69. God intended the earth with everything contained in it for the use of all human beings and peoples. Thus, under the leadership of justice and in the company of charity, created goods should be in abundance for all in like manner.(8) Whatever the forms of property may be, as adapted to the legitimate institutions of peoples, according to diverse and changeable circumstances, attention must always be paid to this universal destination of earthly goods. In using them, therefore, man should regard the external things that he legitimately possesses not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should be able to benefit not only him but also others.(9) On the other hand, the right of having a share of earthly goods sufficient for oneself and one’s family belongs to everyone. The Fathers and Doctors of the Church held this opinion, teaching that men are obliged to come to the relief of the poor and to do so not merely out of their superfluous goods.(10) If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what he needs out of the riches of others. -Vatican II, Gaudiem et Spes
A couple of blocks from my home there is a Speedway station, a typical gas station/convenience store. We sometime gas up there, or stop for a quick gallon of milk when we are in a hurry.
There is a round friendly twenty-something guy who works the counter. He is quite chatty, and I am introverted and at first found his cheery attempts at conversation annoying. I realized a long time ago that my natural reticence is often misinterpreted as aloofness or even unfriendliness, so I try and pretend that I am a naturally friendly person. Thus I chat.
I learned that he is a manager, and that he is married with a kid.
The other day I was standing in line after pumping gas. He was talking with the guy ahead of me. I wasn’t paying attention until he said, in response to something, “Hey man, I make minimum wage. I can’t afford that.”
When I was at the counter I asked him “I thought you were the manager here. You only make minimum wage?”
“That’s right. Working for a gas company sucks. They say that they will give me a raise when they can afford it.”
“But Speedway is a huge corporation. Surely they can afford to pay you a decent wage.”
“Well, jobs are scarce. What can I do?”
Later I looked it up and discovered that Speedway is wholly owned by Marathon Petroleum,
and that it is the fourth largest convenience chain in the country. The CEO of Marathon made over $9 million in 2009, the most recent year I could find information about.
I write of this because I have been thinking a lot about the long and thought-provoking conversation that my post on phony distributism inspired. If you haven’t read it you really should. Not only was it that rare thing, an internet conversation that remained charitable and respectful, there was a good bit of work that went into the lengthy posts. The conversation was mostly between Red Owen ( ” the ochlophobist”) speaking for the radical left and Tom Storck and Christopher Zehnder for the distributist cause. Owen convincingly argued that it was anachronistic to equate leftism with statism, that nearly all of the contemporary left believes in direct democratic worker ownership and are deeply suspicious of bureaucracy and centralization. Of course I don’t think Owen ever granted that the stain of statism was earned on the left by the fact that the largest self-proclaimed attempts at socialism were statist and nightmarish ( I speak of the Soviet Union and Communist China) nor of the fact that most of the participants in the Russian Revolution were not fighting to establish the police state that evolved. Suspicion is not irrational.
Still, I think it was eye-opening to see that what the modern left envisions is not far from the distributist ideal, at least regarding economic organization. That leaves the huge area of sexual politics, abortion, and the other cultural and moral stands that the left, for the most part, endorses. I always thought that for a movement which claims to be trying to inspire a working class revolution to take such positions was stupid and politically suicidal. Do any of them actually have blue collar jobs? I do, and working class folks are for the most part moral conservatives and offended by the left’s embrace of what seems to them odious.
So the conversation eventually became a disagreement about what tactics were justified in establishing economic democracy. Owen, in keeping with his ideals, thought that workers were justified in seizing the property of the oppressive elite. The distributists, in keeping with the tradition of Catholic social teaching, balked at this.
And it is true that CST shies away from anything resembling class warfare, and is skeptical of rebellion of all sorts (though in extreme cases it does not condemn direct action, even revolution).
But is this a deal breaker? I think not.
Catholic moral teaching is never static. Gaudiem et Spes speaks of the Church’s “unfolding of the divine law” and one need not look far to see that moral teaching evolves, just as doctrinal teaching does. This is called “development of doctrine” and is evident whether one looks to social teaching or teaching on marriage and sexuality.
Can anyone envision how the Theology of the Body would have been received if it had appeared in the wake of Vatican I instead of Vatican II? The Church was slow to see the value of the unitive aspect of human sexuality, and in earlier times tended to see sexual pleasure as a sort of unfortunate necessity for procreation. St Augustine, the most influential of the Western Fathers, thought that sexual pleasure was always sinful, though in marriage it was only venially so. He was no longer a Manichean; he did not hold, as they did, that procreation was sinful. But he was still influenced by the negative sort of Platonism, which saw the world and matter as a shadowy illusory thing, an impediment to illumination, which was purely spiritual. Don’t get me wrong; I am a Platonist, too. But mine is the other Platonism, one that sees the created world as the icon of God, and matter participating sacramentally in the divine.
And turning to social morality, the Church has come far from the days when it used torture and declared preemptive war. And it was not long ago in historical terms when it condemned the concept of human rights and democracy.
And there are inherently radical notions in traditional Catholic social principles. Vatican II said, echoing St Thomas “If one is in extreme necessity, he has the right to procure for himself what he needs out of the riches of others.” Does it seem like such a leap, if an individual can do this, that the workers at an oppressive enterprise can refuse, together, to endure injustice?
We live in a world of extreme disparity, where in spite of increased productivity and corporate profits working class wages are stagnant or declining, and poverty is increasing. a handful live in luxury while most struggle to make ends meet. Globally, of course, the disparity is even starker. I have been chronicling the situation for some time here.
If revolution has ever been justified in the history of the world it is surely justified in a world where a manager at a gas station is laboring to support his family on minimum wage, while his overlord rakes in over $9 million a year.
As I have said before, I only hope that it will be nonviolent.
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The real problem comes from the distributist allergy to competition and to large scale anonymous cooperation. To take down a modern army that has force multipliers in excess for 43 to 1, you need 43 soldiers on your side to overwhelm a single soldier on their side.
Beyond any morality about how incredibly WRONG it is to use violence to enforce an unwanted economic system on large groups of people, I just don’t see a modern peasant uprising doing any good at all. Even the Occupy Protests have only succeeded in tearing down, not building up; and they haven’t even turned really violent (yet).
To Paraphrase Pope Leo XIII, the rich are VERY capable of defending themselves. They’re like Batman (a recent estimate claims that to duplicate all of Batman’s tools for real would cost $624 million- a fraction of the estimated $7 billion that the fictional Bruce Wayne would be worth)- except they use tax money to protect themselves (you can BET that the police, the army, the navy, the air force would NOT be on the side of the peasants).
Your comment about the Speedway manager was very illuminating. I wonder how many other managers of that type of outlet are likewise paid minimum wage.
Now as to the original thread on distributism, I never had any quarrel with Owen’s contention that “that it was anachronistic to equate leftism with statism, that nearly all of the contemporary left believes in direct democratic worker ownership and are deeply suspicious of bureaucracy and centralization.” In fact, I pointed out in my first comment that Pius XI had conceded the point back in 1931. My quarrel with Owen was mostly with his apparent insistance that the left are mostly pure and virtuous, and just in case anyone isn’t, they’re not really on the left. Owen seemed rather displeased – to say the least – with my last comment, but since I was having trouble at the time posting comments here, I let his remarks pass.
As to sexuality, by the way, St. Thomas Aquinas is very clear that what he calls the delight of marital sex, “delectatio in actu conjugali,” is neither mortal nor venial sin (ST I-II, q. 34, a 1, ad 1).
I was more snarky in that last comment than I now wish I had been. I was in the midst of the worst of a bout of strep throat that day. My apologies.
Pax, brother.
One of the interesting things in our local economy is that the 7-11 stores in Oklahoma City are owned by a local franchisee. Their starting wage is $11 and some change/hour, and after three months, they offer medical insurance and a retirement plan. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the franchisee is a Catholic. In Oklahoma City, with our cost of living, $11/hour goes a long way. He manages to make a profit paying higher wages, while at the same time not selling soft-porn magazines (Playboy and etc) and condoms. They do sell Coca-Cola though, so as the saying goes, “nobody’s perfect.” I like their free ATM, which is also free of any charge from my credit union.
Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you.
Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.
– The Epistle Of St. James 5: 1-7
Lord have mercy !
Like Tom, I don’t think the medieval view on pleasure in the marital act was universally quite so dim as St. Augustin’s. Jean Leclerq’s book, Monks on Marriage: A Twelfth-Century View, shows that the medieval view of marriage (even the marriage act) was far more positive than it is often portrayed. The Church, in fact, has always asserted the unitive aspect of the sexual act, which she has characterized as the material cause of marriage (the vows being the formal cause.)
As for class warfare — I don’t think in the conversation I had with Owen (and for which I thank him) that I denied either the reality of class warfare or the necessity that at times a class has to resist, as a class, the violence perpetrated against by another class. In such circumstances, a state of class warfare already exists on account of the injustice perpetrated by the one class against the other. I merely (with the Church, I think) asserted that it does not belong to the nature of classes that they be in conflict. I think there are times that men of a certain class have to resist an unjust situation forced upon them. But even in such a resistance, they may not treat their opponents as if they are not created in God’s image or as if they have no claims at all to a participation in the common good. The goal is to bring classes into harmony, to restore peace with justice, which is the goal of any struggle or war. (In laying out my position, here, I do not mean to characterize in any way what Owen said.)
I would say, too, that in certain circumstances, workers may seize the productive property of an oppressive capitalist. I would not, however, think this is the normal way of proceeding.
Finally, as an Aristotelian-Neo-Platonic Thomist (or one with leanings in that direction; Daniel, I think, would say I lean so far in that direction as to be supine), I would caution against the term “evolution” in describing development of doctrine. “Evolution” carries with the sense of a radical change, an alteration of something into another that it was not before. (Which is why, I think, Pius X rejects the term in Pascendi Dominici Gregis). Development, however, is an unfolding of what is implicit in the nature of a thing — like the growth of an oak tree from a seed. In the realm of ideas, it is a more precise explication.
I’ve just read the original “phony distributism” post, and found it very illuminating. Owen’s defense of the radical left is very eloquent, and there is certainly much in it with which I sympathize. I might almost be convinced, but I think that Christopher is right though to push the hierarchy of goods. Material possessions are not the highest good. The fact that medieval peasants were worse off materially than Soviet Communists doesn’t mean that they were worse off absolutely. It is easy to dismiss the teaching that suffering obediently under current conditions was better for the souls and lives of peasants than rising against landowners as rich oppressors telling their victims to be quiet, but that ignores the fact that many medieval aristocrats actually abandoned their riches in order to live a life of poverty. The early Cistercian Order recruited mostly from the aristocracy; the brothers who died of malnourishment and hardship in Citeaux had voluntarily chosen that life because they thought it better for their souls.
What I especially dislike about Marxism is that it is so egalitarian and anti-authoritarian (this is also why I prefer Austrian authoritarian corporatism to English distributism). The perfection of the universe consists in hierarchical order, and that necessarily involves subordination, submission, obedience (check out this sermon of Bl Card. Newman’s: http://www.newmanreader.org/works/occasions/sermon11.html). Small wonder in a universe built through the eternal Word, whose is obedience to His Father. Because of original sin dominion among men is wounded, but that doesn’t mean that there can be no just authority. Do those in power often abuse their authority to oppress the poor for their private advantage? Yes. But does that mean that any non-egalitarian, non-democratic authority cannot serve the common good. I think not. The superiors of my monastery, for instance, use their power for the good of the whole.
