FideCogitActio : omnis per gratiam

A quiz for reader(s)…

2012-01-19T05:25:00.002+08:00

"_______________ is a politico-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which the powers of the state are limited to the protection of the individual's rights against the initiation of physical force. … Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force."

The answer to the above blank is…

A. Capitalism

B. Laissez-faire capitalism

C. Socialism / Keynseanism

D. Distributism

Enterprise, so called…

2012-01-19T03:47:00.000+08:00

"Hardly anybody…dares to defend the family. The world around us has accepted a social system which denies the family. It will sometimes help the child in spite of the family; the mother in spite of the family; the grandfather in spite of the family. It will not help the family. … We live in an age of journalese, in which everything done inside a house is called ‘drudgery’ while anything done inside an office is called ‘enterprise.’"

-- G.K. Chesterton, Dec 1931

Maximum initiative…

2012-01-18T05:57:00.000+08:00

"All who believe that ownership in the means of livelihood is normal to man, and necessary to liberty, and all who dislike and distrust the concentration of control advocated by Socialists and practiced by Monopolists, should join the [Distributist] League … [The League] stands for the Liberty of the Individual and the Family against interference by busybodies, monopolies, or the State … [and for] … the better Distribution of Property (i.e. ownership of land, houses, workshops, gardens, means of production, etc.). … [As such, the League] fights for small Shops and Shopkeepers against multiple shops and trusts…[, for] Individual Craftmanship and Cooperation in industrial enterprises… [, and for the] Small Holder and the Yeoman Farmer against monopolists of large inadequately farmed estates … [In a word, the League stands for] the Maximum, instead of the minimum initiative on the part of the citizen."

-- G.K.'s Weekly, March 29, 1929

The division of mind…

2012-01-18T03:45:00.000+08:00

"The division of labour has become the division of mind… and means in a new and sinister sense that the right hand does not know what the left hand doeth. In the age of universal education, nobody knows where anything comes from. The process of production has become so indirect, so multitudinous and so anonymous, that to trace anything to its origin is to enter upon a sort of detective story, or the exploration of a concealed crime."

-- G.K. Chesterton, Jun 1932

A dialogue between a "real capitalist" and a "distributist dreamer"…

2012-01-17T03:02:00.001+08:00

"Distributism does not blend or 'balance' Capitalism and Socialism. Both of these systems result in the concentration of ownership. Socialism does not 'redistribute' wealth, it denies the private ownership of it altogether…. We have been trained to believe that any significant state involvement means Socialism. This is a lie. State managed redistribution of privately owned wealth from the rich to the needy is not Socialism because the the wealth remains privately owned. … Both Capitalism and Socialism require the big state. This is true despite the Libertarian desire to minimize state involvement."

-- David Cooney, 10 Jan. 2011

A: Cooney's point about "redistribution" seems arguably correct. But where does he get his assertion about Capitalism? (Or is he ignoring the laissez-faire brand? For it never needs a "Big" government.)

B: I think the idea here is: "Wal-Mart without federal highways––oh really, now?"

A: I'm not following. And federal highways are one of the very few functions a SMALL government is actually allowed to govern.

B: Let me quote from a private and slightly revised correspondence:

"[We musnt confuse] 'prices' with 'costs.' [For] this ignores the role of externalities and subsidies. Prices can be lowered by externalizing costs. For example, WalMart could not survive if the costs of transportation were not subsidized. If there were weight and distance tolls on roads, the long range distribution system would be shown to be inefficient for low cost goods and would be confined to high-quality, rare, and high cost goods. If pollution were paid for by the producers, instead of by the gov't or simply by decreased public health, it is absurd to speak of 'low-prices.' …

"The WalMart distribution model looks this (I am using WM as an example because their operations are well-known and documented): They open a distribution center in a new area, and then saturate that area with stores along the major highways. It is obvious that the region cannot support that number of stores, but sales are not, initially, the object. As the local commerce (and competition) drys up, Walmart closes most of the stores to leave an 'optimal number,' which leaves the area at the mercy of Walmart, and stores that are remote from many people. At that point, even the pretense of low prices is lost. And this analysis ignores the cases of stores whose entire profit margin consists of the sales tax rebate."

In any event, small govt may be able to govern highways… but how did they get built?

A: Small government can = federal government, as long as it is existing within its Constitutional authority. And that's what I thought you might mean re: Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart is no archetype of Capitalism, only of our current Socialist-laden Capitalism. A great capitalism could still exist even if Wal-Mart could not.

B: What would you say is the best actual, sustained case of laissez-faire capitalism in history (i.e. devoid of government crutches and monopolies)?

A: Several hundreds or thousands of (micro-)times in American history, most of which were in its earlier times. I'm not much of a historian, and so remember dates, etc., but I have read about them in books on history and economics. The PIGs to the Constitution and Capitalism are my better resources. (Which are, admittedly, not academic.)

But this question (which I've heard often) misses some of the point: for a single application of a single policy amidst an incredibly controlling, subsidy-laden socialist capitalism, if it frees the market in some small way, is enough of an example of laissez-faire capitalism. And I have found this to work at near 100%.

B: I'd call the "micro-times" of true capitalism just family's lives, i.e. time scales in which capitalism is effectively distributism. I am troubled by the apparent symmetry between the following claims: "Capitalism has never really been tried" and "Communism has never really been tried". It could just as easily be said that regulating monopolies under a socialist aegis frees the market for a greater number of producers, and therefore socialism is vindicated. The problem is that both capitalism and socialism seem to treat economic conditions and dynamics as a kind of trans-historical, absolute sphere of deterministic principles, as if "society" and/or "the market" were something over and above the particular people who interact. Speaking of freedom presupposes we know what freedom means, and I deny that freedom is simply the ability to do whatever. Freedom is the power to do the good, and nothing about capitalism in its theoretical purity seems to speak to "the good" (but only to "goods"). Therefore, it seems a truly-free market (i.e. a sustainable system of free people interacting towards the common good) can only be brought about by aiming market laws at the common good, which is the purpose of governance.

In any case, the point is precisely that 'real' laissez-faire capitalism (LFC) seems only to enjoy micro-spatiotemporally sustainable success, not longterm, widespread success (absent government crutches). Any theory can be made to work for a time. Look at Sweden as "proof" of socialism (never mind that it's liberalizing now that the socialist generation is growing oppressive). If LFC is practically unworkable in the real world of historical change, then it is just that: practically unworkable.

Here's a little syllogism (modus tollens): If the market M just is human behavior B, and if B is consistently and reliably rational Rr, then the market is Rr; but B is not Rr (~Rr), therefore M is ~Rr. If however M is irrational, then, either "the invisible hand" is just as 'good' a guide as "The Great Spirit of Natural Selection" or pure-market economics is ~Rr and LFC seems in dire straits.

It's an interesting conundrum: if LFC has never really, fully, truly been tried (á la Ron Paul), then it's not really been shown to be false. My query is why, if LFC is the natural order of human flourishing, it can't seem to get off the ground (i.e. it can't get really tried).

Nonetheless, let it be granted that distributism is all for smaller government, so small, in fact, that it would not amount to more than needed to protect the smallest and best government, namely, the family. That's a key point, in any event: there is a close connection between small government and small economy , on the one hand, and big economy and big government, on the other.

Or rather a second…

2012-01-16T02:10:00.001+08:00

"Communism is that form of Capitalism in which all workers have an equal wage. Capitalism is that form of Communism in which the organising officials have a very large salary. … Both presuppose property not personal, but Worked from a centre and distributed as wages. There is a third ideal; or rather a second. It is that individuals should own and be free. … The right and essential thing [is] that as many people as possible should have the natural, original forms of sustenance as their own property.

The division of labour has become the division of mind; and means in a new and sinister sense that the right hand does not know what the left hand doeth. In the age of universal education, nobody knows where anything comes from. The process of production has become so indirect, so multitudinous and so anonymous, that to trace anything to its origin is to enter upon a sort of detective story, or the exploration of a concealed crime."

-- G.K. Chesterton, Apr-Sep-Jun 1932

Actually operating…

2012-01-15T13:28:00.001+08:00

"Capitalism, as practiced in the real world, goes far beyond the private ownership of productive capital. Capitalism as it actually exists includes different forms of corporate ownership, … investment and financing schemes, interest, the acceptance of greed as an objective good, usury, using capital for profit … [and] to prevent competitors from making profit, monopoly, free trade, involvement of the highest levels of government, and a utilitarian view of the worker. … [T]he economic system actually operating under the name Capitalism is very different than the basic definition of the word [i.e. private ownership of production]…. Since both Distributism and Capitalism operate on the basis of private ownership of productive capital, we need to look beyond this one common root and realize that neither of these economic systems is wholly defined by it."

–– David Cooney, "Is Distributism a Form of Capitalism?"

Capitalism has no conscience besides what we put into it…

2012-01-14T23:49:00.001+08:00

John Medaille of the Univ. of Dallas Discusses Economics. His book, “Toward a Truly Free Market” is Available at www.amazon.com.
December 20th, 2011

John Medaille of the Univ. of Dallas answered questions such as the following:
1) The economy is not doing well. What caused the problem?
2) When the gov’t needs money, why not just create it and forget selling bonds and paying interest? This way there would be no national debt.
3) How important are Christian principles to the proper functioning of a free market system?
4) Is it harmful to the economy if too much annual income goes to too few?
5) Should Soc Sec be privatized? Should we keep the minimum wage and The Federal Reserve?

The heart of the social order…

2012-01-13T00:46:00.000+08:00

"The rural family needs to regain its rightful place at the heart of the social order. The moral principles and values which govern it belong to the heritage of humanity, and must take priority over legislation. They are concerned with individual conduct, relations between husband and wife and between generations, and the sense of family solidarity. Investment in the agricultural sector has to allow the family to assume its proper place and function, avoiding the damaging consequences of hedonism and materialism that can place marriage and family life at risk."

-- Benedict XVI, 16 Oct 2006

MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO THE DIRECTOR GENERAL
OF THE FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION (FAO)
FOR THE CELEBRATION OF WORLD FOOD DAY

Neither balance nor blend…

2012-01-12T09:41:00.001+08:00

"Distributism does not blend or 'balance' Capitalism and Socialism. Both of these systems result in the concentration of ownership. Socialism does not 'redistribute' wealth, it denies the private ownership of it altogether…. We have been trained to believe that any significant state involvement means Socialism. This is a lie. State managed redistribution of privately owned wealth from the rich to the needy is not Socialism because the the wealth remains privately owned. … Both Capitalism and Socialism require the big state. This is true despite the Libertarian desire to minimize state involvement."

-- David Cooney, 10 Jan. 2011

First and second concern…

2012-01-11T00:37:00.003+08:00

"I know that my first care is that of my immortal soul and that, since my soul is for all present practical purposes inseparable from my body, my second care is that of my body.... Hence my decision to purchase a smallholding, work it for myself, and live like a king in my own country."

–– G.C. Heseltine, G.K.'s Weekly.

By reference to moral values…

2012-01-10T02:10:00.001+08:00

"Capitalism is not a philosophy. It is simply a method of allocating resources based on voluntary exchange instead of coercion. While some say that such a method promotes greed, history indicates that greed is no less present in any other system of allocating resources. Distributism is completely compatible with capitalism to the extent it is a voluntary expression of the desire to make such market exchanges by reference to appropriate moral values and not just profit. Distributism is most difficult to apply in the context of enterprises that need large amounts of capital to compete successfully. Such businesses tend to organize as public companies whose ownership is distinct from management. Such companies have a very difficult time voluntarily expressing values that are inimical to profit maximization. It is not impossible, since corporations can be organized expressing other goals which would be disclosed to investors, but thus far such efforts have not proven all that successful. Instead, non-pecuniary values are imposed via government regulation, which plainly can be blunt and political instruments. It is also important to realize that non-investor corporate constituencies, especially consumers, do alter behavior by imposing their values thereby affecting corporate profits. Imperfect information and imperfect consumers limit the efficacy of such forces, but truly there is nothing about a free market system that renders it inherently incompatible with Catholic values."

-- a guy named Mike Petrik, on a blog

Why are people always burying distributism?

2012-01-07T20:17:00.000+08:00

"The very fact that people are always burying distributism is evidence of the fact that it is not dead as a solution. …

"[Chesterton argued] that were Dickens living today, he would not be harking back to the past, but dealing with things just as he found them. … [The] particularly Dickensian [consists in a man's] enjoying his surroundings as they were, and beginning from there.

"It is the same with Distributism. It needs to be constantly rewritten, re-assessed, restated, with the wisdom and clear-sightedness of a Chesterton who … who can help us today to make a synthesis of Cult, Culture and Cultivation.

"In spite of the nuclear age we are living in, we can plant our gardens even if they are only window boxes, we can awaken ourselves to God’s good earth and in little ways start going out on pilgrimage, to the suburbs, to the country, and when we get the grace, we may so put off the old man, and put on Christ, that we will begin to do without all that the City of man offers us, and build up the farming commune, the Village, the 'city' of God, wherein justice dwelleth."

–– Catholic Worker Movement - DorothyDay - www.catholicworker.org

Economic empowerment…

2012-01-07T20:10:00.000+08:00

Look, Ma, it ain't just Chesterbelloc and the Catholics going on about distributism, them humanists are going on about it, too.

"[W]hile I argue [pace Marx] it is false to claim that surplus value is unjustly appropriated by … employers, landlords and middlemen who are contributing to the value of a good or service, it is undoubtedly true that those who work for them, rent from them or sell to them would be financially better off if they could keep the financial benefit of this transaction - the surplus value - for themselves.

"This in a nutshell is what distributism is all about.

"Distributism is not trying to make the poor rich by making the rich poor, but empowering the poor and the not-so-rich to accumulate more of the demand-based value of their labour, more of the demand-based value of their produce, more of the demand-based value of their accommodation. …

"The key work to understanding early 20th century distributism is Belloc's seminal work, _The Servile State_. A savage denunciation of laissez-faire capitalism, which Belloc argued was re-establishing feudal servility on economic lines, _The Servile State_ is no less savage towards state socialism, which (ironically presaging the later words of free market economist Friedrich Hayek) Belloc called no less a road to serfdom. …

"The laurel for outstanding success in implementing distributist aims must rest with the Spanish, where following the Spanish Civil war, Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta founded the Mondragon Co-operative in the Basque region. From a handful of unemployed oil lamp makers, Mondragon has grown to become the ninth largest corporation in Spain. … The lot of the poor is improved not through welfare but through economic empowerment. Capital is seen not as the enemy but as an instrument for social progress. …

"[I]f capitalism is simply about maximizing profits and standing back even if that leads to monopoly ownership, then Mondragon isn't capitalism. And if socialism is about collective ownership rather than private profit, Mondragon isn't socialism either, because Mondragon is all about making individuals and their families wealthier."

-- Distributism as an equalitarian economic policy - www.hsnsw.asn.au

Natural capital…

2012-01-07T20:05:00.000+08:00

"The twin pillars of the capitalist system – private ownership and free markets – are undergoing a significant shift as a result of the financial meltdown. The days of companies "privatizing the profits" and governments "socializing the losses" are gone forever. … Capitalism is dooming itself because it is polluting and depleting its resource base – natural capital – in its frenetic pursuit of profits and growth. The tragedy of modern capitalism lies in its denial that there is a biophysical limit to exponential consumption and growth. … [We must revise] statistical accounting systems, such as Gross Domestic Product, so that they reflect externalities like pollution and public health. … Capitalism cannot be reformed until we reform our own consumption behaviour: until we learn to live with less, until we reduce our bloated ecological footprints and until we lower our material expectations."

-- Hugh Robertson, "Capitalism and Sustainability" - www.future-generations-party.org

Too much capitalism means too few capitalists…

2012-01-06T21:43:00.000+08:00

"The modern rulers, who are simply the rich men, are really quite consistent in their attitude to the poor man. … That which wishes, in the words of the comic song, to break up the happy home, is primarily anxious not to break up the much more unhappy factory. Capitalism … is at war with the family, for the same reason which has led to its being at war with the Trade Union. This indeed is the only sense in which it is true that capitalism is connected with individualism. Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies. It desires its victims to be individuals, or (in other words) to be atoms. For the word atom, in its clearest meaning (which is none too clear) might be translated as 'individual.' If there be any bond, if there be any brotherhood, if there be any class loyalty or domestic discipline, by which the poor can help the poor, these emancipators will certainly strive to loosen that bond or lift that discipline in the most liberal fashion. If there be such a brotherhood, these individualists will redistribute it in the form of individuals; or in other words smash it to atoms."

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Superstition of Divorce, II.2

A more, rather than less, radical critique…

2012-01-06T19:41:00.000+08:00

Does Catholic Social Teaching approve of capitalism?

"If by 'capitalism' is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a 'business economy', 'market economy' or simply 'free economy'. But if by 'capitalism' is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.' …

"The theology that makes CST 'a category of its own,' makes it a more, rather than less, radical critique of Capitalism, because it subordinates economics to other, higher, dimensions of society…. [Médaille] painstakingly builds the case for introducing ethics and justice into economics and business, starting with the most basic issues. … Médaille confronts [the problem of relativism] directly, and carefully reconstructs the process of moral reasoning, taking the reader all the way from the Bible and the Greeks to the Enlightenment, and the separation of reason from faith—the source of our modern (or post-modern) predicament, where relativism rules."

-- Angelo Matera, Book Review: The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace by John Medaille - www.cjd.org

That isn't just bullshit…

2012-01-05T19:49:00.000+08:00

Me: "The point of distributism is that capitalism must regulate-itself-or-be-regulated in a way that protects and promotes the very conditions which make capitalism possible. Labor is taken as a given in neoclassical economics, but labor is nothing more than laborers, who are nothing more than the sons and daughters of families. Therefore, the market must first respect families –– the market must not use families, it must consist in families."

My coworker: "Hm. That's the first thing I've heard that… takes away from capitalism… that isn't just bullshit."

I now understand the reason for my doubts…

2012-01-05T19:37:00.000+08:00

"Until very recently, … I had grave doubts that what has come to be called 'capitalism' could establish the kind of economic democracy which political democracy required as its counterpart. I now understand the reasons for my doubts. They were based on an understanding of 'capitalism' which was colored by the sound criticisms that had been leveled against its injustices and inequities, not only by Marx and Engels, and by socialists generally, but also by Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, and by social philosophers or reformers as diverse as Alexis de Tocqueville, Horace Mann, Henry George, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Hilaire Belloc, Jacques Maritain, Amintore Fanfani, and Karl Polanyi."

-- Mortimer Adler, Preface to The Capitalist Manifesto (1958) by Louis Kelso, p. 5.

Expropriation in Taiwan…

2012-01-04T19:34:00.000+08:00

"Elderly farmers... said the proposed amendments to the Act of Eminent Domain are still tilted toward corporations. Tsai Pei-hui, a professor of Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University who joined the protest, said a dozen of the controversial land expropriation cases in special agricultural zones are related to major government construction projects. The draft amendment... allows the government to acquire private lands in agricultural zones, which means farmers' properties can be expropriated at will.... One of the main points of the amendment bill is that land expropriation must be in the 'public interest....'" However, the draft bill, which was scheduled for a second reading Tuesday, did not take into consideration the public's opinions on what constitutes 'public interest,' [Tsai] said."

Farmers say draft bill fails to address land expropriation woes - Taiwan News Online

www.taiwannews.com.tw

Avarice is directly a sin against neighbor…

2012-01-03T19:32:00.000+08:00

"External goods [i.e. commodities] have the character of means useful for an end. Hence man's good in them must consist in a certain measure of them; that is, a man must seek to have external riches only in a certain measure, insofar as they are necessary for him in his state of life. In any excess of the measure there will be sin; it is evil if he should wish to get or keep them beyond a right measure. This would be avarice, which is defined as 'the immoderate love of having.' ...

Avarice can be immoderate in external goods in two ways. First, directly in the getting or keeping of these goods, by getting of keeping them more than he should. This is directly a sin against our neighbor, because external goods cannot be simultaneously possessed by many, and therefore, if one man has more than he ought, others have less than they ought.

Secondly, avarice can imply an immoderateness in the internal affection we have for riches, namely, by immoderately loving, desiring, or delighting in them.... Consequently, it is a sin against God."

-- St. Thomas Aquinas ST IIa IIae, q. 88, Art. 4, resp. 1.

The necessary role of justice in political economy…

2012-01-02T19:28:00.000+08:00

"Medaille suggests that economics—better labeled as political economy—lost its way under the influence of David Hume and Bernard de Mandeville. ... As his antidote, the author returns to the political economy of Aristotle and to the necessary place of justice in proper theory. ... Aristotle also argued that '[t]he family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants.' Medaille elaborates: 'It is the family, and not the individual, that is the starting point ... because only the family is [fundamentally] self-sufficient; an individual in isolation can neither reproduce nor provide for himself.' Accordingly, all economics is necessarily social, or communitarian. This return to Aristotle also points to measures of justice. ...

"The author also resurrects the key insights of early 20th Century Distributists[: namely,] 'Markets are not natural phenomenon, but are socially created'; '…exchange does not create wealth; that happens in the production process'[;] …if the worker is to reap the full value of his labor, then he must own an interest in the land he works; — “Property must be seen as an aid to productive work, and not as a substitute for it'; and —-“This accumulation of property into the hands of those who do not use it is the sole cause of the vast inequalities that bedevil civil society and economic order” [referencing here Adam Smith—one of the author’s heroes-- “Wherever there is great property there is great inequality…[and] the indigence of the many”]. In each case, Medaille provides provocative elaborations of these basic premises behind the Call for a Property State."

-- "Commentary on John Medaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market" | Front Porch Republic - www.frontporchrepublic.com

A fantasy world of moral and fiscal unreality...

2012-01-01T05:59:00.000+08:00

Debt, Finance, and Catholics

Samuel Gregg

Debt and deficits seem to be on everyone’s minds these days. ... Unfortunately, modern Catholic social encyclicals have relatively little to say about financial questions. Even the 2004 Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine confines itself to very broad statements about finance and foreign debt, and it never really addresses the moral dimension of private and public debt.This absence of sustained contemporary Catholic reflection on financial questions is puzzling. ... Indeed, for many centuries, Catholic bishops and theologians invested considerable energy in understanding the world of money because of the usury question. Catholic thinkers were consequently among the first to identify money’s primary functions, illustrate how money in the conditions of economic freedom could assume the form of capital, demonstrate the moral legitimacy of charging interest on money-as-capital, and assess the moral status of different debts in different contexts.

... [E]arly-modern Catholic theologians assailed governments who tried to escape their debts by measures such as inflating the currency or borrowing more money to pay for interest payments on existing public debt, or who spent large portions of the taxes they raised on servicing debt or on activities that were either morally evil or simply did not fall within the core functions of constitutionally limited governments.

... Today one looks in vain for Catholic thinkers studying our debt and deficit problems from standpoints equally well-informed by economics and sound Catholic moral reflection. ... Instead, one finds broad admonitions such as “put the interests of the poor first” in an age of budget-cutting. The desire to watch out for the poor’s well being in an environment of fiscal restraint is laudable. But that’s not a reason to remain silent about the often morally-questionable choices and policies that helped create our personal and public debt dilemmas in the first place.

One Catholic who has proved willing to engage these issues is none other than Pope Benedict XVI. In his 2010 interview book Light of the World, Benedict pointed to a deeper moral disorder associated with the running-up of high levels of private and public debt. ...

