What Isn’t To Be Done (Part 1)

A review of “Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching”

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a review of Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching. It is, at last, complete. It’s a bit long, though, so I’ve divided it into two parts.

Localism is an anthology of essays by “leading thinkers” on economics and cultural commentary edited by Dale Ahlquist and Michael Warren Davis. Its collective upshot is to rebrand distributism as “localism,” equate it with Catholic social teaching, and contend that it’s the only way forward for serious Catholics to confront the problems of the world.

I aspire to be one such Catholic, and I’m not convinced.

Adumbrating Localism

What actually is localism?

Despite the assurance on the back cover that readers will learn “what distributism is, and what it is not”, the book is rather short on definitions. Or rather, it included numerous descriptions and nominal definitions without addressing the contradictions between them or demonstrating, even in outline, their ultimate conceptual coherence.¹

From what I could cull out of the scattered statements, localism can be defined in a few ways along a spectrum from the strictly economic to the metaphysical.

To begin with economics, Dale Ahlquist writes that distributism

is based on the idea that ‘more workers should become owners’ and that widespread ownership would provide freedom and independence and make for a more just society. It did not pull any punches, claiming that industrial capitalism is responsible for many grave ills in modern society and that socialism is the well-intentioned but wrong-headed solution that only makes matters worse. (Localism, p. viii)

But a strictly economic definition falls short of the deeper integration between economy and community which the localists envision. As David W. Cooney says,

without a good, strong, local economy to support it, the local community is weak and dependent no matter how much neat stuff the average person may own or how nice the cars in the driveways are. … If you are your neighbors’ customer, and they are yours, then you mutually support each other, and money will flow throughout the local economy. The best way to support the local economy is to be the customer of local, independently owned businesses to the greatest extent you can. (ibid, pp. 24-25)

But that still falls short. Distributism isn’t just an economic policy for communitarians. After all, anticorporate, stakeholder socialism is the vibe of every belinened sustainable farmers market up and down the California coast. These co-ops and other initiatives seem marked by a distinctly postmodern communitarianism unburdened by history or organized religion: they’re quasi-intentional communities of men and women who have discovered a desire for authentic self-actualization in the monochrome satiety of postmodern life; farming, husbandry, and so on are how they achieve it. In other words, these are voluntary communities of self-actualizing individuals.

Here, then, distributism distinguishes itself. Despite its theoretical likeness to co-ops and communes, it’s at odds with those italicized ideas. Freedom through limitation, playing that Chestertonian game-on-the-cliff, is the axiom of the localist mind, and chief among those limits are land and family. We are born somewhere we don’t choose, into families we don’t choose. Says Jason Craig,

This life brings men in contact with their local place and its people, and it creates and protects the communal life of man, which is not a superfluous part of his life but a source of it. That which removes man from his home and place, therefore, is something we should resist. (ibid, pp. 52-53)

These two forces conjoin to form a third limiting vector, the sense of history: my family has worked this land for generations, it’s my destiny to do the same, etc. Wallace Stegner — along with Wendell Berry, one of the intellectual godfathers of Localism — says that, “no place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.” (Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p. 202)

This leads naturally to the final component of the localist mind: the religious dimension. This may come in many forms, but at its core, it flows from or at least flows with that sense of history. We don’t just work the land, we belong to it and in it; it is our God-given inheritance, held in trust. Consumerism and socialism alike sever the intimate contact that binds the human heart to “the life of significant soil,” as T.S. Eliot puts it (Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages”, V). Says Ahlquist,

Distributism is opposed to centralization, whether it be political or commercial. It is about directness. It is about dignity. It is about responsibility, which is the flip side of freedom (Localism, p. viii)

Here we have the implicit metaphysical orientation behind localism’s economic policies. Its antitrust impulses, its suspicion of technology and global capitalism, and its desire — to be accomplished with a regulatory cudgel, if need be — to promote small businesses and family farms, are all founded on the conviction not just that human nature was endowed by its Creator with a purpose, but that that purpose can only be realized through prolonged physical contact with the natural world via farming and the personal contact of Sunday worship and workaday commerce alike. Localists defend involuntary affiliations and the transcendent order they express, because without these, they contend, voluntary associations and individual freedom lose their meaning.

Economic Ambiguities

The “leading thinkers” in Localism are, at any rate, thinkers, often sophisticated. But frankly, the book is weakest precisely where it claims to cast fresh light, economics. It’s hard not to walk away with the impression that the contributors hate everything about modern industrial society and believe that only a return to agrarian life can salve our social sores. They say otherwise, of course, but that’s the overwhelming upshot.

I can hear my localist readers (I assume there are a few) protest that I’m straw-manning their ideas, or at least exaggerating their stance vis-à-vis the modern industrial world. Unfortunately, I am not, at least as far as the book is concerned. It is abundantly clear that the editorial vision equates industrial society with a new kind of tyranny.

