In our previous
posting on this subject, we completed a brief overview of the lost debate
between G.K. Chesterton and G.B Shaw.
Today we begin an equally brief summary of the last debate
between the two “metaphysical jesters,” as one commentator termed them. (William B. Furlong, GBS/GKC, Shaw and Chesterton: The Metaphysical Jesters. University Park, Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1970.)
And so our story begins. . . .
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| (Left to right) G.B. Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton |
Hilaire Belloc
mounted the dais, glowered at the crowd in the approved manner, and took his
seat. After some caustic remarks that
the uninitiated might have been tempted to regard as witty, or worse, humorous,
he commenced the evening’s festivities.
The event had been organized in support of the Distributist League founded
a short time before but already in serious financial difficulties. His opinion of the “cranks” who were drawn to
the organization and to the movement was too well known to leave anyone
familiar with the situation in doubt about his feelings. (A.N. Wilson, Hilaire Belloc. London:
Penguin Books, 1986, 343.)
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| Hilaire Belloc |
“They are about
to debate,” rumbled Old Thunder, referring to the disputants G.K. Chesterton
and G.B. Shaw. “You are about to
listen.” One can imagine Belloc breaking
off momentarily for what the audience might assume was a dramatic pause or
comic timing, but which really would have been a silent expression of disgust.
“I am about to
sneer.”
It was October
29, 1927, the final debate between Chesterton and Shaw. For two decades or more the pair had been
arguing the same point and had never managed to resolve the issue or even reach
a conclusion other than they could not reach a conclusion. Twenty years had gone by with Shaw stubbornly
refusing to acknowledge Chesterton’s principles, and Chesterton declining to
cater to Shaw’s lack of them.
Nothing was
resolved during the debate. Shaw
insisted that no one had the right to own land or anything else as private
property. This was on the grounds that
some owners abused their rights, using them to oppress others. Further, Shaw declared that Chesterton’s
allowed exceptions, such as his admission that in his opinion the coal mines as
a national resource should be state-owned, invalidated distributism’s general
prescription for broad-based private property.
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| G.K. Chesterton |
Chesterton
insisted with equal or greater vehemence that distributism is based on the fact
that everyone has a natural right to own and that abuse does not invalidate
use; the proper way to prevent owners from taking advantage of non-owners is to
turn everyone into owners. He then made
a profound statement that summed up — at least for him — what he called “the
Catholic standpoint”: “Mr.
Bernard Shaw proposes to distribute wealth. We
[the distributists] propose to distribute power.”
Shaw dealt with Chesterton’s
point by dismissing it: “My main activity as an economist of late has been to
try to concentrate the
attention of my party on the fact not only that they must distribute income, but that
there is nothing else to distribute.”
Chesterton’s declaration of
the ultimate purpose of distributism being to distribute power was rooted in an
exalted and sublime understanding of the human person. Distributist philosophy assumes that man is
destined for more than the animal existence Shaw’s focus on mere income
implied.
For Chesterton, the primary
importance of private property is not to sustain life or maintain a standard of
living — although enjoyment of the fruits is an important aspect of capital
ownership. Rather, private property in
capital is important because, as American statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852) observed, “Power naturally
and necessarily follows property.”
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| George Bernard Shaw |
Essential human dignity
demands that each human being have access to the means of acquiring and
developing virtue, that is, of becoming more fully human. Acquiring and developing virtue requires
power, and power ordinarily requires private property in capital.
Social Catholicism, the
social Gospel, however one expresses it, does not therefore consist of
reorienting religion away from God and to humanity, especially collective
humanity in any form. All that does is
institute what Fulton Sheen called “religion without God,” an inversion that
puts man at the center, and makes God the servant of man.
Rather, Catholic social
teaching is concerned with structuring the social order so as to provide the
proper environment within which people can acquire and develop virtue, thereby
fitting themselves for their proper end.
This in turn requires that every person have control over his or her own
life, and that means private property in capital.
Nor is this a new idea, nor
was distributism the first attempt to apply it or at least present it. From the earliest times it has been
recognized that what Aristotle called “the good life” — the life of virtue —
requires a level of capital self-sufficiency.
This is not merely to provide consumption power, but to secure the
economic basis to support social identity and life in the pólis, the organized community.
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| William Cobbett |
As far as Aristotle was
concerned, a non-owning worker, even though nominally a free citizen, was less
than a slave. A slave as an owned thing
had status as the possession of his owner.
A non-owning worker, dependent on wages for his subsistence, had no
status at all; he was a “masterless slave.” (Politics, 1260a36-1260b7)
As William Cobbett (1763-1835), the “Apostle of Distributism,” declared
centuries later,
Freedom is not an empty sound; it
is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, —
and it means nothing else, — the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property.
If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself
what you will, but you are a slave. (William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland
(1827), § 456.)
One of the more
astonishing things Jesus did during His earthly ministry was to treat the poor
and non-owners as fully human as everyone else — but not more so. That is the sense of the comment about a
camel being able to pass through the eye of a needle easier than a rich man can
enter the Kingdom of Heaven. In a
society that regarded earthly wealth as a sign of special favor from God, Jesus
was not saying that the rich are inferior to the poor, just that they are no
better.
Nor, according to
Jesus, is wealth to be despised, or there would be no merit in giving it up as
a counsel of perfection. Management and
ownership of wealth is, in fact, presented in the Gospels as a means of growing
in virtue.
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| Judea Has Talents! |
Nowhere is this
better illustrated than in the Parable of the Talents. (Matt. 25:14-30; Luke 19:12-27.)
It is a
straightforward story, although more understandable to Jesus’s listeners than
to modern readers. A rich man is
preparing for a journey and calls in three slaves. The thought occurs whether it is a coincidence
that many of the rich men in Jesus’s parables are obvious stand-ins for God.
Many modern
translations of the parable use “employee” or “servant,” but that changes the
point Jesus was making. The rich man
called in three slaves.
To the first
slave he hands over five talents, an enormous sum of money; a talent was six
thousand drachma, and one drachma was a day’s pay. To the second he hands over two talents, and
to the third, one talent. When he
returns, he rewards the first two who doubled the money by means of prudent
investments by giving them the money and freedom and punishes the third who
buried it in the ground.
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| Good and faithful slaves got money and freedom |
On the surface
the story as a story makes no sense to modern readers until they learn that it
was not uncommon in the ancient world for a master to select favored slaves and
prepare them for manumission, especially if it could be done profitably. Giving intelligent and entrepreneurial slaves
management of a sum of money or capital — it was called a peculium — gave them the opportunity to prove to their master that
they were ready for freedom. (See John
A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome, 90
B.C.-A.D. 212. Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press, 1967, 188-189, 241.)
Those who did not even try to take advantage of such an opportunity were
obviously worthless slaves and unfit to “share their master’s joy” as freedmen
and partners.
The religious
point of the story, of course, is that people should use the gifts God gave
them to benefit themselves and others and prove themselves worthy to enter the
Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus gave a familiar
example to illustrate the point and drive it home to His listeners — free men
own and manage private property to the benefit of everyone, while slaves do
nothing even for themselves with what they are given.
Slaves are, in
fact, not considered human — and Chesterton was concerned with giving modern
wage and welfare slaves the wherewithal to become capital owners and lift
themselves out of servitude. As we will
see in the next posting on this subject, society was becoming increasingly
inhuman as well as inhumane. The problem
was what to do about it.
#30#
