A Meandering Introduction to Distributism

Good literature is many times discovered in the oddest places and at the oddest times. What I mean by “good” literature is the stuff that sticks with you long after you've read it, the kind of writing that you can recall passages of from memory because it jarred you out of your mental lethargy and into the bright light of self-reflection. Whether that jarring was humor, or pathos, or drama, it woke you up. I was exposed to such a book about thirteen years ago, when I was still in grade school, when my mother was trying to find a good book for me and my brother to read for class. I had never heard of the book she picked. It was titled The Phantom Tollbooth.

It wound up being one of the most fantastic reads of my life, and continues to give me pleasure even now that I am grown and married. It is the story of a young boy who is suddenly removed from a mundane life in our world and thrust into a world that literally embodies figures of speech and mathematical abstracts. This other world is made up of two kingdoms, the kingdom of letters and the kingdom of numbers, which are at odds with each other because each kingdom insists that they encapsulate the whole of truth and need no one else. These two kingdoms had been simpatico at one point, before the twin princesses of Rhyme and Reason were whisked away and all hell broke loose. Now everyone's only hope is to rescue the two princesses or the world will remain divided forever.

Now, I am aware that readers, book reviewers, critics, fans and the like are fond of putting intent into the work they are presented with. It is easy for some to call Tolkien's Lord of the Rings a simple analogy for the spiritual life, easier still to claim that Hamlet can be handily dissected using the methodology of one Sigmund Freud. I am not attempting here to tack any of my own meaning onto a beloved work, only to show a very strong parallel between the book and an overarching issue of our times that remains oddly absent from the national spotlight.

How could a children's book about a little boy and two kingdoms at odds possibly reflect the state of our nation? Well, we'll start with the two kingdoms part.

The term “partisan” has dominated the news recently, with headlines such as “partisan bickering” and “hyper-partisan atmosphere” rising to the top of the stack. All that those terms really mean is that there is a massive ideological fault-line between two very well staked-out camps. The simple divisions arrange themselves across this fault-line in roughly this fashion: liberal vs. conservative, left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, socialist vs. capitalist. One side believes in the unfailing right of the people to demand the wealth and happiness they want from the government and, by extension, from their fellow men. The other side believes in the unfailing right of the people to duke it out in order to reach the top of an exclusive pile of wealth and happiness, sometimes at the expense of their fellow men.

Both of these “sides” will not only defend their respective lines in the sand with great vigor, but they will also demand that all who wish to be good, engaged citizens of this nation pick a side. They frame the argument as a simple 'one or the other' choice. It is either light or darkness. You must choose. And when you choose, you will be welcomed heartily by one side and energetically damned by the other. The Phantom Tollbooth does a wonderful job of capturing this same divide, as the kings of both sides try desperately to convince the little boy that their position is the best. Each king casts the other as some sort of radical: believing only in words is ludicrous for the king of numbers, and putting one's faith solely in numbers is preposterous for the king of letters.

And the funny thing is, both kings are right. And both are wrong at the same time. Each casts the other as a radical because each realizes the other clings to only a portion of the truth and has run with it. The thing they each fail to realize, however, is that they themselves also cling to only a portion of the truth and have run with that portion to the detriment of the rest. The same is true with our nation. For example, conservatives see the hypocrisy of jet-set liberals who claim they are champions of the poor, and liberals recognize the injustice of their opponents' support of huge, faceless corporations who hire and fire people without a thought in the world to the actual welfare of those same people. Each sees in the other the darkest example of all that is evil, and yet will never step back long enough to examine themselves for any wrongdoing. One side deifies power, the other side deifies the hard-working self.

It would seem not many people believe there is a third option, but there must be. Political power dies with either the person holding said power or the system that created that power. A very finite god indeed. The honest, hard-working self also dies when either a man loses all willingness or ability to work, or loses his actual physical life. Also a very finite god. We are a species that knows instinctively that there are some things which last, even if we do not know what they are. So there must be a third way.

The third option is paralleled wonderfully in The Phantom Tollbooth when the little boy finally rescues the princesses Rhyme and Reason. First he shows the two kings how they actually are one and the same because they have both agreed to disagree and therefore are in agreement. But his reconciling of the two kings is not enough to save the two kingdoms. There remains the necessary outside impetus of the twin princesses to restore actual order and peace. It is only through their reintroduction to the world that sanity returns and all is made right.

The same is true in real life. Not only must both sides find how their two extremes can be melded into a coherent middle ground, but life in general and the political dialogue in particular must be reintroduced to their respective purposes. Politics has become an end in itself, a game played for the amusement of a few and the horror of many others. Life has done the same, transforming into a festival of pleasure knowing no healthy bounds and destroying the weakest among us in its headlong pursuits. The world, but more especially we, must be changed.

Pardon my romantic meanderings, but the subject I am leaping into is no small subject. We are talking about what both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party instinctively want, and yet will never achieve if they do not understand who they are as people. We are talking about an end to greed disguised as business, and end to federal rulings as the be all and end all of life and conscience, the death of “big” government and “big”labor and “big” business. We are talking about subsidiarity, locality, love of God, love of neighbor, love of land, love of home, love of life, and love of country.

We are talking about distributism.