Why are you looking at me that way? Haven't you ever met a man named "Hilaire"?

I’ve just finished reading Hilaire Belloc’s The Servile State. His main argument is that Capitalism is an unstable economic structure which must, sooner or later, settle into a more stable economic structure. The two possibilities for stable structures are slavery and property, and the one we are rapidly descending toward is slavery.

I’m not 100% on board with his argument on the necessary development of capitalism, but I find that anyone who tries to predict the future is very lucky to get even one thing right, and he does a great job of describing the development of such systems as minimum wages, social security, and some dynamics between “labor” and “capital” that had not yet begun in 1912 when he published his book.

The very best part of the book is the beginning where Belloc defines his terms. And the best distinction he makes, or the one most eye-opening to me anyway, is the distinction between political and economic freedom.

Political and economic freedom

Political freedom is what we usually mean when we talk about, well, freedom in the political realm. It’s the freedom to take part in government. It includes such things as freedom of speech, some sort of franchise such as the ability to vote or to serve in public office, and freedom to bring one’s case to court for a fair trial.

Economic freedom is the ability to buy or sell without constraint. This includes both buying and selling products and services, so it includes selling one’s labor. That is, it includes the freedom to hire oneself out – or to not hire oneself out.

Now, the freedom to not hire yourself out depends on the ability to go into business for yourself. That is to say, you have to possess the means to produce some good or provide some service directly, on your own behalf, rather than contributing to someone else’s products or services. As Belloc puts it, you must have either land or capital or both.

If you have land, you can plant your own crops and feed yourself, theoretically, without dependence on anyone else. If everybody did this we would lose most of what we call “civilization,” but we would certainly not have to worry about unemployment or political strife.

If you have tools – and today, tools could include anything from your own forge, hammer, and anvil to your own computer and printer – you are able, theoretically, to produce good products for your own use or for sale, again without dependence on anybody else.

If you lack land or capital, that is, if you lack the means to produce goods, then you lack economic freedom. “Wage slavery” is more than a catchy phrase: it describes your actual condition. You are not free to withhold your labor from another or to use it according to your own judgment.

Capitalism, according to Belloc

Now, by Belloc’s definition, “Capitalism” is that state of affairs where a few members of society own most of the means of production, and a large portion of society are dispossessed of the means of production and therefore must hire themselves to the owners. This would seem to be a fair description of America at the beginning of the 21st century: most of us work for a company or corporation, and the assumption is that you will earn your bread as an employee rather than as an independent producer.

That is why the political mantra has been “Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!” rather than “Work! Work! Work!” We are assuming that we need somebody to hire and pay us for our labor, because our labor is about the only thing we have to sell.

Now, I don’t think that Belloc is saying that hiring oneself out to another is necessarily a bad thing – so long as you are free to choose whether and to whom you hire yourself. And one of the many problems with our economic system is that people are reduced to saying, “I’ll take any job I can get.” We are forced to place ourselves on the auction block and beg people to bid on us. We could almost be called “productivity prostitutes” as much as “wage slaves.”

The solution that brings human freedom, usually called distributism, is for more people to own their own means of production. That is, that you have something to contribute to society, by which you can put food on your own table and clothes on your own children, without being forced to work for somebody else. This would be a world full of entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Belloc notes that, until the sixteenth century, most of Europe was structured this way; but that world is nearly lost.

I don’t see things as quite so desperate as does Belloc. For example, many people are responding to the current economic crisis by starting their own business, by re-acquiring their own means of production. But it’s true that this is still a small movement in a very large society. And it will be quite an uphill battle to move from our current system to one where most people are free to work for themselves if they should so choose.

I’m still thinking about what practical steps to take, but I’m increasingly convinced by the distributist ideal. At the very least, it seems to be an attempt to see government and the market at the service of the human person, rather than the other way around.

How could you not love that face?

Don’t worry, I’m not going all gushy on myself. Nor do I expect you to.

So one of the things I do to escape from stress is to read about the history of philosophy. So far I have a rough knowledge of Western thought from the Greeks up through about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and a couple bits of Muslim, Indian, and Chinese philosophy from various parts of history.

Anyway, I was reading about John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265 – 1308) in Frederick Copleston’s masterpiece, and I came across the following provocative passage:

Scotus often gave a peculiar stamp or emphasis to the elements he adopted from tradition. Thus in his treatment of the relation of the will to intellect he emphasized freedom rather than love, though he held, it is true, to the superiority of love to knowledge….

This helped me to articulate something I’ve known for some time but have never quite managed to say clearly.

Let me ask you a question. What does your will do? What is the action of your will? What is its purpose?

Okay, that was three questions, or at least, three ways of asking one question. Sorry about that. But I hope you have an answer.

I’m guessing your answer is something like, “My will chooses things. It’s purpose is to choose freely, to be free.” And that is a typical modern answer. In fact, in the twenty-first century, it’s hard to consider that there might be another way to answer the question.

But, as you might guess if you’ve read enough of this blog, the medievals would have answered very differently. They would have said, the act of the will is to love, that is, to pursue what is good. And they would have had almost as much trouble understanding our emphasis on freedom as we have understanding their emphasis on the necessity of choosing good.

Getting medieval on you

Here’s how it works, from a medieval point of view: the human mind has certain powers or “faculties” that perform different tasks. The senses apprehend particular objects – colors, textures, sounds, etc. – and understand the objects of the physical world. The intellect apprehends the essence of those objects, that is, it understands that this four-legged yapping creature is in some way the same kind of thing as that four-legged yapping creature; they are both dogs, even though they are distinct individuals. In other words, the intellect sees the nature of a thing.

