What Isn't To Be Done (Part 2)

A review of "Localism: Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching", continued

Read part one here.

Let’s cut right to the chase: does Localism amount, as the subtitle claims, to “coming home to Catholic social teaching”?

Recapitulating “Localism”

A little recap may be helpful. At the end of the day, “localism” may refer to one of two related but distinct ideas.

On the one hand, it may refer to a handful of economic policies founded on the axiom that owning and operating the means of production accords more with human dignity than separating ownership and operation into the capital and labor classes — ownership should be “localized” in the network of operators, you might say. Prior to the labor movement in the West, capitalist control of the means of production gave them the upper hand in salary and safety negotiations, frequently immiserating workers. If more workers become owners, the asymmetry between capital and labor would be more fairly distributed. That is, at least in part, one of the implications of the word “distributism”. Let’s call this, unimaginatively, general localism.

On the other hand, “localism” may refer to a worldview which adapts the aforementioned economic policies to agrarian purposes. If general localism sees owning and operating the means of production as more consistent with human dignity than mere operation, agrarian localism sees owning and operating specifically agricultural means of production as the preeminent expression of such dignity. Whereas general localism has no inherent beef with industrial society, provided that it respects workers’ dignity, this view — let’s call it, no less unimaginatively, agrarian localism — identifies industrial society itself as the true enemy of dignity, and prescribes policies accordingly.

With this distinction in mind, to which of these positions do Localism and Catholic social teaching, respectively, correspond? If they both correspond to the same sense, we have the answer to our question.

A Problematic Rebrand

Contributor David Cooney claims that “localists don’t necessarily say we need to return to an agrarian society, but economic independence for communities necessarily includes agricultural independence to the greatest extent possible.” (Localism, p. 26; emphasis mine) That final phrase reads like an intellectual concession to the non-agrarians in the localist tent, but it’s actually a slippery evasion. Determining the possibility of anything is a complex calculus: assuming that you know the relevant facts, you also need to assess costs and benefits — in which values have at least as much influence as facts.

If I had come across Cooney’s essay in isolation, I could have taken his concession seriously. I can’t, however, when it’s embedded in a book whose editorial outlook so clearly devalues industrial, and valorizes agrarian, society.

From the book’s foreword:

It was once normal to live on a farm. Then it was normal to at least be related to someone who lived on a farm. When that stopped being normal, so did everything else. (ibid, Ahlquist, p. x)

From the book’s afterword:

What are we actually saying? That small businesses are better than big businesses. That independent farmers are better than agribusiness. That local government does a better job of providing for the common good than federal and even state governments. We want big families on a bit of land, at least enough to grow strong and free. We want men to have good jobs making useful, beautiful things. We want women who know true independence from corporate masters, emancipation from wage-slavery. We want our children to grow wise, not merely clever; pious, not merely obedient. (ibid, Davis, p. 229)

Of the essays in between, some have tellingly agrarian titles (“How To Get Back to The Land”; “Go Back”). Those that don’t still wax pastoral, sometimes literally:

When multiple families bridge the practical and functional gap, connected in economic dependency included, then we arrive at that noble yet practical ideal of the village, that beautiful yet practical integration in a place of religion, work, and festivity. (ibid, Craig, p. 46)

Become a producer. Build up local economy. Plant a garden. Found a farm. (ibid, Giambrone, p. 107; emphasis mine)

It was one considered our national story that people came to the North American continent in search for land to make a home, but land meant so much more to our ancestors than it generally does to us now. In a world without electric lights, instant communication, and infrastructure, the home rested on a balance of natural life inside and around it. … America’s ancestors knew that the only means of establishing a people is to root them into the land without destroying it, that is, begin a pastoral. (ibid, Reynolds III, p. 159)¹

I would call ‘localism,’ then, an attitude: an attitude that recognizes that just as human beings are necessarily rooted in particular times, so we are rooted in particular places. And without this rootedness, we are not complete as human persons; we lack an essential dimension, namely, our natural relations with others. (ibid, Storck, p. 196)

These celebrations of agrarian life lead to some outrageous contentions, like this deliciously preposterous gem of anti-history:

Man invented cooking before he thought of nutrition. To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste. (ibid, Richardson, p. 175)²

Many are often, in good Chestertonian style, accompanied by cheap appeals to the popular Catholic imagination:

This model of widespread ownership is so removed from the norm of today that it sounds like a fairytale. Hobbiton is a foolish fantasy to those immured in a galactic Star Wars empire. (ibid, Fitzpatrick, p. 83)³

If you ask me, it’s simply impossible to maintain that Localism doesn’t demand the abolition of industrial society. This book isn’t simply expounding general localism, but its grumpy agrarian variant.

Let’s see if the popes agree.

Catholic Social Teaching

Rather than plow through the documents one by one (which is a gargantuan task — papal pronouncement haven’t gotten shorter over the years), I decided to consult the Vatican’s Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Church. If anything would give me what I’m looking for, surely that will do.

