Humility and Pride

by Roy F. Moore

Humility is the queen of virtues. She found her champion in Chesterton, who, besides being one of the wittiest and wisest men of the 20th Century, was also one of the most humble. With his keen insight, he could distinguish true from false humility, pointing out where the one must be sought out and the other repelled. In his work Orthodoxy, from the chapter “The Suicide of Thought”, he wrote thus:

“Humility was largely meant as a restraint upon the arrogance and infinity of the appetite of man. He was always outstripping his mercies with his own newly invented needs. His very power of enjoyment destroyed half his joys. By asking for pleasure, he lost the chief pleasure; for the chief pleasure is surprise. Hence it became evident that if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.”

So it was with him, so it is with Distributism. Why?

For a comparison, look at her two rivals, capitalism and socialism. Why do they fixate on bigness, whether in government or business? Not everything constructed on a huge scale is necessarily a good thing. When economic giants like Enron or WorldCom crumbled, thousands lost their jobs, savings and futures. When political powers like the British Empire dissolved, the world changed forever for those opposed to its demise.

So why the need for bigness? It comes down to the sin that brought down our First Parents in the Garden of Eden. And that is pride. St. Thomas Aquinas defines it as “inordinate self-love.” Dante in his Divine Comedy called it "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor." Chesterton describes it as the vice that is “the poison in every other vice.” Since it is root of the rest of the Seven Deadly Sins, it is the core of greed and envy. Capitalism is often accused of fostering these vices, but socialism is just as guilty of them as well.

It was the belief of John Calvin that material prosperity was a sign that one belonged to the “saved.” When the centuries-old prohibition against usury was thrown out in his system, it lay the groundwork for rapid accumulation of wealth at other’s expense. This, along with the seizing of Church lands during the reign of England’s Henry VIII, were the foundation for capitalism to build on. This “hatred and contempt for one’s neighbor,” the peasantry and craftsman who held onto Catholicism and the old ways, sowed anger and misery in many memories. Over time, the fruit of it became the poison of socialism.

As the 19th Century rolled on, Europe roiled under the twin burdens of excess wealth and excess poverty. With the rise of the Communists and their spokesmen Marx and Engels, the bloodletting against real and perceived persecution of the poor rose. Both private property and the market economy, though distorted by the ideas of men like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, were seen as the very source of the common man’s misery. A state where the government controlled all and supplied all needs was seen as its cure.

But the very rich whom the socialists strove against where also the very ones who, more often than not, supported and financed Socialist ideas. Engels himself came from a wealthy family and supported the lazy Marx and his suffering family. In time, the fortunes of the Rockefeller and Carnegie families in America would go to fund causes promoting monopolization, eugenics and population control. Again, “inordinate self-love” by this self-proclaimed elite manipulated the poor as if they were toys. And, they claimed, for the poor’s own good.

Both capitalism and socialism tend to see humanity as a conglomeration of numbers, not men with immortal souls. The one treats men as “units of production and consumption“, potential markets to tap into, customers with needs to fill at the lowest cost possible. The other treats men as only the “oppressed masses“, drugged by religion and exploited by bosses, in need of a revolutionary vanguard, either Marxist or Fabian, to lead it into a glorious classless society.

Both are materialistic systems, full of themselves and empty of God, Who is considered an dangerous illusion by one and an extraneous add-on by the other. Both desire to envelop the globe with their influence, with every society colored in a monotone of dull socialist brick red or a brash, unnatural capitalist electric blue. All growing larger and more powerful, certain of triumph, convinced of never making mistakes or at least huge ones. Pride is at the core of both.

But Distributism believes in limits, treasures the small, cherishes the common pleasures of the common man. In the language of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it prefers the Shire to Mordor. It holds that small government and small businesses, fair trade and family farms, a clean Earth, big families and frugal comfort are more natural to man than mansions and empires. The local is preferred to the global. All is based on humility, contentment and gratitude for what we have from the hand of God.

