Save the Children
Modern Americans are going to live forever. We must believe that; otherwise we would not rise up in spontaneous outrage whenever a stuck accelerator causes a car to crash or a surgical procedure goes awry. Science and technology have made our world not only foolproof but death-proof, or at least they would have, were it not for unscrupulous manufacturers and diabolical white males who roam the world seeking the ruin of bodies. Every natural disaster, human error, or manifestation of Original Sin is an occasion not just for an exercise in national breast-beating but for some piece of sweeping legislation that will eliminate risk or eradicate evil.
We are especially prone to legislative hysteria when children are involved. If a child chokes to death on a hot dog, the pediatricians of America want wieners to be classified as lethal weapons, and if a crackhead mother on welfare finally kills the baby she has been tormenting for months, we do not blame crack dealers or welfare or the degraded morality of urban African-Americans. No, we pass laws that strip normal parents of their traditional rights, beef up the budgets of child-protection agencies, and demand parenting classes for all prospective fathers and mothers—anything, in other words, except to confront the real issue, which is the nightmare we have created by paying people not to work and by pretending that all people in every culture are basically the same. If anything is to be banned in America, it should be the liberals who have destroyed so many lives with the stupid programs that enrich worthless drones in counseling and sociology at the expense of everyone else—and that was before the passage of President Obama’s healthcare bill.
For people allergic to leftist sentimentality, these past few months have been difficult. When the newsreaders were not chattering about the hot dog’s threat to world peace or touting the glories of socialized medicine, they were showing their viewers pictures of earthquake victims in Haiti and Chile, polio victims in Africa, the violence Michael Jackson’s children are being exposed to, or (and this is my favorite) the humanitarian award the United Nations has given “Shakira”—a Colombian pop star, apparently, who has some strange aversion to being fully clad. At the awards ceremony in Switzerland, she was described as a “true ambassador for children and young people, for quality education and social justice.” When some years ago I coined the phrase “pornography of compassion,” I did not realize how literally correct I was.
The child-savers have been afflicting the world at least since the beginning of the 20th century, when a conspiracy of WASP do-gooders with time on their hands succeeded in getting legislation passed to “protect” children—largely immigrant children—from parents who put them to work, neglected their education, inflicted corporal punishment, or refused to imbue them with the gospel of Horatio Alger and Carrie Nation. In reading hundreds of pages of the bilge written by these people, including Rockford College’s own Jane Addams, I almost never ran across an acknowledgment of the harsh reality that even substandard parents will probably take better care of their children than the most high-minded altruist who wants to rear other people’s children.
Even the madman Rousseau believed that an educated father makes a better teacher than the best of tutors, because the father cares more about his children than someone who gets paid to teach them. This is far more true today, when the only possible justification for public education is that it is guaranteed to stunt the mental growth of children and corrupt their character. Years ago, I knew a Jehovah’s Witness who had left high school to join the Navy. He was not exactly stupid, but about as ignorant as a man can be who only knows what he reads in the papers or sees on the network news. He and his equally ignorant wife decided, on moral grounds, that they had to homeschool their child, and after two years of this doomed experiment, their kid, whom nature had programmed to be decidedly below average, was two years above the national average on reading and mathematics.
Any normal couple will do a better job rearing their children than someone who is paid to take on this wearisome task. I am not speaking now of sex offenders, sadists, and drug addicts, only of the carefree and sometimes slipshod methods of the poor Irish, Italian, and Polish families who entered the United States a hundred years ago or the Mexicans who are currently overwhelming our welfare and criminal-justice systems. To take an extreme example, do we really know that children will grow up into better human beings if they are taken away from a mud hut in Somalia and reared in an upper-middle-class suburb of Los Angeles? Sir Peter Bauer once sagely observed that the premise of humanitarian aid is that people in rich countries are happier than people in poor countries. If that were so, then why are so many Americans so manifestly unhappy? Why is there so much depression and suicide here? Why do so many affluent women addle their brains with mood-altering poisons?
The answer I usually receive is that people in poor countries are so busy scratching out a living that they don’t have the time or energy to be depressed. Well, chalk up a point for poverty and hard work. If we cut off all aid to the indolent poor in this country, the gangbangers would either starve or pick up a shovel. “Root, hog, or die” is a true expression that works on many levels.
When we begin to worry about things like education and the “quality of life,” we have already fallen into the sentimentalist trap. Listen to this egregious nonsense from the Save the Children Foundation:
Our mission is to create lasting, positive change in the lives of children in need in the U.S. and around the world.
Our priorities are to ensure that children in need grow up protected and safe, educated, healthy and well-nourished, and able to thrive in economically secure households.
I suppose the boldface letters tell us that they really really care about education, nourishment, and economic security.
