The book “Beyond capitalism and socialism” is a collection of writings from fourteen contributors on the subject of distributism. Distributism was the name that Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton gave to the version of subsidiarity that they were advocating in their writings. What is subsidiarity then? Subsidiarity is one of the pillars of Catholic social teaching which states that small communities – families, neighborhoods, even small businesses – should not be violated by the intervention of larger communities—e.g., the state. More simply put, allow issues, whether they are business or societal to be handled by those who are closest to and thus most familiar with the issue.
With that, I would like to highlight a few interesting quotes I pulled from the book. Enjoy!
- If Catholics are going to confront the world with the idea that they have the answers to the fundamental problems of human life and society, they must provide our neo-pagan world with concrete and principled solutions.
The most perfect form of human life is the one in which the contemplative channels his own attained wisdom into action, both through teaching others and among the society of men to achieve the common good.
He (Fr. McNabb) argued that if we can see the concrete, lived problems of the age and we know the Catholic moral, doctrinal, and social principles which are meant to be remedies for any human problems, we cannot but desire to implement those truths in the lives of real men, woman and children in order to ameliorate the evils that beset us in the life of the modern system and to assist these same people at the same time in their movement toward their movement towards their ultimate end, God.
One year’s newspaper contains more words than were written in the whole century of St. Thomas. Most of them are useless. Some are diabolical. They are an expression of a world which is wrong, often enough, from the beginning because it is seeking the wrong end.
He (Fr. McNabb) was concerned about the world’s attitude to material things, because it leads inevitably to subhuman conditions of living so destroys human beings. Article: Under pressure, afraid to take bathroom breaks? Inside Amazon’s fast-paced warehouse world.
Communism begins with the liberal and capitalistic error that man is economic, and, instead of correcting it, merely intensifies it until man becomes a robot in a vast economic machine. There is a closer relation between communism and monopolistic capitalism than most minds suspect. They are agreed on the materialistic basis of civilization; they disagree only on who shall control that basis, capitalists or bureaucrats.
Capitalistic economy is godless; communism makes economics God. It is divinity itself. Capitalism denies economics is subject to a higher moral order.
Most of our modern ideas suffer from being no more than breakfast cereal. Most of the energy and attraction in them is in the packaging. Inside there is very little substance. A lot of fried air with sugar coating. There may be a few grains of truth, but not enough, not the whole truth. Yet the world feeds on these light and snappy ideas and on nothing else. The rest of the complete breakfast is missing.
In a broken society where we have this seemingly endless battle between left and right, the virtues on either side are doing war with each other: truth that is pitiless and pity that is untruthful.
- We are not Amish. The Catholic religion is exoteric. It is not meant to be lived privately, but in society, a society larger than that of the family.
- In the age of specialization we tend to grasp only small and narrow ideas. We don’t even want to discuss a true Theory of Everything, unless it is invented by a specialist and addresses only that specialist’s “everything.”
