As the news cycles continue to spin absurd tangents off of the tragedy in Arizona, I'm venturing another opinion about an issue which I really think unrelated to the current events but which is the center of much discussion in the wake of them. The issue: gun control.
I'll keep this short.
I am not a member of the NRA. I do not own a gun. I have no inordinate love of guns.
Furthermore, I think that many of the defenders of gun rights give an absurd reading of the second amendment and present a figment of a constitutional right.
There is, however, a common sense approach to this matter which, if overlooked by gun advocates, is even more frequently missed by their opponents.
I have fired weapons in my lifetime. I've shot paper targets and tin cans. Perhaps, in my youth, I once or twice made sport of small birds and mammals with a carefully aimed bee-bee. [I do not doubt that this admission could itself form an inroad to a whole other controversy. Bring it on!] All in all, my experience with firing guns has been entertaining, a sporting affair - even when it was in the context of military training. In the back of my mind, I always prayed I would never have to use a weapon in earnest. I enjoyed the skill of marksmanship, learning my way around the weapons' intricacies, the thrill of the trigger pull after a controlled exhalation. And I've never shot anyone. Never even thought of it.
Now, sure, there's an argument to be made about defense of home and property that a person ought to be allowed a gun in the home. Most moderates (I consider myself, all in all, to be among that political class) will admit this. Ordinarily, the gun control argument gets hairy when someone drops this ballistic bombshell: "There's no reason that somebody needs a whole collection of guns or semi-automatic weapons in the home." And, as far as it goes, this argument is sound: there is, in the pragmatic way of looking at things, no reason. And, according to the same system of evaluation, there are many reasons indeed that such arsenals ought to be "controlled".
But - here's the rub - it all depends on what we regard as most reasonable. It all depends on what we consider to be the reasons - that is, the philosophical causes - that inform our day to day existence in the most profound ways. For me, those reasons are not ultimately the practical and the pragmatic. They are more holistic. In my ideal view of things, man's pleasure is often found in the things that don't have the immediate reason the rationalist looks for: stamp collections, idle walks, improvised whistling, falling in love, joining a political party, shooting a gun at inanimate objects.
Why does a man need a machine gun? I don't know that any man does. But I can think of why a man may want one. If a man likes shooting cans or paper targets, he might like shooting them in a variety of ways. With each weapon comes a different skill, a different pleasure, a different art - art, the quintessential pleasure of man, and what Dante calls the grandson of God. Indeed, there is much in our divinely imprinted nature that shines through in our ability to manipulate machinery to such precise ends, to aim and to cause reactions faster than our physical natures could ever cause without our artifaction.
There are some who will find this a weak argument for non-restriction of weaponry by device class, and I respect their concerns. The truth is that the effect of certain weapons can be very much more terrible when aimed at a living being than other weapons'. However, the aim is the most terrible part. And it is more causally, more philosophically, related to the effect which we all (of course) desire to avoid. The question is whether we want to cede control of a thing which may be used harmlessly and for pleasure because of the perverted individuals who use that thing for pernicion.
This relates, of course, to what I said in my last post about our propensity as a people to respond categorically to aberrations and to try to "control" every aspect of our lives; I've tagged this post with many labels, including subsidiarity, and there is the reason why. We are always and everywhere giving up ordinary freedoms and passing laws to restrict the liberties of normal individuals in order to control against those abnormal few who abuse the gifts of freedom and will. It is a strategy which perhaps is justified in a Kindergarten, but it has no place amongst the affairs of civilized men and women. I need not make any of the slippery slope arguments (which only may be fallacious) about how a restrictive society will continue in its rut; for, if you, dear reader, have not yet felt sympathy for my philosophical appeal, I don't know whether we'll ever come to agree on this.
For my part, I doubt I'll ever start a gun collection: it's cost prohibitive. But I'd like to know that I may do so if I choose - if I win the lottery or get my wits about me and get out of academia so that I can earn money. My aim in doing so, however, would not be to take life, but to give it: to live more vitally, more freely, more artfully, more pleasurably. To shoot with friends at things which there is no harm and all fun in shooting, to feel the rush that it gives, to respect the awful power it represents, to deplore the terrible violence that is its perversion. In short, to revel in controlling what is my right as a normal man to control, and what needs no other to control on my behalf.
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Thursday, January 13, 2011
Saturday, December 18, 2010
So, What Would Dorothy Day Do?
About a fortnight ago, I posed a question and promised to return to it.
And so, let's get to it. But how?
It would be tempting to start with an invitation, dear reader, that you reflect with me upon the world in which we find ourselves, now nearly a full year into the second decade of the second millennium of the Christian era. But what use is it? I don't know how it goes for you, but for me the reflection overwhelms me almost the moment I've begun. How difficult it would be even to try to catalog the major problems we face, to pick perhaps the top ten maladies plaguing society, and then even tentatively to suggest how Dorothy Day's example might help us in addressing just one of them! How, then, to begin?
Well, in short, not there. We have already been warned against the wrong-headedness of such an approach by the great Chesterton, who called it - in What's Wrong With The World - "the medical mistake":
But here I must take one more tangent. I own that this list is by no means exhaustive; but even with that caveat I know some will disagree with what I have remarked as "essential" to Dorothy Day's character based on my own study of her life and works. I fear this is unavoidable - yet, I will not apologize nor over-correct for the possible disagreement. I cannot enter deeply here into any discussion of where and why I see these features figuring prominently in Dorothy's biography (nor discuss why I choose these particular qualities above others equally worthy of consideration). My main goal is too modest for all that; I am concerned here to explore the usefulness and fruitfulness of our question as a practical one for translating the Gospel in our age. I welcome dispute and conversation on the matter and will happily work to justify my observations at a length in the comment-boxes that would be cumbersome to this main post. [For those who are simply unfamiliar, there are plenty of good resources out there to get started in a study of this fascinating woman's life: here are just a few.]
Today, I offer for our consideration three manners in which Dorothy Day is a modern exemplar of the Christian life and the practice of the Gospel: as a radical, as a personalist, and as a woman with an apostolate.
Dorothy Day: Radical
In identifying Dorothy Day as a radical, I borrow from the wisdom of Archbishop Charles Chaput who recently offered some reflections on her witness to our age on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of her death. In his own choice to call Day a radical, the Archbishop returned to the etymological root (pun intended) of the word: "She was radical in the truest sense of the word," Chaput said, "committed to the root of the Christian vocation." She witnessed to the Gospel in season and out of season, and "refused to ignore or downplay those Catholic teachings that might be inconvenient."
Thus we find the first use for our question, "What Would Dorothy Day Do?" It translates into the many situations in which the relation of the Christian vocation to the status quo is one of paradoxism. We might think especially, in our age, of situations which seem to imply a binary choice, wherein neither proposed way seems really consistent with the demands of the Gospel. How often are we choosing "the lesser of two evils" - when do we give into compromise for the sake of social manners and communal comfort? Such are situations which probably call for radicalism.
We may ask, what would Dorothy Day do in political life? Whose "side" would she have taken in the many conflicts which define civic discourse in our age: in the airports, at the borders, outside the abortuaries, across the world from the battle zone? I think that her life gives us clear indications of what she might have done in any of these scenarios; but it does not finally matter so much whether we choose to do exactly as she might have done, rather it is important for us that we, when once we've discerned the way that our vocation seems to indicate, do not hesitate in following through to the radical consequences that may unfold. We need not seek ridicule, strife, indignation, or imprisonment: consequences which Day's social actions earned for her with striking regularity. But when the cause of righteousness seems to lead to these things - which seems more and more likely an event - then we may find a useful measure of the full extent of our call in the radicalism of Dorothy Day. And if the situations of paradoxism plaguing our world discomfort only our minds but do not otherwise affect us, then we may well ask whether we are truly fulfilling our Christian call. If the times call for radical response and we do not give it, who will?
Dorothy Day: Personalist
I have remarked before on how the personalist vision is essential for rightly-ordered social action. I believe that it is, philosophically, the key to unlocking the import of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of Christian Personalism - a response to and development upon Christian Existentialism - I think a useful encapsulation can be found in a teaching by Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day's own tutor in this school. She recounts somewhere (I am paraphrasing) how Peter described "selfhood" as being essential to living in true communion: He said that when any number of "I"s are present - that is, truly thematic selves - then there is a "we", and "we" is the essence of community; where, on the other hand, there is only "they", there is not community but "a crowd".
Crucial to the living of the Christian vocation is finding the other truly as a "self", a fully realized person with whom we are called into relationship. For Day, the importance of this is that the very self of the other is transformed by the Incarnation and by Christ's teaching on the judgment: when we serve others who are hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, we serve Him: and discovering Him in this way is crucial to having true relationship with Him. This is an inimitable aspect of Christian life which prayer and even the sacraments - even the Eucharist - cannot replace. Thus, for Dorothy, the exercise of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy became essential expressions of the Christian vocation: not merely peripheral concerns or even fruits of some deeper experience of holiness and grace. Christ is waiting to be met in personal encounters with the poor and needy in a way that is necessarily complementary to the manner in which He comes to us through sacrament.
[[It is an interesting side-light on this matter that the present Holy Father's social teaching seems to take a very similar tact to that of Dorothy and Peter Maurin. I have written about the Pope's work here in light of his affinity with the Christian Personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand. I also treat of an instance in section IV) where, on the unique category of love of neighbor, Benedict seems to go beyond the master's theology; it occurs to me now that the direction he seems to be taking in this respect is really foretokened in the examples of Day and Maurin.]
So, what would Dorothy Day do as a personalist in our age? Where - in whom - would she find Christ waiting for compassion, for respect, for love? Would she wait for Him to come to her, or go to seek Him out? ... which leads us to our next category:
Dorothy Day: Woman of Apostolic Living
Dorothy's apostolicity comes in two categories: word and action.
In Word
Dorothy challenged the orthodoxies of her day with words seeded by the Gospel's teachings. What conversations call for authentic Christian voices in our world today? In her own age, Dorothy published a paper for a penny-a-copy with a pittance of resources. We have unprecedented technological means for spreading the Christian message, for reaching untold audiences at the click of a mouse. On our own Facebook Walls we have, in all likelihood, audiences which numerically equal or surpass the initial subscribing membership of The Catholic Worker. Do we use this to our advantage - rather, to the Gospel's advantage? Do we choose our words to discomfort the smug and comfort the afflicted? Do we challenge with our words? Do we respond to the errors that cross our screens and add our voice to the conversation, or for the sake of anonymity and convenience turn a blind eye?
In Action
Dorothy was not content merely to wait for the challenge of the Gospel to cross her doorstep. She went out and gathered the lost and forsaken. She let her lodgings be overtaken by those in need and found larger ones when she ran out of space so that more could have the advantage of her aid. To our jaded age it may seem she was often taken advantage of. Perhaps she was. But this seemed to her less of a risk than the risk of doing too little, of missing a chance to engage in the apostolate.
The answer to our question here is so vast and varied as to almost seem unhelpful. There are so many ways in which we can help, so many ways in which we can make a difference. We know this much from the Gospel - so how does Dorothy's example really help to elucidate and distill that teaching for us and make it practicable?
I would argue that Dorothy's apostolic action is a useful model for us in its ambition and scope. In the name of humility, and in the name of the virtues of prudence and temperance, it seems that Christians today might let themselves too easily off the hook for simply not doing more that they could. (I should note that here, as in all of the above - in case you haven't realized it yet - I accuse myself first of all!)
This is, again, something I have written about before. In our age excuses are not hard to come by. Furthermore, -and I know this will be one of my more controversial points - it seems more in vogue these days to encourage the ordinary ways of holiness, to call for Christians to be more perfect in their day-to-day lives as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, businessmen, workers, painters, writers, etc. And, surely, this is needed. But I think we also need to intensify our call for Christians to do more - to go beyond the ordinary, to become immersed in the apostolate in a thorough-going manner, to go to the brink of when it seems they can simply do no more and then give even a little extra.
Perhaps it will seem that we are being taken advantage of, that the needy are bleeding us dry. But, then, perhaps this is the kind of bloodshed called for in this apostolic age, a new kind of martyrdom. And so, rather than asking what action Dorothy would undertake among the many social imperatives that need the work of good Christians, we can ask our question as a measure of degree: when we wonder whether we should do more, we can ask: "What Would Dorothy Day Do?"