Owen suggests that the conflict between the Church and radical leftism is reducible to the Church’s implication in oppression, but I think that the conflict goes deeper. If you look at Marx’s very earliest work you can see that hatred of Divine Authority is a first principle for him. Look at this quote from his doctoral dissertation (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1841/dr-theses/foreword.htm):
Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world-subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus:
Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious.[19]
Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus:
In simple words, I hate the pack of gods
[Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound]
is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside.
But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes:
Be sure of this, I would not change my state
Of evil fortune for your servitude.
Better to be the servant of this rock
Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.
(Ibid.)
San,
Thanks for the comment.
“The fact that medieval peasants were worse off materially than Soviet Communists doesn’t mean that they were worse off absolutely.”
My position is that there is a certain baseline of material stability that must be met before much in the way of sustainable spirituality can be maintained within a community or within a demographic sector within a community. So we find a pious (inevitably folk and not orthodox) Catholic mother who was a peasant in Chile under Pinochet and who had to feed her baby cocoa leaves to serve as a narcotic which would hide the baby’s hunger pangs and we ask her – would you rather be magically transported to peasant life in rural France in 1205, living (in servitude as a peasant) on some monastery property, or would you rather be magically transported to Russia in 1974, or would you rather stay in RCC blessed Pinochet’s Chile, and, having informed the woman of all details of all her options, which is she going to choose? Yes, technology skews the analogy, but had the whites won in Russia, peasants there in 1974 might have been living no better than peasants in Chile. She would be beyond reproach, in my opinion, were she to decide to take her baby to Russia, and most who balk at this for spiritual reasons are living in the world of abstraction that a nice comfortable middle class life affords. And there is something to be said of the fact that, irregardless of technological differences, the Soviets in 1974 devoted more of their society’s resources to the welfare of all persons than monastics in France did for the peasants working on their lands in 1205 (not to single them out – the nobility did not either). So for all of the Soviet godlessness, they attended to basic human needs (as in, needs oriented toward continued breathing) better than their Christian competitors (if you will). Perhaps sometimes, when Christians refuse a task, God puts the rocks to work.
I’ve long considered it a problem in the history of Christian monasticism that it drew so heavily from the aristocratic ranks. I’ll admit that this problem is undoubtedly to do with my own prejudices, but it is a real problem for me with regard to reconciling Christianity with what I might call (as a shorthand) my (perhaps idiosyncratic) manner of belief in human dignity. There is within many of the reforming movements, whether the deserts of the 4th and 5th centuries, Cistercian, Franciscan, etc., certainly an initial motivation that seems to be related to some sort of recognition of the inherent injustice of the former life, but the response to this is something of a (forgive the gross generalization here) narcissistic spiritual sadism that does not correspond (more often than not anyway) with an actual confrontation of injustice. And the fruits seem to be borne quickly. It doesn’t take long after the initial years of the reform movement until you have a situation where wealthy vocations are found in Cistercian choirs, and poor vocations are out working the fields for them, with very pronounced class differences existing within the monastic structures. There is also a patronizing tone to so much hagiographic literature describing the embrace of poverty of the rich that I find revealing – the formerly rich man retains his or her aristocratic dignity and prestige by being honored as one who threw away his riches, as if being rich in the first place in order to be able to have the honor of throwing that wealth away is itself an honorable thing. The poverty embraces initially lives a comfortable life earned through exploitation and the brutality inflicted upon peasants, and then in embracing poverty is treated (sometimes in this life, sometimes after) as a hero figure, when more often than not the person in question did nothing to confront the powers that led to his prior comforts. His conversion to poverty is all about him and his salvation and is in this sense just a continuation of the sort of individualism only possible to the wealthy prior to modernity. It all leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Of course we can say that there was no consciousness socially nor any theoretical framework via which such a person could have confronted systemic injustice then, but that lack doesn’t detract from the ultimate apparent selfishness of the aristocrat who gets his willies and fame from rejecting wealth in a manner that does not attempt to bring justice to those he formerly exploited, or the chauvinism involved in praising him for doing something which only his prior state of unjust wealth allows him to do – it only points to the fact that such times and places were, shall we say, “backwards” and thus we might thank our lucky stars that we do not live in such social blindness.
Again, I am probably too hopeful here, but I can’t help but think that most modern Western persons, even conservative Christian ones, were they to read social histories which give detail to the treatment of workers/peasants in Europe prior to modernity (and here I’m talking about social historians such as ones I mention in the previous thread, and not romanticists like ChesterBelloc), and the ecclesial defenses of those conditions given at the time along with ecclesial admonishments that workers/peasants remain in their station, such readers would find themselves at least uncomfortable in trying to defend such things.
On finding Marx the antichrist, well, yes. And when he wrote his dissertation he was in his young hegelian fury wherein his rejection of God is quite fashionable in the manner typical of petit-bourgeois intellectuals. I would distinguish this from some of the more base and existential antichristness of most radicals by the time we get 20-30 years later than that dissertation. It remains unclear to me whether Marx’s later hatred of God is more informed by his encounters (albeit in his case largely intellectual) with human misery or whether it remains of the fashionable academic sort. With regard to the more “earthy” hatred of God, such as one sees in late 19th century anarcho-syndicalism, it might behoove a conservative Catholic to ask why it was 19th century radicals so hated Catholicism, and why this hatred was so immediately popular across such a considerable percentage of working class persons (such that the Church felt a very urgent need to respond to radicalism via every mechanism it had on hand), and whether or not that hatred was to some degree justified, or, at least, inevitable and largely the fault of an uberreactionary Catholic hierarchy. In any event, Marx is to most Marxism today what Darwin is to evolutionary theory. Astoundingly “in the right direction” in outline and in some details (ie commodity fetish), decidedly wrong in many details, and like most 19th century intellectuals, a bit of a whackjob. This doesn’t pertain to the quote you give here, but it might also be noted that Marx’s more stringent antichrist language came after the death of a young son of his whom Marx was quite attached to – it was after this that Marx’s antichristianity seems to become less intellectual and more visceral, and it is the latter I can identify with more than the former, which is of little interest to me.
Before discounting Marx on religion or in terms of his intellect, I would ask any concerned and literary minded person to read S.S. Prawer’s magisterial Karl Marx and World Literature ( http://www.amazon.com/Karl-World-Literature-Second-Edition/dp/1844677109/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344540191&sr=8-1&keywords=karl+marx+and+world+literature ) . Marx’s command of the bible and of theology was greater than many of his Christian critics may suspect. Not that this absolves him of anything. If Engels’ account of the relationship between Marx’s posthumous notebooks and Engels’ own whoppingly misguided (talk about betting on the worst possible historical scholarship – such that virtually every “proof” in the book has long since been refuted even by people who support his theses) work “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” is accurate – then Marx was as desperate as Engels to disprove anything and everything that has any foundational value for Christianity. I’m not so sure Engels’ account of all this is accurate, but even if it is, in terms of the value of Marxism, so what? Evolutionary theory is accurate, or not, regardless of whether or not Darwin was committed to destroying Christianity. I hold the same is true with regard to Marx and later Marxism (at least in broad brush terms of general outline). Some place great weight in the fact that later revolutionaries who crushed local Christianities did so in the name of Marx. I think Marx has little to do with it and more attention should be paid to the what those local Christianities were supporting in terms of social order and political faction prior to their destruction or mistreatment by revolutionary forces. Plenty of Marxists today support a freedom of religion, though I suppose that too might seen as a conditional support – I suppose dedication to religious freedom varies considerably amongst contemporary Marxists.
To the extent that divine authority is socially constructed to serve the interests of those earthly authorities that place their heels on the poor, then, well, we should reject such a god. That, in a nutshell, is the spirit of Marx and the radicals of his generation and several generations after him. I don’t think that spirit is entirely wrong. The god that blesses Franco and Pinochet, the god that blesses class distinctions, the god that ordains intransigent social chauvinisms, the god that demands man bow to an aristocrat or landlord or master — that god should be hated, or so it seems to me.
Owen, can you recommend an introduction to Marxist theory for the lay reader that is better than Marx’s writings? The few Marxists I know, and they are very well read, always insist I should just read Marx. But that just makes me think Marxism is more a religion than a science, if it really hasn’t progressed since the 1800’s or been better explained than by its great prophet.
Zeb, for starters:
Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital http://www.amazon.com/Companion-Marxs-Capital-David-Harvey/dp/1844673596/ref=pd_sim_b_3
Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right http://www.amazon.com/Why-Marx-Right-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0300181531/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1330201424&sr=8-4 Eagleton doesn’t do for me what he seems to do for others, but I’ve now encountered enough former conservatives for whom this book nudged them in some fashion to not discount its usefulness. Eagleton is perhaps the epitome of the Ivory Tower Marxist who has made a very comfortable life out of his Marxism, but the man does get some things right nonetheless.
Perhaps the best contemporary Trot overview is Paul D’Amato’s The Meaning of Marxism http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Horizon-Pocket-Communism/dp/1844679543/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344550004&sr=1-1&keywords=jodi+dean
Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon http://www.amazon.com/Communist-Horizon-Pocket-Communism/dp/1844679543/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344550004&sr=1-1&keywords=jodi+dean
is OK.
There are several decent essays in The Idea of Communism http://www.amazon.com/Idea-Communism-Vol-1/dp/1844674592/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344550639&sr=1-1
An excellent short (and cheap!) heterodox Marxist account of the current situation, especially with regard to transitions in the state of consumer fetishism and its discontents is – Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? http://www.amazon.com/Capitalist-Realism-there-alternative-Books/dp/1846943175/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330201768&sr=1-1
Fisher is a great example of contemporary Marxist thought getting away from 20th century orthodoxies.
I have also come to this ‘realization’ or epiphany if you will – many of my friends who are not at all inclined toward Marxist economic and political theory are often more ‘moved’ or nudged by historical accounts of worker’s history. If nothing else, solid social histories of the working classes will sometimes give a movement conservative some paucity and modest consideration of why Marxism had the appeal it did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The seminal work of such history (the work that in many respects created a genre and method of social analysis) is E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class http://www.amazon.com/Making-English-Working-Class/dp/0394703227/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330202014&sr=1-1 . While the period of time looked at may seem irrelevant now or pulled out of a hat, this work is indispensable if one is to come to some terms with Anglo Marxist thought. Thompson has his tangents, and they are delicious. Distributists may also be very interested in Thompson’s excellent first major work “William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary” http://www.amazon.com/William-Morris-Romantic-Revolutionary-Spectre/dp/1604862432/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344550591&sr=1-7
There are two other works that I always recommend because they help people from conservative backgrounds break free from some of the usual stereotypes of communists and socialists in American history. Both are well written and well researched.
Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin Kelley http://www.amazon.com/Hammer-Hoe-Communists-Depression-Morrison/dp/0807842885/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330202230&sr=1-1 In this book the reader will encounter African American Communist Party Club meetings begun with prayer, led by black clergymen. The New York HQ of CPUSA didn’t know what to do with them, but Kelley is adept at pointing out the diversity and quirks of American communists at that time.
