Life On Walton's Mountain

By Cathy of Alex

One of my favorite TV shows is The Waltons. Yes. Really. I own the first season on DVD and I have a few isolated episodes from various seasons on VHS tapes.

Recently, I was rewatching an episode from Season One entitled "The Deed"

This episode follows the usual arc of a typical show: Intro, crisis, family pulls together or apart, family pulls together at the end, an outsider is converted to the Walton "way", a lot of food is consumed, Grandma is ironing using the outlet in the light bulb, lumber is cut, Mama is curt with someone, Grandpa sticks his tongue out-you know-the usual.

I love it. Can't get enough of it. This is family life. The Waltons is often accused, in a bad way, of being an idealized representation of family. Maybe in some cases it is as family "should be": elders are not thrown into a nursing home to die, no one is 'fooling around' outside of marriage, parents are not divorced or seperated. But what draws me to the show is the respresentation of family as it often is (in my family anyway): Wisdom and advice of the elders is taken seriously, crisis, whining, moments when someone says something hurtful that they regret, dreaming, longing, working hard, growing up, apologies, mistakes, God, prayer, love, trust.

In "The Deed" it suddenly occured to me how much of a self-sufficient world The Waltons is. The only time the Waltons venture off the mountain is when they have to-even Godsey's store, the church and the school are at the base of the mountain. Otherwise, they are hardly ever "in town". They grow their own food. They make a living harvesting timber from their land or selling milk and eggs.

The drama of this episode is their entire way of life is threatened (as it often is in the series) by the realization that their forebears never legally filed claim to the land. Now, a timber company wants to come in and log. Pa talks about how without the trees on the mountain the water will runoff and wash all their topsoil away. They will end up in a Dust Bowl like the people fleeing West (this episode takes place in 1933). The family needs to raise the nearly insurmoutable sum, for those days, of $200 so they can take their case to court.

John-Boy (See how true drama this is? How many of you have childish nicknames your family stuck you with that you want to forget!? LOL!), at the age of 17, decides he needs to help the family by going to "The City" (in this case Wheeling, West Virginia) and get a job. He will send money home to contribute to the court case. Of course, he's "fresh off the farm" and has some trouble. Jaded folks like us we'll probably scoff at the troubles he does have because they seem ludicrously benign to what would probably happen to him today. But, remember, this was Appalachia in 1933 not South Central Los Angeles in 2009.

The only interaction with the outside world the Waltons have is when they have commerce to transact. Otherwise, it seems, to us, that "life" is just passing them by. How backward and unenlightened they are to us now, right?

I was thinking about the family lives of my Dad and both sets of Grandparents growing up. My Mom was raised in Chicago. My Dad and my Grandparents all grew up on farms or very rural areas. My Dad's family did not even live in a house with indoor plumbing or more than one electrical outlet until the early 1950s, no telephone until the 1960s. Dad's family was very self-sufficient. Grandpa and my Great-Uncles went into the woods and logged, gathered berries, hunted and trapped for money. Some of what they did to earn a living would be illegal today. If you ever wanted to tick my Grandpa off tell him "you need a permit or a license for that" then run. Fast.

That's what they lived on. That's what they raised their families on. Work, reliance on each other, and the land. My Grandpa had 8 children who lived into adulthood. Sometimes, he was lucky to earn 5 cents in wages/day.

Now, today, how many have land to even work on or that they could use to survive on if they had too? How many even have the slightest clue how to do even the simplest task of gathering food? How do we raise our families? By the sweat of our own brow using the land God gave us to sustain us or salaried servitude to corporations we detest and despise? How many of us couldn't survive at all if it were not for some kind of government assistance?

What happened? Did people forget or lose connections to the land? Was hard work too unglamorous to be tolerated? Is farming, hunting and gathering work for a class that we flatter ourselves is not our own?

The economy stinks right now. I've heard more families are going back to the "old ways": vegetable gardens, canning, sewing, knitting, because they can no longer afford to pay someone else for the service of the goods.

In the U.S. we quit being a largely rural society decades ago. We are, primarily, urban dwellers. How many gardens do you think can be planted in concrete soil? How many people in cities are living in apartments where a sustaining vegetable garden is not an option? How much of the produce and goods in the stores are even from this country?

Is it time for a resurgance of interest in "Distributism"? I think there are aspects of that movement that may have applicability to us today and offer some solutions.

If you want to read more about Distributism. There is a blog called The ChesterBelloc Mandate that is a clearinghouse on the subject. Furthermore, Paul Likoudis, had an article in the March 12, 2009 Wanderer called "Is There A Bellocian Response For Today's Economic Crisis?" that is worth a read. The Wanderer is online but a subscription is required to read Mr. Likoudis' article.

I just wonder if we had to go back to reliance on the land and on each other would we be able to?

Even more importantly, if we had to kick it WAY old school and trust in God to provide how many of us would fail?

MH - Chesterton in the Twin Cities

An excellent reminder by The Seventh Age of the annual G.K. Chesterton Conference being held at the University of St. Thomas next weekend, and a link to a terrific story in the hometown paper by new columnist Katherine Kersten.

Chesterton is a lost treasure, a writer who often doesn't get the credit (or the attention) he deserves. (I've met too many people who have no clue as to who - or what - a Chesterton is,) Fortunately, with much credit due to Dale Ahlquist and the American Chesterton Society, there is a renaissance going on. As readers of Our Word know, I had the great good fortune to interview Dale for a local cable TV show a couple of months ago - he's bright, funny, a very sharp thinker, and an absolute expert on GKC. Chesterton's work on Distributism has played a big part in shaping my economic thinking.

