Posted on 10/11/2015 7:33:48 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
American public diplomacy is in disarray. We are not winning--indeed, we are hardly waging--the war of ideas, and it is vitally important that we do, because in our war against the radical Islamists the final victory will take place not on the battlefield but in the minds of men.
The purpose of U.S. public diplomacy is to reach key audiences in foreign countries, outside of the bilateral channels of traditional diplomatic relations, with ideas that are powerful enough to form their disposition toward us and our political purposes in the world. In essence, public diplomacy is the defense and promotion of America's principles beyond our shores. To advance a particular policy at a specific time--a free trade agreement, say, or an arms control measure--we have traditional public relations. In times of national peril, the call goes forth not for more public relations, but for a public diplomacy that can engage in the war of ideas.
First, in order to fight a war of ideas, one has to have an idea. This is not as simple as it may sound. A war of ideas is a struggle over the very nature of reality for which people are willing to die. Therefore, one must formulate the ideas that are so central to one's life that one is not willing to live without them. For a nation successfully to project such ideas, there must be a broad consensus within it as to what those ideas are.
Second, one cannot go into a war of ideas until one understands the ideas one is at war with. Such wars are always conducted in terms of moral legitimacy. The defense of one's ideas and the attack on those of the enemy are conducted with moral rhetoric. "Axis of evil" is a perfect example, as is "the great Satan." All moral differences are at root theological.
Third, wars of ideas, by definition, can only be fought by and with people who think. This defines the natural target audience for this war, the so-called "elites." The term "elite" is not determined by social or economic status, but by intellectual capabilities. Trying to use ideas to influence people who do not think is an exercise in futility. Such people are led and influenced by those who do think.
Fourth, along with a consistency of purpose, one must have the organizational and financial means for conducting a war of ideas over the course of generations. Ideas, when they are profound enough to form the basis of a civilization, or its negation, have a prolonged gestational period. K.P.S. Gill, India's foremost authority on counterterrorism, has said that, in Kashmir, radical Islamists taught their doctrines in madrassas for two decades before the occurrence of any terrorist acts. After this period of gestation, the war of ideas was already won in the minds of the students who then formed the cadre of Islamist terrorist organizations. The same is true in other parts of the Islamic world. The war of ideas requires institutions that are capable of countering this kind of indoctrination over similarly lengthy periods, i.e., decades.
Our Ideas
Though its form has changed, today's war of ideas is not new. On our side, it has its provenance in the American Founding. The source of our moral legitimacy was announced in the Declaration of Independence, addressed out of "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind" to the entire world. Apart from the apparent need to solicit foreign assistance, why did the founders of the United States feel it necessary to do this? After all, a revolution against the British crown in 13 small colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America would hardly seem to have been an event requiring the attention of the world. The founders were bold enough to turn to the world in setting forth the justification for their undertaking because the principles to which they were appealing are based upon truths that they claimed to be universal. By universal, they meant true everywhere, at all times, for everyone. These self-evident truths are the God-given, inalienable rights that each human being possesses, that governments are instituted to guarantee, and from which alone they derive their just powers.
In effect, the Declaration of Independence was the first public diplomacy document of the United States. Everything done in U.S. public diplomacy is, or should be, an elaboration of this pronouncement. For instance, the U.S. government's radio and TV broadcasting efforts are an outgrowth of the Declaration in their efforts to address the world as to the moral legitimacy of the United States. The underlying presumption is that members of the audience possess these rights no less than we, and that is why we speak to them with respect and without condescension. It is why we appeal to their reason in our attempts to present, out of the decent respect for the opinions of mankind, our case before them. The case now, as it was then, is for freedom and democracy, for the exercise of those inalienable rights for all people. President George W. Bush was referring to this mission when he said in his first inaugural address, "Our democratic faith is more than a creed of our country.... Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations."
This message has inspired and given hope to millions of people around the world. However, the people who hate the United States understand it as well, and deeply fear it. The last thing they wish their people to hear is that they, too, possess these same God-given inalienable rights and ought to have the free exercise thereof. The enemies of freedom find this truth to be the most dangerous weapon we employ. It helped to defeat the Nazis in World War II and the Soviet Empire in the Cold War.
