Back to the Stone Age II F
Property is the broadest term and the one most likely to be misused. In English, we can use property to refer to everything we possess, including our personal characteristics, or more narrowly as the things we own, such s real estate, or to the more abstract notion promoted by Locke, that as human beings we have a right to property, along side our rights to life and liberty. I shall be content to use it, here, in a basic etymological sense as that which belongs to us (proprius is a Latin adjective meaning one's own), but not (even though a case could be made for such usage) including our physical or mental attributes.
Property, as Aristotle observed, is natural because it is essential to human functioning and thriving. We have to eat and shield ourselves from the elements, hunt animals with weapons and grow food with implements. I am going to postpone an extended discussion of property until later because I do not wish to lose the thread of this albeit simple argument.
Property is universal in human societies and claims to the otherwise, put forward by Marxist and feminist anthropologists, can only hold up if we insist that property be defined in Anglo-American terms. It is true that in a tropical climate a hunter-gatherer people needs little property: privileged access to watering holes, spears to hunt with, perhaps baskets to store the nuts and berries our women gather, but anything a man makes or improves or finds can be (though it is not always) property, even if he is expected to share its use with his relatives.
Anthropologists are fond of myths like the accidental discovery or fire or the invention of property and marriage. Let me put forward my own myth, which is the fruit of years of study.
Since in such primitive circumstances there is no means of storing a surplus, these humans lived from day to day, consuming what they got. Such a life is primitive and precarious. When droughts or freezes come, the whole community might die out. Fortunately, some clever people learned to store food in holes they dug and later to fire-harden the clay, thus sealing it against vermin. Finally, someone learned (this is my speculation) how to lift the baked clay out of the ground, and the pot was born.
Which came first, the pot or the surplus grain to store? It hardly matters. With storage comes the possibility of surplus that can be used to tide the family over during bad times. Let us call this stored surplus wealth. At first it might have been only wild grains. Later the family storehouse might have included some cooked or aging meat or cured vegetables. It would also include extra clothing, tools, and weapons.
As men learned to specialize, they could trade their products with each other, assigning some value to a bushel of wheat compared with a gallon of wine, or a goat, or a well-made pot or weapon. Metals became a form of wealth both for their utility in making tools and weapons and for their beauty and durability. An ounce of silver might be equivalent to a pound of copper, a cow, or a barrel of wine. Some brilliant Lydian appears to have come up with the idea of putting his name or symbol on a fixed amount of metal. He invented money. Naturally, a king smart enough to invent money was also smart enough to realize that he had to pay his metalworkers. Ever since, even the most stable currencies have been overvalued by perhaps 4%, which covered the ruler's expenses and perhaps a bit more.
It is an irrelevant consideration here, but it might be helpful to point out that Jesus got it exactly right in asking whose name was on the coin. The name and the face on currency are the mark of the sovereign's control over money. In early times, it was probably very useful to have a currency that it was more convenient to redeem in the sovereign's markets.
This is all very crude myth-making though not so ill-informed as some parts of the early chapters of Niall Ferguson's Ascent of Money. Really, he is an intelligent man who teaches at Harvard. Could he not have walked over to talk to ancient historians before putting his erroneous notions and high school level bibliography down on paper? (From the Renaissance on, his book improves rapidly.) Let us try to get to the point.
Property is natural and so too is most of what we call wealth. Money, however, being a social construction to measure wealth in abstract terms (a bit like the Celsius scale) is artificial. This is what lies behind Aristotle's view that for money to breed money (the Greek word for interest is tokos, offspring) is unnatural. Small wonder that many moralists have coupled usury and sodomy.
I do not wish to enter into the polemical arguments between classical liberals and Catholics, primarily because I think both sides are equally wrong and right. The liberals are certainly correct to emphasize the importance of investment in modern economic life and the significance of opportunities that are lost when one man lends another man money. It is as silly to analyze late capitalist systems within the framework provided by St. Thomas and Pope Leo XIII as it is to apply Freudian analysis to the plays of Sophocles.
But the Catholic tradition, going back to Cicero and Aristotle, is right on the moral fundamentals. Man is not an isolated individual, and as a social animal—a man born for citizenship--he does owe justice and charity to his neighbors, and—this above all—however correct the liberals are in their analysis of (comparatively) free markets and of the costs attendant upon distorting markets (through regulation, tariffs, etc.), they miss the obvious truth staring them in the face that wealth (as I pointed out in installment IIC) is an instrument of human happiness and not vice versa. If the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath, how much truer this is of other conventions and institutes that developed to fulfill human needs. To acknowledge this reality is not socialism, whatever Mises and his followers might pretend, any more than it is capitalism to recognize the superior efficiency of markets in supplying man's material needs.
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Dr. Fleming, I noticed there is no link to your Mail column. Is your association with them over? Strange, since you were not even too controversial with your last set of articles.