For those of you in the Twin Cities (and for anyone who cares to make the trip - it's beautiful this time of year; no snow), come on out to the conference. If we've succeeded in digging out from our move, we'll be there; and it would be well worth your time to check out The Seventh Age's talk!

MH - Distributism, Part V

Well, this has been fun, hasn't it? We've spent quite a bit of time discussing Distributism and related topics. Pretty soon we're going to have to decide what to do with it.

In this final segment, I want to bring us closer to modern times, and the famed Catholic social campaigner Dorothy Day. Day, with Peter Maurin, co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933.

Now, when you start getting into the Catholic Worker, you have to be careful. In all honesty, I don't subscribe to every aspect of the Catholic Worker movement. For example, I don't necessarily consider myself a pacifist. (I once made the great mistake of trying to describe my philosophy as being a "man of peace, man of violence" to someone who was a complete philosophical cretin - she probably thought you spelled "philosophy" with an F.) I also think that people in the movement have had a tendency in the past to identify themselves too closely with labor unions and socialist or liberation theology movements, which I think is a profound exaggeration of what the Catholic Worker movement is all about. Nonetheless, I've found that it's all right to approvingly cite groups you don't completely agree with, as long as what you're borrowing from them is grounded in fundamental Catholic teaching. And that is the case with the Catholic Worker movement.

According to the Catholic Worker website, the movement "is grounded in a firm belief in the God-given dignity of every human person." Catholic Worker was started during the Depression, with the purpose of providing food, clothing and shelter to the needy. Think of the Joan Collins character in the classic Star Trek episode "City on the Edge of Forever." However, unlike Catholic Charities, for example, the Catholic Worker movement felt that the message had to accompany the charity for it to truly help. "We try to shelter the homeless and give them clothes," Day explained, "but there is strong faith at work. We pray. If an outsider who comes to visit us doesn't pay attention to our prayings and what that means, then he'll miss the whole point."

Day staunchly believed that Corporate America had a responsibility to society. She was once quoted as saying, "We are all guilty of concupiscence (desires of the flesh), but newspapers, radio, TV and the batallion of advertising people (Woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires." As the Houston Catholic Worker summarized her words,

For her, to tempt people constantly and to barrage them with advertisement is immoral and unethical. One of the greatest sins, she says, is "to instill in the heart of the worker paltry desire, so compulsive that he or she is willing to sell liberty and honor to satisfy them.

The Catholic Worker movement is often considered when people talk about Distributism. Day's contribution to our study is to look at the motives of Corporate America. We've discussed at length how unfettered capitalism, in an unrelenting drive for profit, has few scruples when it comes to pushing its product. For example, companies pander to homosexual groups without regard to moral consequences - they don't even see homosexuals as people, just demographics. As long as they bring in money, why not legitimize their actions in our commercials? Food companies aggressively target children, and there are many who think the growth in obesity among kids is related to the extensive advertising they see from these companies. One of the most hilarious things I've seen is the "campaign" by tobacco companies to discourage teens from using their product. You really have to wonder about this, since most demographic advertising is predicated on the idea that you reach a potential customer early in life, when they're most susceptible to forming brand allegiance. It shows how far we've gone that we actually force tobacco companies to go through with this charade.

This brief summary is in no way to be considered an adequate explanation of the Catholic Worker movement. By all means, check out the links and learn more about this important part of Catholic history. The purpose in introducing it here is to bring the story of Distributism to our time.

Many of you will suggest that this was all well and good from an intellectual or academic point of view, but it doesn't really get us anywhere. After all, how likely is it that we'll turn back the clock to a farm economy, to family-run businesses, to stay-at-home moms? And you're right. Although Chesterton was fond of challenging people to explain why we couldn't turn back the clock, I'll agree that with something as large as a global economy, that might be kind of hard to do.

Unfortunately, once you dive into a subject like this you begin to get involved in the internecine battle between the paleo-conservatives and the neo-conservatives. (By the way, when you figure this one out, let me know.) Actually, I'm kidding about that last comment. I will admit to having mostly paleo sympathies, but in areas such as the Iraq War I'm probably more closely identified with the neocons. But I respect each side, and as you can tell from many of the posts in this blog, I liberally use information from each when I find it trenchant.

In this situation, I'm going to try to split the difference. True paleos, such as Michael Rose, would sharply criticize neos like Michael Novak for not being "anti-capitalist" enough: "There is little doubt that Novak's efforts have done much both to convince American Catholics that capitalism is their only economic option, and to discredit the real Catholic answer to that contention...." Well, I don't know about that. I like Rose, but I like Novak as well. The truth is that capitalism is deeply flawed - as would be any system that promotes corporate scandals like Enron, that encourages disordered thinking such as that exhibited by the company in this HR memo, that fosters the growth of mega-world conglomerates and produces such an inequity in wages, that causes companies to prostitute themselves in the name of higher profits, that turns employees into wage slaves and regards them as little more than pieces on a gameboard, to be moved around at whim.

Deeply flawed, as I say, but at the moment it's what we've got to work with. As we saw in our previous Distributism post, German bishop Wilhelm Emmanual von Ketteler, a father of Catholic social thought, "accepted capitalism and believed that its replacement was not a practical possibility." We have to try to turn things around, true, but unless the revolution comes in the next few weeks, we're going to have to do it within the context of adopting Distributionist principles in our own lives and habits, and to work for their introduction in the basic framework of capitalism.