Their Ideas
In this new war, the character of the enemy is defined by the term Islamism, as distinct from Islam. Like all "ism"s, this term indicates a transmogrification of reality. Islamism is the ideologization of Islam. Drawing on several of the many strands of Islamic tradition (Kharijites, Asharites, Ibn Taymiyya, etc.), radical Islamists reduce God to his omnipotence, concentrating exclusively on His unlimited power, as against His reason. God's "reasons" are unknowable by man. God rules as He pleases. There is no rational order invested in the universe upon which one can rely, only the second-to-second manifestation of God's will. This view results in anti-rationalism which, in turn, nourishes irrational behavior.
Radical Islamists translate their version of God's omnipotence into a politics of unlimited power. As God's instruments, they are channels for this power. The primacy of force, on which their endeavor is based, necessitates the denigration of reason as a means to know the world or God. Once the primacy of force is posited, terrorism becomes the next logical step to power, as it did in the 20th-century secular ideologies of power, Nazism and Marxism-Leninism. This is what led Osama bin Laden to embrace the astonishing statement of his spiritual godfather, Abdullah Azzam, which bin Laden quoted in the November 2001 video, released after 9/11: "Terrorism is an obligation in Allah's religion."
The radical Islamists are the new totalitarians, with the ironic twist that, unlike 20th-century totalitarians, they are not secular. However, this is a distinction without a difference because they share with atheist ideologues the belief that power is the primary constituent of reality. The Arab jihadist volunteers who went to Iraq to fight for the fascist regime of Saddam Hussein--a cynical secularist who manipulated Islam for his own purposes--did not do so simply because they shared his anti-Americanism. Saddam Hussein and the Islamist fighters met at the nexus at which the secular and the theological views of unlimited power coincide. Like 20th-century totalitarians, radical Islamists also use this shared view of reality to dehumanize large portions of mankind, justifying their slaughter--albeit in their case as "infidels," rather than as non-Aryans or bourgeoisie.
False Advertising
Faced with this new enemy, how has America deployed its intellectual weapons? How has America communicated to the world the view of reality for which we are willing to fight and die?
After 9/11, the State Department and U.S. international broadcasting turned to the advertising world and its executives, including from MTV, to meet the enemy in the war of ideas. Unfortunately, American advertising became not only the primary but the preferred means by which to present ourselves to the world. Typically, this approach was translated into TV commercials showing happy Muslims in the United States, under the rubric of "Shared Values," and new radio stations playing pop music to Arabs and Iranians, under the same assumption of whatever "shared values" such music expresses.
The general approach of advertising is to try to influence an audience with a short attention span by using subliminal messages to affect short-term behavior. In other words, the means of advertising determine the message. It reduces the war of ideas to slogans that are of marginal use in persuading thoughtful people concerning matters of life and death.
Not only do the means restrict the message, the message itself is wrong. When the rainbow of diversity that is popularly celebrated in America leads the message, it leaves the impression upon foreign audiences that the United States is indifferent to the various claims to ultimate truth that its assorted representatives put forth. Islam is just another item on the shelf of American consumer society, chosen for its level of personal satisfaction. Smiling American Muslims are simply happy shoppers in the cafeteria of religions. This implied demotion of the importance of what is believed to be true inadvertently inflames believers. America is seen as shallow.
The objective of the TV ads presenting happy Muslims in the U.S. was laudable in so far as it intended to demonstrate tolerance and the fact that the U.S. does not consider itself at war with Islam, both important points. However, it was the wrong message for the audience. The fact that Islam is tolerated here is not a particularly persuasive message to Muslims who think that Islam is true. In fact, it is likely to be seen as condescending. Also, a demonstration of tolerance is not a convincing message to those who do not think tolerance is a virtue, but a sign of moral decline.
Because of their inherent limitations, these ads could not begin to suggest the moral principles from which such tolerance is drawn. Muslims are not free in the United States because the United States thinks Islam is the source of happiness, but because the United States recognizes Muslims as human beings with inalienable rights. It is precisely that recognition that is absent in many of the Muslim countries that deny such rights to their heterodox Muslim and non-Muslim citizens. The sanctity of the individual and the inviolability of conscience are not doctrines necessarily recognized by an audience that does not have a framework in which to receive them.