And
Agrarian Socialism in America: Marx, Jefferson, and Jesus in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1904-1920 by Jim Bisset http://www.amazon.com/Agrarian-Socialism-America-Jefferson-Countryside/dp/0806134275/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330202280&sr=1-1 This is one of the best books on the radical populism of that period, and I think it an excellent precursor to What Happened To Kansas?? sorts of questions, as Bisset also does an excellent job dwelling upon the interplay between religion and radical politics in that place and time. What a thing that a century ago a Baptist living in a plains state was more likely to be a socialist than a political conservative or a believer in usual free market theories.
You can also watch the video series for Harvey if you would rather not read the book: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/
To the above I would add these videos by Richard Wolff:
http://rdwolff.com/content/marxian-class-analysis-theory-and-practice-online-course
http://rdwolff.com/content/marxian-economics-intensive-introduction
http://rdwolff.com/content/economic-crisis-and-globalization
And in the event you do want to venture into the easiest of primary Marxist texts, this is a good guide: http://www.amazon.com/The-Communist-Manifesto-Important-Political/dp/1931859256/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1342000907&sr=8-7&keywords=com
One of the best semi-popular Marxist thinkers in America today is Doug Henwood who does the Left Business Observer site. His analysis is typically excellent. Listen to his podcasts here: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/ and read his blog here: http://lbo-news.com/
Also, for some great and readable analysis of a libcom (libertarian communist or anti-authoritarian communist) thought the blog of Louis Proyect is excellent: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/
There are also many excellent anarcho-syndicalist and anarchist resources out there, the only one of which I will mention here is David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years ( http://www.amazon.com/Debt-The-First-000-Years/dp/1933633867/ref=la_B001IQXM5K_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344550553&sr=1-1 ), which, despite its flaws, should be required reading for folks interested in the issues Daniel discusses on this blog.
“And there is something to be said of the fact that, irregardless of technological differences, the Soviets in 1974 devoted more of their society’s resources to the welfare of all persons than monastics in France did for the peasants working on their lands in 1205 (not to single them out – the nobility did not either).”
An interesting claim. By what calculus was this determined? What variables were considered? Is the claim true only for France? Or only for some parts of France? What of Germany? England? Spain? Hungary? Italy?
Is this conclusion a fruit of your own studies? If not, upon what study or studies do you base it?
Thanks for your response, Owen. I am really torn here. On the one hand I certainly agree that it is a terrible injustice that the poor should starve while the rich live in plenty. Moreover, I find the arguments for “economic democracy” as the a way of ensuring that everyone receives a minimum of the necessities of life quite plausible (even though the very word “democracy” makes me almost physically ill). Certainly it is true that it is easy for me “in the world of abstraction that a nice comfortable middle class life affords” to say that medieval peasants have a better chance of getting to heaven than atheist industrial workers, and therefore live a better life, but that things might seem very different to me if I actually had to make the choice. Mother Theresa famously said that she thought the prosperous but hard hearted Westerners were “poorer” in a real sense than the materially poor Indians that she served, but I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone for preferring to be a bourgeois westerner rather than an Indian beggar.
Your disgust at those medieval aristocrats who chose to exchange there lives of plenty for lives of extreme poverty in monasteries (sometimes actually dying of starvation) is dependent on the thesis that being a aristocratic land-owner in pre-enclosure Europe is per definitionem exploitation of the peasants who work that land. But this is one of the questions that is being disputed here. Certainly many aristocrats did exploit their peasants, but what of those lords who really saw their lands as a responsibility to be used for the common good of their subjects? St Leopold of Austria springs to mind — he certainly “regarded the external things that he possessed not only as his own but also as common in the sense that they should benefit not only him but also others” — or even more clearly St Elisabeth of Hungary– I think a case can be made that they were not exploiting the poor, even though they controlled them economically.
It seems to me that human life reflects the divine plan most when it is structured as a hierarchical order, in which their is governance and obedience, rule and subordination. Heaven will be hierarchical, and I think earthly life should fit us for the courtesies of the life to come.
Is it possible to have a just hierarchical society, in which no-one starves to death, and exploitation and oppression are kept to a minimum? I don’t think that there is anything intrinsically impossible in it. I think it is in its attitude toward authority and obedience etc. that CST differs most radically from radical leftism. Leftism seems to declare all true in-equality and subordination unjust, and that seems to me to breath more the spirit of “I will not serve” than of “my food is to do the will of the one who sent me.”
I don’t think it at all surprising that a lot of contemporary leftism is anti-family. They hate every other authority, why not paternal authority?
So while at times it might be necessary to join forces with revolutionaries, take up arms and “gallop and harry and have them down,” it is not always so. Let’s try to keep in mind St Paul’s warning that the real enemies against which we contend are not earthly masters, who might exploit people’s labor, but the demons who are trying to take their souls:
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men,
knowing that whatever good any one does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free. Masters, do the same to them, and forbear threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him. Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Eph 6:5-12)
Christopher,
I can’t imagine anyone has ever done a comparative study of the percentage of resources expended upon public health, housing, education, etc. between Soviet and medieval social orders.
I am not a medievalist, but especially because of a former job which brought me into constant contact with medievalist academia I have perhaps more than just a cursory knowledge of the literature. I have tended to have more interest in literature which focused upon material and social aspects of medieval life, thus I am one of those people who enjoys reading Dom David Knowles’ recording of tax receipts in a British Benedictine monastery in 1050 or Sophia Senyk’s recording of the treatment of workers by Ukrainian monastics in the 17th century. I have never encountered any account of a medieval social order in which evidence was presented that suggested a medieval social order (either clerically ruled or aristocratically ruled) which came anything close to the Soviet one in terms of its commitment of available resources to providing material stability to the overall population. By the 1960s and early 70s in the Soviet Union you find comprehensive healthcare, education, housing, ag/food, and employment programs which achieved astounding successes in the aggregate. The Soviets deliberately structured their economy to provide healthcare, education, housing, substantial caloric intake, and employment for all of their population, and they largely succeeded in this. The enormous shift in social provision and care in the two generations between the Russian revolution and the early 70s cannot be overstated. Christian social ordos never attempted anything like this, and thus obviously never succeeded in anything like this. Indeed, until the mid 20th century Catholic and Orthodox Christian elite have pretty much unanimously fought against social ordos which are oriented toward a comprehensive provision of healthcare, housing, caloric intake, employment, and the like. One can and should fault the Soviets for many things, though at least in spite of those things they ultimately attempted and largely succeeded in a comprehensive social provision ordo which at least lifted peasants out of material misery. One might also keep in mind that Christian social ordos in early modernity, when given the chance, had their own penchant for genocide, mass murder, enslavement of groups and subgroups, and so forth, thus the “yes, but at what cost?” question directed at the Soviets misses the point that at very least they had the stated goal of providing base material security to all persons (and they ultimately acted upon this with some success). Any society which is not oriented toward that goal is worthless. No medieval society of any size was oriented toward that goal, even within the confines of their limited technological capabilities. We know by the late medieval period into early modernity, from phenomena such as peasant revolts (and the correspondent rhetoric) that there was at least a burgeoning (and before that likely a nascent) social consciousness that any king or hierarch or authority which does not view the provision of material stability for all citizens as a primary goal is a despicable leader who is best placed into a grave as soon as possible.
Owen et al,
I’m not sure how someone peddaling across France in the early 21st century could come to such sweeping conclusions about the Middle Ages. But, in any case, any serious Catholic student of history knows that there has always been widespread “superstition” among the peasant classes, as well as the noble classes. But to suggest that this constituted something like a very different religion from the official religion would require much more even the demonstration of the existence of such superstition. (I recall reading thatMartin Luther, for instance, even when he was a doctor of theology and still Catholic believed a lake in Saxony was enchanted by witchcraft.) Even among literate medieval Catholics, hermeticism and mystical studies of Kabbalah (hardly a staple of Catholic orthodoxy) were not uncommon — yet one would not thereby assume that the practitioners were not genuinely Catholic. I for one do not think belief in sacred stones or in tree spirits or Faerie is necessarily inconsistent with Catholic belief. Hell, St. Paul himself suggest that the gods of the nations were real, though demons. I know a literate, modern Catholic writer friend who sets out food for his deceased father on All Souls Day; a practice I have no problem with. That Catholics may have practiced some form of birth control would not be surprising, for medieval Catholics were not unknown to practice usury or to commit murder (to name just a few sins). That’s not to say, however, that it was widespread belief that such practices were legitimate.
As for the status of religious life, at least, just before the Reformation, I would suggest Joseph Lortz’s History of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, which gives a balanced, light-side, dark-side presentation of the period. And, yes, I know that Lortz joined the Nazi Party (though he quickly saw how foolish he was regarding Hitler and unsuccessfully tried to withdraw). He was also a Thomist and an Ultramontanist — so my recommendation is not necessarily for you, Owen, but for others who might be reading this.
Recalling, too, that Owen in the previous thread dismissed Johannes Janssen for being an Ultramontanist, I nevertheless recommend the reading of his History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, which one can find in toto at http://www.archive.org/stream/historyofgermanp00jansuoft/historyofgermanp00jansuoft_djvu.txt. I have also found it on Google Books. I think Janssen can help in the discernment of the material and social conditions of at least the Germanies at the end of the Middle Ages — and whether it makes sense to hold the 1970s Soviet Union as the standard by which we should measure medieval Christian efforts to realize the common good. I would suggest that doing so is to ignore not only differences in technology but other factors as well — such as the need for such efforts on the part of the elites.
Finally, I think its bad historical method to assume that peasant life in the 19th century was identical to peasant life in the 18th century, or either to peasant life in the early modern or medieval periods. It is important to remember that when we speak of these periods, we are speaking of roughly 1,500 years. Social conditions were hardly static. Adhesion to the Faith was hardly static and, no doubt, it differed from region to region.
One more point: when I, at least, speak of the richness of medieval culture, I do not refer simply to the cathedrals, the chansons de geste, romance literature, the theologians, or Gregorian Chant. I refer to the development of folk handicrafts, folk music, folk costume, of which there have been many rich examples that predated industrialism and leftist reforms. Our European peasant forefathers were just ignorant, semi-pagan grunts. They were not refined like, perhaps, moderns might want them to be, but modern urban culture is not the measure, I think, of all that is good.
San,
Thanks for your recent reply.
I am torn as well, as I usually don’t see any clear cut way to reconcile contemporary received Christianity with its own history (and here I speak with regard to the need for an acknowledgement of the intrinsic evil of certain social orders) or with what I believe to be basic obligations that I and others have toward other human beings. I don’t mean to sound trite, these issues present real dilemmas for me.
For efficiency’s sake, I will touch upon points in bullet fashion.