What this sort of thinking leads to was on display recently when a group of Southern Baptists were caught smuggling children out of Haiti. Whether or not the parents received any money, whether or not the child-savers really had an orphanage, whether or not they were acting even before the earthquake is of little interest to me. What is interesting is the moral arrogance of the Americans who assume, first, that the kids will be better off in a society that is committed to destroying whatever human norms may still exist even in Haiti; and second, that it is their right to impose Third World children with who knows what sort of native abilities and disabilities ultimately on the people of the United States.
Oh, but Haiti is such a poor and violent country. Don’t we have a duty to rescue Haitian children? But why is Haiti such a poor country and America so rich? Could it possibly be that it is because America is populated by Americans and Haiti by Haitians?
Not if you believe the other kind of leftists, capitalist libertarians like Douglas Casey, who recently opined that if Haiti were given the same dose of free-market economics that Friedman and his boys injected into Chile, Haiti could be another Hong Kong—as if anyone in his right mind could ever want to live in Hong Kong. Obviously, hard work and free enterprise are good things, but if 200 years of Haitian independence has only produced an immense violent slum run by witch doctors, it is just a little naive to expect that a mechanical fix will create an economic and moral paradise. It would be nice to have just one example in which such remedies have worked with people who were neither European nor Asian.
I have been no closer to Haiti than the pages of Graham Greene’s The Comedians, which is too close for my comfort, but I have no reason to doubt that if left to their own devices they might find leaders and institutions with which they could make a better life for themselves. It might not be the life I want, but, then, I do not know that other people actually want any part of my life or our life.
Human happiness is not a one-size-fits-all garment, and it is xenophobic to suppose that it is. This is what liberal philosophers are so fond of gabbling about—that the purpose of a liberal state is to make it possible for individuals to pursue their own life plans. Why does it always turn out that it has to be the life plan drawn up by a liberal philosopher, whether a leftist like Professor Rawls or a quondam libertarian like Professor Nozick? Why can’t they just mind their own business and leave other people to mind theirs?
If we can once realize that it is best to leave Haiti and Somalia alone, then we might begin to understand that we should also leave other people’s families alone. What is the alternative? If government officials and social workers have to tell parents when and where and how their children go to school, what sort of food they eat and TV they watch, what sort of sex education they receive, then not only those lawmakers and social workers but also the voters who give them power have to assume complete responsibility for the outcomes.
We have to quit letting them—and ourselves—off the hook with the comforting language of unintended consequences. If I were to fire off a few rounds into a daycare center, I might have had no intention of killing any particular child, but when a child is dead, I am held responsible. But when government programs ruin the lives of millions of children, no one, it seems, is to be held accountable. It is American governments and their employees, the voters who put the legislators in office and the taxpayers who pay the bills—it is we, in other words, who are responsible.
This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
Entries(RSS)
"Not if you believe the other kind of leftists, capitalist libertarians like Douglas Casey, who recently opined that if Haiti were given the same dose of free-market economics that Friedman and his boys injected into Chile.."
Yeah that's nutty stuff. I had a debate with a boring modal a few months ago over Haiti, and he insisted that there was nothing that the free market couldnt fix in Haiti. But I said to him; the market there already seems pretty free and yet people are still sitting in the mud and begging for food from the blue helmets. Then he got into an angle that foreigners were exploiting Haitians for some nefarious purposes. My only reply was that there is nothing in Haiti to exploit.
You've made me re-think my own use of libertarian for myself. The majority of them are egalitarian fools and utopians. Now I am calling myself a reactionary with free market sympathies.
Yes, I think it is vitally important to make these distinctions. One can believe that the free market is the most efficient means and most often the most just means of exchanging and distributing goods and wealth without adhering to the ultra-thin philosophy of libertarianism, just as one can believe in the free market without being a capitalist, i.e., a shill for vast corporate interests that try to acquire a monopoly on wealth and property, on the one hand, and state institutions on the other. There is no such thing as a perfect society, but one can make improvements by going back and forth, balancing between, on the one hand, the principles of charity and justice, and, on the other, market efficiency. If one then throws in a third principle--subsidiarity or federalism--then one can simultaneously advocate market freedoms and limited government, while defying both collectivists and libertarians. Of course, this means we must morally walk, chew gum, and bounce a ball at the same time. But that is what ideologies prevent us from doing.
Most of it is quite thin, but I think Rothbard's 'anarcho-capitalism' is interesting in only in that I've never been able to answer the question as to what will come after social-democracy. Will we revert to a limited government confederation? A 1984 totalitarian state? Will tribal protection groups like Clan Maxwell and Clan Fleming establish themselves in America? Something better? Something worse? These are questions that I think should be looked at.
In #2 Dr. Fleming has stated the case for and limitations of free markets perfectly.
At a Catholic church, I mentioned the quake in Haiti as one of the challenges of a moral explanation of the world. Everyone started excitedly discussing how the quake had a silver lining, in that We were going to rebuild Haiti to be better than ever. I thought, but didn't say, "You mean, like we did 100 years ago?" It didn't seem to do anything then, so why would it now?