In other words, someone has to pay for all this debt. And clearly many Western Europeans and Americans seem quite happy for their children to pick up the bill. That’s a rather flagrant violation of intergenerational solidarity.

... This willingness on the part of governments, communities, and individuals to live off debt means that people are “living in untruth.” ...

In fact, it’s possible to go further and argue such attitudes reflect a mindset of practical atheism: living and acting as if God does not exist, as if the only life is this life, as if the future does not matter. Only people who have no hope — no hope in God, no hope in redemption, no hope for the future — will think and act this way. ...

For if we choose to live our lives according to a perspective dominated by immediate gratification or pursue economic policies forever focused on the short term (which is, more or less, Keynesianism’s Achilles’ heel), then living off debt is entirely rational. But what does that say about our priorities and conception of human flourishing?

Taking on debt is not in itself intrinsically evil. In many circumstances, it’s an entirely reasonable decision. Nevertheless, a situation of inexorably increasing debt and a failure to confront its moral and economic causes can slowly corrode our personal sense of responsibility for our freely undertaken obligations and severely tempt us to live in a fantasy world of moral and fiscal unreality. ...

The economic freedom of the family...

2011-12-31T05:49:00.000+08:00

Property

Posted By Hilaire Belloc On June 18, 2011 7:20 PM

... [D]estitution means nothing else than the absence of property. ... To be paid a sufficient wage is not the same thing as to own; for he who pays the wage controls him who receives it.

The whole meaning of property is the economic freedom which it bestows upon the individual or family possessing it. ... A man who lives in his own house exploits no one. A man possessing his share in the factory in which he works exploits no one. A man possessing national bonds, the proceeds of which are equivalent to the taxes he pays for the meeting of the interest of national bonds, exploits no one. ... Some will have more, some less. ... It is the few taxing the many that [creates a sense of injustice]. All the theoretical injustice of attaching to exploitation one class by another lessens and nearly disappears where property is fully distributed. Where it is only income that is well distributed men are still under the thumb of whoever or whatever pays that income....

Of course, an exact distribution of ownership would be an ideal, and therefore impossible, state of affairs: but a condition of society in which the greater part of citizens owned enough to be economically free is practicable, and possible of attainment. So far from being an imaginary Utopian scheme it has been accepted for centuries throughout societies numbering millions and is to be found peaceably and successfully at work over the greater part of the civilized earth at this moment. Only where men are living under the curse of Industrial Capitalism is well divided property unfamiliar. ... Well distributed property is its own guarantee of survival. ...

Discovery and invention have, it is true, produced, much larger industrial units of production than our fathers knew—for instance in the way of ships, of land transport, and instruments and materials used for building. But discovery and invention also advantaged certain lesser units. There is no better example of this than the electronic motor and the facile distribution of electric power. These between them could have restored masses of small producers had they been taken advantage of in time.

... Where the nature of the new instruments makes small units impossible there is nothing to prevent those who work wit the large new units holding those units co-operatively as members of a Guild. ... The Guild is essentially an association of free owners who work co-operatively any instruments which is too expensive for separate ownership by a single member. ...

Let it be remembered that this aim of ours for the restoration of private property among a determining number of the community, the distribution of property among the masses of citizens who should thus be made free, does not contradict state ownership of certain functions. What it contradicts is the false doctrine of general or preponderant state ownership, or what is worst of all universal State ownership. The State exists for the family and the individual; not these for the State.

... Any free and well ordered state includes a proportion of State ownership which is based upon private ownership in the hands of as many citizens and families as possible at any rate, of so many as to make the principle determining character of society. ... The function of distribution should also follow the same lines. Where there must be concentration in a large unit, that unit should be organized as a Guild; but in the vast majority of cases a small unit of distribution—the small store—is sufficient.

Pagan Christmas?

2011-12-30T23:30:00.005+08:00

It's that time of the year again, when more people than usual come down with Danbrownitis, and we are reminded how the Church "stole" Christmas (and everything else!) from the pagans, in order to shore up their Constantinian theocracy, etc., etc. As a small antidote for seasonal Danbrownitis, then, I offer the following excerpts from some articles about the history of (the date of) Christmas.

1) "Calculating Christmas" by William Tighe, Touchstone Magazine, Dec. 2003.

[T]he choice of December 25th is the result of attempts among the earliest Christians to figure out the date of Jesus’ birth based on calendrical calculations that had nothing to do with pagan festivals. … [T]he pagan festival of the “Birth of the Unconquered Son” instituted by the Roman Emperor Aurelian on 25 December 274, was almost certainly an attempt to create a pagan alternative to a date that was already of some significance to Roman Christians. Thus the “pagan origins of Christmas” is a myth without historical substance.

The idea that the date was taken from the pagans goes back to two scholars from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Paul Ernst Jablonski, a German Protestant, wished to show that the celebration of Christ’s birth on December 25th was one of the many “paganizations” of Christianity that the Church of the fourth century embraced, as one of many “degenerations” that transformed pure apostolic Christianity into Catholicism. Dom Jean Hardouin, a Benedictine monk, tried to show that the Catholic Church adopted pagan festivals for Christian purposes without paganizing the gospel.

In the Julian calendar, created in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar, the winter solstice fell on December 25th, and it therefore seemed obvious to Jablonski and Hardouin that the day must have had a pagan significance before it had a Christian one. But in fact, the date had no religious significance in the Roman pagan festal calendar before Aurelian’s time, nor did the cult of the sun play a prominent role in Rome before him. …

It is true that the first evidence of Christians celebrating December 25th as the date of the Lord’s nativity comes from Rome some years after Aurelian, in A.D. 336, but there is evidence from both the Greek East and the Latin West that Christians attempted to figure out the date of Christ’s birth long before they began to celebrate it liturgically, even in the second and third centuries. The evidence indicates, in fact, that the attribution of the date of December 25th was a by-product of attempts to determine when to celebrate his death and resurrection. …

At this point, we have to introduce a belief that seems to have been widespread in Judaism at the time of Christ, but which … has completely fallen from the awareness of Christians. The idea is that of the “integral age” of the great Jewish prophets: the idea that the prophets of Israel died on the same dates as their birth or conception.

… The early Christians applied this idea to Jesus, so that March 25th and April 6th were not only the supposed dates of Christ’s death, but of his conception or birth as well. There is some fleeting evidence that at least some first- and second-century Christians thought of March 25th or April 6th as the date of Christ’s birth, but rather quickly the assignment of March 25th as the date of Christ’s conception prevailed … [and which gave rise to] the Feast of the Annunciation…. What is the length of pregnancy? Nine months. Add nine months to March 25th and you get December 25th; add it to April 6th and you get January 6th. December 25th is Christmas, and January 6th is Epiphany. …

Thus, December 25th as the date of the Christ’s birth appears to owe nothing whatsoever to pagan influences upon the practice of the Church during or after Constantine’s time. It is wholly unlikely to have been the actual date of Christ’s birth, but it arose entirely from the efforts of early Latin Christians to determine the historical date of Christ’s death.

And the pagan feast which the Emperor Aurelian instituted on that date in the year 274 was not only an effort to use the winter solstice to make a political statement, but also almost certainly an attempt to give a pagan significance to a date already of importance to Roman Christians. The Christians, in turn, could at a later date re-appropriate the pagan “Birth of the Unconquered Sun” to refer, on the occasion of the birth of Christ, to the rising of the “Sun of Salvation” or the “Sun of Justice.”

2) "Whose Christmas Is It Anyway?" by Judith Weingarten

A recent doctoral dissertation by S.E. Hijmans at the University of Groningen (NL) takes a fresh look at … [the pagan background of December 25 and] Dr Hijmans is the first to have noticed that there is absolutely no evidence to show that the Games of the Sun founded by Aurelian ever took place on December 25th. On the contrary, no feast day for Sol is mentioned on that day until 80 years later in the Calendar of 354 and, subsequently, in 362 by Julian the Apostate….

In fact, the Calendar lists a festival of Sol that was celebrated in 354 AD from 19-22 October culminating in an unparalleled 36 chariot races (instead of the standard 12 or 24 races at this time) -- an extravagance which seems to suggest not an annual festival but a rarer quadrennial event; thus, these are likely to be the Games dating back to Aurelian. … So, if the Christians had wanted to take over Sol's most important festival, that should have been the multi-day games celebrated on 19-22 October. …

At the very least, this new way of looking at the evidence casts doubt on the contention that Christmas was instituted on December 25th in order to counteract a popular pagan religious festival. Christ didn't have to trump Sol after all. Sol wasn't even in play.

3) "Notes on the Date of Christmas" by Fisheaters.com:

[Citing an article by Professor Tommaso Frederici in Osservatore Romano, 24 Dec 1998:] "December 25 is explained as the 'Christianization' of a pagan feast, 'birth of the Sol Invictus'; or as the symmetrical balance, an aesthetic balance between the winter solstice (Dec. 21-22) and the spring equinox (March 23-24). But a discovery of recent years has shed definitive light on the date of the Lord's birth.

"As long ago as 1958, the Israeli scholar Shemaryahu Talmon published an in-depth study on the calendar of the Qumran sect, and he reconstructed without the shadow of doubt the order of the sacerdotal rota system for the temple of Jerusalem (1 Paralipomenon/ Chronicles 24, 7-18) in New Testament times.

"Here the family of Abijah, of which Zechariah (Zachary) was a descendant, father of John the herald and forerunner (Luke 1, 5), was required to officiate twice a year, on the days 8-14 of the third month, and on the days 24-30 of the eighth month. This latter period fell at about the end of September. It is not without reason that the Byzantine calendar celebrated 'John's conception' on September 23 and his birth nine months later, on June 24.

"The 'six months' after the Annunciation established as a liturgical feast on March 25, comes three months before the forerunner's birth, prelude to the nine months in December: December 25 is a date of history."

In other words, according to the evidence of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Sacred Scripture, our liturgical calendar is accurate:

[late] September - Zachary (Zechariah) "executed his priestly function" (Luke 1:8) according to his class. His wife, Elizabeth, conceived (the Church traditionally holds St. John's conception to have taken place on 23 September) just as St. Gabriel said (Luke 1:24) and hid herself away for 5 months.

25 March, the Feast of the Annunciation - In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy (Luke 1:26), St. Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her she is to have a child

24 June, the Feast of St. John the Baptist - Three months after the Annunciation, St. John the Baptist was born, at a time when the days were becoming shorter

25 December - Nine months after the Annunciation, Jesus was born, at a time when the days were becoming longer.

[This article, "Are Christmas and Easter 'Pagan'?", makes a good point in passing about another argument leveled against December 25:

Even the common argument that shepherds would not have been in the fields in December is inaccurate. That is the time of the year when sheep naturally begin giving birth ("lambing"), and the shepherds would typically stay with the sheep at night to take care of the newborn lambs. In fact, the lambing season would have been the only time of the year in which the shepherds would have stayed with the flocks during the night (see Luke 2:8).

4) "Why is Christmas celebrated on December 25?" by David Bennett:

This essay is not intended to address the issue of when Jesus was actually born, but rather, I am interested in exploring reasons why Christians chose December 25th to celebrate Christ's birth, although based on the theories below, it is certainly plausible that Jesus was actually born on December 25th. Basically, I want to provide an overview of recent historical scholarship regarding the origins of Christmas that suggests that the date of Christmas was chosen primarily for Christian reasons, as opposed to so-called pagan reasons. …

[I]n the early Church, there was no fixed date for the celebration of Christmas across the entire Church, or even agreement as to when Jesus was born. The current date of the celebration of Christmas, like the final decision on the canon of Scripture, took hundreds of years to become established throughout the entire Church. … [T]he main reason early Christians chose December 25th for the date of Christmas relates to two significant and symbolic dates: the date of the creation of the world, and the vernal equinox. According to some Christians, both events happened on March 25th. …

There are other good, Jewish, Christian, and biblical reasons why Christians chose the date of December 25th. … So, we have multiple reasons why ancient Christians chose December 25th as the date to celebrate the birth of Jesus. And while we may not agree with the reasoning behind the choice of December 25th, nonetheless, there are no pagan conspiracies at work, and no evil machinations of the emperor Constantine, just solid Christian symbolic reasoning. This is not surprising, considering Christians of the time were very concerned about the influence of paganism, and took great pains (even giving their lives) to avoid worshiping or celebrating non-Christian gods. Besides, virtually every historical and Apostolic Christian church celebrates the birth of Jesus on December 25 (those using the Gregorian calendar that is), and it is highly unlikely every Church in every region caved into pagan influence so readily. …

This, of course, brings up the issue of the relationship between Christian feasts and pagan ones, and we must ask, "is there anything wrong with Christians borrowing some practices and concepts from pagan festivals?" The Catholic and Orthodox answers are "no." Did Christians put an end to every Saturnalia custom? Probably not. Did some Saturnalia customs become associated with the Christmas feast because the dates of the festivals were close to one another? Certainly. However, Christians took these customs, baptized them as Christian, and now these customs honor the true Sun of Righteousness, Jesus Christ.

5) An astute reader's comment from Dr. Weingarten's post (above) that sums of the matter nicely:

25 Dec is nine months after the feast of the Incarnation, 25 Mar. This was specified iirc because great prophets were believed to enter the world on the same day they departed. It is thus tied to Good Friday calculation. Since another calculation identified 6 Apr as Good Friday (and hence as the Incarnation) churches in the East celebrated Christmas on 6 Jan. The very fact that early Christians were celebrating Christmas on two different days in two different regions should indicate that they were selecting the date for their own reasons and not for any retrospective modern Realpolitick.

Merry Christmas to all!

Every economic decision has a moral consequence....

2011-12-30T04:54:00.000+08:00

The Trouble with Catholic Social Teaching

Posted By Dale Ahlquist On April 19, 2011 7:31 PM

... There are people who think Catholic Social Teaching has something to do with homosexual rights or abortion rights or contraception rights. It doesn’t. Those things are not rights. They are wrongs. And the Church holds the line against them without compromise. Other people avoid Catholic Social Teaching because of what it really does mean. It means justice for the poor.

The Church has always emphasized the corporal works of mercy: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the afflicted. But justice is distinct from mercy in that it means achieving something more permanent than relieving immediate suffering. It means, as Chesterton says, raising both the political and the economic status of the poor. ...

Chesterton ... says we once had the medieval concept of the Just Price. Then the simplistic “laws” of supply and demand. Now things are more complicated: we have a market where suppliers “demand a demand....

Anything that exploits the weaker side of man is, quite simply, evil. It is one of the reasons why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The old economic models no longer work. In order to have a just society we need to act with principles other than economic profit. This is a theme repeated by Chesterton throughout his writings. It is also a theme repeated in the ... the encyclicals on Catholic Social Teaching. The latest installment is Caritas in Veritate (“Love in Truth”) from Pope Benedict XVI.

Mammon, the one real alternative to God, has always had a robust following, but never more so than in the modern world, where, as the new encyclical points out, the amount of overall wealth has increased but so has the disparity between the rich and the poor.

The Pope says, “Every economic decision has a moral consequence.” He echoes ... the social philosophy of Distributism, which was espoused by Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Fr. Vincent McNabb, and others. ... Benedict does not confine his treatment of social issues to mere economics. He touches upon technology, ecology, and education−the whole human person. ...

In a skeptical and materialistic age, the social encyclicals seem to garner the widest attention because everyone is interested in seeing how the Church will adjust to the trends of the modern world. However, it is arguable that there has never been a real surprise in any papal encyclical. The Pope simply affirms the truths the Church has always affirmed. The encyclicals are needed only because the world changes, not because the truth changes. The world needs to be refreshed by the truth. For instance, in 1968, the only surprise of Humane Vitae was that the Church was not going to give into the world. Lust is still wrong. Now, in 2009, the only surprise of Caritas in Veritate was that the Church was not going to give into the world. Greed is still wrong.

In both these encyclicals, the family is defended as the basic unit of society. We cannot have sexual arrangements that destroy the family. We cannot have economic arrangements that destroy the family. ...

Wall of separation…

2011-12-29T19:26:00.000+08:00

"[A]s Professor Médaille reveals, the Enlightenment’s wall of separation of the 'moral question and the economic question' compelled civilization to flirt with capitalism, socialism, Communism, Keynesianism, mercantilism, and even laissez-faire. And this last has, unfortunately, replaced the 'free' in free market with excess and fiscal libertinism.

"Absent distributive justice, we cannot speak of supply and demand. [Economics] isolated from the external truths of the higher sciences ... is insufficient and disconnected from truth. ... Indeed, this 'free' market called capitalism is a system of privatized profits and socialized losses. Deregulatory and 'free' market policies have led us to higher debt, more centralized economic power, and larger government. ...

"The author suggests certain steps are needed to achieve a free market. Corporate tax subsidies must be eradicated so that the collectivizing of production and the strong political power of corporations can be eliminated."

-- "Toward a Truly Free Market: A Review" - distributistreview.com

Unless we first reclaim ourselves...

2011-12-29T15:34:00.000+08:00

An Introduction to Distributism, Part II

Posted By Donald P. Goodman III On October 17, 2011 6:54 AM

(For Part I, click here.)

The widespread distribution of productive property is the primary goal of Distributism; however, other principles also inform Distributism’s pursuit of this goal. The first of these is the principle of subsidiarity... [which is] the simple notion that
[J]ust as it is a crime to take away and hand over to the community those things which can be done with proper struggle and industry by single men, so also it is an injury, a grave fault, and a disruption of right order to summon to the larger and higher society those things which can be done and excelled by smaller and lower communities.35
... [W]hatever can be done by a smaller unit should not be done by a larger one ... [which] clearly leads to the greater distribution of productive property. There is no reason for much of our production of wealth to be so concentrated; Distributism would encourage this overconcentration to be remedied, spreading ownership of productive property more broadly throughout the populace.

It’s important to remember that this principle works both ways. Pius XI notes that “it is rightly argued that certain types of goods must be reserved to the republic since they bear such great power with them, [power] so great that it cannot be permitted to private men by a sound republic.”36 ... Subsidiarity does not exclude higher authorities from all functioning in society; it simply ensures that lower authorities are not deprived of their rightful role. Distributists respect both sides of the subsidiarity coin....

It is true that modern industries are often not amenable to wide scale distribution in the traditional sense; after all, an aircraft factory is not a shoemaker’s shop. But this does not mean that the workers in such factories cannot become owners. ... Spain’s Mondragon37 and the many cooperatives in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region38 have proven to the world that worker-owned cooperative production can be just as successful, or even more successful, than the highly centralized production that has unfortunately characterized the industrial age. ...

The other vital principle which forms Distributism’s pursuit of widely distributed productive property is solidarity ... [which] is the recognition that a state is a single whole that is possessed not only of many individual goods, but also a single common good.39 It recognizes the fundamental precept of traditional and Catholic social thinking that the man “who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is. . . either a beast or a god.”40 ... The organization entrusted with ensuring that particular goods are kept within proper limits and directed toward the common good is the state.42 Therefore, keeping in mind the principle of subsidiarity, the state guides economic life, including its subsidiary corporations (such as workingmen’s associations43), toward the common good, while individual corporations pursue their own particular goods within that framework. This notion of many particular goods subordinated to and cooperating toward a single common good is what we mean by solidarity.

Solidarity has many repercussions in economic thought. ... [C]ompetition, though just within certain limits,44 cannot serve as the basis for a just economic order45; in other words, whatever benefit that businesses seek to obtain by competition cannot come at the cost of the public good. Truly, this is anathema in an age when corporations routinely justify their butchering of the national and even international economies by their obligations to make profits for their shareholders....

Furthermore, what has traditionally been known as the preferential option for the poor follows directly from the notion of solidarity. Leo XIII stated that “when there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to especial consideration…[, hence] wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government.”46 ... [S]pecial care should be taken by the whole for those parts which are least able to help themselves.

So how is a Distributist society to be established? That question is impossible to answer generally. ... Means for encouraging widespread ownership of productive property, always respectful of the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, will vary by place, condition, climate, economy, culture, government, and innumerable other variables. Catholics need to dedicate themselves to consideration of these measures in their own areas and situations, tailoring them to specific conditions. One condition, however, will be the same always and everywhere, a condition identified by Pope Leo well over a century ago:
[S]ince religion alone, as We said at the beginning, can avail to destroy the evil at its root, all men should rest persuaded that [the] main thing needful is to re-establish Christian morals, apart from which all the plans and devices of the wisest will prove of little avail.48
We cannot reclaim society for Christ unless we first reclaim ourselves. To that task, first and foremost, distributists, like all men, must devote all their strength.

Notes
1 St. Luke 10:7.
2 Didache: The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (Peter Kirby, trans.; 2001), available at http://earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html.
3 Id.
4 A superb example of such thinking is St. Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum; vel De Regno, available at http://gorpub.freeshell.org/books.html#deregno.
5 See, e.g., Dr. William Luckey, The Intellectual Origins of Modern Catholic Social Teaching on Economics: An Extension of a Theme of Jes us Huerta de Soto 9 (speech given to the Austrian Scholars Conference at Auburn University, 23-25 March 2000) (arguing that given research “which ought to have been available to [the pope],” “it is hard to excuse Leo XIII”).
6 See, e.g., id. at 1; see also Rev. Maciej Zieba, O. P., From Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum to John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus 5:1 Journal of Markets & Morality 159 (Spring 2002) (arguing that part of Rerum novarum‘s “tendency is brought to a halt and partly turned around in the first two social encyclicals of John Paul II”).
7 Pope St. Pius X, Singulari quadam (24 September 1912) (“[i]taque primo loco edicimus catholicorum omnium o cium esse. . . tenere rmiter pro terique non timide christian veritatis principia, Ecclesi catholic magisterio tradita, ea pr sertim qu Decessor Noster sapientissime in Encyclicis Literris Rerum novarum exposuit”). All translations from the Latin in this work are the author’s, unless otherwise noted.
8 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, no. 47 (teaching that “[t]he right to possess private property is derived from nature, not from man”). All citations from Rerum novarum are from the English translation available at http://www.vatican.va.
9 Id. (teaching that “the State has the right to control its [private property's] use in the interests of the public good”).
10 Id. at no. 45.
11 Id. at no. 20 (teaching that “before deciding whether wages [are] fair… wealthy owners and all masters of labor should be mindful… that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profi t out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine”); see also nos. 43{45.
12 Id. at no. 37.
13 Id. (teaching that “[t]he richer class have many ways of shielding themselves,… whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own… for this reason [ ] wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government”).
14 Id. at no. 39.
15 Id. at no. 41.
16 Id. at no. 3.
17 Id. at no. 42.
18 Id. at no. 45.
19 Id. at no. 3.
20 John M edaille, Neo-Feudalism and the Invisible Fist in The Distributist Review, available at http://www.distributistreview.com/mag.
21 Duane D. Stanford, InBev to Buy Anheuser-Busch, Gains Top Market Share in Bloomberg (14 July 2008), available at http://\-www.\-bloomberg.\-com/\-apps/\-news?pid=newsarchive\&sid=aDm1PPbwrdHc.
22 Tom Daykin, InBev looks at SABMiller in JSOnline (May 29, 2008), available at http://www.jsonline.com/business/29568214.html.
23 Dmitry Krasny, And Then There were Eight: 25 Years of Media Mergers, from GE-NBC in Mother Jones (March/April 2007).
24 James Niccolai, Intel grabs server market share from AMD, says IDC in Network World (19 August 2010), available at http://www.networkworld.com.
25 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, no. 3.
26 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (The Liberty Fund, 1977).
27 Id. at no. 62.
28 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea in The Basic Works of Aristotle 1003 (Benjamin Jowett trans., Richard McKeon ed., Random House 1941).
29 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Ia, Q. 21, Art. 1 (“secundum quam aliquis gubernator vel dispensator dat unicuique secundum suam dignitatem”).
30 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, no. 33.
31 Id. at no. 46.
32 Id. at no. 47.
33 Id.
34 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State (The Liberty Fund 1977).
35 Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 79 (“sicut qu a singularibus hominibus proprio marte et propria industria possunt per ci, nefas est eisdem eripere et communitati demandare, ita qu a minoribus et inferioribus communitatibus e ci pr starique possunt, ea ad maiorem et altiorem societatem avocare iniuria est simulque grave damnum ac recti ordinis perturbatio”.
36 Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 114 (“Etenim certa qu dam bonorum genera rei public reservanda merito contenditur, cum tam magnum secum ferant potentatum, quantus pravatis hominibus, salva re publica, permitti non possit”)
37 See, e.g., Dr. Race Matthews, Mondrag on and the Global Economic Meltdown in The Distributist Review (6 June 2010), available at http://distributistreview.com/mag.
38 See, e.g., John Restakis, The Lessons of Emilia Romagna (30 April 2005), available at http://www.geo.coop/ les/BolognaVisits Lessons ER.pdf.
39 For a lengthier discussion of this, see the author’s Individualism and the State (23 July 2010), available at http://distributistreview.com/mag.
40 Aristotle, Politics 1131{32 (Benjamin Jowett trans.) in The Basic Works of
Aristotle (Richard McKeon ed., New York: 1941).
41 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, no. 51.
42 Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 49 (“[o] cia vero h c singillatim de nire, ubi id necessitas postulaverit neque ipsa lex naturalis pr stiterit, eorum est qui rei public pr sunt”).
43 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, no. 49.
44 Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 88 (“[a]t liberum certamen, quamquam dum certis nibus contineatur, quum sit et sane utile”).
45 Id. (“rei conomic rectus ordo non potest permitti libero virium certamini”).
46 Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, no. 37.
47 Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 25 (“in ipsis protegendis privatorum iuribus, pr cipue in rmorum atque inopum rationem esse habendam”).