I began this series of reflections by looking at the question, "What Would Jesus Do?" The question emblazoned on bracelets adorns the hands of believers throughout the world; what should really be found at the hands of believers is the answer to that question. In the hands of Dorothy Day, that answer was found: hands cuffed in radical action against injustice, hands lovingly stroking the face of a stranger, hands typing the words of evangelistic love, hands serving food to Christ in the breadlines. Ultimately, our purpose in asking our new question is not the question itself: it is the answer we will give: the answer we must give: the answer that reveals how Jesus already had done and continues doing "what He would". He calls us - and sends us forth.
And so, let's get to it. But how?
It would be tempting to start with an invitation, dear reader, that you reflect with me upon the world in which we find ourselves, now nearly a full year into the second decade of the second millennium of the Christian era. But what use is it? I don't know how it goes for you, but for me the reflection overwhelms me almost the moment I've begun. How difficult it would be even to try to catalog the major problems we face, to pick perhaps the top ten maladies plaguing society, and then even tentatively to suggest how Dorothy Day's example might help us in addressing just one of them! How, then, to begin?
Well, in short, not there. We have already been warned against the wrong-headedness of such an approach by the great Chesterton, who called it - in What's Wrong With The World - "the medical mistake":
[T]his scheme of medical question and answer is a blunder; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.... The only way to discuss the social evil is to get at once to the social ideal. We can all see the national madness; but what is national sanity? I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right. [Source]And so we will undertake a different approach, a positive project: we will outline certain aspects of the example of one modern saint and see whether these qualities suggest anything to us that can be transfered into and emulated in the context of our own age, not so distant from her own. I might suggest certain crises of culture which seem to line up in particular ways with Dorothy's life, but the choice of how exactly and to what extent her own actions apply in a given situation calls for personal discernment and the diligent exercise of prudence.
But here I must take one more tangent. I own that this list is by no means exhaustive; but even with that caveat I know some will disagree with what I have remarked as "essential" to Dorothy Day's character based on my own study of her life and works. I fear this is unavoidable - yet, I will not apologize nor over-correct for the possible disagreement. I cannot enter deeply here into any discussion of where and why I see these features figuring prominently in Dorothy's biography (nor discuss why I choose these particular qualities above others equally worthy of consideration). My main goal is too modest for all that; I am concerned here to explore the usefulness and fruitfulness of our question as a practical one for translating the Gospel in our age. I welcome dispute and conversation on the matter and will happily work to justify my observations at a length in the comment-boxes that would be cumbersome to this main post. [For those who are simply unfamiliar, there are plenty of good resources out there to get started in a study of this fascinating woman's life: here are just a few.]
Today, I offer for our consideration three manners in which Dorothy Day is a modern exemplar of the Christian life and the practice of the Gospel: as a radical, as a personalist, and as a woman with an apostolate.
Dorothy Day: Radical
In identifying Dorothy Day as a radical, I borrow from the wisdom of Archbishop Charles Chaput who recently offered some reflections on her witness to our age on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of her death. In his own choice to call Day a radical, the Archbishop returned to the etymological root (pun intended) of the word: "She was radical in the truest sense of the word," Chaput said, "committed to the root of the Christian vocation." She witnessed to the Gospel in season and out of season, and "refused to ignore or downplay those Catholic teachings that might be inconvenient."
Thus we find the first use for our question, "What Would Dorothy Day Do?" It translates into the many situations in which the relation of the Christian vocation to the status quo is one of paradoxism. We might think especially, in our age, of situations which seem to imply a binary choice, wherein neither proposed way seems really consistent with the demands of the Gospel. How often are we choosing "the lesser of two evils" - when do we give into compromise for the sake of social manners and communal comfort? Such are situations which probably call for radicalism.
We may ask, what would Dorothy Day do in political life? Whose "side" would she have taken in the many conflicts which define civic discourse in our age: in the airports, at the borders, outside the abortuaries, across the world from the battle zone? I think that her life gives us clear indications of what she might have done in any of these scenarios; but it does not finally matter so much whether we choose to do exactly as she might have done, rather it is important for us that we, when once we've discerned the way that our vocation seems to indicate, do not hesitate in following through to the radical consequences that may unfold. We need not seek ridicule, strife, indignation, or imprisonment: consequences which Day's social actions earned for her with striking regularity. But when the cause of righteousness seems to lead to these things - which seems more and more likely an event - then we may find a useful measure of the full extent of our call in the radicalism of Dorothy Day. And if the situations of paradoxism plaguing our world discomfort only our minds but do not otherwise affect us, then we may well ask whether we are truly fulfilling our Christian call. If the times call for radical response and we do not give it, who will?
Dorothy Day: Personalist
I have remarked before on how the personalist vision is essential for rightly-ordered social action. I believe that it is, philosophically, the key to unlocking the import of the Catholic Church's Social Teaching.
For those unfamiliar with the concept of Christian Personalism - a response to and development upon Christian Existentialism - I think a useful encapsulation can be found in a teaching by Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day's own tutor in this school. She recounts somewhere (I am paraphrasing) how Peter described "selfhood" as being essential to living in true communion: He said that when any number of "I"s are present - that is, truly thematic selves - then there is a "we", and "we" is the essence of community; where, on the other hand, there is only "they", there is not community but "a crowd".
Crucial to the living of the Christian vocation is finding the other truly as a "self", a fully realized person with whom we are called into relationship. For Day, the importance of this is that the very self of the other is transformed by the Incarnation and by Christ's teaching on the judgment: when we serve others who are hungry, thirsty, naked, imprisoned, we serve Him: and discovering Him in this way is crucial to having true relationship with Him. This is an inimitable aspect of Christian life which prayer and even the sacraments - even the Eucharist - cannot replace. Thus, for Dorothy, the exercise of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy became essential expressions of the Christian vocation: not merely peripheral concerns or even fruits of some deeper experience of holiness and grace. Christ is waiting to be met in personal encounters with the poor and needy in a way that is necessarily complementary to the manner in which He comes to us through sacrament.
[[It is an interesting side-light on this matter that the present Holy Father's social teaching seems to take a very similar tact to that of Dorothy and Peter Maurin. I have written about the Pope's work here in light of his affinity with the Christian Personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand. I also treat of an instance in section IV) where, on the unique category of love of neighbor, Benedict seems to go beyond the master's theology; it occurs to me now that the direction he seems to be taking in this respect is really foretokened in the examples of Day and Maurin.]
So, what would Dorothy Day do as a personalist in our age? Where - in whom - would she find Christ waiting for compassion, for respect, for love? Would she wait for Him to come to her, or go to seek Him out? ... which leads us to our next category:
Dorothy Day: Woman of Apostolic Living
Dorothy's apostolicity comes in two categories: word and action.
In Word
Dorothy challenged the orthodoxies of her day with words seeded by the Gospel's teachings. What conversations call for authentic Christian voices in our world today? In her own age, Dorothy published a paper for a penny-a-copy with a pittance of resources. We have unprecedented technological means for spreading the Christian message, for reaching untold audiences at the click of a mouse. On our own Facebook Walls we have, in all likelihood, audiences which numerically equal or surpass the initial subscribing membership of The Catholic Worker. Do we use this to our advantage - rather, to the Gospel's advantage? Do we choose our words to discomfort the smug and comfort the afflicted? Do we challenge with our words? Do we respond to the errors that cross our screens and add our voice to the conversation, or for the sake of anonymity and convenience turn a blind eye?
In Action
Dorothy was not content merely to wait for the challenge of the Gospel to cross her doorstep. She went out and gathered the lost and forsaken. She let her lodgings be overtaken by those in need and found larger ones when she ran out of space so that more could have the advantage of her aid. To our jaded age it may seem she was often taken advantage of. Perhaps she was. But this seemed to her less of a risk than the risk of doing too little, of missing a chance to engage in the apostolate.
The answer to our question here is so vast and varied as to almost seem unhelpful. There are so many ways in which we can help, so many ways in which we can make a difference. We know this much from the Gospel - so how does Dorothy's example really help to elucidate and distill that teaching for us and make it practicable?
I would argue that Dorothy's apostolic action is a useful model for us in its ambition and scope. In the name of humility, and in the name of the virtues of prudence and temperance, it seems that Christians today might let themselves too easily off the hook for simply not doing more that they could. (I should note that here, as in all of the above - in case you haven't realized it yet - I accuse myself first of all!)
This is, again, something I have written about before. In our age excuses are not hard to come by. Furthermore, -and I know this will be one of my more controversial points - it seems more in vogue these days to encourage the ordinary ways of holiness, to call for Christians to be more perfect in their day-to-day lives as husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, businessmen, workers, painters, writers, etc. And, surely, this is needed. But I think we also need to intensify our call for Christians to do more - to go beyond the ordinary, to become immersed in the apostolate in a thorough-going manner, to go to the brink of when it seems they can simply do no more and then give even a little extra.
Perhaps it will seem that we are being taken advantage of, that the needy are bleeding us dry. But, then, perhaps this is the kind of bloodshed called for in this apostolic age, a new kind of martyrdom. And so, rather than asking what action Dorothy would undertake among the many social imperatives that need the work of good Christians, we can ask our question as a measure of degree: when we wonder whether we should do more, we can ask: "What Would Dorothy Day Do?"
I began this series of reflections by looking at the question, "What Would Jesus Do?" The question emblazoned on bracelets adorns the hands of believers throughout the world; what should really be found at the hands of believers is the answer to that question. In the hands of Dorothy Day, that answer was found: hands cuffed in radical action against injustice, hands lovingly stroking the face of a stranger, hands typing the words of evangelistic love, hands serving food to Christ in the breadlines. Ultimately, our purpose in asking our new question is not the question itself: it is the answer we will give: the answer we must give: the answer that reveals how Jesus already had done and continues doing "what He would". He calls us - and sends us forth.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
More Thoughts on Yuletide (of My Philosophy of Decking the Halls)
Lo, the day is coming, blazing like an oven, when all the proud and all evildoers will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire, leaving them neither root nor branch, says the LORD of hosts."The day is coming..." - these words from the first reading of today's Mass present a good jumping-off point for yet another discussion of due seasonal awareness in our existential encounter of the meaning of the Christmas season.Malachi 3:19
In the Church, for some weeks now, we have been looking toward the prophetic day, the adventus of Christ the King. Next week, we celebrate the Solemnity of Christ the King - the final Sunday in the Novus Ordo calendar of the ordinal Sundays following Pentecost. It is a celebration of arrival as well as of expectation: it is, in a sense, a nice microcosm of the whole meaning of the season of Advent which we enter the following week. We are at once joyous, but also restrained - penitential, sober, alert, watching. Watching for Christ to come again, in the consummation of time and the fulfillment of the Kingdom, and also watching with a different emphasis of attention Christ's daily arrivals in our lives as Baptised members of His Holy People.
Now, so far I am very much in agreement with the sort of philosophy propounded by many good Christian apologists on the correct posture of religious experience at the ending of the Church year: see, for example, this excellent resource. But I part ways - really, just a bit, although it might seem more pronounced - in terms of how we should approach the day-to-day experience of this restrained joy and anticipation.
I have taken a bit of flack this week for having already put up my Christmas tree. Now, it should be noted that, while I have placed the tree (a fake one, but nicely made) and hung it with lights (actually, they came pre-arranged on the branches), I am not going to regularly light the tree just yet. But while I'm easing into that, I will be lighting it before the recommended date given by FishEaters, December 24th. I want to deal with that recommendation here, as well as address some of the objections that I've taken against my having put up my tree "so early" - and I apologize if some of this will seem redundant to those who have read my other ruminations on this subject, but I will try to cast the matter in more precise terms here than I've done before.
So, on to the objections:
It's not even Thanksgiving yet!Well, this can be dispatched with rather easily, I think. What is Thanksgiving, anyway? And why should it have any bearing on our understanding of the cosmic realities surrounding the revelation of the Son of God as Man? Thanksgiving is, in a sense, a Hallmark Holiday. It is a secular celebration tied in some ways to the tradition of harvest festivals, and useful insofar as that goes. But it is, on the other hand, an observance of an American heritage - largely imagined - of making friends with our displaced aborigines. In fact, there's something ironic in hearing people who disparage the secularization of the Christmas observance appealing to Thanksgiving as some sort of meaningful time-marker that ushers in the appropriate time of anticipation. It is, to say the very least, question begging: for those who object that I've put up my Christmas tree before Thanksgiving, I reply, "Why do you put up your Christmas tree after Thanksgiving? Or, more to the point, why do you put it up at all, whenever you do put it up?" And there's the rub. The why is the heart of the matter, so let's get at that, shall we?
