The Individual, The Family, and Catholic Corporate Society - Dr. John Rao

[PeterII]

What's wrong with a worker owning his own tools and his own bench?

It depends.  Who did he steal it from? 

[PeterII]

This Rao guy is a totalitarian socialist who makes Hillary Clinton proud with his, "it takes a village" crap. 

I don't know anything about Mr. Rao, but in spite of Hillary Clinton's having popularized the phrase, it does take a village. We're social creatures, and we can't turn off the culture around us as if we're turning off a TV set. The culture is more like the air we breathe than an appliance we can use, or not, at whim.

Back in the day, Catholics lived in Catholic neighborhoods built around a parish Church. We could trust our neighbors to keep an eye on our kids using the same sorts of judgments and "values" that we would. Kids could go out and play, attend school, grow up and find a mate with some degree of normality and without having to go through the sort of discernment they or their parents have to today. Neighbors offered to babysit nowadays? Well, are they Buddhists or Muslim or Wiccans or Satanists or atheists? Are they practicing homosexuals who speak about homosexual sins as if they're not sins? If they found out I spank my kids or smoke in my own home, will they report me to Child Services? How much time would they let my kid watch TV at their place? And what would they think it's OK to watch? What about music? What if my kid were to ask them about sexual matters? What would they say? Doesn't the wife belong to PETA?

And for men who want their wives to stay at home and raise their children, it's inhumane the way it's done nowadays, with women stuck alone, without adults around at all, 24/7 with kids until it's time to feed the tired husband. No lady next door to have coffee and a chat with, to share work with, to watch the kids while you run to the library, etc.

This isn't how life is supposed to be. Not even close. It definitely takes a village. A village, not a government (which is what Clinton meant by the term). Radical individualists hold the individual as the be all, end all of things. Socialists do the same with government. Both are wrong: it's the family that's the heart of it all -- and families need support. Parish-based neighborhoods and extended family need to come back.

This sounds like unrealistic social engineering.  If those Catholic neighbourhoods, villages, kingdoms etc. back in the day were so great, then where did they go?  Why could they not survive Vatican II or other upheavals (King Henry VIII took a whole country)?  We need a strong Church before you can have a strong Catholic anything.

Catholics can save their souls in all sorts of societies too, whether rural or urban, rich or poor.  Just look at the rich diversity of Catholic orders.  And Catholic families are nice, but there are more than a few Traditionalists who are estranged from their families due to their beliefs.  There is no societal cookie cutter approach to saving one's soul. 

[Cambrensis]

[Rao] says, "It takes coordination by the State,"

That's a pretty selective quotation.  What he actually says is:

Greeks and Romans gave to the social authority of a monolithic State too exclusive an importance. What Catholic Christianity did---with a bit of practical historical aid from the Germanic and Slavic disruption of the ancient order of things---was threefold in character: it made it clear that the State required the corrective and transforming guidance of the supernatural authority of the Church; that other natural, non-governmental social institutions, equally subject to the teachings of the Mystical Body, were involved in the enterprise of chaining the individual's destructive tendencies; and that all of these societies, together, were ultimately intended for the positive benefit of distinct human persons and their divinization in Christ. ... it takes more than a village represented by a monolithic Church and State alone to complete nature's social influence in assisting attainment of the individual's supernatural end and simultaneously improving his temporal existence. It takes every other kind of authoritative social institution dedicated to a valid, natural or supernatural human activity involving more than one individual: varied religious organizations within the Mystical Body, diverse organs for the exercise of communal political power, fraternal and charitable associations, economic guilds, schools and universities, and many others beside them.

He's talking about the diffusion of power through a variety of autonomous institutions for the benefit of individuals.  Totalitarianism is the concentration of power in the state for the benefit of the state.

[jovan66102]

Marked.

[VoxClamantis]

This sounds like unrealistic social engineering.  If those Catholic neighbourhoods, villages, kingdoms etc. back in the day were so great, then where did they go?  Why could they not survive Vatican II or other upheavals (King Henry VIII took a whole country)?  We need a strong Church before you can have a strong Catholic anything.

It isn't "unrealistic social engineering"; it was reality. It was unrealistic social engineering that's the answer to your question "where did they go?" Read "The Slaughter ot the Cities" by E. Michael Jones:

I agree we need a strong Church before we have a strong Catholic anything, but that doesn't make what I stated any less true. The idea is a Catholic culture that forms Catholic families that live in Catholic neighborhoods centered around parishes.

Catholics can save their souls in all sorts of societies too, whether rural or urban, rich or poor.  Just look at the rich diversity of Catholic orders.  And Catholic families are nice, but there are more than a few Traditionalists who are estranged from their families due to their beliefs.  There is no societal cookie cutter approach to saving one's soul.  

Of course Catholics can save their souls in all sorts of societies, but there's riding a bike uphill, and there's riding one downhill. There are healthy societies, and there are unhealthy ones. And a "society" of atomized radical individualists such as we have now is not healthy in the least.

[Tim]

I've read quite a bit of Dr. Rao, and in a nutshell he is saying we must return to the Catholic ghetto parishes. He's a distributist, and having grown up when both were the norm I'm right there with him. In Chicago we had distributive education, and we became the greatest manufacturer of goods in the world. There was a saying then, if you can't get it made in Chicago, it can't be made. The Science of Economics has changed us to a city of MBA speculators who never do anything but make money by schemng in the markets.