What kind of changes are these? Race Mathews of Australia, in his 1999 G. K. Chesterton Memorial Lecture, made several recommendations on implementing the principles of distributism, as outlined in this fine article:

1. Measures are needed to insure that small businesses are not crushedby larger ones, outlawing predatory pricing and other anti-competitive practicesas well as unfair retail leases in large shopping complexes.
2. Acknowledgment by government that agribusiness and small holder farming-the authentic family farm--differ radically from one another and accordingly have different requirements in terms of public policy.
3. Every worker should own a share in the assets and control of the business in which he works. This can be implemented through ESOP's, mutualism and cooperatives which should reinvent themselves for new needs.

Nicholas Healy concurs with Mathews in this article (tax incentives for small scale entrepreneurship, growth of Employee Stock Ownership Plans, zoning laws to favor small businesses over Wal-Marts), but suggests we must look deeper into ourselves:

A great deal could be accomplished by changing laws to encourage smaller-scaled enterprises. Perhaps this would slow down, if not reverse, our cultural decay. Yet encouraging a degree of "distributism" may not be enough. Perhaps it is time to go deeper; to reconsider our economic system in the light of a new understanding of the nature of man, and head the Holy Father's recent exhortation for us to reconsider the role of woman.

What does this mean?

Capitalism seems quintessentially masculine. It rewards initiative, aggressiveness, competitiveness and single-minded devotion to work. It is not a system which encourages or rewards receptivity, the divinely ordained role of "receiving and giving." Of course, women can and do succeed in the market economy, but too often they are required to do so on "male" terms. At times, they seem to "succeed" by diminishing or subsuming their femininity. Thus, much of the debate on the role of women has centered on "rights" and "empowerment"; in effect, the opportunities to be given women in a "masculine" system.

Mary, as the role model par excellence, shows us that receptivity is the essential beginning for the Christian. Her fiat: "Be it done unto me according the Thy word," led to her gift: "My soul doth magnify the Lord." Opening to the Holy Spirit, she bore abundant fruit, and the graces she received she has lavished on the world in ever increasing measure.

[...]

What would an economic system be like if it emphasized and encouraged Marian receptivity? What if we put first not initiative, efficiency and productivity, but openness to God, family stability and security, the valuing of the human person, and true service to the poor? In Centissimus Annus, the Holy Father noted that ordering society to the Catholic vision of the common good may require "important changes in established lifestyles in the Capitalist countries." Surely this suggests a more radical approach than merely tempering the abuses of capitalism. Surely we cannot cling uncritically to a system which, for all its marvelous generation of wealth, has undoubtedly helped bring us to the brink of cultural and spiritual ruin as a nation.

I could not begin to suggest the practicalities of a more feminine system based on Marian receptivity. I do suggest that it is fitting for Catholic intellectuals to reflect prayerfully and fearlessly on our economic and social arrangements. It may be that the answer does not lie in a new "system" at all. Perhaps, like most things Christian, it must begin with each of us having a changed heart and new eyes. Yet, if we trust God and His Word, we know that it is in giving that we receive, and it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.

What I particularly like about Healy's suggestions are that they demonstrate a holistic way of thinking - they cut to the heart of Catholic teaching and show how it comes into play in this situation. (I'm not necessarily saying I agree with his entire hypothesis, but I like how he put it together.) This is a true example of what this blog has been talking about all along - using that Catholic faith to inform your thinking on all kinds of issues, from culture to economics and politics to literature and art. It exposes the lie, expounded by so many secularists (and liberals) that faith must be left at the door when you enter the public arena.

But it does mean a change, doesn't it? Are we going to be like the rich young man who, upon learning from Our Lord that he would have to give up everything, shook his head and walked sadly away?

The answer lies within ourselves. As employees, we must stand up for what is right in the workplace. Maybe we can't do it openly, but we can do it in the way we live our lives, the way we serve in the workplace as a witness to our faith. To do it, we must not be afraid to dare to be different.

As stockholders and investors, we must hold our corporate executives accountable to a higher standard of ethics. We must also ask ourselves if we are satisfied with a "moral" profit, or if the increases must go even higher. Do we put profits ahead of people? Chesterton commented,

If capitalism means private property, I am capitalist. If capitalism means capital, everybody is capitalist. But if capitalism means this particular condition of capital, only paid out to the mass in the form of wages, then it does mean something, even if it ought to mean something else.

The truth is that what we call Capitalism ought to be called Proletarianism. The point of it is not that some people have capital, but that most people only have wages because they do not have capital.

Finally, as consumers, we must ask how much encouragement we give to Corporate America through our buying habits. In this article the writer Wendell Barry, "who believes in economic democracy, says we are in trouble if we have an industrial economy--and he believes we do'which is firmly founded on the seven deadly sins and the breaking of all ten of the Ten Commandments." (Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community). He once pointed out the connection between advertising and the commandment against adultery:

To make sex the preferred bait of commerce may seem merely theobvious thing to do, once greed is granted its now conventional priorityas a motive… Television is the greatest disrespecter and exploiterof sexuality that the world has ever seen; even if the network executivesdecide to promote" safe sex" and the use of condoms, they willnot cease to pimp for the exceedingly profitable "sexual revolution.

