Distributism and its significant impact on The Shire

[Tolkien]

My latest article in The Postil Magazine explores the Catholic and Biblical influences on Distributism and its significant impact on The Shire.

The Distributist System, Catholicism, J.R.R Tolkien, and his Distributist Hobbits – The Postil Magazine

www.thepostil.com

 

[pmmg]

You had more to say about this than I would have thought. The shire, of course, is a fantasy. And the advantage of fantasy is getting to show the ideal. I'm gonna think about as time goes on.

 

[Tolkien]

You had more to say about this than I would have thought. The shire, of course, is a fantasy. And the advantage of fantasy is getting to show the ideal. I'm gonna think about as time goes on.

Agreed, and i think that was what Tolkien was in many ways attempting to do, show the ideal. Yet, even the Shire was corrupted.

 

[ThinkerX]

To me, the Shire was something of a fool's paradise from the outset. It was a sort of medieval agricultural society minus the feudalism, which created a sort of poer vacuum.

 

[pmmg]

Well...its not really a secret, but I am not as enamored with Tolkien as much as I probably should be, and I never really had any interest in Hobbits. But Tolkien clearly loved them and put a lot of his ideals into them.

I am more interested in the theme of Distributism. Political Science was my college major Tolkien had his ideas, but it something beyond him. I'm going to sift it through the gears for a while.

 

[Tolkien]

Well...its not really a secret, but I am not as enamored with Tolkien as much as I probably should be, and I never really had any interest in Hobbits. But Tolkien clearly loved them and put a lot of his ideals into them.

I am more interested in the theme of Distributism. Political Science was my college major Tolkien had his ideas, but it something beyond him. I'm going to sift it through the gears for a while.

A political scientist, wonderful! Just the kind of people I enjoy discussing with.

I would love to hear any response or thoughts that you might have on Distributism or otherwise. Might I link you to another article i wrote, that might also be though provoking?

 

[Prince of Spires]

I found the piece dragging on a bit and I'm not sure what the point was. Some of it referred back to Tolkien and the Shire, but most seemed mainly your own opinion.

The point that returned a few times, that capitalism somehow forced people to move to the cities during the industrial revolutions, a bit too simplistic and blaming capitalism too much. It was much more a combination of people living longer (meaning more people to do the same amount of work) and technological advances which led to less work for the same amount of food, which mean that people had to go elsewhere to find work. This combined with the promis of a better life made people move to cities. There was no overarching, evil conspiracy by capitalists that forced and tricked people into this.

It also seems to consider both socialism and capitalism to be the same sort of thing, which I found confusing.

As for the Scouring of the Shire, it was mainly a reflection of Tolkien's personal experience he had returning from the first world war. Namely that his beloved countryside had been devoured by that war machine that demanded more labour and industrialization. The cost of surviving as a nation.

 

[Tolkien]

I found the piece dragging on a bit and I'm not sure what the point was. Some of it referred back to Tolkien and the Shire, but most seemed mainly your own opinion.

The point that returned a few times, that capitalism somehow forced people to move to the cities during the industrial revolutions, a bit too simplistic and blaming capitalism too much. It was much more a combination of people living longer (meaning more people to do the same amount of work) and technological advances which led to less work for the same amount of food, which mean that people had to go elsewhere to find work. This combined with the promis of a better life made people move to cities. There was no overarching, evil conspiracy by capitalists that forced and tricked people into this.

It also seems to consider both socialism and capitalism to be the same sort of thing, which I found confusing.

As for the Scouring of the Shire, it was mainly a reflection of Tolkien's personal experience he had returning from the first world war. Namely that his beloved countryside had been devoured by that war machine that demanded more labour and industrialization. The cost of surviving as a nation.

For sure, and I agree. It fit too much information into one article. It attempts to communicate distributism, its history, and how Tolkien incorporated it all at once. It would have been reduced had it been written to a audience familiar with Distributism, but most are not.

Capitalisms inevitable end (when played out long term and mixed with human nature) of an oligarchy will force people into whatever system they manipulate to their benefit. They will make the alternatives harder to endure economically and subsidies their systems. So, industrialization, factories, etc., were simply what they created to benefit themselves, and taxation, regulation, and subsidies were how they made other options unavailable.

Socialism and capitalism are two antagonist (somewhat) forces of the same machine. At best. At worse, teammates. This is clear when one steps out of the right vs left mindset and also looks at it from a historical perspective.

