In the posting of Monday of this week, we mentioned that how
we meet our duties to our fellow man is irrelevant as long as the means is
ethical and we get the job done. In
yesterday’s posting (Tuesday’s, if you’re keeping track), we noted that there
is a slight variation on that which ends up being its exact opposite: the means
is irrelevant as long as we get what we want.
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| Copyright free distributist image. |
What brought this forcibly to mind was reading one of G. K.
Chesterton’s later essays from a rather obscure collection, Avowals and Denials (1934). We picked up this volume, a first edition, by
the way, a little over a year ago.
Suggesting just how well known it is, the price (including shipping from
England) was less than $10. It was in
near-perfect condition.
Since the volume contained material as fully quotable as
Chesterton’s earlier writings, the only reason we can come up with to account
for its sinking into near oblivion is that, possibly, it makes latter day
Chestertonians and neo-distributists a trifle . . . uneasy. Uncomfortable, perhaps.
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| The Original Deep, Fat Friar |
After all, a significant amount of what Chesterton wrote
after 1933 and his publication of his sketch of Aquinas (Saint Thomas Aquinas: The “Dumb Ox”) could be taken as warnings to
his own disciples and followers to ease up on the sanctimonious arrogance and
exhibit a trifle more common sense and fidelity to truth.
This possibility was suggested by a couple of lines in the
essay, “On Facing Facts” (Avowals and
Denials: A Book of Essays. London:
Methuen & Co., 1934, 182-188). One
of the facts that Chesterton believed people should face was that it is
impossible to live in the future or even in the present, only the past, for
it’s really the only thing we actually know anything about:
“[N]obody
knows anything about any living thing in the future, except what he chooses to
make up, by his own imagination, out of what he regrets in the past or what he
desires in the present.” (p. 182.)
Chesterton then commented that one of the problems with
Englishmen of the 1930s was that they really weren’t all that aware of the past
they were living in. They tended to
hearken back to times about which they knew very little, and ignored the
immediate past that had formed the present: “The most dangerous gap in general
knowledge is the gap in the minds of most men about what happened to their own
fathers. They often know rather more
about what happened to their grandfathers, and much more about what happened to
their great-grandfathers.” (p. 183.)
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| Happy, carefree peasants |
This sounds a great deal like the modern distributist
movement, which seeks to return to a Medieval Never-Never Land of happy,
carefree peasants, small artisans, and shopkeepers, with most people (who have
no idea how, or even which part of Bossie to yank to get a drink) living on
three acres and a cow. We tend to hear a
great deal about how terrific the Guilds were, how the Church took care of
people, how liberty isn’t all that essential, democracy has failed, the Black
Death was just a wonderful thing . . . .
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| Fifteen minutes of flame |
Okay, maybe not the Plague, but those Jews and Muslims sure
knew their places, and nobody had ever even heard of a Protestant. Just heretics, and, boy, we sure knew how to
handle them back then, didn’t we!
Or not. Quite often
the neo-distributist fantasies to which we are treated not only reject the
present and the immediate past, but have very little to do with what actually
went on during the Middle Ages that they find so attractive. Until they need an operation and there’s no
anesthesia.
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| Jakob Fugger, Commercial Banker |
Somehow today’s Professional Chestertonians and
neo-distributists draw a veil over Chesterton’s (qualified) acceptance of
modern technology — if it was broadly owned by means of what sounds very like
Louis Kelso’s Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Surprisingly, given their obsession with the
distant past, they also ignore the fact that the Middle Ages saw the first
Industrial Revolution and significant advances in financial technologies, such
as the “reinvention” of commercial banking.
This freed economic growth from the slavery of past savings and made
possible the rapid advances that characterized western society from the 15th
century on.
This has meant that Chesterton’s followers, then and now,
seem to have given in to the temptation to take what they find pleasant and
attractive as well as personally expedient from anything Chesterton said, and
ignore the uncomfortable rest — even if the truth of “the rest” is
evident. Consequently, they also reject
anything from outside their chosen frame of reference or that contradicts or
differs from the carefully selected, or even invented “facts” with which they
support their position.