It's not even Advent yet!Now, we're getting a little closer to a meaningful discussion, as Advent does at least relate in a meaningful way to the matter at hand, a way that Thanksgiving does not. So, let's look at this one more closely. A first approach here is the same Socratic question with which I ended the last paragraph: "So, when do you put up your tree, and why? What does it mean?" Now, to this, there is the answer of FishEaters first of all, which situates the question in the meaning of the season of Advent:
The mood of this season is one of somber spiritual preparation that increases in joy with each day, and the gaudy "Christmas" commercialism that surrounds it in the Western world should be overcome as much as possible. The singing of Christmas carols (which comes earlier and earlier each year), the talk of "Christmas" as a present reality, the decorated trees and the parties -- these things are "out of season" for Catholics; we should strive to keep the Seasons of Advent holy and penitential, always remembering, as they say, that "He is the reason for the Season."And so it is that FishEaters recommends putting up the tree on Christmas Eve - certainly not lighting it before that night. But, here, the argument is all non sequiturs: we haven't really identified why the trees go up at all, what lighting them is meant to symbolize to begin with. After all, any conclusions we derive about propriety of time-frame will depend upon this information. Thus, if the Christmas tree is somehow part of the commericalized secular abuse of Christmas, then we should want nothing to do with it at any time. There is, on the other hand, the notion of the Christmas Tree as a "baptized" symbol representative of Christ Himself: the tree anagogically associated with the Cross, the evergreen with His eternity, the lights with the kerygma directed to the conditions of the poor and lowly. But penitential preparation and expectation doesn't mean we hide Christ from our experience: we don't pretend during Advent that He's never come. [Indeed, the first half of Advent - and the foregoing weeks in the liturgical cycle - aim to prepare us for and focus on the Second Coming at the end of time. What does the tree have to do with that?]
But the symbolism of the tree, while indeed representing truths about the Person of Christ, has even richer meaning. The symbol includes its pagan connotations before the baptized meaning: the Norse and Germanic celebrations of Yule, the winter ritual of warding off death with symbols of life (the tree's vitality) and warding off dark and cold with warmth and light (the candles hung upon the boughs). Not just the symbol itself was baptized and given new meaning, but the Christmas event transforms these earlier associations as well. These pagan ideas - as symbolized in a tree - in a sense recapitulate the entire pagan ethos of pre-Christian expectation: those seeds of the Gospel that were implanted through natural law and the experience of nature. The tree here is meaningful not in its similitude to Christ, but in its difference: it represents our wants and desires for light in darkness, warmth when we are cold, life that escapes or cheats the ever ominous threat of death. We lose this meaning somewhat in our technological age, when winter doesn't mean the threat of starvation or exposure, the testing of our harvest and our hearth against the ferociousness of a fallen world. G.K. Chesterton's reflection from The New Jerusalem puts this meaning quite nicely: "Anyone thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate." The effect of all this is that the tree becomes part and parcel of our expectation, our anticipation, even our somberness: the tree reminds us of Christ, but it is not Christ. The lights combat the darkness, but they do not conquer it as He will do when He comes. It is a species of logical fallacy to suppose that the tree must necessarily distract us from this difference. The notion of holding off on the use of the tree as decoration ironically gives it more power than it deserves, rather exalts it instead of "putting it in its proper place." It all depends on what the tree means and why we put it up when we do. If we see the tree only as an embodiment of Christ and as some sort of panacea for the winter blues, then I agree that it has no place in Advent or before. But if it is, instead, a reminder of our own feebleness, a symbol of the futility and fragility of our battle with darkness and death, then it can very truly have a proper place throughout the entire darkening part of the year. In the one approach, the culmination of the tree's meaning is when its lights are hung on the night of Christ's arrival, demonstrative of the light he brings; in the other, the culmination is when the tree's lights fade and our attention redirects to the child in the manger that was once empty, His own ethereal light and power making a joke in the darkest time of year of our own weak dwimmer-craft.
But... the department stores! The commercialization of it all! Doesn't this give in to that cheapening of Christmas, and shouldn't we as good Christians fight against that trend of secularism?Once again, this is typical of the approach that FishEaters seems to take along with many well-meaning preachers. I reiterate here that we run the risk of mistaking, a la post hoc ergo propter hoc, a common result for an inevitable one - or, in the terms of philosophy, we give perhaps sufficient cause the more potent meaning of necessary cause. As my defense against this objection, I'll appeal to the secondary players in the Christmas drama: John the Baptist, Herod the Great, and the Oriental Magi. As a preliminary, though, I present another Socratic question: "What should we do?" It's all very well and good to grumble about the commercialization of Christmas and determine that we will not participate, but all our efforts and words spent upon this determination can sometimes distract us from the pressing question of what we ought to be doing instead. Many people I speak with on this issue have very good reasons for rejecting the culture's observances at this time of year, but they're much less salient about having reasons for their own practices. Don't we concede too much to the culture, don't we let them have their way with Christmas, by simply stopping our ears and closing our eyes and running around all gloomy and disgruntled, "tsk"-ing in the check-out aisles and frowning at the office decorations?
Enter the Gospel players. John the Baptist is the figure of knowledge about the meaning of Advent and Christmas; Herod the figure of missing the point; and the Magi the figure of those who half-understand, who are charmed by the signs and search for meaning. Take any one of these away, and you lose something of the power of the drama. There are plenty of Magi in our world today who are, as the Biblical Magi did, running into Herod and being put on a wrong track. Who will announce, as the Angel did, the error of Herod's ways? Who will warn them off the mistaken path and usher them into the true recognition of the mystery? It must be we who do so, taking John the Baptist as our model.
To put it succinctly, it is precisely because Christmas has been commercialized and demeaned by our culture that we must become more knowing, more articulate, more robust in the manifestation of its true meaning and power. If we don't do it as a sign for the world, we must at the very least do it for ourselves and not succumb to pride. We can't think we're unaffected by all of what's happening around us from mid-November until December 25th, and then suddenly ending. When we return home after a saccharine-soaked swim in our cultural soup, we must have cures for it. On the one hand, we can drive past the decorated trees on mainstreet and pass the Salvation Army Santa Clauses and retreat behind our door with a grumbled "Bah humbug," seeking to purify our minds entirely from all this untimely joy. But it seems to me to be just as effective to put up our own tree, with our own meaning and intent, and to allow ourselves to be struck by the difference of it all. The tree can serve as a true herald who disabuses us of Herod's lies. We should keep the season robustly and vitally within our own homes, very aware of the meaning behind all that we do. Doing so will at once highlight the vapidness of the culture's indulgences and soberly remind us what is being missed - it might even spur us on to find ways of expressing the distinction to the world (such as writing a blog post, for example). Are we giving in to the culture more by maintaining our own observance with added vitality rather than by simply retreating from it all?
And so goes my attempt at justifying my seemingly untimely tree. I welcome discussion, even debate, on the matter. Because, for me, what we do and when we do it are less important questions than why we do them at all. I respect the person who puts up his tree on Christmas Eve, provided he has good reasons for it. It puts Christmas ornaments and decorations in the proper place to realize them as manipulable symbols that have meaning according to their use. They are not ex opere operato fixtures that necessarily add to or detract from our religious awareness. Rather, they are expressions of our awareness - or of our ignorance - to the extent that we use them deliberately and use them well.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
It's Just Not Cricket
In a schoolyard, a game of Simon Says. A boy stands in the middle of a circle of classmates, each of whom has one foot raised in the air, a hand on the head, and eyes tightly shut.
"Open your eyes," the boy says. None do. "Simon says, open your eyes." And their eyes are opened.
The boy, a shrewd young man who is perhaps feeling a little too haughty in his position of arbitrary power, has begun to grow rather bored with the game. To his right sit another half-dozen or so kids who have gotten caught doing or not doing the sundry activities commanded, but none from real inattentiveness: most have deliberately thrown the game to mix things up a bit, to gain a chorus of appreciative laughter and to reinforce the idea that this is fun, after all, what they're doing. But the illusion has lost its power for the boy who is Simon. He is no longer entertained: he sees the absurdity of it all. And so, he contrives his own way to have fun.
In a yawning sort of way, he says matter-of-factly, "Aiighh-ooohaayysmm, put down your foot." Two of the children around him stand down. He points triumphantly, "Ha! I didn't say Simon says!"
"Yes, you did!" Even those who were wise to the ruse feel empathy for the injustice, because they had been as unsure in keeping their feet raised as their fellows had been in putting them down.
"No, I didn't," Simon shouts back, "I yawned. I never said 'Simon says.'" And he smugly folds his arms. Defeated by his certainty, the losers slink off to sit in the row of rejects, muttering under their breath. And, hearing them, another inspiration strikes him.
"Simonssaysdont put-your-foot-down," he mumbles, quickly, with the flattest of intonations, but carefully enunciating the last few words. The remaining three contestants lower their raised feet, and Simon raises his arms in victory above his head. "Ha! I said don't! You didn't hear me, but I said it! I said don't! You're all out! I get to be Simon again," he finishes, turning to the gaggle seated nearby, appealing to them for a new round.
But no one stirs. Eyes all around him aim arrows of animosity.
"It's not fair," one boy complains. "It doesn't make sense if we can't understand you."
"But it doesn't make sense, anyway," Simon tries to explain, wondering to himself how they cannot have been equally disenchanted with the stupidity of the game before his innovations made it interesting again.
"We'll play again," offers another boy, but caveats in a sinister tone: "Only, you can't be Simon."
"Hey, no!" Simon pouts. "If nobody is left at the end, the same person goes again! That's the rule!" Granted, he said to himself, we never had to use that rule: but that was with the old way, the stupid way. But his appeal does not silence the malcontent around him: the other children have seen that rules can be played with, can be improvised.
And so the circle gathers once more around a new demagogue, but Simon goes off to sulk. He has learned a lesson, today; indeed, they all have - a terrible and important lesson about politics and laws, about despotism and democracy, and about the philosophy of rule-making and rule-breaking.
In the news recently, there's been quite a dust-up over an e-book recently posted for purchase on Amazon.com. The work, The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct, was of course bound to be provocative. The title alone is enough to make me recoil in disgust; I have no need even imagining what would be its lurid contents. The concept is despicable, and it is a sign of the times in which we live.
But the outcry about the book strikes me as frankly ironic. Perhaps this is some of my cynicism about our culture, but the calls for Amazon to remove the listing and to censure the author strike me as simply inconsistent.
The manufacturers of our culture are constantly doing away with taboos and norms. The popular culture trajectory for the past half-century has seemed to be simply searching out those things which "simply are not done," and doing them. And, having done, promoting them. And having promoted them, normalizing them. And having normalized them, legalizing them. And having legalized them, turning with the same attitude of open-mindedness and tolerance to the things which used to be normal (or normative) and persecuting those instead.
What logical argument can the doyens of our ethical elite possibly mount against this new book, I wonder? How must the author feel hearing their outcry, the same voices that have always and forever been crying out for more license and liberty and the stripping away of taboos, now warning, "No, you can't do that, mate; it's just not cricket"? They have mumbled their commands; he could have sworn he'd heard "Simon Says." And now this sudden changing of the game? And the fact is, when you get right down to it, that his critics have no argument: many of them, at least. They have sown a philosophy of rules and are now reaping its fruits. Isn't the present author simply taking a page out of their book and asserting a strategy they used in the past to make what wasn't done suddenly okay to do?
This is not to say that the author is ultimately right. Of course, he isn't. He's wrong according to the natural law: but they've denied that. He's wrong according the Church's law: but they've abolished that. He's wrong according to men's laws: but they've changed those before. And he's wrong according to cultural sensitivities and mores and commonly held values: but isn't he simply reshaping them as his present critics have so laudably reshaped them in the past?
It's a sad, silly state of affairs. It's the state of affairs that moralists and preachers have warned about for years and years. But that's a slippery slope, they were told. "It'll never come to that: that's simply not done; it's just not cricket." But it came to that, and then went past. And then another sticking point, another event horizon, a place at which we'd surely never arrive - see it retreating now in the rear view mirror? Every voice of caution, every prophet who stood to withstand the tyrannical march of progress and social experimentation has been mowed down by their tanks: the academic hierarchy, the Hollywood execs, the bought-off politicians. And the blood that soaks the battleground of the culture wars cries out as eloquently as the blood of Abel: "I told you so."