So, you ask, what's all this about economics and social ethics lately?

2011-12-28T19:46:00.000+08:00

A few things:

0. I'm not a communist! I'm a capitalist... with qualms. My tentative thesis: capitalism rests on the free-market mechanism (FMM), but is self-defeating as soon as it is applied in a necessarily limiting social context (i.e., capitalism requires market-external intervention), whereas distributism protects the FMM but in a radically different form (i.e., the ecological analogue of 'distributed cognition/processing'). Since both theories consist in the FMM, there cannot be a clash between them, unless/until the former rejects the structure of the latter in favor of politically abetted concentration, a concentration which denatures the 'neural' tissue of the FMM. Capitalism emphasizes the mechanism of the FMM at the expense of a sustainable structure, while distributism emphasizes the structure of how the FMM can persist.

1. I don't capitalize "distributism". It's too tendentious/pugnacious, otherwise. Marxism, Darwinism, Georgism, etc. Okay. But let's stick to socialism, capitalism, distirbutism, institutionalism, solidarism, etc.

1a. Georgism and distributism, dear cousins!

2. Even mentioning "distribution" scares otherwise receptive conservative/traditionalist minds, so distributism needs a new name. I propose: "[Darwinian] niche capitalism" or "radically parallel-process capitalism" or "ecomodular capitalism".

3. I'm not a bought-and-sold distributist. Not yet, anyway. I really am just reading in all directions, and basically making up for a mediocre economic education along the way. I'm a big fan of the free market and, as an American, I'm hugely biased towards capitalism. I am gravely dissatisfied, however, with the historically regular and increasingly manifest link between "capital concentration" and "political centralization" (and vice versa!) If, however, the Magisterium indicates that neoclassical liberalism (NL) is heresy, let NL burn.

4. As John Médaille argues, economic reform is only possible after political reform, and political structure follows economic dynamics. The rise of federal hegemony over states' rights is a parallel development of the corporatist centralization of capital in the USA. Likewise, the dismantling of federal debt and welfare statism can only come by (re)distributing the political power to the states, cities, and boroughs of the USA. In turn, once these local (!) powers regain their power, they will regain their revenue responsibility in the republic. Away with kicking problems upstairs to Uncle Sam!

4a. There is a crucial link between states' rights and truly free markets, since (classical) federalism is just political distributism. This is why I believe the "Austrian–distributist" debate among Catholics is a new kind of De Auxiliis for the Church. If they are ever going to find each other (as kissing cousins, indeed), Austrianism and distributism will do so in the domain of states' rights, at least in the USA.

Trying this on for size…

2011-12-28T19:24:00.003+08:00

"[T]he essence of distributism is a decentralized (often agrarian-based) system of widely distributed property that is a bulwark of liberty precisely because it relieves men from dependence on the state[,] thus checking the power and growth of the state. This is its best selling point. Prescient distributist thinkers such as Dorothy Day and Schumacher understood the poison of the welfare-warfare state, which in the corporatist context is usually based on militarism, jingoism, and anti-semitism."

-- Anonymous, on a blog I can't recall

A false idea of freedom…

2011-12-28T19:23:00.003+08:00

"Hell consists in man's being unwilling to receive anything, in his desire to be self-sufficient ... to stand entirely on his own feet.... Hell is wanting-only-to-be-oneself."

-- Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 1990 [1968]), p. 239.

"[N]othing ... is greater to one than one's self is."

-- Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (1855), no. 48.

"The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty, of which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings, of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director."

-- Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), VI, ii, 46.

"Even as one's liberty is not lessened by one being unable to sin, so, too, the necessity resulting from a will firmly fixed to good does not lessen the liberty, as instanced in God and the blessed. Such is the necessity implied by a vow, bearing a certain resemblance to the confirmation of the blessed."

-- Aquinas, ST II-II, q. 88, art. 4, resp. 1.

"[I]n democracies of the more extreme type there has arisen a false idea of freedom which is contradictory to the true interests of the state. ... In such democracies every one lives as he pleases, or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fancy.' But this is all wrong; men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it is their salvation."

-- Aristotle, Politics, Book V, ix.

It's illegal to prosper…

2011-12-28T19:14:00.003+08:00

"[M]y observation is that it is typically illegal for low income people to do the things they used to do to increase the quality of food in their diets. You can’t raise pigs and chickens in your back yard anymore. OK, maybe we’re seeing some small evolution in some areas on chickens, but not a lot. Nobody is keeping a milk cow in cities and selling the milk and cream to their neighbors. And everywhere, there is a war on the territory presently occupied by low income people. … [P]oor people also can’t build their own housing anymore. That’s against the law too."

The Six Hands of Community Food Security « BobWaldrop.net

Knives out in Florida…

2011-12-28T19:03:00.001+08:00

Florida v. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

The focus is on the 5th Amendment and the Individual Mandate in the ACA ("Obamacare").

Interestingly enough, John Médaille's latest book, which I recently finished, is cited twice in the brief.

http://www.cocklelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/25618-pdf-Kotani.pdf

This dispute could be a 'De Auxiliis' controversy in our day…

2011-12-28T18:53:00.000+08:00

"The Austrians err when they claim that the Distributists are a bunch of ignoramuses who simply don’t understand economics. Refer to the academic qualifications of men in the Distributist camp, like John Médaille, Thomas Storck, Race Mathews, Richard Aleman, etc. I would remind folks that Lew Rockwell’s degree is in English and Tom Wood’s degree is in history. The Distributists err when they claim the Austrians are a bunch of heretics. In Catholic Social Doctrine there is the principle of the 'Autonomy of the Temporal Order'. The Church does not mandate we embrace a specific economic (or political) model. The Church has been critical of both Socialism and Capitalism in the past, but also recognizes that we live in a global economy today. The prudential application of moral principles can be applied in both a Distributist and Capitalist economic model."

Thomas Woods and His Critics, The Austrian vs. Distributist Debate Among Catholics | The American Ca

All striving against nature is in vain…

2011-12-28T18:49:00.000+08:00

"[I]t is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences … in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition."

–– Pope Leo XIII, De Rerum Novarum (1891), §17.

The limits of human action…

2011-12-28T18:45:00.001+08:00

"The only way in which one can increase one’s share of wealth on the market is by increasing one’s marginal productivity. … Economics cannot tell the ethician [sic] or the theologian what to do and what not to do. All it can do is to set forth the limits of the possibility of human action. If good intentions are to bear good fruit, they must take account of these limitations."

James A. Sadowsky "The Christian Response to Poverty"

The opiate gag…

2011-12-28T18:42:00.001+08:00

A Communist nation mourning like hired Jews for Kim Jong Il… and Marx tells me religion is the opiate of the masses?

http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-technology/nkoreans-line-streets-for-kim-jong-ils-funeral-20111228-1pchz.html

Making our ultimate end immediate…

2011-12-28T18:37:00.001+08:00

"The missing element [in our age] is the philosophical and moral foundation that society needs overall, including in its economy. … [N]either making the greatest profit, nor getting the best deal, is the most important thing. Until we … put our ultimate end as the primary factor in all of our actions our society will continue to decline no matter how prosperous it may become. Unfortunately, the prevailing economic model separates morality from economics, and the most well known alternative [viz. socialism] seeks to correct the injustices … with even greater injustices."

-- David Cooney, "The Missing Element", The Distributist Review

You keep using that word, but I don't think "free" means what you think it means…

2011-12-28T18:09:00.001+08:00

"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term 'free market' in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate … [argument] that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because 'that’s not how the free market works'--implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of 'free market principles.'"

–– Kevin Carson, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, p. 142

Finding the flood…

2011-12-28T18:06:00.002+08:00

"Evidence shows that what is now the Persian Gulf was flooded by the waters of the Indian Ocean around 8,000 years ago. Dr. Rose thinks the new colonists may have come from the heart of the Gulf to escape the rising water levels that plunged the once fertile landscape beneath the water."

These aren't the errors you're looking for…

2011-12-28T18:04:00.002+08:00

Nor are these the cells you're looking for.

"In saying that the use of embryonic stem cells in experiments is 'immoral', they are tacitly claiming that such cells are taken from human beings, since that is the only possible grounds on which one could object to their use in experiments. And yet, at the same time, few on the Court seem to oppose abortion, which also involves the destruction of an embryo. So there is an error of judgment involved here, just not the one the editors of Nature imagine."

-- Dr. Scott Carson on the article below

Error of judgment : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

www.nature.com

A warning to all you "info junkies" out there…

2011-12-28T17:59:00.001+08:00

And to the three of you who still read my blog here.

"[According to Ellul,] modern propaganda cannot work without 'education'; he thus reverses the widespread notion that education is the best prophylactic against propaganda. On the contrary, he says, education … in the modern world … is the absolute prerequisite for propaganda. In fact, education is largely identical with what Ellul calls 'pre-propaganda'––the conditioning of minds with vast amounts of incoherent information, already dispensed for ulterior purposes and posing as 'facts'…. Ellul follows through with by designating intellectuals as virtually the most vulnerable of all to modern propaganda, for three reasons: (1) they absorb the largest amount of secondhand, unverifiable information; (2) they feel a compelling need to have an opinion on every important question of our time, and thus easily succumb to opinions offered to them by propaganda on all such indigestible pieces of information; (3) they consider themselves capable of 'judging for themselves.' They literally need propaganda."

–– Konrad Kellen, Introduction (Feb. 1965) to Propaganda by Jacques Ellul, p. vi.

Economics is not a value-free science…

2011-12-28T17:40:00.000+08:00

“The Church's social doctrine has always maintained that justice must be applied to every phase of economic activity, because this is always concerned with man and his needs. … Thus every economic decision has a moral consequence. … Perhaps at one time it was conceivable that first the creation of wealth could be entrusted to the economy, and then the task of distributing it could be assigned to politics. Today that would be more difficult, given that economic activity is no longer circumscribed within territorial limits, while the authority of governments continues to be principally local. Hence the canons of justice must be respected from the outset, as the economic process unfolds, and not just afterwards or incidentally. Space also needs to be created within the market for economic activity carried out by subjects who freely choose to act according to principles other than those of pure profit, without sacrificing the production of economic value in the process. The many economic entities that draw their origin from religious and lay initiatives demonstrate that this is concretely possible.”

–– Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate (2009), §37.

"Only Black Sabbath can rhyme masses with masses."

2011-12-28T17:26:00.001+08:00

Every life is a sermon...

2011-12-28T15:22:00.000+08:00

Father Vincent McNabb: a Voice of Contradiction

by Michael Hennessy

[A talk given to the UK League of the Kingship of Christ by its Treasurer, Michael Hennessy, at St Georges House, Wimbledon, on Saturday 15th June 2002]

"Every minister of holy religion must bring to the struggle the full energy of his mind and all his powers of endurance."

If there is one thing, one single line of text, that could be said to have motivated the tireless apostolic work of Father Vincent McNabb, it is this line from the encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII. This great papal "call to arms", issued by Holy Mother Church just weeks before Father McNabb was ordained as a priest in the Dominican Order at the age of 23, illuminated all of his work and action: after Holy Scripture and the works of St Thomas it held pride of place in his heart.

This should perhaps not be so surprising since he was a Dominican working for a large portion of his life in the slums of England, and Rerum Novarum was written - it is said - by Cardinal Zigliara, a noted Dominican scholar, in collaboration with the Pope, and was undoubtedly influenced by the life and work of the great English Cardinal Manning. Yet certainly no priest, no religious in England was as indefatigable as Father McNabb in his desire -- in his work -- to see the blue-print of Rerum Novarum put into action.

Indeed, those Dominican students he taught while at Hawkesyard Priory remembered being instructed to keep a copy of the encyclical beside their beds: and his biographer (-of-sorts), Father Ferdinand Valentine, recalled being told to memorise the paragraph which Father McNabb thought was most central to Pope Leos work:

"There is general agreement that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-men's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organisation took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is ... still practised by covetous and grasping men. ... [T]he hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."

It was to those living in the slums and decaying tenements and to those working in the factories and sweat-shops of London that Father McNabb brought these words of the Vicar of Christ: and as a priest he brought to them Christ's power to inspire and to heal.

+ + +

It is evident that Father McNabb is hardly known amongst Catholics today. ... Some may be aware that he is associated with that set of ideas known as Distributism (for which he was the principal inspiration); some that he was a well-known Dominican friar who frequently spoke at Parliament Hill and at Speakers Corner to the motley London throng; some that he was at one time a friend of Eric Gill and was connected with his community at Ditchling; perhaps most of those who have heard of him stumbled across his name while reading about Hilaire Belloc or G K Chesterton. All these mental associations are indeed aspects of the man, of the priest; yet he would, I think, like best to have been known for championing Rerum Novarum.

Father McNabb was -- with some notable exceptions, principally within his own Order -- held in high esteem by his contemporaries, even by those such as George Bernard Shaw or the Webbs, founders of the socialist Fabian Society, who could have most been expected to dislike him. During Father McNabb's life, G K Chesterton wrote of him, in the introduction to ... Father McNabb's book, Francis Thompson And Other Essays:

"Now I am nervous about writing here what I really think about Father Vincent McNabb for fear that he should somehow get hold of the proofs and cut it out. But I will say briefly and firmly that he is one of the few great men I have met in my life; that he is great in many ways, mentally and morally and mystically and practically... nobody who ever met or saw or heard Father McNabb has ever forgotten him."

Hilaire Belloc, who was in many ways temperamentally similar to Father McNabb, wrote this about him after his death in the Dominican journal Blackfriars in 1943:

"The greatness of his ... character, of his learning, his experience, and, above all, his judgement, was altogether separate from the world about him... the most remarkable aspect of all was the character of holiness... I can write here from intimate personal experience ... I have known, seen and felt holiness in person... I have seen holiness at its full in the very domestic paths of my life, and the memory of that experience, which is also a vision, fills me now as I write - so fills me that there is nothing now to say."

... Monsignor Ronald Knox, who was, in many ways, Father McNabb's temperamental opposite, wrote, when asked for his opinion on the move - in the 1950s - to start a process for Father McNabb's beatification:

"Father Vincent is the only person I have ever known about whom I have felt, and said more than once, He gives you some idea of what a saint must be like. There was a kind of light about his presence which didnt seem to be quite of this world."

But perhaps my favourite tribute to him from his famous contemporaries - in one way at least - comes from the pen of Maurice Baring and through the eyes and ears and reflections of an unbeliever. To give some background: Cecil Chesterton, G K Chesterton's brother, died in 1918 from trench fever caught while serving at the Front: he had converted to Catholicism in 1913. Before joining up, he had been a pugnacious journalist who had fought against financial and political corruption in Parliament, had been successfully but wrongfully sued by the Isaac brothers for revealing their part in the Marconi Scandal, and was in Belloc's view the more able of the Chesterton brothers (a view that, I have to add, no-one else seems to have held, the humble G K Chesterton aside). Father McNabb preached at Cecil Chesterton's funeral: sadly, no copy of the sermon survived (Belloc referred to it as the greatest piece of sacred oratory he had ever heard) but Maurice Baring published a poem in the 1943 August issue of Blackfriars inspired by the comments of an unbeliever friend and poet who had accompanied Baring to the funeral:

A poet heard you preach and told me this:

While listening to your argument unwind

He seemed to leave the heavy world behind;

And liberated in a bright abyss

All burdens and all load and weight to shed;

Uplifted like a leaf before the wind,

Untrammelled in a region unconfined,He moved as lightly as the happy dead....

... [Vincent McNabb] was born Joseph McNabb, at Portaferry near Belfast on 8th July 1868. He was thus - I think importantly - senior to both Belloc and Chesterton, by two and six years respectively. His father was a sea captain whom he seldom saw: his mother was just that, a mother, and - in his eyes - all the more blessed for being 'just' that.... She was the mother of eleven children in total, Joseph McNabb being the tenth. In his later years he wrote a book, almost an autobiographical study of his early years, called Eleven, thank God! which he dedicated to his mother and which stands as a great apologia pro familia magna. Family always held a central place in Father McNabb's world, as it indeed holds a central place in Rerum Novarum.

Although born in Ireland, by the age of 14 he had moved with his family to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, on account of his father's work. ... Curiously, what appears to have been the principal human motive behind Father McNabb's vocation was the same thing that drove Chesterton into the Catholic Church - fear of Hell. As he put it: "I dont want to go to Hell; I think I'll go to the Novitiate!" ...

As we have seen, Father NcNabb was ordained in September1891, shortly after his 23rd birthday, and in the year of Rerum Novarum. He was the most brilliant scholar of his year in the novitiate, although the following years were to see some greater academic minds entering the Order. ...

For the next 26 years, Father McNabb was sent hither and thither as holy Obedience demanded. ...

+ + +

... Now let us look in more detail at the work and thought of Father McNabb. ... It was not until he finally settled down at St Dominic's Priory ... at the age of 52 that he found a context for his work and contacts with those able best to assist him in his work and so - per accidentem - became a national Catholic figure. His preaching at Parliament Hill and Speakers Corner with the Catholic Evidence Guild were instrumental to this growing renown.

... I would like now to cite some quotations from his own works to throw light on what he was saying to those contemporaries.

This first piece is from the introduction to the book, Old Principles and the New Order, published in 1942, which was a collection of his essays printed in Catholic journals over the previous twenty years:

"This book rests upon certain dogmatic and moral principles, certain undeniable facts, and it makes certain practical proposals.

The first principle is that there is a God, our Creator, Whom we must love and serve; and Whom we cannot love and serve without loving and serving our fellow creatures.

The second principle is that the Family is the unit of all social life; and that therefore the value of all social proposals must be tested by their effect on the Family.

The third (psychological) principle is that from the average man we cannot expect more than average virtue. A set of circumstances demanding from the average man more than average (i.e. heroic) virtue is called an Occasion of Sin.

The fourth (moral) principle is that the occasions of sin should be changed, if they can possibly be changed, i.e. they must be overcome by flight not fight.

The great observed fact, of world-wide incidence, is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas) normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue....

From this observed fact that the industrialized town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be fled,... Flight from the Land must be now be countered by Flight to the Land."

... The occasion of sin which Father McNabb was particularly - but not exclusively - referring to was the temptation placed before poor families living in poor conditions to resort to methods of birth control ("no birth and no control" as G K Chesterton so famously put it - "race suicide" as McNabb put it rather more grimly).

While the state in which so many of his contemporaries lived and worked filled him with grief and anguish ... it was largely amongst these people that he worked, and to these people he ministered and preached. Despite his popularity, and its usefulness to his mission, he was consistent in urging his congregation, his audience, to leave him and to leave London. He encouraged all those who could to desert the Babylon of London - 'Babylondon', as he often referred to it - and vowed to remain behind to serve those who could not, or would not, leave.... [T]his flight to the Land was no foolish idea: towards the end of Father McNabb's life the Government was itself was in the face of war to encourage a return to the land, so as to increase agricultural produce from a degraded and untended land. ...

Of course, the primary reason for Father McNabb's detestation of squalid and degrading urban conditions was the effect they had upon family life. The family is the prime unit of Christian society - indeed of any society - and precedes the State in every respect. Father McNabb knew that all economic, social, and political acts ... [should be judged by their effects] upon the family.... The family was what he called "the Nazareth measure". As he wrote in his book, The Church and the Land:

"All our personal and social building, to be lasting, must be trued by the measures of that little school of seers whose names are the very music of life - Jesus, Mary, Joseph! ... [L]et no guile of social usefulness betray you into hurting the authority of the Father, the chastity of the Mother, the rights and therefore property of the Child."

... In his book, Old Principles and the New Order- a title that sounds quite prophetic to our own ears - he writes about charity, poverty, and obedience:

"[E]ven Catholics have sometimes come to think that the three virtues behind these religious vows were only for religious, whereas the three virtues are binding upon all individuals, and in some measure, upon that grouping of individuals... which we moderns...confusedly call the State.."

... Father McNabb is pointing out that these three virtues should be as much a daily call to arms as they are to the religious who have professed vows. ... Moreover, Father McNabb added:

"[I]t need hardly be pointed out that the poverty of work and thrift, the self-control of virginal and conjugal chastity, the obedience to rulers and to law, are of the greatest social value and need."

In many articles Father McNabb traced the decadent and withering effect of the State upon society to its neglect of poverty -- through reckless expenditure, financial mismanagement, usurious practices -- to its neglect of obedience -- by going against the natural moral law and the laws of revealed religion -- and to its neglect of chastity -- by permitting, even encouraging, activities that undermined sexual or conjugal morality. Just as every individual should strive to be poor, chaste, and obedient, so too the State should aim to adhere to these three cardinal virtues.

One of Father McNabbs hardest lessons to his own and to our generation concerns poverty. ... To Father McNabb poverty meant having enough for your duties of state but no more: having no excess, no extravagance, no luxury -- always giving, as Christian charity dictates, to those less fortunate what you yourself or those for whom you are responsible do not need. Certainly, what constituted "enough" in Father McNabb's eyes would be considered as much too little by most of our contemporaries and even by most of us. But he was not recommending that we all become mendicants or fall into a life of helpless wretchedness and pauperism - only that we attempt to be self-sufficient, restrict our desires, limit our needs, and give from any over-abundance we possess.