In other words, contending claims to truth are often incompatible. That is why there is a war of ideas in the first place. It is a mistake to fudge this issue and to offer a derivate virtue--tolerance--in place of the larger truth from which it stems. If there is to be a war, let it be of one claim to truth against another--not of a seeming indifference to truth on our side against an absolute claim to it on the other. For if we take the side of relativism, we will lose. The West today appears to be offering greater freedom with no purpose, as against the Islamist offering of personal submission to a higher purpose.
Battle of the Bands
Consider the voice of America, the premier broadcasting arm of the U.S. government. VOA's mission is to express and serve the enduring interests of the United States, which include, most importantly, the spread of its democratic principles. Since 9/11, VOA has spun off Arabic and Farsi language services especially critical to the war of ideas and transformed them into primarily music stations, Radio Sawa and Radio Farda. The model for doing so is commercial. For a commercial broadcaster, large numbers mean survival. Large audiences, demographically defined in the Arab and Persian worlds as youth audiences, are attracted by popular music formats, like youth audiences everywhere. However, this approach shares the faulty assumptions of the "Shared Values" TV ad campaign, albeit in a different manner.
Numbers of listeners certainly matter, but not as much as who is listening--and to what. The Voice of America was designed to operate without the financial pressures of commercial media in order to be able to afford to tell the whole truth about the United States, including its full cultural depth and spiritual resonance. VOA has always used music to attract audiences. For example, Willis Conover's jazz program broadcast on VOA to Soviet audiences during the Cold War was one of the most successful radio programs in history. However, it was offered within a format devoted mainly to substance--news, editorials, and features. That ratio has now been reversed with music occupying as much as, or more than, 80% of the hour in Radio Sawa. The more like commercial radio U.S. broadcasting becomes, the less reason it has to exist. After all, the image of America created by the popular media is the cliché that often repels much of the world. U.S. broadcasting has the duty to reveal the character of the American people in such a way that the underlying principles of American life are revealed. Music with a sprinkling of news cannot do this.
The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees the VOA, and the level of confusion on the Board has been so profound that its leading members do not even consider broadcasting to be part of U.S. public diplomacy. At a town hall meeting at the Voice of America on September 10, 2002, Chairman Ken Tomlinson told the employees, "You can't intertwine public diplomacy with broadcasting." Board member Ted Kaufman responded, "I couldn't agree with the chairman more...we've got to start thinking about ourselves separate from public diplomacy." This loss of a sense of mission has been reflected in the changes the Board has made.
Radio Sawa, for example, has two brief, bulletin-style newscasts in the hour. The rest is American pop and Arabic music, including, according to Sawa's progenitor, Broadcasting Board Governor Norman Pattiz, "everyone from Eminem to J.Lo to Britney Spears." Mr. Pattiz told the New Yorker that "it was MTV that brought down the Berlin Wall," a statement of breathtaking ignorance. In October 2002, Chairman Tomlinson approvingly quoted his Naval Academy graduate son: Britney Spears's "music represents the sounds of freedom." Based upon this extraordinary assumption, the Board of Governors transformed the substantive programming of VOA's and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Farsi services into another mostly music station modeled on Sawa. The war of ideas has been demoted to the battle of the bands.
The Primacy of Reason
Instead of respectfully appealing to the mind as recommended by the Declaration of Independence, out of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, the new nearly all-music formats pander to another part of the human anatomy. The act of condescension implicit in this new format is not lost on the very part of the audience that we should wish to influence the most--those who think.
One of the facile explanations for why U.S. government broadcasting has been reoriented to huge youth audiences and away from elites is that "democracy is a mass movement"--a tautology that overlooks the fact that mass movements are formed and led by leaders who think. The Federalist was not the result of a mass movement, but the foundation for one. Those who worry over the moral health of their own societies despise the vulgar part of American popular culture. Since that part of American culture is already available in their societies, why should it be officially reinforced by a U.S. government broadcast? Becoming the caricature of ourselves is bad U.S. public diplomacy.
If we want the world to be reasonable, we had better give it our reasons. The primacy of reason in Western thought is the principal cause of its success in developing science and constitutional government, both of which may be said to emanate from natural law. The primacy of reason is also the source of tolerance, as only reasonable people can "reason" together over even fundamental differences.