The intellect also sees the implications of nature. Just as it makes connections between individual things in the physical world, it makes connections between ideas. This aspect of the intellect is called reason, and it allows us to form an argument and to examine our ideas logically. The intellect is able to evaluate both things in the world and ideas in our minds.

Now, both the senses and the intellect have a power that the medievals called “appetites”. The appetite of the senses is, well, the things we call appetites today: desires for things like food, pleasure, comfort. Sensible appetites motivate us to pursue sensible goods. The intellectual appetite, though, motivates us to pursue intellectual goods, like truth and beauty and the common welfare of society. This appetite is the will. The will, by its very nature as an appetite, is necessarily ordered toward choosing good things. In fact, it was taken for granted in ancient and medieval times that we are incapable of choosing evil for its own sake; it is impossible to choose anything unless we see something good in it.

In other words, to know something, anything, led immediately to a desire for the good of that thing. That’s the sense in which to know me – or anyone else, for that matter – is to love me.

Freedom!

But because the will is a power of the intellect, it is able to use rational argument and to see different ways of achieving the good that it necessarily desires. This power is called liberum arbitrium, which is Latin for “free choice” but has traditionally been translated “free will.” It is the ability to choose the means to pursue the good.

For example, it is good for me to be healthy. One necessary aspect of health is regular exercise. But there are lots of ways to exercise: I could ride a bicycle, do pilates, swim laps in a pool, lift weights, take a walk with a friend, and so on. My will is bound to desire health; unless I’m obtuse, I recognize that exercise is necessary to health, but I’m free to choose how I’ll go about getting exercise based on what I enjoy, and what works best for my body type.

I’m also free to choose some other aspect of health as more important, such as getting my diet under control or making my sleep schedule regular. Maybe I need to focus on mental health before physical health. And maybe I’ve twisted my understanding of health so much that all I see is the need for pleasure and comfort. The point is, the will seeks what is good; freedom seeks the ways to achieve that good.

That’s how the medievals saw things, up until John Duns Scotus. Since then, the idea has been growing that freedom, rather than love of the good, is central to the will. It wasn’t long before people began to claim that the will could choose either good or evil with equal freedom, even though the only way medieval people could see to choose something evil was if the will was bound by a kind of slavery. Eventually, the idea that civil laws, and even moral teaching, would try to impose goodness on the will became repugnant to the ideal of freedom. Freedom was exalted as the highest value, even over good.

I can see some reasons for this line of argument; it’s not entirely irrational. But I think it makes a small mistake at the beginning, and leads to disastrous consequences. Freedom cannot itself be good without being one good among many; and freedom is not the standard or definition of good. Rather, the only way freedom can truly be free is to place itself at the service of love.

"But I shot a man in Reno..." or did I?

Have I mentioned how much I love the book I’m reading? The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers. And it’s not just because the author’s last name sounds just like “pink hairs,” either!

A history lesson

The middle section of the book gives a quick history of major ideas in morality from Plato to the present. The very short version is that in the fourteenth century (that’s AD 1301-1400) an English Franciscan named William of Ockham (famous for “Ockham’s razor”) began pushing the theory that the will was more important than the intellect, and that freedom was the greatest of all goods – greater even than truth.

Ockham’s ideas caught on, and in the next couple hundred years transformed the way people thought about ethics and morality.

Instead of being about the pursuit of goodness, happiness, and excellence, morality became a struggle between freedom and law, between choice and obligation.

Don’t impose your morality on me!

There’s a lot packed into that history, but something that struck me very personally was that law is something imposed on me from outside, whereas virtue is something I develop from within myself.

Now, being a basically lazy man, I’ve spent vast portions of my life waiting for somebody else to make me do things. I’d put off homework till the teacher sat me down and watched me do it. At work, I would only get things done if the boss was around to make me look busy. Heck, even at home, I only bother to pick the place up if there’s company coming over.

In other words, I’ve been defining my freedom as avoiding the imposition of law – and I associated doing anything at all with the obligation of law. Even things I know are good for me, I need someone to “make” me do them.

The approach of virtue is altogether different. It recognizes that freedom is at the service of a person’s ability to act, to do stuff. And it is a person’s mind that figures out what’s good to do. The will follows the mind and moves us into action.

Right, totally abstract. Let me see if I can give an example.

An example

So I’m sitting on my bed looking at the mess that is my bedroom. Papers piling up on the desk. Clothes strewn all over the chairs and the corner of the bed – not yet on the floor, but that’ll come soon if I don’t do anything about it. A bowl and a glass from when I ate lunch in my room a week and a half ago.

But something in me says, I don’t have to clean my room. Nobody’s going to make me. You’re not the mom of me!

So, instead of cleaning my room, I read a book. Yep, The Sources of Christian Ethics. And it occured to me that I could choose to clean my room – not because someone was forcing me to, but because it was good to. I could clean my room simply because I enjoy having a clean room.

So I stood up and started clearing off my desk.

Those who cling to freedom will lose it

It’s ironic that, by clinging to a false freedom – refusing to let anybody “make” me clean my room – I actually lost a true freedom: the ability to clean my room and to enjoy it. But that’s what happens when a good thing gets put in the wrong place.

Freedom is not the highest good, and is not something to be grasped with both hands. If we hold it lightly, and use it to grow in virtue, then it blossoms itself and makes everything we do truly free.