Keep in mind that this concerns not just America. We export our goods to the rest of the world; so also do we export our economics, our way of doing business, and the effects that we see here have been seen around the world. One of the great concerns of John Paul II was that Communism would be replaced in the East by the rampant materialism and corruption seen in the West. His fears have been well-founded. We've succeeded in making many of these countries just as decadant as our own. Europe was already there, had already done the damage; we seem to be racing with them to see who can bring down the rest of the world first.

So we have some thinking to do. Do we accept the corruption of our children with products such as Bratz? Do we hold corporate executives responsible for their involvement in social issues, such as this story of Microsoft supporting a gay-rights bill? Do we shop at the national chain, the Big Box retailer who has little in common with our community, or do we spend our dollars with local retailers?

Pointing out what's wrong with Corporate America is like catching fish in a barrel. You don't even have to go looking for it, it comes to you. All you have to do is write it. (And I will continue to do that; it doesn't end with this series.) We must go further - we must be willing to hold others accountable, and hold ourselves. It's apparent that Corporate America is failing us badly. Its emphasis on the bottom line, its innate desire to view workers as pieces of property, as economic units that can be shuffled around at will, its willingness ot pimp itself for the sake of the almighty dollar - all of this strips away the humanity of man and reduces him to a wage slave. All the while CEOs walk away with obscene salaries, even while their companies post losses or face bankruptcy. Perhaps it's easier said than done, but the people running these corporations must be held accountable to some level of moral standards.

How is this to be done? The suggestions above are a good start, but while government can do some things, we have to remember that most Distributionists saw Big Government as the flip side of Big Business - neither one to be trusted. I think change will be accomplished primarily through conversion of the heart. Corporations are neither moral nor immoral, they just are. In the end, it's the people running the companies who are going to have to change. As consumers, as workers, as stockholders, as neighbors, as voters - we are in a position to help this happen.

We can help them out by changing ourselves. When they see that trafficking in immorality doesn't bring a profit, when they see that treating employees as statistics doesn't serve society, they might change. But if they look out over America - over the people whom they often treat with such contempt - and see nothing more than willing victims - if that is what they see, why should they change? As Christ once asked, when the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on earth?

Will He find it in the economy of the West?

The answer is up to us.

MH - Distributism, Part IV

One of the reasons why these posts come far and few between is the complexity of the subject matter. Books and books have been written on these topics, by minds that are far more educated, far sharper than mine. My goal here is not to write a book on Distributism, but to bring some of these ideas to you - to expose you to them, get you thinking about them, introduce you to other concepts such as solidism, in hopes that they help you look at the world in a different way. They're also meant as a defense of Catholicism, a rebuttal to those who suggest that you have to leave your faith and values at the front door when you enter the public arena. By no means do I consider myself an expert on this; one of the reasons I include so many links is so you can see the original source material, so you can see what it really means instead of trying to understand my babbling!

At any rate. Recently we were at Loome Theological Booksellers in Stillwater (the founder, Thomas Loome, was a one-time student of Joseph Ratzinger, I'll have you know), and while we were there I stumbled upon the book Building the Free Society: Democracy, Capitalism, and Catholic Social Teaching, edited by George Weigel and Robert Royal. Well, it was pretty hard to pass up a book with a title like that, so I decided to add it to our library.

I've just begun to skim through the book, but what caught my eye was an essay by Thomas C. Kohler on Pius XI's famous encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (On Reconstruction of the Social Order), written in 1931. This was issued to commemorate the fourtieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, which we've discussed previously. (Quad = four, get it? See, you too can learn Latin!)

This essay serves to introduce us to two concepts related to Distributism - Subsidiarity and Solidism. Both ideas, ironically (considering our new Holy Father) come from Germany. According to Kohler, social Catholicism "received its start in Germany under the guidance of Wilhelm Emmanual von Ketteler, the bishop of Mainz (1811-77), and Germany had remained a leading center for Catholic social thought."

Kettner "accepted capitalism and believed that its replacement was not a practical possibility." Instead, he sought to use labor unions, co-ops, and other forms of associations supported by a limited amount of social legislation. This became the principle of subsidiarity - "the state and all other associations exist for the individual. Societies should not assume what individuals can do, nor should larger societies undertake what smaller associations can accomplish." What could not be done by either associations or individuals should be undertaken by the state or larger social institutions, but this would be seen as limited in necessity.

Subsidiarity received its formal definition in Pius' encyclical. Read it all by following the link above, but concentrate on passages 79-80. Here's a sample of what Pius said:

[I]t is a fixed and unchangeable principle, most basic in social philosophy, immovable and unalterable, that, just as it is wrong to take away from individuals what they can accomplish by their own ability and effort and entrust it to a community, so it is an injury and at the same time both a serious evil and a disturbance of right order to assign to a larger and higher society what can be performed successfully by smaller and lower communities. The reason is that all social activity, of its very power and nature, should supply help [subsidium] to the members of the social body, but may never destroy or absorb them.

By keeping economic units small and/or family operated, we promote a more stable society and encourage a Christian way of life.

While the encyclical does deal with subsidiarity, Kohler says the much larger portion "is devoted to enunciating a 'sane corporative system' on which a society can be grounded." This was solidarism, founded by German economist Heinrich Pesch, S.J. Again, according to Kohler,

Solidarism, or corporatism, can be seen as an attempt to work out the principle of subsidiarity in the economic order of a society. Meant to represent a "third way," solidarism rejects the premises of both socialism and liberal individualism. It locates in the nature of man and society a principle for the order of the economy as a whole. Repudiating both centrally planned command economics and unrestricted competition, solidarism proopses the establishment of free, voluntary, and self-governing organizations composed of all the members of the various professions and occupations represented in the economy.