Many strains and schools of Islam are open to reason in this way (indeed, this view was often dominant during Islam's golden age). A successful public diplomacy would support their advancement and encourage, through third parties (since non-Muslims are not welcome as direct interlocutors in this debate), the resuscitation of natural law thinking in the Islamic world. This may sound like an abstruse endeavor, but without it, as many Muslims know, there is no hope for the Islamic Umma to enter the modern world. The radical Islamists are violently opposed to Muslim thinkers who espouse a development of Islam's dormant natural law tradition because it represents a potent threat to them from within Islam itself. It is exactly based upon such thinking that we must facilitate the creation and reinforcement of an anti-totalitarian social and intellectual network throughout the Islamic world.
Organizing for the Long Haul
Today, there is no single government institution whose sole responsibility is the conduct of the war of ideas. As a result, no government agency feels responsible for it. This mission used to belong to the United States Information Agency, which at the height of the Cold War had some 10,000 employees (including foreign nationals) and a $1 billion budget. After the end of the Cold War, USIA's functions were dispersed to the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. Within the State Department, public diplomacy functions were further dispersed to regional and other bureaus, making coordination and control by the new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs problematic at best.
This is structurally dysfunctional in several ways. Diplomacy and public diplomacy often conflict. Diplomacy deals in government to government contacts. It may at times require support for an authoritarian regime, while at the same time public diplomacy may be cultivating support for democracy in that country. The State Department does not, and should not be expected to, give priority to public diplomacy. The State Department should concentrate on the implementation of the broad range of the president's policies. Public diplomacy should concentrate on the longer-range goal of winning the war of ideas.
We need a central U.S. government institution within which policy, personnel, and budget can be deployed coherently to implement a multifaceted strategy to fight the war of ideas over an extended period of time. Without it, the U.S. will remain largely absent from the field. In this time of crisis, a new USIA-like organization should be created that can articulate and promulgate American ideals to the world and counter hostile propaganda. This new cabinet-level communications agency, independent of the State Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA, could maintain a strategic focus on aiding Muslim liberals and moderates, and not get lost in daily "spin" control. It would be staffed by people who know substantively what the "war of ideas" is about and have the regional expertise to operate across the Muslim world and in other vital regions. Its director should report to the president.
Currently, annual U.S. public diplomacy expenditures approximate McDonald's global budget for promoting its burgers. This is roughly half of what Saudi Arabia has spent yearly for the past two decades to spread Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world and here. This $1.4 billion (1/365th of the Pentagon's budget) is grotesquely inadequate and needs to be trebled for starters.
If our troops were sent into battle without proper arms or ammunition, we would be rightly outraged at this unconscionable and deadly negligence. They offer, for our sakes, the last full measure of devotion, and we understand that we owe them the last full measure of support. It is no less unconscionable--and no less deadly--to send them into battle without explaining the cause for which they are fighting to both our enemies and our friends.
This year marks the centennial of Hilaire Belloc’s curious book The Servile State. Recent commentators have been unsure where to place this volume on the ideological spectrum. In the Liberty Fund edition, Robert Nisbet labels Belloc a “libertarian Catholic,” a writer taking his inspiration from the nineteenth century’s Cardinal Newman and Lord Acton.[1] In his biography of Belloc, Joseph Pearce also terms his subject’s creed “essentially libertarian.”[2] Such labels, though, imply a respect for free-market capitalism that simply cannot be found in The Servile State. Rather, Belloc deemed “the capitalist state” both “unstable” and deadly: “If you left men completely free under a capitalist system, there would be so heavy a mortality from starvation as would dry up the sources of labor in a very short time.”[3] And he went on to advocate the use of state power, particularly the power of differential taxation, to dismantle big corporations, to thoroughly soak the rich, and to massively redistribute their property to those without any.[4]
Considering that agenda, other biographers have labeled Belloc a kind of socialist.[5] They cast his political-economic agenda as “childishly simple” and attractive primarily to “shaggy William-Morrisy idealists,” precursors to the Hippies of the 1960s.[6] In reality, though, Belloc condemned public ownership of property and indicted the political order of early twentieth-century Britain for introducing a new kind of slavery into the world.