As Chesterton wrote in The Outline of Sanity:

"There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants."

Pride and world systems based on it dissolve nations. Humility – in which Distributism finds its roots - preserves and sustains nations because it preserves and sustains the family and the home.

Gilbert! Magazine
Reprinted with Permission

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The Bluff of the Big Shops

I deny that the big shop is the best shop; and I especially deny that people go there because it is the best shop... - G.K. Chesterton The Outline of Sanity

Twice in my life has an editor told me in so many words that he dared not print what I had written, because it would offend the advertisers in his paper. The presence of such pressure exists everywhere in a more silent and subtle form. But I have a great respect for the honesty of this particular editor; for it was, evidently as near to complete honesty as the editor of an important weekly magazine can possibly go. He told the truth about the falsehood he had to tell.

On both those occasions he denied me liberty of expression because I said that the widely advertised stores and large shops were really worse than little shops. That, it may be interesting to note, is one of the things that a man is now forbidden to say; perhaps the only thing he is really forbidden to say. If it had been an attack on Government, it would have been tolerated. If it had been an attack on God, it would have been respectfully and tactfully applauded. If I had been abusing marriage or patriotism or public decency, I should have been heralded in headlines and allowed to sprawl across Sunday newspapers. But the big newspaper is not likely to attack the big shop; being itself a big shop in its way and more and more a monument of monopoly. But it will be well if I repeat here in a book what I found it impossible to repeat in an article. I think the big shop is a bad shop. I think it bad not only in a moral but a mercantile sense; that is, I think shopping there is not only a bad action but a bad bargain. I think the monster emporium is not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable; and I deny that its large organization is efficient. Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization. The only thing perfectly organic is an organism; like that grotesque and obscure organism called a man. He alone can be quite certain of doing what he wants; beyond him, every extra man may be an extra mistake. As applied to things like shops, the whole thing is an utter fallacy. Some things like armies have to be organized; and therefore do their very best to be well organized. You must have a long rigid line stretched out to guard a frontier; and therefore you stretch it tight. But it is not true that you must have a long rigid line of people trimming hats or tying bouquets, in order that they may be trimmed or tied neatly. The work is much more likely to be neat if it is done by a particular craftsman for a particular customer with particular ribbons and flowers. The person told to trim the hat will never do it quite suitably to the person who wants it trimmed; and the hundredth person told to do it will do it badly; as he does. If we collected all the stories from all the housewives and householders about the big shops sending the wrong goods, smashing the right goods, forgetting to send any sort of goods, we should behold a welter of inefficiency. There are far more blunders in a big shop than ever happen in a small shop, where the individual customer can curse the individual shopkeeper. Confronted with modern efficiency the customer is silent; well aware of that organization's talent for sacking the wrong man. In short, organization is a necessary evil--which in this case is not necessary.

I have begun these notes with a note on the big shops because they are things near to us and familiar to us all. I need not dwell on other and still more entertaining claims made for the colossal combination of departments. One of the funniest is the statement that it is convenient to get everything in the same shop. That is to stay, it is convenient to walk the length of the street, so long as you walk indoors, or more frequently underground, instead of walking the same distance in the open air from one little shop to another. The truth is that the monopolists' shops are really very convenient--to the monopolist. They have all the advantage of concentrating business as they concentrate wealth, in fewer and fewer of the citizens. Their wealth sometimes permits them to pay tolerable wages; their wealth also permits them to buy up better businesses and advertise worse goods. But that their own goods are better nobody has ever even begun to show; and most of us know any number of concrete cases where they are definitely worse. Now I expressed this opinion of my own (so shocking to the magazine editor and his advertisers) not only because it is an example of my general thesis that small properties should be revived,but because it is essential to the realization of another and much more curious truth. It concerns the psychology of all these things: of mere size, of mere wealth, of mere advertisement and arrogance. And it gives us the first working model of the way in which things are done to-day and the way in which (please God) they may be undone to-morrow.

