by Jim Beers
Must we cut taxes, or must we reduce the scope of government? Should we look to government to provide jobs, or encourage the private sector to create employment? Are we too involved in the rest of the world, or should we retreat back within our own borders? How should we relate to Moslem governments and what should we do or not do about citizenship in and entry into the United States? Should or can I talk with friends, relatives, and neighbors about any of these things or will they get mad and end future comity? I am tempted to utter the Yiddish exclamation for a cry of anguish, suffering, frustration or for help; “Oi, gevald!”
As if this were not enough, the selection of a Catholic to run as Vice-President against a Catholic Vice-President has opened another big can of worms that has been assiduously avoided for decades: what are Catholics to believe when they decide to vote? Does Catholic support for “Social Justice” concerns (more taxes for welfare, government programs and safety nets, etc.) justify or permit public support for abortion or public advocacy for same sex activities as some priests, some Bishops and the current Catholic Vice-President (and many current leading Catholic politicians) have been asserting? Or, can Catholics have legitimate misgivings and concerns about higher taxes, government welfare levels and other programs; while rejecting any justification to support abortion or same sex activities as the Catholic Vice-Presidential nominee, certain priests, and some Bishops (and many other Catholic politicians) are asserting? Priests seem largely silent on the matter at the moment while Bishops that formerly advocated increasing the scope of government to help the poor are now fighting to restrain governmental reach in order to keep Catholic schools, hospitals and services open after being ordered by government to provide all employees with immoral benefits. “Friends, Minnesotans and Countrymen” remain largely sealed up in their traditional political party philosophies. Who can you talk to? Who can answer? What is a Catholic voter to make of all this? Like some old Eastern European grandma might say, “Oi, oi, oi” as she scurries about smacking her cheeks with her hands.
Then something fortuitous happened. One night I happened to re-read an old hardbound booklet in my GK Chesterton collection. I say, “Booklet”, because it is only 47 small pages long and it is titled “DO WE AGREE?” It is a 1928 account, published by Cecil Palmer, of “A DEBATE BETWEEN G. K. CHESTERTON AND BERNARD SHAW WITH HILLAIRE BELLOC IN THE CHAIR”. The debate consists of a discourse with 3 back-and-forths between “Mr. (George Bernard) Shaw” and “Mr. Chesterton” plus a very short “summation” by “Mr. Belloc”. I had not the slightest expectation that these two debaters would help me understand the voting decisions I faced: how wrong I was.
The question “Mr. Shaw” (who went first) posited to “Mr. Chesterton” was:
“But now comes the question upon which I will ask Mr. Chesterton whether he agrees with me or not. The moment I made up my mind that the present distribution of wealth was wrong, the peculiar constitution of my brain obliged me to find out exactly how far it was wrong and what is the right distribution. I went through all the proposals ever made and through the arguments used in justification of the existing distribution; and I found they were utterly insensate and grotesque.’
‘Eventually I was convinced that we ought to be tolerant of any sort of crime except unequal distribution of income. In organized society the question always arises at what point are we justified in killing for the good of the community. I should answer in this way. If you take two shillings as your share and another man wants two shillings and sixpence, kill him. Similarly, if a man accepts two shillings while you have two shillings and sixpence, kill him.’
‘On the stroke of the hour, I ask Mr. Chesterton: Do you agree with that?”
Mr. Chesterton’s riposte in the debate (contained in the remaining 30 pages of discourse between the two) is worth repeating here for consideration concerning a wide range of current American issues. If the reader will permit my selections herewith, I will assure you that I mention them not to make any point of my own but to share the flavor of the thoughts that flew back and forth that night in an English hall, long ago. “Mr. Chesterton” answered in the debate, something like this:
“To put the matter shortly, I might say that all this theory of absolutely equal mechanical distribution depends on a sort of use of the passive mood. It is easy enough to say Property should be distributed, but who is, as it were, the subject of the verb? Who or what is to distribute? Now it is based on the idea that the central power which condescends to distribute will be permanently just, wise, sane, and representative of the conscience of the community which has created it.’