How does this push toward a globalized hegemony, ushered in by the unholy alliance of big tech, big business, and big government, impact the viability of local businesses and local cultures? Can the small, local, and beautiful survive and prosper in a world dominated by the big, global, and brash? (Joseph Pearce, Localism, 145)²

News corporations have a massive financial incentive to cast every economic, political, or cultural problem as a national problem with a national solution. This in turn gives federal politicians an excuse to collect power in their own hands. These political elites also accept billions of dollars a year from multi-national corporations to stamp out potential competitors, especially small businessmen. A mom-and-pop drugstore is a bigger threat to Walgreens than CVS or Rite Aid. Even the intelligentsia (universities, think-tanks, and the like) are in on the scam. They earn their keep by trading in abstract ideologies. They have to make our problems seem more complicated than they really are. … Joseph Stalin and Jeff Bezos harnessed the power of Big Government and Big Business to make the world a worse place to live. (Michael Warren Davis, ibid, p. 231; emphasis mine)³

Here’s the thing: the world didn’t transition to industrial society by accident, and the transition wasn’t driven exclusively by greed and rapacity. A major motivation was the desire, at least half-conscious, to escape preindustrial tyranny, which was real and no less comprehensive. If the contributors to Localism are going to preach death to industrial tyranny without assuring uncertain readers that they have a plan to avoid simply reverting to preindustrial tyranny, it’s fair to demand an explanation. These are leading thinkers, after all.

A Portrait of the Tyrant as A Preindustrial Man

To stimulate such an explanation, let’s follow Patricia Crone in Preindustrial Societies⁴ and think away the conditions of our industrial one. Concretely, this means imagining life without global supply chains, mechanized agriculture, and high-speed communications networks. What results?

First and foremost, agricultural output would decline precipitously: traditional subsistence farmers can only consistently feed about 5 people a year. (Cf. Preindustrial Societies, p. 16) And if you must do without mechanized communication (a further perk of being modern), then you’d also have to deal with the fact that the knowledge of agricultural scarcities in this or that region would come too late for a government or church to respond in a timely fashion. As the authors of Superabundance point out, what we call resources aren’t actually resources in the proper sense: they are materials. A resource — in the sense of a material with definite and exploitable uses for this or that problem — comes about from the convergence of materials, knowledge, and time. Agricultural decline and the lack of sophisticated extractive technology would eat away at the materials in question, and the lack of rapid communication would eat away at the time. With fewer materials to exploit in a longer timespan, “preindustrial societies were dominated by scarcity.” (Ibid, p. 15)

An obvious consequence is that the current global population would be totally unsustainable. Forcibly deindustrializing, whether through government regulation or a collective “change of mood” (ibid, p. 28), would mean famine and death for billions — hardly a policy consistent with the pro-life cause to which the authors of Localism are committed.

And besides, how would the survivors spend most of their time?

Scarcity everywhere made for a huge population of vagrants, beggars, robbers, and criminals of other types: no less than 10 percent of the population of seventeenth-century France (estimated at 20 million or less) is believed to have fallen into this category. (Ibid, p. 22)

The authors of Localism rightly abominate the woke attack on masculinity. But if Crone’s characterization is correct, men wouldn’t have it much better in a preindustrial age. Many wouldn’t be working the land, they’d be unemployed vagrants.

Of course, not everyone would wind up in abject, resentful poverty. But if historical precedent is any indication, the landowners would more than likely congregate in cities parasitizing the surplus wealth from the countryside.⁵ Such cities gave us the gorgeous handiwork in gold, stone, and illumination from so many periods of history popularly dismissed as “dark ages.” It’s not uncommon to hear traditionalist partisans of the Catholic Church retort Voltaire’s familiar mockery of medieval ignorance and incompetence by pointing out contrary examples: Gothic cathedrals, illuminated manuscripts, etc. But I’ve begun to suspect that many such Catholic partisans suffer from what you might call museum myopia. While know-how and expertise certainly existed, they weren’t widely diffused, nor their results — with the exception of the cathedrals — widely accessible. Medieval European artisans — like their analogues in Japan — were more or less in thrall to wealthy urban patrons.

Such people belonged in an altogether different category: highly skilled and extravagantly rewarded (when not extravagantly ill-treated), they supplied exquisite pieces of craftsmanship, exotic luxury goods, and high-powered intellectual, artistic, medical, and financial services to the courts of aristocrats and kings. Such specialists tended to belong to the top. There were not however many of them. (Ibid, p. 23)

If you think the country-city divide is bad now, try living in medieval Europe.