The lesson of the schoolyard is the lesson today. The author might be the loser today, he's waiting on the sidelines. The present Simons one day may learn how rules can turn against you when once you've shown how to turn them; they may find that their game is suddenly somebody else's.
"Open your eyes," the boy says. None do. "Simon says, open your eyes." And their eyes are opened.
The boy, a shrewd young man who is perhaps feeling a little too haughty in his position of arbitrary power, has begun to grow rather bored with the game. To his right sit another half-dozen or so kids who have gotten caught doing or not doing the sundry activities commanded, but none from real inattentiveness: most have deliberately thrown the game to mix things up a bit, to gain a chorus of appreciative laughter and to reinforce the idea that this is fun, after all, what they're doing. But the illusion has lost its power for the boy who is Simon. He is no longer entertained: he sees the absurdity of it all. And so, he contrives his own way to have fun.
In a yawning sort of way, he says matter-of-factly, "Aiighh-ooohaayysmm, put down your foot." Two of the children around him stand down. He points triumphantly, "Ha! I didn't say Simon says!"
"Yes, you did!" Even those who were wise to the ruse feel empathy for the injustice, because they had been as unsure in keeping their feet raised as their fellows had been in putting them down.
"No, I didn't," Simon shouts back, "I yawned. I never said 'Simon says.'" And he smugly folds his arms. Defeated by his certainty, the losers slink off to sit in the row of rejects, muttering under their breath. And, hearing them, another inspiration strikes him.
"Simonssaysdont put-your-foot-down," he mumbles, quickly, with the flattest of intonations, but carefully enunciating the last few words. The remaining three contestants lower their raised feet, and Simon raises his arms in victory above his head. "Ha! I said don't! You didn't hear me, but I said it! I said don't! You're all out! I get to be Simon again," he finishes, turning to the gaggle seated nearby, appealing to them for a new round.
But no one stirs. Eyes all around him aim arrows of animosity.
"It's not fair," one boy complains. "It doesn't make sense if we can't understand you."
"But it doesn't make sense, anyway," Simon tries to explain, wondering to himself how they cannot have been equally disenchanted with the stupidity of the game before his innovations made it interesting again.
"We'll play again," offers another boy, but caveats in a sinister tone: "Only, you can't be Simon."
"Hey, no!" Simon pouts. "If nobody is left at the end, the same person goes again! That's the rule!" Granted, he said to himself, we never had to use that rule: but that was with the old way, the stupid way. But his appeal does not silence the malcontent around him: the other children have seen that rules can be played with, can be improvised.
And so the circle gathers once more around a new demagogue, but Simon goes off to sulk. He has learned a lesson, today; indeed, they all have - a terrible and important lesson about politics and laws, about despotism and democracy, and about the philosophy of rule-making and rule-breaking.
In the news recently, there's been quite a dust-up over an e-book recently posted for purchase on Amazon.com. The work, The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover's Code of Conduct, was of course bound to be provocative. The title alone is enough to make me recoil in disgust; I have no need even imagining what would be its lurid contents. The concept is despicable, and it is a sign of the times in which we live.
But the outcry about the book strikes me as frankly ironic. Perhaps this is some of my cynicism about our culture, but the calls for Amazon to remove the listing and to censure the author strike me as simply inconsistent.
The manufacturers of our culture are constantly doing away with taboos and norms. The popular culture trajectory for the past half-century has seemed to be simply searching out those things which "simply are not done," and doing them. And, having done, promoting them. And having promoted them, normalizing them. And having normalized them, legalizing them. And having legalized them, turning with the same attitude of open-mindedness and tolerance to the things which used to be normal (or normative) and persecuting those instead.
What logical argument can the doyens of our ethical elite possibly mount against this new book, I wonder? How must the author feel hearing their outcry, the same voices that have always and forever been crying out for more license and liberty and the stripping away of taboos, now warning, "No, you can't do that, mate; it's just not cricket"? They have mumbled their commands; he could have sworn he'd heard "Simon Says." And now this sudden changing of the game? And the fact is, when you get right down to it, that his critics have no argument: many of them, at least. They have sown a philosophy of rules and are now reaping its fruits. Isn't the present author simply taking a page out of their book and asserting a strategy they used in the past to make what wasn't done suddenly okay to do?
This is not to say that the author is ultimately right. Of course, he isn't. He's wrong according to the natural law: but they've denied that. He's wrong according the Church's law: but they've abolished that. He's wrong according to men's laws: but they've changed those before. And he's wrong according to cultural sensitivities and mores and commonly held values: but isn't he simply reshaping them as his present critics have so laudably reshaped them in the past?
It's a sad, silly state of affairs. It's the state of affairs that moralists and preachers have warned about for years and years. But that's a slippery slope, they were told. "It'll never come to that: that's simply not done; it's just not cricket." But it came to that, and then went past. And then another sticking point, another event horizon, a place at which we'd surely never arrive - see it retreating now in the rear view mirror? Every voice of caution, every prophet who stood to withstand the tyrannical march of progress and social experimentation has been mowed down by their tanks: the academic hierarchy, the Hollywood execs, the bought-off politicians. And the blood that soaks the battleground of the culture wars cries out as eloquently as the blood of Abel: "I told you so."
The lesson of the schoolyard is the lesson today. The author might be the loser today, he's waiting on the sidelines. The present Simons one day may learn how rules can turn against you when once you've shown how to turn them; they may find that their game is suddenly somebody else's.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Who Is My Neighbor?
Now the whole parable and purpose of these last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this: to assert that we must instantly begin all over again, and begin at the other end. I begin with a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is good. It is one of those adamantine tendernesses which are the touchstones of every age and race.The preceding passage is taken from one of the most stirring and rhetorically brilliant passages in all of Chesterton's writing. It is a brief chapter at the end of a too-brief book. You can read the entire passage here. When you're done that, you really should read the whole book. When you've done that, why not attend a conference on the book to learn more?G.K. Chesterton
In an earlier post, I spoke about the ramifications for our spiritual lives of the Gospel's teaching that we "belong" to Christ, and, by extension, to one another. I promised to come back to the subject and relate its meaning to our socio-politico notions.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37) is often used in addressing issues of social justice, and rightly so. It should be borne in mind that Christ's parable is addressed as an answer to the question, "Who is my neighbor?" We tend automatically to think of the poor man beset by robbers who receives the service of the Samaritan as the "neighbor." But, when Christ reiterates the question at the end of the parable, he asks which of the three passers-by - the Pharisee and Priest who ignore the man's plight, or the Samaritan who shows mercy - are neighbor to the afflicted person. The Good Samaritan is the neighbor in answer to the question.
This, then, begs the question: why were the priest and the teacher not neighbors to the wounded traveller? The answer lies in their choice not to commiserate with his sorrow and enter into relationship with him. Their coldness was a result of their attentions to other precepts of ritual purity which took precedence over the command to help the migrant man left in the ditch at the side of the road by brigands. The translation of Christ's answer, then, is not that "neighbors are people who help us" - remember that the question had been asked in the first place as a means to interpreting the command to love one's neighbor. Christ's answer, we must say, is indirect. It answers the question of who neighbor is by answering the more ultimate question of what neighborliness consists in. The command to love one's neighbor contains all of the information that the questioner needed: love is what creates neighborhood. Love draws person to person and establishes relationship. Love of neighbor does not need a qualifying question to answer who neighbor is: when love reigns, the lover sees his neighbor and, seeing him with love, he does what a good neighbor ought to do.
An important point to remember, here, theologically, is that the command to love God fully is placed first. This, then, becomes the basis - theoretically and formally - for the love of neighbor. For love of God will actually beget the virtuous disposition of charity - or, if you like, infuse it - in the believer. This disposition then serves as the answer key for finding a neighbor and responding according to the command to love.
Now, the upshot of this, following from the previous post, is that our social order needs to be one in which this disposition can realistically become the basis of personal action. In the engagement of every social work, including our economic service, human beings must be able to realize this potential which is begotten by the theological virtue of love.
And this has consequences for how we organize the relationships we have in society and the economy. We must remember that the human person is at the beginning and end of all our work in these matters. When we become too abstract, speaking about the migration of peoples as a labor force, or as laborers as an aspect of economic capital, or as the roles of people within society as their determinative value or worth to the social good, we do so at our peril. Economic rationalization has its place. Abstract theory of government and the rhetoric of policy have theirs. But all of these things are at the service of the ultimately important things, the human things.
A social order's efficiency and value may be seen in terms of what can be accomplished and achieved. But the matter of how things are achieved and who achieves them is even more important to consider. People need a space in which they can have the vision that love demands: a vision directed toward human ends, toward the good for themselves and the good for others.
This should be a staggering thought for us to consider. I'm not saying that I know the necessary ways to transition to a more personalistic atmosphere for modern society, but I know that the Church's Social Teaching demands us to consider it. Think of the line in the supermarket, the stands at the major sporting event, the traffic jam on the freeway, or the cubicle in an office building: maybe a lot like that road to Jerico. The end of the road might be the commercial city, or a mis-placed sense of civic, economic or even religious duty. But our way is strewn with real people, real people who would be loved - regardless of whether or not they'd love in return. And it's our job, it's the whole purpose of the love God gives us, to see them fully, to become neighbor to them by considering them under the aspect of a full personalist humanism, and if necessary by rendering them a service in charity.
The difficulty of this excercise should sober us. But it's also worth considering whether it needs to be so difficult, or how it might be less so. In our earlier post, we looked at how our membership in the Mystical Body of the Church bears a mark of personalism by our individual recognition within the unity to which we are ordered. We are called to communion, yes, but we are called by name - the name we are marked with at the same time as our marking with the sign of the Cross in Baptism and our "being claimed" for Christ. We retain that mark of individuality and it's what enables us to be in real relation with others, to belong to them while still being ourselves.
And so, another question that must confront us and that should inform our consideration of social ethics is how we enable people to become truly "thematic" to one another (to borrow a term from the personalist philosophers). What this means is that people need opportunities to excercise their humanity, their full activity of reason and will, their talents, quirks, and even just to be seen and felt in their fleshly individuality. To the extent that this thematicity is diminished, it becomes harder to become neighbor to one another - we're missing the spur that drives loves on, that awakens it in the heart of the lover and draws him to the other.
So, there we have reached the answer to our question - and it is, paradoxically, no more than a more fundamental question. Just as Christ's parable sort of threw the question back upon the questioner and made him look in the law of love to discern whether he was a good neighbor to others, so must we return to the basics and find a new beginning to looking at the social order. Let's start where Chesterton did: with our neighbor.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Meeting Our Membership Goals
You may be a construction worker working on a home,When Anthony Card. Bevilacqua, Archbishop Emeritus of Philadelphia, retired, he took up residence at Saint Charles Seminary. It was not uncommon for seminarians to meet him walking the halls. Looking with consideration at them from beneath his bushy eyebrows, he would sometimes ask, "Are you one of mine?" - by which he presumably meant to find out whether it was a seminarian who had been accepted to Philadelphia during his term as Archbishop.
You may be living in a mansion or you might live in a dome,
You might own guns and you might even own tanks,
You might be somebody’s landlord, you might even own banks
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.- Bob Dylan
The amusing question became a popular joke among the seminarians, but few ever stopped to consider the rather profound ecclesiastical implications behind its unconventional wording. The Shepherd had a sense of real possession over the members of his flock and his phrasing evinced this theological posture.
The mystery of membership in Christ's Body is one which provides for copious reflection. Indeed, the concept of personal identity is radically different for the Christian than for any other kind of person: the defining question in Baptism changes from "who we are", as the individual dies in the sacred waters and is claimed for Christ through the power of resurrection, and thenceforth the matter becomes a question of "whose we are" - we belong to Christ, living as members of His Mystical Body, the Church.
Our understanding of the social order ought to be framed by the theological import of this ultimate relation. The simple dialectic between the radical individualism of Western liberalism, on the one hand, and the depersonalizing solution into an absolute Social State, on the other, fails adequately to cope with this ontological transformation brought about by the Incarnation.
Even in the Christian tradition, the popular interpretation of the social Gospel has been insufficient in this regard. I'm thinking particularly of the work of Prof. Michael Novak, who sees something analogous between the ideal of the American market economy and the mystery of the Mystical Body.