‘That is what we doubt. We say there ought to be in the world a great mass of scattered powers, privileges, limits, points of resistance, so that the mass of the Commons may resist tyranny. And we say that there is a permanent possibility of that central direction, however much it may have been appointed to distribute money equally, becoming a tyranny. I do not think it would be difficult to suggest a way in which it could happen. As soon as any particular mob of people are behaving in some way in which the government group chooses to regard as anti-civic, supplies could be cut off easily with the approval of this governing group. You have only to call somebody by some name like Bolshevist or Papist. You have only to tie some label on a set of people and the community will contentedly see these people starved into surrender.”
“Mr. Shaw”:
“The capitalist and the landlord have their own particular ways of robbing the poor; but their legal rights are quite different. It is a very direct way on the part of the landlord. He may do exactly what he likes with the land he owns. If I own a large part of Scotland I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea, or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than that I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it. They might frighten the deer.”
“I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.”
“Mr. Chesterton”:
“I am not likely to be led to the denial of property in land, for I know ordinary normal people who feel property in land to be normal. I fully agree with Mr. Shaw, and speak as strongly as he would speak, of the abomination and detestable foulness and sin of landlords who drove poor people from their land in Scotland and elsewhere. It is quite true that men in possession of land have committed these crimes; but I do not see why wicked officials under a socialistic state could not commit these crimes. But that has nothing to do with the principle of ownership in land. In fact these very Highland crofters, these very people thus abominably outraged and oppressed, if you asked them what they want would probably say, ‘I want my own croft: I want to own my own land’.”
“We might call attention to an Hebraic code called the Ten Commandments. They do, I think, correspond pretty roughly to the moral code of every religion that is at all sane. These all reverence certain ideas about ‘Thou shalt not kill’. They all have a reverence for the commandment which says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.’ They reverence the idea the idea that you must not covet his house or his ox or his ass. It should be noted, too, besides forbidding us to covet our neighbor’s property, this commandment also implies that every man has a right to own some property.”
“Mr. Chesterton’s” closing remark is a chilling warning to everyone that reads this debate:
“It only remains for me to say one thing. Mr. Shaw said, in reference to the State owning the means of production, that men and women are the only means of production. I quite accept the parallel of the phrase. His proposition is that the government, the officials of the State, should own the men and women: in other words that the men and women should be slaves.
“Mr. Belloc” was charged to “sum up”. He said he would “do nothing of the sort.” He went on to say, ironically, that “In a very few years from now this debate will be antiquated.” “In I do not know how many years – five, ten, twenty – this debate will be as antiquated as crinolines are.” “One of three things is going to happen. One of three things: not one of two. It is always one of three things. This industrial civilization which, thank God, oppresses only the small part of the world in which we are most inextricably bound up, will break down and therefore end from its monstrous wickedness, folly, ineptitude, leading to a restoration of sane, ordinary human affairs, complicated but based as a whole upon the freedom of the citizens. Or it will break down and lead to nothing but a desert. Or it will lead the mass of men to become contented slaves, with a few rich men controlling them. Take your choice. You will all be dead before any of the three things comes off. One of the three things is going to happen, or a mixture of two, or possibly a mixture of the three combined.” END
I beg to differ with you Mr. Belloc regarding the timeliness and enduring worth of this debate. It is 85 years later and this debate is spilling answers into the lap of an American reader facing the same questions in a world he thought to be so different from yours. My thanks to you Mr. Belloc, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Palmer and especially Mr. Chesterton for recording this debate and putting it into a form available to a reader like me nearly a century later: you have pointed the way for me to traverse the murky swamp of current affairs that, I am sure, Mr. Chesterton would recognize quickly and all too clearly were he here today. Like those “ordinary normal people” in your long-gone audience I have been enriched and delighted by what I have discovered.
To you Mr. Chesterton, I Agree.
Jim Beers
30 August 2012
If you found this worthwhile, please share it with others. Thanks.
Jim Beers is a retired US Fish & Wildlife Service Wildlife Biologist, Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow. He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and Washington DC. He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. He has worked for the Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security Supervisor in Washington, DC. He testified three times before Congress; twice regarding the theft by the US Fish & Wildlife Service of $45 to 60 Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to expanding Federal Invasive Species authority. He resides in Eagan, Minnesota with his wife of many decades.
Jim Beers is available to speak or for consulting. You can receive future articles by sending a request with your e-mail address to: jimbeers7@comcast.net