Many Catholics throughout the ages have fallen into complacency on this point by retreating behind the wall of "spiritual poverty", by allowing themselves anything and everything on the basis that they are poor in spirit. Father McNabb of course realised the importance of spiritual poverty ... [but] he also realised the dangers of riches, the difficulty of achieving spiritual poverty when surrounded by excess - and he also realised that the demands of justice and especially of charity required people to have less than they would probably like or would naturally have. Furthermore, he saw the embrace of poverty as a means of defeating the increasing materialism and destitution of the world about him. ...

+ + +

... Father McNabb would never claim originality or even ingenuity for any of the things about which he taught or preached. His great pride - if we are permitted to use that word in this context - was that he taught only what the Church taught: in particular that he taught almost exclusively from Holy Scripture and from the works of the Angelic Doctor. ...

Interestingly, the very first book for which Father McNabb was responsible was an edition of the decrees of the First Vatican Council: his first printed pamphlet, entitled Infallibility, was a version of a lecture he had been asked to give to the Anglo-Catholic Society of St. Thomas of Canterbury. Father McNabb showed great interest in the possibility of the Anglican Church re-uniting with the Catholic Church.... He also took an interest in the poor Jews of Whitechapel and East London in general, and was held in great affection by the Jewish community there. ...

+ + +

... Even amongst his fellow Dominicans, as yet untainted by modernism and its laxities, Father McNabb was considered to be an ascetic. As Prior of Woodchester, Hawkesyard and Holy Cross he had developed a reputation for being hard on others, but certainly no harder than he was on himself: and he could always lend someone a sympathetic ear, something he never seems to have had for himself! He ate sparingly - he blamed his "Protestant stomach" - and his face and body demonstrated the hard self-denial of his religious life. He slept on the floor of his cell - which floor he scrubbed daily - and his bed lay unused even through illness and his final death-pangs. He had no chair in his room until the last days of his life when - still refusing to lie on his bed - he finally consented to be seated in a chair. When writing, he knelt at a table surmounted by a crucifix and small statue of the Blessed Virgin: on the table lay his only books, a copy of the Vulgate, his Breviary, and the Summa Theologica. ...

Everything he wrote was hand-written: he abominated most machinery and had particular a vehemence for type-writers! Hilaire Belloc, who shared many views with Father McNabb, always had a fascination for machinery and considered the type-writer - and the telephone (something else Father McNabb loathed) - as a great boon (Belloc's handwriting was notoriously slovenly: Father McNabbs was habitually neat and legible). It would no doubt have been both interesting and amusing to have been a fly-on-the-wall as they discussed the desirability of the automated writing machine!

Of course, as a religious, indeed, as a Catholic, prayer was central to his life. His profound attachment to Holy Mass and the Office aside, Father McNabb devoted much of his energy to praying and to encouraging others to pray the Holy Rosary. As a man of formidable intellect and deep learning he had nothing but impatience for those who claimed that the Rosary was a prayer, a devotion, for simple beginners, for the unlettered, for those who have not yet ascended to the sublime heights of spirituality. Such people rendered Father McNabb almost speechless with indignation. "The Rosary", he would say, "is the safest and surest way to union with God through mental prayer". ... Again and again he would say: "Most of the contemplatives I have met are in the world, and these have found union with God through the Rosary." Devotion to the Rosary, he insisted, should be fundamental to a Catholic's prayer life. As he said during a sermon on Rosary Sunday on 1936:

"The Incarnation is the centre of all our spiritual life.. One of the means by which it is made so is the Holy Rosary. There is hardly any way of arriving at some realisation of this great mystery equal to that of saying the Rosary. Nothing will impress it so much on your mind as going apart to dwell in thought, a little space each day, on Bethlehem, on Golgotha, on the Mount of the Ascension."

... Although he was not averse to rail travel, or public transport in general, he usually refused to travel by car or by cab: the long distances he had to cover in London from St Dominics Priory to the various convents to which he was chaplain, to Speakers Corner and to Parliament Hill, he managed on foot and at a startling pace. Hilaire Belloc, who astonishingly still holds the time record for walking between London and Oxford, was full of admiration for Father McNabb's speed and endurance: indeed, he gave him advice on how to follow his own route from Toul to Rome, famously walked and recounted in The Path to Rome. Father McNabb's superior would not however allow him the vacation time to accomplish this walk, which he had so wanted to do - at the age of 68 (Belloc had been 31!) - to celebrate the golden jubilee of his profession in the Dominican Order.

... I touched earlier upon Father McNabb's homespun habit. When one was worn out he received another - and the donor from 1917 onwards was the Ditchling Community, an artistic variant of the back-to-the-land movement which Father McNabb supported throughout his life. Eric Gill and Hilary Pepler had been the two talents behind its genesis in 1907. Father McNabb acted as the Community's chaplain - many of the its members became Third Order Dominicans - but nonetheless fault-lines soon appeared. Its attempts to live off the land faltered - most of its members were artists and had little aptitude for real land-work - and gradually it became an artistic rural retreat rather than a self-sufficient community with an artistic bent. Father McNabb was disappointed that the members of the Community had not applied themselves more to the primary thing - to working on the land. On this matter he did not see eye-to-eye with Eric Gill. Eventually, Gill departed for Wales in 1924. Thereafter, despite his enthusiastic advice to all who asked for it to return to the land, to strive for poverty and self-sufficiency away from the stink of the cities, Father McNabb never again attached himself to any particular project as he had to Ditchling.

Indeed, Father McNabb was always concerned with the primary things and saw any work or activity that moved even one stage away from the primary thing as less worthy and possibly less virtuous. As a result he loathed international finance which was as far removed from reality and the primary things as it was possible to go. As he put it, cuttingly:

"Some men wrest a living from nature. This is called work. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called trade. Some men wrest a living from those who wrest a living from those who wrest a living from nature. This is called finance."

+ + +

Before I move on to describe Father McNabbs death, I feel I must offer up a few examples of his wit in order to derail any growing impression that Father McNabb must have been a miserable fanatic. Father McNabb certainly had a way with words. He was particularly adept at dealing with hecklers. On one occasion during a long disquisition on sin at Speakers Corner an Irish woman shouted out: "If I was your wife I would put poison in your tea!". Grinning, Father McNabb replied: "Madam, if I were your husband I would drink it!". On another occasion he famously compared hearing nuns' confessions to being pecked slowly to death by ducks. On a more serious note, he once attended a public meeting on the subject of the Mental Degeneracy Bill then passing through the House of Commons. After listening to various medical experts explaining how they would certify as degenerates, and as a result sterilise, many types with whom Father McNabb was familiar in his pastoral work, the good friar stood up and, having been called to speak by the chairman of the meeting, bellowed: "I am a moral expert and I certify you as moral degenerates!" He stormed out of the meeting to rapturous applause and the meeting broke up in disarray.

+ + +

If it is true that it is possible to tell a lot about a person's life from the manner of their death then it seems only appropriate that we should now turn to the last long weeks of Father McNabbs life and to his eventual death.

On 14th April 1943, as he was drawing to the end of his seventy-fifth year, Father McNabb was told by his doctor that he had only a short time to live. That same day he wrote to his niece, Sister Mary Magdalen, a Dominican sister, "Deo Gratias! God is asking me to take a journey which everyone must sooner or later take. I have been told that I have a malignant incurable growth in the throat. I can, at most, have weeks to live." ...

It was to be approximately nine weeks before Father McNabb finally died - and these last two months were as busy a period for him as any that had gone before. ...

When the press - Catholic and secular - found out that such a popular figure was about to die they hounded the Dominican Community at St Dominics Priory. Father McNabb was determined that his death should be as much a sermon as his life as a Dominican had been. He knew that the last weeks would be difficult. He had been told that he would effectively die slowly of starvation, and may well experience some severe breathing troubles, as the passage of his throat narrowed and finally disappeared. While his strength was still with him he continued to preach and speak across London, marching along its dreary streets in his habit and hob-nailed boots with his heavy McNabb-sack over his shoulders. He went to all his choir duties until a few days before his death: although he was able to speak to the end, and his breathing problems were slight, he was not able to eat for about a week, and could not swallow any liquids for three days, before he died. In the end, he collapsed one morning at Prime, on Monday 14th June.... The next day he received the Last Rites and slowly deteriorated until the morning of Thursday 17th June when he summoned Father Prior to his cell.... Father McNabb sang the Nunc Dimittis for the last time, confessed his sins to Father Prior, and renewed his vows. He then became unconscious for half-an-hour, sneezed, and died.

Crowds of people, young and old, rich and poor, but especially old and poor, came to see him, pray for him, and touch his habit as he was laid out in the Lady Chapel at the Priory for three days. The Requiem Mass took place on Monday 21st June: the Church was packed, principally with Catholic luminaries - the streets outside were thronged with the poor from the tenements he had so often visited. ... Truly, his last sermon, his death, was what reached his greatest audience. As his Prior, Father Bernard Delaney, said at his funeral:

"All that he [Father McNabb] said, all that he did, all that he was, were the expression of his burning love for his Master, Jesus Christ Our Lord. The cause of God was his consuming passion - the glory, the justice, the truth of God. He was a great Friar Preacher, but he was something more - he was a living sermon."

... Although some aspects of Catholic social teaching which he championed would certainly be enthusiastically cheered by elements amongst the typical May Day anti-capitalist and anti-globalization protesters, and some aspects would be limply applauded at ghastly Justice and Peace hand-holdings across the country by the polo-necked pseudo-Dominicans who sadly today often pass for St Dominic's sons, much of what Father McNabb stood for - integral, upright, unapologetic, strong, fervent Catholicism - is of course now out of favour. There can be no doubt that Father McNabb would have been desolated by what passes for Catholicism in so many churches ... today. ...

I will conclude this piece with some more of Father McNabbs words, and with a prayer of his:

"Some people say, I do not like sermons. ... They do not realise that every deed done in the sight or hearing of another is a preached sermon. The best or the worst of all sermons is a life led. God made every man and woman an apostle when he made them capable of dwelling with their fellow men and women. The best argument for the Catholic Church is not the words spoken from this pulpit but the lives lived in this Priory and in this parish. We should measure the words by the life, not the life by the words." ...

Man in his entirety...

2011-12-27T23:58:00.000+08:00

From Teacher to Farmer: Why I Went Back to the Land
Posted By Kevin Ford On November 11, 2011 8:54 AM

A little more than a year ago, I quit my job as a theology teacher at a Catholic high school to become a full-time organic farmer. I like to call myself a “Catholic farmer”, because I am striving to live out the Church’s teachings on marriage and the family, as well as Catholic social teaching, in my work and in the daily life of my family. I had been contemplating a return to the land for several years, and I finally opened myself to the grace needed to take such a leap of faith. I feel as though my story is a microcosm of the Catholic Land Movement as a whole. I doubt if any will follow exactly the same path, but hopefully some will end up on the land, working to restore Catholic culture, just as I did. After much prayer and discernment, I have narrowed my reasons for returning to the land to the following: restoring Catholic family life, bringing wholeness to our lives, regaining simplicity, and building Catholic community.

In our world today, nothing comes under attack more often than marriage and the family. In this modern assault, I felt it necessary to flee to the fields in order to provide an environment that is natural for family life, one where my children could flourish. City life with its “damnable conveniences” as Fr. McNabb, O.P., called them, is often a source of great temptation. The pagan temples and idols of today are not so clearly perceived, because they are often disguised in masks of pleasure, convenience, and materialism. To me, a return to the land marks a radical departure from the frivolity of modern city life as I seek to live a life that is meaningfully fruitful. Pope Benedict XVI has stated: “The rural family must regain its place at the heart of the social order.”(1) The rural family has traditionally been the backbone of healthy cultures. Never in history has the mass of humanity been concentrated in the cities as they are today. Pope Pius XII speaks very wisely of the benefits of rural life for families in his address to Italian farm laborers:
Your lives are rooted in the family...; consequently, they conform very closely to nature. In this fact lies your economic strength and your ability to withstand adversity in critical times ... [and] the importance of your contribution to the correct development of the private and public order of society. You are called upon for this reason to perform an indispensable function as source and defense of a stainless moral and religious life. For the land is a kind of nursery which supplies men, sound in soul and body, for all occupations, for the Church, and for the State.(2)
... I sought a place for my family to live out its life in totality without the distractions that city life often brings..., way out in the country whose nights are lit by heavenly lights alone.

... As I taught theology to high school students, I would often find myself thinking about my own children and the difficulty I would have passing on the faith to them, simply because of how much time I must spend at school. I did not doubt the dignity of the teaching profession. However, I doubted the wisdom of our modern age that insists on men working separate from their families, and always seeking after a wage. ... I began to realize that the breakdown of the family could be traced to the implementation of the wage system. ... [T]he family didn’t start to fall apart when mothers left the home for the work place. Rather, the family’s disintegration began when fathers left the home and the land for the convenience of a city wage.

... The etymology of the word husband was absolutely fascinating. Hus-Band literally means house-bound. When a man was married he became house bound. There in the home with his wife he would bring forth a family. There in the home he would work and provide for the family; everything was centered around the home. The home was not a place to return to after work, but rather it was the place of work, it was the center of life, and it was the stability that fostered healthy families. I realized that what I wanted was a life that was whole, one that had integrity. I wanted to live, work, and pray with my family all the time, not just in the evenings or when I was off work. I wanted to be a husband in the true sense of the word, and I wanted to be a father who was always there. Working towards a self-sufficient life on the land offers me the opportunity to truly be a father to my children. I can’t express in words how beautiful this has been.

The third reason I returned to the land was to regain simplicity. Reading Eric Brende’s book, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, profoundly impacted my views on modern technologically-saturated life. ... It is not that all machines are bad, but the scale to which technology has infiltrated our lives led me to take my family down a different path. Now we analyze our technology piece by piece and look carefully at its effects on family life. If it is truly more harmful to family life than helpful, then we simply don’t need it. Too often a machine has taken the place of meaningful human and family interaction.

Dishwashers haven’t decreased the dish loads, but rather increased the sinks full of dishes and decreased important interaction between people, especially children, as they learn to work together. ... We find that with less technology, we suddenly have time for activities we previously couldn’t squeeze in. Without the time in front of the television, we find time to read together, sing and dance with the piano, or simply sit out back in the evenings and watch the chickens scratch about (chickens can be a source of great hilarity, believe it or not). This simplicity gets rid of excess distractions and leaves us with more time for one another.

The final reason I returned to the land was in hope of rebuilding Catholic rural community. ... Today Catholic communal life is gravely lacking. ... [My wife and I] sought a Catholic village. Starting something like this from scratch was simply out of the question. ... We are still seeking ways to build Catholic community wherever God leads us. It is a dream of ours that one day we will have many neighbors farming and doing their various crafts next door, but until then we will have to wait for the right door to open.

Our faith is sacramental, and therefore it is not meant to be only a spiritual reality. Catholicism with its sacraments corresponds to man in his entirety. We who are embodied souls need a faith that is both physical and spiritual. Thus we seek in some way to incarnate our Catholic life on the land and to share that life with others. ...

Going back to the land has radically changed my life and my goals. It has transformed my way of thinking, and it daily encourages me to be a better man. By throwing myself into the hands of providence, I am forced to give my fiat or give up. ... Yet, I have never done anything so rewarding and at the same time so difficult. I hope many others will follow in my footsteps, and that one day we may have a countryside filled with Catholic smallholdings once again. Vivat Christus Rex!

Notes

(1) Message of his Holiness BENEDICT XVI to the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for the Celebration of World Food Day, from the Vatican, 16 October, 2006

(2) Speech delivered by His Holiness to the delegates at the Convention of the National Confederation of Farm Owner-Operators in Rome on November 15, 1946, #4.

Production coterminous with consumption...

2011-12-26T15:02:00.000+08:00

‘The Distributive Alternative’

Posted By Russell Sparkes On November 6, 2010 7:09 AM

... Probably the greatest and most persistent attack on Distributism was the notion ... that it was an otherworldly invention by Chesterton and Belloc as part of their romantic attachment to the Middle Ages, and alleged desire to return there. This was often caricatured as policy of giving everybody ‘three acres and a cow’, which was in fact a policy slogan of Joseph Chamberlain in the 1880s.

There is little truth in this argument, for, as we shall see later, Chesterton and Belloc did not reject modern technology, but they did fundamentally disagree with the economic system on which modern society is based. As we shall see, they called it ‘plutocracy’, or rule by the rich.

Probably the original inspiration behind Distributism, was both Chesterton and Belloc’s keen interest in English political, social, and economic history. I believe that Chesterton was also struck by a vein of social commentary in literary men like Dickens ... [and] William Cobbett, that doughty fighter for the poor of England. Chesterton describes Dickens’ hated [sic] of the way the free-market economists of the Nineteenth Century, the so-called ‘Manchester School’, advocated starvation and misery for the poor as a necessary evil:

‘He didn’t like the mean side of the Manchester philosophy: the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance…. Thus, for instance, he hated that Little Bethel (a workhouse) to which Kit’s mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it. ... [i]
It was also inspired by the recent practical success of Land Reform in Ireland as they were impressed by the peaceful and successful redistribution of land in Ireland which was carried out following the 1903 Wyndham Act. They both knew its author, the Conservative Minister George Wyndham, who became a great friend of Belloc. Finally, both Belloc and Chesterton were Catholics, and they were certainly inspired by the formidable figure of Cardinal Manning, of whom more later.

Hence the ‘received wisdom’ on Distributism—that its main proponents were well-meaning idealists ignorant of the real world of politics and economics is quite wrong. Hilaire Belloc was a Member of Parliament from 1906-1910 before he resigned his seat in disgust. Chesterton was a well-known and widely respected journalist whose views helped shape popular opinion.... In 1927 Chesterton was invited to lecture at the London School of Economics....

In 1936 Keynes revolutionalised economics by inventing macroeconomics in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes’ great discovery was that the focus of previous economists on the individual firm meant that they had ignored the fact that the economy was an organic whole; what to an individual firm was a cut in costs (wages) was to the worker a cut in income. Chesterton made exactly the same point in 1926, before the Great Depression began in 1929 -- but then he was not blinkered by having absorbed the doctrines of economics:

‘Capitalism is contradictory as soon as it is complete; because it is dealing with the mass of men in two different ways at once. When most men are wage-earners, it is more and more difficult for most men to be customers. For the capitalist is always trying to cut down what his servant demands, and in doing so is cutting down what his customer can spend. As soon as his business is in any difficulties, as at present in the coal business, he tries to reduce what he has to spend on wages, and in doing so reduces what others have to spend on coal. He is wanting the same man to be rich and poor at the same time.’ [iii]
One last point about classical economics is how it has often mirrored the wishes of the rich and powerful, contradicting its earlier teaching to do so. ... As Chesterton wrote in 1927:

‘But what is interesting to note is the way in which the sophistry of political economy changes and adapts itself to the needs of the luxurious at any particular moment. Whatever the politician may want to do, there is always a political economist beside him to say that it must be done, and whenever the rich want to be luxurious, it is always opportunely discovered that luxury is a form of economy.’ [iv]
They pointed out that Adam Smith’s insistence on the need to specialize and trade, rather than to produce locally, led economics to neglect transport costs, the uncertainty involved in trade, and broader environmental considerations. As Vincent McNabb pointed out, in the language of economics, Smith’s error:

‘I have often said that the most efficient social and economic unit is one wherein the area of production tends to be co-terminous with the area of consumption; i.e. that things will be produced where they are to be consumed.’ [v]

[i] G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, London, Home University Press, 1910.

[iii] G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, (first published 1926), reprinted Ignatius Press 1992, page 59

[iv] G.K. Chesterton, ‘Very Political Economy’, from G.K.’s Weekly, 5 August 1927.

[v] Fr Vincent McNabb, Old Principles and the New Order, Sheed and Ward 1942, page 12.

Let it rust...

2011-12-26T14:32:00.000+08:00

What We Are Getting At

G. K. Chesterton — Posted On July 3, 2011 11:07 AM

Distributists ... are not out to improve the present industrial system, but to destroy it. We want to shift the center of gravity from the machine to the craftsman, from the factory to the farm. We want to decentralize production, so that each district may tend to be self-supporting, we want to have little knots of craftsmen everywhere supplying the needs of the district which feeds them.

While we admit the existence of certain exceptional forms of ownership, as in a mine or a factory, we insist that they are exceptions, and even here we make a distinction between a mine, which we must have, and a factory, which perhaps we need not have. We may find it useful to prepare definite plans for the Distributist working of mines. There is no sense in preparing detailed plans for the Distributist working of a factory. ...

We can start dealing with the small owner in industry and agriculture and, wherever possible, with owners in our own district. ... Some can, if they have the courage of giants, help to form groups of craftsmen, like the Distributing group. Others, again with the courage of giants, can start tilling the land.

... [R]equests have been received from Distributists for a complete plan of how our theory is to be applied to the modern conditions of industry and agriculture. We are accused of being vague, of having nothing to offer the vast army of people employed in factories and offices. Well, we have nothing to offer them—except a way out. We do not intend to devise schemes for making life in a factory or an office tolerable; that is what the monopolists intend to do, and no doubt they will do it. Our business, so far as the factory and office employee are concerned, is to make them desire freedom and to show them how they may be free.

... We hope to turn back the tide of monopoly, we hope to change England from a nation of machine-miners, clerks and carriers to a nation of farmers and craftsmen. But we do not hope to do it all at once. The change, if it is made, will be made piecemeal—by converting Englishmen to Distributism, and by gradually building up a Distributist community outside monopolist organization.

That may appear to place us at a debating disadvantage with the Socialists, who know precisely how they will take over and work monopoly. But the reason for their precise knowledge is that they are themselves monopolists. We don’t intend to take over monopoly. We intend to destroy it by starting an exodus from its factories.

Our main immediate concern is to gain converts ... [a]nd when a likely subject asks what we shall do with the steel trade or what not, we must not be ashamed to say: “We shall do nothing with it. We shall leave it to rust.”

... We think that something can be done through Parliament to make small ownership easier to gain and to hold. But we are not a Party, and our main effort must be always outside Parliament. ...

The one thing needful is to preach steadily and work steadily for small ownership and the localization of production and consumption, while refusing to consider the irrelevant problem of the big town. ...

To each one according to his own worth...

2011-12-02T15:12:00.001+08:00

An Introduction to Distributism, Part I

Posted By Donald P. Goodman III On October 10, 2011 9:41 AM

Catholic social teaching is as old as Catholicism; the Scriptures themselves teach the basics of economic justice. ... However, formalized economic teaching from the Magisterium is a relatively recent thing; its pioneering document was that of the great Pope Blessed Leo XIII, Rerum novarum.

Rerum novarum has been received less than enthusiastically by modern economic thinkers; some, even Catholics, argue that it was based on ignorance5 or even that it has since been changed.6 Nevertheless, the correct attitude of the Catholic toward this great encyclical was enunciated early on by Pope St. Pius X, in his own encyclical Singulari quadam:
Therefore, in the first place, we proclaim that the duty of all Catholics is… to hold firmly and to confess fearlessly the principles of Christian truth, handed down by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, especially those which Our most wise predecessor explained in the encyclical letter Rerum novarum.7
... Rerum novarum, and its daughter encyclicals from later popes, is the blueprint for Catholic economic thought, the schematic to which all our bricks and mortar must conform.