PS: You can blame America for Shakira. She used to be a talented and fully dressed singer of frivolous but enjoyable Spanish-language latin-pop. Then the Americans noticed her, and the rest is history. Maybe wealth and status aren't the most important things in the world, but don't ever say that in polite company.
#3 "Will we revert to a limited government confederation? A 1984 totalitarian state? Will tribal protection groups like Clan Maxwell and Clan Fleming establish themselves in America? Something better? Something worse?"
This debate was held in English politics a hundred years ago. I think we will probably follow their demise as we suffer from all the same symptoms. The debate was always limited to "capitalists, i.e., a shill for vast corporate interests that try to acquire a monopoly on wealth and property, on the one hand, and state institutions on the other." The bed sores of vast immigration from the edges of empire, the loss of freedoms at home while desperately exporting "freedoms" abroad, the loss of the common culture, the emphasis on the future, the loss of conviction in and understanding of Old Europe and Faith, all these trends seem to predict a similar course for our own children and children's children.
L. Brent Bozell wrote a nice liitle essay back in July of 1970 , The Confessional Tribe, that was prescient in what has happened to orthodox Christians who have survived the deluge of the last 100 years.
An interesting and predictable outcome of meddlesome leftist programs, which mirror psychotherapy, clinical psychology, therapy, grief counseling, Twelve-step "recovery" programs, etc., is to make whatever the problem is worse and unending. Leftist programs and do-goodism must be particularly galling to African Americans since they presuppose the latter's inferiority. As for Shakira, whoever she is, the question is who's making the money off using her as a circus monkey. I'd also like to thank Dr. Fleming for setting me straight on libertarianism and von Mises.
Excellent piece!
I agree with most of Dr. Fleming's points here. Especially about leaving nations alone to sort out their own problems. He is also right about leaving families to solve their own problems with the help of their neighbors, if they need it. Police interference should only be a last resort. My uncle was a policeman for many years. He tried to avoid aresting people if at all possible. The old beat cop was a peacekeeper in the neighborhood who didn't want to run up a huge arest record. Today police haven't got a lot of discretion. Dr Flamings comments. I franky thought, had a somewhat libertarian ring about it. They want limited government and non intervention, as well. Of course the family is the building block of society. Is there any wonder why we are in the hole we in right now?
Dr. Fleming,
It is strange that we have turned the exception into the rule. Aristotle, before logic was turned into symbols, noticed that the truth is revealed through what generally occurs and not what always occurs. There are special circumstances when young children should be removed to safer surroundings than their own parents are providing --usually with relatives or close kin. But generally speaking, two parents are -- surprise, surprise -- the best environment for rearing children. But just as Christian charity has been divorced from Christ, in favor of secular social work, children have been divorced from parental obligations to the "mutual compatability" of their parents. If there is no redemption in human suffering, no purpose or reward outside the "self " who is suffering, then life becomes miserable and the miserable become quitters and cowards. As you know, one mark of the courageous man is his ablility to endure for the sake of the good. Parents more than anyone else possess the innate understanding of what is good about their children, while the state( which means foster parents paid by tax payers) might be dutiful but are usually blind as night bats as to what is lovely and true about the foster kids in their care.
Ditto that this was an excellent piece. I have said for many years that there are two types of legislation that will almost always get passed regardless of their stupidity: laws that claim to be for national defense (or "homeland security") and laws that claim to "protect children." I could never quite understand why a country that claims it is a constitutional right to kill unborn children in their mothers' wombs is all that concerned about "protecting" children.
As a follow up, as a child I: rode a bike without a helmet; rode in cars with no seat belts; rode in the bed of my uncle's pickup truck (and stood up to get the wind in my face); got up into the barn loft (filled with hay and straw) and lit firecrackers to drop onto the toy soldiers below; chewed my grandfather's tobacco; took target practice (by myself) with my father's 22 rifle and a tin can;played "civil war" in elementary school (we got on someone's back and ran at each other like a joust, trying to knock the "rider" to the ground); etc, etc. I am sure many Chronicles readers can add to that litany. I am horrified to now see what a barbaric time I grew up in.
"chewed my grandfather’s tobacco"
You vain man, Mr. Flinn, why did you leave out the getting sick after the first try part?
#13, Robert:
WHAT??? I never got sick!! I just became very colorful in the face.
In any case, I thank you for the good post that recalled so many of my own childhood memories. I lived near a river so it was an adventure to swim in it from time to time during the summer, although it was never encouraged or allowed by adult neighbors or parents. Only with fellow adventurers and never alone!!!
We used to swim in the stagnant lakes down here in Florida all the time. But once every 10 years or so some kid gets an amoeba up his nose and dies so now it's a no-no.
"But once every 10 years or so some kid gets an amoeba up his nose and dies so now it’s a no-no."
