Babies and Distributism

"Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilization, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilization. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world."

— G.K. Chesterton - The Well and the Shallows/Babies and Distributism
tip to Dawn at The Dawn Patrol

Meek Living - Realistic?

Blackberry Gathering (1912) - Elizabeth Forbes

A COMMON THREAD among some 20th century Catholics was a desire for a simpler life, dictated in part by liturgy, in part by the rhythm of the day, in part by one's locale and auspices of the land. Tolkien lauded this all his adult life through "the Shire" and its inhabitants, hobbits. Thomas Merton went to his hermitage. Dom Bede Griffiths to his ashram. The Distributists to the teachings of the Church and "subsidiarity". E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful. (Even James Hilton in his Lost Horizon. Though he wasn't Catholic, we won't hold that against him.)

Is it, do you think, too great a promise by Our Lord that "the meek shall inherit the land" [Mt 5,5]?

Zmirak on Distributism

John Zmirak on Distributism and other "Third Ways."

Financial Advice - Buy a Farm

A billionaire and influential financial adviser gives some good Distributist advice: Barton Biggs has some offbeat advice for the rich: Insure yourself against war and disaster by buying a remote farm or ranch and stocking it with ``seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.''

Would that we could all do what The Yeoman Farmer has going up in Michigan, eh?

Pirates of Distributism

I recently watched "Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End," and was surprised to witness a paean to Distributism. The Nine Pirate Lords are the last hold-outs against the "East India Trading Company" which is on the verge of taking control of the Seven Seas through use of the British Navy and the sin-sated Davy Jones.

Cutler Beckett -- a scum CEO-type who will make and break any deal under the pretence of "It's just good business" -- seems to have absolute control, even over supernatural forces, which he uses to his greed and power lusts. Small ownership, whether human, mythological, nautical, or supernatural, all cave to the overwhelming conglomerate.

But if this amounts to a kind of watery Distributism against the state of servility to Big Business, an undercurrent (sorry) exists too: what C. S. Lewis called (in That Hideous Strength) the Normal. Decency, civility, a recognition of fair-play, loyalty, and even the Golden Rule are known, again as per C. S. Lewis (in The Abolition of Man), when one is done unto. Lewis said that all persons have the Golden Rule embedded on their hearts. We may not practice "treating others the way we want to be treated," but all of us know when we have been ill-used, as shown in the pirates' repeated phrase, "Not fair!"

To top it off, the film gives probably the funniest depiction of purgatorial suffering shown on the silver screen, which Johhny Depp pulls off hilariously as Captain Jack Sparrow in Davy Jones' Locker.

All in all -- thumb up. Enjoy.

Distributism

This is a video with excerpts about the economical theory of Distributism. This thought was based on the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII, initiated by English thinkers and propelled universally by writers G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.

For more information:

The ChesterBelloc Mandate

The Distributist Review

The Distributist League

I seek to understand distributism - it does not come easy to me. Can one really grasp it if one is deep within the bowels of Capitalism?

STORE WARS [ht: M. Shea]

A Catholic Vision for Farm and Town

From the National Catholic Reporter:
"It’s not well known that Catholics have been way ahead of Willie Nelson or Wendell Berry when it comes to a populist, environmental vision for rural America.

“ 'Environmental history intersects with American religious history in the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, with its distinctly Catholic-American environmental vision,' University of Notre Dame scholars Christopher Hamlin and John McGreevy wrote last year, adding that the conference has been completely missing from the environmental history and overlooked in the religious history.

"Consistently over its history, the conference has expressed and worked on behalf of a vision of religious, cultural, social, ethical and environmental values, all seen as part of one web of life.

"From inventing new kinds of Catholic rural communities during the Depression to countering the predations of the agri-industrial complex in recent years, the conference has served rural Catholics.

"Headquarters is a barn-red, two-story ranch house on the outskirts of Des Moines about a mile from where Interstates 35 and 80 intersect to form a crossroads of the nation.

"Its location in the upper Midwest is no accident, as it was born into and much influenced by the German-Catholic heritage of that area, which included a strong agrarian vision. Input from figures like liturgical reformer Benedictine Fr. Virgil Michel shaped the conference in its early years.

"Easily one of the most remarkable conference figures was Msgr. Luigi Ligutti, director during the 1950s, who was nicknamed the pope’s county agent.' ”

Read further …

Catholic Social Teaching, Economics, and

The Common Good

From a superb essay in the Boston Review by Lew Daly:

The common good commands objective change in the balance of economic power. It is not a unifying force but one that divides right from wrong by a unifying standard. It is a faith with poor friends and wealthy enemies. To deny responsibility for the common good, asking “Am I my brother’s keeper?,” is the same thing as murder, the Bible teaches. In medieval Christianity, “ordering what is personal to what is common” is the beginning of justice, and the tyrant, simply, is one who destroys the common good for private gain. For Roosevelt, it was necessary to wage a “struggle for the liberty of the community rather than the liberty of the individual.” Martin Luther King Jr. described a “single garment of destiny,” by which “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Freedom came not from autonomy or anarchy but from one’s membership and birthright in the “beloved community.”

Within the last 30 years, the struggle between the common good and competing principles of property right and economic efficiency was enjoined again, by a resurgent ruling class. While they cannot succeed in returning to the good old days of laissez-faire constitutionalism, they have succeeded in stalling and, in some respects, rolling back the legislative progress secured in the 1930s.

Catholic teaching recognized the evil that arose from releasing individuals from the moral law. In the background to the New Deal, its whole thrust was to replenish that moral law in binding force against destructive economic power. Father Ryan inscribed this in our public history when he dedicated the new building of the Department of Labor in 1935, beseeching public authorities to fulfill their solemn obligation to the common good, so that God’s justice will “dominate and permeate all the relations of industry and labor.” In King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the moral evil of segregation aborted the same natural law. It was aborted again as the spirit of Lochner was reborn in the Reagan-Bush era. Ryan and King and the millions they helped had little doubt of what was at stake. Has abandoning their faith profited justice in the decades since?

ChesterBelloc Mandate - Distributism 102

The ChesterBelloc Mandate is an online archive of distributist materials. This site was created for the novice or the researcher interested in the subject, whether sympathetic or not. By the by, Bertrand Russell coined the conjoined names of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc -- "ChesterBelloc" -- to refer to the united front these two great friends presented to an obstinate and faithless world of modernity and atheism. (We could use them today; Gilbert and Hilaire, pray for us.)

One may want to begin here for a definition of Distributism.

Dégénération

by Mes Aïeux (in Québécois French, with English subtitles)
[Tip: Andrew Cusack]

Why Shop @ a Farmers' Market

The Good Earth

Tomatoes from the summer of '06. This is Lady Porthos' work, not mine, but I've got to bolster up my Agrarian creds to curry favor with Ath.

An additional Distributist contribution. (It's Eva, and not Zsa Zsa as previously reported in the comment boxes.)

Memorial Day +

Anamnesis - Remember Who You Are
Brothers Aramis and Porthos know my fondness for Distributist ideas and ideals. But on this Memorial Day in the United States, and elsewhere around the world, it is easy to forget the connection between our agrarian heritage -- our biblical mandate of good stewardship of the Earth and every person's closeness to the need to grow food, whether we recognize it or not.

We laud the work of such farmers as the Yeoman Farmer, whose blog provides a well needed wonderful dose of wisdom, faith, and reality. (Go and read!)

But this Memorial Day, may I humbly implore you to carve a scant fifteen minutes from your (all too) busy schedule to watch this video by Matthew Kraus.

Make it part of your devotional time today. It may change your life.