Such confusion, especially among conservative readers, also attends Richard Weaver’s small book Ideas Have Consequences[7] and for the same reason. The titles of these volumes are wonderfully adaptable to the vacuous form of discourse common to early twenty-first-century American conservatism. It seems clear that few contemporary conservative pundits who cite these titles have actually read them; fewer still have understood them. For the key to the two books is a common reading of history and an implicit common agenda. Simply put, both Belloc and Weaver saw Europe’s High Middle Ages (circa A.D. 1250) as an era when human society embodied inspiring ideals; and they saw philosophical nominalism, scientific logic, and capitalism (properly defined) as the modern enemies of those social ideals.
Belloc insisted that the critical parts, or cells, of this good society were productive families, secure in their property. The whole objective of his political economy was to break down the corruptions of modern capitalism and socialism, and re-establish families in working homes set on land in freehold tenure. His models were the artisans and the free peasants of the High Middle Ages, a community held together by the Christian church and a religiously infused aristocracy attentive to its duties. To be understood, The Servile State must be read through this lens, one rarely used by Tea Party enthusiasts or talk-show pundits.
Building on the Insights of Pope Leo XIII
Hilaire Belloc was clear that the inspiration for his analysis in The Servile State was Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. On the one hand, this document was “modern,” representing the Roman Catholic Church’s readiness to engage—rather than simply denounce—the new urban-industrial age and the place of wage laborers within it. On the other hand, Rerum Novarum was “reactionary,” for its program aimed at restoring a social-economic order that resembled—in its most important components—that of the High Middle Ages.
For example, the encyclical was agrarian in its insistence that all wealth derived from the land: “the earth, even though apportioned among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, in as much as there is not one who does not sustain life from what the land produces.” Even those who possessed no soil contributed their labor. In consequence, “it may truly be said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one’s own land, or from some toil, some calling, which is paid for either in the produce of the land itself, or on that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth.”[8]
Leo also affirmed the theory of “labor property,” rooted in the “law of nature.” He wrote:
Now, when man thus turns that activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates—that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality.
It was “just” that the laborer possess what he had made, and no one had standing to violate that right.[9]
The “natural and original right of marriage” and “the principle purpose of marriage ordained by God’s authority from the beginning”—namely, to “increase and multiply”—were also linked to the physicality of home, tools, and land: “The right of property . . . must in likewise belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family.” Indeed, this right was “all the stronger” as it found “a wider expression in the family group.” The ability to pass on resources for survival to children through inheritance was also important: “in no other way can a father effect this except by the ownership of productive property.”[10]
It was in this context that Leo rejected “the main tenet of socialism, [the] community of goods,” because it “would violate a natural right and introduce confusion and disorder into the commonweal.” Indeed, private ownership should “be held sacred and inviolable.” However, this meant something other than merely protecting the assets of the relatively few who—circa 1912—actually owned productive property. Rather, as Leo explained, “the law . . . should favor ownership, and its policy should be to induce as many as possible of the people to become owners.” This would also be the solution to “the social question” of the age: “If working people can be encouraged to look forward to obtaining a share in the land,” then “the gulf between vast wealth and sheer poverty will be bridged over.”[11]
The Development of the Capitalist State
Belloc’s project in The Servile State was to analyze how that “gulf” had emerged, what had been the consequences, and how the elements of a good society might be put back together again. An important component of this task was to reframe history, in order to understand how a system of ordered liberty and widely dispersed property had come to an end. Belloc began the story shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Between A.D. 500 and 1000, he said, the Christianized Europeans—just like the pagan Romans before them—took slavery for granted. However, slaves were no longer “made” by conquest. Rather, “it was poverty that made the slave,” as individuals or families accepted slavery as an alternative to indigence. There was no organized protest against the system based on conscience. Rather, owners and slaves alike accepted slavery as an inevitable aspect of the human condition.
The end of European slavery, according to Belloc, came through “the experiment called the Christian church.” While no church dogma explicitly condemned slavery, the Christian emphasis on spiritual equality undermined its premises. At a physical level, the emergence of the autonomous villa, or estate, eventually rooted the slave. Over time, an implicit bargain emerged between lord and slave family: the latter would be attached to a particular section of land, would pay the lord a fixed amount of crop (or, later, a customary fee), and would retain the balance for consumption or private sale. By A.D. 900, the market in men had come to an end. About the same time, cities began to re-emerge as trading centers. Craft guilds developed as self-governing enterprises to control competition among artisans, assuring good quality, “fair” prices, and secure incomes. Under these circumstances, there could be neither capitalist nor proletarian. Indeed, by A.D. 1250, a well-developed “distributive system” existed in Central and Western Europe (including Britain), with three forms of labor: the serf, secure in his position, who paid regular but limited dues and services fixed by long custom; the freeholder peasant, who supported rulers through taxes; and the guildsman.
