... or: Musings On Theological Socialism.
Sarah Hoyt gave an Instalanche to this X-extract blog post about the failure of the New Harmonie socialism experiment.
Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.
Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.
It collapsed almost immediately.
The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?
My feverish, coffee-starved brain made a connection into my current, deep disaffection with the Catholic Church. I instantly thought of the term, Theological Socialism. If my faith's leadership thinks everyone is going to get the same reward after we die, then why don't I go to the beach instead of Mass? Like the hard-working people in New Hamonie, I've realized that if my prelates are right, then I've been played for a chump.
They aren't right. Not at all. They are reveling in being the paymaster and totally avoiding the task of foreman.
This last weekend, I worked the men's Cursillo retreat. In the kitchen, we dished up some great meals. Many of my friends in the kitchen were from the Valley - El Centro, Calexico, etc. Like the Chicago girl who took my last name, they were all from modest means and now relatively successful. They had something to give to others because they had lived, in fits and starts, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. As Instapundit said some years ago, wealth and income are markers of behavior.
Discussing this with ChatGPT, we came to this:
(B)efore wealth can be distributed, it must be created. Before generosity can be practiced abundantly, the capacity for generosity must be developed.
Your wife and your friends from Calexico and El Centro illustrate something that gets lost when wealth is discussed exclusively in terms of inequality and redistribution.
They began with relatively little. Through years of work, discipline, delayed gratification, and sacrifice, they accumulated not merely financial resources but productive capacity. They developed skills, judgment, reliability, and habits of responsibility.
Their present generosity is made possible, in substantial part, by their earlier sacrifices.
And here's where the Catholic dimension becomes especially interesting.
The very virtues that made these people prosperous are themselves Christian virtues.
Industry, prudence, temperance, fortitude, stewardship, and perseverance are not merely economic instruments. They are moral achievements.
Of course, wealth itself is not proof of virtue; Christ's warnings about riches make that clear. But neither is wealth morally irrelevant. How someone acquired it, what sacrifices its acquisition required, and what responsibilities he subsequently assumed are legitimate subjects of moral judgment.
G. K. Chesterton said, "Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." Traditions are the hard-won lessons from the past being given to us on a silver platter.
1826 is a long time ago, long before the modern era where the transfer portal has ruined college football. Ancient Israel, which gave us the Old Testament is older even than that, before Jean-Jacques Rousseau's benighted concept of the noble savage. The people who lived through the failure of New Harmonie tried to pass along their painfully gathered wisdom in writing. So did the rabbis watching the Israelites prance around golden calves right before the smiting got real.
We ignore those and turn to socialism in all its rancid forms at our own peril.
It's a ton of fun to yap about a world of generosity and open-hearted forgiveness. It's not a lot of fun tell your staff they're going to need to work late tonight.
 |
| "Your scrolls need to be distributed to the Children of Israel tomorrow morning at 0800!" |