There is one obvious and enormous and entirely neglected general fact to be noted before we consider the laws chiefly needed to renew the State. And that is the fact that one considerable revolution could be made without any laws at all. It does not concern any existing law, but rather an existing superstition. And the curious thing is that its upholders boast that it is a superstition. The other day I saw and very thoroughly enjoyed a popular play called It Pays to Advertise; which is all about a young business man who tries to break up the soap monopoly of his father, a more old-fashioned business man, by the wildest application of American theories of the psychology of advertising. One thing that struck me as rather interesting about it was this. It was quite good comedy to give the old man and the young man our sympathy in turn. It was quite good farce to make the old man and the young man each alternately look a fool. But nobody seemed to feel what I felt to be the most outstanding and obvious points of folly. They scoffed at the old man because he was old; because he was old-fashioned; because he himself was healthy enough to scoff at the monkey tricks of their mad advertisements. But nobody really criticized him for having made a corner, for which he might once have stood in a pillory. Nobody seemed to have enough instinct for independence and human dignity to be irritated at the idea that one purse-proud old man could prevent us all from having an ordinary human commodity if he chose. And as with the old man, so it was with the young man. He had been taught by his American friend that advertisement can hypnotize the human brain; that people are dragged by a deadly fascination into the doors of a shop as into the mouth of a snake; that the subconscious is captured and the will paralysed by repetition; that we are all made to move like mechanical dolls when a Yankee advertiser says, "Do It Now." But it never seemed to occur to anybody to resent this. Nobody seemed sufficiently alive to be annoyed. The young man was made game of because he was poor; because he was bankrupt; because he was driven to the shifts of bankruptcy; and so on. But he did not seem to know he was something much worse than a swindler, a sorcerer. He did not know he was by his own boast a mesmerist and a mystagogue; a destroyer of reason and will; an enemy of truth and liberty.

I think such people exaggerate the extent to which it pays to advertise; even if there is only the devil to pay. But in one sense this psychological case for advertising is of great practical importance to any programme of reform. The American advertisers have got hold of the wrong end of the stick; but it is a stick that can be used to beat something else besides their own absurd big drum. It is a stick that can be used also to beat their own absurd business philosophy. They are always telling us that the success of modern commerce depends on creating an atmosphere, on manufacturing a mentality, on assuming a point of view. In short, they insist that their commerce is not merely commercial, or even economic or political, but purely psychological. I hope they will go on saying it; for then some day everybody may suddenly see that it is true.

For the success of big shops and such things really is psychology; not to say psycho-analysis; or, in other words, nightmare. It is not real and, therefore, not reliable. This point concerns merely our immediate attitude, at the moment and on the spot, towards the whole plutocratic occupation of which such publicity is the gaudy banner. The very first thing to do, before we come to any of our proposals that are political and legal, is something that really is (to use their beloved word)entirely psychological. The very first thing to do is to tell these American poker-players that they do not know how to play poker. For they not only bluff, but they boast that they are bluffing. In so far as it really is a question of an instant psychological method, there must be, and there is, an immediate psychological answer. In other words, because they are admittedly bluffing, we can call their bluff.

I said recently that any practical programme for restoring normal property consists of two parts, which current cant would call destructive and constructive; but which might more truly be called defensive and offensive. The first is stopping the mere mad stampede towards monopoly, before the last traditions of property and liberty are lost. It is with that preliminary problem of resisting the world's trend towards being more monopolist, that I am first of all dealing here. Now, when we ask what we can do, here and now, against the actual growth of monopoly, we are always given a very simple answer. We are told that we can do nothing. By a natural and inevitable operation the large things are swallowing the small, as large fish might swallow little fish. The trust can absorb what it likes, like a dragon devouring what it likes, because it is already the largest creature left alive in the land. Some people are so finally resolved to accept this result that they actually condescend to regret it. They are so convinced that it is fate that they will even admit that it is fatality. The fatalists almost become sentimentalists when looking at the little shop that is being bought up by the big company. They are ready to weep, so long as it is admitted that they weep because they weep in vain. They are willing to admit that the loss of a little toy-shop of their childhood, or a little tea-shop of their youth, is even in the true sense a tragedy. For a tragedy means always a man's struggle with that which is stronger than man. And it is the feet of the gods themselves that are here trampling on our traditions; it is death and doom themselves that have broken our little toys like sticks; for against the stars of destiny none shall prevail. It is amazing what a little bluff will do in this world.