– When I worked at Loome Theological Booksellers years ago my boss, a Catholic theologian who was both a Catholic Worker sort but also a reader of First Things, gave me Christopher Hitchen’s book on Mother Theresa. My boss said it was simultaneously unfair in its treatment of the saint, and yet accurate in some of its criticisms. In typical Hitchens fashion the rhetoric was over the top and hyper acerbic, but if 10% of the data and historical info he provided was true I think Mother Theresa is certainly not a model I would turn to, nor the bastion of compassion we might think her as. But given Hitchen’s ability to so warp and contort data when he was writing in defense of the American war machine, I have to reason no trust him on Mother Theresa. Still, after that book I was left with a lot of questions about her life work.
– “is dependent on the thesis that being an aristocratic land-owner in pre-enclosure Europe is per definitionem exploitation of the peasants who work that land”. Yes, and if we can’t agree upon that I don’t know what we might agree on. Those rulers of those peasants choose the work the peasants did and the terms they did it under. They controlled rents, most land use distribution and decision making concerning the land that peasants worked and lived on, tax and/or required trading scheme structures, and so forth. In much of Europe the landlord had to provide permission for a peasant to marry, to move, and so forth. The landlord determined the extent to which the peasant was compensated for his/her labor (this largely through land use and other resource permissions given to the peasant, as well as percentages/portions of harvests and the like) without, in the vast majority of cases, anything like a negotiation process. Medieval peasants in the West were more slaves (in the pure sense of that word) than many, and perhaps most, of the slaves in the ancient Mediterranean world. They had to bow to their masters. They had to use deferential language toward them. They were usually treated and regarded as lesser humans than the elite or even subhuman. They had virtually no powers, individually or collectively, to make decisions regarding the administrative and organizational things that affected them. (consider this brief little essay — though couched in an Orthodox polemic against the West, it also decently and briefly summarizes the socio-politico-existential trauma of the peasantry in the Medieval West, though yes, some of his sources are dated – https://docs.google.com/file/d/1yT3wgQ8_sECLqtgNnaHdOenTJVPsRaRUbAEpy_OH0WvTQI4dJ5TYeUxiLTb2/edit?fb_source=message&pli=1# — the obvious problem from the Orthodox polemic point of view being that the class situation in Byzantium wasn’t the bees knees either)
-to be continued –
– cont’d-
So that brings us to St Leopold of Austria and St Elisabeth of Hungary. Within a system that is intrinsically evil, there is often a defensive paradigm which involves an emphasis upon the “better” or more ideal (which is usually argued to be more humane) examples of that system. So as Eugene Genovese (one of my favorite Marxists turned conservatives who can’t shake their Marxism) makes very clear in such works as
Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 and Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South the slaveholders defense of the institution of slavery often involved a criticism of “bad” slaveholding practices, and the support of “good” and ideal slaveholding practices. The problem here is that this all takes place within the context of chattel slavery. Even if we see that after the Civil War we see that defenders of slavery in the South are arguing that God allowed the South to lose the war because their version of slavery had not been “biblical” enough (slaves should have been able to own property, including other slaves, and allowed to marry, and allowed due process in some legal settings, and, at least in the minds of some of the Southern Divines, “good” and “responsible” slaves should have been given the opportunity to purchase their own freedom, etc.), there is still the idea that slavery as an institution is correct because it could be done correctly, and not something which is intrinsically evil (by slavery here I mean the idea that one human being can own another human being — in some versions of ancient slavery we see a social phenomenon that is more akin to indentured servitude in modernity).
My position is that the “good” slaveholders were the worst (certainly in terms of their social effect, but also because of the dubiousness of their albeit inferred project of presenting slavery as just and humane and intrinsically good if done correctly). Here, whilst noting that Zizek is a clown of the left and especially of Marxism and someone I often disagree with, I find this presentation by Zizek to be superb and directly on point with regard to what we are discussing here:
Insofar as St Leopold of Austria and St Elisabeth of Hungary justify the continuation of or a return to the social order they participated in, their social effect is evil. Does this mean that they lacked all virtue or that it would not have been better on a given day to have been a peasant under St. Leopold than a peasant under some other master? Of course not. It does mean that by providing a gloss of virtue to an otherwise intrinsically evil system they helped perpetuate that intrinsic evil, whether they intended so or not.
-cont’d again-
— It seems to me that human life reflects the divine plan most when it is structured as a hierarchical order, in which their is governance and obedience, rule and subordination. Heaven will be hierarchical, and I think earthly life should fit us for the courtesies of the life to come.
Is it possible to have a just hierarchical society, in which no-one starves to death, and exploitation and oppression are kept to a minimum? I don’t think that there is anything intrinsically impossible in it. I think it is in its attitude toward authority and obedience etc. that CST differs most radically from radical leftism. Leftism seems to declare all true in-equality and subordination unjust, and that seems to me to breath more the spirit of “I will not serve” than of “my food is to do the will of the one who sent me.”
I don’t think it at all surprising that a lot of contemporary leftism is anti-family. They hate every other authority, why not paternal authority?
I for the most part agree, and it is here that I find CST, shall we say, not evolved enough, or not sufficiently rejecting former social paradigms.
Here I would point to a work I linked to in the thread on the other post, Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. In this work, Robin notes that reactionary thought has been quite fluid in modernity. The common thread is the protection of privileges for an elite and distinct stratification in society. But who gets in the elite and how they get there may change, and as well the treatment and disparagement of their inferiors may vary.
It is my position that traditionalist Catholics who want to return to the authoritarian social norms of pre-modernity are, simply, (forgive the forthrightness here) crazy. For example, let’s go with matters pertaining to feminism. No one in their right mind would want their daughter (I happen to have 3 daughters) to grow up in such a social order. Women in pre-modernity were virtually never able to own property. They were virtually never able to testify in court. They were virtually never able to sue for divorce, even in the most egregious of circumstances. Men then, by today’s standard in the West, routinely beat their wives, and there is every indication that marital rape was not at all uncommon; certainly women were very rarely in a position to deny sex to their husbands without fear of serious consequence. Social norms dictated, at least in public spheres, a reverence for their husbands that mimicked the required public reverence of servant for master. Women were virtually always prohibited from inheriting property (obviously, considering they couldn’t own it except in very rare anomalies), or in the case of the peasantry, inheriting land usage allotments. Women from the middle and upper classes were almost always denied formal education opportunities. And so on and so forth. What sort of madman wants his daughter to be subject to her husband and other social authorities in the manner typical of a medieval woman?
We shouldn’t just pick on the medieval period. Even when the fathers of the Church were trying to protect women they often did so in a manner we would not want to follow today. Consider Augustine’s argument that it would be better for a man to use a prostitute to release his sexual urges than to practice coitus interruptus with his wife, as deliberate “spilling” in marriage defiles the wife in a manner more grave than infidelity on the part of the husband does (see the last section of this charming essay: http://mybyzantine.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/brothels-baths-and-babes-prostitution-in-the-byzantine-holy-land/ ). I don’t think many traditionalist Catholic wives today would prefer their husbands go get a hooker rather than commit coitus interruptus in the marital bed in order that the dignity of the marriage as formerly idealized be maintained.
So, given that a return to former paternal authority structures the question becomes where should the contemporary earthly hierarchies be found, and how should they be structured? And it should be noted when thinking about this question that complex and varied social and political phenomena has nudged current debate over hierarchies in society.
-to be cont’d-
– cont’d –
It seems to me that when considering the left’s particular anti-authoritarian projects, we need to keep in mind the history of prior authoritarianisms. We need to consider how what was often a rather modest and coherent fight against what we now (nearly all of us anyway, even amongst conservatives) consider injustice was met with all sort of feverish and outlandish reaction.
For instance, in the last year I’ve been reading a lot about Margaret Sanger, and I have found that most pro-life dogmas I had learned about Sanger back in my youthful pro-life days were either overstated or outright falsehoods (ie, How many devout pro-lifers know that American eugenicists couldn’t stand Sanger, and that Sanger’s few public appearances with eugenicists involved her debating them? Yes, she did take money from one of their organizations). During this study of mine I learned, for example, that Sanger had been anti-abortion for nearly all of her life, and that Planned Parenthood came over to a pro-abortion position (after Sanger’s death) because, in significant part, of the heatedness of political battles in prior years, in which the insane overreaction on the part of conservatives, including those elements of the RCC hierarchy/clergy in America that engaged Sanger, left Planned Parenthood leadership with the quite understandable posture that those people must be wrong about pretty much everything. How many devout pro-lifers in America today know that Sanger’s political opponents had, via lobbying efforts, laws passed which made it illegal for doctors to even discuss, yes, to mention, birth control (and by that I mean condoms and other non chemical devices) with their married female patients?!?! Quite the contrast from Pope BenXVI noting that the use of condoms when AIDS is present “can nevertheless be first step on the way to another, more humane sexuality” – had he said that to a woman in a 1920s American doctors office he might of been hauled off to jail thanks to the efforts of fundamentalist Prot and RC anti-contraception crusaders. How many know that Sanger’s opponents, via successful lobbying efforts, passed a federal law making it illegal for anyone to share information about contraceptives via post, and indeed women were put in jail when their mail was read and they had shared information concerning contraceptives in it – one woman was briefly put in jail for mentioning contraception in a letter to her adult married sister!?!? When you are dealing with people who are living out that sort of fever swamp conservatism (to borrow a phrase from Buckley), you are naturally going to think, “these people are completely nuts” and be inclined to dismiss anything they have to say. Such polarization plays a substantial role in the various rejection of particular authorities by the left. Is the left guilty of the same sort of thing? Sure. But insofar as a Christian happens to be a traditionalist or conservative, it might behoove him to understand the motivations of the left, and the role that reactionaries played in pressing the left toward ideological extremes.
Consider the role the churches played (and here I would include the RCC, mainline Prot, and Orthodox) in fighting against workers rights from, say, the first time the red flag was raised in a workers struggle (the Merthyr Rising of June 3, 1831 in South Wales) until, say, the 1880-90s when the RCC and other established Christian churches began to realize that they had to backtrack if they were to have any hope in keeping a large portion of the working classes from becoming militantly anti-Christian. In many cases workers were asking for things far far less than what we take for granted today. It’s easy to focus on the communards and other radicals of the second half of the 19th century and note their anti-authoritarian anti-Church views as if they came out of a vacuum and were occasioned only because of their sinful rejection of heavenly and divinely ordained earthly hierarchies. But, to use Chesterton’s phrase, we might say that such things as the social reign of Christ the King and Catholic integralism (or, rather, the sort of society integralists wanted to return to) had been tried and found wanting, and that the response of Christian elites to attempts at forming new paths toward different and better (for most persons, at least materially, shall we say) social orders was met with such hostility by Christians (including Catholic elite, which includes Catholic hierarchs) that it became natural and essentially inevitable that radical leftists would strongly divert from Christian authoritarian paradigms. I view this as the dominant tragedy of modernity.
– to be cont’d –
– cont’d-
I was going to write something about St. Paul and his text, but I have run out of time, and spent far to many words here already. In a nutshell, I vacillate between reading Paul as an often seemingly contradictory and/or paradoxical rhetor whose work should generally not be read literally and reading Paul as someone who often got things drastically wrong. In my more “good Christian” days I attempt the hermeneutical gymnastics (ie what is meant by slavery, what is demanded in his concept of obedience, etc.). But I suspect most of us have been down those paths many times before and it opens up a whole new arena of argument which I don’t know that we want to tread.
