On Penty's Guild Alternative

– The Earl of Portsmouth, Alternative to Death

In Iota Unum, Romano Amerio observes that the political conflicts of the 19th century revolved essentially around a single issue: whether or not religion should have an influence on public life, and to what degree public life should be based therefore on the Teaching of the Church. Against those who aimed to secularize social and public life were arrayed a broad range of groups, parties, and organizations imbued with a grasp of the Church’s Social Doctrine and committed to bringing it to bear on public life.

Sadly, those then working for secularization have largely succeeded; religion and its influence have been almost totally eliminated from temporal life. What’s more, those same parties have since had a great degree of success at eliminating religion even from the Church! That success has given rise in relatively recent years to a cry of protest from the faithful, many of whom are working vigorously to effect a return of orthodoxy to the pulpit, and sanctity to the sanctuary.

Yet there remains the question of effe

He then begins his direct attack on modern society with a three-chapter barrage against modern business and finance. What he terms the “tyranny” of big business, our obsession with investment and the hording of capital, and the workaholic notion of constantly increasing production for its own sake, are three notions which are slain by Penty’s pen. And over and above the clear and logical argument Penty presents in defense of his theses, we find in this section a couple of surprising gems. One is a brilliant explanation of the apathy and disarray which one finds today in almost every over-stuffed bureaucracy. He lays the blame for this apathy at the feet of the modern tendency for the continuous concentration of wealth and the means of production in the hands of a few capitalists. His description of the result is priceless (and applies, sad to say, to the global-cop bureaucracy which used to be a fighting force known as the U.S. military): “In the higher ranks these circumstances [lead] to those jealousies and feuds by which all large organizations are distracted. In the lower ones it [leads] to apathy and indifference.”

His final few chapters are devoted to an analysis of the God-created economic order which has at its center the practice of agriculture by the majority of the population. He further describes the way in which this order has been upset both by the machine and by the tendency for most of the means of production to concentrate in the hands of a few as a result of capitalist speculation. The reader is here forewarned that a part of his discussion in this regard focuses on post-WWI England, but it will be immediately observed that his conclusions and principals are universally applicable. His premise is a simple one, and it is masterfully explained and defended. If purchasing power (what men need to buy the material goods incident to living) is to remain connected to work, and if workers are going to ever be liberated from dependency on the capitalist’s control of domestic and foreign markets, then society must be drastically restructured. A pyramid of production and employment, with agriculture at the base, is the workable structure for an independent and self-sufficient society. Any attempt to repair or adjust the modern system will be merely a temporary and insufficient Band-Aid.

Some topics in this essay:
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