For they go on saying that the big fish eats the little fish, without asking whether little fish swim up to big fish and ask to be eaten. They accept the devouring dragon without wondering whether a fashionable crowd of princesses ran after the dragon to be devoured. They have never heard of a fashion; and do not know the difference between fashion and fate. The necessitarians have here carefully chosen the one example of something that is certainly not necessary, whatever else is necessary. They have chosen the one thing that does happen still to be free, as a proof of the unbreakable chains in which all things are bound. Very little is left free in the modern world; but private buying and selling are still supposed to be free; and indeed still are free; if anyone has a will free enough to use his freedom. Children may be driven by force to a particular school. Men may be driven by force away from a public-house. All sorts of people, for all sorts of new and nonsensical reasons, may be driven by force to a prison. But nobody is yet driven by force to a particular shop.

I shall deal later with some practical remedies and reactions against the rush towards rings and corners. But even before we consider these, it is well to have paused a moment on the moral fact which is so elementary and so entirely ignored. Of all things in the world, the rush to the big shops is the thing that could be most easily stopped--by the people who rush there. We do not know what may come later; but they cannot be driven there by bayonets just yet. American business enterprise, which has already used British soldiers for purposes of advertisement, may doubtless in time use British soldiers for purposes of coercion. But we cannot yet be dragooned by guns and sabres into Yankee shops or international stores. The alleged economic attraction, with which I will deal in due course, is quite a different thing:I am merely pointing out that if we came to the conclusion that big shops ought to be boycotted, we could boycott them as easily as we should (I hope) boycott shops selling instruments of torture or poisons for private use in the home. In other words, this first and fundamental question is not a question of necessity but of will. If we chose to make a vow, if we those to make a league, for dealing only with little local shops and never with large centralized shops, the campaign could be every bit as practical as the Land Campaign in Ireland. It would probably be nearly as successful. It will be said, of course, that people will go to the best shop. I deny it; for Irish boycotters did not take the best offer. I deny that the big shop is the best shop; and I especially deny that people go there because it is the best shop. And if I be asked why, I answer at the end with the unanswerable fact with which I began at the beginning. I know it is not merely a matter of business, for the simple reason that the business men themselves tell me it is merely a matter of bluff. It is they who say that nothing succeeds like a mere appearance of success. It is they who say that publicity influences us without our will or knowledge. It is they who say that "It Pays to Advertise"; that is, to tell people in a bullying way that they must "Do It Now," when they need not do it at all.

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The Outline of Sanity

by Dale Ahlquist

America leads the world in many things, including mental illness. Our mixed up society helps produce mixed up people. We are mixed up about religion, education, sex, and two other very basic things: politics and economics. We are basically insane when it comes to the role of money and laws and our daily bread. We want as much money as possible, we also want the government to supply everything we want, and we don’t expect to have to pay for it.

An ongoing theme in all of Chesterton’s writings is sanity. The basic argument of Orthodoxy is that the Apostle’s Creed would be the best basis for a sane society, that modern philosophies not only do not lead to truth, they lead to madness. We see the theme in Chesterton’s fiction as well, such as in the series of mystery stories called The Poet and the Lunatics.

Sanity is about wholeness, completeness. Insanity is about narrowness and brokenness. We live in broken society and it is ruled by two very broken, narrow social philosophies that seem to be at war with one another when they are in fact co-conspirators against the common man: socialism and capitalism, or Hudge and Gudge, to whom we were introduced in What’s Wrong with the World.