As you can see, once again there is an emphasis on the ability of workers to be involved - the opposite of the "wage slave" Chesterton so scorned. There is no "corporative state," as was the case in fascist regimes. The Church's concern is that the individual remain just that, an individual, recognized as a human being, and not the cog in some powerful machine, whether that machine be operated by big government or big business. When institutions create distant bureaucracies and experts doing other people's thinking for them, it suggests you can't make decisions for yourself - Kohler calls that "truly dehumanizing." He goes on to say:

Moreover, as Quadragesimo Anno points out, institutions that deviate from the principle of subsidiarity tend to hinder material prosperity. Hierarchical, top-down schemes ultimately suggest that administrative specialists and organizational planners can anticipate not only that people's ideas, needs, and desires will be but when they will have them. When we are denied opportunities for self-determination, we are stripped of the conditions through which we actuate our human potential. We become objects of administration, instead of persons free and encouraged to engage in successively more signifcant acts of self-realization.

[...]

The encyclical also demonstrates an admirably early understanding of the growing tendency of people to become overly preoccupied with their jobs and relations in the workplace. Because of its abiding interest in the institutional arrangements that affect the development of human personality and the potential for self-realization, [QA] is compelled to focus on the relations between employer and employee.

What does this all mean? That the workplace must exist for the individual and his betterment, in the same way that all other institutions - "since all rightly ordered societies exits for the individual, the emphasis in establishing any sort of social order must be on setting the conditions that will enhance opportunities for individuals to deliberate, choose, and act for themselves. Only by so doing do we treat people as human beings." Those that fail to do so will eventually collapse.

Notice how timely this discussion is, coming on Pope Benedict's warning of the "Dictatorship of Relativism." It is the rampant radical individualism, coming as a reaction to the oppression of collectivist government, that leads to such excess.

I think that's enough for one sitting. But you see how we've started with Distributism, going back to the days of Chesterton and Belloc, and have seen how many of the same conditions exist today. Therefore, this is a relevant discussion. In our next installment, I think we'll get into the Catholic Worker movement and Dorothy Day, among others. What she has to say about how Corporate America prostitutes itself, selling anything for a profit regardless of the effect it has on society, is blunt and worth considering. One of the greatest sins, she says, is "to instill in the heart of the worker paltry desire, so compulsive that he or she is willing to sell liberty and honor to satisfy them."

The rest is for another day. Perhaps a day this weekend.

MH - Distributism, Part III

In part 1 of our series on Distributism, we discussed the reasons why a third way - neither socialist nor capitalist - might be needed, by looking at how both Republicans and Democrats fall short in certain areas. Part 2 dealt with previous papal encyclicals on the subject of capitalism and its relationship to the dignity of the worker.

We could do this entire post on Chesterton, and maybe we will. My thanks to Dale Ahlquist and his book G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense, which I've cited before, as the source of many of the Chesterton quotes.

Chesterton felt Big Business and Big Government were both dedicated to controlling the lives of individuals. In the case of Big Business, it was done through making the employee a "wage slave," one who worked not for himself but for someone else.

"When most men are wage-earners, it is more and more difficult for most men to be customers. For the capitalist is always trying to cut down what his servant demands, and in doing so is cutting down what his customer can spend."

This can be seen most strikingly in the advent of the superstore, the one-stop, low-price leading mega-building. Now, Wal-Mart wasn't around when Chesterton lived, but you wouldn't know it by his predictions. Chesterton forsaw the development of the superstore, and didn't like it. One of the funniest claims, Chesterton says, is:

"[T]he statement that it is convenient to get everything in the same shop. That is to say, it is convenient to wlalk the length of the street, so long as you walk indoors or...underground, instead of walking the same distance in the open air from one little shop to another. The truth is that the monopolists' shops are really very convenient - to the monopolist. They have all the advantages of concentrating business as they concentrate wealth, in fewer and fewer of the citizens."

In other words, by controlling the amount of disposable income we have, the big business forces us to seek the lowest prices we can, therefore driving us to that same big business. We're told that these companies are able to keep prices low by buying in bulk, and those who favor such companies will say that in doing so, the big business is able to keep other businesses - its suppliers - afloat.

But look at the problems inherent in such a situation - take the crash of Kmart a few years ago, for example. When Fleming won the contract to be the sole food supplier for Kmart, it was seen as a major victory for Fleming, and a defeat for its competitors. However, when Kmart ran into major financial difficulties in 2002, Fleming felt the pain of having put so many eggs in one basket (Kmart was responsible for one-quarter of Fleming's revenue, according to this story), and wound up facing problems of its own. Of course, when you read the fine print you see that Ronald Burke, one of the major investors in Kmart, also owned a sizable chunk of Fleming stock, which he sold for $75 million, making a $25 million pretax profit.

However, Chesterton saw more danger from big business than simply the superstore. There was the matter of big business' effect on the individual. Both big government and big business conspire against the individual because, Ahlquist says, "they are soulless. They are in revolt against the normal and the ordinary...They do not want the common man to have power." As Chesterton points out:

"They are willing to give him a vote, because they have long discovered that it need not give him any power. They are not willing to give him a house, or a wife, or a child, or a dog, or a cow, or a piece of land, because these things really do give him power."