Rerum novarum was unpopular in some circles because it identified deeply rooted flaws in all the currently popular economic systems, particularly those called capitalism and socialism. ...

Pope Leo identified four primary problems with the prevailing economic situation: the lack of workingmen’s guilds; unrestrained competition; usury; and the concentration of property into few hands.19 All of these problems, though, really point to the last...[:] the overconcentration of productive property into the hands of a few, wealthy capitalists. This remains the defining characteristic of our current system. ...

And such market concentration is a definite problem, as the Pope himself pointed out. Indeed, the fact that “the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few” is a problem so severe that it has laid “upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”25 Nor is this mere hyperbole; as the great Catholic historian Hilaire Belloc observed, wealth is necessary to human existence, and “[t]herefore, to control the production of wealth is to control human life itself.”26 Capitalist society’s tendency toward the ever-increasing concentration of the means of producing wealth, then, is also a tendency toward the control of life by the owning few, exercised on the non-owning many. This limits the economic, and therefore political, significance of the bulk of the population while giving the few owners of productive property a great deal of power over the state.

The great pope ended his encyclical with an appeal to Catholics throughout the world:

We have now laid before you… the means whereby this most arduous question must be solved. Every one should put his hand to the work which falls to his share….27

And Catholics responded, attempting to imbue their societies, so corrupted by the revolution, with the principles of a Catholic social order. They devised systems which would apply those principles toward definite goals in particular societies. One such system acquired the name “Distributism.”

Distributism attempts to resolve these problems by recourse to an ancient principle of social interaction, distributive justice, ... [the] virtue “according to which a ruler or steward gives to each one according to his own worth.”29 The importance Distributism places on distributive justice is supported by Leo XIII himself, who taught that maintaining distributive justice toward all classes of society is “the first and chief” of a ruler’s duties.30

Distributism applies the principle of distributive justice to property, particularly to productive property. Pope Leo taught us that “[t]he law… should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners,”31 noting that “[m]any excellent results will follow from this; and, first of all, property will certainly become more equitably divided.”32 It is clear, further, that Pope Leo is speaking here of the distribution of productive property, not property simply, for he continues by arguing that this policy would greatly increase production, and the only type of property he specifically mentions is land, the epitome of the productive asset.33

The just distribution of productive property defines Distributism....34 While in a socialist society none are owners, and in a capitalist society only a few are owners, in a Distributist society most are owners of productive property. This is the defining characteristic of Distributism: the widescale distribution of productive property throughout society, such that ownership of it is the norm, rather than the exception. ...

Look for Part II next week.

Germany, Greece, and the Euro...

2011-11-30T20:04:00.000+08:00

Let the Greeks ruin themselves

Germany has Europe’s deepest pockets, but it does not want to pay to save troubled euro-zone economies

Feb 18th 2010 | BERLIN | from the print edition

LESS than a year before the euro became the currency of 11 European countries in January 1999, a declaration signed by 155 German-speaking economists called for an “orderly”—ie, long—delay. The prospective euro members, they said, had not yet reduced their debt and deficits to suit a workable monetary union; some were using “creative accounting” to get there, and a casual attitude towards deficits would undermine confidence in the euro’s stability.

Now the prediction is coming true, says Wim Kösters, of the Ruhr University in Bochum and one of the original signatories. ...

This dilemma is felt especially keenly in Germany. It was a wrench to surrender the Deutschmark, symbol of post-war recovery and economic success. On the eve of monetary union 55% of Germans were against it, making their nation the euro zone’s most reluctant founders. When a “rescue” is mentioned, all eyes fix on Germany, Europe’s biggest economy and most creditworthy borrower. Germans fear that a rescue of Greece would, in effect, extend their welfare state to the Mediterranean.

... A harsh austerity plan, they hope, will be enough to deter speculators—and to reassure their voters at home that Greece is not getting off lightly. The model is Ireland, whose brutal spending cuts restored market confidence without aid from its European neighbours.

A bail-out, Mrs Merkel fears, would break the bargain Germany struck in accepting the euro: that the single currency’s members would never jeopardise its stability nor ask Germans to pay for anyone else’s mismanagement. ...

The path out of the crisis is unclear. Greek bonds remain under pressure (see chart). Arguments rage over which chain reaction would be more damaging: serial bail-outs or serial defaults. ...

+ + +

How to save the euro

It requires urgent action on a huge scale. Unless Germany rises to the challenge, disaster looms

Sep 17th 2011 | from the print edition

... It is a sobering thought that so much depends on the leadership of squabbling European politicians who still consistently underestimate what confronts them (see article). But the only way to stop the downward spiral now is an act of supreme collective will by euro-zone governments to erect a barrage of financial measures to stave off the crisis and put the governance of the euro on a sounder footing.

The costs will be large. Few people, least of all this newspaper, want either vast intervention in financial markets or a big shift of national sovereignty to Europe. Nor do many welcome a bigger divide between the 17 countries of the euro zone and the EU’s remaining ten. It is just that the alternatives are far worse. That is the blunt truth that Germany’s Angela Merkel, in particular, urgently needs to explain to her people.

... A rescue must do four things fast. First, it must make clear which of Europe’s governments are deemed illiquid and which are insolvent, giving unlimited backing to the solvent governments but restructuring the debt of those that can never repay it. Second, it has to shore up Europe’s banks to ensure they can withstand a sovereign default. Third, it needs to shift the euro zone’s macroeconomic policy from its obsession with budget-cutting towards an agenda for growth. And finally, it must start the process of designing a new system to stop such a mess ever being created again.

... So far the euro zone’s response has relied too much on two things: austerity and pretence. Sharply cutting budget deficits has been the priority—hence the tax rises and spending cuts. But this collectively huge fiscal contraction is self-defeating. By driving enfeebled economies into recession it only increases worries about both government debts and European banks (see article). And mere budget-cutting does not deal with the real cause of the mess, which is a loss of credibility.

... Instead of austerity and pretence, a credible rescue should start with growth and, where it is unavoidable, a serious restructuring of debt. Europe must make an honest judgment about which side of the line countries are on. Greece, which is unambiguously insolvent, ought to have a hard but orderly write-down. ... Freeing up services and professions, privatising companies, cutting bureaucracy and delaying retirement will create conditions for renewed growth—and that is the best way to reduce debts.

How to prevent contagion? ... Core countries like Germany and the Netherlands have enough cash to look after their own banks, but peripheral governments may need euro-zone money. Ideally that would come from the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF).... But it also makes sense to set up a euro-zone bank fund, together with a euro-zone bank-resolution authority. ...

None of this will work unless the Europeans create a firewall around the solvent governments. That means shoring up euro-zone sovereign debt. Spain and Italy owe €2.5 trillion. ... The ECB must declare that it stands behind all solvent countries’ sovereign debts and that it is ready to use unlimited resources to ward off market panic. That is consistent with the ECB’s goal to ensure price and financial stability for the euro zone as a whole. ...

Even so, this is a huge step. The ECB’s German officials have taken to resigning in protest at the limited bond-buying undertaken so far. ...

The issue now is not whether the euro was mis-sold or whether it was a terrible idea in the first place; it is whether it is worth saving. Would it be cheaper to break it up now? ... The sobering truth about the single currency is that getting in is a lot easier than getting out again. Legally, the euro has no exit clause. ...

Attaching hard numbers to any of this is difficult. Analysts at UBS, a bank, reckon that euro break-up could cost a peripheral country 40-50% of GDP in the first year, and a core country 20-25% (see article). ... [T]he immediate bill for a break-up of the single currency would surely be in the trillions of euros. By contrast, a successful rescue would seem a bargain. ...

German taxpayers might accept that the immediate costs of our rescue plan are smaller than break-up. But what they detest is the idea that it might let feckless Italians and Portuguese off the hook. Safe in the knowledge that the ECB stands behind their bonds, they may shy away from reform and rectitude.

Two risks flow from this. The immediate (and real) one is that furious Germans will demand that Greece is thrown out (or bullied out) of the euro to frighten the others. Such a horrific event would indeed scare Portugal and Ireland, but a threat to expel Italy or Spain is empty: they are too big and too tightly tied into the EU. Simply chucking out Greece because it was convenient would permanently undermine the security of small members of the EU. Besides, once Greece defaults and restructures, its economy stands a good chance of making a credible start on its long journey to economic health.

The longer-term risk has to do with “more Europe”. Fans of political integration say that the only way to enforce discipline is to create a United States of Europe (see Charlemagne). ... The ten countries, including Sweden, Poland and Britain, that kept their own currencies may face a choice: to join the euro or be excluded from a new “core Europe”, which in effect starts setting policies. ...

... The euro has reached the point where nobody is going to get what they want—something that needs to be spelled out to the Germans more than anybody. ... For the ECB to stand behind less prudent countries may be unwelcome to Germans; but letting the euro fall to bits is much, much worse. Spell that out clearly to your voters, Mrs Merkel.

+ + +

The future of the EU

Two-speed Europe, or two Europes?

Nov 10th 2011, 2:23 by Charlemagne | BRUSSELS

NICOLAS Sarkozy is causing a big stir after calling on November 8th for a two-speed Europe: a “federal” core of the 17 members of the euro zone, with a looser “confederal” outer band of the ten non-euro members. ...

You cannot make a single currency without economic convergence and economic integration. It's impossible. But on the contrary, one cannot plead for federalism and at the same time for the enlargement of Europe. It's impossible. ... We are 27. We will obviously have to open up to the Balkans. We will be 32, 33 or 34. I imagine that nobody thinks that federalism—total integration—is possible at 33, 34, 35 countries. ... [T]he single currency is a wonderful idea, but it was strange to create it without asking oneself the question of its governance, and without asking oneself about economic convergence.

... The European Union is, in a sense, made up not of two but of multiple speeds. ... But Mr Sarkozy’s comments are more worrying because, one suspects, he wants to create an exclusivist, protectionist euro zone that seeks to detach itself from the rest of the European Union. ...

In other words, France, or Mr Sarkozy at any rate, does not appear to have got over its resentment of the EU’s enlargement. At 27 nations-strong, the European Union is too big for France to lord it over the rest and is too liberal in economic terms for France’s protectionist leanings. Hence Mr Sarkozy’s yearning for a smaller, cosier, “federalist” euro zone.

This chimes with the idea of a Kerneuropa ("core Europe") promoted in 1994 by Karl Lamers and Wolfgang Schäuble, who happens to be Germany's current finance minister. Intriguingly, it is the first time that Mr Sarkozy, once something of a sceptic of European integration, has spoken publicly about “federalism”.... It echoes the views of Mr Sarkozy's Socialist predecessor, François Mitterrand.

... Mr Sarkozy probably wants to create a euro zone in France’s image, with power (and much discretion) concentrated in the hands of leaders, where the “Merkozy” duo (Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy) will dominate. Germany will no doubt want a replica of its own federal system, with strong rules and powerful independent institutions to constrain politicians. ...

Done properly, by keeping the euro open to countries that want to join (like Poland) and deepening the single market for those that do not (like Britain), the creation of a more flexible EU of variable geometry could ease many of the existing tensions. ... But done wrongly, as one fears Mr Sarkozy would have it, this will be a recipe for breaking up Europe. Not two-speed Europe but two separate Europes. ...

Mr Sarkozy’s words seem to have caught the attention of Joschka Fischer, elder statesman of Germany's Green party and a former foreign minister, who said that the EU at 27 had become too unwieldy. “Let’s just forget about the EU with 27 members—unfortunately,” he told Die Zeit, a German weekly newspaper. “I just don’t see how these 27 states will ever come up with any meaningful reforms.” Indeed, some think the euro zone itself might be smaller than the 17 members (Greece may soon default and leave the euro).

The speech that everybody is waiting for now is Mrs Merkel’s. The chancellor wants to change the treaties, and on November 9th she called for “a breakthrough to a new Europe”. ...

+ + +

The German problem

To save the single currency, Angela Merkel must take on her own country’s economic establishment

Nov 19th 2011 | from the print edition

... At her party’s conference on November 14th the chancellor, Angela Merkel, left no doubt about the gravity of the euro crisis (see Charlemagne). “If the euro fails, then Europe fails,” she said.

On the same day Jens Weidmann, the president of the Bundesbank, roiled financial markets with hardline comments ... [ruling out reliance on] the European Central Bank (ECB) as a lender of last resort to governments, arguing it would be illegal and wrong for the bank to hold down bond yields. ...

Mr Weidmann is not a lone ideologue. Mario Draghi, the ECB’s new Italian president, has ruled out acting as a lender of last resort to governments, albeit less categorically (see article). Mr Weidmann has his supporters among the Finns and the Dutch, too. But the rigidity of his argument is embedded in the solid rock that is Germany’s economic establishment, which holds that big rescues are counterproductive because they both dull governments’ incentives to act and create new dangers. ...

The problem is that the dogmatic prescriptions of the “German orthodoxy” are pushing the single currency towards collapse. If Mrs Merkel wants to save the euro, therefore, she must challenge her country’s economic establishment, and explain to voters why the revered Bundesbank’s rigidity is wrong. ... German orthodoxy ignores the possibility that rising bond yields are being driven by a self-fulfilling panic in financial markets. ...

The euro zone’s most recent plan—to amplify the existing rescue fund with financial engineering and money from China—has failed miserably. ... Either Europe’s governments will have to assume explicitly some joint liability for each other’s debts. Or they will have to do so implicitly, by allowing the ECB to counter a panic with purchases of government bonds: in effect, letting it act as a lender of last resort. The danger lies in eschewing both options. ...

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Is this really the end?

Unless Germany and the ECB move quickly, the single currency’s collapse is looming

Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition

EVEN as the euro zone hurtles towards a crash, most people are assuming that, in the end, European leaders will do whatever it takes to save the single currency. That is because the consequences of the euro’s destruction are so catastrophic that no sensible policymaker could stand by and let it happen.

A euro break-up would cause a global bust worse even than the one in 2008-09. The world’s most financially integrated region would be ripped apart by defaults, bank failures and the imposition of capital controls (see article). ...

Yet the threat of a disaster does not always stop it from happening. The chances of the euro zone being smashed apart have risen alarmingly, thanks to financial panic, a rapidly weakening economic outlook and pigheaded brinkmanship. ...

Add the ever greater fiscal austerity being imposed across Europe and a collapse in business and consumer confidence, and there is little doubt that the euro zone will see a deep recession in 2012—with a fall in output of perhaps as much as 2%. That will lead to a vicious feedback loop in which recession widens budget deficits, swells government debts and feeds popular opposition to austerity and reform. Fear of the consequences will then drive investors even faster towards the exits.

Past financial crises show that this downward spiral can be arrested only by bold policies to regain market confidence. ...

Without a dramatic change of heart by the ECB and by European leaders, the single currency could break up within weeks. Any number of events, from the failure of a big bank to the collapse of a government to more dud bond auctions, could cause its demise. ...

The only institution that can provide immediate relief is the ECB. As the lender of last resort, it must do more to save the banks by offering unlimited liquidity for longer duration against a broader range of collateral. ... One promising idea, from Germany’s Council of Economic Experts, is to mutualise all euro-zone debt above 60% of each country’s GDP, and to set aside a tranche of tax revenue to pay it off over the next 25 years. Yet Germany, still fretful about turning a currency union into a transfer union in which it forever supports the weaker members, has dismissed the idea.

This attitude has to change, or the euro will break up. ... Debt mutualisation can be devised to stop short of a permanent transfer union. Mrs Merkel and the ECB cannot continue to threaten feckless economies with exclusion from the euro in one breath and reassure markets by promising the euro’s salvation with the next. Unless she chooses soon, Germany’s chancellor will find that the choice has been made for her.

+ + +

HOW GERMANY COULD SAVE THE EURO

25 NOVEMBER 2011

BY John Muellbauer, Official Fellow, Nuffield College; Professor of Economics, Oxford University (Originally published at VOXEU)

For months economists have been arguing that Germany holds the key to ending the Eurozone crisis. Should it relax its anti-inflation stance and allow the ECB to inflate away sovereign debt? Or should it write a cheque of its own to the EFSF? Neither, says this column. ... Eurobonds are the answer – but with conditions.

... The German Ministry of Finance could offer a two-year loan to the Italian government at 3% above what it pays, and promise that next year, if the Italian reform programme is showing visible signs of success, the spread could fall to 2.5% and then to 2% if progress continues. With backsliding, the cost would rise. This solidarity gesture would be highly profitable for the German taxpayer. The conditionality of the offer would keep the new Italian government committed to reform, aiding Italy’s credibility as a Eurozone member. Conventional Eurobonds, meanwhile, with the same funding costs for every country but with risk collectively underwritten, would likely be a recipe for disaster. They would encourage lax fiscal policy, backsliding on reform, and moral hazard. ...

Conditional Eurobonds would institutionalise, for all Eurozone countries, the simple example above of Germany lending to Italy. The conditional Eurobonds, issued on new borrowing, would be collectively underwritten by member governments of the Eurozone. ... The proceeds of the payments could be distributed in several ways. In the simple example of a bilateral loan from Germany to Italy, Germany would retain the entire spread. With multilateral underwriting, all Eurozone countries would receive shares of the payments into the central fund. The shares would be determined by the size of their own borrowings and their spreads relative to Germany. Per unit of borrowing, less risky countries such as France would receive more than riskier countries such as Belgium, but less than Germany itself. ...

A hugely important point about conditional Eurobonds with spreads is that they address the German fear about the Eurozone becoming ‘a transfer union’. The point is also not made clearly enough that this kind of bond, by creating the right fiscal incentives, allows a kind of fiscal decentralisation or subsidiarity....

+ + +

Beware of falling masonry

The crisis in the euro area is turning into a panic and dragging the zone into recession. The risk that the currency disintegrates within weeks is alarmingly high

Nov 26th 2011 | from the print edition

FIRST Greece; then Ireland and Portugal; then Italy and Spain. Month by month, the crisis in the euro area has crept from the vulnerable periphery of the currency zone towards its core, helped by denial, misdiagnosis and procrastination by the euro-zone’s policymakers. Recently Belgian and French government bonds have been in the financial markets’ bad books. Investors are even sniffy about German bonds....

Worse, there are signs that the euro zone’s economy is heading for recession, if it is not there already. Industrial orders in the euro zone fell by 6.4% in September, the steepest decline since the dark days of December 2008. ...

European banks are dumping the bonds of the least creditworthy, and other assets, in an attempt to conserve capital and improve cashflow as a full-blown funding crisis looms. Governments are promising ever more severe budget cuts in the hope of pacifying bond markets. The direct result of these scrambles is a credit crunch and a squeeze on aggregate demand that is forcing Europe into recession. ...

Consider the three ingredients for recession: a credit crunch, tighter fiscal policy and a dearth of confidence. ... A downturn of such severity will hugely increase the pressures within the zone. Investors will be even less willing to finance banks, as more garden-variety loans to businesses and householders turn bad. As unemployment rises, tax receipts will go down and welfare payments up, making it harder for governments to rein in their deficits and hit the targets they have set, and causing bond markets to question their solvency more pointedly still.

... With a few exceptions, the benchmark cost of credit in each euro-zone country is related to the balance of its international debts. Germany, which is owed more than it owes, still has low bond yields; Greece, which is heavily in debt to foreigners, has a high cost of borrowing (see chart 2). Portugal, Greece and (to a lesser extent) Spain still have big current-account deficits, and so are still adding to their already high foreign liabilities. Refinancing these is becoming harder and putting strain on local banks and credit availability.

The higher the cost of funding becomes, the more money flows out to foreigners to service these debts. This is why the issue of national solvency goes beyond what governments owe. The euro zone is showing the symptoms of an internal balance-of-payments crisis, with self-fulfilling runs on countries, because at bottom that is the nature of its troubles. ...

The prospect that one country might break its ties to the euro, voluntarily or not, would cause widespread bank runs in other weak economies. Depositors would rush to get their savings out of the country to pre-empt a forced conversion to a new, weaker currency. Governments would have to impose limits on bank withdrawals or close banks temporarily. Capital controls and even travel restrictions would be needed to stanch the bleeding of money from the economy. Such restrictions would slow the circulation of money around the economy, deepening the recession.

External sources of credit would dry up because foreign investors, banks and companies would fear that their money would be trapped. A government cut off from capital-market funding would need to find other ways of bridging the gap between tax receipts and public spending. It might meet part of its obligations, including public-sector wages, by issuing small-denomination IOUs that could in turn be used to buy goods and pay bills. ... Scrip of this kind becomes, in effect, a proto-currency. In a stricken euro-zone country, it would change hands at a discount to the remaining euros in circulation, foreshadowing the devaluation to come. To pre-empt further capital outflows, a government would have to pass a law swiftly to say all financial dealings would henceforth be carried out in a new currency, at a one-for-one exchange rate with the euro. The new currency would then “float” (ie, sink) to a lower level against the abandoned euro. The size of that devaluation would be the extent of the country’s effective default against its creditors.

... [T]he likeliest trigger for a disintegration of the euro is unknowable. But there are plenty of candidates. One is a failed bond auction that forces a country into default and sends a shock wave through the European banking system. ... Another danger is a disagreement between Greece and its trio of rescuers (the EU, the IMF and the ECB) over the conditions of its bail-out. ...

The few left in the euro (Germany and perhaps a few other creditor countries) would be at a competitive disadvantage to the new cheaper currencies on their doorstep. As well as imposing capital controls, countries might retreat towards autarky, by raising retaliatory tariffs. The survival of the European single market and of the EU itself would then be under threat.

Such a disaster can still be averted. The ECB might launch a programme of bond-buying on the pretext that a deep recession in the euro area threatens deflation. If done on the scale that the Bank of England has undertaken, it could restore stability to Europe’s panicky bond markets. ... But any lasting stability for the euro must lie with governments, particularly in the degree to which they are willing to give up fiscal sovereignty in return for pooling liabilities. Germany stands firmly at one extreme of this debate. Its chancellor, Angela Merkel, wants big changes to force probity..., but has opposed the idea of jointly guaranteed “Eurobonds”. German officials have argued that any open-ended commitment to joint liabilities would encourage errant governments to profligacy, violate Germany’s constitution and raise its borrowing costs. Even now, the head of the Bundesbank, Jens Weidmann, appears to believe that the imposition of fiscal rigour will be enough to restore calm to Europe’s bond markets.

... Another new proposal is intriguing—thanks, in part, to its provenance. Germany’s Council of Economic Experts recently proposed a “European Redemption Pact”. This scheme would place the debt, in excess of 60% of GDP, of all euro-zone governments not already in IMF rescue plans into a jointly guaranteed fund that would be paid off over 25 years. Modelled in part on the federal government’s assumption of the debt of America’s states begun by Alexander Hamilton in 1790, the fund would provide joint liability for these debts under strict conditions. ...

At its peak, the redemption pact would be huge: the joint liability would amount to €2.3 trillion. But it would technically be temporary. For all these safeguards, Germany’s government has so far poured cold water on the idea. But time is running out. And the scale of the impending catastrophe demands radical answers.

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Can Germany save Europe? Will it?

By Thomas Mucha, Created 6220-11-29 13:22

An extraordinary plea today aimed at Berlin. It comes from an unlikely place.

Europe's ongoing debt crisis took another very dramatic turn today.

And it came from a most unlikely place, considering Germany's long and difficult history: Poland.

