Holy Post Café

I saw and began reading a piece in the british Telegraph expecting the worst from its title, The Holy Post Café, but came away from the article feeling a bit differently.

This is the Holy Post Café. It's the first of that trinity of words that's the giveaway. This is not first and foremost a café or a post office. It's St Luke's church in the village of Kinoulton, in the Gainsborough lands between Nottingham and Melton Mowbray. The beaders are in the sanctuary, while the post office and cafe nestle behind the pews in which villagers sit and chat and pass the time of day.

I've come here with Dr Stuart Burgess, the Government's "rural advocate" and chairman of the Commission for Rural Communities, which once upon a time would have been called a quango. We meet in the Neville Arms down the road. With the leather sofas and contemporary dining furniture filling its small front bar, it's a Darwinian model of how the traditional village hubs of shop, pub and church are adapting, or dying.

Dr Burgess has been on something of a mission, since the closure of some 2,500 rural post offices was announced nearly two years ago, to establish alternative village postal services: "I've been travelling the country, cajoling." ("Encouraging," corrects his PR man). "Local businesses use rural post offices, but it's really the social dimension – they're critical for the elderly and a real focal point for communities."

The name of the Post Office's revival scheme, Outreach, isn't lost on Dr Burgess, a Methodist minister. "Outreach" is what churches call their efforts to minister to local communities. The target was to have 500 new Outreach post offices, ranging from mobile vans to services in alternative premises. That target has already been reached, with some 25 Outreach post offices either in churches or run by churches in local premises..More>>

Trevor of Sheffield

Thanks for Cat at Brits at Their Best for this gem: the Little Masters of Sheffield - making pocket-knives by hand.

Longman - Yeomanry Will Rise Again

Phillip Longman at Mercatornet writes on the comeback of yeomanry:

Today, there is a strong correlation around the world between adherence to traditional Christian, Islamic or Judaic religious values and high fertility. The result is an emerging world in which the ancient, patriarchal values of these religions are becoming stronger, while secularism suffers demographic decline.

The current world economic crisis will most likely compound the trend, for a variety of reasons. The widespread loss of jobs and retirement savings gives a survival advantage to those who still have abundant human capital upon which to rely, specifically, strong, largely self-sufficient families in tight-knit, high-trust, self-financing communities. Under currently unfolding conditions, the “fittest” are those who invest heavily and successfully in building up strong families and local community support networks.

Many people may try to contend with their financial and economic losses by forming secular communes. History suggests, however, that families and communities bound by common blood and religious faith are more likely to succeed in fostering the necessary sacrifice of individualism and consumerism.

These changes we are living through are very scary, but they also, I think, have the long-term promise of restoring the economic basis of the natural family and renewing society generally. Seeing more specifically how this future might unfold requires dwelling briefly on a few poorly remembered traditions from the past.

In a recent issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, I have published a brief article entitled The Return of Yeomanry. This word “yeomanry” is now obscure in English, and may be impossible to translate into many other languages. But particularly in America during the 18th and 19th century, it stood for a clear ideal of human organization, which was small-scale production centered on a self-sufficient family unit.

One of America’s most prominent founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote frequently the superior virtue of the country’s then substantial yeomanry, which mostly comprised family farmers who owned their own land and small family business owners. Jefferson’s vision of America’s future was that widespread family ownership of small scale productive would remain the dominant form of social and economic organization, and that the influence of both Big Business and Big Government would be held in check..More>>

For those of us convinced of the merits of subsidiarity - what Father Vincent McNabb, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc called "distributivism" - Longman's words bring hope.

Computers & 'Soft Despotism'

... the computer comes to represent an ideal, in light of which real thinking perversely begins to look deficient. Thus, when the postindustrial visionary reasons from the fact that complex systems involve "the interaction of too many variables for the mind to hold in correct order simultaneously" to the conclusion that "one has to use algorithms, rather than intuitive judgments, in making decisions," he argues from the fact that the mind does not do what a computer does to an assertion about the incompetence of the mind. This seems to express an irrational prejudice against people.

- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft [171]

Subsidiarity: A Primer

Brad Miner (The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man's Guide to Chivalry) writes,

Subsidiarity matters to me, and it's useful to recall this core principle of Catholic social teaching (and of American federalism), especially this week, as Benedict XVI releases his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), which is expected to address the subsidiarity principle in the context of the global financial crisis.

Here's what I wrote about it a decade ago in my book, The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia, sandwiched between entries on Strauss, Leo (1899-1973) and Sumner, William Graham (1840-1910):

subsidiarity: A term (the Latin subsidium for aid, help) from Roman Catholic social philosophy which expresses the view that, whenever practicable, decisions ought to be made by those most affected by the decisions. Put another way: the national government ought only to do what the states cannot; the states only what communities cannot; communities only what families cannot; families only what individuals cannot. This is not to suggest that Catholic social theory (especially as read in papal encyclicals) is always in favor of the minimalist state. John XXIII in Pacem in Terris (1963), while affirming the doctrine of subsidiarity, called for publicly funded health and unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, and government support for the arts. Still, it is clear that "a planned economy . . . violates the principle of subsidiarity . . ." (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1965). Read: R.J. Neuhaus, Doing Well and Doing Good (1992). "Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and endeavor can accomplish, so it is likewise unjust and a gravely harmful disturbance of right order to turn over to a greater society of higher rank functions and services which can be performed by lesser bodies on a lower plane." --Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931)

I might have mentioned that, although not derived from Catholic sources (the first formulation in an encyclical came in 1891 in Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, "Of New Things,"), subsidiarity forms the basis of our Tenth Amendment ("The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people") ...