In this sense, big business and big government are invoved in a conspiracy against you and me. For many years, the common wisdom has been that Republicans are the party of big business, while Democrats favor the working man. However, big business has a much broader agenda, and contributes substantially to both parties, in order to maintain its influence. Its ultimate goal is to maintain the status quo, for which they generally use the offices of the Democratic party. Think about it: more regulation, more layers of bureaucracy - in other words, specialities of the Democrats - actually favor big business. Oh, they may complain about it, perhaps in order to maintain their cover, but in fact these rules and regulations cost money - money that entreprenuers and smaller businesses seldom can afford. Through regulation, big business is able to eliminate competition and continue their monopolies. What the Republican party truly needs to do is identify itself more closely with the entreprenuerial class, which is the area of the economy that actually produces jobs, and tends to afford employees more ownership abilities.

Economics is not the only area in which this unholy aliance poses a threat to society. Chesterton stated in The Superstition of Divorce:

Capitalism . . . is at war with the family, for the same reason which has led to its being at war with the Trade Union . . . It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its clearest meaning (which is none too clear) might be translated as individual. If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline, by which the poor can help the poor, these emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal fashion . . . in other words smash it to atoms.

. . . A very profound and precise instinct has led them to single out the human household as the chief obstacle to their inhuman progress. Without the family we are helpless before the State, which in our modern case is the Servile State.

Let's think about this for a moment, because this is really a multileveled arguement consisting of three main points: big business encouraging consumerism, big business taking workers away from their families, and big business producing products that harm the family.

Begin with the two-wage-earner family - one can argue, correctly, that this often is a consequence of materialism (or perhaps more accurately, consumerism), becaues people want their toys - the second home, the fourth car, etc. On the face of it, this seems to be something you can't hang on big business.

True, but before we go too far down this road let's go back to what JPII said in Centesimus Annus: "If, on the contrary, a direct appeal is made to his instincts — while ignoring in various ways the reality of the person as intelligent and free — then consumer attitudes and life-styles can be created which are objectively improper and often damaging to his physical and spiritual health." In other words (my interpolation), materialism can be said to be an outgrowth of original sin, an affinity for sin; for business to deliberately cultivate and take advantage of that affinity is in and of itself a sin, when it "totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs." (JPII)

When big business panders to, indeed creates, desires that are based purely on materialism, they must share some of the blame for creating this atmosphere of consumerism. You could call them predators, feeding off human weakness like a bar serving booze to a known alcoholic; the bartender may claim that he's only giving the customer what he wants, but in fact he's taking advantage of that alcoholic, exploiting his weakness in the name of profit.

Let me hasten to add: I'm not trying to say there's something wrong with owning nice things. Again, let's go back to what JPII said:

It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards "having" rather than "being", and which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself. It is therefore necessary to create life-styles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.

And what I'm trying to suggest is that corporate America, in its desire to make as much money as possible, is in the business of creating life-styles based on "having," on spending money and gaining possessions rather than spending time trying to gain the Kingdom of God.

But I said this was a multileveled arguement. Now let's look at its affect on family life in general. Ahlquist summarizes Chesterton's position on big business and the family as follows:

"Families are a nuisance to businesses that have to provide a living wage, health care plans, and maternity leave, and that have to put up with employees coming in late or going home early because a child is sick or missed the school bus."

Look at the statistics - Americans work more hours than employees in any other industrialized country, yet we take less vacation time. Work is the source of so much family stress - economic pressures, extended business travel, more time at the office - is enormous. And this says nothing about how artificial work measures such as "team building" put pressures on marriages by encouraging close relationships between men and women.

Yet business often turns a blind eye to such pressures, and nowhere is this attitude more evident than in the HR information I quoted earlier. It's clear that business sees employee value in terms of what the employee contributes to the well-being of the company, not the intrinsic value of the individual. Some would argue that business has done a great deal for the families - providing on-site day care facilities, plus other amenities at the corporate "campus," such as stores, dry cleaners, fitness centers, and medical facilities. But is this really for the advantage of the employee, or is it for the convenience of the company - to keep the employee at work as long as possible, to eliminate as many excuses as possible for the employee wanting to leave the facility. Keep 'em there, and they'll work longer and harder.

So far, we've talked about the internal mechanics of big business, and how it works (alone and in collaboration with big government) to dehumanize the employee and separate him from his family. In our next post we'll discuss how business puts profits ahead of people - and nations - by the products they produce.

And remember, all this is not intended as an attack on business per se, but a buildup to the rationale behind Distributism, and how it can become part of our thinking, our behavior, and our political system.

MH - Distributism, Part II

Last week, you'll recall, we started our discussion of Distributism by looking over the political landscape, and finding that for many of us, both the Republicans and the Democrats fall short of what we really desire in a political party.

To start with, if you did your homework assignment, you've already checked out this website, an overview on Distributism. According to the site, Distributism can be defined as "an economic system in which private property, (especially the 'means of production'), is well distributed, in which as many people as possible are actual owners." Already that should put the lie to socialism or communism as acceptable economic models, for in both of those systems the emphasis is on ownership by the State; private ownership, in fact, undermines the authority of the State by allowing even a small amount of independence to creep into one's life.

So what about capitalism? It's probably no surprise to regular readers of this site that its owners tend to fall on the conservative side of the fence (actually, I was once accused, in print, of being a right-wing demagogue, but it's not the worst thing I've been called). Therefore, as a conservative, it seems to me that a greater case must be made as to why capitalism, as personified by Corporate America, is teetering on the edge of moral bankruptcy.

