Hilaire Belloc is lauded as a prophet of our times by Father C. John McCloskey at ZENIT in an excellent interview here. Remember Belloc's immortal words:
Hilaire Belloc wrote:HOW CATHOLICISM STANDS TODAY is obviously a vital matter both to the man who recognizes it for the salvation of the world, and to the man who regards it as a mortal poison in society. But it is also a vital matter to any neutral observer who has enough history to know that religion is at the root of every culture, and that on the rise and fall of religions the great changes of society have depended ...As I have noted before, a society or culture that expels the Judeo-Christian ethos in particular and the Magisterium of the Catholic Church in particular - regardless of its ostensible self-understanding, as per Belloc above - is not a secular society. There never was and never shall be such a human culture. There may be a momentary void created by the expelling, but into such a vacuum will within 2-3 generations or faster come a new form of our human default religion, paganism, replete with all its usual characteristics (cf. the works of Burke Satinover cited in the link).The form of any society ultimately depends upon its philosophy, upon its way of looking at the universe, upon its judgment of moral values: that is, in the concrete, upon its religion.For whether it calls its philosophy by the name of "religion" or no, into what is, in practice, a religion of some kind, the philosophy of any society ultimately falls. The ultimate source of social form is the attitude of the mind; and at the heart of every culture is a creed and code of morals: expressed or taken for granted.
Phillip Longman at Mercatornet writes on the comeback of yeomanry:Today, there is a strong correlation around the world between adherence to traditional Christian, Islamic or Judaic religious values and high fertility. The result is an emerging world in which the ancient, patriarchal values of these religions are becoming stronger, while secularism suffers demographic decline.For those of us convinced of the merits of subsidiarity - what Father Vincent McNabb, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc called "distributivism" - Longman's words bring hope.
The current world economic crisis will most likely compound the trend, for a variety of reasons. The widespread loss of jobs and retirement savings gives a survival advantage to those who still have abundant human capital upon which to rely, specifically, strong, largely self-sufficient families in tight-knit, high-trust, self-financing communities. Under currently unfolding conditions, the “fittest” are those who invest heavily and successfully in building up strong families and local community support networks.
Many people may try to contend with their financial and economic losses by forming secular communes. History suggests, however, that families and communities bound by common blood and religious faith are more likely to succeed in fostering the necessary sacrifice of individualism and consumerism.
These changes we are living through are very scary, but they also, I think, have the long-term promise of restoring the economic basis of the natural family and renewing society generally. Seeing more specifically how this future might unfold requires dwelling briefly on a few poorly remembered traditions from the past.
In a recent issue of Foreign Policy Magazine, I have published a brief article entitled The Return of Yeomanry. This word “yeomanry” is now obscure in English, and may be impossible to translate into many other languages. But particularly in America during the 18th and 19th century, it stood for a clear ideal of human organization, which was small-scale production centered on a self-sufficient family unit.
One of America’s most prominent founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote frequently the superior virtue of the country’s then substantial yeomanry, which mostly comprised family farmers who owned their own land and small family business owners. Jefferson’s vision of America’s future was that widespread family ownership of small scale productive would remain the dominant form of social and economic organization, and that the influence of both Big Business and Big Government would be held in check..More>>
Chill October (1870) - John Everett Millais
Biographer Robert Speaight (Life of Hilaire Belloc, 1957) relates Hilaire Belloc's criticism of H. G. Well's History of the World. As a mental experiment, try inserting a few of our contemporary writers where I place parentheses:(Wells's) ephemeral fallacies - religion without dogma; the Catholic Church invading Europe like an alien and holding it down; Wycliffe flaunting his vernacular; a priesthood of conspiring conjurers and a laity of servile dupes - these were the mental stock-in-trade of a whole mass of the English middle-classes who imagined they were in the vanguard of progress. (Wells) was their prophet; sharing their shallow antinomianism and their bumptious hopes; a typical product of the Protestant underworld ... (Wells) declared that 'Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn'.
As for (Wells's) 'dawn', Belloc did not think it would last very long, and he did not think it was the precursor of the day. It was 'the shoddy remnant of the Christian hope, and when it is gone there will return to us, not the simple paganism of a sad world, but sheer darkness: and strange things in the dark.'
