We always reform or ridicule, not the customs of the remote past, but the new customs of the day before yesterday, which are just beginning to grow old. This is true of furniture and parents.
G.K. Chesterton, Chicago Tribune, February 23, 1921.
Jack Knight. Note the heavy early aviator's dress. Knight died in 1945 of malaria contracted on a trip to South American that was working on securing a reliable source of rubber to the wartime allies.
The United States Postal Service completed a pioneering air mail run in which Jack Knight, taking off on the prior day from San Francisco, landed at Cheyenne, Wyoming, and then took off and flew through the night to Chicago. Ernest M. Allison ten took over and lasted at 4:50 p.m. at Roosevelt Field at Long Island, New York.
The flight demonstrated that air mail was feasible.
While successful, it was also conducted under extreme odds, involving arctic conditions and nighttime fires to light the way. Knight was justifiably regarded as a hero during his lifetime.
Quebec established a Commission des liqeurs to control the quality and sales of alcohol. Quebec, with its strong French traditions, was the only Canadian province to reject any sort of prohibition.
In its original form, the Commission lasted until 1961. It has evolved into the latter Société des alcools du Québec which interestingly operates on a model similar to that of the State of Utah's, with the state being the sole distributer of alcohol.
In Washington D. C. a collection of stately dignified women was photographed, probably being members of the women's party that was meeting in the city at the time.
What is wrong with our civilization
can be said with one word — unreality. We are in no danger either from the
vices or the virtues of vikings; we are in danger of forgetting all facts, good
and bad, in a haze of high-minded phraseology.
We've exchanged a life outdoors and close to nature for one indoors that's artificial. We've lost our connection with nature in its real, and often not always kind, but always existentially beneficial, sense. We've lost our connection with other animals in the same way. In the process, we've made ourselves increasingly physically and mentally ill. We know that, and in struggling to deal with it, we're moving in the opposite direction.
We've forgotten who are neighbors are. We don't found real bonds of love with anyone. We've forgotten what a community really is, as we don't live in them. We have no connection with the place or the land. We don't understand ourselves as creatures. We're obsessed with money even when we claim we aren't.
The past was certainly not perfect by any measure. And the present certainly isn't. This year, 2020, has been a disaster. A horrible pandemic that originated in the densely packed cities of China spread rapidly through the densely packed cities of the rest of the globe, and while we struggle to deal with it, the best we can come up with is to hide indoors.
Perhaps it's time to really reconsider what "progress" is, and where we're progressing to.
So asks Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson.
He doesn't really answer the question, as this is really a review of a book by Thomas Philippon which suggests that what Chesteron noted long ago, that the problem with capitalism isn't too many capitalist, but too few.
Philippon, who is French, isn't new to these views. He recently published on them himself in The Atlantic, where he started his comments off with:
When I arrived in the United States from France in 1999, I felt like I was entering the land of free markets. Nearly everything—from laptops to internet service to plane tickets—was cheaper here than in Europe.
Twenty years later, this is no longer the case. Internet service, cellphone plans, and plane tickets are now much cheaper in Europe and Asia than in the United States, and the price differences are staggering. In 2018, according to data gathered by the comparison site Cable, the average monthly cost of a broadband internet connection was $29 in Italy, $31 in France, $32 in South Korea, and $37 in Germany and Japan. The same connection cost $68 in the United States, putting the country on par with Madagascar, Honduras, and Swaziland. American households spend about $100 a month on cellphone services, the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates. Households in France and Germany pay less than half of that, according to the economists Mara Faccio and Luigi Zingales.
What's going on?
Well, according to Philippon, big corporations have worked to establish themselves as monopolies and have created administrative barriers to competition. This is hardly a new thesis, distributist have been stating this for a century.
Philippon, whom Samuelson doesn't fully endorse, makes direct and interesting comparisons with his region of origin, Europe, which since the 1990s has done things to foster competition. He argues we aren't.
There's more than a little irony in what he notes in that Philippon is the second French born economist in recent years to come in and make arguments, in the form of "capitalism", that are Distributist in nature. Of course, Distributism is a form of capitalism, something that even some of its loose adherents don't always appreciate, and its unfortunate name attracts the like of those who'd like to appropriate it in the name of their wackadoodle nut job concepts such as Proudhonism, which its early lights such as Chesterton and Belloc would have found blisteringly laughable (as likely would have Proudhon as well, if he took time out from provoking arguments at French cafes).
Anyhow, as Philippon implicitly notes, a nation founded on agrarian concepts and a natural Distributist economy early on, and which gave us such early legislative acts as the Sherman Anti Trust Act, can't seem to find that anymore. Competition is accordingly suffering, he maintains.