Bruce,
Yea,it's getting to the point that a guy can never die. I remember attending funerals with black vestments, the priest administering extreme unction in the home, special pale candles next to his coffin a day or so later, The Dies Irae at the Requiem Mass, etc.. Today it is all about living forever, celebrating life and enjoying the resurrection before suffering and death or even the last four things. Long eulogies full of lies about make believe people, White Vestments, new annoitings in hospitals by lay women, The Mass of Resurection... etc. I had an old professor who always said it might be possible to live in the new order, but not to die in it. Evidently the way folks pray really does effect what they believe. Instead of fearing God, our kids we have been reduced to fearing the amoeba.
Thanks to Dr. Fleming and all the comments in this article's response.
As a God fearing Christian when one sees the picture of the "Great
Bean" in Millennium Park does it reflect the superficiality this
country would like to embrace? The "education" imposed on children
and the thought that a father and mother must have some "social
cotton wrapping" about them and their children in order to have
"successful" children for the future is enough to make previous
generations tempted to tear their hair out of their heads. I have
been able to still maintain some of my own.
Glad to read about those who continue to keep on keeping on and are
charitable to their neighbors.
But what about?:
"the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church, prepared during the papacy of Pope John Paul II. The section entitled 'The Social Doctrine of the Church' contains a paragraph explaining that these teachings developed in the 19th century as a result of the Gospel’s encounter with the new industrial society that revolutionized relations between man and man, man and the state, and man and nature. The section 'Justice and Solidarity Among Nations' might similarly have explained that the Church’s teachings on international relations developed as a result of the Gospel’s encounter with the institutions and mechanisms of liberal internationalism, which they accept and appear to take for granted. Thus, Paragraph 2439 states that 'Rich nations have a grave moral responsibility toward those which are unable to ensure the means of their development by themselves or have been prevented from doing so by tragic historical events.' According to Paragraph 2440, 'It is also necessary to reform international economic and financial institutions so that they will better promote equitable relationships with less advanced countries'".
From whom are you quoting?
The recent catechism is quite muddled in many sections. Its very length and affectation of deep erudition in fact reveals an intention to lead the unwary astray. Catechisms, as I understand them, are educational textbooks that reflect the intentions and biases of the anonymous committee that draws them up. There is a way in which this material can be presented so as to minimize the distortion, for example, to confront the obvious reality that industrialization wrought great damage on the fabric of European and North American society, but there are so many misunderstandings and errors, it is hardly worth the effort. Let me list a few:
First, while industrialization did grave damage, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the sufferings of the poor were greater than in earlier periods of stress, such as the Black Death, Mongol invasions, or the collapse of the Empire. Pope Gregory the Great spent his own and the church's resources to relieve the poor, and neither he nor any of the greatest popes ever suggested that it was the ruler's responsibility to create a welfare state.
Second, this interpretation completely ignores the principle of subsidiarity, which can be traced back at least to St. Thomas but is entirely consistent with the federalist structure of the Church (independent dioceses, semi-autonomous parishes, etc.) If there is a government responsibility for welfare, then it should be discharged by the appropriate authorities at the lowest possible level.
Third, this naive Marxism completely ignores how destructive welfare programs have been to the social institution that the Church has always celebrated as fundamental to society and whose image has been given by the first family and by the Holy Family.
Finally, it is the people who cause the misery who should be forced to pay, not ordinary men and women. Some industrialists like Robert Owen and Henry Ford accepted some of this responsibility. In a Christian society, no one would be a product manufactured by sweatshops or by children.
Once death has removed the last of the rotten bishops and pseudo-theologians who draw up such propaganda, we can return to the older teachings of the Church, including the social encyclicals that are so misrepresented today by Catholic leftists who give the wweak-minded readers of Mr. Woods (there I go again, picking on the disabled) an excuse for accepting the Misesian heresy.
MR. Van Zant,
I think your questions are all very good. Perhaps some day on another thread we could read Freedom and Virtue which is a collection of essays with Libertarians on one side and Traditionalists on the other. I would enjoy reading this along with folks like yourself, Tom Fleming, Clyde Wilson, Chilton Williamson and Chronicle bloggers. It is a very old and timely argument. At least as old as Rerum Nevarum of Leo XIII and Populorum Progressio of Paul VI. Actually I think it is as old as "greed" and "plenty" but in any case, it would be a good discussion to have these days.
Here is one writers take on this subject.
"What do conservatives and libertarians have in common? They both oppose socialism, the destruction of property rights, and the growth of the welfare state. What separates them? Nearly everything else. While the two sides of the American Right have serious differences, they aren't often spelled out. Usually so much time is spent in joint efforts to unseat the Left that political novices often confuse them. Good thing this revised edition to Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate (The Intercollegiate Studies Institute) is now available. It brings together top names from both sides: Russell Kirk, L. Brent Bozell Sr., Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver, Murray Rothbard, and John Hospers.
