Sanity for Helen...and the Rest of Us

Hilaire Belloc was a prophet.He was, among other things, a writer of lucid and virile prose, a prose style that is at once clear, engaging, confident and straight-forward.  He was a gifted poet, with a poetic sense of melancholy and subtlety that surpassed that of his friend G.K. Chesterton; Belloc’s poems are among the most haunting and well-written of the twentieth century. He was an author of brilliantly humorous and satiric novels. He could write whimsy-with-a-purpose. His travelogue of his walking trip to Rome is a classic of the genre.  He was that rare thing, a historian with vision, a student of history who could see the forest for the trees. He was a leader of the early Distributist movement. And he was one of the most clear and penetrating thinkers of all time.But above all, Belloc was a prophet. His non-fiction work The Great Heresies is both a brilliant elucidation of the major heresies that have attacked the Catholic Church throughout history, and also the most crystal clear analysis of the modern attack that has perhaps ever been written – an analysis that not only sees the modern assault on faith for what it is, but also for what it is becoming. Belloc, in this book, recognizes and predicts the growing cruelty of the modern world, the escalation of the denial of human dignity and suffering, the growth of a pernicious atheism, the contempt for beauty, the disdain for goodness, the growing trend toward slavery to the state and to corporations, and above all the abandonment of reason.For those of you who may doubt that Reason itself is under assault, try gathering a variety of friends on Facebook and engaging them in argumentation in threads and comboxes. As a rule, the best of them will argue in circles and throw up emotional barricades to understanding another’s position—or even their own. The worst of them will use reason to prove that reason is worthy of contempt, a tool of the oppressors of sexual license and liberty. They will carry proudly the banner of unreason, or irrationality, and more, they will mock and ridicule coherent thought and definition. Belloc saw all this coming.In fact, if you really want a taste of Hilaire Belloc in person, along with a stunning lecture culled from The Great Heresies, book my one-man Belloc show which I offer through the Theater of the Word Incorporated. I have yet to perform as Belloc for anything other than a rousing standing ovation. Well, once—a matinée for a group of Catholic lady librarians, who were rather overwhelmed as they ate their moldy tuna fish sandwiches in a bright suburban conference room and wondered what the hell I was talking about.At any rate, Belloc wrote a wonderful little book called Economics for Helen. It is a primer on Distributism. I urge everyone to read it, for it’s Belloc at his best.In this book Belloc spends a lot of time defining his terms. For definition is the key to clear thinking, as Belloc knew. And on the very first page we are treated to a typical Bellocian assertion: “It is through some muddlement in this original definition of wealth that nearly all mistakes in economics are made.”Belloc then goes on, in the first few pages of this very first chapter, to tell us both what wealth is and what it is not, economically considered. He finishes with two formulae:

1. Wealth is made up, not of things, but of economic values attaching to things.2. Wealth, for the purposes of economic study, means ONLY exchange values: that is, values against which other values will be given in exchange.

Now if we follow Belloc’s reasoning in this book, and understand the strict limitation of what he means by “wealth” (it is not money, nor intangible items, for instance), then a surprisingly coherent philosophy of economics begins to open up to us. Thus, in writing for the eponymous every-girl “Helen”, Mr. Belloc makes things very clear and simple for the rest of us, too.My purpose here is not to critique this book, but just to give the reader a flavor of it and of Belloc’s method, which at times is startling—startling in its simplicity and precision of definition.For instance, in this same first chapter, he says,

The Science of Economics does not deal with true happiness nor even with well-being in material things. It deals with a strictly limited field of what is called ‘Economic Wealth,’ and if it goes outside its own boundaries it goes wrong. Making people as happy as possible is much more than economics can pretend to. Economics cannot even tell you how to make people well-to-do in material things. But it can tell you how exchangeable wealth is produced and what happens to it; and as it can tell you this, it is a useful servant.

If only every man approached every science in this way! To realize limitations, both in defining terms and in defining the scope of your inquiry would save us all so much needless bother and confusion. Economics is a tool, as any science is a tool. But we have begun to think that man serves his tools, and the tools do not serve man. We also think the tools should tell us everything, because we have deified them. When my friends on Facebook tell me that because we can not measure subatomic particles without disturbing their position, it therefore follows that uncertainty is built into the very fabric of existence and God can never be known, even imperfectly, so agnosticism is the only adequate response to all of life, they are making such a colossal blunder of thought that one staggers the way the little protons do when the scientist pokes them. We have forgotten how to think clearly, lost sight of the hierarchy that puts tools at the disposal of man. Of course economics can not tell us anything beyond what it surveys, and the more we are clear on what it is that it surveys, the more useful a science it is to us.At one time those who studied the skies thought the stars were the key to our fates; and even in modern newspapers astrologers confuse the movement and position of heavenly bodies with the mysteries of the soul. Is it surprising then, that modern economists inflate their fields of study so that we fall down in awe before the ineffable economic “laws” that we are supposedly compelled to follow? That we feel we dare not tamper with a system that is more a god than an activity of man?Distributism is a return to sanity, then, in more ways than one. It begins foremost by recognizing that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; that our economies must serve us, not us our economies. It is man who decides what happiness is and how to go about it; the tools we use to that end are, like the tools in a workbench, the better the sharper they are.And tools honed by Belloc are very sharp, as is Belloc himself.Perhaps in another article I will go into this book at length. But you’re better off reading it for yourselves; for literary criticism, like any tool, is only useful to people who don’t see it as an end in itself, but who use it as a tool or a pointer—and who then follow that pointer and go out and—of all things!—read the book.