Friday Daydreaming

In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen's guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.

Thus wrote Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. I hope to post a few thoughts on this encyclical in the coming weeks, but I certainly encourage everyone out there to give it a read and introduce themselves to the wealth of wisdom that is Catholic social doctrine. If there is one great awakening that I’ve experienced on the last few months, it is that Capitalism is intrinsically wrong-headed. I’ve always known that aspects and symptoms of our capitalist culture were amoral and even evil, but it wasn’t until recently that I began to recognize the flaws in the foundations of capitalist thought. Economists have endeavored to isolate economics from morality as a true independent science, with laws and constructs existing completely outside the sphere of moral influence. If there is to be any improvement in our capitalist culture, we must again assert the primacy of morality and bind the system to morality rather than bending our morality to the system.

As an act of pure fanciful thought and daydreaming, I ask you all on this fine Friday afternoon (or whenever you read this) to imagine a world A.) without advertising and B.) where quality was rampant. Just think about such a world. Can you really see a world without advertising? Is it less desirable to you than our own?

More on this and related topics in the coming weeks. Have a wonderful weekend and everyone read Lepanto this Sunday!

World Made by Hand

There is a new novel coming out early next year that should be extremely thought provoking - World Made by Hand. Here is a blurb from the publisher:

In the best-seller The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. With World Made By Hand Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like after these coming catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy. And the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. As the heat of summer intensifies, the residents struggle with the new way of life in a world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. A captivating, utterly realistic novel, World Made by Hand takes speculative fiction beyond the apocalypse and shows what happens when life gets extremely local.

Sounds pretty interesting to me. While I'm not a fanatic on the climate change front, my recent foray into the world of Distributism has me very interested in this novel. I love Distributist thought, but I think I'm with Kunstler that it will take a series of global catastrophes to bring that thought to the forefront of public life. It could be a total flop of a book but I think I'll give it a shot.

H/T: Veritas et Venustas