Dr. Fleming,
"We have to quit letting them—and ourselves—off the hook with the comforting language of unintended consequences. If I were to fire off a few rounds into a daycare center, I might have had no intention of killing any particular child, but when a child is dead, I am held responsible. But when government programs ruin the lives of millions of children, no one, it seems, is to be held accountable. It is American governments and their employees, the voters who put the legislators in office and the taxpayers who pay the bills—it is we, in other words, who are responsible."
I would disagree that it is "we" who are responsible. American leaders in government and their employees, academia, the military services and all who endorse the politically correct programs they press upon normal Americans -- they are responsible. The leadership of these institutions are responsible.
I do not believe it will be possible to change anything that is going on now unless we change the leadership of America. We certainly must not let them "off the hook."
It took "them" a long time to work their way into the institutions that run the American system. It will take us a long time to work our way into the system.
Thanks to your fine work and the excellent work of all the editors at Chronicles, the first steps are being taken. Thank you for another excellent and thought provoking piece.
Cheers,
Mr. Breisch, I obviously do not mean literally you and me but the so-called democratic majority who vote these people into office. The problem with the argument that the people are good but our leaders are bad is that we have to assume that the people have no idea of what they are doing and thus are morally not responsible for their political actions.
An interesting case of political and ethical irresponsibility is presented by single-issue voters, who may be willing to vote for pro-life or pro-gun candidates who are also socialists. I hope I shall not be misinterpreted when I say that voting out the socialists is far more important than voting out the abortionists. Abortion has been with us from ancient times; the Medieval Church could not eliminate it and we shall not ever be able to restrict it, short of a spiritual and moral revolution. It hardly matters what a candidate says about abortion, because he is not going to do anything. A socialist candidate, by contrast, intends to diminish what responsibility we have within our families and is bent on doing more evil. Suppose Ron Paul were, as he used to be, neutral on abortion and Obama said he was pro-life. Which would you rather have as President?
At the pool during that time, a Certain Man had compassion on a
man lying beside its edge. Some people in the industrial, technological and information ages would still have much to
learn from that certain communion.
For some, social justice along with a social doctrine, sociological
science, is just that.
Suppose Pat Buchanan was from the diminishing culture of life and Obama from the growing culture of death. Suppose further you need a speaker for upcoming commencement ceremonies at a Christian Institution or National Republican Party Convention. Who would the current leaders of American culture choose?
To Mr Flinn, Robert and Bruce:
One time, after a lot of rain, when the creek behind the house was really high and the current extremely swift, I and a couple of other kids got in and rode the current several miles downstream to my grandparents' place, then followed the bank back up. Never mind the danger. It's not dangerous if you dont fight the current and if you find the right place to get out, where the water is shallow. Never mind bumping in to things either. If you stay relaxed and limber, you'll just float past them.
If my parents had caught us, I'd been dead, but it was very fun and a great learning experience.
Little adventures like that make young men resourceful and better able to deal with the world. That's what they need, not a totally risk-free youth.
Allen, there's a lot of things I'm glad they didn't catch us doing! Like shooting each other with BB guns and bottle rockets. We were preparing for the Russian invasion. If they'd invaded we'd have been right there ready to shoot their eyes out!!
When my boys go out, I'm much more worried about them seeing vile pop-culture trash in someone else's home than I am about them getting injured.
"Once death has removed the last of the rotten bishops and pseudo-theologians who draw up such propaganda, we can return to the older teachings of the Church, including the social encyclicals that are so misrepresented today by Catholic leftists who give the wweak-minded readers of Mr. Woods (there I go again, picking on the disabled) an excuse for accepting the Misesian heresy."
You've said before Dr Fleming, thats it perfectly acceptable to accept the economic theory of Austrians as long as we ignore their other philosophical ponderings. But the problem isnt limited to the Catholic left. Even on the Catholic right, traditionalists present us with the same false choice that the leftists do - that you have to despise all aspects of the free market to be a Catholic. Even they go way out in left field to promote their socialism in disguise (notably, mainly only American traditionalists) - distributism, and even going as far as to promote the work of 'Catholic' feminist, ecumenist, and communist Dorothy Day.
I would make this distinction. While Catholic leftists adopt false Marxian ethics and politics, and Misesians adopt false libertarian ethics and politics, most Catholic traaditionalists are guilty only of misapplying basically sound principles and/or expressing them in Marxian language. What little I know of Dorothy Day suggests that while she certainly got carried away, she started from a reasonably sound foundation. Distributism is not socialism in disguise, but a recognition that a sound social life rests on property-holding independent families. Many of their positions were close to those of the decidedly anti-socialist southern agrarians. I do not say that either agrarians or distributists had the right answers, but they did possess the right ethical and cultural vision, whereas Marxists and Misesians have an essentially degraded vision, even when it is upheld by admirable people (Rothbard) and serious minds (Gordon, Hoppe, Raico, and others).