All three types of labor also shared in the common property of villages, where rights to graze a cow or gather acorns and firewood were well defined and zealously protected. This was essentially an agrarian system: “Then, as now, the soil and its fixtures were the basis of all wealth.” As Belloc summarized: “all three between them were making for a society which should be based upon the principle of property. All, or most—the normal family—should own. And on ownership the freedom of the state should repose.” It was true that co-operative bodies, such as guilds and religious fraternities, placed certain restraints on personal economic liberty. However, this was for the preservation of a greater liberty resting on real economic democracy.[12]
The end of the medieval-distributist order came in the sixteenth century, when there arose, according to Belloc, “the dreadful moral anarchy which goes by the name of capitalism.” While most economic historians trace the origin of this economic ideology in Britain to the eighteenth century, Belloc insisted that the change was much older. And in the course of three centuries, it transformed Britain from a land of owners into (by 1912) a place where a third of the people were indigent and 95 percent were dispossessed of all capital and land.[13]
Capitalism emerged through “the deliberate action of men, evil will in a few, and apathy of will among the many.” The first stage came in the 1530s, an “artificial revolution of the most violent kind,” involving the seizure of monastic lands by King Henry VIII. Prior to this revolution, about a third of England’s land belonged to the squires or county lords; a third belonged to free peasants; and a third to church entities. Most of the land that Henry confiscated, as part of his “Reformation,” eventually wound up in the hands of the squires, who now emerged as a powerful, effectively uncontrolled economic oligarchy. In the 1640s, this group eliminated the monarchy as a threat to its power. The same small oligarchy controlled Parliament and used Enclosure Acts and a Statute of Frauds to chase free peasants off their customary lands and to seize the village commons for consolidation into corporate-style farms.[14]
Few Property Owners, Many Dispossessed Workers
Reflecting on this startling departure from orthodox history, Belloc concluded that by 1700, “England had already become capitalist,” with “a vast section of her population” proletarianized. It was this change, he insisted, and not the later Industrial Revolution, “which accounts for the terrible social condition in which we find ourselves today.” The introduction of industrial processes—Watt’s condensor, Hargrave’s spinning jenny, and King’s flying shuttle—were not the causes of monopoly. By the time they appeared, England had already been captured by an oligarchy. If these inventions had arrived in the thirteenth century, Belloc insisted, they “would have blest and enriched mankind” and would have been organized on a cooperative basis. Instead, they fostered still further consolidation through the trusts; such economic combinations brought “the ruin of the smaller competition through secret conspiracies entered into by the larger men, and supported by the secret force of the state.”[15]
Socialism emerged in the nineteenth century as a movement to counter the oligarchy. However, “the effect of socialist doctrine upon capitalist society is [actually] to produce a third thing different from either of its two begetters—to wit, the servile state.”
This was not meant just as a criticism of the modern welfare state, as many conservatives now suppose. Rather, The Servile State marked “the re-establishment of slavery as a necessary component of capitalism.” More specifically, the Servile State existed when ownership of the means of production “by a few” came into “stable equilibrium by the establishment of compulsory labor legally enforceable upon those who do not own the means of production for the advantage of those who do.”[16] What did Belloc specifically mean by these claims?
He saw capitalist society dividing into two classes: a small number of free citizens who owned productive property and a dispossessed majority who were masters only of their labor and who had no control over capital or land. The Servile State develops as the ownership class and the government converge around the goal of security. In this form of state capitalism, government provides to the free “security” in their property and profits, rent and interest. For the property-less unfree, the government guarantees security in subsistence. In exchange for a surrender of economic autonomy and for acceptance of permanent status as wage-laborers, the unfree gain a minimum wage which provides “sufficiency and security,” workmen’s compensation insurance which cements a new form of inferior status, and means-tested unemployment and sickness insurance which reinforces their status as proletarians. The inevitable consequence of these measures, Belloc argued, was compulsory labor: the expectation that all unfree adults would be in the wage-labor market. State schooling reinforces the process: “Roughly speaking, it is the generation brought up under the Education Acts of the last forty years which has grown up definitely and hopelessly proletarian.”[17] Notably, the children of the unfree learned that property ownership was beyond them, that they must think of themselves as wage earners alone.