And that is why i connected him to the Distributists of his day. As they all said the same thing, if in different modes. Tolkien in a fantasy

 

[pmmg]

Thing is, when I formulate my thoughts, it will probably be too political to be posted on MS, so I would not likely dive too deep on the forum.

But the world seems a dichotomy of Socialism and Capitalism, and I am thinking, with new things like crypto and worldwide markets, something else may show up shortly that replaces them, only...I don't know what it will be. Other areas of thought, that are outside the perimeter of capitalism and socialism, are of interest to me. I'd like to see what else there is, and how it may work out... My suspicion is...'poorly', but...

Initially, I think the issue with the shire's portrayal of no mayors or sheriffs, and a bounty and a sharing attitude, will fail when set against mankind and the human condition. It just takes one to cheat the system and all of it comes crashing down. One bully, and no sheriff cant last very long.

But... I am not sure I am going to continue where it leads here. There are rules.

Personally, I am a free market type. I think the free market fixes all ills if just left to run its course...only...it never is. That kind of puts me in the capitalist camp, but, I guess I will say, I can see the rough edges too.

 

[ThinkerX]

Now that I think about it...

...here was one real-world culture vaguely similar to the Shire that intrigued me to the point where I thought about cloning it for a story setting (it actually got a couple of brief mentions towards the end of 'Labyrinth War').

This was a 'feast culture' from ancient South America. It began as a tyranny, complete with a brutal ruling class and an oppressed majority. This tyranny imploded in a spectacular fashion and was replaced by a 'communal clan' system devoid of central leadership. The big feature of this society was the daily feast - everybody got a seat at the table for a daily meal. This society was centered on a city with a mid-five-digit population and lasted for several hundred years until climate change forced its abandonment about a thousand years ago. The other interesting thing is that this society persisted despite a severe shortage of arable land. Instead, a major slice of their food came via trade. Alas, no written records, just paintings and whatnot gleaned from lengthy archaeology excavations.

So, somewhat similar to the Shire in terms of being decentralized and prosperous.

(My version included multiple races, most of whom didn't care for money as a concept, who agreed to a sort of 'base welfare standard' to prevent chaos. Maybe someday I'll set a story there.)

 

[Incanus]

Initially, I think the issue with the shire's portrayal of no mayors or sheriffs, and a bounty and a sharing attitude, will fail when set against mankind and the human condition. It just takes one to cheat the system and all of it comes crashing down. One bully, and no sheriff cant last very long.

I just wanted to point out that The Shire as designed explicitly has both a mayor and 'shiriffs' as well as hobbits serving as 'bounders', around the borders. During the time of LotR, the name of the mayor was Will Whitfoot. The Wikipedia page for The Shire has this info. Following the story, Sam Gamgee becomes mayor six or seven times running.

 

[pmmg]

You care more about tolkien than i do.

There is the system as it related to the shire and as it related to just being a system.

 

[Incanus]

Yes, I'm a huge Tolkien fan, for sure. (My screen name comes from LotR, though it should have a diacritic mark over the 'a'.)

I don't know what the other sentence means, so no comment there.

 

[Genly]

Just throwing it out there, but maybe we are seeing the Shire through the lens of human nature, perhaps forgetting that the hobbits are not human. They seem to be much more honest than humans and much less prone to violence. These characteristics would naturally affect any societal and political structures that they develop.

 

[Tolkien]

Just throwing it out there, but maybe we are seeing the Shire through the lens of human nature, perhaps forgetting that the hobbits are not human. They seem to be much more honest than humans and much less prone to violence. These characteristics would naturally affect any societal and political structures that they develop.

I think you are correct. They represent a "positive" theme of humanity allowing a place like the Shire to endure.

Yet it even fails in the end.

 

[Devor]

So, to put in perspective where I'm coming from, I'm a semi-traditional Catholic. Your first quote here is by Dale Ahlquist - I shook his hand once after a talk he gave about G.K. Chesterton, who is far and away my favorite Christian writer. I also majored in economics and marketing in NYC, and I feel that free market capitalism works given certain assumptions (i.e., rational, fully-informed, mobile, etc.), so that the role of government in the economy is to ensure those assumptions are realized in practice. I'm not going to try and argue for any of those points, but it will probably show in my response anyways.