Somehow, orthodox Catholicism must find a way to distance itself from the dehumanizing demands of pre-modern and early modern manners of obedience, and yet still maintain some coherent cosmology and political theology which conveys hierarchy and the need for obedience. How this is to be done, I do not know. I am convinced a return to former social orders, or even a romanticism about them, is the wrong way to go.
And for the record, I have yet to meet a leftist intellectual of any sort who believes that red lights and stop signs are an unjust imputation of hierarchy and a violation of human freedom (though I suppose there is such a wacko out there somewhere, probably among the anarcho-greens). The anarchists I know teach that workers will, if they choose to remain in a workers collective, have to agree to obey the decisions of the collective (at least some of them anyway), and so forth. The difference is that, in theory anyway, the leaders of that collective (say managers of a collective run factory) came from amongst the workers, do not have an authority granted by supposed divine right or by birth or by some other elite convention, and are held accountable by workers, and are not rewarded such that workers suffer in order to maintain the vastly disproportionate wealth of an elite.
Thank you for your thoughts San, I apologize that my response is so abysmally long. It is a rare forum wherein I can discuss these issues with thoughtful Christians who care as you do for coming to terms with traditional Christian thought and the needs of working person.
Thanks Owen. I’m not sure where to start, but I can book mark this and keep coming back to the list. I think at this point what I am most interested in is a philosophical and theoretical explanation and defense of Marxism that takes into account 100 years of practical experience and academic criticism. As I understand it Marx intended for his theory to be scientific, and when we learn science we don’t read Darwin or Newton. We start with an introductory text book written with the last five years. It sounds like the Harvey and Eagleton might best meet that need?
Daniel writes in the post: “That leaves the huge area of sexual politics, abortion, and the other cultural and moral stands that the left, for the most part, endorses. I always thought that for a movement which claims to be trying to inspire a working class revolution to take such positions was stupid and politically suicidal.”
For the record I am sympathetic to this line of thought. The famous Marxist David Harvey is fond of saying that there is nothing the capitalists love more than when political discourse, polity, and activism is largely tied up with a center left and a center right arguing with each other over identity politics. This ensures that capitalism is never confronted.
I would add that most identity politics structures are now completely interweaved with capitalist structures. Thus we can speak of both pro-life and pro-choice ideologies, but we can also speak of pro-life and pro-choice industries. On the pro-life side you have a plethora of think tanks, lobbying orgs, and non-profits which employ staffs, sell videos, dvds, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and the like, to the tune of millions upon millions of $$ a year when it is all added up, in addition to the industry that is their fundraising. That the pro-choice side is an industry goes without saying – from flavored condoms in Planned Parenthood to fetus brains being sold to the highest bidder. At the end of the day, both sides spend a great deal of time and energy bringing in money and the person without ideological blinders on might very well ask if money and the accoutrements of mass consumption have not become a driving factor, if not the driving factor, of some of these efforts on both pro-life and pro-choice sides. As someone who was once active in the pro-life movement back in Operation Rescue days, I have certainly known folks who made careers out of pro-life work, and who spent a lot of time focused on both the finances and the consumer trinkets of the movement. Ever noticed how many pro-life consumer trinkets are around at the March for Life? I haven’t been in many years but I’ve heard it gets worse each year.
Look at the recent Chick-fil-A scandal. After the inane boycott by the left was announced we saw the Chick-fil-A appreciation day. It was mentioned in church pulpits across the country, and on K-Love, and on Dobson. In my local paper they had an article on a Contemporary Christian music band playing at a local Chick fil A that day, and they noted the many local church youth groups going there to eat that day. This is more overt an instance of the phenomena than often seen, so perhaps we should highlight it – here we have Christians purporting to express their moral convictions, and to make an overtly political act, by way of individual consumer choice at a fast food restaurant. As a [libertarian, as it so happens] friend of mine said in response to this, “identity via consumption has become the only identity.”
Think about it. Convert to Catholicism or Orthodoxy today and what will be the primary indicator of it? Your purchases and your entertainment choices. Prayer books, rosaries or prayer ropes, icons, t shirts, music, subscriptions, EWTN, AFR, etc. — most will form and cultivate their new religious identity primarily through consumer acts. Yes, they will go to services and make correligionist friends, but their primary means of appropriating the new faith and owning it will be through these consumer choices. This is how they will feel themselves to be Catholic or Orthodox, to come to existential terms with it, to know themselves to really be Catholic or Orthodox. In such a world, it makes perfect sense that buying a sandwich on Chick fil A appreciation day is intuited and asserted to be a significant moral act guided by Christian faith.
Then the mainstream left responds, in its usual head to table inducing stupidity, with an appreciation day for Starbucks, a company that is supportive of marriage equality laws. See http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-chickfila-starbucks-gay-20120806,0,2945774.story . Daniel has seen my response to this phenomenon, but I will repeat it here in a less foul language version:
What banality, and what tactical stupidity (Starbucks isn’t going to see anywhere near the windfall from this effort that Chick-fil-A got on its appreciation day). If ever there were an instance that epitomized the new leftist phenomena of identity politics trumping class politics… Yeah, “appreciate” a rabidly anti-union company that once denied firefighters at the World Trade Center “ground zero” drinking water and then spent millions proclaiming that they were reversing those charges of a few thousand dollars? The company that sued Samantha Buck for naming her coffee shop Sambucks? The company that sued a monastery that sells coffee for using the name “Christmas Blend” for a brand of coffee? The company that purchases vast amounts of coffee from suppliers who have repeatedly been shown to make use of slaves (in the precise and not exaggerated use of that term)? But hey – they don’t care where their trendy middle class customers stick their [male sexual organs] so it’s all good.
Those who boycott fundamentalist chicken outlets, those who flock to appreciate them, those who appreciate Starbucks, all of them are playing right into the mechanisms of commodity fetishing. There is nothing more petit-bourgeois than [whining] about greasy Dobsonista chicken and then heading off to Starbucks whilst moralistically patting yourself on the back for being a trendy liberal who, like, I mean, OMG, like, really cares about people, as is proven by getting teary eyed during the last Glee episode. [#@&!] middle class liberals, they’re worthless.
——–
In my mind, you cannot divorce things like homosexuality as lifestyle, or pansexuality as entertainment (and its attendant abortion culture) from capitalism and the commodification of identity. But one has to be careful there – because the converse ends up also being true. If you don’t like abortion in a capitalist context, and you decide to confront abortion using capitalist terms and mechanisms (which every pro-life org of size does, whether they intend to or not, and whether knowingly or not), you only end up confirming the “identity via consumption has become the only identity” reality, which ends up serving the causal structures which have borne the fruit you so despise.
I’m kind of coming late to this conversation but regarding this comment by Mr. White, wow, it took my breath away. Would you please come and preach a mission at my parish?
Oh, I’m also confused about you have been saying Bl. John Paul II and Pinochet, Owen. A Chilean friend of mine has told me that John Paul actively tried to undermine Pinochet, and that his 1987 visit to Chile was the beginning of the end of the regime — is he just totally wrong?
In the thread above thread by “RCC blessing Pinochet” I primarily meant the local hierarchy – though they were certainly in keeping with the Vatican’s overall take and with the expanding power of Opus Dei among Catholic elite in Latin America. Despite George Weigel’s perhaps overly hopeful telling of the story of JPII pressing Pinochet to retire, there is certainly truth to it. By that time many of Pinochet’s right wing supporters in the West had either abandoned him or distanced themselves from him. Documentation of the death squads was by then well established and Pinochet had become a liability to the world conservative movement. Those who continued to support Pinochet in the late 80s were something like Marxists who continued to espouse Stalinism after Khrushcev’s “Secret Speech.” But that said, just because there was the impression of pressure given doesn’t mean that there was not behind the scenes support: http://www.remember-chile.org.uk/comment/vatican.htm .
Perhaps the best work dealing with JPII in Latin America is Rubén Dri’s La hegemonía de los cruzados: La Iglesia Católica y la dictadura militar. (The hegemony of the Crusaders: The Catholic Church and the Military Dictatorship) Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2011 It is not yet in English.
In the course of this discussion I have suggested multiple times the ridiculous and fantastical notion (as if we can choose these things and defy time and space) that a person of non-elite, non petit-bourgeois background would be better off in Russia of the 1970s than in medieval Europe. It has been suggested to me that spiritual things matter more, ultimately, than material things. I have suggested that folks consider reading more social history.
In recent months I had occasion to view a conservative encounter, seemingly accidentally, some social history that had some effect on his conceptions of the relationship of common humanity to Christianity. Yes, Rod Dreher is insufferable most of the time, but he does wear his mind on his sleeve, and this provides something to reflect upon sometimes. So, for intance, this from a blog post he made in March:
Here’s what I’m talking about. I’m reading a great book now, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography From the Revolution to the First World War. Its author, historian Graham Robb, pedaled his bicycle around the country for four years, researching this book. His argument is that our idea of France — France’s idea of France — is a fairly recent fiction concocted by Parisians, and intellectual and cultural elites who saw the entire country through a Parisian, nationalistic lens. The wild linguistic and cultural variety of France was simply not seen as important, if it was seen at all, by the modernizers. Robb is fantastic talking about la France profonde – the France that existed off the grid, in which most French people lived until basically the day before yesterday, but which wasn’t thought of as important because all eyes were on Paris. He writes about everyday life for these people in the 18th and 19th centuries, and how staggeringly difficult it was.
For me, the biggest revelation — and the one most challenging to my idea about the past — is Robb’s discussion of religion. I don’t suppose it should surprise me, but it’s made me reflect on how my idea about Christianity in the European past is distorted by the same intellectual habits, or forces, that Robb identifies as suppressing (intentionally or not) the true wild nature of life as it was actually lived in France back then. Put simply, I wrongly confuse the history of (theological) ideas with the history of the culture. Robb points out in his narrative that the Christianity these country people — Catholics, mostly — practiced was in many ways very different from the official, formal Christianity taught by the Church. In general, it was far more paganized than people today realize, paganized to a degree that would give traddie types like me conniptions if it were to be found in parishes today. For example:
“The great cathedrals of France and their numberless flock of parish churches might appear to represent a more powerful common bond. Almost 98 percent of the population was Catholic. In fact, religious practice varied wildly. … Heavenly beings were no more cosmopolitan than their worshippers. The graven saint or Virgin Mary of one village was not considered to be the same as the saint or the Virgin down the road. Beliefs and practices centred on prehistoric stones and magic wells bore only the faintest resemblance to Christianity. The local priest might be useful as a literate man, but as a religious authority he had to prove his worth in competition with healers, fortune-tellers, exorcists and people who would apparently change the weather and resuscitate dead children. Morality and religious feeling were independent of Church dogma. The fact that the Church retained the right to impose taxes until the Revolution was of far greater significance to most people than its ineffectual ban on birth control.”
There are plenty of detailed accounts subsequent to this, but I’m too lazy to type any of them in. Robb doesn’t appear to have any axes to grind against the Church. He appears simply to be trying to determine what the lives of ordinary people were really like — the kind of people whose experiences haven’t been thought of as historically significant by the kind of people who write histories.