Belloc neatly summarized the new servile order: “Subject the proletarian, as a proletarian, and because he is a proletarian, to special laws. Clothe me, the capitalist, as a capitalist, and because I am a capitalist, with special converse duties under those laws.” Laborers accept this surrender “of a mere legal freedom” because the Servile State provides “the very real prospect of having enough and not losing it.” Indeed, Belloc acknowledges that in strict terms of material welfare, the newly enslaved may be better off than if they owned property and were responsible for their own support. Partly for this reason, Belloc concluded that the strains of capitalism would relax “and the community will settle down upon the servile basis which was its foundation before the advent of the Christian faith, from what that faith slowly weaned it, and to which in the decay of the faith it naturally returns.”[18]
The Distributist Alternative
How might a community escape this end? In The Servile State, Belloc offered little practical guidance. The clear alternative was rebuilding a social-economic order featuring widely distributed property. However, “Will man want to own? . . . Can I discover any relics of the cooperative instinct . . . ?” Most of the unfree, Belloc mused, seemed content in their servility. Owning property meant bearing responsibility for its protection and maintenance and facing many risks, without guarantee of reward. In comparison, the Servile State offered a meager but secure level of subsistence: a genial form of slavery.[19] Most modern men wanted income, the consumption of cheap, industrial goods, and the security of state welfare, not the challenges of property.
It would be in his subsequent The Restoration of Property that Belloc laid out a fairly complete distributist program of reform. Family freedom, he said, required “a jealous watch against, and destruction of, monopoly” and “the safeguarding of inheritance, especially the inheritance of small patrimonies.” The goal was “a society in which property is well distributed and so large a proportion of the families in the state severally own and therefore control the means of production as to determine the general tone of society.” Controversially, Belloc reasoned that since the architects of the Servile State had used law and police powers to build their regime, from Enclosure Acts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the welfare measures of the early twentieth, “in this attempt to restore Economic Freedom, the powers of the State must be invoked.” This would include protection against “direct rapine” and from “the exaggeration of competition.” Guild-like structures should be empowered and official machinery created to foster the propagation of small property.[20]
Regarding specifics, Belloc favored the use of differential taxes to redistribute property. For example, he would tax “chain” retailers so that one company could run no more than a dozen stores. He would handicap department stores, like Harrod’s, in a similar way. A “turnover tax” would be imposed on large wholesalers; small, family-held firms would be tax-free. Large industrial plants would face a tax on power used; artisans would enjoy protection and subsidized credit. Electricity and the internal combustion engine—both favorable to family-scale production—would be encouraged; steam and water power would be taxed. Agricultural land would be restored to families: “there must be a radical difference in the burdens imposed upon the land occupied, as land (according to our view) should be occupied, by a human family living thereon, and land occupied by others from whom the owners draw tribute.” State policy should support subsistence farming and “privilege” this peasantry “as against the diseased society around it.” Taxes on real estate transactions should “make it easy for the smaller man to buy land from the richer man and difficult for the larger man to buy from the smaller man.” Belloc noted that medieval guilds had not entirely disappeared; doctors and lawyers, for example, still maintained guild-like structures that controlled entry into the professions, mandated certain forms of training, and the like. The trade unions, which bore a “proletarian spirit,” should be replaced by similar guild structures that again controlled quality, regulated training, and set just prices.”[21]
While the sweep of Belloc’s public-policy agenda would cause mass heart failure at a modern Tea Party rally, he insisted that his project was properly labeled reactionary. He sought the method:
by which a reaction against Capitalism and its product, Communism, may be begun . . . . The main task remains not that of elaborating machinery for the reaction toward right living, but of forwarding the spirit of that reaction in a society which has almost forgotten what property and its concomitant freedom means.[22]
Policy Insights for Today
Is The Servile State, with its strong whiffs of medievalism, actually relevant to America, circa 2012? The answer is yes. Certainly, the financial crisis of 2008 and its consequences underscored the reality and perils of a servile economy. The vast majority of Americans put their faith in wages, retirement accounts resting on stocks and bonds, and the government safety net. Faith in all three has been shaken by subsequent events, just as Belloc would have predicted. Jobs were lost; the decline in real wages—evident since the 1970s—accelerated. Individual Retirement Accounts proved to be fragile, ephemeral forms of private property; as the old saying went, you can’t eat a stock certificate. And the government safety net revealed many holes, sure to become wider and more numerous as lawmakers deal with yawning federal and state budget deficits.
