Yesterday we
declared we were more than a little baffled when attempting to define “social
credit” briefly and accurately. Today we
are going to see if anybody else has done any better — confining ourselves to
experts who seem to have a bit more credibility than we do. Not that we necessarily agree with these
experts, but others might. We’re only
trying to dig down and uncover the truth in a way ordinary people can
understand.
Unfortunately, the
first thing we note is that even the experts appear to prefer talking about
social credit instead of defining it. We’re
still left in the dark about what the Wikipedia entry on Major Douglas gave as
the two essential mechanisms of social credit 1) the national dividend, and 2)
the just price.
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| Major C.H. Douglas |
This might be due
to the fact that social crediters (spelled that way, evidently, to distinguish crediters who get the cash from creditors who pay it) put a great deal
of weight on the claim that social credit is advertised as “practical
Christianity.” This, of course, rings
alarm bells loud and clear. It implies
that social credit is based on faith instead of reason (and if you’ve been
reading this blog regularly you know where we stand on that), and makes it automatically second rate by giving it a
crutch, by which one infers that social credit cannot stand on its own merits.
Now, another
problem with describing social credit as “practical Christianity” is that we
can’t find any evidence that Major Douglas ever made that claim. That’s not to say he didn’t, but you cannot
logically prove a negative, i.e., you
cannot prove the existence of non-existence.
We don’t know that Major Douglas
did or did not say it.
That being the
case, and the presumption in both civil and canon law is “innocent until proven
guilty” (i.e., you are required to
assume that someone did not do something until and unless you are presented
with actual proof that he or she did do it, for good or ill), we assume Major
Douglas did not make that claim, and will continue to do so until someone shows
us that he did. The statement does not
appear in any form in either Economic
Democracy (1920) or Social Credit
(1924), Douglas’s first two books, nor do any of the articles and books we’ve
reviewed cite a specific source.
This creates
another problem. Some people who support
Douglas’s theory have linked the program to Catholic social teaching (See, e.g., Anthony Cooney, Distributism, London: Third Way
Publications (ND).). Books, pamphlets and articles abound that present social
credit as a “Catholic” economic system.
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| "The Church has no models to present." |
But what does the
Catholic Church say about this? After
all, the Catholic Church is more of an expert on what the Catholic Church
teaches than social crediters seeking endorsements. Fortunately, Pope Saint John Paul II was
pretty clear in § 43 of Centesimus Annus:
The Church has no
models to present; models that are real and truly effective can only arise
within the framework of different historical situations, through the efforts of
all those who responsibly confront concrete problems in all their social,
economic, political and cultural aspects, as these interact with one another.
For such a task the Church offers
her social teaching as an indispensable
and ideal orientation, a teaching which, as already mentioned, recognizes
the positive value of the market and of enterprise, but which at the same time
points out that these need to be oriented towards the common good. This
teaching also recognizes the legitimacy of workers’ efforts to obtain full
respect for their dignity and to gain broader areas of participation in the
life of industrial enterprises so that, while cooperating with others and under
the direction of others, they can in a certain sense “work for themselves”
through the exercise of their intelligence and freedom.
The most that
could be said, then, is that social credit is consistent with Catholic social teaching, not that it is a Catholic
or Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim, or pagan) system . . . if it is, in fact,
consistent. . . .
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| C.S. Lewis: Social credit a fad that fell suddenly. |
A few people seem
to think otherwise, such as Anglican apologist C.S. Lewis and Catholic
controversialist Hilaire Belloc. We
found only a rather equivocal and confusing reference to Chesterton’s views on
social credit, in a letter the poet Ezra Pound wrote to the economist Irving
Fisher in 1935: “[Chesterton] finds nothing to contradict in as much social
credit as I advocate,” which is about as clear as some of Pound’s poetry. (Quoted in Dennis R. Klinck, “Chesterton and
Social Credit,” The Chesterton Review. Volume
3, Issue 1, Fall-Winter 1976-77, 31.)
Although the evidence is more than a little shaky, Dr. Klinck builds
this hearsay into a Chestertonian endorsement of social credit.
C. S. Lewis used
the “Douglas scheme” as an example of a fad that fell “even more suddenly” than
most. (C. S. Lewis, “The Decline of
Religion,” The Grand Miracle. New York: Ballantine Books, 1983, 135.) Hilaire Belloc, whose distributism has
suffered almost as much as social credit at the hands of misguided enthusiasts,
thought that Douglas missed the point of restructuring the social order by
focusing on income rather than ownership.
(Hilaire Belloc, An Essay on the
Restoration of Property. New York:
Sheed and Ward, 1936, 9.)
So we still don’t
know what social credit is, exactly, except that — as far as Pound, Lewis, and
Belloc are concerned, 1) Chesterton could not find anything in social credit as
Pound advocated it to contradict Pound’s understanding of social credit, 2)
social credit is a fad, and 3) it focuses on income rather than on the
ownership that is the focus of distributism.
That’s really not much to go on, so we’ll take a break on this subject
until Monday (or maybe Tuesday), and have something a little more interesting tomorrow.
#30#
