If yesterday’s posting didn’t reduce you to raging
incoherency . . . there might just be hope for you yet. If, however, you’ve been spending your time breathing
threats and imprecations as you prepare to extirpate all heresy in thought,
word, and deed (“No one
expects the Spanish Inquisition!”), you might need a reboot of your reason
app., and a shift from faith, to reason illuminated and guided by faith in your
understanding of the natural law, especially as applied to political science
and economics.
As we were saying. . . .
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| The OTHER Bagehot portrait. |
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, at a time when
the last vestiges of noblesse oblige
were rapidly disappearing from England, the totalitarian
Nation-State philosophy of Thomas Hobbes was updated and presented by Walter Bagehot in The
English Constitution (1867). This was followed in 1873 by Lombard Street,
in which Bagehot applied the political philosophy expounded in The English Constitution to the financial markets of the City of
London. And influenced the development
of Keynesian economics. . . . (John
Maynard Keynes, “The Works of Bagehot,” The Economic Journal,
25:369–375 (1915).)
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| English democracy, Bagehot style. |
Briefly, Bagehot’s premise in The English Constitution was that the real power in England is vested in the House of Commons, which in
his day was controlled by the financial élite through manipulation of the
“rotten borough” system. Under the
rotten or “pocket” borough system, large population centers sometimes had less
than a dozen eligible voters, who could easily be controlled at very little
expense.
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| "A retired widow" |
Everything else, from the queen (“a retired widow”), the
Prince of Wales (“an unemployed youth”), the House of Lords, and even Magna Charta was
“dignified,” rather than “expedient,” i.e.,
so much window dressing to keep the stupid masses more or less contented and in
their place. (If you don’t believe that
Bagehot said exactly that, get yourself a copy of The English Constitution and have yourself a quick read.)
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| "Bertie," Prince of Wales (unemployed) |
Bagehot applied these principles to the money and
credit system in Lombard Street,
still considered by many authorities to be the first, if not the last word in
sound principle for the financial markets. All money, instead of being created by
accepting a bill drawn on the present value of existing and future marketable
goods and services (“discounting and rediscounting”) as the medium of exchange,
is instead created by the State by fiat.
Instead of the amount of money in the economy being
determined by the present value of existing and future marketable goods and
services in which the issuer of the money has a private property stake, private property is effectively abolished. This is done by having the State back the
money supply with the present value of future tax revenues — in which it does
not have a private property stake. In more understandable terms, the State
redefines money from “anything that can be accepted in settlement of a debt,”
to “whatever the State says it is.” By
asserting and maintaining control over money and credit, the State establishes
absolute power.
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| Henry VIII, Father of the English Reformation |
As a number of rather astute individuals have pointed out
over the centuries, power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. As far as Robert Hugh Benson was concerned, the corruption that began with
the Reformation in England had reached its inevitable conclusion by the
end of the nineteenth century. The upper classes of England had a doom hanging
over their heads, although Benson was never able to explain in any definite way
the exact nature of the catastrophe he saw coming.
We could, of course, go on at great length as to why,
although we believe Benson’s intuition was correct, his
reasoning was a little off. That, however,
is not the point. The fact is that
Benson understood, in however distorted a fashion,
that something was seriously wrong with the world. He correctly identified the underlying cause: abandonment
of the sound moral philosophy taught by the Catholic Church and other reason-based systems, and submission
to the ideological colonization of secular humanism and pure moral relativism
spread by people such as Msgr. John A. Ryan.
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| R.H. Benson |
Significantly, in his satiric masterpiece, Lord
of the World,
Benson had the western “Christian” nations abandoning
every vestige of the natural moral law along with Christianity, while the sole remaining
catechumen (someone receiving instruction to enter the Catholic Church) at the end of the book is an
obviously sincere Muslim. This suggests
that Benson viewed orthodox Muslims who accept the
Aristotelian/Thomist understanding of the
natural moral law as closer to the truth than apostate or heretical Christians
who reject it.
Benson knew that something had to be done if the world was
to avert disaster — discern and live up to one’s vocation to the best of one’s ability. That, of course, takes power — and power takes
property. If, as both Leo XIII and Pius
XI pointed out, ordinary people lack capital ownership, then only the rich and
upper classes will have the means to acquire and develop virtue by pursuing
their vocations . . . in a world in which those same rich and upper classes had
lost any desire to do anything of the sort.
The rest of Benson’s work contains a lot of detail, especially
about religion, with which we may or may not agree. Such is Benson’s
skill as a novelist, however, that we don’t have to agree with the details,
even religious details. Wisely, Benson presented his ideas in fictional form, and we
can suspend any disbelief we might have while we are entertained, and certainly
run the risk of learning something about the world, other people, and, most of
all, ourselves.
That tells us about Benson’s work. We’ve been getting a few enquiries about
Benson the man and the writer, not just his ideas, though. If the spirit moves us, then, we might give a
little more in that vein next week.
Otherwise, you can satisfy your Benson cravings by reading him, rather
than about him:
Sources for Benson’s novels and related material:
