Distributism

Because it came up in the Chesterton comments, I bring this forward from June 2011. I was going to make some of these points in the comments, but see that I was smarter ten years ago.

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Distributism – You can catch wikipedia here. A more informal, modern take here.

All I had remembered about Distributism is that it had been championed by Chesterton, and its slogan was “three acres and a cow.” I hadn’t even gotten that right, actually, as I had misremembered it in an American fashion, “forty acres and a cow.” It was an individualist twist on the marxist idea of workers owning the means of production, in that individual workers would own their means of production, not The Workers as a group. Which is certainly an improvement, as The Workers always turns out to be a front for New Bosses. Hillaire Belloc was also a proponent (no surprise), and much of Catholic social action of the 30’s, including the Antigonish Movement, was influenced by the idea. My grandfather left Nova Scotia before the Antigonish Movement, and I don’t know if any siblings or other relatives he left behind were participants. But he moved to Massachusetts, and after some grim times and false starts, moved to Westford and eked out a living the rest of his days on…three acres and a flock of chickens. He usually needed another job as well, beyond selling eggs and strawberries. It’s an important addition to the discussion, as it was to Carl’s income.

Nestled in Chesterton’s thought was the belief that not only could a man support a family if he were given such means of production, but that a certain type of historical Englishness would be preserved. “Three acres and a cow” were not the only possible means of production distributism might provide, but the example was meaningfully chosen. He desired a return to bucolic England. So did Tolkien, if his Shire is any indication. There is certainly some element of unhealthy fantasy here – not the elves and magic-imbued artifacts, but the memory of England as it never was, only as it seemed to a child’s eyes. That the fantasy was sustained by continuing examples of charming smallholders even in their adult experience can be attributed to convenient data selection – confirmation bias.

It’s easy to see how the idea arose. Small farmers rented from large landowners, often hereditary, and often contributing nothing of obvious value to society. An observer might well think “if these farmers owned that land and didn’t have to support this ridiculous aristocracy, they could do much better.” By the late 19th C this was already under correction and breaking down, but that might have not been easy to see while living through it. Changes in the law made aristocrats less and less eligible for those rents, and they had to resort to other means of support. Investments was one, and the financiers and money-movers were reaping that reward. Perhaps this is what galled Chesterton and contributed to his early antisemitism – that the money was finally being redistributed, but not in a way that would preserve his myth of Merrie England. Someone else had cut in line, somehow.

Imagine if such a system had come in. It has a certain attractiveness to it, that an impoverished person in Detroit might be able to make a claim on the government and say “give me three acres and a cow further upstate” as a way of getting a leg up. Except you likely couldn’t live on that. A young man I have known since his childhood has forty acres, is very intelligent, works very hard, and is supporting only himself. He still needs outside work to get by. So this original distributism might allow one to subsist – which is historically accurate for preindustrial England but not what Chesterton was envisioning. If we had gone that route, we would be a poor nation. Americans in many cases actually do own their means of production now – a computer and a cell phone being the most obvious examples.

In the debate about job creation a similar, though updated myth has come in. The 1950’s of our imagination, where a man could go to work at a good union manufacturing job and make his way in the world is the same sort of fantasy: not only a type of job, but a type of life that should still be available, dammit! What’s wrong with America that we can’t do this anymore? Well first, we never did. The poverty rate was almost 25% for the 1950’s. My uncle whines about this all the time, and he’s not the only one, dreaming of a world that never was of manufacturing jobs dominating, not in any era. Second, even for those who had it, it is a life that people wouldn’t go back to. How do we know? Because even when it was still available, people got out of it unless they were in the most favored of manufacturing situations. When I was in school, no one waxed eloquent about the great joys of manufacturing jobs – they were referred to as soul-deadening assembly-line, or shoe factory, or electronic assembling employment. It was no more the great nostalgic time of American greatness than Chesterton’s bucolic fantasies were in his day. As Garrison Keillor wisely pointed out. “We think of those as simpler times, because we were children, and our needs were looked after by others.”

But third, and most important, even if we could, we can’t. We may think it a tragedy that manufacturing has gone elsewhere, or think it a great blessing, but either way, that world is not in any possible future. We may be pessimists who believe that 50% of us will be unemployed in 2040 or optimists who believe a technology-supported, human value-added economy is going to be the great liberator, but either way the change is coming.

Chesterton on Festivals

The Christmas That Is Coming.

There is no more dangerous or disgusting habit than that of celebrating Christmas before it comes, as I am doing in this article.  It is the very essence of a festival that it breaks upon one brilliantly and abruptly, that at one moment the great day is not and the next moment the great day is.  Up to a certain specific instant you are feeling ordinary and sad; for it is only Wednesday.  At the next moment your heart leaps up and your body and soul dance together like lovers; for in one burst and blaze it has become Thursday. I am assuming (of course) that you are a worshipper of Thor, and that you celebrate his day once a week, possibly with human sacrifice.  If, on the other hand, you are a modern Christian Englishman, you hail (of course) with the explosion of gaiety the appearance of the English Sunday.  But I say that whatever the day is that is to you so festive or symbolic, it is essential that there should be a quite clear black line between it and the time going before.  And all the old wholesome customs in connection with Christmas were to the effect that one should not touch or see or know or speak of something before the actual coming of Christmas Day.  Thus, for instance, children were never given their presents until the actual coming of the appointed hour.  The presents were kept tied up in brown paper parcels, out of which an arm of a doll or the leg of a donkey sometimes accidentally stuck.  I wish this principle were adopted in respect to modern Christmas ceremonies and publications.  Especially it ought to be observed in connection with what are called the Christmas numbers of magazines.  The editors of the magazines bring out their Christmas numbers so long before the time that the reader is more likely to be still lamenting for the turkey of last year than to have seriously settled down to an anticipation of the turkey which is to come.  Christmas numbers of magazines ought to be tied up in brown paper and kept until Christmas Day.  On consideration, I should favour the editors being tied up in brown paper.  Whether the arm or the leg of an editor should ever be allowed to protrude I leave to individual choice.
GK Chesterton The Spirit of Christmas

Written almost a century ago, the essay illustrates the early versions o some troubles we see in our own day.

We were up near the lunatic fringe of Christmas celebration.  Though entirely aware of the acquisitive, faux spiritual, and maudlin dangers of Christmas, we were determined to overcome these by sheer effort.  The Wyman eccentricity was distilled at Christmas.  Even in our current, more relaxed approach, we are still oddly intense about it.

We decorated our tree later than anyone we knew, but not quite the Old World custom of parents decorating it Christmas Eve to be revealed Christmas morning.  We thought about it, but we also had a fanatic tradition of family and holidays, and so traveled to all three sets of parents on the Day itself.  I won't detail our other charming lunacies, but simply mention that we created new and personal advent traditions, carol traditions, food traditions, read-aloud traditions, decorating traditions, hospitality traditions - what else...  Who knows?  you couldn't move to another room or say a complete sentence out loud with bumping up against some Wyman-only Christmas custom.

Tracy once taught an adult Sunday School class on Unplug The Christmas Machine.  Highly recommended, BTW.  But we didn't study and discuss it in order to reduce the energy put into the holiday, but to refine it and focus it.  We had traditions about pruning traditions.

Rob Bell - Part I

It may be all parts, not just Part I.  But just in case.

I was tempted to call the post Sniveling Sells to make fun of his book title Love Wins.  But that would not only be childish of me, it would not be accurate.  The book is at least better than that, in general.  It has moments of sniveling, and I do not think they are unfortunate stylistic accidents that a good editor could have removed, but central to Bell's style.  He is clearly young, full of himself, and not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.

He is nonetheless still more right than wrong in what he is trying to accomplish, and irritating as he is, he deserves attention.  First, the preface is excellent.  It is not flawless, but it bears a message to evangelicals that they need to hear, and it is done with kindness, and earnestness, and even a fair bit of wisdom.  If you can get ahold of the preface and nothing else, I suggest you read it and contemplate it.  My guess is that your contemplation of the legitimate issues he brings up will be more valuable than what he writes.

I think that the garden must be weeded before we can judge how this crop is doing.

Bell's style of rapid-fire questions is not merely stylistically irritating.  It reveals an unfairness, even akin to dishonesty, in his entire approach.  He does not merely question, imitating Jesus's return questions to his critics, as Bell claims.  These are different questions, not at all like Jesus's.  We have seen this before, and I have mentioned it in a post about Chesterton last year, A Note of Interrogation. Or, you may pick up the thread of this by reading Bell, not from the perspective of a like-minded accuser trying to get general evangelical authorities to listen, but from the POV of a person who is hearing the questions and attempting to answer them.  Very quickly one understands: Oh, I get it, it's not just impatience that prevents you from waiting around for attempts at an answer.  It's that you don;t want answers.  You want to tell me answers.  Got it.  I get the impression, and perhaps it is an unfair leap on my part, that from the perspective of  Mars Hill, some people get to ask questions and others don't. 


Nor is it just a device in the first chapter to set out all his questions at once.  He's still doing it by page 103.  These are not bad questions.  In fact, nearly all of them are excellent questions.  They are just not being honestly asked to elicit discussion.

Second, two psychological bits that most readers are going to miss, but need to be pointed out by the few of us who have the necessary experience (not much wisdom needed) to notice.  Bell uses an image in the preface of black letters on a page, while he and others read into the "white space."  As if that is a good thing.  It sounds like a clever image, whose only flaw might be being too clever by half.  But "reading the white space" has a very specific, and not very complimentary, meaning in the Rorschach.  It refers to a person being unnecessarily oppositional, often in a showy way.  It is one of the most accurate bits of interpretation in that much-maligned projective test.  When the psychologist tells you "He saw four pictures in the white space, three different cards," diagnoses of personality disorder begin to float into the conversation as possibilities. One, maybe, but it better be pretty offhand.  It's not a good thing.  I'm not suggesting personality disorder, much less diagnosing it, in Bell.  I am noting that he is showing one symptom.

Also in the psychological sphere is his early quote of Renee - I intentionally do not mention her last name -  who has written a book, and in it are accusations that her father sexually abused her while reciting the Lord's Prayer, and such like.  Bell clearly takes this at face value in part of his accusation of evangelicals.

How does one put this nicely?  People with Borderline Personality Disorder sometimes make accusations that are poetically true, but not literally true.  Taken that way, there are indeed evangelical children who have had their perpetrator's Christianity as an inseparable part of their victimization.  I looked up the woman's name, went to her website and read extensively of her story, and found much to like about her.  I don't doubt she experienced horrible abuse, and has done well building some kind of reasonable life out of the broken pieces.  But her romance with victimhood, and how it still rules her and gives her a club of self-righteousness to bring to her social and political beliefs, remains obvious.  It's very typical.  Setting oneself up as a defender of the oppressed is a pretty good response to one's own history of oppression.  Except you can then never see the victim as having any part in their fate, nor the "system" that oppresses them as being any sort of a balance or compromise between goods.

Why then, would I object at all?  Isn't it true enough?  (See how my questions can be sly and unfair?)  Because it's a lie, and I have seen people ruined by accusations from people with that diagnosis, who will admit when in therapy that they aren't really sure what the reality of their past is and what people mean now, and that's part of their problem, yet are still quick to accuse.  I say this as one who counts well-recovered individuals of this type as among my favorite patients, most admired people, and even sometimes friends, as much as we can allow that in this business.

It was an unlikely accusation, wouldn't you have thought?  If you were going to use it to prove your own point, wouldn't you have wondered, just for a moment, whether you should perhaps make some effort to find out if it's actually, uh, true?

Of course not.  You need the victim to be a victim.  Case closed.  So by page 7 I am not only irritated by Bell's style, but I don't trust his judgement and honesty.

And yet.  And yet there is still much in this book that is wise.  It deserves to be noted that the criticisms of Bell have often been less Biblical, and display less ability to listen, than Bell does himself.  I wish someone else had written the book.

Chesterton

The Anchoress has a selection of Chesterton quotes. I was surprised to see the link at Instapundit, actually.

A Sample:

2) When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid, hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the nose.
- Illustrated London News, 1905

24) I have a notion that the real advice I could give to a young journalist is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and one for the Church Times and put them in the wrong envelopes…what is really the matter with almost every paper is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper.
– Autobiography.

Anti-Semitism

I was distressed to find two or three running paragraphs of prejudice against Jews in GK Chesterton's short story "Dukes," written in 1909. It was standard Jew-pedlars and pawnbrokers, moneygrubbing, no-true-gentleman sort of thing, common among the educated classes of England in that time, but it still caught me by surprise.

The Wikipedia article references the debate, and Chesterton's opinions on "The Jewish Question" of the day. He was anti-capitalist (as well as anti-socialist) and saw the Jews of Europe as the spearhead of this. He thought their culture separate from European Christendom and that they should have a homeland in Palestine. He was an immediate opponent of Hitler and National Socialism. Jewish groups were later clear that he was "not an enemy."

But still. It was pretty rank. One hopes that had he lived in another time he might not have adopted opposition he did. Yet one also hopes that Christians show more ability to rise above the evils of their era better than other folks.

Two Quick Updates. I am definitely going to post something on Distributism - not its history, but how some similar thoughts are playing out today.

Second, my life has been gradually invaded by knitters. My DIL first, but then kitten, hbd chick, and now BtEG. What is this knitting hegemony which occurs unannounced? Is the apocalypse held at bay by skeins of yarn?

Chesterton Through The Eyes of Borges

My wife rescued Daylight and Nightmare, a collection of Chesterton's stories and fables, from a library booksale. I tend to read prefaces*, yet often regret it. This time it was worth it. The collector dedictes the volume to Jorge Luis Borges, whose Ficciones I read and loved in college. I had not known that Borges was a very great fan of Chesterton, and could quote long sections from memory. It seemed strange to me for but an instant, as their significant compatibilities overwhelm the very different categories they are assigned to in the modern mind. As many of you may not be familiar with both, Borges was considered much among the moderns: friends with Sartre, influenced by Schopenhauer and an influence on Eco; assigned in college lit classes, drawn to the weird and disquieting, fond of twists and inversions on time and infinity - "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Infinite Library." Chesterton is regarded as entirely a creature of the Old World, read mostly by traditional Catholics and a few other Christians today, but little regarded in the academy.

Others who have commented some on the Borges- Chesterton connection, if you're interested. Nick Milne and Out of the Woods Now (twice).

Yet GKC also gravitated to much of the strange, or perhaps uncanny would be a better word. The description of Sunday, and indeed the entire unsettling, even frightening world of The Man Who Was Thursday, even in the mystery genre with its full measure of murder and gore, readers find unnerving even now, a hundred years later. Borges notes:

Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, & blind, & central....

We don't always think of him that way - we think of Father Brown, or of his biography of the gentle St. Francis. Yet once mentioned, it is noticeable everywhere in his work, and one wonders how it had escaped notice.



Borges suggested we read all works as if the were written by some radically different author to see them more clearly - to pretend in the mind that "Hamlet" had been written by James Joyce. I could barely refrain from pretending the short pieces were written by Borges, or imagining one Ficciones "An Approach to Al-Mutasim" as a work by GKC. It was surprisingly easy. "Approach" is about a book review on a book which does not exist. The review prompts it to come into being. Very Chesterton. So also, Chesterton's "The Taming of the Nightmare," starts with the comic and keeps returning to it, yet rapidly falls away into eeriness after each rise.

Little Jack Horner sat in a corner - so far the traditional surroundings of the nursery hero correspond with those in which we find him for the purposes of the story, but there being no Christmas pie in the neighborhood, he was unable to give vent to the joyful, if somewhat egotistical, sentiment which is recorded of him elsewhere.

Jack is almost immediately accosted by goblin-wind and brought to the borders of an unknown land with "a low, lonely wall, beside which there was a dillapidated notice board, looking the other way, stating that trespassers would be prosecuted, by order of somebody, no one knew quite who." The first creature he meets beyond the wall is a mooncalf who recites verse initially comic:

The Calf was the Mooncalf, The Cow was the Moon,
She died from effects of a popular tune...

until we find that the calf does indeed believe the moon is his mother, and sings to her constantly, with round eyes and singleness of purpose night upon night, though the moon takes no notice.

It is something of a reverse of the effect of Monty Python, in their Quest For The Holy Grail movie. There every scene begins nobly, seriously, at times even frighteningly, yet quickly deteriorates (or elevates) into comedy. In Chesterton, homely streets turn sinister in a few blocks, with the buildings remaining normal but the sky becoming crooked. Queer characters sit next to unsuspecting diners at cafes and tell them stories that end inconclusively.

The style of writing is old now, and fables aren't told that way anymore. The inklings were much influenced by GKC, and the last echoes of the style appears in their works, perhaps. Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham comes near it; the initial description of the gray city in Lewis's Great Divorce has a Chesterton feel. The eerier, or more mythic modern fantasies, from Ursula LeGuin or Scott Donaldson, have something of the flavor.

*Preface, foreward, introductories - anyone know what the distinction is?