Since you say that wealth is an instrument of human happiness and not vice versa, how do you feel about people who complain about their taxes? Do you feel they are being petty about something as minor as not being able to keep all of their money? Or do you feel they are correct in being concerned about something that attacks their happiness and well-being.
I tend always when the opposites appear: hot/cold; man was made for the Sabbath/the Sabbath was made for man; wealth is an instrument of human happiness/happiness is an instrument of wealth; the group is an instrument of the individual/the individual is an instrument of the group, to not fall on one side but to view them as two sides of the same one coin.
So for example even though perhaps it was implicit, Jesus being less succinct might have asked whose face is on the coin, and on the other side of it which group of people make the coin, or legal tender, mean anything at all? Again, in the story or myth perhaps in his mind that was implicit but instead he went right from one side of the coin, from the currency's king or emperor to the transcendant or God.
It's not that the two sides of the coin can be or 'should' be synthesized as if that is really what the transcendant (or the mundane) is or is about. No they are already two distinctive sides of the same one coin; just as the transcendant and the entire coin with both of its sides, is now again two sides of reality's larger coin: the transcendant/mundane. Was the transcendant made for the mundane or the mundane made for the transcendant = both.
I feel and think that it is hybris. Or perhaps in some maybe they experience a cognitive dissonance in not being able to hold two apparently opposite sides of an issue as the whole reality in their mind's eye when parsing and considering how to proceed. When this limited one-sided tact is employed in considering exclusively the mundane as if it is merely one-sided, I notice or sense it also stems from the predisposition that there in fact is also no transcendant other side or opposite of the ostensibly whole mundane coin itself. Be that as it may since it is a matter of faith anyway. However, transcendant opposite or underpinning of the world, or no transcendant, it doesn't mean that the world or the coin itself doesn't also have its own two or opposite sides which nonetheless are the same one coin.
If the conventional world considers scholarship, even when considering the mundane itself, to be confined or straight-jacketed to this one-sided so-called logical, and linear path which chooses to ignore the whole coin or reality in ascertaining how to proceed. Sadly then, it also abandons or prematurely truncates reason itself, in behalf of its *belief that even mundane reality alone in the world is less than it actually in fact is. Which then blinkers, ironically, scholarship itself. Does it not? So that then is my question.
"I do not wish to enter into the polemical arguments between classical liberals and Catholics, primarily because I think both sides are equally wrong and right. The liberals are certainly correct to emphasize the importance of investment in modern economic life and the significance of opportunities that are lost when one man lends another man money. It is as silly to analyze late capitalist systems within the framework provided by St. Thomas and Pope Leo XIII as it is to apply Freudian analysis to the plays of Sophocles."
I agree with this statement for the reason given, and also because of the relentless expansion of the quantity of the means of exchange, the Federal Reserve Note (FRN), and thus inflation which devalues quickly any money initially loaned out. You can save an FRN today, but if you exchange it for goods 10 years from now for food, you won't get anywhere near the quantity of food then that you would get today.
I believe a second feature must be kept in mind, and that is that not having an actual sovereign such as Caesar (pace to the bankstas), the means of exchange belongs to the people -- although not necessarily the individual FRNs. A serious problem with the current US system is that new currency/debt is put into the economy through usury -- that is through debt with interest by the privately owned Federal Reserve through the private banks, which is very destabilizing. It seems to me that in any just system means must be used to put new currency into the economy without usury -- that is without debt and any of its particular interest, regardless of how it is subsequently employed in the economy. Several schemes, which I won't go into, have been proposed to do this.
I do not wish to enter into the polemical arguments between classical liberals and Catholics, primarily because I think both sides are equally wrong and right.
Which "Catholics" are you referring to, Dr. Fleming? Do you mean the Chesterbellocian distributionists, do you mean Chesterton and Belloc and St. Thomas and Leo XIII themselves (or just one of them), or do you refer to the nut-jobs who insinuate that the Barack Obama health care scheme is a moral imperative "in line with the Church's social teaching"?
Or to some extent to all three of these groups?
There is no current debate between Catholics and Libertarians. There is the historical fact that “Faith, Hope, and Charity” were replaced with the pseudo-ideals of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” which in the practical order means: a liberty from the restrictions God has placed on mankind; an equality of the profane with the sacred; and the brotherhood of all men in their opposition to traditional values. These distortions of reality along with the superstitions of “progress” and “evolution” that are the “opiates of the people,” giving man a false “faith” in humanity, and holding out to him the false “hope” of an earthly millennium, ( a utopia, earthly paradise, the vain attempt to "immanentize the eschaton" call it whatever you wish) in which society will be so organized as to remove from mankind the very need to be good. Within such a worldview “charity” is profaned to the level of “helping mankind” along its pilgrim road to this false utopia. The road to helping all mankind will occassionaly include political promises to help "our own citizens" and thus ...... No debate whatsoever, the libertarians have won the debate and all of us should know the rest of this story.