The practical solution to “what’s wrong with the world” is explained in The Outline of Sanity. It is Distributism. It is a difficult idea to explain, but this book is where to begin. Belloc’s The Servile State is an essential work but is as dry as dust. If you recommend that one as a starting point, you are sure to chase people away from Distributism.

Of course, you’ll probably chase them away anyway. We have been pretty much brainwashed into the “security” of socialism and the “freedom” of capitalism, both of which are lies, but the insanity is only exacerbated when we try to have both things at once – not when we try to have both freedom and security at once, but when we try to have both capitalism and socialism at once – which is what we presently have in the Servile State. (I just got done telling you that Belloc’s book is essential reading, now don’t bring it up again.)

Distributism offers freedom (which is responsibility) and security (which is protection of the individual and the community). It is based on the widespread ownership of private property. It presumes that small business is better than big business, that craftsmanship is superior to mass production, and that local government is better than big government.

It was Pope Leo XIII who first articulated the connection between property and justice for the modern world in his 1893 encyclical Rerum Novarum. This idea is carried forward a few decades later by G. K. Chesterton in The Outline of Sanity (which is a collection of essays that originally appeared in his newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly in 1925). He shows how neither socialism nor capitalism promote justice because neither promote small property.

A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But he is not a champion of private property. The point about capitalism is that it preaches the extension of business, but not the preservation of belongings; it also tries to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate. The point about communism is that it tries to reform the pickpocket by forbidding pockets.

While Chesterton demonstrates how Socialism utterly fails to fulfill any of its promises because it does not trust the common man to make his own decisions, he also points out that capitalism’s primary failure is that it has accomplished everything that socialism threatened to do. Under capitalism, a clerk lives in a house that he does not own, that he did not make, and that he does not want. He thinks in terms of wages, of putting in time. It would make no difference to a clerk of a huge corporation if his job were instead in a government department. It makes no difference if he’s a faceless servant of the State or of the Rich.

The present system, especially as it exists in industrial countries, has already become a danger, and is rapidly becoming a death trap. This system rests on two ideas: that the rich will always be rich enough to hire the poor; and the poor will always be poor enough to want to be hired by the rich.

Paralysis in this system is inevitable. Capitalism is a contradiction. When most men are wage-earners it is hard for them to be customers. For the capitalist is always trying to cut down what his servant demands. And in doing so he is cutting down what his customer can spend. He is wanting the same man to be rich and poor at the same time.

Chesterton prophetically describes “The Bluff of the Big Shops.” He saw clearly that today’s “Superstores” would snuff out small local shops, and in almost every way it would be the customer who would suffer. With the elimination of the small shops, there is no more shopping around. At the big shop we really can’t get what we want.

I think the big shop is a bad shop. Shopping there is not only a bad action, but a bad bargain. The monster emporium is not only vulgar and insolent, but incompetent and uncomfortable. And I deny that its large organization is efficient. In truth, large organization is always disorganization.

It is said that it is convenient to get everything in the same shop. But in truth the monopolists’ shops are only convenient to the monopolist. They concentrate business as they concentrate wealth--in the hands of fewer and fewer citizens.

Now this surrender to modern monopoly does not have to take place. All we have to do to support small shops is to support them. Everybody could do it, but nobody can imagine it being done. In one sense nothing is so simple, and in another nothing is so hard. Whether or not we surrender [to the big shops] is a matter of moral will and not economic law.

Chesterton’s preferred solution is that most every business be a small business. Where larger businesses may be necessary, they should be owned by the employees; they should be run by a guild, combining their contributions and dividing their results. He believes that small shops can be governed - even if they are self-governed. He believes small shops can be supported—if we support them.

Distributism is Democracy. Distributism is based on property. Democracy can work only if property is widespread. Democracy means self-government. Property means self-support. In a Distributist society, people produce and use their own goods, make their own laws, and are not dependent outsiders.