A good series of articles over at one 'trad' website showed the history of the distributist movement, where they are able to show that at the height of its popularity in the 1910s it was interchangeably used with socialism, and that Belloc and co were admirers of the French Revolution. It seems to differ in one key aspect to the agrarians, and that is a kind of property egalitarianism. The agrarians never discussed an entire society wide property redistribution; just the preference of an agrarian, family-oriented, rural society (which I agree with).
"I do not say that either agrarians or distributists had the right answers, but they did possess the right ethical and cultural vision"
Tom Fleming
Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand. It is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.
- Wendell Berry
"Even on the Catholic right, traditionalists present us with the same false choice that the leftists do .... (notably, mainly only American traditionalists) – distributism." Dan Maxwell
On Palm Sunday a year ago, the Englishman, A.N Wilson, reported that he “heard the Gospel being chanted,” and could assent to it “with complete simplicity.” Sometime in the past five years, he went from writing a book about a failed messianic prophet to believing that Jesus had risen from the dead.
The question “why?” He described listening to Bach or reading the works of Christian authors and realizing that their “perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than [his] own.” seeing the world through the eyes of faith is “much more interesting” he said, than the alternatives.
Then there was the low esteem in which Darwinism holds man. The people who insist that we are “simply anthropoid apes” can’t account for something as basic as language. The “existence of language,” love and music, to name but a few, convinced Wilson that we are “spiritual beings.” For Wilson, they prove that “the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true.”
Then there’s what he regards the “an even stronger argument”: “the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives.” From “Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged” to the person next to you at church, Christians bear witness to the truth of Christianity and that as a “working blueprint for life” and “template against which to measure experience, it fits.”
A.N Wilson is a British writer (no giant thinker) and (Ah!shucks!!) Anglican who is also sympathetic to those Mostly American???-- (You gotta be kidding me, Dan) traditionalists.
@ Robert,
I meant that it is mainly Americans traditionalists that (now) promote distributism, such as the American mouthpiece of the SSPX, Angelus. The UK SSPX published a couple scathing critiques of the movement. I've rarely heard it mentioned by continental European traditionalists.
It was a confused period, somewhat like the 1930's. Classical liberalism had clearly failed and would be eliminated by the war. People who had a medieval vision of a just and ordered society were drawn toward, for example, William Morris, a really admirable man and writer in so many ways but who had fallen under the spell of socialism. Remember, this was before socialism had triumphed in any country. Belloc tended toward extremism, always, and his very misguided view of the FR stems partly from French chauvinism (thus hostility towards the English critique) and partly from the opinion that defenders of revolutionary capitalism were the great opponents of the Revolution. Remember that Burke was basically sound on economic reality. Belloc and Chesterton were quite right in their critique of monopoly capitalism and their dislike of that class, but neither had a clue as to what to do. Fr. McNabb, the most utopian and the most pragmatic, saw the way out in the formation of religious communities, but these had nothing to do with state-imposed socialism. Reading Chesterton for his economic prescriptions would be like reading Mises for his prose style or Rothbard for his parody song lyrics. The importance of the distributists lies in their literature, their historical vision, their commitment to Christendom. Yes, I know some very fine men who are self-described distributists whose views verge on voluntarist socialism, but while I part company with their economic nostrums, I still admire their many virtues.
Look at it this way. We all become hostages to the enemies we have declared. For example, NR conservatives, in hating communism, ended up supporting the stupidities of the capitalists and the evils of the imperialists. Kirk tried to shy away from these issues and opposed imperialism, but he could not ever quite break out of the prison of anti-communism. This happens to all of us, but we almost never realize what has happened to us. The best we can attempt is to seek the truth, regardless of movement, and take the best from the best. I am grateful to the classical liberals for their defense of economic freedom and their opposition to collectivism, but I am even more indebted to the agrarians and distributists for their valiant struggle to preserve the mind of the Christian west.
@32 Daniel,
These ntions were taught by their founder but never understood by Americans. I know a little about him and his vision and my take is that only traditional Frenchmen (and a very few old American agrarian sympathisers knew what he was speaking about) when he said,
"And I wish that, in these troubled times, in this degenerate urban atmosphere in which we are living, that you return to the land whenever possible. The land is healthy, the land teaches one to know God, the land draws one to God, it calms temperaments, characters, and encourages the children to work.
And if it is necessary, yes, you yourselves will make the school for your children! If the schools should corrupt your children, what are you going to do? Deliver them to the corrupters? To those who teach these abominable sexual practices in schools? To the so-called "Catholic" schools run by religious men and women, where they simply teach sin? In reality, that is what they are teaching to the children, they corrupt them from their tenderest youth! Are you to put up with that? It is inconceivable! Rather that your children be poor, rather that they be removed from this apparent science that the world possesses, but that they be good children, Christian children, Catholic children, children who love to pray and who love to work, children who love the earth which the good God has made.