So, on this Mid Week At Work, some essays and essayist to consider. . . something new, which turns out to be something old.
The Socialist isn't wrong because he realizes things have been lawlessly scattered. The Socialist is wrong because he wants to sweep up all the scattered things into one monstrous heap in the marketplace instead of putting them back in their proper places all over the town
Chesterton is somebody we quote here a lot. Indeed, he might be the most quotable speaker and writer in the English language of all time. He wrote in every genera and on every topic.
Of course, being a writer doesn't qualify a person to be considered for Sainthood, and that's not the reason he was. Rather, his cause was open due to the requests of his modern fans (I hate to use that word in this context, but that's basically how to term it).
I always personally thought Chesterton's cause for canonization was a long shot, which doesn't mean he isn't a saint. He's just not the kind of guy that we think of being canonized, which is perhaps the reason that the cause should have advanced further than it did.
I suppose that should take us first to the question of what is a "saint". The topic is misunderstood, particularly in this context. A "saint", in this context, is somebody who is declared to have passed from this life to the next and be now in Heaven.
The term "saint" itself derives from the Latin "sanctus", simply meaning holy. The Greek word that appears in the New Testament is "ἅγιος" (hagios) and has a broader use, sometimes confusing modern readers if they're aware of it, as it will be used to apply to all holy persons. For example, it's used to refer to angles, which has carried through, in so far as I'm aware, only to St. Michael the Archangel in English.
Anyhow, the canonization of a person means that they've been officially declared by the Catholic Church to be in Heaven. Not being canonized doesn't mean that a person isn't in Heaven, it means that there's no official declaration and therefore no official opinion.
In the modern Catholic Church the process of canonization is a very detailed one involving rigorous study and a lengthy process. This wasn't always the case. In the Orthodox Churches this still isn't the case and the process is much different. Indeed, the one modern instance of where the Catholic process resembles the Orthodox is in the occasional instances in which an Orthodox Church comes back into communion with Rome, for which it has generally been the case that anyone declared to be a saint by that church is taken in as one by the Catholic Church. In early times, the process was sufficiently loose that it often occurred simply by local acclimation, an element of the decision here oddly enough.
Chesterton was a convert to Catholicism and very openly Catholic. Indeed, his conversion was so open that it was widely assumed that he was a Catholic before he was. He was a close friend of fellow English Catholic writers J.R.R. Tolkein and Hilaire Beloc, neither of whom have been proposed for canonization, and was also a close friend of devout Anglican convert from atheism C. S. Lewis. Indeed, both Tolkein and Chesterton were instrumental in Lewis' conversion and they were both disappointed that he didn't become Catholic.
Chesterton was also a man out in the world who wrote prolifically and often satirically. I think that alone makes him an unlikely candidate for canonization, not because he couldn't be a satirical saint, but because it doesn't fit the modern image of a saint very comfortably. We just don't think of saints that way. Maybe we should. Some early saints were certainly pretty distinct characters, for example. St. Jerome kept a lion and was notoriously short tempered. St. Nicholas, a bishop of the early church in real life, is alleged, probably falsely, to have punched Arias in the nose at the Council of Nicea. Certainly a saint could be a pointed writer.
Chesterton also was a very large (i.e. fat) man and some people claimed that this disqualified him. That's pretty shocking really and I suspect only in this context could a person's weight be used against him. You couldn't go around maintaining that people in any other category were barred from consideration for something because they're fat. Indeed in recent years a couple of models have emerged who are fat, and that's been celebrated, although not without some controversy.
And he drank alcohol. Chesterton, Tolkien, Lewis and Belloc used to gather at the same tavern regularly to have a few beers, which is what they drank. That too is interesting as a claimed bar, however, as Catholics aren't prohibitionist by theology, quite the contrary and in earlier eras it would have be assumed that nearly any saint drank alcohol unless it was specifically noted to the contrary, as everyone did. Monasteries brewed beer, for example, for eons, and of late they are returning to it.
These weren't the declared reasons, however. The local Bishop for where Chesterton lived determined not to advance the cause further for these reasons:
I am very conscious of the devotion to GK Chesterton in many parts
of the world and of his inspiring influence on so many people, and this
makes it difficult to communicate the conclusion to which I have come, . . . That conclusion is that I am unable to promote the cause of GK
Chesterton for three reasons. Firstly, and most importantly, there is no
local cult. Secondly, I have been unable to tease out a pattern of
personal spirituality. And, thirdly, even allowing for the context of G K
Chesterton’s time, the issue of anti-Semitism is a real obstacle
particularly at this time in the United Kingdom.”