Here's what Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski said in a speech Monday in the German capital, as reported by the Financial Times [3]:

"I demand of Germany that, for your own sake and for ours, you help it survive and prosper,” he said. “You know full well that nobody else can do it. I will probably be the first Polish foreign minister in history to say so, but here it is: I fear German power less than I am beginning to fear German inactivity. You have become Europe’s indispensable nation."

... It's an incredibly lucid and forthright account of the troubles facing Europe (and Germany) right now, so I'll point you to three more key points that the Polish diplomat made.

... Sikorski ended his Polish pep talk with this dire warning:

"What, as Poland’s foreign minister, do I regard as the biggest threat to the security and prosperity of Poland in the last week of November 2011? It’s not terrorism, and it’s certainly not German tanks. It’s not even Russian missiles which President Dmitry Medvedev has just threatened to deploy on the EU’s border. The biggest threat to the security of Poland would be the collapse of the eurozone."

Thrive by thrift...

2011-11-30T17:19:00.001+08:00

G.K. Chesterton’s Distributism

Posted By Dale Ahlquist On August 11, 2011 6:32 AM

The word “economy” and the word “economics” are based on the Greek word for house, which is oikos. The word “economy” as we know it, however, has drifted completely away from that meaning. Instead of house, it has come to mean everything outside of the house. The home is the place where the important things happen. The economy is the place where the most unimportant things happen. ...

There is another rather neglected meaning to the word “economy”: the idea of thriftiness. ... Chesterton points out that inside the word thrift is the word thrive.9 We can only thrive within our means, just as we can only be free within the rules. The modern understanding of the word economy is, once again, just the opposite. It is about accumulation instead of thrift. Even worse, it is about mere exchange. It is about trade, and not even about the things that are traded. It is about figures in a ledger. It is about noughts. It is about the accumulation of zeros. It is more about nothing than it is about something.

Our separation of economy from the home is part of a long fragmentation process. ... We have separated everything from everything else. We have accomplished this by separating everything from the home. Feminism has separated women from the home. Capitalism has separated men from the home. Socialism has separated education from the home. Manufacturing has separated craftsmanship from the home. The news and entertainment industry has separated originality and creativity from the home, rendering us into passive and malleable consumers rather than active citizens.

There is more to Distributism than economics. That is because there is more to economics than economics. Distributism is not just an economic idea. It is an integral part of a complete way of thinking. ...

It takes a complicated key to fit a complicated lock. But we want simple solutions. We don’t want to work hard. We don’t want to think hard. We want other people to do both our work and our thinking for us. We call in the specialists. And we call this state of utter dependency “freedom.” We think we are free simply because we seem free to move about. ...

The Distributist ideal is that the home is the most important place in the world. Every man should have his own piece of property, a place to build his own home, to raise his family, to do all the important things from birth to death: eating, singing, celebrating, reading, writing, arguing, story-telling, laughing, crying, praying. The home is above all a sanctuary of creativity. Creativity is our most Godlike quality. We not only make things, we make things in our own image. The family is one of those things. ...

But Chesterton’s Distributist ideal not only called for mothers to stay at home, it called for fathers to stay at home as well. The home-based business, the idea of self-sufficiency would not only make for stronger, healthier families, but a stronger, healthier society. ... A home-based society is naturally and necessarily a local and de-centralized society. ...

Though Chesterton would argue that a Distributist society would be most fully realized if it were based on a Catholic worldview, he would not insist upon that basis as essential for achieving such a society. In fact, he would argue that such a society is more congenial to the different religions than any other societal plan. Freedom of religion, as it now supposedly exists under a huge centralized government, actually needs to be “enforced” by that government. The result, as we have seen, is that religion has actually been stifled where the government watchdog is there to “guarantee” the freedom. ...

The dilemma of Distributism is the dilemma of freedom itself. Distributism cannot be done to people, but only by people. It is not a system that can be imposed from above; it can only spring up from below. ... If it happens, it seems most likely that it would be ushered in by a popular revolution. In any case, it must be popular. It would at some point require those with massive and inordinate wealth to give it up. ... The Christian argument, if taken seriously, should be more terrifying to a rich man than a mob with axes and torches. ... The central figure of the Christian religion said quite unambiguously that it is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. No matter how the rich man may try to breed smaller camels and manufacture larger needles, no matter how hard he snorts and stomps, he cannot get around the reality that to cling to his riches is to put his soul in peril. ... As Chesterton says, “The obligation of wealth is to chuck it.”13

But the rich are a small part of the problem–only because there are so few of them. The larger part of the problem is the mentality that drives so many people to chase after money. Again, religion provides a practical solution. There is a commandment that states, “Thou shall not covet.” This little known commandment would have to be rediscovered and re-emphasized in order to build a Distributist society.

Down with physicalism...

2011-11-30T14:31:00.001+08:00

‎"Intention is ascribed by language users; it is not inherent in physical systems. Language users are physical systems in which intention (i.e. linguistic reference and representation) is inherent."

Down with physicalism, up with analogy.

This is where my head is...

2011-11-30T00:18:00.001+08:00

Up with economy, down with chrematistics!

Below is the TED Talk for Open Source Ecology. Have a gander. It has me drooling.

The book that got my wheels spinning in this direction is Eric Brende's Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology. My recent posting of Matthew Crawford's essay on "the case for working with your hands" is also part of this impulse. Wendell Barry's new book What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth is also good stuff.

My larger philosophical impulse is an increasing absorption with distributism, as my recent various quotations about economic matters should indicate. Distributism is often mocked for being impractical, but the Open Source Ecology shows how hollow that accusation is. I have been reading numerous posts at The Distributist Review and have a stack of books on economics and social equity ahead of me. I have long been skeptical of the ideology of overpopulation fear-mongering, and one aspect of the debate is hunger and economic equity. The problem with global population is not whether resources are adequate--they are!--but how the resources are distributed and tended by global peoples. It was not until recently, however, that I realized the direct link between my own standard-and-style of living and the problem of unjust economic distribution.

There is a lot of talk nowadays about redistribution, but I think that misses the point on two fronts. First, since America long ago ceased being a quasi-distributist polity, the redistribution many people want remains confined in the capitalistic strictures that distributism opposes. Second, distributism allows for economic prosperity and entrepreneurship--indeed, distributists believe a distributist economy is what grounds entrepreneurship in the first place!

Hence, distributism avoids the errors of socialism (i.e. negation of private property and absolute centralized regulation of property development) and avoids the errors of capitalism (i.e. the intrinsic centralization of capital apart from individual families' autonomy over their own property as a potentially total domain of "real value"). It is a central tenet of Catholic social teaching that the family is the nucleus of human society, and in so far as distributism puts families, as opposed to the state or consumers, first, puts me largely in the distributist camp.

In any event, perhaps being a husband and father-to-be has given me the focus and personal attachment to see how simply living and living simply are great sources of joy, and how I myself can live out our abiding Adamic call to stewardship of Creation.

Working with your hands...

2011-11-29T16:35:00.001+08:00

May 24, 2009

The Case for Working With Your Hands

By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

... Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. ...

... High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. ... But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? ... Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. ... The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India.

... One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. ... Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. ... I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. ...

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor..., I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.” ...

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. ... I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods.

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. ... As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun. ...

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. ... The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational. ...
As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot ... [and] you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. ... My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer. ...

[M]echanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. ...

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. ... The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. ... Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. ... Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. ...

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up ... a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But ... it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. ... Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions.... In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. ...

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Matthew B. Crawford lives in Richmond, Va. His book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published this week by Penguin Press.

Action without agents?

2011-11-29T16:15:00.001+08:00

To paraphrase Maritain: "...because all law is a promulgation of reason, ... there must be an eternal reason behind the eternal law; and since the natural law is nothing more than our participation in the eternal law, there must be some principle of reason behind the natural law."

Morality is value-laden action. Action is behavior ordered towards an end or ends.

If moral claims are absolute, they are also eternal. That is, if there are absolute moral principles, there are absolute principles of action.

There are absolute moral truths, and therefore also absolute principles of action.

Action, however, cannot exist without an agent. As such, absolute principles of action exist only because an absolute principle of agency exists. Morality is absolute, therefore there exists an absolutely moral agent, which all men call God.

The wrong baby...

2011-11-28T23:38:00.001+08:00

A worried woman went to her gynecologist and said:

'Doctor, I have a serious problem and desperately need your help! My baby is not even 1 year old and I'm pregnant again. I don't want kids so close together.'

So the doctor said: 'Ok and what do you want me to do?'

She said: 'I want you to end my pregnancy, and I'm counting on your help with this.'

The doctor thought for a little, and after some silence he said to the lady: 'I think I have a better solution for your problem. It's less dangerous for you too.'

She smiled, thinking that the doctor was going to accept her request.

Then he continued: 'You see, in order for you not to have to take care of 2 babies at the same time, let's kill the one in your arms. This way, you could rest some before the other one is born. If we're going to kill one of them, it doesn't matter which one it is. There would be no risk for your body if you chose the one in your arms.'

The lady was horrified and said: 'No doctor! How terrible! It's a crime to kill a child!'

'I agree', the doctor replied. 'But you seemed to be OK with it, so I thought maybe that was the best solution.'

The doctor smiled, realizing that he had made his point.

He convinced the mom that there is no difference in killing a child that's already been born and one that's still in the womb. The crime is the same!

Love says, 'I sacrifice myself for the good of the other person.' Abortion says, 'I sacrifice the other person for the good of myself.'

By: Life is Dangerous: Let's Ban It

Various good and not so good things...

2011-11-28T15:49:00.001+08:00

‎"Whereas Belloc sang loudly and proudly of the European peasant, the man who went to Mass, worked in his fields, lived above his cows and horse, and delighted in ordinary living and the common tasks of sowing and reaping, baking and brewing, all rooted in the traditions of his ancestors, Jung was obsessed with the idea of the "superman," the type who ... would produce 'a new elite that would revolutionize human culture and lead it to a new utopia' -- a man to be made by reviving ancient occult practices."

-- "BELLOC AND JUNG: A STUDY OF CONTRASTS" by Paul Likoudis

+ + +

‎"[S]ome opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient working-mens guilds were abolished..., and no other protective organisation took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which ... is nevertheless under different guise, but with the like injustice, still practised by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labour and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."

-- Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum §3, May, 1891

+ + +

"The [OWS] protestors are not mad because they are not rich, but because they can’t subsist. They stand against giving away their hard-earned money to the likes of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Ben Bernanke, and the financial firms on Wall Street. ... Without plans for managing the OWS protest and what demands to sign onto, big business and big government will step in and choose the agenda for the protestors. ... What ought OWS to do? It needs to adopt a Distributist platform of local accountable government, local business, local infrastructure, local banks, and justice. The Distributist plan is the only one that cuts across liberal and conservative lines; it is the only plan that defends our sovereignty, encourages jobs of our own, and subsistence. Some people will be rich in a Distributist economy, but Distributism doesn’t aim on being rich. It aims on private, productive property."
-- "Occupy Wall Street" Posted By Ryan Grant On October 17, 2011 6:12 AM

+ + +

Atheism and autism: Controversial new study points to a link between the two

I've had this hypothesis for years. The (atheist and autistic) populations are roughly equally proportionate among humans. Both groups struggle with analogy and narrative, struggle with "seeing wholes" instead of mere parts, and struggle to recognize personal agency behind gross movements. And don't forget The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, a fictional glorification of the autism that is atheism (or vice versa, in the protagonist's case). Article's worth a look. I was going only by rough demographic data, so a cognitive analysis sounds neat.

+ + +

A: If Natural Family Planning (NFP) is "just the same thing" as artificial contraception, why don't people who use contraceptives just use NFP?

B: Because natural family planning isn't as effective.

A: Nope, that's not the reason. NFP is certainly not as 'easy' as artificial contraceptives, but, when applied correctly, is just as if not more effective. Plus, it is a moral choice. Read this article about the effectiveness of NFP and this medical bulletin about NFP effectiveness.

B: I consider myself to be an expert in family planning. I assure you, it is not as effective.

A: I consider myself a lot of things, but I'll stick to professional research and sound moral doctrine.

B: I will not debate the moral doctrine with you. There is no point. But from a practical standpoint, not to mention a female standpoint, you are overreaching.

A: You can abstain from arguing morality, but first you need to remove your implicit moral pragmatism from your case. There are no amoral claims. Indeed, the point of my initial claim is to deflate a common canard against NFP, namely, that it is 'just like artificial contraception', or that it is 'just Catholic contraception', so, in an important sense, effectiveness is beside the point. Besides, what does the comment 'from ... a female standpoint, you are overreaching' mean? Is there a female standpoint? Is there only one female standpoint?

+ + +

Death. Skydiving. : Orgasm. Flirting.

If skydiving makes life richer because it sips from death, why not just guzzle from death, and be done with it? Adventure, as Maritain argued, is a species of argument for the immortality of the soul.

+ + +

The "rice gospel" gives way to the latex gospel.

Janet Smith, "Contraception: Why Not?" - Part 4 - Humanae Vitae

+ + +

Here's an idea: next time you have a question, ask your friend or spouse or family or, hell, even a guy on the street, before you ask the Internet.

+ + +

Higgs hunt enters endgame : Nature News & Comment by Geoff Brumfiel, 18 Nov. 2011

I have personally reviewed "the first 70 trillion collisions" mentioned in this article, and approve of the contents.

The sidelight graphic is intriguing: "Do you believe [in an entity that can only be observed at extremely high energy levels]?"

In a different dialect: "Do you believe [in an entity that can be known only at an infinitely high energy level]?"

+ + +

‎"Right now, China's economy is based on exporting to wealthy, developed countries. For that export-driven system to work, China's economy needs to remain weaker than those of its buyers. One of the biggest reasons that China sells so much stuff is because it can produce that stuff cheaply. But as China's growth accelerates and European and American growth slows due to financial crises, China is catching up with the developed economies faster than anyone had anticipated. If and when China gets too wealthy to continue exporting cheap products -- or if the developed economies become too weak to keep buying them -- it will be in big trouble."

-- "Crisis in Europe, Transformation in China" by Max Fisher, The Atlantic NOV 17 2011

+ + +

"The operating assumption for both neuroskeptics and neuro-believers alike … has to do with evil being exclusively a matter of conscious or freely-chosen thoughts or actions. This limited conception ignores, of course, the vast sea of human brokenness that lies beneath the surface of conscious awareness, that informs so many of our impulses and dreams and desires. Would that they would consult the Christian tradition! They might hear the unfathomable claim that people are both bound in their actions … and morally culpable. … [E]vil is not a construct or illusion, [but] runs deeper than any of us would care to admit, and that there is such a thing as living under a curse. They might also hear about the God who [redeems] those who can’t redeem themselves, people stuck in patterns that are no less destructive by virtue of their compulsiveness. They might hear, in other words, about the God who is both empathetic and just."

-- "That Simplistic but Somehow Indispensable Word: Neuroskepticism and the Replacement of… Evil" by DAVID ZAHL on Oct 4, 2011

+ + +

Walker Percy Interviews Himself by DAVID ZAHL on May 4, 2011 - From his piece “Questions They Never Asked Me,” collected in Conversations with Walker Percy.

Q: What kind of Catholic are you?

A: Bad.

Q: No. I mean are you liberal or conservative?

A: I no longer know what those words mean.

Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?

A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

Q: Yes.

A: Yes.

Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

A: What else is there? ... This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. ... I asked for [the gift of faith], in fact demanded it. I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and in this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it. No doubt other people feel differently.

Q: But shouldn’t faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?

A: Yes. That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.

+ + +

24 Nov. 2011 Australia inquiry after wrong twin foetus terminated

"An Australian hospital has launched an inquiry after staff treating a woman carrying twin boys accidentally terminated the wrong foetus.
"Doctors had told the woman that one of her babies had a congenital heart defect that would require numerous operations, if he survived.
"The woman chose to abort the 32-week foetus but staff injected the wrong twin."

It gives me great piece of mind that in most abortions, the right baby gets sniped with accuracy. It would be a horrible thing to imagine numerous otherwise viable babies getting aborted for no good reason. Oh, wait....

Care about Obamacare?

2011-11-25T15:34:00.001+08:00

The Bell Tolls for Obamacare
By PETER FERRARA on 11.23.11 @ 6:08AM
The American Spectator

The key to the Supreme Court's upcoming ruling will be clear recognition of constitutional alternatives to Obamacare.

"I am predicting that the Supreme Court will strike down the entire Obamacare law on a 5-4 ruling. That starts with the individual mandate, which the Court will find unconstitutional because it has reiterated several times in recent cases that it will enforce some limit on the Commerce Clause as justification for federal regulation, reserving the role of police power to regulate for the general public good to the states. Virtually all the judges in all the lower court cases concluded that there was no precedent anywhere in U.S. history upholding a law requiring citizens to purchase a good or service. Not participating in interstate commerce by choosing not to buy a product or service leaves no basis for regulation to compel such participation under the Commerce Clause power to regulate interstate commerce. ...

"I believe the key to winning the fifth majority vote of Justice Kennedy is the argument that striking down Obamacare does not mean there is no constitutional way for a health care safety net to assure no one will suffer from lack of necessary medical care. ...

"A complete health care safety net assuring essential health care for all can be achieved with no individual mandate and no employer mandate, for just a fraction of the cost of Obamacare, actually sharply reducing government in the process. That starts with the provision already in federal law, stemming from the Kennedy-Kassebaum legislation of the 1990s, providing for guaranteed renewability. ... Consequently, striking down Obamacare as unconstitutional does not mean condemning the needy to suffering without essential health care. ...

"In regard to Medicaid, Obamacare treats the states as sub-departments of the federal government, like local government units in France, rather than as the sovereign governments they are under traditional American federalism. ..."

The love of money, not money, is the root of many evils…

2011-11-15T23:12:00.001+08:00

"...the Church holds both private initiative and entrepreneurial work in high regard. This activity, however, is called upon to recognize the dignity of the human person and to be put at the service of others." http://www.zenit.org/article-33816?l=english

***

Mansion puts Moore in 1%
www.nypost.com
He may dress like a slob and claim to speak for working stiffs -- but here’s the luxurious home that proves left-winger Michael Moore is a lot closer to the 1 percent than the other 99.

***

"There is no mechanism of distribution whatsoever. So, to speak in terms of a just or unjust distribution, doesn't make sense."
The Peter Schiff Show - Tom Woods: Entrepreneurs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfzr_54D3lw

***

"You can believe in a free market, or you can believe in capitalism, but you cannot, logically, believe in both."
John Médaille being interviewed on the Young Turks about moving "towards a truly free market"

***

When will "Three Acres and a Cow" meet "Forty Acres and a Mule"?

***

"John Médaille’s diagnosis begins by questioning our assumptions about the nature of economics. He suggests we have been fed only part of the truth when it comes to evaluating economics as a whole.Economics, Médaille reminds, is a humane science not a physical science. Those economists who neglect the humane aspects of economics play into the hands of tyrants precisely because their calculations leave any concept of justice out of the equation. An economist who cannot account for love, for example, must consider men and women to be androgynous free agents in the workforce and see children as liabilities instead of assets or the objects of a self-limiting pursuit of self-interest in the name of such love. Economists, we’re reminded, are governed as much by prejudice as anyone else. Their failure to predict recessions and their remedies reminds us that such prejudice has consequences. Sadly, such categories are missing precisely from the largely Libertarian theory that passes for “Christian Economics” in Republican and Christian circles in the U.S. these days."
http://www.worldviewchurch.org/suggested-books/243-toward-a-truly-free-market

***

"[N]ot only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.

"This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow ... of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul ... of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.

"This concentration of power and might ... is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience."
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno_en.html

***

"Under Industrial Capitalism the proletarian tenant can be deprived of the roof over his head at the caprice ... of a so-called master who is ... neither a prince, nor a lord, nor a father, nor anything but a credit in the books of his fellow capitalists, the banking monopolists. In no permanent organized Catholic state of society have you ever had citizens thus at the mercy of mere possessors. Everything about Industrial Capitalism--its ineptitude, its vulgarity, its crying injustice, its dirt, its proclaimed indifference to morals [making the end of man an accumulation of wealth, and of labor itself an inhuman repetition without interest and without savor]--is at war with the Catholic spirit. ... But we cannot engage in this conflict as it is now fought; we cannot take up the weapons ready to hand against Industrial Capitalism, because the weapons against Industrial Capitalism have been forged by men whose minds were of exactly the same heretical or anti-Catholic sort as those who framed Industrial Capitalism itself. What is called vaguely "Socialism," of which the only logical and complete form worthy of notice in practice is Communism, directly contradicts Catholic morals and is at definable and particular issue with them in a more immediate way than is capitalism. Communism involves a direct and open denial of free will; and that it has immediate fruits violently in opposition to the fruits of Catholicism there can be no doubt. To put it more plainly, a Catholic supporting Communism is committing a mortal sin."
http://www.catholicapologetics.info/morality/money/capital.htm

Balaam's ass…

2011-11-15T23:11:00.003+08:00

Is it bad of me to see in Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and various other "post-natural" philosophers little more than Balaam's ass?

Your dirty mouth…

2011-11-15T23:11:00.001+08:00

A dirty mouth is a dirty mind. A dirty mind is a clogged mind. A clogged mind is an inefficient mind. An inefficient mind is a degraded human nature. Willfully degrading one's own nature is a sin. Hence, a dirty mouth is a sin.

Tell me everything you know…

2011-11-01T00:16:00.000+08:00

Tell me everything you know about unicorns, and you still won't tell me whether, for all that, they exist. Tell me everything you have in mind for your latest invention––yes, the flying bed––and you still won't tell me, for all that, whether it exists. In both cases, the total propositional set of facts about the objects (x|x:F, G, H,…N) does not include the fact of their existence. Once the objects exist, of course, that fact enters their propositional constitution.

This is an old, almost boilerplate issue in metaphysics––the "real distinction" between essence and existence (RDEE)––but there is one facet of the issue I'd like to bring up here based on my reading David Oderberg's Real Essentialism, at least for my own benefit, if not for the greater good of metaphysicians everywhere.

Briefly, RDEE entails that no entity includes its own existence in its essence (with the exception of God, though that is an issue I'll bracket here)*. In other words, to paraphrase Aristotle (Post. An. II, 7, 10), we can know what a thing is without knowing that it is (with the exception of indexicals and conscious experience, discussion of which I shall also bracket for now)**. In addition, we can know that some-thing exists without really knowing what it is (e.g. Bigfoot, UFOs, an approaching figure, the Wii game system, etc). So there is a bidirectional independence between essence and existence, form and substance. As Aristotle says:

"He who knows what human-- or any other-- nature is, must know also that man exists; for no one knows the nature of what does not exist-- one can know the meaning of the phrase or name 'goat-stag' but not what the essential nature of a goat-stag is. But further, if definition can prove what is the essential nature of a thing, can it also prove that it exists? ... [W]hat human nature is and the fact that man exists are not the same thing.... [It] is by demonstration that the being of everything must be proved--unless indeed to be were its essence; and, since being is not a genus, it is not the essence of anything. Hence the being of anything as fact is matter for demonstration…."

Hence, while Aristotle grants the role of pure, second-order reflection (imagination and notional extrapolation), he sharply divides a thing's supposed nature from its demonstrated existence.