All the same, was not the “housing bubble” the cause of the Panic of 2008? And was it not a consequence, in turn, of the distributist goal of delivering widespread home ownership? Could not Belloc’s very scheme be indicted as the cause of current economic woes?
If still alive, Belloc would probably give three answers. First, he never claimed that everyone should own property. Even under the best of cultural circumstances, many were unfit to bear the responsibilities involved. He certainly would not have approved of issuing mortgages to persons without the means to pay for them. Second, Belloc would have objected to the very nature of the modern American housing market. Laws favoring home ownership should have the purpose of settling families in proper structures and building stable communities. In America, however, home ownership has become in large measure a method of speculative investment. This is the very antithesis of distributist principles. And third, Belloc would have stressed that distributists never sought just home ownership. The goal was to place families in productive homes, with small workshops, loom rooms, food-preservation facilities, chicken coops, and gardens as the norm. Today, he would have added home offices, computer rooms, home-schooling rooms, and so on. The typical American suburban home—commonly prohibited by zoning laws and restrictive covenants from housing any kind of productive work—is simply not part of the distributist vision.
Today, a chastened American population is rediscovering the merits of property ownership, home production, and true liberty. The home-schooling revolution led the way, showing how families could reclaim a vital endeavor from the industrialized maws of public education. Family gardens have returned; so have chicken coops: for proof, examine Backyard Poultry magazine. The home computer and the Internet have opened remarkable opportunities for small home businesses; and the number of such enterprises has climbed sharply during the last twenty years.
From Aristotle to Thomas Jefferson to contemporary writers such as Wendell Berry, the linkage of property ownership and a vital home economy to true liberty and security has endured in the political vision of those who cherish liberty and the family. Whereas raw capitalism ends up in an unholy alliance with collectivism known as the Servile State, the distributism of Hilaire Belloc delivers an economy fit for families. Far from being just a reactionary medievalist, Belloc actually represents the most prescient of analysts and guides to a sustainable and child-rich future.
Dr. Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, is professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
Articles this long may satisfy your over-blown ego but they do little to state what is actually going on in America. Thank you for the dis-service, comrade.
With all due respect, these articles are spot on in describing where we have arrived at in our nation at this time.
I would further add that on should also look at the Yuri Bezmenov video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4
After reading these two lengthly articles and watching Bezmenovs warning you will have a different appreciation for where we are.
The articles are too long to be of much use to Americans even if the authors are correct.
To sum it up, Obama/Clinton are too busy pushing sodomy and global warming to think of anything else.
As to Clinton, add lining her pockets.
Rediscovering and going through the arduous task of restoring the ideas which were understood by ordinary citizens in the early days of America is a sometimes thankless job.
Most of us long for a rediscovery and restoration of the ideas of liberty among us, but are not able, or willing, to promote and protect them for future generations.
Freedom is at risk, our grandchildren's future is at stake, and, if their liberty is to be secured, we must strive to become as informed as the ordinary citizens Alexis de Tocqueville visited in the American wilderness of the 1830's, whom he described in the following manner:
"It cannot be doubted that in the United States the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of the democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I believe, where the in struction which enlightens the understanding is not separated from the moral education ...." The American citizen, he said, "..will inform you what his rights are and by what means he exercises them .. In the United States, politics are the end and aim of education ... every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is taught, moreover, the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution .... it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon .... It is difficult to imagine the incredible rapidity with which thought circulates in the midst of these deserts [wilderness]. I do not think that so much intellectual activity exists in the most enlightened and populous districts of France." - Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"<
I loved reading this article.
If the articles are too long for Americans to read and understand, then what does that mean for America, the only guardian of these truths? I hope you are wrong. I fear you are right.
And if you are right, a dark age approaches.
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