Chesterton does not say there is no place for exchange, nor does he say that man needs nothing from the State. He says these things must exist, but in proper proportion. Neither the Trader nor the Government Official should play a dominant role in society.

Can it be done? Chesterton says Distributism is a thing done by people; it is not a thing that can be done to people. It can be done, if we decide to do it. It means that we take greater control over our lives. It means that we cease to be wage slaves and consumer slaves. It means being fair and free and faithful. “The aim of human polity,” says Chesterton, “is human happiness. But this does not mean that we are obligated to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or progressive. We are not obligated to be any of these things if they do not make us happier.”

©2006 The American Chesterton Society

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A Review of The Outline of Sanity

by Dr. Peter Chojnowski

The WorldCom default on its loans, amounting to some $4 billion (plus an additional $3.3 billion just revealed), is just the most recent example and testament to the virtual reality that has become a substitute for an economic system in which real men own real property and from that real property operate real businesses making real products, which in turn would produce real profits. As G.K. Chesterton states it, "Now what is the matter with the financial world is that it is a great deal too full of imagination, in the sense of fiction." What is most amazing about this state of affairs is not so much the hazardous state into which corporate and financial America has placed the wage-earning families of the world, but rather, that so few men are asking the obvious question concerning the theoretical basis for a system in which so many are placed at such risk because of the self-interested actions of so few. With corporate collapses like Enron, WorldCom, and Kmart, with national defaults on bank loans as have never been seen before in human history by nations such as Russia, Argentina and, soon, Brazil, would not such a re-evaluation of the fundamentals of the Liberal Capitalist system, universally triumphant-at least in theory-since the break-up of the Soviet empire in 1991, be at the forefront of every thinking man's mind, especially the thinking men who inherit the religious and intellectual traditions of Chesterton, Belloc, Pope Leo XIII, and Pope Pius XI. The reason this is not on every thinking Catholic's mind is, I believe, simple. Too many Catholics, who should know better, reject or ignore the warnings and admonitions which issued from the popes from Leo XII to Pius XII, and have, also, remained ignorant of the critiques of the Liberal Capitalist system which have issued from Catholic intellectuals such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. With this said, we must also state that there are those who see the problem, know the Church's Social Teaching, and, yet, reject the solutions the Church proposes to the economic situation of the age. Such enthusiasts of the Liberal Capitalist System have recently published a number of articles to this effect in various American Catholic journals. Their outright rejection of the economic teaching and practical agenda for Catholic social and economic reconstruction, as offered to us by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum and by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesima Anno, is often subtly laden with a hint of irritation that anyone would seek to challenge a system which, so obviously, "works." There are those on the other extreme, who identify with the Social Teachings of the Church, but who only are interested in an immediate implementation of that teaching in their own lives and not in any theoretical defense of the need to resort to the Social Teachings. If most of us cannot "do" now, why spend time reading about or discussing the matter?

G.K. Chesterton, in his newly re-published 1926 book The Outline of Sanity, answers the objectors who ask, "Why deal with this topic at all?" by making the following analogy:

A man has been lead by a foolish guide or a self-confident fellow traveler to the brink of a precipice, which he might well have fallen over in the dark. It may well be said that there is nothing to be done but to sit down and wait for the light. Still, it might be well to pass the hours of darkness in some discussion, about how it will be best for them to make their way backwards to more secure ground....The formulation of any coherent plan of travel will not be a waste of time, especially if there is nothing else to do.

With this one thought, Chesterton justifies his "string of essays," which were published as The Outline of Sanity in 1926 and recently republished by IHS Press, and which serve as what "might rightly be called a Manual of Distributism, for it outlines the essential principles of Distributism as well as the broad strokes necessary to bring society back to its senses."

