The Distributist's Bookshelf: G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong With The World

What's Wrong With The World by G.K. Chesterton. ♦♦♦♦ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).
200 pp.

"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."

- from the first chapter, The Medical Mistake

In 1910, G.K. Chesterton presented to the world this "thundering gallop of theory" because, as he put it in the Dedication, "politicians are none the worse for a few inconvenient ideals." The ideals which he presented for the consideration of both politicians and the man-in-the-street are as provocative and challenging today as they were when the book was first published.

Chesterton divided his book of impractical politics into categories addressing the three major subsets of any polis: men, women, and children. These categories comprise the three central sections of the book: "Imperialism, or the Mistake about Man"; "Feminism, or the Mistake about Woman"; and, "Education, or the Mistake about the Child". Like bookends to these varied discussions, Chesterton addresses in the first section "The Homelessness of Man" and recapitulates in the fifth and final section with "The Home of Man".

Apart from the figures of the man, woman, and child within society, three other characters figure into Chesterton's examination of modern society: Jones, the average man in the street, and his old mortal enemies, Hudge and Gudge, representing the liberal political aristocracy and the conservative respectively. Chesterton introduces the machinations of Hudge and Gudge in section one, demonstrating how their constant give-and-take about what to do with Jones only ends up disenfranchising and alienating Jones from the State which is as much his as it is theirs.

Hence, the homelessness of Jones. Hudge and Gudge, being practical men, set aside "idealism" in order to scrutinize the problem of Jones's poor situation and come up with a practical solution. Hudge builds tenement houses and bustles Jones into them in order to get him out of the ghetto, but his ideal charity ward degenerates into the slum of the modern welfare state. Gudge, reacting against Jones, repudiates the slums with vigor, but soon convinces himself - in support of his indignation - that Jones was better off where he was before and ought to have been left alone in his poor state. And Jones is left to choose between the poverty of abandonment and the poverty of degradation. "[T]he mistakes of these two famous and fascinating persons arose from one simple fact," Chesterton says: namely,

that neither Hudge nor Gudge had ever thought for an instant what sort of house a man might probably like for himself. In short, they did not begin with the ideal; and, therefore, were not practical politicians.

When, in his final section, Chesterton returns to Hudge's and Gudge's parsimonious practical politics, he proposes a theory which should give modern readers pause as they contemplate the binary political calculations to which we are reduced every election day:

And now, as this book is drawing to a close, I will whisper in the reader's ear a horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspicion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is very much of a put-up job, and that the way in which they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence. [...] I do not know whether the partnership of Hudge and Gudge is conscious or unconscious. I only know that between them they still keep the common man homeless.

The lack of idealism resulting in this age-old conflict also gives rise to the specific problems relating to men, women, and children. In the case of Man, the ideals of patriotism, comradeship, of self-rule and equality, give way to another poisonous philosophy, one which manifests itself in Imperialism and Social Engineering. Chesterton rails in one instance against the obsession with "hygienics" which was in vogue in his day, but we can easily see in this instance hints of our own current welfare projects: the tyrannical war against personal choice of lifestyle and health, the removal of table salt from restaurants, etc. Chesterton boils it down into what he calls "the huge modern heresy of altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

In the case of Woman, the ideal of the domestic woman, Queen of her domain, gives way to a lesser ideal with the ironic pretense of trying to achieve something greater. The ideal of Woman becomes en-masculated and adopts ideals meant for men, which only serves to degrade the potential of women. A specific instance Chesterton uses here is the example of women's suffrage. One might take exception to his particular characterization, but one cannot deny the veracity behind his observation of the philosophy underlying the suffragist movement.

[T]here has happened a strange and startling thing. Openly and to all appearance, this ancestral conflict has silently and abruptly ended; one of the two sexes has suddenly surrendered to the other. By the beginning of the twentieth century, within the last few years, the woman has in public surrendered to the man. She has seriously and officially owned that the man has been right all along; that the public house (or Parliament) is really more important than the private house; that politics are not (as woman had always maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are a sacred solemnity to which new female worshipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots in the tavern are not only admirable but enviable; that talk is not a waste of time, and therefore (as a consequence, surely) that taverns are not a waste of money.

Thus, according to Chesterton, the modern Woman has abandoned her role of the Universalist, the Queen of a much larger domain within the domestic household, for an ancillary role in the much smaller domain of the larger State.