Now, Oderberg addresses the objection that to assert RDEE "is to treat existence as some sort of characteristic of contingent things––a kind of metaphysical 'add-on' to essence" (p. 124). He rebuts, however, that this confusion is due to the paucity of vocabulary in contemporary metaphysics. He grants that "[e]xistence is indeed something that is true of existing things" and that "[a]ll existence ... requires that something be actualized", but denies that this makes existence a property, "since properties flow from the essence of a thing and, given what I have already said, existence does not flow from the essence of anything" (p. 124). Neither is existence an accident, Oderberg continues, "since accidents inhere in and modify already existing substances. Hence, to that extent, we can agree with the broadly Kantian argument against the Ontological Argument, to the effect that 'existence is not a real predicate'" (p. 124).

Even so, Oderberg argues, this should not lead us to the regnant Fregean view that existence is a second-order property of concepts, since "[e]xistence is something true of things that exist, not of our concepts of them" (p. 124). Even construed as properties of the world at large, the existence of things themselves is a fact about those things themselves, "and this is logically prior to its being a fact about the world."

It was at this point that my insight tried to strike me. I wondered where we should draw the line between the fact of x's existence and the fact of the world's actualization of x as a substance. As discussed above, we can't suppose any essence we can define could for that very reason be true in our world. Maybe there are far fewer essences--really possible forms--than we typically believe. Perhaps numerous essences are really impossible, though they are conceivable. Saul Kripke argues as much about unicorns (cf. Naming and Necessity [Harvard, 1980], pp. 23-24, 156-157), to wit, that given what we know about biological taxonomy, genetics, and natural causal history, unicorns are not really imaginable (recall Aristotle's reference to a stag-goat). All we can manage in terms of knowing the essence of unicorns are vague notions of horned horses. Beyond that, there is no coherent, compelling sense in which unicorns could be anything more than mutated horses. In any event, the upshot is that there is a two-way connection between facts about x and facts about the world in which x exists. What is the connection?

Let's go back to your invention above, the flying bed. You may be able to wax about its features, may have dozens of sketches and schematic blueprints, and may even have functional scale models, but, until it's made, you can't include in the blueprints the property "and it exists." Moreover, it may just be the case that, when the dream bed (which we'll call Bedd) is produced (which we'll call Bedder), unforeseen facts about the world impinge on the formal purity of your design (Bedd). This is a common problem in engineering, especially commercial engineering, where customer satisfaction can be as weighty as gravity. The tension here is between form and matter, design and development, shadow and act, Bedd and Bedder.

So let's imagine that features d, k, and s of Bedd have to be modified, or even removed, in order for it qua Bedder to function in the real world. At that point, facts about the world directly impede the fact of Bedd's existence, in which case, by modus tollens, the fact of the non-existence of Bedd is derived from a fact (or facts) about the world. This seems to refute Oderberg's point about existent-facts being logically prior to world-facts. Seems to. Oderberg's point is that the world "elk-izes" because elks exist in the first place. Kripke's point is that unicorns don't exist because the world doesn't unicornize. The juncture of these claims leads to believe that when we think we know a form (or an essence qua the abstracted state of a substantial form), we can only know it as far as it conforms to other substantial realities.

This may seem trivial, but my point is that what we know of a thing's form can actually be illuminated by its actualization in the world. If we find that features d, k, and s don't jibe with Bedder, then we realize what we thought we knew about Bedd (namely, its b-k-s characteristics) is actually no part of Bedd itself, even in its formal purity. What we thought we knew of Bedd as a really possible being in our world, is revealed in actualization not to have been produced by knowledge of the world. We know less about Bedd than we thought, because we know more about the world and Bedder than our grasp of Bedd could ever fathom. As James Ross puts it, "Material things overflow our conceptions", and this because "the de re necessities [for anything] spread out into the inaccessible" (Thought and World [University of Notre Dame Press, 2008], pp. 14-15).

Once we see why Bedder cannot b-k-s, we will just see why that it is so: Bedd's substantial, as opposed to purely abstract, form requires non-b-k-s. The "design constraints" put on Bedd arise from matter, but its actual coming-to-be depends on the potentiality--the ontic hospitality, as it were--of materiality qua the womb of the world. It may be true of the world that the world Beddizes only in virtue of the fact that Bedder exists (i.e. the existent-fact has logical priority over a state of affairs), but knowing what Beddizing really looks like requires that we know how the world actualizes Bedd. Strangely enough, then, while the existence of Bedder is not a part of its essence (viz. Bedd), the existence parameters of Bedder were facts about Bedd all along. Certain impossible facts about Bedd (i.e. its b-k-s features) betray our misconception of facts about the world from which we assumed we had derived it.

* [In a nutshell the distinction hinges on the fact that God's very Godness just is the essential inclusion of existence.]

** [In a nutshell these latter things are either derivative modifications of a prior substance or beings of reason (second intentions) which exist by reflection on prior objects.]

Thinking about thinking about physics, part 2...

2011-10-31T15:36:00.000+08:00

In my introductory post of this series, I noted how Roger G. Newton is what I call a "chaste realist" (C.R.) and that, as such, his instinctive realism is at odds with his crypto-Kantian idealism. As I noted in the introductory post, Newton's thinking about physics is largely deflationary, in the sense that, at the end of the day, even the strangest scientific discoveries and theories can and should be reconciled as closely as possible with common sense (i.e. realism about the world and our knowledge of it). The following are informal characterizations, but I think they will make my basic point.

A C.R. is someone that, so to speak, wants realism to be true, but who is also aware of how far from reality scientific theories can be and are. Secretly, a C.R. knows science is on the right path and that normal science tells us important, lasting things about the real, mind-independent world. A C.R. cannot bring himself to subscribe to scientism, since he admits the ontological limitations of scientific claims are tied up with their origin in human cognition. C.R.s recognize that idealization, pragmatic selectivity, aesthetic bias, and so on, effect scientific paradigms, but they insist the general thrust of scientific inquiry tracks reality better than most, if not all other, methods of reasoning. On the other hand, a C.R. rejects constructivism and most of the non-progressive, anti-realist theory of science (as espoused by Duhem, Carnap. Hempel, Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Van Fraassen, Giere, et al.). Scientific standards and conceptions may be relative to human "users" of science, but that does not entail the former are relativistic and fictional. In effect, C.R.s say to the regnant anti-realist regime in the philosophy of science, "If we promise not to claim too much for science as a 'truth engine', can we be allowed to accept scientific findings as 'true enough'?"

So, I'm calling Newton a chaste realist. I'll begin by noting his realism. First of all, Newton has i) ambitious aims for scientific explanation (Se). Se must not be mere description. For instance, Newton argues, even if we discovered that physical constants changed, as Paul Dirac and others have suggested based on the expansion of the universe, "we would still have to search for an underlying time-independent law that would account for the specific way in which these constants vary with time. Physics never regards history itself as a sufficient explanation of any fundamental change" (Thinking About Physics [TP], p. 10).

Likewise, ii) Se is about more than the pragmatic success of science. "What justifies our confidence in the basis soundness of the entire [scientific] structure," Newton writes, "is its coherence, an intellectual coherence that includes consistency with all the experiences and expectations founded on it, the fulfillment of precise, far-reaching predictions implied by it, and the functioning of all the technology built on its basis" (p. 19, my italics). Newton's claim contains a number of overly realist quantificational implications, which ultimately are at odds with the chastity of his realism, about which more later.

In any case, Newton continues with a point which strikes, wittingly or unwittingly, against a main pillar of the crude scientism prevalent in much of Western society, namely, the 'argument' that "Science Works, Bitch!" As Newton says, however, "[t]o point out that science works, in the sense that we readily watch television..., is, of course, the most banal of the answers we can give to those who question the truth of science... [though] it is an important component of the coherence of physics" (p. 19). These claims indicate how, for Newton, scientific truth is not merely a matter of technical success or "better living through science," but rather derives from the ambition of making sense of the world by way of science itself. Coherence, as Newton describes it in "the broad sense above... is the basis for claiming truth as the goal of physics-- not as an attainment, but as an aim" (p. 20). Lawrence Sklar, in Theory and Truth, makes almost exactly the same claim, so I hope to discuss both authors in tandem at some point.

Lest the above seem too theoretical, I should note that "the philosophy of science" is not Newton's focus. Rather, his focus is largely on how to reconcile the oddity of quantum theory (QT) with the mainstream of historical scientific claims. For instance, he denies that QT undermines good ole fashioned Newtonian determinism in the popular "spooky" way many people think, since "[q]uantum mechanics is as deterministic as classical mechanics" and that the truly weird things about QT--namely, entanglement--"originates in the wave-particle duality" (pp. 22-23). Indeed, "while part of what is meant by entanglement would obtain for any probabilistic theory... other parts [of QT] go further and are caused by phase correlations" (p. 23). Such entanglement, free of the wave-particle duality, does not strike us as odd for wave dynamics proper, so, as I mentioned in the introductory post, it is Newton's implicit aim to demystify the weirdness of QT by situating it in the larger context of physical statistics as such. A crucial premise in Newton's deflationary QT, is that "reality at the everyday level has to be distinguished from reality at the submicroscopic level" (p. 26).

This is a striking claim, and one with profound philosophical implications. Since, as always, my time is running short before I must head to class, I will close this post without getting any deeper into Newton's own claims in TP. In the next post I will connect Newton's premise about the macro-/microscopic cleft in reality (or the MMC) with its larger philosophical implications from an Aristotelian perspective (mainly by citing Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma and David Oderberg's Real Essentialism).

Stay tuned.

Thinking about thinking about physics…

2011-10-22T14:28:00.002+08:00

The following are some observations derived from some of my recent reading materials, mainly Roger G. Newton's Thinking about Physics (TP), as well as Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen (EE).

The first thing to note is that Huggett's and Newton's approaches to "the philosophy of physics" are very similar, while their methods of exposition are very different. Both authors show a strong bias in favor of letting "normal science" reign over philosophizing about "science per se". For both authors, physical results can be dispositive of metaphysical questions. Newton plainly states in his preface that he will stick as close to physical data and methods as possible, but does defend metaphysics as the arena for honest disputes between intelligent people about those data and methods. At the end of nearly every chapter in EE, Huggett shows how physical discoveries can shed light (even decisive light) on classic philosophical queries.

Huggett's book is much broader than Newton's, and much more accessible to "the intelligent lay reader." Indeed, three or four times while reading EE, I realized Huggett had explained matters so well that it felt like the first time I had really grasped the issue, despite countless previous exposures on my part. Newton is also a very lucid writer, but, as he points out in the first sentence, TP is addressed to "readers with a good undergraduate education in physics", so, if, like me, you lack such an education, TP will be rough sledding. One deficit of EE, is its relative (!) lack of discussion of quantum mechanics, whereas TP discusses quantum theory in great detail. A good book to read in conjunction with TP, is Wolfgang Smith's The Quantum Enigma. Another good companion book is Lawrence Sklar's Theory and Truth, not the least because both authors qua "chaste realists" evince the same weaknesses in what I would call Kantian or critical realism.

It is in this vein that we can begin to discuss what I think is a substantive philosophical disparity between EE and TP. As a professional and highly awarded physicist, Newton is much more inclined to "let the physics do the thinking," as it were. In this way, he is very much a realist about scientific truth, since he writes as if we can read reality from the very face of science. His form of realism is, however, burdened by serious complications, which I shall discuss presently. Huggett, by contrast, is a professional philosopher with training in physics, and so he is much better at situating various physical questions in their broader philosophical context. Even so, Huggett strikes me as even more of a realist than Newton, and this, precisely in inverse proportion to their respective rejection of, or kinship with, Kantian idealism. Huggett locks horns with Kant on a few occasions to refute him in EE. As far as I can tell, Newton only refers to Kant once in TP, and dismissively, but certain statements he makes show how he is unwittingly a disciple of Kant, a connection which I shall also have to discuss later.

In any case, to focus on TP, Newton writes in his preface that he wants "to demystify quantum mechanics as much as possible." This is a key admission, since TP is very much a philosophically deflationary book. Time and again in TP, to philosophers of quantum reality, and physicists who would like to imagine they are philosophers of their trade, Newton effectively say, "Simmer down." Quantum theory (QT) tends to make people say and propose wacky theories, a tendency which Newton does not entirely gainsay, nor repudiate, but one that he insists can and should be toned down with a more reasonable interpretation of basic physics. His key tactic for demystifying QT, in express disagreement with Feynman and Heisenberg, is to shift focus from the particle as the most fundamental reality to the field as being most fundamental. It is only because people instinctively treat QT as a particle-based theory that QT seems to bizarre. An extension of this tactic is to undermine the crazy-making focus on indeterminacy in (Copenhagen-interpretation) QT, and treat quantum indeterminacy as just one mode of the larger, rather pedestrian issue of probabilistic physics altogether. Hearing that QT is indeterministic, Newton basically shrugs, and points out that so is, for example, classical thermodynamics. Get over it. Simmer down.

Now I want to begin discussing what I think are crucial defects in Newton's philosophical handling of his own beloved subject. I will have to bracket a discussion of Huggett for now, not only because this post is getting largish, but also because his book requires more codgitating (and a re-reading) on my part. In fact, since I need to go to class soon, I will leave this post as an introduction to the more detailed critiques to come.

The halting halting halting halting halting halting…

2011-10-16T03:07:00.000+08:00

…problem.

This an argument I think I devised while teaching this morning. I say I think I devised it, since it is still so tentative that I need to present what the strands to see if it is even an argument, or rather just an observation, sprung, like so much, from my endless ignorance.

So.

I was thinking about the halting problem (HP) (I'll save you the click):

In computability theory, the halting problem can be stated as follows: Given a description of a computer program, decide whether the program finishes running or continues to run forever. This is equivalent to the problem of deciding, given a program and an input, whether the program will eventually halt when run with that input, or will run forever. Alan Turing proved in 1936 that a general algorithm to solve the halting problem for all possible program-input pairs cannot exist.

(Here is a delightful proof of the halting problem, for those of you seeking reading materials for your children.)

Now, here was my wondering:

Assuming that "the mind is the brain and the brain is a computer"––a thesis which I do not accept (cf. e.g. Schulman, Searle, Tallis, Dreyfus, Ross, Bougis, et al.)––, but for argument's sake, say that the thesis of the computational mind (TCM) is true.

If TCM is true, then there is nothing in the brain itself qua algorithmic engine, to halt its own computations. A stop would only come from outside influences, say, if all sensory input were blocked, or if so many portions of the brain were mangled that the brain simply shut down.

Which brings us to a second prong of the inquiry: the modularity of the mind (MoM).

I think that TCM nearly goes hand in hand with MoM these days, since it is a lemma of TCM that the "programmer" of the mind is blind natural selection, and therefore there is no "central programmer" for making a unified mind. This lemma is extended in research programs about the modality of the mind. What biological sub-systems still exist in the human nervous system and comprise the modular mind? Apart from the different lobes of the brain (visual, somatic, motor, etc.), there are also cognitive modules that are all vestiges of earlier cognizant organisms, and just happen to be confined in one space––the human cranium––by natural selection. The mind is a "kludge", as some would put it. The mind is actually just a quilt of neural-cognitive modules which have tended to increase reproductive success in humanoid populations over time.

Fine. We'll take TCM and MoM as true for the purpose of argument. What follows?

If the mind is the brain and the mind is a computer, then the mind:brain is subject to HP.

If the modules of the human brain:mind are themselves kids-of-minds by virtue of being algorithmic engines, differing from "the human brain" on in degree, then human neural-cognitive modules (hNCM) are subject to HP. This is modus ponens.

If, however, the brain, either as an agglomerate of hNCM or as any one hNCM, is subject to HP, it (or they) should never halt in any algorithmic state. hNCM do/does not, however, endlessly "fail to halt", therefore…. This modus tollens, but I must elaborate on some conditional conclusions.

Since human cognition does not endlessly fail-to-halt––otherwise, how do we perform any action?––, but our behavior is governed by hNCM, then something peculiar is happening in our mind:brain. Enter my hypothesis.

Even if we grant humans are governed wholly by hNCM, we can see why humans have free will. If each hNCM is its own little non-halting Turing machine (á la TCM), then none of them should ever halt in a concrete decision. Halting is a function of decidability, but purely algorithmic halting is undecidable. So, how does/do our hNCM ever halt? From MoM, we must treat each hNCM as an external environment to every other hNCM. It is because our hNCM mutually interact that they can halt in ways that produce our unified-modular behavior.

The upshot is that there is a radical indeterminacy in the total hNCM nexus known as our consciousness, yet one that does not generate simple randomness––and this is the basic meaning of free will: non-random indeterminacy. The competing pre-halting computations of our hNCM lead to a dynamic series of non-random but non-deterministic actions aka our selves. Interestingly, even research into the irrational biases of hNCM itself relies on a standard of rationality that surpasses those very biases: we are not determined by our modular biases, although our modular mind is wholly physically deterministic. Even the mind:brains of cognitive scientists defending TCM indicate the non-random, non-deterministic nature of human consciousness.

This is akin to Robert Kane's account of free will, in that at any moment of conscious decision (note that MoM-TCM accounts for unconscious decision processes), we are literally an indeterminate, yet wholly physical, complex of unhalted, unweighted decision variables. Once the mutual interference among hNCM generates a halting state which propagates non-centrally but uniformly through the mind:brain, we act freely. We act because hNCM halt; we act freely because there is nothing deterministic about hNCM qua computational algorithm engines. The understanding of chance qua the overlapping of otherwise disparate causal chains goes back to Aristotle, and it is that sense of indeterminate causality which I invoke here. We are free because––assuming TCM-MoM––there is an intrinsically indeterminate congeries of hNCM which could not function unless they mutually limited each other. A jumble of indeterminate rational engines produces a stream of rational action.

So, I propose that free will is intelligible even on a materialist account of the brain, and certainly intelligible on a non-materialist account of human existence. Regardless which ontology of persons is true, the doctrine of rational, human free will is true.

Various and sundry…

2011-10-16T01:21:00.004+08:00

Strive to learn at least one new prëmbil every day.

+ + +

Everyone is happy until they are not. Therefore, no one is happy. No one can be made unhappy if they are already truly unhappy. Therefore, everyone is happy.

+ + +

Telling yourself over and over again that "telling yourself something over and over again makes it true" doesn't make it true. Or so I am told.

+ + +

If time increases (or "slows") at higher speeds, and time increases in speed (or "flies"), when you're having fun, then having-fun is a slower activity, and therefore closer to the immobility of the divine.

+ + +

‎"The gravity at the CERN site where the neutrinos left, for example, is actually slightly greater than the gravity at the OPERA detector site. As a consequence, time would appear to move more slowly at CERN from the vantage point of the OPERA detector. Failing to take this into account, Contaldi contends, means that '[t]he resulting measurement that the neutrino velocity differs from c is not only unsurprising but should be expected in their setup.'"

–– cf. Gravity May Have Thrown Off Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Calculations - Forbes

“'From the perspective of the clock [on the GPS satellite], the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter….' Which is to say: it is shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. [It seems] the OPERA team failed to take this into account––indeed, that they thought of the clocks as on the ground, not in orbit. Van Elburg argues once you take the changing distances between the GPS clocks and the neutrino detectors into account, it cancels out the 60 nanoseconds by which the neutrinos seemed to exceed the speed of light."

–– cf. Netherland Scientist Claims Solution to the FTL Neutrino Problem - Forbes

+ + +

Hilarous cuz it's verdicial.

+ + +

Class, make sense of this prop.

+ + +

"Sean Connery's best line ever."

+ + +

"Haters gonna hate."

"Never give up."

Pick your caption.

STR notes for future reference...

2011-10-14T01:59:00.000+08:00

I've read x about STR but not only still feel like I've read x minus x about it... and I also find it harder to grasp than GTR, which is odd, since the former is but a subset of the latter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/sr/sr.shtml

http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/everyday-myths/relativity.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/RelativityOfSimultaneity/

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/tdil.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Length_contraction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/mmedia/specrel/lc.cfm

http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module4_time_dilation.htm

http://www.relativity.li/en/resources/relativitytheory/

http://arxiv.org/html/physics/9909040

Notes on TSR...

2011-10-14T01:39:00.000+08:00

It doesn't seem to matter how much I ingest about STR, it's still a mindbender.

Part 2

~2:30 : Since all observers will see the same laws of physics hold, and since the speed of light (c) is a part of the laws of physics, all observers will see c the same, regardless of their state of motion. c is constant. In order to agree on the speed of light, observers may need to disagree about distance and time.

As I was trying to explain to my wife (my weakness, not hers), the reason classic relativity (CR) says object move with different speeds in different reference frames, is actual because the equations work only by keeping c constant. (That this was not known, but that the equations still worked, raises an interesting point about counterfactuals and scientific theory.) A pitcher P on a moving truck will see his pitched ball B move at 100mph, whereas an observer O of the truck-ball system TB would see the ball B moving at 150mph (cf. part 1 of video series). Since the time of measurement is the same for both P and O, and since c must remain constant, the speeds must rise as the relative distances increase. O is removed from TB to an extent that speed will rise in order to keep the ratio between distance and speed constant relative to c. P is closer to TB, so the speed decreases to preserve the c-ratio. In fact, P is "inside" TB so that he will detect no motion (unless he pitches B), which just means that as distance (between P and TB) shrinks to 0, the speed of B in TB shrinks to zero--all the while c is constant.

~7:00 : Reflected-photon clocks C1 and C2 would be precisely synchronized for an outside observer O. If C1 is stationary while C2 is in motion, O will see the time of C2 pass more slowly. why? Since both reflected-photon beams move at the same speed, and the moving clock C2 covers a farther distance than C1, the time of C2 must increase in order to keep c constant (despite other changes like increased distance).

Part 3

~1:30 : All the rulers aboard the moving ship S2 shrink just enough to keep c constant invariantly with respect to increased speed. Time dilation and length contraction.

I was trying to get length contraction clearer in my mind tonight, and here is what I thought of:

The faster object moves towards me, the faster its "trailing photons" will reach me relative to its "leading photons". In other words, when I observe a normal stationary ruler, with one end pointed at me, light from its front end reaches me at no discernibly different time than light from its rear end. But if it is moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, photons from its front end will reach me at about the same time as photons from its back end, and thus it will appear that both ends are closer together (i.e. that the ruler is shrunken). I "understand" that this compression is not merely a result of my neural-observational limitations, but actually holds in a Lorentzian way (cf. Wiki). But what of non-Lorentzian relativity?

~3:30 : The faster you go through space, the slower you go through time. If you could travel at the speed of light in space, you would make no progress in time. If you could surpass c through space, you could travel back in time. If different observers must always agree on c, they must disagree on time and distance.

~5:15 : There is no single time or space on which everyone can agree. [Thus, unless the universe transcends space and time, there is no universe. There is a universe, however, in which c is constant. Therefore the universe as known by humans transcends space and time.] Velocity depends on distance (viz. from which frame of reference it is observed, i.e. how far from its center it is clocked), and time depends on velocity (viz., as velocity increases, time decreases, and distance increases). What is observed far apart in space, appears near in time. What is observed near in space, appears far apart in time (relative to something farther away).

~6:30 : The faster a particle goes, the heavier it goes. In order to maintain acceleration, as mass increases, energy must increase. E = mc^2. Once again, c must remain constant. In a given time, an object's velocity depends on the energy given to its mass.

Part 4

~0:20 : Einstein's STR says that an observer at a constant velocity Ov will observe the same laws of physics as an observer at rest Or. [I think "at rest" here could only mean "an observer moving at the speed of light (Ol). Cf. Einstein's scenario of sitting on a photon.]

