When I first started reading Wendell Berry thirty odd years ago I had just returned to the Catholic faith. I was struck by how easily his ideas harmonized with the Catholic social teaching and distributist thought I was discovering. In the early 90s I finally wrote Mr Berry and asked him about this; had he ever read the papal encyclicals? Or Chesterton and Belloc? He replied somewhat testily that no, he was not familiar with any of that. I sensed, as one might expect from someone raised as a Baptist in Kentucky, that he was somewhat suspicious of Catholicism and not quite comfortable being told that his ideas resonated with Catholics. (He has since gotten over that and has addressed Catholic conferences).
I relate that story because distributists need to be reminded that distributism is not “Catholic Economics”; it is not revealed truth, and it is not just for Catholics. Every truth in the distributist canon can be arrived at by unaided reason. You do not need to have been baptized or to have read the social encyclicals to understand that small is beautiful, that life should be lived on a human scale, that property should be widely distributed instead of being in the hands of a few, that labor has priority over capital.
It is true that distributism owes a great debt to Catholic social teaching, and particularly to the papal social encyclicals. And it is true that at least a plurality of distributists over the years have been professed Catholics. Indeed, after a vibrant moment in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century distributism has existed as something of a Catholic relic. If it was a movement it wasn’t moving much at all, was relegated to abstract discussions among co-religionists over beer. It was a sort of curiosity, the ideal of eccentrics.
But all that has changed in recent years. When I first discovered distributism just about any Catholic who was interested in social and economic issues was either a leftist of the liberation theology sort or a free marketeer. That is, they either emphasized solidarity or subsidiarity, but rarely put them together. All of that has changed; thirty years of free market ideology has resulted in economic collapse and an emerging plutocracy. Young Catholics have for some time rejected market fundamentalism and are open to the distributist message. And distributism has, in the last decade or so, come alive. Through the tireless work of Tom Storck, John Medaille, Richard Aleman, and others, distributism is no longer living in the past but vibrant, brought into the contemporary debate with new vigor. Dusted off, it appears fresh and new.
There are those- and some of them are on my blogroll- who dismiss distributism as anachronistic, as if it were a combination of William Morris crafts plus British romantic agrarianism. To be sure, distributism did arise within the milieu of English radicalism, which is paradoxically reactionary and agrarian. But the principles of the movement apply to any society.
Indeed, it seems uniquely suited to the American scene. It is not so far from Jeffersonian democracy, and there are antecedents to distributism in our history: perhaps no culture has so nearly approximated the distributist ideal as did the American Midwest in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Property was widely distributed, most folks were small farmers, craftsmen or shopkeepers. There was no dramatic imbalance between the rich few and the poor many. That is long gone, done in by a series of disasters, beginning with the Dust Bowl and the Depression and finally all but finished off in the 70s, when farmers took the “get big or get out” advice of the county land agent and the Department of Agriculture and went deeply in debt to finance newer and bigger equipment, only to be done in when land prices bottomed out. Farms foreclosed by the thousands, eaten by agribusiness. If it wasn’t a set up it sure looked like one. But that society is a living memory to many who are still around.
And now that there is finally outrage over the rule of the Corporation and openness to alternatives we should stand ready to address the modern crisis. But we must do so in a new way. John Lennon famously said to the leftists of his day “If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow”. To paraphrase him, if you go carrying pictures of Christ the King you ain’t going to convince anyone of anything. We must frame distributist thought in a way that young people can hear it, and whether you like it or not the Church isn’t exactly viewed favorably these days. If you quote papal authority it ought to be only to Catholics, not to those who don’t recognize magisterial authority.
Actually, the sectarian tone of distributism is a recent thing; G K’s Weekly and other distributist organs of the early 20th century avoided it, and read like any other political/economic journal.
But perhaps you disagree with this. Perhaps distributism is one point of your 5 point plan to create a Catholic commonwealth in the United States, complete with a monarch and state religion. If so, good luck on that. Don’t forget to write.
As for me, I believe that distributism has the answers to the crisis we are in. It is an idea whose time has come. But don’t get me wrong; just because I say this is the Distributist Moment does not mean that I think we are on the verge of becoming a mass movement. We may have come a long way in the last decade, but we still labor in obscurity. How much obscurity? Well, whenever I type “distributist” or “distributism” the spell-check thing underlines the word, thinking it is an error. When spell-check doesn’t think your word exists you are pretty obscure.
So I don’t think we are about to reap a great distributist harvest.
But it is high time we broke some ground and sowed some seeds.
Daniel, this is a great post. I certainly appreciate your ecumenical sensitivity on this issue. As someone who is a distributist but not a Catholic, I’m definitely glad to see someone say that’s okay. I’ve sometimes felt a bit out of place.
In fact, the pamphlet that was passed out at Occupy Wall Street was indeed a good one, but I was turned off by the direct mention of Chrisitan vales. I wonder how many would-be distributists — those whose sensibilities would allow them to accept the distributist creed with open arms — completely disregarded the message once they read that line.