The problem seems essentially to be that Paul's discourse on the Body in 1 Corinthians 12 lends itself to an organismic interpretation. Although this idea is by no means explicit in the Apostle's words, one can easily see how someone might begin to understand "membership" in the social order as a functional reality, with the different parts performing their specific roles as members or organelles of an organic whole. Yet, it is important to realize that the Body of which Paul speaks is a unique kind of Body. It is not merely metaphorical, true; but our understanding is problematic when the interpretive hermeneutic begins from the biological reality of the human body as we know it, and proceeds thereby toward an understanding of Paul's teaching. Rather, Paul's teaching is to be itself an interpretive key to other aspects of the Revelation in Christ, and vice versa. Taken in such a way, the guidelines for understanding the symbol become more cogent.
Number six of Lumen Gentium contains a taxonomy of metaphors from Revelation with the Body of Christ as foremost, but all of which are contingent for a full understanding of ecclesiology (and, by extension, these formulae condition our interpretation of the Church's evangelical mission with regard to the social order). The Church is a sheepfold with Christ as the one door; She is a flock to whom He is the Good Shepherd; She is a fecund land, a vineyard, "the tillage of God"; She is the building of God with Christ as cornerstone; She is "mother" and the "spotless Bride of the Lamb"; and She is finally the Body of which Christ is head. The document then goes on to speak extensively of the Church as the holy People of God, "a nation of Kings and Priests," with Christ himself as the High Priest.
The vision imparted by this rich tapestry of symbolism is not easy to summarize, but the major outline might be said to be one of distinction within unity. The individual is not annihilated by the role of service, but rather fully realized and actualized by the very "belonging" - again, the question is best put in terms of "whose" we are: into whose flock we have been cordoned, onto which building we have been built... and so on. However, the question is certainly not one of function. The gifts and charisms which are committed to the individual parts are secondary to the primary identification established by the ordering of the whole to its end. These aspects do not define the members in themselves, but are ordered to the service of the same ontological reality to which the members are ordered as persons, namely Christ. Put another way, all individual services and ministries, vocations and callings, are contained within the basic Baptismal call to holiness and relationship with Christ.
Now, the Church's proclamation of the Kingdom of God contains as an essential element the building up of a more just social order. And since this mission of the Social Gospel is nothing more than the extension of Christ into the world, it follows that the same kind of formal structure applies to that message as the one we've seen defining our ecclesiological ordering.
In a forthcoming post, I will speak about the shortcomings of a too-functional view of social justice. I will try to demonstrate that the same dual integrity of distinction and unity must apply to the social order as applies to the Body of Christ as a sacramental reality. Only in this way is the ordering of society truly analogous to the Mystical Body. It is not something brought into being by diversity of function and roles, but rather something primary to which any diversity of function and roles is contingently ordered. Finally, I will try to show that personal realization - what in the order of the Church is the "calling by name" of each sheep in the flock, the Baptismal claiming of each particular member for unique relation to the end - is just as crucial in the ordering of a just society, which is sadly lacking in our current arrangements which relegate economic players to the position of functional technicians rather than fully thematic persons.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Whence, Whither and Wherefore
The LORD'S message was, Halt at the cross-roads, look well, and ask yourselves which path it was that stood you in good stead long ago. That path follow, and you shall find rest for your souls.Our culture is in a crisis. It is a crisis of direction and discernment. It is a crisis of ends and means. It is a crisis of causality. It is a crisis at a cross-roads.Jeremias 6:16a [Knox]Simon Peter saith to him: Lord, whither goest thou? Jesus answered: Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow hereafter.John 13:36 [Douay-Rheims]
A wayward generation looks for a sign. Ours is a wayward generation in the most literal sense. We wander capriciously, blindly led by the blind, ever clutching at new mess-making demagogues for want of rescue from the messes made by previous ones. We put our hope in change, in changeable objects that have no business bearing the aspirations of that holy virtue. We look for signs, maybe. But our sign has been given us: the sign of Jonah. We too little heed its clear indication, the Way which it signifies; but brazenly march forward down our own path - headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps down a mired and muddied road.
Prophets were sent to the people of Israel to call them back to the Lord, that they might walk humbly with God (Micah 6). The gift of prophecy is still given, as Saint Paul observes (see 1 Corinthians 12-13). And prophecy consists in much the same task as it did in times past. Prophets call us to task for waywardness and point out the true road. What has changed is that the Way has been revealed to us in its fullness: it is Jesus Christ himself. Prophets now point to Him and to His Word to be our guide. Our urgency should be no less than the people of Nineveh, who feared the Lord when they heard the preaching of Jonah. That whole great city, its whole political order (from the King to the chattel), underwent upheaval in order to follow that sign and embark in the way of righteousness. Our social order has also been given a sign: the Church has proclaimed the Gospel of Truth and Life to the modern world. But we have been slow in donning our sackcloths.
In What's Wrong With the World, G.K. Chesterton (one of many modern prophets sent to show us Christ more clearly) attempted "a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical fact" (Part V, Chapter 5: Conclusion). This fact he pithily states in his first chapter: "I have called this book 'What Is Wrong with the World?' and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right."
Another way of putting this is to say that what is wrong is not merely that we do not heed the sign given us to show the Way, but we do not even look for one. We are not so concerned with where we go, but myopically center in on the fact of our going someplace.
Chesterton railed against the cult of progress, and this cult is perhaps even healthier in our day than it was in his. It is the worship of Mammon, an obsession with means to the detriment of the fair consideration of ends, the very essence of materialism.
In our mad rush from one crisis to another, we forget where we've come from and give no thought to where we should ultimately end up. It's a mad game of musical chairs, having a laugh with a moribund shrug that it seems somebody, after all, must always end up without a seat each time the silence falls. The Gospel of Wealth can only afford so many places round the table, and we figure perhaps the poor left out of the game are only there for lack of effort during the last interlude. We're just following the rules.
But Chesterton suggests that we might change the rules; nay, we might even change the game. Our Lord's banquet table has seats for the poor and maimed and blind and lame (Luke 14:21), and for Chesterton, securing our invitation should be the end of all our actions, even our political and economic ones. If this requires taking a seat on the floor and bowing out of the mad rush, then so be it.
Whence, whither and wherefore do we go along our way?
This patchwork of ideas that I have dumped onto the page above is an inroad to exploring this question. It is not a question to find an answer unknown: the answer is self-evident. But the question helps one to find where that answer lies in each of the sundry affairs of modern-day life: every moment of discernment and decision, big and small, finds us at a cross-roads. Which is the way that stood us in good stead before? Which is the way of the Cross?
I have above suggested several ideas that I invite my readers to reflect upon with me in the coming months.
I have decided to begin writing a series of papers which I will germinate here on the blog. If all goes as planned, these papers will become the formula of some kind of small book aimed at bringing the Catholic Social Teaching's answers to bear upon the questions of modernity. I propose to put these questions in a somewhat novel (but also very old) way.
My focus will be the four causes of classical philosophy. I said above that our culture is in a crisis of causality. We suffer most of all for losing sight of our final end, our telos: to know, love, and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him in the next. We suffer also from post-Cartesian metaphysics; formal causation has been largely subsumed into the consideration of the efficient or agent cause. This cause, too, is effete in our day: because an agent without an end lacks its ultimate definitive trait of directedness. We are left with a capricious efficiency and robust materialism (a kind of primacy given the material cause).
My goal will be to approach these topics in "primer" language, so that they can be freed somewhat of the technical language of philosophy and placed before the layman. I would consider this an injustice if my object were to train philosophers, but it is not. My object is to invite the question: whence, whither and wherefore? I hope to persuade that there is an ethical satisfaction in seeking full causality for our individual actions, as well as our social and political ones. We must bring the discernment of proper ends back into the discussion of appropriate means, and heed the signs of the times.
Finally, I will propose one path which places man (as an individual and as a member of a society) more easily and efficiently within reach of his ends is not a new road, but a very old road. It is a road that has stood men in good stead for many ages, a road that many Distributists sought as a way of transforming Nineveh. I will suggest this road as perhaps not quite necessary but at least expedient for one's own good and his contribution to the common good...
So, this is my project. This is how I plan to demonstrate the answer to my question, whence, whither, and wherefore. I beg your input, your reaction, your patience, your criticism: in a word, your help. And I beg the help of your prayers, because any builder labors in vain who has not the Lord's help.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
The Distributist's Bookshelf: Henry David Thoreau's Walden
In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden; Or, Life in the Woods / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod (Library of America) by Henry David Thoreau. ♦♦♦♦♦ ♠ ♠
(New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985).
pp. 321-587
It may seem a similarly Quixotic experiment to make Thoreau's treatise a hallmark of the ideal Distributist's Bookshelf. His philosophy of transcendentalism, for example, is rather at odds with the traditional metaphysical axiology of distributist thinkers like Belloc and Chesterton. His romantic notions of ideal pagandom and his fetish for Oriental wisdom would fain have met Belloc's approval, if quoted to him over a beer in a homely British Inn. But let's take a look at Walden and see why I think it deserves a place in every truly humane reader's library.
A good place to start is Thoreau's discussion of Economy. In the first chapter of his book, he outlines the "necessaries of life for man" which include "Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel" (332). He distinguishes these from luxuries, which he says are not merely unnecessary, but often times positive distractions from more important things (334). He continues, in the same place,
Thoreau embraces the ideal of leisure. He observes that once man has taken care of the essentials of life, he should look at his freedom from want as an opportunity to contemplate higher things, rather than a chance for getting surplus wealth. Yet, this latter object is what he found occupying most of his contemporaries: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (329). This desperation is largely due, Thoreau contends, to the industrial system, which begets a cyclic obsession with wealth, rather than true value:
Thoreau's complaints with the modern life do not stop there. He moved into relative isolation in order to commune with Nature. The hustle and bustle of modernity, for him, was disruptive to meaningful communion, as he explains in his chapter on solitude:
Many other specific ideas and virtues of Walden might be referenced: its cunning ctiticisms of industrial squalor, its celebration of the value of home and homestead, its wry sarcasm about the many material possessions which man uses to prop himslef up (literally - in one place, Thoreau offers a wonderfully amusing satire on furniture: "Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse") (see 374).
The greatest asset of Walden, however, is hard to put into words. It is its very ethos. The sheer beauty of Thoreau's prose is in some places literally enough to move one to tears of empathy. His descriptions of crickets chirping, or the sun rising, all the sundry wonders of creation which modern man takes so much for granted - these are the crown jewels of Walden. If not a single ethical principle articulated as such finds its way home when one reads the book, he shall still be somehow a better man for having poured through its pages - or rather, had them poured into him. For Thoreau's liquescent sentences speak directly to the romance in the heart of man which Chesterton knew to be the practical form of reverent awe and wonder. A distributist should return to the pages of Walden often, if only to re-sensitize himself to the miraculous renewal of creation that happens in each moment of every day: the budding of every flower, the falling of every snowflake.
Somehow, this ethos behind Walden is the ultimate communication of its words to the reader, and perhaps no digest is possible. Even Thoreau himself, a peerless master of our language, found it difficult to convey summarily this finding of his own practical experience. So, I shall end at a loss for words, and allow the author one final attempt of his own:
(New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985).
pp. 321-587
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."In 1845, Henry David Thoreau took to the woods near Concord, Massachusetts with the goal "to live deliberately." He meticulously recorded the practical exigencies of his experiment and set them down in several hundreds of words which are amongst the finest prose ever composed in the English language. Whether or not Thoreau succeeded in his Quixotic experiment, he certainly did succeed in crafting one of the finest and most beautiful books ever written by an American.- Thoreau, What I Lived For
It may seem a similarly Quixotic experiment to make Thoreau's treatise a hallmark of the ideal Distributist's Bookshelf. His philosophy of transcendentalism, for example, is rather at odds with the traditional metaphysical axiology of distributist thinkers like Belloc and Chesterton. His romantic notions of ideal pagandom and his fetish for Oriental wisdom would fain have met Belloc's approval, if quoted to him over a beer in a homely British Inn. But let's take a look at Walden and see why I think it deserves a place in every truly humane reader's library.
A good place to start is Thoreau's discussion of Economy. In the first chapter of his book, he outlines the "necessaries of life for man" which include "Food, Shelter, Clothing, and Fuel" (332). He distinguishes these from luxuries, which he says are not merely unnecessary, but often times positive distractions from more important things (334). He continues, in the same place,
When he has obtained those things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced... (op. cit.).
