stimulation of the economy and in its provisions for the short term. It emphasises the importance of work. That is certainly central both to economic growth and to human wellbeing.
The success of the Budget, however, will depend on whether people respond to its stimulus by buying the goods and services that businesses provide. That question takes us beyond economic relationships to the whole range of relationships that encourage either trust or suspicion, hope or despair, individual self-interest or attention to others and to the community as a whole, or boldness or timidity. It has to do with the way in which we imagine the world. Our own imagining in turn is influenced by the way in which governments and politicians imagine the world and its workings in their ordinary dealings and in the budget. If their imagining is compassionate and generous, ours is more likely to be the same. It may be illuminating from the perspective of the imagination to compare the Budget and its setting within broader government actions with the vision of Fratelli Tutti.
The imagination is of critical importance because it shapes what we see and how the things that we see are related to one another. The encyclical at its heart is a meditation on attention, on opening our eyes to what and whom we normally miss and giving them due importance. It invites us to see the world through the lens of social friendship by showing the disastrous consequences of seeing it through the lens of selfish individualism.
In the encyclical the attitudes that reveal most strongly the quality of our imagination are related to borders and equality. The exclusion, neglect and ill-treatment