There is no such thing as the Science of Economics, that is puffery. Science has applied laws which can be quantified and be reproduced, Economics can do no such thing, it's majick, black in fact.

tim

[PeterII]

He's talking about the diffusion of power through a variety of autonomous institutions for the benefit of individuals.  Totalitarianism is the concentration of power in the state for the benefit of the state.

In the passage you quoted, Rao says, "[non-governmental social institutions] were involved in the enterprise of chaining the individual's destructive tendencies"

And this is the difference:  Those non governmental institutions came about voluntarily through the actions of individuals bettering themselves, not destroying themselves.  It's subsidiarity rather than top down economic planning.  Yet Rao condemns libertarianism in the name of "authority" despite the fact that it is the libertarians who create the foundation for non governmental social institutions.  He puts the cart before the horse. 

[PeterII]

It isn't "unrealistic social engineering"; it was reality. It was unrealistic social engineering that's the answer to your question "where did they go?" Read "The Slaughter ot the Cities" by E. Michael Jones:

I haven't read this book, but know from his other work that E. Michael Jones subscribes to the labour theory of value as the basis of Catholic civilization, which is pure Marxism.  From the description of this book, it appears Jones is trying to blame a conspiracy of WASP overlords for the destruction of cities.  Yet the "urban renewal projects" that ruined cities like Detroit was undertaken by Catholics, such as mayor Cavanagh. 

I've read quite a bit of Dr. Rao, and in a nutshell he is saying we must return to the Catholic ghetto parishes. He's a distributist, and having grown up when both were the norm I'm right there with him. In Chicago we had distributive education, and we became the greatest manufacturer of goods in the world.

A Distributist who advocates ghettos?  What ever happened to getting back to the land and a worker "owning his own tools and his own bench."  Ghettos were built on the division of labour brought about by modern manufacturing. People moved from the country to be live in the cities so they could live close to factories.  This is something Distributists supposedly hate.

[Tim]

Pete in all charity you have your eyes closed. The time I spoke of was the greatest proliferation of small businesses. Everyone made a buck, because ownership was not removed from the day to day of the business. It was built up after the war, and to make a consumer good like a mix master took dozens of small shops co-ordinating to supply parts and sub-assemblies to the maker for final asembly and shipping to the sellers. This is where innovation comes from down at the bottom. The assets of those little shops were the men and their tools. The men were the sum of all the shops they worked in carrying that experience and using their imaginations to create better systems of manufacture.

I don't know where this "socialism" silliness comes from at all. Everyone made money according to their abilities. Guys with real talent and experience made a considerable amount more than average guys. There were no unions and that's one of the reasons this is history. They were called "job shops" because for whatever reason a journeyman could lock his tool box, walk out the door, and in to the next one, and negotiate a better deal, many times bringing his apprentices with him.

Owneship made sure that when they had a guy with extraordinary talent he stayed, even to the point of starting another "job shop" with him at the helm as a partner. This is the incubator for business. Start small and build on it. I know three brother I grew up with that started in their father'sbasement sharpening knives for restaurants, and grew the business to a Multi-national manufacturing concern.

They did it by hiring folks they thought could do the job and seeing they could trust them gave them larger and larger authority. Today they have operations in most of the US, Central America, South America, Europe, Middle East, and Russia. I personally know almost all of the guys running large parts of the Corporation, they all started in the their shop, from engineers, machinists, and grinders..

tim 

[Crusading Philologist]

It is precisely in discussing the individual's salvation through membership in a jointly supernatural and natural Christ and Mystical Body that we enter into the realm of social theory.

This is a good point that is often ignored. The Church as an organic union of supernatural and natural elements already tells us something about society in general, and as the ultimate society the Church serves as a metric by which other societies can be judged. I don't see why we must base our social thought on the purely secular assumptions of various political ideologies.

He's talking about the diffusion of power through a variety of autonomous institutions for the benefit of individuals.  Totalitarianism is the concentration of power in the state for the benefit of the state.

In the passage you quoted, Rao says, "[non-governmental social institutions] were involved in the enterprise of chaining the individual's destructive tendencies"

And this is the difference:  Those non governmental institutions came about voluntarily through the actions of individuals bettering themselves, not destroying themselves.  It's subsidiarity rather than top down economic planning.  Yet Rao condemns libertarianism in the name of "authority" despite the fact that it is the libertarians who create the foundation for non governmental social institutions.  He puts the cart before the horse. 

When have libertarians ever created social institutions? If anything, they destroy them. The fact that one is born into a particular family, town, class, or church restricts individual freedom, after all, and we all need to be rugged individualists. The trouble with liberals is that they have things exactly backwards. They believe that the "individual" is naturally free and that he gives up some of his freedom for the sake of safety and convenience. In reality, however, liberty is the product of a well-ordered society. The individual, and even the idea of the individual is the creation of a particular society, cannot be said to be free when he is all alone out in the "state of nature." Rather, the individual person, who always finds himself already within a particular social context that he did not choose, can be free only in a complex and balanced society in which he is protected and given purpose by multiple organic social institutions and authorities. The sort of simplified social space created by liberals who wanted to ensure the free working out of market logic actually destroys any sort of meaningful liberty because it creates a society in which the individual is left undefended from the depredations of both the market and the state.