In doing this, my purpose here isn't to write an entire series defining Distributism and what it means. There are a lot of good websites out there already that have done a far better job of that than I could do. What I really want to do is call your attention to this concept, and point out why we have to begin to change the way we think about our how capitalism fits into the Catholic social teaching. And I'm not talking about the liberal policies that many pass off as teachings of the Church. The best way to do this is to look at some of the great social teaching documents of the Church, and for that I prefer to go straight to the Popes themselves.

In one of my first essays, I used the text of Pope John Paul II's encyclical “Laborem Exercens (On Human Work)” to demolish the assumptions of a particularly idiotic Human Resources document that had been sent to me. Now, let's take a look at the encyclical that was the basis for much of JPII's thought on the subject: the epic "Rerum Novarum (On Capital and Labor)," written in 1891 by Pope Leo XIII. Far from being outdated, this encyclical rings true to life in so many areas, even today.

Leo begins by dispensing, as we did a moment ago, with socialism:

4. To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man's envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.

5. [...] Socialists, therefore, by endeavoring to transfer the possessions of individuals to the community at large, strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.

Lest one think that the Holy Father is roundly endorsing capitalism, however, let's go on. The following excerpts outline the Pope's idea of a truly just economic system, including the right to organize in a union, the right to a fair and just wage, and the proper treatment of employees. As you read through this list, make a mental note as to how Corporate America stacks up; maybe there won't be a quiz next week, but we are taking notes...

3. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolaged and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition.

10. Is it just that the fruit of a man's own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by any one else? As effects follow their cause, so it is just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor.

16. We affirm without hesitation that all the striving of men will be in vain if they leave out the Church.

20. The following duties bind the wealthy owner and the employer: not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character [...] to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers - that is truly shameful and inhuman. Again justice demands that, in dealing with the working man, religion and the good of his soul must be kept in mind. Hence, the employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings [...] that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one's profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine.

45. Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice.

46. We have seen that this great labor question cannot be solved save by assuming as a principle that private ownership must be held sacred and inviolable. The law, therefore, should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.

49. The most important of all are workingmen's unions, for these virtually include all the rest. History attests what excellent results were brought about by the artificers' guilds of olden times. They were the means of affording not only many advantages to the workmen, but in no small degree of promoting the advancement of art, as numerous monuments remain to bear witness. Such unions should be suited to the requirements of this our age - an age of wider education, of different habits, and of far more numerous requirements in daily life.

60. Prejudice, it is true, is mighty, and so is the greed of money; but if the sense of what is just and rightful be not deliverately stifled, their fellow citizens are sure to be won over ot a kindly feeling towrds men whom they see to be in earnest as regards their work and who prefer so unmistalably right dealing to mere lucre, and the sacredness of duty to every other consideration.

In 1991, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope John Paul II issued the encyclical Centesimus Annus - a look back on Leo's encyclical, and a commentary on the present state of labor. Contrary to what some conservative commentators said, this encyclical is not an unequivical attack on capitalism, nor is it an endorsement of Marxism. Rather, what JPII does is restate Leo's concerns, with an eye to what modern capitalism has become. It is a pointed critique of capitalism's shortcomings, and a warning of what they portend for society as a whole:

35. The Church acknowledges the legitimate role of profit as an indication that a business is functioning well. When a firm makes a profit, this means that productive factors have been properly employed and corresponding human needs have been duly satisfied. But profitability is not the only indicator of a firm's condition. It is possible for the financial accounts to be in order, and yet for the people — who make up the firm's most valuable asset — to be humiliated and their dignity offended. Besides being morally inadmissible, this will eventually have negative repercussions on the firm's economic efficiency. In fact, the purpose of a business firm is not simply to make a profit, but is to be found in its very existence as a community of persons who in various ways are endeavouring to satisfy their basic needs, and who form a particular group at the service of the whole of society. Profit is a regulator of the life of a business, but it is not the only one; other human and moral factors must also be considered which, in the long term, are at least equally important for the life of a business.

36. A given culture reveals its overall understanding of life through the choices it makes in production and consumption. It is here that the phenomenon of consumerism arises. In singling out new needs and new means to meet them, one must be guided by a comprehensive picture of man which respects all the dimensions of his being and which subordinates his material and instinctive dimensions to his interior and spiritual ones. If, on the contrary, a direct appeal is made to his instincts — while ignoring in various ways the reality of the person as intelligent and free — then consumer attitudes and life-styles can be created which are objectively improper and often damaging to his physical and spiritual health. Of itself, an economic system does not possess criteria for correctly distinguishing new and higher forms of satisfying human needs from artificial new needs which hinder the formation of a mature personality. Thus a great deal of educational and cultural work is urgently needed, including the education of consumers in the responsible use of their power of choice, the formation of a strong sense of responsibility among producers and among people in the mass media in particular, as well as the necessary intervention by public authorities

[...]

It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards "having" rather than "being", and which wants to have more, not in order to be more but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself. It is therefore necessary to create life-styles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.

39. All of this can be summed up by repeating once more that economic freedom is only one element of human freedom. When it becomes autonomous, when man is seen more as a producer or consumer of goods than as a subject who produces and consumes in order to live, then economic freedom loses its necessary relationship to the human person and ends up by alienating and oppressing him.