Finally, in the case of the Child, Chesterton observes that modern education has gone wrong by trading in the ideals of Tradition and Authority for trendy scientism and novelty. He says, "It ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school to-day the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself." In education, says Chesterton, there's a certain "need for narrowness," a discernment. The modern educator dissembles the fact that he is indoctrinating youth by indoctrinating them with the firmest and most stifling dogma that was ever known: namely, the impossibility of dogmatic fact. And so the modern educator abandons "the true task of culture," which is "not a task of expansion, but very decidedly of selection — and rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it." This is an inescapable practical fact; the educator, whether he would or no, instills fundamental attitudes about the world into his student, which take the form of a practical creed in discerning facts about the universe. Chesterton simply suggests that the broadest of such attitudes - which also happen to be the oldest, classical postures - ought to be the ones used.

To the Distributist reader today, some of Chesterton's examples and the exact issues he chooses for debate may seem antiquated. But his project of discernment, and his fundamental distinction about the practicality of idealism is an ageless sentiment, and one which ought to be brought to every debate about politics today. Every Distributist should have this work on his shelf and return to it often, in order to absorb the spirit of that project into his own worldview, to begin viewing the world as Chesterton did - with clarity and insight, and with a solidaristic love for Jones.

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

"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..."

- Thoreau, What I Lived For

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.

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).

The Distributist's Bookshelf: Peter Maurin's Easy Essays

Easy Essays by Peter Maurin. ♦♦♦ ♠ ♠ ♠ ♠
(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 radical
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 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.

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.

The Distributist's Bookshelf

A while back on this page I undertook an ill-fated venture which I called the Ship's Manifest. The idea was that this website was something like my ark in which I hoped to weather the storms of ideological hail swirling about the modern world, and the "manifest" was meant to detail the cargo (intellectual) of the ship. In plain terms, it was my reading list. (NB: The "Manifest" project has since been dismantled and the entries removed, so don't drive yourself nuts looking for them.)

This was ill-fate for a few reasons. For one, I had become a little too trigger-happy in employing the (perhaps somewhat melodramatic) conceit of my blog's name, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and was stretching metaphors a bit. The result was that the somewhat melodramatic began to border on the histrionic.

A second reason the venture was ill-fated was that my seminary pursuits at the time precluded my posting with as much regularity as I moved through books.

A third and final reason the idea failed was that nobody ought really to give a damn what I'm reading at any given time. Sometimes, I don't even care. Not everything I read is easily related to my vocation and I felt I was shoe-horning certain things into place in order to derive Distributist wisdom from works that were only tangentially related. This is not to say that Chesterton's maxim does not hold true, that "there is no such thing as a different subject." But if I'm going to spend time writing about books here, I want it to be in a precise and valuable way such that my readers can discern what might or might not be worth their while. And I also want a way to be able to denote when a literary work is being discussed particularly for its relation to Distributist thought. Thus, I have reviewed recently the beginning of Dawson's The Judgment of the Nations and commended it to my readers, but if pressed I would not say it is essential reading for the Distributist.

So, I'm going to try this again. Only this time 'round, I'll be employing a different format and mechanism and hopefully make much less a hash of it. The new feature will be called The Distributist's Bookshelf. I will be making a little virtual bookshelf (or stealing one from the web if I can find a neat code that fits my purposes) either in the side-bar or on the bottom of this page. It may end up being nothing other than an Amazon.com "list" of books and reviews that are good for Distributists to have, with my explanations of why I think so and maybe some other insights I may want to share. I will employ a rating system for these books. I will rate them from 1 to 5 diamonds (♦) in terms of overall quality (literary merit, content, achievement, etc.); and I will rate them in terms of 1 to 4 spades (♠) in terms of their "necessity" to the Distributist's library(one being least and four most essential).

The list of labels in the left-hand margin of the page will include Distributist's Bookshelf as a new easy-click way of finding all of the entries for the topic. Entries detailing other books that I consider from time to time just for fun will simply bear the label books as is the case now. All of the entries for The Distributist's Bookshelf will appear as well under the label for books, since that is what will be considered in this project. So, in order to isolate only those books highlighted as more-or-less essential reading for Distributist, the new label for the bookshelf project will be the way to go.

Now that this messy bit of housekeeping is out of the way, I ask you to stay tuned for the first entry in my new project. It's a selection which I consider an absolute must for all Distributists (♠ ♠ ♠ ♠), and the choice just may surprise you...