The core axiom of Catholic social teaching (hence, CST) is the dignity of the human person, the “unmistakable protagonist” of all social life (Compendium, §106). The human person is created in God’s image and destined for communion with God and others; for this reason, persons are ends in themselves, never reducible to means for private gratification or exploitation.⁴ Human dignity grounds every other principle of CST. The common good is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” (ibid, §164) The principle of subsidiarity states that “it is an injustice and a disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.” (ibid, §186) Solidarity is a complementary principle that “highlights … the intrinsic social nature of the human person, the equality of all in dignity and rights and the common path of individual peoples towards an ever more committed unity.” (ibid, §192)⁵

Many of the general implications of these principles suit the ideas expounded in Localism, especially when it comes to the family, where solidarity and subsidiarity intersect.

A society built on a family scale is the best guarantee against drifting off course into individualism or collectivism, because within the family the person is always at the center of attention as an end and never as a means. (ibid, §213)

The family, therefore, must be seen as an essential agent of economic life, guided not by the market mentality but by the logic of sharing and solidarity among generations. (ibid, §248)

An element that must be appreciated and safeguarded is that of a family wage, a wage sufficient to maintain a family and allow it to live decently. Such a wage must also allow for savings that will permit the acquisition of property as a guarantee of freedom. (ibid, §250)

Likewise amenable with the book is the Compendium’s vision of the relationship between labor and capital:

Labor has an intrinsic priority over capital. This principle directly concerns the process of production: in this process labor is always a primary efficient cause, while capital, the whole collection of means of production, remains a mere instrument or instrumental cause … There must exist between work and capital a relationship of complementarity: the very logic inherent within the process of production shows that the two must mutually permeate one another and that there is an urgent need to create economic systems in which the opposition between capital and labor is overcome. (ibid, §277)

The latter statement amounts to an endorsement of the maxim that “more workers should become owners.”⁶ Further endorsement can be found in the document’s attention to the communal context of economic life:

All those involved in a business venture must be mindful that the community in which they work represents a good for everyone and not a structure that permits the satisfaction of someone’s merely personal interests. This awareness alone makes it possible to build an economy that is truly at the service of mankind and to create programmes of real cooperation among the different partners in labor. A very important and significant example in this regard is found in the activity of so-called cooperative enterprises, small and medium-sized businesses, commercial undertakings featuring hand-made products and family-sized agricultural ventures. The Church's social doctrine has emphasized the contribution that such activities make to enhance the value of work, to the growth of a sense of personal and social responsibility, a democratic life and the human values that are important for the progress of the market and of society. (ibid, §339; emphasis mine)

So far, then, we seem to have an endorsement of what we called general localism, and perhaps a partial endorsement of the metaphysical foundation of agrarian localism (i.e. aspects of human dignity anthropology). Unfortunately, though, the endorsements stop there.

Recall, for instance, Localism’s suspicion of and hostility toward industrial society, whose mechanistic approach to improving man’s material estate has been so prejudicial to the agrarian lifestyle of our ancestors. It was clear that the editors of the book regarded industrial activity as, at best, indifferent to the fulfillment of human dignity, and at worst, actively contrary to it.

Nothing could be further from the spirit of the Compendium, according to which “human activity aimed at enhancing and transforming the universe can and must unleash the perfections which find their origin and model in the uncreated Word.” (ibid, §262) Certainly, this has to be read in context: such activity must be duly attentive to human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. Properly contextualized, of course, this openness to the transformative power of industry stands in stark contrast to the anti-industrial spirit that permeates Localism and haunts it with the neo-romantic language of enchantment. This formulation suggests that the Church emphatically does not equate the fulfillment of human dignity with traditional agrarian life, a subject that comes up fewer than ten times in the entire document. It casts its net wider, and justifies doing so in theologically sounder terms than those of secular romanticism:

By his work and industriousness, man — who has a share in the divine art and wisdom — makes creation, the cosmos already ordered by the Father, more beautiful. (ibid, §266)

Already, therefore, we can say with confidence that, although CST aligns well with general, it is, at best, in tension with agrarian, localism. Further citations stoke those tensions into outright conflict. Recall, for instance, Ahlquist’s quip that “distributism is opposed to centralization, whether it be political or commercial. It is about directness. It is about dignity.” (Localism, p. viii) The Church, on the other hand, has a far more nuanced — and, as you will see, ironically relevant — attitude toward centralization, precisely in the name of dignity:

The action of the State and of other public authorities must be consistent with the principle of subsidiarity and create situations favorable to the free exercise of economic activity. It must also be inspired by the principle of solidarity and establish limits for the autonomy of the parties in order to defend those who are weaker. Solidarity without subsidiarity, in fact, can easily degenerate into a ‘Welfare State,’ while subsidiarity without solidarity runs the risk of encouraging forms of self-centered localism.” (Compendium, §351; emphasis mine)⁷

And do you remember Joseph Pearce’s attack on globalization and international trade, and his corresponding endorsement of local protectionism? The Church has a very different — but no less resounding — take on just those same issues:

Today more than ever, international trade — if properly oriented — promotes development and can create new employment possibilities and provide useful resources. The Church’s social doctrine has time and again called attention to aberrations in the system of international trade, which often, owing to protectionist policies, discriminates against products coming from poorer countries and hinders the growth of industrial activity in and the transfer of technology to these countries. (ibid, §364; emphasis mine)

In summary, therefore, CST aligns with general localism in its endorsement of workers as owners and its sensitivity to the asymmetry of the antagonism that has historically bedeviled the relation of capital and labor, but its endorsements of industrialization, markets, trade, and international cooperation, caveats notwithstanding, preclude any possible identity with the agrarian localism expounded in the book. In other words, not only does coming home to Catholic social teaching not require our assenting to Localism’s flimsy economics, it actually requires our dissenting from much that these aspiring gentlemen farmers profess and would have us do.

Still, these aspiring gentlemen farmers are my fellow Catholics. I may dissent from their positions and despise the tone with which they demand my assent, but charity — or at least fellow-feeling — compels me to ask why so many of them, often well-read and always well-intentioned, make the same mistake. But that is a question for the… ahem, third part of this review.

1. In point of fact, many of “America’s ancestors” came to North America because they were either weirdos more drawn to the isolated life of trappers and fur traders, or else radicals and ne’er-do-wells who had outstayed their welcome in Britain. The earliest inland settlers were woodsmen who more resembled the hunter-gathering Native Americans with whom they traded than the agrarians who soon followed, bringing with them, indeed, a passion for land — expressed so often by grasping and rapacious annexations from the natives on racialized religious grounds. Wallace Stegner, in fact, points out that our “national story” has always tended to privilege the restless nomad over the settled farmer. In this light, E. Wesley Reynolds III’s rebrand is blatant revisionism.

2. An unfortunate side effect of the agrarian rhetoric is that agrarianism in this country has long been associated with white supremacy, male chauvinism, and the American South. In that context, the editors of the book showed poor judgment in selecting contributors: with the one exception of a woman (writing about cooking, for crying out loud), they are all men; and with the exception of a single Nigerian, they are all white. I’m sure the editors meant well, but could the optics of their neo-agrarian manifesto be any worse?

3. Fetishizing Hobbiton is a bizarrely unaccountable takeaway from The Lord of The Rings. Tolkien deliberately presents the majority of the hobbits as closed-minded and dull, indifferent to tales of heroism and the doings of the wider world. That’s the gist, for instance, of Sam’s lonely reverie in the Green Dragon in the first chapter of the book. It has even been argued that Tolkien modeled the word ‘hobbit’ on Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, a feckless follower of social conventions. Even more amusingly destructive of the fetish is the fact that the Shire’s idyllic security has nothing to do with the hobbits’ way of life, which has only survived because of the secret protection of the Rangers — a network of rootless field operatives dispatched from a distant country to fight a hidden war against operatives from said country’s geopolitical rival. One such operative, in fact, winds up claiming the throne, shellacking the rival, and initiating an unprecedented new age of world peace and international harmony... I’m certain that Tolkien did not intend an analogy with popular conspiracies about George H.W. Bush and the CIA, but I like to imagine localist apoplexy at the idea.

4. The Kantian overtones are everywhere apparent in the pontificate of St. John Paul II, to whom the architectonic approach of the Compendium is indebted. Notwithstanding Michael Waldstein’s prologue to his translation of Man and Woman He Created Them, in which he elaborates the distinction between Kant’s and St. John Paul’s ultimate visions, note the profound positive influence on Catholic theology that the Enlightenment has exerted.

5. Building on an unpublished talk by the late Rev. Joseph Koterski, S.J., I say “complementary” because solidarity and subsidiarity are mutually limiting principles. Solidarity informs the conditions that help us decide when an activity is best left to a lower organization and when it should be handed off to a higher, just as subsidiarity guides us in concretely enacting solidarity, preventing it from becoming the arrogant and heavyhanded humanitarianism of so many modern Western NGOs, which have been criticized — not unjustly — as so many organs of cultural imperialism.

6. Importantly, the Compendium goes on openly to endorse market economics:

In the perspective of an integral and solidary development, it is possible to arrive at a proper appreciation of the moral evaluation that the Church’s social doctrine offers in regard to the market economy or, more simply, of the free economy: “If by ‘capitalism’ is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production, as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a ‘business economy,’ ‘market economy’ or simply ‘free economy.’ But if by ‘capitalism’ is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality, and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.” (§335)

7. It would behoove the editors of a book subtitled “Coming Home to Catholic Social Teaching” to acquaint themselves with more than the bare 1940s minimum of the doctrine they profess to proclaim, especially if they’re going to propose as a new and supposedly clearer name for said doctrine a term which already appears in it, especially when that term is used negatively. It shouldn’t take a cheeky footnote by a small-time Substacker to point that out, either. Or have we forgotten that the words “leading thinkers” also grace the book’s cover?