There have been many liberal/Catholic debates over the past 150 years, and the Liberal side is often represented by self-described Catholics like Lord Acton, Fr. Sirico, while the other side has been taken sometimes by quasi-Marxists. The debate strikes me as analogous to the Evolutionist/Creationist debate in which theologians argue scientific questions as the scientists tackle metaphysics. Since Catholic theology, or rather all Christian moral theology, predates both capitalism and socialism, both sides are seriously in error.
I once spent several days in Croatia trying to explain to two very fine Catholic intellectals (one of whom is rather well-known) that they were wrong in their attacks on Michael Novak and company. Novak is not an advocate of traditional free enterprise but a believer in state capitalism, in fact, he is not a serious thinker at al but a pamphleteer for his party. On the other hand, their own distributist/Third Way arguments are far closer to Marxism than to the Gospels or to Leo XIII. I did not get anywhere, because it is impossible to argue reasonably with people, however bright, who have taken sides in a war of words. For the anti-American/anti-capitalists, Neuhaus is a spokesman for capitalism and free enterprise, when in fact he disliked both of them, even the words and complained once when our Annual Report had Capitalism in the title. I do not say he was a Marxist--his thinking was so muddled and opportunistic it was hard to tell what it was on any day of the week--only that he was no advocate for free enterprise.
Tom,
"The debate strikes me as analogous to the Evolutionist/Creationist debate in ..."
Yes, Dr. Fleming, that was my point. There is not enough understanding of the tradition today to have a debate. The Pontifical Academy of Science may host public debates occassionaly on the various theories or causes involving genetic changes within a species or variety of species ( I do not know) but for the rest of the West, there is very little public debate taking place.
As for the "distributists" Belloc knew something about liberal economics and traditional culture but he never said all that he knew in one or two books and certainly never advocated an economic ideology of his own or a "Catholic Economic Program" for England, so far as I know.
The closest he came to recommending anything like a recognition of where we are today was in his poetry.
Ha'nacker Mill
Sally is gone that was so kindly,
Sally is gone from Ha'nacker Hill
And the Briar grows ever since then so blindly;
And ever since then the clapper is still...
And the sweeps have fallen from Ha'nacker Mill.
Ha'nacker Hill is in Desolation:
Ruin a-top and a field unploughed.
And Spirits that call on a fallen nation,
Spirits that loved her calling aloud,
Spirits abroad in a windy cloud.
Spirits that call and no one answers --
Ha'nacker's down and England's done.
Wind and Thistle for pipe and dancers,
And never a ploughman under the Sun:
Never a ploughman. Never a one.
I would like to cast my vote for wealth as Dr. Fleming's ancient myth defines it. I would like to just work, accrue a surplus, and depend upon it for when I need it. I personally would rather "opt out" of the current economic model that requires investment this and investment that in order to "beat" inflation. I've been reading the old Carl Barks Scrooge McDuck comics with my kids, and while I've enjoyed practicing my Scottish accent I can't help but think how useless a money bin full of money is today. If only the Beagle Boys had been elected head of the Federal Reserve, then they finally could have concocted a fool proof scheme to steal Scrooge's wealth right from under his nose.
Incidentally, I proffitted much from the article on Libertarianism and Christmas from the most recent issue of Chronicles.
Dr. Fleming,
In your comment on the 14th you state that the distributist arguments made by some are closer to Marxism than to the Gospels or teachings of Leo XIII. This caught my attention, because I have long been inclined to affiliate the thought of Chesterton with paleoconservatism as a "style of political thinking and acting." Many diagnoses and prescriptions seem to be held in common.
Perhaps you mean only that those two Catholic intellectuals themselves had unsatisfactory, quasi-Marxist arguments; more likely, it seems, is that you mean more. I would be very interested to hear in what ways you believe distributism and paleoconservatism to be similar, and in what ways opposed.
Thank you.
Let me be very precise. None of what I wrote above refers to Chesterton, Belloc, or Fr. McNabb. I would rather not name any of their latter-day disciples who have fallen too far to the left in their entirely justified distaste for Catholic neoconservatives, such as Novak, Neuhaus, and Weigel. I would say that the otherwise estimable David Schindler has also made this mistake. My point is that one should not reduce arguments about the moral to the dichotomy of Socialist/Capitalist, and that much (not all) of what passes for Third Way economics is merely a shift to the Left. As for the other question, about the relationship between this or that form of conservatism and distributism, I leave that to the people who call themselves intellectual historians, a form of writing I assiduously avoid with only a few exceptions.
I omitted the word "economy" in the prhase, "arguments about the moral economy"