Chesterton On Hard Thinking

Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

The full context is in Chapter VIII of Orthodoxy. One of his central contentions is that the truisms of our age - he wrote a century ago, but the philosophical climate of the intellectuals then is similar to the popular climate now - are in fact untrue. That are not inaccurate because they are oversimplified cliches, but because they are backward, the reverse of the truth. We hide our thoughts behind ill-defined words, so that we can pretend what we say is kind, brave, and open-minded, when we are really mean of spirit and make excuses for tyrants.

Also, he kicks Shaw, which always makes me happy.

On Cue

My uncle from NoCal started grumbling about a year ago - as if it were some carefully considered opinion that independent deep thinkers had been developing over the years and were offering as a potential Narrative For Our Age - that perhaps the American presidency was just too complicated for any one person to really manage well. I suspect they are imagining how this will begin to work it's way into American Government textbooks as a thought-provoking question at the end of the chapter. Write it yourself.

It's the perfect topic of discussion for a dilettante like me. (Thank you, spell-check. Double consonants are my downfall.) You can spin some theory on the basis of broad but vague knowledge - a management article you read three months ago, a few cliches about the Roman Empire, some quotes from Roosevelt, some statistics on the GDP and the size of the federal government compared to Fortune 500 companies, plus a few personal anecdotes from your own career, and heck, you can go on for 30 minutes straight on that topic. Piece o' cake.

So the momentum builds slowly over the year, and I am hearing it more and more: "Maybe the presidency is just too much for any one person. There's just so much to do."

Really? Governing is hard? It takes some skill? Maybe even some...experience? Nah, that couldn't be it. It's just too much for even a brilliant person to do.

Set-up. There are two groups of liberals that fall outside the beard-stroking-deep-thought-of-the-month category. There are essentially moderate people who think that some liberal ideas are quite good but temper that with some distance, some influence from other gravitational fields, such as their upbringing or their jobs, that keep them from being fully captured in the current liberal fashion orbit. And, there are folks of genuinely curious disposition, who may have absorbed a lot of liberal assumptions along the way but are always looking for new angles and interpretations (so long as they don't originate from any of the despised groups). I exempt both groups from the following generalisations, only giving the caution that if you believe you are in one of these exempt groups, what makes you so sure? They're small.

NPR is a mixed bag here. They bring in some expert commentators who just might fall into the second exempt group. Not anyone completely off the reservation, of course, but people who like hanging out at the edge of the liberal circle, gazing out onto the other 80% of the population for novel understandings or examining the driftwood that washes up on liberal shores. OTOH, NPR puts many of the inner circle thinkers on display - folks who have no clue that they don't represent 90% of the smart people, and have no awareness of any driftwood.

On to today. My father-in-law always saves his magazines for us, and we saw him for Thanksgiving and took some home. Right on cue, just after the election, as even liberals are beginning to get the idea that Obama has basically accomplished one thing, health insurance reform, and that's falling apart - Newsweek has a cover with Obama as Shiva, the Indian deity with many arms, holding money, a globe, a military helicopter, a house, with the tag line "Is The Modern Presidency Too Much For Any One Person To Handle?"

It is not so much the question itself. It's rather an interesting question actually. It's the utter predictability of the question being raised now. I haven't checked the Hillary sites, but they must be spitting mad at this point. The incurious liberals, the ones who go into journalism and popular books, and the people who read them with the idea that they are being exposed to the great questions of the age, are utterly predictable. Far more than fundamentalists (who are a pretty ununified group perpetually arguing with each other about ever-smaller points, actually), they are a people told what to believe and they believe it. The trick is that it's artful and indirect, giving them the illusion that they are coming up with these great new discussion topics, rather than the preacher's overt declarations. The new spin comes with humor, and cleverness, posed as a question* or sold as a fashion.

So, you'll be catching a lot of this wise opinion over the next year or two, not on the Sunday morning shows where it's not catchy enough, but in thoughtsy interviews on NPR, or dropped into editorials, or mentioned in response to any suggestion that Obama isn't really getting a lot accomplished. Golly, there's just so much a president has to keep track of, and we stupid citizens expect him to do it all. Those corporate interests are just so powerful, and there are just so many of us now, and we're an advanced industrial nation with all sorts of new technologies. Maybe we need a new constitution, too.

*I wrote about the dishonesty of the "note of interrogation" last March, in the context of a Chesterton essay on pacifists asking near the end of WWI, when victory was finally in sight "Can we win?"