Finally, a crusade as well for the heads of the family. You who are head of your household, you have a grave responsibility in your countries. You do not have the right to let your country be invaded by socialism and communism! You do not have the right, or else you are no longer Catholic! That is not mere politics, that is to wage a good campaign, a campaign such as waged the saints, such as waged the Popes who opposed Attila, such as waged St. Remi who converted Clovis, such as waged Joan of Arc who saved France."
But I don't think all this is appropriate to discuss on this thread. Maybe some other time.
Thomas Flinn #12. I did most of those things too and never got in trouble. (I shot ants with a BB gun as well as cans with my dad's .22 caliber rifle.) But in junior high I did get hauled into the very formidable vice-principal's office for blowing up tiny bombs during school hours. You take a BB, put one of those toy-gun caps next to it face outward, and wrap aluminum foil around it, with a comet-like tail so that it infallibly lands squarely on the cap and "blows up" when you throw it onto the concrete. When the vice-principal demanded an accounting of my behavior, I merely said very shamefacedly that I learned it from my brother, who was still in elementary school.
Dr. Fleming, @19 I quoted from Chilton Williamson's "Earthly Purposes," posted elsewhere on this site. Some accused him of Pope bashing. I was trying to be ironic.
At a scout campout we were told (by some woman/nag) that our boys couldn't let their marshmallows catch on fire because a boy somewhere had his eye put out by one. Save the children from flaming marshmallows!!
Since they have marshmallows AND hotdogs at campouts I'm amazed the children survive!!
Mr. Van Zant,
I hope you can distinguish between the accusation of brushing with trends and the more debased habit of Pope Bashing. I think I indicated that Mr. Williamson, in my opinion was one of the better Catholic writers still practicing the trade. It was not Bill Buckley who invented the trend with Mater,Si Magister,No or Michael Novak and his Catholic Ethic and Spirit of Catholicism, or George Wiegel and his shoddy crtique of the last encyclical. The english writer,Mr Belloc, noticed it during his talks at Fordham University in the last century. It is a habit of our culture. I have read Mr. Williamson since 1979 and have nothing but respect and high regard for everything he writes and proposes. I indicated that I thought one poster was a tad hard on him by wondering about his Faith. The late Brent Bozell wrote a good article back in 1967 on the apparent fixation of Americans equating the church's encouragement of giving a penny to a beggar with some form of Catholic socialism in his article" Leo and Paul, A Private Conversation." I would be interested on your thoughts on that article if we ever get the chance to discuss it. Please accept my apology if I inadvertenly accused you or Mr. Williamson of "Pope bashing" instead of the more venial sin of aiding and abetting the enemy.
Well robert II, you can accuse me of aiding and abetting the enemy, along with Mr. Williamson, but I do not believe either of us is guilty of the charge. I just happen to believe that I have no obligation, moral or otherwise, to aid anyone who I do not know because I simply do not have the resources to do so. Our country, which can only provide aid by taxing citizens who also have no obligation to aid the rest of the world, and borrowing money, should stop doing so (along with a lot of other things it should not be doing). You may not have noticed, but our "representatives" continue to drive up the national debt such that almost none of us can afford to pay our share of it. As a result, only two things can happen, both of which are immoral: future generations that had no say in taking on the debt will have to pay it or the debt will be repudiated thus cheating those who funded the debt of their money. Now, I would also argue that those who are funding the debt should know better and stop, but if they continue, they share some of the guilt and probably deserve what they are likely to get.
Fair Enough. I can't disagree with you there. We have spent a trillion in Afghanistan and more in Iraq, and about the only western figure with a voice left to oppose that type of aid was the Holy See. Don't know the figures on helping other nations trim their populations with "American reproductive technology" but I know alot of Transnational Corp., who also want the Bush tax breaks, think, in the words of Bill Clinton and Obama, "we can do better." I think the current debate between "cutting American entitlements" while "expanding American freedoms" around the world is ludicrous, and something along the lines of unnatural vice that St. Paul described as being beneath the worthy conversation of Christians. I have given you and Mr. Williamson all the honesty and compliments I can muster. You have spoken well and wisely, a worthy debater and Chronicles blogger.. God Bless both of you.
@33 Dr. Fleming said:
"Reading Chesterton for his economic prescriptions would be like reading Mises for his prose style or Rothbard for his parody song lyrics. The importance of the distributists lies in their literature, their historical vision, their commitment to Christendom."
Indeed. No matter what atrocities Chesterton may have perpetrated as a clumsy economic thinker (and I am entirely unfamiliar with those of his writings), they are almost certainly ameliorated by his utterly sound writings on the church and his astounding grasp of the true outline of history. To read Chesterton is to be brought under the influence of a profound mind, whatever the topic. Again, I have not read him on economics. But I expect I would get far more enjoyment and edification out of reading Chesterton on any subject, even one which he basically misunderstands, than I would out of reading even the most wonderfully reasoned essay from, say, Christopher Hitchens.
