True freedom and the revival of the idea of Distributism

One of the problems plaguing the free world is that it has largely forgotten meaning and nature of freedom. When people are liberated enough to do more or less what they will, they tend to become libertines. Education has naturally been dragged into this maelstrom in order to perpetuate what it currently means to say we are a free people living in a free country.

The understanding of “free” should not be simply getting something without paying for it or of inconsequential limitlessness. On the contrary, freedom comes at great cost and great consequence, and a freeing education—a liberal education—not only prepares people to pay that price but also to live out that freedom within an economy that is conducive to its exercise and excellence.

One of those economic approaches that is getting more attention in debate, and even in practice, in the big-box, big-business, big-government era of Americana is distributism. Distributism is an action-governing attitude in which private property is distributed on a wide scale instead of being owned by only a few large and looming organizations, as is the case today. These companies have something approaching a global grasp, and they have their fingers in everyone’s pocket in one way or another. And though most are never the wiser, the sense of commercial overlordship is growing more palpable.

The idea of distributism is a reaction born of the loss of confidence in corporations and politicians and was furthered and encouraged in the early 20th-century by thinkers including G. K. Chesterton as a movement of renewal or return. It was a turning away from what he called the “madness of bigness.” Rather than the bulk of commerce being concentrated, distributism allows normal people to take their lives and labors into their own hands and their own responsibilities by means of tangible and dignified opportunity and occupation.

And by this is meant not some smaller-scale rat race, but real work with local impact. Work that is fulfilling because it imparts real ownership and real consequences of productivity that determine the quality of life within the family, opening up the possibility for a long-lost concept—namely, the labor of love.

The late Catholic author Stratford Caldecott wrote that distributism

can be seen as a practical expression or implication of the Catholic social doctrines of subsidiarity in solidarity, of the common good, and of the family as the best foundation of a healthy civil society. Distributism is not socialism. It does not suppose that property should be stolen from the rich and given to the poor, or appropriated by the state or by a party representing the people, but rather that legislation should make it easier for the small property-owner, landowner, tradesman, and shopkeeper to survive, and harder for the tycoon to accumulate so much wealth and power that the former is forced to become a mere employee of the latter, or effectively a wage-slave.

But the enactment of such healthy, cultural competition and cooperation depends entirely on the right idea of freedom, which has nothing to do with affluence and everything to do with accountability. And herein lies the trouble that gnaws at the soul of the modern money-making society, which has all the wealth in the world, but no peace.

If there is no peace in society, can we call ourselves free? The attitude underlying much of the current concern and dissatisfaction over work and jobs and careers are the result of a purely pragmatic attitude toward freedom and labor. True freedom involves the unimpeded capacity to realize the human good. Entitlement for handouts and bailouts and striving for capitalist empires and socialist systems is not freedom, however, but slavery to a system.

By this, we live only to work, which is in opposition to the view of the ancients and Catholic social teaching, where we work in order to live. The subordination of men and women to purely functional or utilitarian ends reflects a limited view of labor, corresponding to a limited view of humanity, a view that is hardly a vision. There is so much more to life than making a living.

If distributism is a solution by empowering men and women to control their own lives with a strong sense of how they live, then it must be considered something more than just another civil or social doctrine, but rather a fitting civil environment for the political animal. That is, if man was made free by God to find, in his fallen state, fulfilment and redemption in the sweat of his brow, then he should strive to wield that freedom in a realm that is suited and even organized for these faculties and proclivities.

Distributism looks at the ways in which people endowed with freedom can be free to exercise their freedom—free to own property, to manage their own affairs, to do business with their neighbors, and to raise their family in health and happiness. In this way, at least in its idea, distributism is not a submission to yet another ideology; it is a liberation from ideologies by giving man the chance to be the free being that he is by nature. Again, as Caldecott wrote, distributism is not so much a policy as it is a philosophy.

The way we approach the world and the workings of the world is largely begun in the schoolroom—or continued from the first school of the family—and it is here we should look for the purpose of restoring the understanding of human nature, human freedom, and human society. If distributism is the life of the free man, then what is the education he should receive to enter into that freedom? Entrenched within the modern educational “system” are the very ideologies and indoctrinations that advance subservience to a system.

The problem is that education itself is not free, but shackled to a certain mindset and model, with schools nowadays generally resembling prisons in their physical and spiritual character instead of churches or town halls, as they once did. Education is chained to a godless grindstone, like the rest of society. As Chesterton said, “The moment men begin to care more for education than for religion, they begin to care more for ambition than for education.”

The Liberal Arts—the freeing arts—provide a wide array of knowledge and familiarity in the humanities and the practical arts, and as it is not specialized, such an education opens the door to the kind of hands-on, rough-and-ready, can-do spirit in which distributism might find an authentic foothold. Arts that seem as basic as grammar, rhetoric, and logic explore the way the world works. And the arts of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy begin to work with that world, to know how it is built. And the philosophical and theological arts, together with poetry, drama, and music, pursue the “why,” the “that for the sake of which,” giving man a true place in the world he is the steward of.

When people know something about the mutual dependence of things, which is the mark of a liberal education, they will naturally appreciate the reality reflected in distributism. Moreover, such an education prepares people to seek experiences and lifestyles that are intrinsically good, meaningful, and rewarding. A man who has his share and his part to play in his own life and the lives of those he loves and lives with is an enactment of the vision that a liberal education bestows and a fitting occupation for the formation that a liberal education imparts. And that vision and formation is one that renders men and women more intellectually free, freer to ascertain and achieve the good through deliberate action.

An education that introduces people to the world, challenging them to try their hands and hearts at many things to discern their strengths and weaknesses and their passions, is the type of experiential education most conducive to achieving the cultural attitude and aptitude to advance the social outlook of distributism in this country—an outlook that gazes beyond the strictures and systems of capitalism and socialism, which are based almost solely on arbitrary, state-determined algorithms for a perfunctory, problem-solving profit. Education should be far more than that, as it was before the modern malaise of education, as it should be life in a free society—for men and women and are only truly free when they are truly happy.