Reading this book makes me question what I thought I knew about the past of my own religion. It’s made me aware that I have this idea that the past — the Christian past — is a lot neater and cleaner than it actually was. I tend to think of this period in Christian history as a golden age of faith. Everybody believed in God. Everybody went to Mass. Religious orthodoxy was pretty much a settled matter (except for that unpleasantness with the Protestants, of course). Etcetera.
Reading in Robb about how actual religious and parish life was in 18th and 19th century France, outside of the cities — and the overwhelming majority of the French lived outside the cities — makes me wonder if we really are any worse off today, in terms of heterodoxy and heteropraxy, than Christians of earlier ages. This ties back to the question about religion and fertility in that it makes me wonder if our religious ideas and practices aren’t more driven by material and cultural realities than material and cultural realities are driven by religious ideas. To be sure, I don’t think it’s an “either/or” causal path. It’s an ebbing and flowing dialectic. Still, the Robb book, aside from being wonderful on its own, is challenging the settled ways I had of thinking about our Christian past, especially in relation to the post-Christian present.
UPDATE: I’ll give you another example from the book. It’s shocking and heartbreaking to read about how the children of the poor lived, and died, in France of this era. I’m not talking about children taken by disease. I’m talking about children who lived in a time and among people who didn’t have enough to eat. Robb talks about “angelmakers,” village women whose job it was to kill newborns whose parents didn’t want them or couldn’t afford them:
In 1869, over 7 percent of births in France were illegitimate, and one-third of those children were abandoned. Each year, fifty thousand human beings started life in France without a parent. Many were sent to enterprising women known as “angel-makers” who performed what can most kindly be described as postnatal abortions. A report on the hospice at Rennes defined them as “women who have no milk and who — doubtless for a fee — feloniously take care of several children at the same time. The children perish almost immediately.”
Before 1779, the nuns who ran the foundling hospital in Paris were obliged by law to take the infant overflow from the provinces. This emergency regulation produced one of the strangest sights on the main roads of France. Long-distance donkeys carrying panniers stuffed with babies came to the capital from as far away as Brittany, Lorraine and the Auvergne. The carters set out on their 250-mile journeys with four or five babies to a basket, but in towns and villages along the route they struck deals with midwives and parents. For a small fee, they would push in a few extra babies. To make the load more tractable and easier on the ears, the babies were given wine instaed of milk. Those that died were dumped at the roadside like rotten apples. In Paris, the carters were paid by the head and evidently delievered enough to make it worth their while. But for every ten living babies that reached the capital, only one survived more than three days.
These tiny, drunken creatures made epic journeys that dwarfed the journeys of most adults. …
I never imagined that there was a time when abortion didn’t exist. What I honestly hadn’t imagined was this sort of thing. It’s hard to take in. But it’s part of why I love reading history: it helps me understand my own time, and my judgments of it, better.
The above can be found here: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/religion-and-fertility/
Now, Robb wrote a relatively popular history and Dreher isn’t the brightest bulb ever to light the tree, but in my experience this is the sort of epiphany many conservative friends of mine have had when I finally convince them to read a decent work of labor history or radical history or social history dealing with the lives of common folk. Such works tend to ameliorate romantic notions of Church, elite, and commoners interacting with each other in a manner reminiscent of a Hobbit shire prior to modernity or prior to late modernity or prior to the full industrial statist effects of modernity.
One thing I have found is that many conservative defenders of an intergralist or some other Christian conservative or third way social ordo tend to intuit or take for granted that in the past common folk maintained and lived orthodox Christian lives (whether orthodox Prot, RC, or Easten Orthodox). But there is simply no indication that such was true in any society prior to modernity (or after), or in early to mid modernity (such as the rural France of the 17th and 18th centuries which Robb describes). Thus the intuition that a common person would be spiritually better off in a typical medieval peasant situation as opposed to the typical situation of a regular worker in 1970s U.S.S.R. is one I can’t accept. Having recently read here the assertion that church attendance in Poland was higher during communism than it is today, I would think, if that is true, that there was almost certainly a higher percentage of orthodox Catholics in Poland in 1974 than there were in Poland during any medieval period. As you readers of Josef Pieper ought to know well, culture requires leisure, and leisure requires material stability. Sure, medieval periods show us “great” culture, but the vast majority of persons living in those cultures were not engaged in them in the manner we so often assume. Orthodox forms of Christianity (again whether Prot, RC, or Eastern Orthodox) have been predominately a middle and upper class phenomenon in part because of the leisure they require to maintain in any culturally sustainable fashion. You don’t see large numbers of, say, orthodox Roman Catholics who are working class until after industrialism made agrarian work less time consuming and radicalism made urban life such that workers didn’t work more than 60 or so hours a week. Orthodox Catholic pieties with their weekly obligations and their relative dependence upon literacy require a fair amount of time and material stability. It might well be noted that orthodox Christianities are again becoming a very middle class (and up on the chain) phenomenon in America, just at the time when lower middle class and working class persons are working considerably more hours than before to maintain material stability in light of gross wage stagnation. I don’t mean to suggest that time and material stability are the only causal factors, but they are very important ones when considering the potential of working class to be orthodox Christians.
I wonder if we added the United States or West Germany or France to the Peruvian woman’s choices, which she would have chosen? I hold no brief for these regimes, but they certainly should be thrown into the mix.
A further point about this, by way of illustration. A couple from Hungary are friends of our family. The husband, Zoltan, participated in the 1956 uprising in Hungary. In 1960, he and his wife escaped Hungary and settled for a brief time in Vienna, but then they emigrated to the United States. Today, Zoltan is disgusted with the U.S.’s social provision for the elderly; but, he does not favor the system under which he lived in Hungary. What he says he wishes he had done was gone to Germany, because of the pension benefits he would receive there.
You’ve said quite a bit here that I agree with, Owen, even though I lean decidedly right (insert standard disclaimer about terminology etc.). I liked this: “…romantic notions of Church, elite, and commoners interacting with each other in a manner reminiscent of a Hobbit shire prior to modernity or prior to late modernity or prior to the full industrial statist effects of modernity.”
I have to some extent made my peace with modernity, horrid though many aspects of it are–at least to the extent of not feeling that it is such a terrible falling-away from the ages of putative faith. Perhaps it’s just a naturally dark view of things, but although there is much to love and admire about the MIddle Ages and pre-modernity in general I have never been able to share the rosy romanticism about both that is a frequently-found feature of orthodox/traditionalist/what-you-will Catholicism. I’m only mildly surprised by the stuff you quote from Dreher above. I didn’t think it was quite that bad, but I didn’t think it was very good, either. Growing up in the rural south also made me somewhat unromantic about country life, too, though I still consider it basically healthy in many ways, healthier than urban poverty.
I like this, too: “Somehow, orthodox Catholicism must find a way to distance itself from the dehumanizing demands of pre-modern and early modern manners of obedience, and yet still maintain some coherent cosmology and political theology which conveys hierarchy and the need for obedience. How this is to be done, I do not know. I am convinced a return to former social orders, or even a romanticism about them, is the wrong way to go.”
I agree, though I don’t know how to proceed, either. In any case the former social orders are not coming back anytime soon, absent some truly impressive catastrophe. Cf. A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Working overtime, so I can’t participate in this too much; another great and thought-provoking conversation…
I would like to challenge Owen’s contention that the peasant classes had no leisure time. While Owen is much better read than I on social conditions in the Middle Ages, it occurs to me that there is evidence that the peasantry had plenty of time on their hands. For one thing there is the ryhthm of rural life: yes, you worked very hard, sunrise to sunset, during the growing season. After the harvest, though, life is different. Feeding the animals, fetching wood, etc, leave a lot of leisure time. For one thing, we have the evidence in elaborately embroidered clothes, in lacework, in any number of time-consuming crafts.
Further, work was forbidden on feast days, of which there were many more than the contemporary religious calendar.
I have long ago discarded my early tendency to romanticize the Middle Ages, but I think it wrong to take the other extreme as well.
I do not have the patience to reply to all or even most of the points which Owen makes in his (as it seems to me) extraordinarily long posts. But there is one point which I do want to challenge, since it seems to be simply assumed by him, and (I think) not addressed by anyone else. This is Owen’s assumption that there is something bad about folk Catholicism. Although I think there is hardly a scholarly consensus about the state of knowlege of the average peasant Catholic in the Middle Ages (cf. Eamon Duffy’s work) even if what can be reasonably called folk Catholicism was the norm, why is that so bad? People assimilate ideas at different levels, as Plato pointed out in a very significant passage in the Republic (476b-d). Why is it so bad if our ancestors did not have an entirely correct or comprehsneive grasp on the Faith. This mode of looking down one’s nose at peasant Catholicism is common among bourgeois thinkers, of course. Interestingly, James Hitchcock, in his The Recovery of the Sacred presents a defense of such folk religion. It is, I think, a shallow psychological view of religion to regard it as nearly meaningless unless it conforms to a 19th-century understanding of catechetical knowledge. “The leisurely, wise Old World Church had created a better system of popular education – the liturgy. In this marvelous, symmetrical blending of dogma and mystical insight, of sacrifice and prayer,charity and intelligence, there is fullyexpressed a faith which when reduced to intellectual outlines however correct always seems a little bleak and acrid.” George Shuster, The Catholic Spirit in America, 1927.
I’ll answer Christopher, Daniel, and Thomas together for efficiency’s sake.
I did not mean to suggest that there is not variance across Western medieval times and locales. But in any given arena of social and material life during that period there is a spectrum of variance that has parameters from which one can generalize. Back in the 90s I attended several of the Medieval Congresses in Kalamazoo (each year they have the largest academic medieval studies conference in the world, a week long with around 1,000 papers given). As I was not into the critical theory that was so popular in the 90s (I really didn’t care for arguments that Charlemagne may have been bisexual) , I tended to go hear papers read on social history. It is amazing what can be learned from the data. A physical anthropologist can look at a given site, and determine from skeletal remains the caloric intake of the population. They can determine, from both the skeletal remains and the work implements found, a tight approximation of how much time was needed to produce certain caloric values, and what sort of work was involved. They can determine the actual caloric values produced via written records of land allotment and rent norms in the area (how much agricultural production the peasant owed the landlord, etc.) and add to that the caloric intake the skeletal remains showed the peasant consumed for himself. From all of this a remarkably clear picture can be painted of the work life of a given medieval peasant in a given locale in terms of how many hours he worked, what sort of work he did, and variances due to seasons and social interruptions (war, disease, etc.). Attend enough of these lectures, and yes, you will note variances between given locales, but you will be more struck by the similarities. In some arenas of social history the parameters are quite tight. For instance, with regard to infant mortality, many social historians focusing on public health have noted how consistent infant mortality rates are across Europe for over a thousand years, certain hiccups due to plague and other abnormal situations notwithstanding. Sure, there are anomalies, and I’d bet one can find someplace in Europe in the 12th century where infant mortality was down to 25% for a generation. But such would rightly be seen by any expect as an outlier, and not data which is representative of typical medieval experience (and an outlier caused by extraordinary and unintentional factors at that). What I write above concerning medieval life is with normative parameters in consideration. When you take a social phenomenon like the treatment of women, you will find variances in that treatment across time and place in medieval Europe, but the spectrum of those variances will reveal a much tighter parameter than comparing any medieval social order’s treatment of women with the treatment of women in any modern western liberal society. I extend that logic to social protections for the poor and working classes in the analogy I use above. That is all. This is not to assert or infer some sort of stark homogeneity in medieval peasant life.