CS Lewis makes this point in another way in his magnificent essay "Christian Apologetics". He says there that, "What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent. You can see this most easily if you look at it the other way round. Our Faith is not very likely to be shaken by any book on Hinduism. But if whenever we read an elementary book on Geology, Botany, Politics, or Astronomy, we found that its implications were Hindu, that would shake us. It is not the books written in direct defence of Materialism that make modern man a materialist; it is the materialistic assumptions in all other books. In the same way, it is not books on Christianity that will really trouble him. But he would be troubled if, whenever he wanted a cheap popular introduction to some science, the best work on the market were always by a Christian."
Because Lewis and Chesterton were throwbacks who recognized the chilling effect of several trends of modern thought, and furthermore because they thought clearly and recognized what are the proper sentiments of mankind, these qualities naturally extended into their writings. It was their interest in everything that caused them to write so well about anything. If you look at the breadth of subjects that each man tackled in his career, it spins the head. And though each is now famed for both fiction and apologetical writing, those were not the chief pursuits of either man. It would not be surprising if Chesterton wrote a lot about money, and did so erroneously in a narrow or experiential sense, while inadvertently shedding a lot of light on life in general. Even when I quibbled with him while reading The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy, I was constantly aware that I was in the presence of a man of astonishing insight.
May God bless all of us and help us get through what are likely to be trying times.
@Daniel Maxwell
I've been doing a bit of research on the connections between Dorothy Day and the Southern Agrarians this summer. Her recently published diaries are quite enlightening. After her conversion, she was no Communist and to her death a daily communicant and frequent (nearly weekly) visitor to the sacrament of confession. She even notes her dislike of the confusing new Divine Office when trying to pray for the dead one November and that she preferred the older Mass. By the time the 60s are underway, she is obviously terrified of where society is going, even though she seemed quite hopeful that the anti-Vietnam and Alinsky people would change America for the better shortly before.
When it comes to the Agrarians, she was a friend of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon in her younger days and remained in contact. This resulted in at least one letter between Tate and Donald Davidson of great excitement that Dorothy was thrilled at "I'll Take My Stand" and was going to encourage her readers to read them...and send them a copy of the Catholic Worker subscriber list.
She notes that the father of her child was in spirit basically a Southern Agrarian and her father's family was from Cleveland, TN. Her grandfather a Confederate veteran. Her attraction and support of Distributism, I think is rather well known, she states that they were what she called "anarchists" or "libertarians" as she and Peter Maurin were. Further, she identified their program as being essentially the same as the Agrarians. (Chesterton himself said in at least one interview that he liked what the Agrarians were up to.)
The connections between the three groups are quite fascinating.
Dr. Fleming, I absolutely agree with you on the misguided thinking of Doug Casey in believing that some free market economic policy will solve all of Haiti's problems.
Don't get me wrong. I am pro-liberty.
But too many other liberals forget where the root causes of social problems originate. It originates in people themselves. When a man takes a course of action to perform violence and aggression against another human being, the desire and inclination towards that violence came from within him. He chose to disrespect another person's peace, and it took the form of his action to harm another person.
If one human could be inclined towards aggression and violence, then we must acknowledge that the other humans policing this human are just as prone to the same violence. It's only the inner moral principle that prevents all people of high civilization to abstain from it.
The mistake of Doug Casey is in forgetting that matters of high civilization are not to be considered in amoral terms. When a statesman forcefully collectivizes and takes over people's resources or coercively restricts the activities of businessmen, his conduct came from his immoral stance. The same immoral stance could lead him to doing similar things even as a private individual. And that could end up resulting eventually in another despotic state. So to say that somehow implementing a free market economic policy will solve problems of Haiti just ignores how individual people and their morals are the root cause of everything. And would Haiti somehow develop a culture of peace and mutual respect in our lifetimes? Lots of luck.
It's always about creating and nurturing a culture of peace, honesty, and respect. To suggest otherwise is to be either misleading or off topic. That is the mistake of many liberals.
I must also say that even though us "moralist" liberals are lumped in together with many robotic, amoral, purely consequentialist liberals, we are not like them at all. It's not the state which is to be held in check; it is all forms of coercion that adversely affect other people, whether from private individuals or from the state. To focus on the state is to focus on just half the problem. Matters of high civilization are always a moral matter.
The problem is that liberalism is considered to be a relatively recent movement that goes back only as far as Locke. But liberalism actually goes back to the Scholastics tradition in Europe. The Scholastics helped investigate moral reasoning and thus helped understand how morals could be applied to everyday life. They interwove reason and empiricism together, the basis of the axiomatic methodology used by Hoppe, Rothbard, and Rockwell in their works on ethics. The Liberal movement, or more precisely, the modern Scholastics movement is a moral movement. It is not a value-free excuse for immoral indulgence, as too many libertine liberals think it is.