None of which means that Chesterton isn't in Heaven, it just means he's not advancing the cause.
Of the reasons cited, the no local cult is probably correct. A local "cult" in that context would mean a local devotion Chesterton was English and England has not been a Catholic country in 500 years. There probably isn't a notable devotion in the Bishop's diocese. And that reason is probably a good one for him not to seek to advance a cause if he doesn't feel otherwise compelled to do so. He noted that as his most significant reason.
The second reason strikes me as in error. Chesterton clearly was outwardly and openly Catholic in a way that probably caused him to draw a lot of personal animosity in his home country. Anti Catholicism is a definite thing in every non Catholic country, to include the United States, but it's very much a thing in the Protestant countries of Europe even now. During his lifetime, it very much would have been a thing. Nonetheless he was devout and was instrumental in bringing a lot of people into the Church.
On the third item, antisemitism, I don't know the answer to this.
I like Chesterton, but I haven't read everything he wrote. Nobody but Chesterton has. He wrote so much, it's impossible. I've only read a snippet, however, and only own his book Orthodoxy. His defenders claim this charge is false when taken out of context, for the most part. Some defenders will say no, this is incorrect and he was in fact antisemitic to some degree. His detractors claim he was antisemitic.
The Bishop is actually saying that in the modern world he's not going to take on an action that's going to raise this issue where he doesn't have to. And he can't be blamed for that. In other words, he doesn't want the Church accused of anti antisemitism because of Chesterton, irrespective of Chesterton's views, whatever they may be. And has he's the bishop in an area where he still has to deal with anti Catholicism, I can understand his view.
Not everyone is. His main backers in the U.S., a society dedicated to his memory, is upset, but polite, but has vowed to keep on keeping on, noting there are other routes to canonization (which there may be, but I don't know what they are, the role of the local Bishop is presumably critical). But some aren't taking it well. A Fr Benedict Kiely, who believes that Chesterton’s intercession personally helped his mother, came out in the English Catholic Herald with this:
Writing to Evelyn Waugh, Hilaire Belloc described the
English Catholic hierarchy in the 1930s as ‘a fog of mediocrity’. The
decision of the current Bishop of Northampton not to pursue the cause of
GK Chesterton’s canonisation indicates the fog has yet to clear.
“The decision is a textbook example of the obeisance of the hapless hierarchy to the dominant PC culture.
Yikes.
Well, Chesterton was a figure of the 20th Century and it wouldn't be uncommon for a saint to be canonized decades and even centuries after his death. His writings remain and the declaration that it won't be pursued doesn't mean that he isn't a saint. As an towering intellectual figure, but with at least some views that trouble or should trouble, he remains with us. We won't be hearing the last of his quotes, I'm sure, any time soon. Indeed, forgotten writings of his continue to surface fairly regularly.
There are a lot of photos on this blog. Indeed, a blog without at least some photos, and there are some, is sort of like a ship on the ocean without sails. It might float for its owner but most folks aren't going to want to get on board.
I.e, want readers? You need viewers. And viewing means that if you are putting something up on the screen you need a few photographs.
Anyhow, we get questions and comments on photos from time to time, but the photograph below is unique as its been getting some unique attention recently, and it's not a recent arrival here on the site.
Indeed, this photo appears at the bottom of this website and has been incorporated into the site itself. When that was done, a quote from G. K. Chesteron was added to it.
The photo also appears in several other locations on this blog in posts. In its unaltered form, it looks like this:
It's one of my favorites, which is why I've used it more than once and in more than one place.
For those who might be wondering, the location is Camp Kearny, California. It was taken in December, 1917. The written notation on the photo states: "Captain Valentine in command of Remount Station, 100k head of stock."
Camp Kearny, which I've never seen or been to, is in San Diego County California. I've never been to San Diego County either. The Army started operating it in 1917, only shortly before this photograph was taken, and it served the country in the build up of the Army during World War One.
Camp Kearny, 1918.
The camp was closed following demobilization from the Great War in 1920, although the 15,000 acre facility was retained and the airfield was kept open for use by arrangement. In 1932 the Navy took over the site as it was big enough for airships and it isn't really all that far inland, although it is inland. In turn, they leased the facility to the Marine Corps, which is an odd thought as the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy and isn't crystal clear as to why the Marines would need to lease something from the Navy, or how one department of the Federal government leases anything from another department. During that time it was expanded to 26,000 acres.
Today its Naval Air Station Miramar, which is likely how most people who have heard of the location know of it.
So what's the deal with the photo here? Well, it fits the era the blog is focused on, and it fits a lot of the theme. Were 100,000 horses really at Camp Kearny? That seems like an awful lot, but there were horses there and they were important. Even so, this is the modern era, a century removed. There's just something about it. A location and a scene in both worlds.