Distributism is an economic and social program, based upon the Social Teachings of the Catholic Church and very closely identified with European pre-World War II Corporatism, which seeks to provide an alternative vision to that given to the world by Liberal Capitalism and Socialism. The basic insight of this alternative system, also advanced by Hilaire Belloc in such books as The Servile State and Economics for Helen, is that Capitalism and Socialism, contrary to much that has been believed by the American Catholic during the post-World War II period, have the same internal dynamic in which economic wealth, consisting in "capital" and "property," is increasingly concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, whether those hands are federal government bureaucrats or Fortune500 stockholders and business executives. This basic thesis of Distributism is often surprising to those who have thought on questions of economics, using the notion that Capitalism, as it is especially practiced in the United States, is based upon "freedom of individual choice" and the easy acquisition of private property. In contrast to this common perception of Capitalism, Chesterton defines Capitalism as,

that economic condition in which there is a class of capital­ists, roughly recognizable and relatively small, in whose possession so much of the capital is concentrated as to necessitate a very large majority of the citizens serving those capitalists for a wage.

With Chesterton's definition of Capitalism in mind, it is not surprising that the Directors of IHS Press have decided to open the book with a quotation from Richard Weaver in which he states,

Respecters of private property are really obligated to oppose much that is done in the name of private enterprise, for corporate organization and monopoly are the very means whereby property is casting aside its privacy.

It is not merely that Capitalism's impetus is towards a consolidation of capital and enterprise in the hands of fewer and fewer men, which ought to concern a Catholic who desires to see the Social Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ extend itself into the economic realm of the family, the community, and ultimately, the nation. The economic meltdowns of the last few years have indicated the fallacy that underlies the very system itself. This fallacy is that if you have a system in which all men seek, and are even encouraged to seek, after their own private economic well being, the community and nation as a whole will be the beneficiary of that economic self-seeking. The greatest evil, according to the Liberal Capitalist ideology, is any type of governmental interference in the private bargaining between employer/employee, seller/buyer, and international financial institution/ local borrower. This is in marked distinction from Chesterton's attitude towards the necessary role the government has in directing the economic activity of a nation so that monopoly does not exist. Chesterton goes so far as to state, concerning his belief in the need for governmental action for the sake of the economic common good, "The present problem of capitalist concentration is not a question of law but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." Those whose sole focus is still upon the potential threat from a revived Communism in Eastern Europe and especially in KGB-dominated Russia, often overlook the monopoly that the moneylenders have over the capital of the Western nations. In response to this, we can quote Chesterton who states, "'What are we coming to, with all this Bolshevism?' It is equally relevant to add, 'what are we coming to, even without Bolshevism?'" In this regard, Chesterton's indictment of the lands without Bolshevism must be seriously considered by those who have become insensitive to the determinative penetration of our own land by Liberalism in all of its forms. Chesterton's indictment includes the following:

A great nation and civilization [i.e., the British] has fol­lowed for a hundred years or more a form of progress which held itself independent of certain old communications in the form of ancient traditions about the land, the hearth, or the altar. It has advanced under leaders who are confident, not to say cocksure. They are quite sure that their economic rules were rigid, that their political theory was right, that their commerce was beneficent, that their parliaments were popular, that their press was enlightened, that their science was humane. In this confidence they committed their people to certain new and enormous experiments; to making their own independent nation an eternal debtor to a few rich men; to piling up private property in heaps on the faith of financiers; to covering their land with iron and stone and stripping it of grass and grain; to driving food out of their own country in the hope of buying it back again from the ends of the earth...till there was no independence without luxury and no labor without ugliness; to leaving the millions of mankind dependent on indirect and distant discipline and indirect and distant sustenance, working themselves to death for they know not whom and taking the means of life from they know not where.