41. The historical experience of the West, for its part, shows that even if the Marxist analysis and its foundation of alienation are false, nevertheless alienation — and the loss of the authentic meaning of life — is a reality in Western societies too. This happens in consumerism, when people are ensnared in a web of false and superficial gratifications rather than being helped to experience their personhood in an authentic and concrete way. Alienation is found also in work, when it is organized so as to ensure maximum returns and profits with no concern whether the worker, through his own labour, grows or diminishes as a person, either through increased sharing in a genuinely supportive community or through increased isolation in a maze of relationships marked by destructive competitiveness and estrangement, in which he is considered only a means and not an end.

[...]

Exploitation, at least in the forms analyzed and described by Karl Marx, has been overcome in Western society. Alienation, however, has not been overcome as it exists in various forms of exploitation, when people use one another, and when they seek an ever more refined satisfaction of their individual and secondary needs, while ignoring the principal and authentic needs which ought to regulate the manner of satisfying the other ones too. A person who is concerned solely or primarily with possessing and enjoying, who is no longer able to control his instincts and passions, or to subordinate them by obedience to the truth, cannot be free: obedience to the truth about God and man is the first condition of freedom, making it possible for a person to order his needs and desires and to choose the means of satisfying them according to a correct scale of values, so that the ownership of things may become an occasion of growth for him. This growth can be hindered as a result of manipulation by the means of mass communication, which impose fashions and trends of opinion through carefully orchestrated repetition, without it being possible to subject to critical scrutiny the premises on which these fashions and trends are based.

42. Returning now to the initial question: can it perhaps be said that, after the failure of Communism, capitalism is the victorious social system, and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society?

[...]

The answer is obviously complex. If by "capitalism" is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a "business economy", "market economy" or simply "free economy". But if by "capitalism" is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.

43. The obligation to earn one's bread by the sweat of one's brow also presumes the right to do so. A society in which this right is systematically denied, in which economic policies do not allow workers to reach satisfactory levels of employment, cannot be justified from an ethical point of view, nor can that society attain social peace. Just as the person fully realizes himself in the free gift of self, so too ownership morally justifies itself in the creation, at the proper time and in the proper way, of opportunities for work and human growth for all.

That's a lot to digest at one time. In order to gather the entire feel for these documents, your reading assignment for next week (should you choose to accept it) is to look at Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus and to review what I previously exerpted from Laborem Exercens, to read not just the excerpts I've provided but to look at them in the context of the entire documents.

Next time, we'll take a look at how Chesterton felt about capitalism, and how well Corporate America measures up to these standards.

MH - Let's Talk About Distributism - Part I

Yes, let's.

For one thing, what is it?

To answer that question, let's take a step back for a moment, to an article in the January issue of First Things. Written by William McGurn and entitled "Bob Casey's Revenge," it discusses how the Democratic Party got to its present pro-abortion state, and subliminally asks the question "what would happen if we had a pro-life Democratic Party?"

We need pro-life Democrats to be able to breathe again. This means that we need a Democratic leadership that doesn’t demand that Democrats vote against, among other things, judicial nominees whose only crime is their “deeply held” personal beliefs or a suspected skepticism toward the one dogma in the Democratic Party: that while all other Supreme Court decisions are malleable and must bend to the social and political agenda of the day, Roe v. Wade is holy writ.

Aye, therein lies the rub. Many conservative Catholics have concerns about America's direction politically - the war in Iraq, various government policies regarding spending, taxes, civil rights, the growing influence of Corporate America. In other words, issues on which they might normally be expected to side with the Democrats (never mind for the moment that the Democrats are far from perfect on these issues themselves), but because of issues such as abortion, homosexual marriage, euthenasia, and embryonic stem cell research - the social issues, in other words - they find themselves with the choice of either voting GOP while holding their noses, voting for a third party (and "throwing their vote away"), or not voting at all.

Conservatives find themselves frequently distraught over what they see as a "betrayal" by the Republican Party (or the "Stupid Party," as the late Sam Francis put it) on issues ranging from spending to a perceived softness on those social issues. Of course, as I learned long ago, one problem with mixing politics and religion is that religious leaders frequently find themselves working so hard for a seat at the bargaining table, they forget the one waiting for them at the Lord's table. Well, what can you expect? After all, the GOP is a political party, not a church. I'm not trying to excuse the squishiness so often found in Republicans; merely pointing out that a political party, like all other organizations created by fallible man, is nothing in which to put your trust.

Many conservatives are drawn to Libertarianism, but on social issues they can be morally bankrupt. Third-parties such as the Constitution Party stand for all the right things, but they're usually seen as trying to out-Republican the Republicans. They also run the risk of being preceived as even more "cruel and heartless" than the Republicans, although I don't much hold with that. Then there was the Reform Party (or the "All Others" Party, as I called it) - true, Pat Buchanan took it over a few years ago, but that was such a hash to begin with, there wasn't much hope.

Someone once suggested (all right, it was me who suggested it) that what this country really needs is a genuine Christian Democratic party, similar to the ones that you used to see in Europe. Not just a tweaking of one of the existing parties, but an entirely new and radically different concept. One might think of it as a party that was socially conservative and economically moderate.

Is such a thing possible, you ask? Practically speaking - probably not. Third parties don't have a great history in this country. Besides, a lot of important forces would join together to prevent the formation of a Christian Democratic party. But if we begin to inform ourselves of the moral and spiritual dimensions of such a movement, we might find ourselves changing in our political outlook, and thereby influencing our friends and colleagues in different ways.

Where do we begin in looking for the foundation of this philosophy? Well, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we need to look at Catholic social teaching and the writing of great Catholics such as Chesterton and Belloc. In short, we need to talk about Distributism.

Which we will - in the next post in this series...