I’m inclined to think that to view peasant owned fine needlework as indicative of leisure is akin to those contemporary conservatives who assert that America’s poor are not really poor because they own microwaves. First, the vast majority of medieval peasants would have owned no attire which involved fine needlework. I think that generalized assertion a quite safe one. Second, if they did own it, it would have involved one or two items of fine needework. What I stated above was that peasants did not have the leisure to maintain an orthodox Catholic piety and life in a manner that was culturally sustainable. An orthodox Catholic piety requires at least a considerable amount of literacy in the culture or subculture and medieval peasants had nowhere near the amount of time required to achieve that (even had they been allowed). It was not until reduced work weeks (for reasons described above) came into being in modernity that we see large numbers of working class Catholic becoming orthodox in their piety and beliefs.
Which brings me to my last point. I have said nothing here which denigrates folk Catholicism. I for one have a higher regard for folk Catholicism than I do orthodox Catholicism, so I would never assert or infer such a thing. I have said that peasants didn’t have the time to be orthodox Catholics in a culturally sustainable manner (as a reader of Duffy’s work, himself a heterodox Catholic who lauds the mix of heterodox and orthodox Catholicisms prior to modernity over the triumph and totalism of orthodox Catholicism advocated today, I don’t think my assertion here is refuted by Duffy). That medieval folk Catholicism very often included necromancy, astrology, supernatural forms of cursing (the evil eye) and blessing, witchcraft, and the like is not a matter of serious dispute. That medieval peasants were more often than not ignorant of basic Catholic tenants is not a matter of serious dispute. That they very infrequently received communion is not a matter of dispute. That hierarchs were constantly battling folk Catholic practices and generally viewed the peasants and their religiosity in a very negative manner is not a matter of serious dispute. I wonder if any other readers here recall when Arturo Vasquez was still writing about folk Catholicism on his blog (back when he was still also writing for conservative Catholic websites) and noting all these details of medieval through modern folk Catholic life and ritual and horrifying his conservative Catholic readership when they encountered this data. It was a sight and site to behold. There is little more Hobbit-shirely romantic and more middle-class-American-conservative-Christian-living-in-his-own-imaginary-renaissance-fair than believing that the faith of a typical medieval Catholic peasant is of the same species of faith as the middle class American orthodox Catholic. They are two entirely different sets of human phenomena.
“I’m inclined to think that to view peasant owned fine needlework as indicative of leisure is akin to those contemporary conservatives who assert that America’s poor are not really poor because they own microwaves.”
To operate an microwave does not require the development of a skill. To do fine needlework or woodwork; in write songs, compose stories, to make and play musical instruments requires leisure. The fact is, there were such peasant arts before the dawn of industrialism — even in very cold and forbidding places, such as Russia. If such arts require leisure, then peasant cultures had sufficient leisure to produce them — whatever one might extrapolate from evidence of caloric intake.
To do theology, one needs to be literate. To be Catholic, one needs only an oral tradition. No one here has argued for a romanticized version of peasant life; those who have challenged you, at best, have simply argued that your rather bleak portrayal is not accurate. It is certainly not the universal opinion of scholars. Nor have we pictured all Catholic peasants as being paragons of Catholic orthodoxy or morality. In fact, I have conceded that much of magic and paganism was present among the medieval peasantry. If medieval literature is any indication, one can find real confusion on certain doctrinal and moral points among the aristocracy of the Middle Ages, and plenty of superstition. The infrequent reception of communion, too, was not simply a peasant phenomenon; it included all classes and continued well into the 20th century.
I don’t know Owen. I attend church with folks whose ancestors came from the Carpathian mountains: Rusyns, Slovaks, and some who might be called Ukranians. This was one of the poorest parts of Europe; really thin rocky soil, harsh winters, etc., marginal agriculture. Yet they had time to make pysanky (elaborately decorated Slavic Easter eggs) and to embroider beautiful garments, tablecloths, etc., many old examples of which are in cases in the parish hall. These were dirt poor people, but rural life leaves a lot of time to craft things in the winter…
“whatever one might extrapolate from evidence of caloric intake.”
Daniel and Christopher. It seems to me that your defense of a broad and vague notion of medieva peasant leisure is based upon impressions.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, when nationalisms were sweeping Europe, particularly in places where you had a smaller nation state threatened by larger ones or things like panslavism, you had the popular development of the broad adoption of various cultural practices which were presented as in keeping with longstanding cultural traditions in that given ethnic group. In many cases these were adopted from some local custom which prior to that point was never widely practiced in the culture, and in other cases the “custom” was completely invented (see for instance, Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Invention of Scotland in which you will learn that just about every Scottish tradition claiming to go back to the middle ages (kilts, bagpipes, etc.) was in fact a concoction. That you can read a book on Romanian fine needlecraft that states that the craft tradition goes back to medeival times does not mean that the craft was widespread during that time, or commonly anywhere near as elaborate as what one finds in early modern manifestations of that craft. Ukrainian peasants in 1400 were not commonly decorating eggs with anywhere near the intricasy one finds Ukrainian Americans doing today. You can’t take an instance of a given craft in medieval times and conclude from that widespread leisure. For one thing there was in nearly all locales stratification within the peasant ranks, with a small percentage of peasants having access to higher quality goods than others. This does not have any bearing on the fact that the vast majority of peasants had no access to such things. But even when they did, these are still people who are generally doing fine needle craft work after having worked 70 or 80 or more hour weeks just to survive. My point remains that there is not enough leisure in such an environment to support orthodox Catholicism in a culturally sustainable manner.
I never asserted that all or even most aristocrats were orthodox in their religion. My assertion is simply that only in the upper classes was there the possibility of maintaining orthodox Catholicism in a culturally sustainable manner.
“But even when they did, these are still people who are generally doing fine needle craft work after having worked 70 or 80 or more hour weeks just to survive.”
So, after working 70-80 hours a week, exhausted, and barely surviving, these peasants went home, lit a taper, and did fine needle work. And, living under such dire conditions, they made and learned to play musical instruments, and created stories and songs.
The character of folk culture is not its wide adoption by cultural groups, but its sheer variety. This is especially true of folk costume, but also of story and song. As for the kilt — yes, in its current form, it is a 19th century invention; but, it is based on the belted plaid, which has deep roots in history. As for bagpipes, they were widely used by peasantry throughout Europe, so I would be surprised if the Scots did not have them.
You say your point regarding leisure and orthodoxy still stands, but that assumes that you have established your interpretation of medieval history. You have not. You have asserted it but not proven it. No doubt, there are historians who would support you; but, as you surely know, there are others that would not.
“You have not. You have asserted it but not proven it.”
And what have you “proven” in this or the last thread, Christopher. Go read Trevor-Roper on kilts. Of course he deals with your counterpoint. I’m not going to do your homework for you but I have now provided link after link after link and reference after reference after reference in this and the former thread. You have noted one source. An ultramontanist, whose ideological commitments (to the extent he actually embraces ultramontanism) are necessarily going to require a very positive view of medieval peasant culture. In the desperate attempts to “disprove” my assertions here all manner of incorrect parsing of my assertions has been made (ie I never asserted or inferred a rigid homogeneity in medieval peasant life, but I get accused of this, etc.), and all manner of vague impressions about medieval life have been offered as counter “proofs” of sorts. You are grasping at straws. You are making simplistic syllogistic grabs (you keep insisting that they had fine needlepoint, and they made music, refusing to even respond to my assertions that just because some peasants occasionally had these things does not mean that they were normative in the life of a typical medieval peasant, and even if a given peasant had one or two or three of such “cultural artifact” things, this doesn’t imply a level of leisure required to sustain an orthodox Catholic culture) in the manner not uncommon to an orthodox Catholic with a philosophy background who is over his head when dealing with historical data and serious historical scholarship. It is now apparent with inane comments like “whatever one might extrapolate from evidence of caloric intake” that you have your own ideological commitments which require you to defend the notion of a certain level of “positive culture” in medieval peasant life, regardless of actual historical data (from which “whatever one might extrapolate….”). As I said in the former thread, there is no argument which can overcome fideism.
Owen,
I merely pointed out the absurdity of your claim. You have not said, “I mispoke,” nor have you shown how it is not absurd. Instead — well, I’ll let others judge the character of your response..
As for my sources, I offered two on this thread: that benighted ultramontanist, Johannes Janssen, and Joseph Lortz. I recall you dismissed Janssen just because he was an ultramontanist; in my mind, hardly a creditable response. I would have offered more, if I thought you would look at them. I will mention, however, Regine Pernoud’s Those Terrible Middle Ages — which, I would suppose, we could disqualify because she was Catholic and her book in English was published by Ignatius Press. I will look up what else I have, if you are really interested; but only if you are really interested and will take them seriously. Anyway, that makes three sources for me on the subject of peasant life in the Middle Ages. How many, again, did you offer? I recall no source, except talks at conferences you alone among us attended, for the claim about caloric intake. I read the Orthodox fellow you cited for “Sans.” I was not impressed.
My good sir: I admit my “ideological commitments”. But could anyone read your long posts and conclude that you have none? But whatever such commitments you or I have, they are irrelevant. We should judge one another simply on account of what we say, not why we say it.
Christopher,
I have shown that your assertion of my claim’s absurdity has nothing to do with what I actually claimed, and that you have gone out of your way to avoid the content of this discussion (ie repeated mention of needlework as if this were a universal material phenomenon that sufficed as a proof, even after I had noted this problem multiple times). Again, you are grasping. Your “proof” involved assumptions regarding needlework and music which you have no hard basis for holding. I was referring to sources mentioned both in this thread and the last one, as was clear in my comment. It is interesting to me that all three of the sources you now dredge up come from scholars working before the type of hard data social history I have relied on came into play. I have read a great deal of medievalist thought written in the 19th and 20th centuries, even if I have not yet read Janssen. Have you read any contemporary social history dealing with the period? I know my ideological enemies Christopher, do you know yours?
“I admit my ‘ideological commitments’. But could anyone read your long posts and conclude that you have none? But whatever such commitments you or I have, they are irrelevant. We should judge one another simply on account of what we say, not why we say it.”
What am I supposed to do with a comment like this? I have not asserted that I have no ideological commitments. Emphatically to the contrary I have been more forthright about my own ideological commitments than anyone else on these two threads, and most forthright about how those commitments relate to methodological preferences. In the last thread I have specifically noted how contemporary social historical methods were borne out of Marxist thought and relate to it today, and in this and the last thread I have argued why I believe those methods are superior to competing methods. For one, they provide hard data, something which romantic historical methodologies, as generally used by ultramontanist historians for instance, do not so much do. My assertion is that your ideological commitments clearly do influence your approach here, to the extent that you apparently don’t even bother yourself to know your ideological enemies. Your posture toward the medieval period is decidedly romantic and fideistic (which reading Pernoud would only breed in a mind, and yes, I have read that work – I used to work at a Catholic bookstore which did a lot of business with the Ignatius crowd, even co-publishing a series of books with them, and I have even had the great misfortune of being in the same room with Fr. Fessio on more than one occasion, he being one of the most despicable human creatures I have ever encountered). Pernoud’s little ditty is a short popular work published for pious laypersons with no background in history who want to feel good feelings about the medieval period. It isn’t a part of a serious discussion on the middle ages.
