A Thought Experiment

I am gratified to see that the Restoration Conversation is ongoing at Jeff and Steve's places. That's the spirit, lads.

Steve seems to be getting a little hotted up about the state of the world, writing, "What if it really is the case that the whole structure is going to collapse, and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it but slow it down a bit? What if our efforts aren’t even accomplishing that? Shouldn’t we all get out? And if we should all get out, how? It’s not a cheap transition to go from living paycheck to paycheck in the city to trying to sustain yourself on a farm out in the country."

Of course, the back-to-the-land movement has been strong among Catholic radicals for a hundred years or so. It was actually tried once or twice, with varying results. Eric Gill's little ur-hippie commune comes to mind. I don't actually find it that surprising that Catholics and hippies have the same sort of mind, having personally experienced both. The original hippie movement was not the weird Marxist thing we see now. Even without any religious foundation, there was a genuine evil to be rejected that they attempted, mostly wrongheadedly, to address.

Nonetheless, I find myself more or less against the idea of Catholic Agrarian Enclaves. I am sure I would be singing a different tune if I had children. I cannot fault the urge to take children out of this environment and am friendly with a few people in the Combermere Enclave. But I cannot help but think there is something inherently unhealthy about the isolationist instinct, even having experienced the urge myself many times. What is different about Steve's desire to pack up the kids and flee the big city and the call of the early Benedictines or the Carthusians or the Cistercians?

More about this later, but I'm afraid I cannot entirely agree with the flight response I see so often among good Catholics of my acquaintance. I have seen the results and have been less than impressed. Maybe my reticence comes only from an examination of the history of such ventures - rarely good and unless specifically monastic, often outright harmful. (Would it have been possible for Eric Gill's deviancies to have had their full play if he had not removed himself and his family from the general run of society and immersed himself in this externalized fantasy?)

I have known various types of isolationists and do not see much to recommend it. The flight from the city, the attempt to re-create a utopia, even a Catholic utopia, strikes me as something grown from the dreams of too many D&D fantasy roll playing games in early adulthood, too many day dreams and not enough commitment to the here and now. Saw this sort of thing from the hippies, from the SCAdians, even from the feminists. It just strikes me as an unhealthy thing. Tom Monaghan has the money to do it and his efforts gave me exactly the same kind of willies. It strikes me as essentially self-indulgent and self-congratulatory. A flight from discomfort and difficulty that seems born out of the modern idea that life ought to be perfect or at least mostly pain and difficulty-free. There is something essentially false about it.

Idyllism is not something that mixes well with the Catholic dedication to Things As They Are, or even trust in Divine Providence. I fear that the attempt will result only in disillusionment. For some time, my friends in Combermere were trying to talk me into moving up there and I did consider it. I was at a conference in Chicago once, heavily populated with Combermereians where they were at it again. Michael O'Brien (who really isn't a guru, no matter how much people try to make him one) said rather dryly, "There's original sin in Combermere too, Hilary."

My thought experiment is of a slightly different order, not flight and the building of a Catholic Utopian Dreamland, but a genuine restoration. An attempt to imagine what the modern world, with all the stuff we have, and without a wholesale rejection of Things As They Are, could look like if we were to insert some basic social structures that are genuinely in accord with Reality (also called "Catholic Social Doctrine"). What would this society look like if we did just a few things. (Admittely things so unlikely as to appear impossible). Like abolish legal divorce, abortion, contraception. Like abolish personal income tax. Like re-establish a Catholic education system that included guild apprenticeships.

What sort of things could we do to this society to make it better?