The Directors of IHS Press are correct to refer to The Outline of Sanity as a "manual of Distributism," but they are more to the point when they state that this book "outlines the essential principles of Distributism as well as the broad strokes necessary to bring society back to its senses." We would miss the point of this text if we did not take seriously the word "sanity" in its title. To the contemporary consumerist Technicolor insanity, Chesterton seeks to counterpoise the "sanity of the Distributist balance." This "balance" involves many different aspects. The most obvious is the "balance" between the personal and social nature of property, in opposition to the liberal individualist and the left-wing collectivist. The other "balance" which Chesterton advocates in this text is the balance between technological means of manipulating nature and means which are in accord with the basic physical, psychological, and spiritual structure of man. One of the primary purposes of The Outline of Sanity is to challenge the universal assumption, just as much in vogue in 1926 as in 2002, that the technological "advance" is "here to stay" and that nothing, certainly not a book or a movement touting an idealistic agrarian utopianism, will impede that advance. One must simply accept the inevitable and recognize that technology is, in itself, neither good nor bad, but our thinking makes it so. To this mechanistic and determinist view of history and human life (one which, supposedly, fits in perfectly with the idea that man must be absolutely free in the market place), Chesterton points out what is so self-evident that is has been forgotten when this issue is considered:

The aim of human polity is human happiness....But happi­ness, the making glad of the heart of man, is the secular test and only realistic test....There is no law of logic or nature or anything else forcing us to prefer anything else. There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.

With this, we have located the most forceful message of this text:

It is time that man exercise his free will and decide to regain the fullness of his individual, familial, and community life by renouncing or tempering his involvement with an economic system, and with its technological substructure, which rips from him two of his most precious commodi­ties, his own labor and the fruit of it. How can a man be happy, with a truly human happiness, unless his own work is controlled by his own will and not subordinated to the profit-making demands of the owners of capital and the means of production? How can the God-ordained nature of work be realized if neither his hands nor his mind manipu­late materials provided to him directly by the Hand of Almighty God according to forms that are derived, through the agency of the human intellect and imagination, from the natural created structure of the world?

So, what can we do to regain the precious commodities of our own work and our own real property? What is the plan and what is Distributism's vision for the future? Here is where the publishers of this text have provided us a service. Contrary to those who state that any projection of a state of affairs that is in marked contrast to the current state is simply wishful musing or, what St. Thomas would call simple velleity, Chesterton states, "In our movement as much as any other, there must be a certain amount of this romantic picture making. Men have never done anything in the world without it." It is with this recognition in mind that we must consider the simpler life of property and self-sufficiency that the Distributists put forward as the solution to the modern economic and social problems of the Capitalist Age. Their agenda was incremental, as must be all agendas that are not backed by men of great power or great financial resources. Before the future can hold anything for those men seeking after justice, both social and economic, the future must be imagined in all of its explicit detail and ambiance. Without this kind of "romantic picture making," the future will necessarily resemble our opponents' worldview, rather than our own worldview. Such "new imaginings" can only come to the young generation through the process of education. In this regard, Chesterton finds a problem because,

At present we have education, not indeed for angels, but rather for aviators. They do not even understand a man's wish to remain tied to the ground. There is in their ideal an insanity that may be truly called unworldly.... What is wrong with the man in the modern town is that he does not know the causes of things; and that is why, as the poet says, he can be too much dominated by despots and demagogues. He does not know where things come from.

The sane worldview outlined by Chesterton in The Outline of Sanity, a world of landowning and land-tilling small farmers and independent, rural-based craftsmen is a marked departure from the world in which we presently survive, because for those who have the Faith and a real, concrete sense of the civilization that the Faith fashioned for itself and its own, "surviving," rather than flourishing in a land according to our desire, is our momentary lot. What The Outline of Sanity can do is to provide us with both the vision of a society and economic order in accord with our true natural and supernatural destiny, along with advising us as to how to form that "social circle" of "men who know the end and the beginning and the rounding of our little life." Let us get the vision and get to work! Real work.

Dr. Peter E. Chojnowski has an undergraduate degree in Political Sci­ence and another in Philosophy from Christendom College. He also received his master's degree and doctorate in philosophy from Fordham University. He and his wife, Kathleen, are the parents of five children. He teaches for the Society of Saint Pius X at Immaculate Conception Academy, Post Falls, ID.

©The Angelus
September 2002, Volume XXV, Number 9
http://www.ihspress.com/

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