Socialism and capitalism are not at war with each other—they are in cahoots with each other. They have formed that unholy alliance, the servile state—big government propped up by big business, and big business propped up by big government (Dale Ahlquist, et al., The Hound of Distributism: A Solution for Our Social and Economic Crisis)

Right off the bat we have a misunderstanding of both capitalism and socialism. Capitalism puts people in charge of the way things are produced while socialism puts the government in charge. I recognize you can argue with both sides of that sentence. But subsidized businesses, and propped up governments, represent a failure according to the rules of either system. They are certainly not the goal.

Perhaps these things are an inevitable result of the relationship between politics and economics, where key decision makers in business or government are always going to attempt to use business to manipulate government, and government to manipulate business, for their own gains. I couldn't say. It's as much a political question as an economic one, as in fact most of the post is.

In a distributist society crafting, farming, and trades would be passed down generations unhindered by outside forces. Further, distributism requires no property tax, no or few regulations, generally low taxation, and no government bailouts or subsidies for major corporations, etc.

^ Nothing about this could sustain modern society. A single computer chip has a few pennies worth of material but requires billion dollar factories and expertise in constantly evolving fields to create. That massive overhead is the same whether you produce one computer chip or a million. It cannot be done on a local level. Neither can the construction of reservoir systems in most areas, something which is essential to basic living.

Even just passing down knowledge through apprenticeships has a fundamental flaw. It encourages the stability of the knowledge over the development of that knowledge. Knowledge develops when you have a lot of interactions from lots of different perspectives. That's something that's well understood by researchers on the subject. Innovation happens in places like schools or at companies with the right kinds of procedures in place to encourage it. Apprenticeships are too isolated to develop a field.

And if we try to assume that we don't care about tech or innovation, I have to point out that even the basics for how to create a self-sustaining homestead have changed over the last 100 years - or even just the last 20 years. Everything from the recommended crops, to which crops are planted together, to composting and water collection has changed. Most layouts include solar panels. There's specific breeds of chicken for eggs or for meat, and even a specific type of rabbit you can breed for meat because you can't live off of normal rabbit meat. Relying only on local resources, most of us could pass a plot of land down for five generations of apprentices and not result in a fully sustainable homestead, let alone an effective modern one.

In part, that's because nobody will want to. Literature is rich with stories about people who emphatically do not want to remain local. That was also the overwhelming attitude of people attending the college I went to, and of people I've worked with. That's why princess Belle sings, "There must be more than this provincial life!" And why princess Ariel longs to know the surface. Or why Alexander Hamilton came to America.

The hyper-local community lifestyle is just not how most people want to live. It's too challenging, too isolated, and too limiting to the freedoms we enjoy in our modern economic system of specialized labor.

~~~

I had continued my reply, but it got into doctrine and Bible passages, and I figured it'd be better to cut it all down to: You're giving subsidiarity far too much weight, Biblical Law had a different purpose than to be an ideal political/economic system for the modern world, that scholars - and even 2 Kings 22 - will tell you it wasn't even enforced until hundred of years after it was written (so how effective of a political system could it have been?), and that Israel was to be self-sufficient in part so the Jewish people could be "set apart," while Christians are supposed to go out into the world, so using an isolationist framework as the basis for a Christian-inspired system is flawed from the start.

 

[Tolkien]

So, to put in perspective where I'm coming from, I'm a semi-traditional Catholic. Your first quote here is by Dale Ahlquist - I shook his hand once after a talk he gave about G.K. Chesterton, who is far and away my favorite Christian writer. I also majored in economics and marketing in NYC, and I feel that free market capitalism works given certain assumptions (i.e., rational, fully-informed, mobile, etc.), so that the role of government in the economy is to ensure those assumptions are realized in practice. I'm not going to try and argue for any of those points, but it will probably show in my response anyways.



Right off the bat we have a misunderstanding of both capitalism and socialism. Capitalism puts people in charge of the way things are produced while socialism puts the government in charge. I recognize you can argue with both sides of that sentence. But subsidized businesses, and propped up governments, represent a failure according to the rules of either system. They are certainly not the goal.

Perhaps these things are an inevitable result of the relationship between politics and economics, where key decision makers in business or government are always going to attempt to use business to manipulate government, and government to manipulate business, for their own gains. I couldn't say. It's as much a political question as an economic one, as in fact most of the post is.




^ Nothing about this could sustain modern society. A single computer chip has a few pennies worth of material but requires billion dollar factories and expertise in constantly evolving fields to create. That massive overhead is the same whether you produce one computer chip or a million. It cannot be done on a local level. Neither can the construction of reservoir systems in most areas, something which is essential to basic living.

Even just passing down knowledge through apprenticeships has a fundamental flaw. It encourages the stability of the knowledge over the development of that knowledge. Knowledge develops when you have a lot of interactions from lots of different perspectives. That's something that's well understood by researchers on the subject. Innovation happens in places like schools or at companies with the right kinds of procedures in place to encourage it. Apprenticeships are too isolated to develop a field.

And if we try to assume that we don't care about tech or innovation, I have to point out that even the basics for how to create a self-sustaining homestead have changed over the last 100 years - or even just the last 20 years. Everything from the recommended crops, to which crops are planted together, to composting and water collection has changed. Most layouts include solar panels. There's specific breeds of chicken for eggs or for meat, and even a specific type of rabbit you can breed for meat because you can't live off of normal rabbit meat. Relying only on local resources, most of us could pass a plot of land down for five generations of apprentices and not result in a fully sustainable homestead, let alone an effective modern one.

In part, that's because nobody will want to. Literature is rich with stories about people who emphatically do not want to remain local. That was also the overwhelming attitude of people attending the college I went to, and of people I've worked with. That's why princess Belle sings, "There must be more than this provincial life!" And why princess Ariel longs to know the surface. Or why Alexander Hamilton came to America.

The hyper-local community lifestyle is just not how most people want to live. It's too challenging, too isolated, and too limiting to the freedoms we enjoy in our modern economic system of specialized labor.