Thoreau embraces the ideal of leisure. He observes that once man has taken care of the essentials of life, he should look at his freedom from want as an opportunity to contemplate higher things, rather than a chance for getting surplus wealth. Yet, this latter object is what he found occupying most of his contemporaries: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation" (329). This desperation is largely due, Thoreau contends, to the industrial system, which begets a cyclic obsession with wealth, rather than true value:
The mass of men... are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times, when they might improve them. There are some who complain most energetically and inconsolably of any, because they are, as they say, doing their duty. I also have in my mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus have forged their own golden or silver fetters (335).Now, this is an observation which the distributist critique of modern economy certainly shares. Thoreau's ideals may differ; he may have given his contemplative energies over to principles with which we do not sympathize. But he speaks to the fundamental drive in man to look beyond the merely material for more important things. His view of work and labor are, in the main, somewhat problematic. Sometimes, he seems only to view pejoratively the Divine mandate to "till the earth," which we know is a holy and meaningful occupation. Yet, even here, there is a point of contact with distributist principles. Thoreau is grappling with that special punishment which God selected for Adam after his fall in Eden: that he would henceforth only bring forth his food from the soil "by the sweat of his brow" (Gen. 3:19). The end of human labor is not in itself, but only meaningful within the context of a fully Christian anthropology, which takes into account the restorative power of grace. But Thoreau grasps that there is something deeper and beyond mere toiling.
Thoreau's complaints with the modern life do not stop there. He moved into relative isolation in order to commune with Nature. The hustle and bustle of modernity, for him, was disruptive to meaningful communion, as he explains in his chapter on solitude:
What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found that no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another. What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, Beacon Hill, or the Five Points, where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue, as the willow stands near the water and sends out its roots in that direction. This will vary with different natures, but this is the place where a wise man will dig his cellar... (428).Once more, that Thoreau found his own roots to be in a romantic deification of nature is surely not an agreeable end to the argument. But he starts out on the right path. He knows what Chesterton called "the homelessness of man." The agrarian ideal of many distributists, the movement "back to the land," is similar in its pursuit of this "perennial source of our life." Thoreau's cabin in the woods is the place where he goes in order to find himself: it is typical of that place which Chesterton describes in his essay, The Surrender of a Cockney: "Every man... has waiting for him somewhere a country house which he has never seen; but which was built for him in the very shape of his soul. It stands patiently waiting to be found... and when the man sees it he remembers it, though he has never seen it before."
Many other specific ideas and virtues of Walden might be referenced: its cunning ctiticisms of industrial squalor, its celebration of the value of home and homestead, its wry sarcasm about the many material possessions which man uses to prop himslef up (literally - in one place, Thoreau offers a wonderfully amusing satire on furniture: "Furniture! Thank God, I can sit and I can stand without the aid of a furniture warehouse") (see 374).
The greatest asset of Walden, however, is hard to put into words. It is its very ethos. The sheer beauty of Thoreau's prose is in some places literally enough to move one to tears of empathy. His descriptions of crickets chirping, or the sun rising, all the sundry wonders of creation which modern man takes so much for granted - these are the crown jewels of Walden. If not a single ethical principle articulated as such finds its way home when one reads the book, he shall still be somehow a better man for having poured through its pages - or rather, had them poured into him. For Thoreau's liquescent sentences speak directly to the romance in the heart of man which Chesterton knew to be the practical form of reverent awe and wonder. A distributist should return to the pages of Walden often, if only to re-sensitize himself to the miraculous renewal of creation that happens in each moment of every day: the budding of every flower, the falling of every snowflake.
Somehow, this ethos behind Walden is the ultimate communication of its words to the reader, and perhaps no digest is possible. Even Thoreau himself, a peerless master of our language, found it difficult to convey summarily this finding of his own practical experience. So, I shall end at a loss for words, and allow the author one final attempt of his own:
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched (495).
Sunday, December 13, 2009
The Distributist's Bookshelf: Peter Maurin's Easy Essays
Easy Essays by Peter Maurin. ♦♦♦ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
(Washington, DC: Rose Hill Books, 2003).
216pp.
“[T]o create a new society within the shell of the old” – this was Peter Maurin’s aim. This was the goal he articulated for the Catholic Worker when, with Dorothy Day in 1933, he co-founded that movement and its publication.
Houses of Hospitality and Cooperative Farm Communes where the rule of life was the daily practice of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy: this was his vision. It was a vision that changed many people’s lives, Dorothy Day being one of them. And, with her help, it was a vision that seemed at times as though it really might change the world. And it may yet.
But neither Peter’s goal of reconstructing the social order nor his vision of the shape of that new order within the shell of the old – neither of these was his real passion, the substance of his vocation. Peter’s love was doctrine. He was a born teacher. He loved conversation, although it doesn’t seem that you could say he loved debate per se. He didn’t pretend such sophistication. His goal in discussion was conversion. He wanted his interlocutor to see things his way. The thrill of the melding of two minds and the shining of the light of what he was convinced to be true on a darkened intellect – that was his muse.
He articulated in several places an antipathy for “technicians.” The average worker, skilled or unskilled, was a technician, a functionary. And scholars, too, were cogs in a wheel of academia. In the Houses of Hospitality, Peter wanted to foster an atmosphere where “Catholic scholars are dynamic and not academic and Catholic workers are scholars and not politicians.” He wanted a place where the ideas he embraced and propounded would find right soil, sink in, take root, grow and blossom. And the means of sowing this crop were his Easy Essays.
The essays are not quite prose. Nor could they properly be called poetry. They’re thought-capsules in a rudimentary form. They are a delivery system. There’s some pith and some ornamentation, but it never distracts. The goal in Maurin’s writing is clear: indoctrination. The point is hammered home, concisely and without conceit. There’s nothing to distract from the main goal. There’s none of the atmosphere of Dorothy’s writing, in which you can smell the dank apartment or the wet soil. Peter’s words are like pills to be swallowed in a gulp rather than savored. But they have in common with pills something other than the bland delivery mechanism: they give good medicine to the mind and soul.
It might seem a strange first choice for the Distributist Bookshelf to pick Peter Maurin’s aphoristic “essays.” But there is a wealth of good information contained in these brief locutions. In the background can be easily discerned the influence of Chesterton and Belloc, Gill and Pepler, Maritain and Mounier. But unfamiliarity with this background is no impedance to appreciating Maurin’s writings. His thoughts are crystal clear. No need to refer to footnotes or an encyclopedia.
Not all of Maurin’s advice will be practical for modern Distributists. People may take some exception to his “true communist” sympathies or his agrarian ideals. But Maurin is a great way to get in touch with the soul of Distributist philosophy. Aquinas and the Papal Social Teachings run like bright threads throughout the tapestry of his writing. These, like other themes, are generously repeated (or better, recapitulated), so that a few reads of his essays gives one a very good familiarity with the “spirit” of Distributistism. He holds personalism in tension with communitarianism, revolution in tension with tradition, idealism in tension with realism.
My favorite of Maurin's essay, and a good sample of his writing, is the one entitled “When Christ is King.”
In the essay, Maurin identifies himself as a "radical" and then distinguishes this from both "liberals" and "conservatives":
Maurin wants to "change from an acquisitive society / to a functional society, / from a society of go-getters / to a society of go-givers."
A society of go-givers. Where have we heard that before? Sounds like certain amounts of gratuitousness would be involved in such a society, at least it sounds that way to me.
The Easy Essays of Peter Maurin are too-little appreciated today. As we try to find a way to make the wisdom of the great lights of Personalist and Distributist thought accessible to all of society, the summations of Peter Maurin can be a great aid. Many workers were made scholars sitting at that man's feet. And much more important, they were probably made saints almost as often.
The way to reconstructing the social order isn't through welfare programs or stimulus packages, nor through liberated market mechanisms paying heed to no extrinsic value or meaning. The social order will change when men are changed: when they are made saints who love the good, and scholars who love the true.
Pick up a copy of Maurin's Easy Essays and put it on your Distributist shelf today. His ideas just might change you. And through you, they may - even in a little way - change the world.
(Washington, DC: Rose Hill Books, 2003).
216pp.
“Peter’s teaching was simple, so simple, as one can see from these phrased paragraphs... that many disregarded them.”- Dorothy Day
“[T]o create a new society within the shell of the old” – this was Peter Maurin’s aim. This was the goal he articulated for the Catholic Worker when, with Dorothy Day in 1933, he co-founded that movement and its publication.
Houses of Hospitality and Cooperative Farm Communes where the rule of life was the daily practice of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy: this was his vision. It was a vision that changed many people’s lives, Dorothy Day being one of them. And, with her help, it was a vision that seemed at times as though it really might change the world. And it may yet.
But neither Peter’s goal of reconstructing the social order nor his vision of the shape of that new order within the shell of the old – neither of these was his real passion, the substance of his vocation. Peter’s love was doctrine. He was a born teacher. He loved conversation, although it doesn’t seem that you could say he loved debate per se. He didn’t pretend such sophistication. His goal in discussion was conversion. He wanted his interlocutor to see things his way. The thrill of the melding of two minds and the shining of the light of what he was convinced to be true on a darkened intellect – that was his muse.
He articulated in several places an antipathy for “technicians.” The average worker, skilled or unskilled, was a technician, a functionary. And scholars, too, were cogs in a wheel of academia. In the Houses of Hospitality, Peter wanted to foster an atmosphere where “Catholic scholars are dynamic and not academic and Catholic workers are scholars and not politicians.” He wanted a place where the ideas he embraced and propounded would find right soil, sink in, take root, grow and blossom. And the means of sowing this crop were his Easy Essays.
The essays are not quite prose. Nor could they properly be called poetry. They’re thought-capsules in a rudimentary form. They are a delivery system. There’s some pith and some ornamentation, but it never distracts. The goal in Maurin’s writing is clear: indoctrination. The point is hammered home, concisely and without conceit. There’s nothing to distract from the main goal. There’s none of the atmosphere of Dorothy’s writing, in which you can smell the dank apartment or the wet soil. Peter’s words are like pills to be swallowed in a gulp rather than savored. But they have in common with pills something other than the bland delivery mechanism: they give good medicine to the mind and soul.
It might seem a strange first choice for the Distributist Bookshelf to pick Peter Maurin’s aphoristic “essays.” But there is a wealth of good information contained in these brief locutions. In the background can be easily discerned the influence of Chesterton and Belloc, Gill and Pepler, Maritain and Mounier. But unfamiliarity with this background is no impedance to appreciating Maurin’s writings. His thoughts are crystal clear. No need to refer to footnotes or an encyclopedia.
Not all of Maurin’s advice will be practical for modern Distributists. People may take some exception to his “true communist” sympathies or his agrarian ideals. But Maurin is a great way to get in touch with the soul of Distributist philosophy. Aquinas and the Papal Social Teachings run like bright threads throughout the tapestry of his writing. These, like other themes, are generously repeated (or better, recapitulated), so that a few reads of his essays gives one a very good familiarity with the “spirit” of Distributistism. He holds personalism in tension with communitarianism, revolution in tension with tradition, idealism in tension with realism.
My favorite of Maurin's essay, and a good sample of his writing, is the one entitled “When Christ is King.”
In the essay, Maurin identifies himself as a "radical" and then distinguishes this from both "liberals" and "conservatives":
If I am a radicalMaurin wants radical change, and notes the difference that this implies with other ideologies. Conservatives want no change. Liberals' New Deal is merely a "patching up." Socialists and Communists want a change that can't really be.
then I am not a liberal.
(...)
Liberals are so liberal about everything
that they refuse to be fanatical
about anything.
And not being able to be fanatical
about anything,
liberals cannot be liberators.
They can only be liberals.
(...)
If I am a radical,
then I am not a conservative.
Conservatives try to believe
that things are good enough
to be left alone.
But things are not good enough
to be left alone.
(...)
And conservatives do not know
how to take the upside down
and to put it right side up.
When conservatives and radicals
will come to an understanding
they will take the upside down
and they will put it right side up.
Maurin wants to "change from an acquisitive society / to a functional society, / from a society of go-getters / to a society of go-givers."
A society of go-givers. Where have we heard that before? Sounds like certain amounts of gratuitousness would be involved in such a society, at least it sounds that way to me.