Read more here.

Why I'm a Distributist (Subsidiarist)

(S)ubsidiarity, by virtue of its emphasis on devolving power away from concentration among the few (whether bureaucrats or businessmen), encourages the sort of competition and diversity that may well be both the greatest help to the poor and the best guarantor of economic stability, and it promotes the kinds of checks and balances that provide efficient, sensible regulation.

The Catechism states: “The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to all forms of collectivism. It sets limits for state intervention. It aims at harmonizing the relationships between individuals and societies. It tends toward the establishment of true international order.”

Timely truths.

Read all of Subsidiarty – A Primer.

Value of Work

Work (1852-65) - Ford Madox Brown

When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. "I was always tired," he writes, "and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all." He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. It's appropriate that it arrives in May, the month when college seniors commence real life. Skip Dr. Seuss, or a tie from Vineyard Vines, and give them a copy for graduation.

The graduates won't even skim Shop Class, of course. But maybe, five years from now, when they can't understand why their high-paying jobs at Micron Consulting seem pointless and enervating, Crawford's writing will show them a way forward. It's not an insult to say that Shop Class is the best self-help book that I've ever read. Almost all works in the genre skip the "self" part and jump straight to the "help." Crawford rightly asks whether today's cubicle dweller even has a respectable self. Many of us work in jobs with no discernible products or measurable results. We manage brands and implement initiatives, all the while basing our self-esteem on the opinions of others.

Compare that with the motorcycle mechanic. Instead of the vague threat of a performance review, the mechanic faces the tactile problem of a bike that won't start. He tests various theories and deploys actual tools. The sign of success is a roaring engine ...

Read all of Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Rogers - Be a Farmer

He’s not a Crunchy Con. HT: Taki's

Caldecott - Lessons from the Middle Ages

Meanwhile, Stratford Caldecott speaks to the topic dear to at least two Mass'keteers' hearts, (neo-)Distributism.

Present-day admirers of G.K. Chesterton (The Outline of Sanity) and E.F. Schumacher (Small is Beautiful) are sometimes accused of wanting to return to the Middle Ages, and can be easily mocked for wanting to do so with full access to modern medicine and laptops.

But neither Chesterton nor Schumacher were so naïve. They were calling for a particular kind of progress – towards a more human-centered, though still technologically sophisticated and creatively developing, society. They both realized that there are particular concepts and ideas that were prevalent in medieval Christendom that we might indeed learn from, precisely to make that progress possible. In fact great cultural movements are often brought about by importing ideas from the past into a new social context – the Renaissance is one example.

So what can we learn from the Middle Ages to get us out of our current global crisis?

As a sympathizer with Chesterton’s philosophy of “Distributism”, and with the recent attempt to revive it by the “progressive conservatives,” I can suggest at least three things in order to encourage further debate ...

Read all …

Postman - Technological Changes

Neil Postman via Daniel Mitsui: Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change here.

Dégenerations Redux

Paul Allen writing at First Things comments on a music video we posted here at the 4Ms some time ago. Rightly, Allen says,

Traditional life in Québec was rooted in the land, its rhythms, the adversities and joys it brings. It was a culture of gratitude. Contrast this cultural landscape with the arid, secular joylessness to which Quebeckers find themselves accustomed, a culture of anxious retirement planning without descendants to care for their parents. (The song refers to the REER, the Canadian equivalent of the American 401k,) It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Take Gilles Vigneault, the Quebec nationalists’ singer-songwriter idol who wrote the now famous unofficial Quebec “national” anthem called Gens du pays, People of the country. The refrain runs: “Gens du pays, c’est votre tour / De vous laisser parler d’amour.” (“People of the country, this is your turn / To let yourselves speak of love.”) Is Vigneault’s call to love the same as the call to joyful dance in “Dégenerations”?

Well, no. Love was killed by the 1960s, precisely as “Dégenerations” narrates. Love is reduced to libertinism—flight from an oppressive past straight into the oppression of a childless society. As for abortion, the members of the group reportedly felt obliged (under pressure, one wonders?) to foreswear any pro-life message in their lyrical lament. So, given the intolerance for any public, pro-life dissent, we are left to lament the inability of those singers to let their own lament be the dissent it really is. Confused? Apparently Mes Aïeux is too. Degeneration has that effect.

Read all of Translating “Dégenerations”: From Québec with Love.

Caldecott - The Truly Radical

Stratford Caldecott writes at Godspy,

Today’s real radicals are not socialists who believe in big government stepping in to control everything in their name. Nor are they capitalists who still believe that economic competition alone, unregulated, will work in the interest of the common good. The real radicals want to turn everything upside down and base it around the family and the local community – on cooperation rather than competition, with government merely protecting the conditions under which small community can flourish.

Read all of After the Disaster: Back to the Family and Localism.

Reno - Roots, Land, & Show of Hands

R. R. Reno (We Need Roots)nails it for this neo-Distributist (not to be confused with a Redistributist like Big O):

G.K. Chesterton was a sucker for romantic gestures. Lines of soldiers with swords crossed, flags rippling in the wind, cathedral bells tolling: These sorts of scenes moved him, as did visions of lovers pledging themselves to each other in the dusky darkness of a summer evening, monks prostrate on cold, stone, chapel floors as they take their vows, and the quiet, invincible resolution of solitary soldiers who face impossible odds. Life is better—richer, deeper, thicker—for our loyalties and loves.

I share this Chestertonian sensibility, which is why the new music from the English folk band, Show of Hands, gives me goose bumps.

Listen to the band’s bitter lament, “Country Life.” The accompanying video on YouTube features harsh black and white images that match the cutting lyrics.

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]