~~~

I had continued my reply, but it got into doctrine and Bible passages, and I figured it'd be better to cut it all down to: You're giving subsidiarity far too much weight, Biblical Law had a different purpose than to be an ideal political/economic system for the modern world, that scholars - and even 2 Kings 22 - will tell you it wasn't even enforced until hundred of years after it was written (so how effective of a political system could it have been?), and that Israel was to be self-sufficient in part so the Jewish people could be "set apart," while Christians are supposed to go out into the world, so using an isolationist framework as the basis for a Christian-inspired system is flawed from the start.

Great post sir, and thanks for cutting it down as I also must be brief.

The main topic was not to argue for Distributism so much as show its connection to Tolkien's Shire. Your objections have been addressed in detail by others but I will not do so here (due to time) just some quick thoughts.

Thank you for letting me know where you come from, I was once a capitalist as well. That is pretty awesome that you met Dale Ahlquist. I am also a fan of Chesterton, but I bet that does not surprise you.

Also, to let you know where I come from, I am not 100% a distributist, I find it fascinating and more in line with my desires more so then socialism or capitalism.


I think you are judging too much in theory, not in practice. Wherever you have long term capitalism it ends the same. Capatalism in theory is not so much the issue, but when put in practice in societies that have government it becomes especially evil. It's like Chesterton said, the issue with capitalism is that there are not enough capitalist! Capatalism turns against its claimed desires and allowances.

Distributist do not say ALL society must be local, they make allowance for specific areas to be governmental controlled and capitalist and centralized, only that the majority of society (or at the very least those who desire it) can be local controlled. There are of course, many responses to your objects, economical and otherwise, but i must refrain from doing so here. The Distributist literature will provide that for you if you so desire it to.

Thank you sir.

 

[Devor]

The main topic was not to argue for Distributism so much as show its connection to Tolkien's Shire.

I apologize, I shouldn't have answered the way I did. The topic kind of brought me back to a time where I still enjoyed discussing politics, economics, and theology on the regular, so I got carried away.

 

[Tolkien]

I apologize, I shouldn't have answered the way I did. The topic kind of brought me back to a time where I still enjoyed discussing politics, economics, and theology on the regular, so I got carried away.

Not at all, and in fact I will engage with you if you like, I also enjoy those discussions. Time is hard to come by at the moment but if you are ok with a SLOW discussion, I will do so.

 

[Devor]

Not at all, and in fact I will engage with you if you like, I also enjoy those discussions. Time is hard to come by at the moment but if you are ok with a SLOW discussion, I will do so.

If there's something you feel like you need to say or reply to then go ahead by all means, but I think I'd mostly rather avoid a back-and-forth debate. If I were twenty years younger, though.