The Easy Essays of Peter Maurin are too-little appreciated today. As we try to find a way to make the wisdom of the great lights of Personalist and Distributist thought accessible to all of society, the summations of Peter Maurin can be a great aid. Many workers were made scholars sitting at that man's feet. And much more important, they were probably made saints almost as often.
The way to reconstructing the social order isn't through welfare programs or stimulus packages, nor through liberated market mechanisms paying heed to no extrinsic value or meaning. The social order will change when men are changed: when they are made saints who love the good, and scholars who love the true.
Pick up a copy of Maurin's Easy Essays and put it on your Distributist shelf today. His ideas just might change you. And through you, they may - even in a little way - change the world.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Fix Bayonets!
I know next to nothing about this guy. I am not endorsing his political platform, or his candidacy, or his character. I would need to do much more research before I would even think of doing such. The little that I have read on his "issues" page contains much that I could see eye-to-eye with him on, and a bit that I would want more nuanced.
But he made a speech, and the speech was good. And the reason it was good is that it's true. He gets what's happening. That music I talked about before - he's heard it. And he's starting to march to the tune. And others seem to be hearing it. Can you?
Mark me again: we're going to see more like this as we go forward. There's something brewing, and it may turn to good or ill, but it's out job to be attuned to it and know what's going on and not get caught unawares. We can harness the power of revolution and the fire of men's hearts for doing good. We need to act, though. The storm is coming...
Friday, November 27, 2009
All of This Has Happened Before...
... and all of this will happen again.
I have to admit that there's something haunting and stirring about that catchphrase from Battlestar Gallactica, and indeed in the series' whole trajectory as it showed that humanity seems forever doomed to repeat the history from which we are ever so slow to learn.
This has hit home with me in a particular way recently as I work my way through The Judgment of the Nations by Christopher Dawson (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942). Dawson's reputation for speaking prophetically is rote for modern students of theology and the philosophy of culture. Still, some of his words can be particularly striking in their prescient insight and indeed unsettling as we observe the slow slouch toward Gomorrah.
Dawson's conservatism, also, was carefully nuanced: "It is necessary... to understand what we mean by democracy, and... to distinguish between what is living and what is dead in the democratic tradition we have inherited from the nineteenth century" [p. 21; emphasis mine]. A modern conservative could learn much from Dawson's fey analysis of that cultural heritage.
Dawson knew that democracy's survival depended upon compromise between liberality and order, organization and laissez-faire. Dawson again:
Dawson's noble thought experiment in Judgment of the Nations deserves a rediscovery today, as many of its questions weigh as heavily on our world as they did a half-century ago. One final observation of Dawson's, in particular, is worth keeping in mind for those of us who would ponder the problems of our time. Dawson spoke of the visceral reaction of traditional, dogmatic Christians (particularly Catholics) against what he called the "sublimated Christianity" of liberal democracy as it had been inherited by the West. In our day, we can see this frequently, whether it's well-meaning Distributists anathematizing members of the Austrian school, or Christian Democratic Socialists condemning all of Capitalism outright, or free-market cheerleaders selectively reading Magisterial teaching in a defensive posture against anything that would threaten their preconceptions. Of course, I have my own views on the matter and might easily set up a line to show where I think these various systems fall with regard to Catholic Social teaching. But I recognize, too, that each of these schools contains scholars who are on their own journeys, constantly in motion, and each one in very good faith and conscience. I try to avoid the kind of reaction Dawson describes against "sublimated Christianity," and acknowledge that while certain theories leave much to be desired, I can at least give credit where it is due to the common pursuit of the "spiritual strength" of democracy: the virtues of freedom, and justice, and humanity.
While I would not go so far as to say that it is a good dictum to apply universally, there is nevertheless a kernel of truth in the saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." In our day, when new ideological blocs are forming, and the cultural inheritance of the West is under renewed threat from without, may we all pay heed to Dawson's rich insights and recognize that there are many "on our side" with whom we embrace much in common; that infighting and name-calling are vulnerabilities we cannot afford; and that through common pursuit in good faith, our more minor disagreements will resolve in truth and justice.
I have to admit that there's something haunting and stirring about that catchphrase from Battlestar Gallactica, and indeed in the series' whole trajectory as it showed that humanity seems forever doomed to repeat the history from which we are ever so slow to learn.
This has hit home with me in a particular way recently as I work my way through The Judgment of the Nations by Christopher Dawson (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1942). Dawson's reputation for speaking prophetically is rote for modern students of theology and the philosophy of culture. Still, some of his words can be particularly striking in their prescient insight and indeed unsettling as we observe the slow slouch toward Gomorrah.
It is... important to distinguish two elements in the modern reaction against liberal democracy. There is the reaction that has arisen out of democracy itself, as a result of the progress of man's organization and the mechanization of our culture which has destroyed the economic and social basis of liberal individualism; and, secondly, there is the national reaction of those countries which had no native democratic tradition and which had accepted liberal ideas as part of the material culture of Western Europe, which they felt to be the symbol not only of progress, but also of foreign exploitation [p. 20].Dawson's diagnosis of the blocs coalescing in the conflict of the 1940s is a remarkably penetrating view given that he was living and writing in the midst of a war during which it was easier than ever to get caught up in mere jingoism. Dawson (along with, history has finally come to demonstrate, some erstwhile maligned administrators within the Vatican) perceived a parity between the Russian and German threats to modernity which the leaders arranging the day's State alliances were slow to recognize.
Dawson's conservatism, also, was carefully nuanced: "It is necessary... to understand what we mean by democracy, and... to distinguish between what is living and what is dead in the democratic tradition we have inherited from the nineteenth century" [p. 21; emphasis mine]. A modern conservative could learn much from Dawson's fey analysis of that cultural heritage.
[T]he rise of Western democracy like that of Western humanism... were the results of centuries which had ploughed the virgin soil of the West and scattered the new seed broadcast over the earth. No doubt the seed was often mixed with cockle, or choked with briar, or sown on barren soil where it withered, nevertheless the harvest was good and the world still lives upon it.It is clear, however, that Dawson - rich in the Christian tradition with its many parables of mixed harvest and weeds growing along with the wheat - had no doubts about whether the work-intensive harvest of the Western experiment in countries like America, Britain, and France was preferable to the totalitarian regimes bred in opposition to it. His attitude in this respect, too, is a lesson for our day. A good summary of Dawson's argument may be to say that Western democracy is enough of a rough and tumble affair to keep on track toward good without worrying about attacks from outside itself; therefore, we must contrive to preserve a unity of spirit and a cooperative attitude in our internal affairs lest we become vulnerable to the dangers of opposing ideologies. Democracy, for all its good, is prone to this unique danger: the foundation of "individualism" can too quickly lead to an atomization within a particular society or between allied States, making it no easy match for more organized, totalitarian regimes. In our own day, we might say the unity of purpose and mores in the Muslim world is a similar structure against which the pastiche of our own pluralism competes rather poorly. Even leaving aside hostile aggression, the spread of Muslim culture and demography is strong enough an ingredient to overwhelm the other weakened and mixed flavors in our Western soup.
We must therefore realize that when we say we are fighting for democracy, we are not fighting merely for certain political institutions or even political principles. Still less are we fighting for the squalid prosperity of modern industrialism which was the outcome of the economic liberalism of the [nineteenth] century [p. 24; my emphasis again].
Dawson knew that democracy's survival depended upon compromise between liberality and order, organization and laissez-faire. Dawson again:
The great problem that the democratic states have to solve is how to reconcile the needs of mass organization and mechanized power... with the principles of freedom and justice and humanity from which their spiritual strength is derived [p. 26]Thus, Dawson is advocating something of a "third way" between anarchic liberalism and militant absolutism. But the dilemma of how to keep a strong military and a well-organized State while maintaining the core, domestic virtues of liberal democracy was a puzzle then, and remains so now. Indeed, the arms race of the Cold War blindly ran us even further into that quagmire. Breaking down the Pentagon juggernaut and cutting military spending (and thereby taxes) is a sentiment many Distributists and Libertarians hold dear, but each day's news from Iran or North Korea makes one more than a little uneasy in playing out the hypotheticals...
Democracy will not be destroyed either by military defeat or by the discipline and organization which it has to impose upon itself in order to gain the victory, if it can maintain its spiritual value and preserve itself from the dangers of demoralization and disintegration. But this is not an easy task [p. 27].
Dawson's noble thought experiment in Judgment of the Nations deserves a rediscovery today, as many of its questions weigh as heavily on our world as they did a half-century ago. One final observation of Dawson's, in particular, is worth keeping in mind for those of us who would ponder the problems of our time. Dawson spoke of the visceral reaction of traditional, dogmatic Christians (particularly Catholics) against what he called the "sublimated Christianity" of liberal democracy as it had been inherited by the West. In our day, we can see this frequently, whether it's well-meaning Distributists anathematizing members of the Austrian school, or Christian Democratic Socialists condemning all of Capitalism outright, or free-market cheerleaders selectively reading Magisterial teaching in a defensive posture against anything that would threaten their preconceptions. Of course, I have my own views on the matter and might easily set up a line to show where I think these various systems fall with regard to Catholic Social teaching. But I recognize, too, that each of these schools contains scholars who are on their own journeys, constantly in motion, and each one in very good faith and conscience. I try to avoid the kind of reaction Dawson describes against "sublimated Christianity," and acknowledge that while certain theories leave much to be desired, I can at least give credit where it is due to the common pursuit of the "spiritual strength" of democracy: the virtues of freedom, and justice, and humanity.
While I would not go so far as to say that it is a good dictum to apply universally, there is nevertheless a kernel of truth in the saying that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." In our day, when new ideological blocs are forming, and the cultural inheritance of the West is under renewed threat from without, may we all pay heed to Dawson's rich insights and recognize that there are many "on our side" with whom we embrace much in common; that infighting and name-calling are vulnerabilities we cannot afford; and that through common pursuit in good faith, our more minor disagreements will resolve in truth and justice.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Something in the Air...
Update: This post refers to the Manhattan Declaration, a momentous manifesto that deserves more notice than might be directed to it by the original buried link within my text; so, I am highlighting it here. Feel free to read my ruminations on the matter (and there are more forthcoming), but be sure to go and read this wonderful work.
There's something in the air. Thunderclap Newman put it quite groovily in the song of that title: "Call out the instigator, because there's something in the air. We've got to get together sooner or later, because the revolution's here, and you know it's right."
Sure, that was the sixties. But there was, in the sixties, a sense - a feeling - an electricity of which everyone, even the most sheltered suburbanite, was at least dimly aware. There was something in the air. Maybe the revolution was overestimated. It's fruits have certainly been a mixed bag of the bad along with the good, and I really wonder sometimes which is the majority. But somewhere near the heart of it all, a flashpoint that put the matter beyond doubt whenever it was touched, was the issue of rights. Some folks had 'em, and some didn't. And some people just wouldn't take it. They got pissed. They shouted from the rooftops. And they got changes made.
I started this blog because I felt the electricity I'd read about, and heard about, and experienced vicariously through art and song. And I got the sense I wasn't the only one. And in the center of it all was this song, this song that said it all, of which the words weren't mine but yet somehow were - and I set out here to sing that song and see if anybody would pick up the tune.
I know there are others who have the song in their heart, who feel something moving around them at this moment that's just somehow different than things were 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 15. Sure, you might say, we were different then. And it's true. Time is a great equalizer that way, there isn't one of us that's isn't different now. But I still maintain that there's something else, some inscrutable, even ineffable thing, that's different - something in the air.
I've been hearing the song more loudly lately and so I came back and thought I'd post some thoughts and see what happens. And then today, I read something, and I found my song there, too, and 148 folks - some very different from me - singing that song loud and clear:
Just thought you'd like to know. If you're here too, I'm sure you have your reasons - and I'd love to hear 'em.