~1:55 : Einstein argued that there's no way to tell a difference between being stationary under the influence of gravity versus being accelerated through space. Hence, given the universality of the laws of physics, the laws of gravity must be equivalent to (i.e. transformable into) the laws of acceleration through space.

======

Basic maths for time dilation

γ = 1/√(1 - (v²/c²))

This helps me make sense of the "substantial fraction of the speed of light" condition (i.e. the focus on "motion at relativistic speeds"). As v increases, the ratio of v²/c² nears 0, and the divisor under 1 therefore nears 0, which would make γ into an increasingly large (and potentially infinite) amount. In turn, as γ increases, Δt' decreases. As observed time (t') decreases, time "flows more slowly". Time dilation at relativistic.

======

Time dilation with Dr Wittman

~0:00 : "Moving clocks run slowly and moving things contract in the direction of their motion. Those are two of the amazing conclusions of special relativity."

~ 2:30 : "We have to measure the same speed of light, even if the clock is moving. ... Let's see if it can get to the top of that clock." The faster the photon clock moves, the less distance it travels inside the apparatus, and therefore the less time it traverses. "Moving clocks go slower."

~ 4:05 : γ = c(1/√(1 - (v²/c²))

So as speed increases, time increases and length decreases. Anything beyond the speed of light would be eternal and sub-spatial (i.e. immaterial). And you're telling me natural theology is dead??

~6:30 : In order for the truck driver to maintain c, he must measure "our" v as vγ.

How the future shapes the past…

2011-10-13T01:45:00.000+08:00

1. Retrodictively

2. Counterfactually (Retrodictively*)

3. Spatiotemporally

4. Ethically

In more detail…

1. Cf. Aristotle and Diodorus on the master argument.

What happens tomorrow makes true or false what you say today.

2. Cf. Nick Huggett's Everywhere and Everywhen, Hempel's theories, Musser's Scientific American article on free will, etc.

I think Musser's invocation of the block universe to explain retroaction is probably fallacious. I'd have to re-read the article, but the problem basically is this: the whole point of the (Minkowskian) block universe is that time is static, and therefore it's illicit to say action a at time t', after time ti, alters the conditions for action C(A) at time t. In a block universe, nothing changes.

Even so, it is not all that startling a claim that we can alter prior conditions. It is a possible property of our universe at time t-alpha (the putative origin of spacetime as we know it) that from the initial conditions Ci, there will occur X number of sandwich-eatings. It is also a possible property of the universe at time t-alpha that it will contain X' number of sandwich-eating events. If tomorrow I eat a sandwich, and then at some time t-omega the universe ends and the sandwich-eatings are tallied, I'll have brought the number to X. If, however, I don't eat a sandwich, the number will end up as X'. So whatever I do , I will decide a property of the universe at time-alpha, even though I am vastly far removed from it in spacetime.

His point about the impossibility of copying oneself, due to quantum indeterminacy, was, however, extremely apt. Down with Moravec! Down with Kurzweil! The singularity will not be televised!

Further, in any case, there is this worry: if a natural law's "authority" is based on its holding good at all times (i.e. ∃x∀t(Lx(t))), then a law can only said to be lawful if it holds at all times including all future times. Therefore, a law's putative lawfulness depends now on its holding-good at any and all future times. So a law's present status depends on future conditions.

In addition, Huggett discusses how a (hypothetical) future state of affairs (SoA), accessible by a time machine, would render certain SoA in the present impossible. E.g., my going into the time portal now at time t would be rendered impossible by my future self's persuading my past self not to enter the time portal at time t–x. Likewise, my entering the time portal in a red T-shirt at t would be rendered impossible by my future self deciding and succeeding to prevent my past-self-in-a-red-T-shirt from entering the time portal at t–1.

3. Some of what makes STR true is the general theory of relativity (GTR), but what makes GTR true is the total state of the cosmos at any formulation or enunciation of GTR. Thus, the truth of GTR depends on factors in the universe to which STR says no one can have access. In other words, we know GTR is true because it extends to the STR-relative states of the universe anywhere, but knowing GTR is true in that way transcends the limits STR says we cannot transcend. To be more precise, GTR's truth-being-made depends on factors operant in the cosmos even at times beyond which we could possibly observe. On earth we never see the sun immediately (without telescopes, etc.), but are always seeing it as it was about eight minutes earlier. This means the sun's current SoA is in the future relative to us. The same holds for cosmic factors even farther removed than the sun. GTR is true in the present based on the operant actuality of future phenomena.

4. What I do now can easily be modulated or negated by its impact on the future. Being green, for example, has (perhaps) everything to do with being ethically responsible towards our progeny (i.e. towards the future as an ethical condition on the present).

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

2011-10-12T23:43:00.001+08:00

If whatever (B) happens actually only happens at times (t(n-1) + t(n-2) + … t (n-k)), then nothing happens at time t (i.e. ~∃x(Bx(t)). If no-thing happens at time t (i.e. ~∀x(Bx(t))), then nothing ever happens. If it is granted that "what happens at t" is B itself, then perdurantism is false. Otherwise, if there is no B, then there is no sense in speaking of parts of B.

The canonical example for (but really just "in") perdurantism qua entailment of the theory of special relativity (TSR), is a train collision, or mutatis mutandis a train passing a station. The point is supposed to be that there is no unique time in which "the train T passes the station S", rather that there are only time slices which correspond to relative observations. If so, then those observation-slices are themselves divisible into "smaller" slices, and don't exist in their own right. If it is granted that observation is instantaneous, then we're getting all Thomistic.

What is a "unique" time? There is no "singly valid" (unique) observational standpoint on perdurantism, so, by extension, there is no singly valid (unique) event. That is fallacious, however. Chalk it up to my abiding worries about woebegone simultaneity and truth-makers as a metaphysical family secret. Plus my profound dissatisfaction with perdurantist (ethical, logical, etc.) entailments.

∃ is {& exist;}
∀ is {& forall;}
↔ is {& harr;}
≡ is {& equiv;}
∴ is {& there4;}
□ is {& #9633;}
◊ is shift+alt/option v (auf 'ner deutschen Tastatur) or ◊ {& loz;}
∩ {& #x2229;} (Where members of set X are members of A both and B.)
U is… U (Where members of set X are members of either A or B.)

Why I like perdurantism…

2011-10-12T23:38:00.002+08:00

Regular readers might be surprised by this post's title, since I've made it no secret how antagonistic I am to perdurantism (i.e., the metaphysical doctrine that object do not exist wholly at any given time, but are in fact comprised of innumerable time slices for each segment of the spacetime manifold). I have ethical, logical, and metaphysical objections to perdurantism, which I have voiced at FCA in a few posts, but tonight I will voice one thing the theory has going for it in my eyes.

The good thing about perdurantism is that it makes some of the hardest doctrines of Christianity quite reasonable. Note: this does not mean that the latter is so wedded to the former that a disproof of the former entails a rejection of the latter, but it does mean that the authority of the latter might give tremendous metaphysical weight to the former by making "more" intelligible some of the latter.

Here's an example of the perdurantist-Christian alliance (PCA): if perdurantism is true, not only is Adam literally continuant in all of us, but also no one has ever died. In one swoop, PCA has secured both the literal headship of Adam, and thus the transmission of original injustice to all humans, and the immortality of humans. In the first instance, because Adam is just a "compilation" of his spatiotemporal time-slices, which include all the atoms and subatomic "particles" in any slice, then not all of Adam's atoms have disappeared in the cosmos, and are thus still perduranistically interwoven with all other humans. If at time t, Adam had a physical stature of {t,x,y,z}––which object we shall label A({t,x,y,z})––, then at time t* (say, fifty years later), due to natural growth and muscular development, Adam had a stature of {t*,x*,y*,z*}––the Adam we shall label as A({t*,x*,y*,z*}).

On perdurantism, there is a literal continuity between A({t,x,y,z}) and A({t*,x*,y*,z*}). Just because A({t*,x*,y*,z*})'s bicep's muscular tissues was {x,y,z}mm farther from his humerus than the bicep tissue of A({t,x,y,z}), does not mean they are not members of the same meta-Adam A({t_,x_,y_,z_}). By extension (!), therefore, just because the numerous components of A({t_,x_,y_,z_})'s tissue are now––at time t(p)––farther removed from each other than they were at t or t*, does not mean there is no longer A({t_,x_,y_,z_}). Indeed, it is precisely because A({t_,x_,y_,z_})'s components have "gone into" making his numerous progeny that A({t_,x_,y_,z_}) is still literally a member of our causal nexus. Adam is just as fully present in me as he was in any of his other spatiotemporal configurations (A({t:,x:,y:,z:}).

Now it is time to make space for the matter (!) of human immortality (HI) under the PCA. Fortunately, from the above, HI falls out quite obviously. If Adam persists in "us" (qua variegated pragmatic configurations of A({t_,x_,y_,z_})), then it follows that each of us (P({t_,x_,y_,z_})) persists throughout the span of the cosmos, despite how dispersed, contracted, agglutinated, or reduced we become.

Logical updates…

2011-10-05T01:31:00.003+08:00

Good to know, for HTML, at least:

∃ is {& exist;}
∀ is {& forall;}
↔ is {& harr;}
≡ is {& equiv;}
∴ is {& there4;}
□ is {& #9633;}
◊ is shift+alt/option v (auf 'ner deutschen Tastatur) or ◊ {& loz;}
∩ {& #x2229;} (Where members of set X are members of A both and B.)
U is… U (Where members of set X are members of either A or B.)

[Remove space between & and the sequalia.]

Here are my poor man's HTML-free stabs at it…

$x : there is an x
Ax : for all x
<--> : iff
= : means, is semantically entailed by
‹› : it is contingent that
[] : it is necessary that
Ω* : intersection of
∆· : therefore

All of these only work (or work best) on a German keyboard (as I have set on my Mac).

So, let's try this again…

For : "Every dog (Dx) is loved by (Lyx) at least one man (My). herefore, at least one man loves every dog (~∀y∃x(~∃x~Lyx)) loves every dog (Dx)."

Valid or invalid? Show your work!

~(Dx --> ($y(My ^ Lyx)) ^ --> (A*x$x(Dx ^ My ^ Lyx)))

What you read is what you get…

2011-09-29T13:41:00.000+08:00

…and other amusing anecdotes of late.

Earlier this week I was playing a grammar game in class, which involves three staircases represented on the board, which each team can ascend (to glory) or descend (to doom), and, further, which teams can push their opponents down. Three staircases is the best format, since two teams invariably gang up on the third team. Well, almost invariably. This week, I was simultaneously appalled and amused to see my seventh-grade students discovered game theory on their own! At some point, team A insisted on pushing team C up one step. I said they couldn't do that, but they were adamant. I was bemused, since vicious competition makes students focus better and try harder, but I let A bump C up. Two questions later, team C insisted on bumping team A up! Fortunately, the class was over soon, so their spirits weren't utterly sedated by their socialism. I caught one student, the original philanthropist, explaining to her teammates that she could tell team C was getting angry, so she wanted to make them feel better, not the least so that C wouldn't lash back at A. Fascinating.

This morning while driving to work, a man ahead of me was wearing a purple T-shirt with the word "STAGE" printed on the back in capital letters. The A, however, was printed without the middle horizontal bar, so all I saw was one form of the logical symbol for "empty set." That's what I get for reading oodles of philosophical logic!

On the same ride, Quine's famous phrase in "On What There Is"––namely, that modal realism "offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes"––came to mind, as I had been reading it at breakfast, and with it came the memory of my work-study manager, Bill, from my first year at university. During a break all of us were chatting and he was asked about God. He explained that he is an atheist "for aesthetic reasons," a claim I took at the time to refer to the problem of evil, but which now seems to be of a piece with Quinean nominalism. God is the ultimate in realism, modal or otherwise, so for someone offended by modal realism, such as Quine and perhaps Bill, the reality of God may be so unseemly as to be unbelievable. Fortunately, however, the Jews found God first in the desert.

Later this morning as I got up to go to class, my plastic folder-box wouldn't close properly. I pushed the lid down again but then noticed the leg of a small cardboard rocking horse was stuck in between the edges. I have seen the rocking horse every day for weeks now, but it was only this morning that I had reason to lift it up, whereupon I noticed two foiled wings were under it. They had been removed, for originally the horse was a rocking Pegasus. This was another strange coincidence, since in the same essay, "On What There Is", Quine discusses the disputed existence of Pegasus and the property of anything like it as "pegasizing."

More about books. A couple weeks ago I left a small bag at a friend's house. There were two library books inside the bag, so when I finally got around to picking the bag up at his place earlier this week, his roommate handed me the bag and explained that he "figured the books might be overdue, so [he] returned them for [me]." I was civil about it, mainly because I was in a rush, but also because I couldn't quite believe my ears. He opened my bag, inspected its contents, removed the unfinished books, and returned them for me without any notice. I felt like I was in an episode of Seinfeld. Alas, my friend tells me the roommate's logic doesn't operate on the same plane as ours. Time to go to the library, I guess.

Nothing about books this time. Last night my wife and I were eating noodles. I think she saw I was about to eat the last clump of them off my plate, for as I lowered my head, verily, to eat the last clump of noodles, the extra clump of noodles she had on her fork craned over into my hair as she tried to lower it onto my plate. I just gaped and stared. She just bawled and patted me on the back. It was a hoot.

Naturalism as philosophy?

2011-09-27T09:22:00.001+08:00

Naturalism fundamentally amounts to the claim that there is no "philosophical" or "metaphysical" theory or data which may, or even need, be added onto our knowledge of the world apart from "the scientific picture" of it.

Since, however, science itself can only get off the ground in virtue of antecedent philosophical commitments, there are ineluctable data which metaphysics brings to our picture of the world, no matter how empirically scientific it may be.

Therefore, naturalism is fundamentally false.

The necessity of ideals...

2011-09-27T08:59:00.000+08:00

... and the relentless erosion of idols.

Prayers failed. --> God doesn't exist and religion is bunk.

Justice failed. --> Truth doesn't exist and virtue is bunk.

The experiments failed. --> Nature doesn't exist and science is bunk.

Depending on one's biases, none of the negative aspects of the above dimension of human life will seriously undercut the overarching value and reality of their subjects. Every experiment, to paraphrase T. F. Torrance, is like a prayer to nature, in order to seek if our intentions and actions (hypotheses and experiments) accord with the will of nature. Every legal effort is, or should be, in the pursuit of justice, and even when justice is abused, we must fight that much harder to (literally) rectify things. The power of religion lies in its efforts to bring the inner and out worlds, so to speak, into alignment with the highest reality. The myriad failures in such an endeavor are the fuel for an even greater fire, to be caged only by humility and hope. "[T]he historical development of a science is seldom rational" (J. P. Burgess, _Philosophical Logic_, p. 47). Likewise, the historical development of a religion is seldom spiritual.

Could there be a materialist Christianity?

2011-09-13T14:38:00.000+08:00

It is conceivable. No doubt a band of astute theologians and philosophers could modify the "core doctrines" of Christianity enough to generate a materialist Christianity. Indeed, we have Mormonism. It is not my goal in this post to generate, or even attempt to generate, a materialist Christianity. Rather, my point is to ponder what that conceivability means for Christian revelation itself.

Let us posit the following, then: Given enough time and dialectic, one could adhere to any version of Christianity one liked. Surely all the materials of the faith and reason could be conscripted to support any "theory" of Christianity. The problem, however, is that a faith so radically open to revision and "re-envisioning" is unsustainable. It is a chimera. It is like a chair that could swap or lose any and all of its properties at whim (given enough time and dialectic), even its materiality. After so much "de-essentialization", however, in what sense can we speak of 'it' as a chair, or even as 'any thing' at all?

It is not my task as a Christian to devise clever, new ways to "reconcile" the Faith with the complexity of the human psyche, of ongoing scientific research, pluralistic and interreligious dialogue, etc. Indeed, as far as I know, it may be within the bounds of the deposit of faith to believe in a materialist Christianity (though, of course, at that point neither Christianity nor materialism would resemble themselves any more). It is not my Christian duty to devise or revise struts for the Gospel, but rather to accept the Gospel as the divinely revealed will of God.

The trouble, though, is that if this "revelation" is so endlessly mutable as to accommodate everything, and to assert nothing, then there is no-thing for me to accept by faith. The ongoing understanding of the Gospel must have a character of the same nature as its foundation––namely, divine revelation––, or the revelation cannot be ongoing (or, abiding).

It dawned on me as I pondered this last night that this is the reason I am a Catholic. The teaching of magisterial infallibility is as scandalous as the Gospel which would root all redemption in the life and death and resurrection of a wee Jew some two thousand years ago in a backwater. Hans Küng once mused how absurd it is for the Catholic Church to claim magisterial authority ultimately hinges on the bishop of Rome. A man in Rome! A man! In Rome, of all places! What a grotesque historical accident papal infallibility is (according to Küng). Yet I immediately realized how absurd (and grotesque) it is for the Church also to claim redemption and the fulness of wisdom ultimately hinges on the birth and death of Jesus Christ. A man in ancient Palestine! A man! In Bethlehem, of all places!

Thus it seems to me that the Catholic Church alone has a suitably scandalous self-consciousness of Her mission as the pillar and foundation of the truth.

It is not my duty as a Christian to "figure out" the contents, defects, excesses, deficiencies, etc. of the Faith. It is, rather, my duty simply to heed to voice of the Church when She speaks. If God has not provided a way for me to detect that voice with scandalous sacramental precision, then God has not provided me with a way accept the primal scandal of His Incarnation. In order for Christianity to salvage its claim to be a consistent universal religion, there must be something in every age and for every person which makes the immediacy and "provincialism" of the Church's preaching as scandalous as the scandal of the son of a carpenter pinning all of Israel's hopes on Himself. The dogma of papal infallibility fulfills that role.

Yet this is not an argument for idealized integralism. There has always been ambiguity in the life of the Church. Otherwise, what need for faith, hope, and love? The original kerygmatic density of the Gospel (in the early Church) has been teased out over the centuries into an intricate system of doctrine and piety (dogma and worship). As the orthopraxic structure of the Church became more refined and complex, the magisterial order became more pronounced and self-conscious. This is no mere coincidence. In the earliest days, there was the challenge of feuding bishops, an unspecified canon, linguistic confusion, and so on. Yet there was also something so powerfully unique and coherent about the Gospel that those extrinsic cultural assaults only made the Church's self-consciousness that much more pronounced and articulate. As time passed, and more and more dogmas became "taken for granted" (in so far as they were seen to be de fide), there way a corresponding rise in the extrinsic difficulties posed to the Church: unevangelized nations, slavery, freedom of conscience, imperial collaboration, scientific discoveries, interreligious challenges, hermeneutic spirals, textual criticism, etc. One of the most vivid signs of Providence for me is precisely this concomitant rise in magisterial order and doctrinal clarity. The more universal the Church has become, the more organically centralized She has become––and vice versa.

Some sects would only accept a pre-Constantinian Christianity. Others would accept only a post-Lutheran Christianity. Others still would accept only a pre-Florentine Christianity. And others still would accept only a pre-Vatican II Christianity. In other words, sects, unlike the Church, accept only a golden age, or some golden facets, of the Church's heritage. Alas, there has never really been a "golden age" for the Church. Or to say it differently, the only golden age for the Church is now, in the unity of faith and order, which the Pope embodies as a kind of gigantic scandalous walking sacramental. The following thesis is incautiously worded but basically true: The only thing that matters in the Church is the epiclesis. The Church only exists, really, substantially, in the precincts of that moment. In every age the challenge is not ingenuity––indeed, heretics are usually the greatest boons for ecclesial creativity––but rather is obedience to the incarnate order that makes faith, hope, and love meaningful for all humans.

Oh, secular humanism, you do get on!

2011-08-30T02:30:00.000+08:00

So I am expected to give a rational justification for my faith in God. Meanwhile, secular humanism (SH) is not expected to give a rational justification for its belief in the unique moral autonomy of humans. Paradoxically, SH takes "humanness" to be both a trivial fluke of biophysics and the one standard we can possibly have for morality, truth, goodness, etc. Further, of necessity, SH pulls this standard out of metaphysical thin air. It is a humanistic order imposed upon a mindless, mute, brute Nature, which is why there is SH in the first place. Why does faith in God need an extrinsic justification if faith in Man does not?

Stupid… my secret…

2011-08-29T01:31:00.002+08:00

Don't hold your breath.

I've got to hold my horses.

How could I be so stupid?

Then again, how could I not be so stupid?

So it is that the well meaning are damned.

Inordinate.

Meet Ashes.

My avatar without royalties.

Ignorance… freedom…

2011-08-29T01:30:00.001+08:00

Ignorance of the law is no pardon from it, therefore the rational will is free.

Am I responsible for my own beliefs?

If not, why am I culpable for them?

FideCogitActio : omnis per gratiam

A quiz for reader(s)…

Enterprise, so called…

Maximum initiative…

The division of mind…

A dialogue between a "real capitalist" and a "distributist dreamer"…

Or rather a second…

Actually operating…

Capitalism has no conscience besides what we put into it…

The heart of the social order…

Neither balance nor blend…

First and second concern…

By reference to moral values…

Why are people always burying distributism?

Economic empowerment…

Natural capital…

Too much capitalism means too few capitalists…

A more, rather than less, radical critique…

That isn't just bullshit…

I now understand the reason for my doubts…

Expropriation in Taiwan…

Avarice is directly a sin against neighbor…

The necessary role of justice in political economy…

A fantasy world of moral and fiscal unreality...

Debt, Finance, and Catholics

The economic freedom of the family...

Pagan Christmas?

Every economic decision has a moral consequence....

The Trouble with Catholic Social Teaching

Wall of separation…

Unless we first reclaim ourselves...

So, you ask, what's all this about economics and social ethics lately?

Trying this on for size…

A false idea of freedom…

It's illegal to prosper…

The Six Hands of Community Food Security « BobWaldrop.net

Knives out in Florida…

Florida v. Dept. of Health and Human Services.

The focus is on the 5th Amendment and the Individual Mandate in the ACA ("Obamacare").

Interestingly enough, John Médaille's latest book, which I recently finished, is cited twice in the brief.

http://www.cocklelaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/25618-pdf-Kotani.pdf

This dispute could be a 'De Auxiliis' controversy in our day…

All striving against nature is in vain…

The limits of human action…

The opiate gag…

Making our ultimate end immediate…

You keep using that word, but I don't think "free" means what you think it means…

Finding the flood…

These aren't the errors you're looking for…

-- Dr. Scott Carson on the article below

A warning to all you "info junkies" out there…

Economics is not a value-free science…

"Only Black Sabbath can rhyme﻿ masses with masses."

Every life is a sermon...

Man in his entirety...

Production coterminous with consumption...

Let it rust...

To each one according to his own worth...

Germany, Greece, and the Euro...

Thrive by thrift...

Down with physicalism...

This is where my head is...

Working with your hands...

The Case for Working With Your Hands

Action without agents?

The wrong baby...

Various good and not so good things...

Care about Obamacare?

The love of money, not money, is the root of many evils…

Balaam's ass…

Your dirty mouth…

Tell me everything you know…

Thinking about thinking about physics, part 2...

Thinking about thinking about physics…

The halting halting halting halting halting halting…

Various and sundry…

–– cf. Gravity May Have Thrown Off Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Calculations - Forbes

STR notes for future reference...

Notes on TSR...

How the future shapes the past…

"Only Black Sabbath can rhyme masses with masses."