Poor peasants couldn’t simply migrate from farm to farm in search of work, either. The concept of labor as a vendable “product” to be exchanged for money from an employer was virtually nonexistent, as were the markets which channeled different kinds of labor to the needs of different employers. Instead,

scarcity meant that it was impossible to pay for all the labor required; in so far as work was not to be left undone, people thus had to be forced into doing it. The carrot being small, the stick had to be large, or in other words, labor was more commonly forced than hired. (Ibid, p. 31)

The fruit of all that forced labor was rarely channeled into such primitive markets as existed. More often, it was managed by what passed for the state: “a great deal of commodity movement took place by order of, or under the control of, the state, that is it did not amount to a genuine trade at all (as opposed to ‘administered trade’ or ‘redistribution’).” (Ibid, pp. 26-27) The Church, and comparable spiritual organs in non-Christian civilizations, often functioned as one more wealthy aristocratic entity accruing money and prestige through these practices — though it’s worth noting that, at least in Western Europe, Church and state never quite reached the mutual understanding that existed between patriarchs and emperors in Eastern Europe, or between the Confucian scholars and the emperors in China.

In sum, most preindustrial societies saw wealthy landowners in one or two central cities dominate hungry and ignorant masses, who had little legal redress or economic opportunity.

Such surplus as the agricultural sector produced passed into the hands of a ruling elite given to spending every penny it had on consumption, not on investments in trade or manufacture; conversely, those who made money out of trade or manufacture were apt to convert it into membership of the ruling elite. … Moreover, since the agricultural surplus ended up with the ruling elite, sensible businessmen concentrated their efforts on the production and/or provision of extremely expensive items for the very rich, not on everyday goods for sale to the masses: it was only here and there that catering for the masses, or some of them, paid off. (Ibid, p. 39)

Michael Warren Davis wants to do more than lobby for workers-as-owners. He wants openly to reverse the Industrial Revolution, and thinks that doing so will somehow result in “big families on a bit of land, at least enough to grow strong and free,” where “men … have good jobs making useful, beautiful things” and “women … know true independence from corporate masters, emancipation from wage-slavery,” and “children … grow wise, not merely clever; pious, not merely obedient.” (Localism, p. 229) If you ask me, he has lost his reactionary mind.

I’m not saying all this would inevitably result if we heed Localism, only because next to nothing is truly inevitable. But if the sketch above reveals anything, it’s that preindustrial societies were no less prone to centralization and tyranny than industrial society, even if the enabling conditions vary. How do the localists propose to reform our current economy along preindustrial lines without also reviving the conditions of preindustrial tyranny?

I ask this repeatedly in conversation with would-be localists, but many dismiss the implicit premise. If I do get a response, it invariably involves some form of protectionist coercion, whether in the form of federal tariffs and hardcore antitrust litigation to local prohibitions on importing products from beyond a certain distance. Any concern about the likelihood of slipping back into the feudal arrangement of landowner-peasant is greeted with impatience: I’m just a handwringing liberal proceduralist, it wouldn’t necessarily happen that way, and besides, peasants didn’t have it so bad; at least they lived more spiritually alert lives, etc.⁶ Pardon me, but it did happen that way, and it was that bad. The burden of proof is on the reformers to show that their reforms won’t simply deform what good persists in the industrial age.

At this point, I can’t help but feel further vindicated in my conviction that conservative American Catholicism is aping the Russian revolutionary movement. Numerous figures in mid-19th century Russia were rightly disgusted by the prevailing order, but few gave any thought to practical reforms with mitigated unintended consequences. (Those who did, and who tried politically to enact such reforms, were deported by the czars to Sakhalin and Siberia. If anybody had it coming, it was the Romanovs.) Localism reads not unlike the imprecations of Alexander Herzen: disgusted by the facts and utterly incompetent to change them.

So far, though, I’ve overlooked a key aspect, suggested by the book’s subtitle: “Coming home to Catholic social teaching.” If, in fact, Localism is consistent with Catholic social teaching, then shouldn’t I cease firing broadsides at my well-intentioned peers? Let that be a question for part two. For now, though, as Aristotle says, “it is a pious thing to honor the truth first.” And the truth is, as far as practical economics, Localism punches bantam in a heavyweight ring.

1. I’m not asking for a straight up treatise; themed anthologies and festschrifts are supposed to be more meditative. But at least order the essays in something like systematic fashion, no?

2. Pearce shows his hand with that string of implied antitheses: the local is equated with the beautiful, the global with the brash.

3. That final comment is simply staggering. Does he actually believe that there’s a moral equivalence between Bezos and Stalin?

4. One of the entry-level books suggested by professional historian and charming eccentric Brett Devereaux at his blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

5. In “The World Crisis and The English Tradition” (Dynamics of World History, pp. 225-236), Christopher Dawson highlights the unique situation of England in this respect, where the landowners were also land-dwellers until far more recently than in other countries in Europe. He makes a fascinating point, but then he closes with the preposterous claim that “the great city is the grave of a culture.” (p. 236) Is that so? Why, then, do we summarize our own culture by reference to cities — Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome? How can he possibly think that? High culture everywhere is almost synonymous with urban culture, at least as its enabling condition.

6. That last defense, which I’ve heard several times over the years, is patent nonsense. Read Chaucer, Boccaccio, and the texts of Carmina Burana and tell me the average medieval man was less depraved than he is now.