Unfortunate. But you have outlined a plan I think could lead to greater success, the result of a broader perspective. Thanks.
I did not think the single mention of Christianity was at all intrusive. We cannot deny our history; I just don’t want to hit folks over the head with it, or imply that everyone must be Catholic before we can work for a just social order.
I’m just afraid the intrusiveness will be felt by others. I can see plenty of folks comepletely turned away to something they would have wholeheartedly embraced. No reason for that.
Hopefully I’m wrong. In fact, after attending the Occupy event in my town last night, I’ve gone back and looked at that flyer and considered distributing it at the next one. So many folks there discussed localism and decentralization and creating our own currencies and just seemed primed and ready for distributism.
Daniel, thank you so much. I really love reading your blog, and this is one of my favourite posts recently. I heartily second your thoughts about distributism needing to be framed in terms not exclusively Catholic.
On the reverse of that coin, though, I’ve begun wondering if the new Catholic evangelisation doesn’t somehow begin with distributism and Catholic ecology; an engagement with the world on issues of increasingly obvious and indisputable relevance and to which traditional and orthodox Church teaching provides, if not solutions, at least helpful guidelines. As a convert, I’ve found that the Church viewed from within has much more of immediate and even material (in addition to spiritual) benefit to a society that is looking at a rising tide of chaos on political, economic, and ecological issues than it appears to from without. I wonder if Pope Benedict hasn’t been hinting at this approach toward Catholic evangelisation with Caritas in veritate and his recent talk on ecology in Berlin. The PR organs of the Church have never been known for being particularly good, nor should that be their primary concern, but it does seem that the Church would be a sight more attractive to those outside if it was more widely known that She stood for saving the environment, defending and empowering the poor, and promoting international harmony and justice as well as holding the positions for which She is more widely reported.
Keep up the good work and may God bless you.
Gregory,
On the reverse of that coin, though, I’ve begun wondering if the new Catholic evangelisation doesn’t somehow begin with distributism and Catholic ecology.”
I think you’re on to something here. I’m afraid that from the outside the Church often looks both right-wing and bourgeois, and if we hope to evangelize people of left-wing or hippie proclivities, this is a horrible image to present. The rich Catholic tradition of social thought is little known, unfortunately, and even rejected by some who are loudest in proclaiming themselves professional Catholics.
Daniel, I agree with previous commenters, this was an excellent post! I first discovered Wendell Berry through a book club with friends, and we moved on from him, but his writing always has stuck in the back of my brain as something that would be wonderful to try, if only our society could be rebuilt along distributist lines. Perhaps now is the time to discuss and share the ideas of distributism, but my question is: where can one go for a non-partisan, non-sectarian primer on the movement? I am slightly familiar with Berry and Chesterton, but I am no expert, and feel that I need to steep myself in the thought before I can become an evangelist for change.
Suggestions for something like “The Compleat Idiot’s Guide to Distributism”?
This is excellent. I especially agree with the appraisal of the one-time American way of life as being pretty distributist in ideals and practice, though without the name. I still think the idea speaks pretty strongly to a lot of Americans–that’s why politicians and advertisers invoke it all the time. Also agree about not waiting for the Catholic confessional state, or talking as if distributism is a specifically Catholic notion. The former may or may not be a good thing, but in any case my projections indicate that it is two to four hundred years away.
Well there is more than one American tradition; certainly the Southern model was pretty far from distributism, at least in the lowlands, where cotton, tobacco and sugar cane were produced by slaves for the aristocracy. The Midwest pretty specifically was distributist. And I note that what was behind that was government homesteading programs, that made land available and affordable.
Daniel,
But even much of the settlement of the Midwest was inspired by the sort of individualism that is at the basis of capitalism. It was not unusual for families to engage in serial land speculation — buying farms, working them for a few years, then selling them when the price went up, and then moving west again. Much of American settlement was inspired by what Washington Irving decried as the pursuit of the “Almighty Dollar” (he coined the term, by the way.) Except for some utopian groups and immigrant groups, usually religiously based, the goal was not the establishment of local communities where men could earn an honorable living while building a culture, but personal enrichment. As I see it, the western settlement was not inherently distributist (though it had distributist effects for a time) but was one phase of American capitalism. Of course, there have been those who reacted to resisted this trend, but they have not been in the mainstream of American culture, which is inherently individualistic.
Reblogged this on Christian Democracy and America's Future and commented:
The modern environmental movement is grasping for a compatible economic system. That system is Distributism, but environmentalists and New Urbanists will never hear of it while it remains confined within the intellectual framework of Roman Catholicism. The Vatican provided its inspiration, but Distributism is for everyone. If our rhetoric does not reflect this openness, we deprive many of the understanding of Distributism’s relevance to resiliency and sustainability.