I never said you hid your ideological commitments; my point was that you speak as if my ideological commitments necessarily color my view of history, while yours do not. It’s nonsense to say that, as you call them (to influence opinion against them), “romantic historical methodologies” do provide hard data. As I mentioned before, Janssen, for one, cites period laws and documentary evidence. Pernoud was no mean scholar. Lortz wrote what has been considered a definitive history of the Reformation period. But your method is disparage your opponents by innuendo and insult.
I do not know my ideological enemies? I have read widely the works of my “ideological enemies” in various subjects, including history (while you refuse to consider a work because it is written by an Ultramontanist.) I have endured this long conversation with you, whom I could safely call my ideological enemy. But this is just ad hominem of yours, a kicking up of dust. You alone gaze on the sun; the rest of us seek the comfort of dark in our fideistic caverns underground.
I did not repeatedly mention needlework; I spoke of peasant arts. Yours is the statement in which a general characterization is couched in a particular example — in this case, needlework; and, as I have said before, it is absurd: ““But even when they did, these are still people who are generally doing fine needle craft work after having worked 70 or 80 or more hour weeks just to survive.” You could not deny the fact of peasant arts, but you had to maintain at all costs your thesis that peasants had no leisure; thus, you assert that overworked, exhausted, just surviving peasants, engaged in an activity that requires leisure and freedom from exhaustion, but without leisure and in what could only be described as a condition of exhaustion.
But all this is now profoundly tedious, and it would be stupid to continue it. (I probably should not have written this post; but, as I have said before, I am intemperate.) You and I have presented our various sources; anyone who wants to read them can judge their comparative merits.
And so as to offer a textual counter narrative in monograph form on this thread as well, I would recommend this over Pernoud to readers who really want to learn about medieval peasant social life and status:
http://www.amazon.com/Images-Medieval-Peasant-Figurae-Reading/dp/0804733732
I’m afraid I’m finding Owen’s position more and more plausible. I have added Paul Freedman as well as Phillip R. Schofield and Andre Burguiere to my wishlist, also Susan Reynolds, whom I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. Have any of you read her?
I have read far too little social history, but I have been reading two authors who cite a lot of social-historical data, and I’m afraid they tend to support Owen’s view up to a point. The first (who can hardly be suspected of an anti-medieval bias) is Edward Hadas in his book Human Goods, Economic Evils he cites a lot of data to argue (quite strongly) that all pre-modern economies included a level of poverty that we would have to reject on “pro-life” grounds. The second is Charles Taylor in his book A Secular Age. I’ve linked the title to an e-text, the 2nd ch. “The Rise of the Disciplinary Society” is especially relevant. He discusses how for much of the Middle Ages you had what amounted to an acceptance of the fact that only a religious elite were orthodox in belief and able to avoid habitual mortal sin in practice. (He cites a lot of the horrifying aspects of “folk Catholicism” that Arturo Vasquez used to write about). This view fit on the one hand with classical Augustinian theology (only a tiny minority will be saved), and on the other hand (by analogy) to the assumption that the majority of human kind had to live in extreme poverty (the two sets of two weren’t necessarily thought to match up– there is just an analogy here). But as the Middle Ages progress you get more and more reform movements who want to “close the gap” between the religious elite and the massa damnata. After the Reformation with the rise of the “disciplinary society” the gap really begins to close a bit– both in the religious sphere in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and then, partly connected to this, in the worldly sphere as well, it starts seeming possible for many more people to escape poverty. You have the whole Calvinism and the rise of capitalism thing. Aspects of this development are surely good, but very soon the religious side is overshadowed by the worldly, and the Baconian project of salvation through
material progress and power over nature rather than through Christ (cf. Spe Salvi) becomes more and more mainstream.
So again I’m torn about this. On the one hand a social order in which lots of people are starving and infanticide and sorcery etc are rampant is clearly worth ending, but the project of modernization is so clearly bound up with satanic ideology that it is hard to say what is better in the end.
That much of leftist rage is provoked by real injustices no-one is questioning. But my problem is still the identification of any non-egalitarian/democratic authority as per se unjust. Owen, you write “Those rulers of those peasants choose the work the peasants did and the terms they did it under. They controlled rents, most land use distribution and decision making concerning the land that peasants worked and lived on, tax and/or required trading scheme structures, and so forth.” It seems to me that precisely what fallen man most needs is such an authority that he submits to simply because God has set it to care over his common good and not because he has “a say” in what it tells him to do. That such an authority will always be tempted to act for its private good against the common good is I think true, but I’m still not entirely sure whether the sort of leftist democratic order that you favor is not on balance more dangerous for souls and therefore worse. Man is on this earth mostly to do penance for his sins; that doesn’t mean that one ought to support social orders that are really unjust, but it is an important consideration when one is trying to determine what constitutes a just order.
I’m going to have to think about this more. Thanks Owen for waking me up a bit, and thanks Daniel for getting this whole conversation started.
“So again I’m torn about this. On the one hand a social order in which lots of people are starving and infanticide and sorcery etc are rampant is clearly worth ending, but the project of modernization is so clearly bound up with satanic ideology that it is hard to say what is better in the end.”
Well said. Add to the word “satanic” the word “dehumanizing” and this is paragraph describes the intellectual problem which I have struggled with for years now and for which I see no clear solution. I enter conversations like these in part because I have still a flicker of naive hope that someone will provide me a viable outline of a way out.
We now live in an age where, because of the radical agitations of former generations which I have described in the previous post, a factory worker in Sweden can live a remarkably comfortable and socially stable life. But in the current political economy which dominates the world, this can only happen because Swedish companies and the Swedish government participate in economic structures which are the driving force behind those factors that have led us to nearly 2 billion people in the world living in slums (and that number growing at a terrific rate). Entertainment and communication technologies have left us spiritually vacuous and disconnected from former socializing structures (churches, guilds, and other fraternities), and capitalists have now well learned that if you provide otherwise poor and working class people will cheap cell phones and cheap TVs they will not engage in direct actions demanding more stable living and working conditions. As I have said before, the thing Marx got most wrong (in terms of economics) was his confidence that the proletariat would continue to grow and grow and grow. It now seems that late capitalism is most adept at driving up the numbers of the lumpenproletariat, and this is a very scary phenomenon (if you ever want to see the vast difference in sentiment between Marx and the contemporary left read Marx on the lumpenproletariat – he is more harsh than Rush Limbaugh when Rush is talking about America’s “culture of dependency”). The scale and quickness of the collateral damage of late modernity is astounding. And as long as vast swaths of the population remain entertained to death (to borrow from Neil Postman), I don’t envision a serious challenge to the current ordo. Actual human community requires social space which is slow, disconnected to power currents, and uncommodified. There are virtually no such spaces left anymore. Go to my local farmers market and you will see half the people looking at their cell phones, customers who have expectations based on mass consumer forms, and selling styles which mimic larger capitalist forms. There are some smaller farmers markets in the area, but the ones that last and “thrive” are those that learn to play the dominant game. It is quite sad.
On that note, one more book I would recommend to all readers here is the great Catholic anarchist Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics, which while dated (written in 1977) nails the inhumanity of late modern social and political orders and parses how any engagement with them is now inhuman from the get go. http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Politics-Semiotext-Foreign-Agents/dp/1584350407/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1344865308&sr=1-4&keywords=paul+virilio
I don’t know that Virilio provides any hint of a way out, but perhaps there is some merit in understanding the social disease that is killing our social orders.
Thanks for the conversation San.
I’ve been following this conversation with interest for a while, so sorry to butt in now….
The debate about the number of leisure hours for the average peasant in the Middle Ages seems to be a bit too technical to resolve without reference to the literature, though my casual familiarity with such makes it likely that Owen is clearly right at least for Northern and Eastern Europe– the medieval Eastern Mediterranean was vastly more urbanized, and so is of less interest for romanticism (the proletariat of 9th century Baghdad seems to have not had private facilities to cook in, for example, depending on barley-bread cooked in commercial neighborhood ovens. But then, they also rioted every few years, Roman-style).
In any case, when trying to think about leisure time, it might be equally interesting to look at examples that are closer to home– southern (that is, non-mining, non-cotton) Appalachia prior to the New Deal is an interesting case, and one that’s close enough to home to actually have living memory of what it was like. I mean, on the one hand, despite poor soil and climatic conditions, there does seem to have been ample time for the development of every kind of folk culture, even among sharecroppers, the closest American analogy to medieval serfs. No doubt, this was aided by certain technological developments, especially with regard to improvements in farm equipment and the variety of crops. But even in the case of African American slaves, who with regard to caloric intake and lack of any meaningful sense of freedom had it as bad as anyone in the historical record, they were able to develop a meaningful culture. We shouldn’t lose sight of the ability that humans have to try to spiritually and culturally overcome even the worst conditions.
Of course, it’s impossible to also lose sight of the fact that culture becomes vastly easier to have and to have access to as leisure time and access to education improves, even aside from the obviousness of the fact that an improvement in everyone’s quality of life is an unquestionable good. And I certainly agree with Owen as to who to think for our access to mass leisure and education….. as well as with regard to who we should blame for trying to take these things away currently.
More of this argument turns on the question of how much Christianity (and especially Catholicism requires mass literacy. Certainly, the examples of Appalachia and African American populations in the Black Belt demonstrate what huge efforts have to be taken to bring mass literacy to impoverished rural populations, and so, I think the notion that assent to a given list of fairly abstract dogmas or of being able to assiduously avoid a long list of specific sins as the criteria for salvation is perverse. And I’m also happy to view the Augustinian notion of election as perverse— Sancrusis did a good job above of pointing out its class implications…..
So I guess what I’m left asking myself is– why would one feel the need to lament the problems of today by making reference to past social orders? Isn’t it enough to identify our problems and attempt to right them without trying to go back to something? I get that this is progressivism in its most stripped-down articulation, but…..?
On that account if one hasn’t one should definitely read Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. http://www.amazon.com/Roll-Jordan-World-Slaves-Made/dp/0394716523/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344864082&sr=8-1&keywords=roll+jordan+roll
In the work Genevose highlights the many accomplishments, technical, economic, and cultural, of the slaves, but at the same time talks about the mechanisms which reinforced the slave order, including and especially issues related to slave use of time – mechanisms which insured that there would not be social development in certain areas for the slave classes broadly. This is analogous to the situation I am arguing the medieval European peasantry were in.
Genovese seems to be to be perhaps the figure which everyone here could find agreement with. He was a Marxist in his youth (and curiously never rejected Marxist method). He continued to use contemporary social historical methods throughout his career, even after his reversion to orthodox Catholicism and he and his wife becoming pals with the First Things crowd. He’s not rightly characterized as a neo-con or neo-Cath, I suspect he would be quite sympathetic to distributism, but at the same time his work is still revered by Marxists and others who make use of the (in my opinion) best social historical methods.