And then there's Chesteron's quote. . . which is quite true, no matter how much we moderns are afraid of it and what that means. Radical free will includes the option of looking back.
I'm not a huge fan of the New York Times. Indeed, over time, I've come to see its adopted editorial policy, in which its headlines tend to reflect a political view and its editorials speak of an imagined self importance that the paper and the city that it is located in hasn't had for years and years, as nearly emblematic of the dense way that some large city elites view the entire rest of the country. When newspapers like the Times cry about a fellow New Yorker they detest as President, they ought to realize that it was views like theirs that helped put him there.
Among the NYT columnist I generally am not impressed with is Paul Krugman.
Krugman was published in the NYT the other day with this editorial:
All of this really symbolizes the thick nature of urban analysis combined with the thick nature of American economic thought in general.
Lets start with the second to last paragraph. Eastern Germany, that part of Germany that used to be the German Democratic Republic (the DDR), the Communist satellite state set up by the Soviet Union shortly after World War Two, isn't generally rural and therefore doesn't provide any sort of useful analogy at all. Communism itself never figured out how to deal with rural populations and rural people at all, which is why is general approach to rural topics was to industrialize and wipe them out, or simply wipe them out if that approach wasn't successful.
East Germany was an economic backwater, to be sure, but that was due to Communism itself, which did a pretty good job of making almost every region it held sway in, after an initial outburst of forced industrialization, an economic backwater. Communism, it might be noted, was hostile to rural life. Indeed, Marx, who thought up his nifty ideas while taking up seating space in British libraries rather than going out and actually working, grew so frustrated with rural people that he declared rural life "idiocy", which probably nicely reflects that in most rural communities some guy who showed up in the library every day and showed no sign of working would probably be asked to go do something else.
Indeed, the rural hallmark of the introduction of Communism in rural Russia was to halt an evolving transfer of the land to the rural residents and terrorize the most successful individual farmers with famine being the predictable result. Farming in Germany in general was doing well enough throughout the 20th Century prior to 1945 to the extent that the Nazis didn't really touch it that much during their horrific reign as they were somewhat afraid of doing so and rural Germans never embraced the Nazis, unlike their urban fellows. While Nazi economic policies would have created long term disaster for German farming and real horrors for rural areas, including farmers, for the rest of Europe, had the Allied victory not ended them, the introduction of Communism in the East certainly didn't' create economic bliss of any type.
Not that the approach in the Western world has been a lot better, but analysis like by Krugman are so dense to the economy that they can't be expected to grasp that.
Indeed, that's long been the case with American economic pundits and economists in general. The United States has long had, and all of the Western World now has, a Corporate Capitalist economy.
That's not a free market economy, even though we think it is. As a Corporate Capitalist economy we have long had state intervention in favor of business consolation which favors large entities in central locations over small ones that are decentralized. We don't have to have that sort of economy, we simply do as long ago we determined that this is the economy we wanted as it very much favors the increase and consolidation of wealth and that's what our leadership has always viewed as a desirable thing, irrespective of whether it is or not.
Save for a minority of Millennials who think they have suddenly embraced the rotting stinking corpse of Socialism, there's hardly anyone who will consider anything else or even recognize that anything else exists. The entire economic world boils down to Capitalism and Socialism, in our narrow minded view, and even economic pundits and economist themselves see it that way. And they all also assume that Capitalism equates with a free market, when in fact an economic system that requires state intervention in order to simply exist must also by implication favor some businesses over others and not really feature a free market.
Simply put, if there's a rural crisis, it's because we planned it that way.
Indeed, an honest look at Krugman's topic would, first of all, ask if there's an actual rural decline, or, rather, a decline in general.
The better evidence is the latter, and distinctly.
The decaying American rust belt, which isn't rural, and an American urban economic environment so bleak that the darling of the new American left in Congress declares herself to be a Socialist and maintains that Capitalism must be destroyed would suggest that the problem isn't rural at all, but rather simply economic. Something in the American economy isn't working.
For that matter, yellow vests protests in Europe, which are rural centered, would suggest that something in the Capitalist system everywhere isn't working very well, as we've addressed here before.
And if that something has featured a long running population depletion from some, but only some rural areas, it's also featured an economic decline from manufacturing areas and an economic backwater in some of the United State's oldest cities.