“I wrote it at the time of the Cuban crisis. I was in Bleecker Street in New York. We just hung around at night – people sat around wondering if it was the end, and so did I. Would 10 o’clock the next day ever come?... It was a song of desperation. What could we do? Could we control the men on the verge of wiping us out? The words came fast – very fast. It was a song of terror. Line after line, trying to capture the feeling of nothingness.Well, reader, whoever you are: if you're here, you've noticed: so am I. It's difficult to describe the pull that I've felt increasingly the past few weeks drawing me back onto the pages of my blog. Blogging for me can be a tedious, sometimes even painful process. I fight with the ordinary pretensions of an aspiring writer, struggle with the natural vanities incumbent upon the same disposition, and torment myself with the constant question of whether or not anyone really gives a damn what I have to say. But, at the end of the day, I realize that I do have something to say. And I have a whole lot I'd like to hear. I set up this place as a venue for conversation and I'll keep up my part even when it seems hopelessly one-sided. I'll keep holding out hope that the discussion will be joined by some searcher after meaning and expression like myself. But even if it's not, I'll feel better for having said what has boiled over inside of me and has been so painful to keep in.- Bob Dylan, speaking about his song, "It's A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
There's something in the air. Thunderclap Newman put it quite groovily in the song of that title: "Call out the instigator, because there's something in the air. We've got to get together sooner or later, because the revolution's here, and you know it's right."
Sure, that was the sixties. But there was, in the sixties, a sense - a feeling - an electricity of which everyone, even the most sheltered suburbanite, was at least dimly aware. There was something in the air. Maybe the revolution was overestimated. It's fruits have certainly been a mixed bag of the bad along with the good, and I really wonder sometimes which is the majority. But somewhere near the heart of it all, a flashpoint that put the matter beyond doubt whenever it was touched, was the issue of rights. Some folks had 'em, and some didn't. And some people just wouldn't take it. They got pissed. They shouted from the rooftops. And they got changes made.
I started this blog because I felt the electricity I'd read about, and heard about, and experienced vicariously through art and song. And I got the sense I wasn't the only one. And in the center of it all was this song, this song that said it all, of which the words weren't mine but yet somehow were - and I set out here to sing that song and see if anybody would pick up the tune.
I know there are others who have the song in their heart, who feel something moving around them at this moment that's just somehow different than things were 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 15. Sure, you might say, we were different then. And it's true. Time is a great equalizer that way, there isn't one of us that's isn't different now. But I still maintain that there's something else, some inscrutable, even ineffable thing, that's different - something in the air.
I've been hearing the song more loudly lately and so I came back and thought I'd post some thoughts and see what happens. And then today, I read something, and I found my song there, too, and 148 folks - some very different from me - singing that song loud and clear:
...we are especially troubled that in our nation today the lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are severely threatened; that the institution of marriage, already buffeted by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is in jeopardy of being redefined to accommodate fashionable ideologies; that freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized by those who would use the instruments of coercion to compel persons of faith to compromise their deepest convictions.So, the song is still there. And that's why I'm here.
Just thought you'd like to know. If you're here too, I'm sure you have your reasons - and I'd love to hear 'em.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
And now...
... the sound of one hand clapping.
The money quote:
Where, O where, to begin? First of all, Joseph Ratzinger came of age in Nazi Germany, and I don't think a socialistic state gives him any warm-fuzzies of nostalgia. And how can Mr. Novak claim that it is the Holy Father (a confessor for over 50 years) who is naive about sin, when it is he who naively believes that market motives and the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest will somehow spark a society of justice and equity. Where does the corrupting power of sin enter into the market? O, that's right, I forgot, the market is amoral - not like there are sinful human agents operating within it, just automaton consumers responding to economic laws and mathematical motives. What a crock.
Finally, what the hell is more practical for defeating sin and overcoming evil in the world than "caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions"? These are things which private individuals must foster and which a State cannot enforce, so it surprises me to hear Mr. Novak calling for something more "pragmatic" and "programmatic." But, apart from that surprise, I am still left to wonder - what is more practical for overcoming sin than caritas in veritate? Anyone? Bueller?
Now, I know I said I wasn't going to get into parsing and analyzing this document just yet. But apparently, people in the blogosphere are very concerned with a phrase from paragraph 39. Mr. Weigel doesn't understand what is meant by "forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion."
Now, first, let's read paragraph 39 in full:
Alright, the phrase which has so many people so upset is "forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion." Now, this is understandable in some ways, since "quotas" are common in Socialist models of economy, and we would not want to say the Pope is encouraging that here. So, just what is he encouraging? What does this expression mean?
Well, on the one hand, I think knee-jerking at the word "quota" is a bit hasty. There is no Latin version of this document on the Holy See's website, yet. The Italian indeed does have "da quote di gratuità e di comunione." However, the French rendering is "par une part de gratuité et de communion" and the Spanish, "por ciertos márgenes de gratuidad y comunión." Certain margins characterizing a form of economy gives a much different sense than "quotas." So, perhaps we're reading too much into a word. Even so, what does this marginality mean and how does it get defined and who defines it? This too seems simpler than is being made out. The paragraph speaks before and after this quotation about the concept of "solidarity" as a necessary characteristic of economic activity, and also notes that globalization is not necessarily letting more people in but simply letting fewer people benefit at the expense of more and more marginalized (people only ostensibly enfranchised of power). If our motives to give are simply to receive in return, or because it is by mandate of the State, this falls short of the ideal and will not lead us to truly include others in economic life - just use them.
I could conceive of various Distributist models which capture the idea of this phrase, like Belloc's incentive-based taxation which tries to keep more people participatory in the economic activity of a region by making bigger business only WANT to accrue a certain part of property. They leave off what would be surplus and unprofitable, allowing others a chance to work with that property; then as others succeed and are able to pay their own greater share of the upkeep of the commonwealth, the larger owners benefit from a fall of their own taxes. The success of the other would be thus an incentive for a particular owner, albeit not until the system had been in place and begun to succeed.
Another thought is that it seems any small, family run business is already a local form of what Benedict is talking about. Two brothers open a store, and one day Brother A gets sick on his day to manage: will Brother B really take it out of his salary for his own coming in, knowing that Brother A had to pay the copay for a doctor's visit that day? No. The brothers will act first of all like brothers, and their business will be characterized by certain margins of gratuitousness and communion. They will be a family first, and a business second. This is what Benedict means by "economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it." He means take what works (and is virtuous) about the local and try to keep the global in the same ethos. It might seem pie-in-the-sky, but given that the human race really is a family, under God, spread accross the globe, then this as a model for "globalization" is not all that far-fetched. So, the job of people like Novak and Weigel ought to be asking, "what would this look like on a bigger scale, and how could we do it?" rather than decrying it as nonsensical drivel.
Anyhow, I'm open for discussion whether this phrase is really as unmeaning as others make it out to be. To me, it does convey a sense, perhaps indeed somewhat imprecise, but only because it's not something to be seen so much in finer details as in the "big picture." Thoughts?
The money quote:
What Benedict XVI has not spelled out yet is another forgotten lesson from St. Augustine: the ever-corrupting role of sin in the City of Man. Augustine points out how difficult it is even for the wisest and most detached humans to discover the truth among lies—and how even husbands and wives in the closest of human bonds misunderstand each other so often. The Father of Lies seems to own so much of the real world.
What are the most practical ways of defeating him? The Catholic tradition—even the wise Pope Benedict—still seems to put too much stress upon caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions, and not nearly enough on methods for defeating human sin in all its devious and persistent forms.
Even the Pope’s understandable nostalgia for the European welfare-state too much scants the self-interests, self-deceptions, and false presuppositions that are bringing that system to a crisis of its own making. This was a crisis John Paul II saw rather more clearly in paragraph 48 of Centesimus Annus.- Michael Novak
Where, O where, to begin? First of all, Joseph Ratzinger came of age in Nazi Germany, and I don't think a socialistic state gives him any warm-fuzzies of nostalgia. And how can Mr. Novak claim that it is the Holy Father (a confessor for over 50 years) who is naive about sin, when it is he who naively believes that market motives and the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest will somehow spark a society of justice and equity. Where does the corrupting power of sin enter into the market? O, that's right, I forgot, the market is amoral - not like there are sinful human agents operating within it, just automaton consumers responding to economic laws and mathematical motives. What a crock.
Finally, what the hell is more practical for defeating sin and overcoming evil in the world than "caritas, virtue, justice, and good intentions"? These are things which private individuals must foster and which a State cannot enforce, so it surprises me to hear Mr. Novak calling for something more "pragmatic" and "programmatic." But, apart from that surprise, I am still left to wonder - what is more practical for overcoming sin than caritas in veritate? Anyone? Bueller?
Now, I know I said I wasn't going to get into parsing and analyzing this document just yet. But apparently, people in the blogosphere are very concerned with a phrase from paragraph 39. Mr. Weigel doesn't understand what is meant by "forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion."
Now, first, let's read paragraph 39 in full:
Paul VI in Populorum Progressio called for the creation of a model of market economy capable of including within its range all peoples and not just the better off. He called for efforts to build a more human world for all, a world in which “all will be able to give and receive, without one group making progress at the expense of the other”. In this way he was applying on a global scale the insights and aspirations contained in Rerum Novarum, written when, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, the idea was first proposed — somewhat ahead of its time — that the civil order, for its self-regulation, also needed intervention from the State for purposes of redistribution. Not only is this vision threatened today by the way in which markets and societies are opening up, but it is evidently insufficient to satisfy the demands of a fully humane economy. What the Church's social doctrine has always sustained, on the basis of its vision of man and society, is corroborated today by the dynamics of globalization.
When both the logic of the market and the logic of the State come to an agreement that each will continue to exercise a monopoly over its respective area of influence, in the long term much is lost: solidarity in relations between citizens, participation and adherence, actions of gratuitousness, all of which stand in contrast with giving in order to acquire (the logic of exchange) and giving through duty (the logic of public obligation, imposed by State law). In order to defeat underdevelopment, action is required not only on improving exchange-based transactions and implanting public welfare structures, but above all on gradually increasing openness, in a world context, to forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion. The exclusively binary model of market-plus-State is corrosive of society, while economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it, build up society. The market of gratuitousness does not exist, and attitudes of gratuitousness cannot be established by law. Yet both the market and politics need individuals who are open to reciprocal gift.
Alright, the phrase which has so many people so upset is "forms of economic activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and communion." Now, this is understandable in some ways, since "quotas" are common in Socialist models of economy, and we would not want to say the Pope is encouraging that here. So, just what is he encouraging? What does this expression mean?
Well, on the one hand, I think knee-jerking at the word "quota" is a bit hasty. There is no Latin version of this document on the Holy See's website, yet. The Italian indeed does have "da quote di gratuità e di comunione." However, the French rendering is "par une part de gratuité et de communion" and the Spanish, "por ciertos márgenes de gratuidad y comunión." Certain margins characterizing a form of economy gives a much different sense than "quotas." So, perhaps we're reading too much into a word. Even so, what does this marginality mean and how does it get defined and who defines it? This too seems simpler than is being made out. The paragraph speaks before and after this quotation about the concept of "solidarity" as a necessary characteristic of economic activity, and also notes that globalization is not necessarily letting more people in but simply letting fewer people benefit at the expense of more and more marginalized (people only ostensibly enfranchised of power). If our motives to give are simply to receive in return, or because it is by mandate of the State, this falls short of the ideal and will not lead us to truly include others in economic life - just use them.
I could conceive of various Distributist models which capture the idea of this phrase, like Belloc's incentive-based taxation which tries to keep more people participatory in the economic activity of a region by making bigger business only WANT to accrue a certain part of property. They leave off what would be surplus and unprofitable, allowing others a chance to work with that property; then as others succeed and are able to pay their own greater share of the upkeep of the commonwealth, the larger owners benefit from a fall of their own taxes. The success of the other would be thus an incentive for a particular owner, albeit not until the system had been in place and begun to succeed.
Another thought is that it seems any small, family run business is already a local form of what Benedict is talking about. Two brothers open a store, and one day Brother A gets sick on his day to manage: will Brother B really take it out of his salary for his own coming in, knowing that Brother A had to pay the copay for a doctor's visit that day? No. The brothers will act first of all like brothers, and their business will be characterized by certain margins of gratuitousness and communion. They will be a family first, and a business second. This is what Benedict means by "economic forms based on solidarity, which find their natural home in civil society without being restricted to it." He means take what works (and is virtuous) about the local and try to keep the global in the same ethos. It might seem pie-in-the-sky, but given that the human race really is a family, under God, spread accross the globe, then this as a model for "globalization" is not all that far-fetched. So, the job of people like Novak and Weigel ought to be asking, "what would this look like on a bigger scale, and how could we do it?" rather than decrying it as nonsensical drivel.
Anyhow, I'm open for discussion whether this phrase is really as unmeaning as others make it out to be. To me, it does convey a sense, perhaps indeed somewhat imprecise, but only because it's not something to be seen so much in finer details as in the "big picture." Thoughts?
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