While that's gone on, the decay of the intellect and sense in reality in those more benighted classes in cities has lead to a very real and ongoing decay in American and western society in general. In the 1970s this expressed itself with a desperate effort of those in those cities and in that economic class to stone themselves into numbness, something previously really only a feature of the lives of the desperately poor in urban areas. This has never really abated and now its gone so far that marijuana, the drug of the pre World War Two ethnic and urban underclass has evolved to legality so that the monied middle class may more easily stone itself and escape reality. In other areas, people who previously were concerned with making do in life have reduced their identity to their sexual appetites and want to be known by them so that they define their existence. All over in the same class personal standards have declined to where features of former working class life that actually conveyed a message, such as tattoos, have become standard in a desperate effort for identity and people change their appearance in all sorts of ways nearly weekly.
Things are so bleak that the USA Today recently ran this headline:
U.S. deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide hit highest level since record-keeping began
And the niftiness of our present economic direction was looked at by the Atlantic in an article published under this headline:
Fascism, which Paul alludes to, and its identical cousin Communism, don't come out of rural areas either. Rater, politics in rural areas tends to be defined by a distinct "leave me alone" attitude that the current "validate me and my beliefs" ethos of the urban white middle class simply can't stand.
About the only thing that Paul got right in his missive is that there has indeed been a long term, indeed very long term, shift of the rural population to urban areas and its technology based.
And its based in that alone. Nothing about large cities is otherwise enviable or really a long term draw to anything. The reason that it happens is economic and political. It's not, as people like Paul would seem to assume, simply natural.
This has everything to do with a system that encourages consolidation over everything else. Even while we fret over this, lawmakers do everything to make it easier and easier.
Legal roadblocks in the form of licensing that at one time partially arrested such things have been removed, thereby shifting the provision of all sorts of services, both professional and otherwise, to city centers and large entities. Consolidation of retail through the use of the corporate business form, combined with the total decay of local statutory forms on such things as land use and zoning, has operated to wipe out local retail through state fiat. Funding of transportation systems, which are always taxed based in some fashion, has encouraged and then practically required the movement of everything into the dense city center. Statutory provisions that would address some of this have failed to pass, as in the example of the the Big Box tax that failed in the Legislature recently, or have gone unused, as in the case of the seemingly dormant Sherman Anti Trust Act.
It's happened not because we tried so many things and they failed, it's happened as we value money over everything else on earth and believe that buys us happiness, even though the long record has shown this isn't the case.
Indeed, that's been shown to so much be the case, that people who really succeed, and acquire wealth, use that to move to rural areas, albeit often sanitized ones where the realities of rural life, or just reality in general, have been removed.
So, Paul, it's not that we looked for solutions and they failed. We just didn't look. And now the long existing problems associated with the big cities are being ignored as well. So soon, indeed now, you'll be able to look much closer to home.
From Chesterton.
So, Paul, I agree. People, including yourself, should get real about rural America. But that would require getting real about economics in a really large sense itself, which few are willing to do, and which I don't expect the New York Times to do anytime soon.
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the
brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is
almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking
the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same
shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is
a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be
printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole
principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut
off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.
He
can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of
it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs
to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about
dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward,
and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will
be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of
furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet
drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this
romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done
so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in
the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance
between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the
sake of dying.
The whole modern world has divided itself between Conservatives and Progressives. The Business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent he mistakes from being corrected.
Ironically I listed to this while on my way to go goose hunting. A hunting trip unfortunately interrupted mid morning by one of the primary evils of modern civilization, the cell phone, with the receipt of a panicky work telephone call I had to address. Following that, I received news of a not unexpected but none the less tragic arrival of "the undiscovered country" for a family member, and packed up and headed home.
Anyhow, it's a poor idea to post on things of this type while in a poor frame of mind, but I am anyway. As I do that, I'm sitting getting ready to go to Mass. But as I'm a western American Catholic, I'm in my Sunday street clothes, which in this case includes a t-shirt which has a spork and a the works "Live Simply" on it, a gift from my teenage daughter who obviously knows my heart.
Exactly. And, yes, Sunday morning wear of a type. I'll wear a hooded sweatshirt over it. It's winter here, after all.
I'm noting all of this as I'm both linking in an interview of the author, but as I'm musing, and in a bit of a despondent mood as well. And that reminds me of the footer photograph that I added to this blog after the turn of the year. . . a minor but not insignificant revision to it.
I know that a human population the size we now have can't really go back to our pre civilization state, and we don't even really want to. But a society more like that romanticized (as it surely papered over the bad parts) in I'll Take My Stand, existed not only in the region addressed but in most regions up until then. And all of the objective evidence is that that situation was generally better than the current one. A goal, albeit a return goal, for a society, perhaps, that seems to be aimlessly sweeping away the best parts of its existence and making itself incompatible with what it is creating.
