Back to the Land

Vincent McNabb and the Distributist Economics of the Family

“The Church is not primarily interested in politics or economics, because neither politics nor economics are primary. Yet the Church is necessarily, and greatly interested in politics and economics because both politics and economics are moral.”

Thus begins the once renowned, though now dimly remembered, Irish Dominican priest and scholar Rev. Vincent McNabb, O.P., in Old Principles and the New Order, a collection of essays that together champion a unified vision of the necessary first principles for cultivating the good life: worship of God, reverence for the family, and the cultivation of virtue. From this font flows Fr. McNabb’s conviction that the social order (as presently constructed) may perhaps be sufficient for survival, and yet is radically insufficient for sustaining what one would properly call living. The primary culprit? Man’s flight from the land.

Old Principles and the New Order is a work that gathers up a host of Vincent McNabb’s essays, articles, and letters devoted to themes extolling the virtues of distributism and subsidiarity. As such, he finds himself in the company of similar intellectual pillars of similar time and place as Chesterton, Belloc, and others. What makes McNabb’s contribution uniquely valuable is the stark emphasis both on the family and the value of the family’s place on the land as small-holders (or perhaps homesteaders, as 21^st century American parlance would have it).

As he notes in his introduction, “the value of all social proposals must be tested by their effect on the Family” (v), and thus the industrial revolution’s urban recentralization has been nothing short of a catastrophe for the family (and ultimately the city itself). With a clarity and candor perhaps shocking to the modern ear, McNabb gives a diagnosis for the root cause of our culture’s sickness unto death:

"The great observed fact, of worldwide incidence, is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas) normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue. This is, as we shall see, authoritatively asserted by Pope Pius XII when he couples Flight from the Land with the degradation of marriage” (vi).

The judgment that the slow disintegration of marriage and family is due in large part to the abandonment of the land is sure to sound strange to many, but to a rapidly burgeoning minority this will not seem strange at all. Though perhaps only subconsciously, a growing number of Catholics have begun to rediscover that age old call of the wild, to return to the land in some capacity that would allow them some degree of autonomy, one first step towards self-sufficiency. Recent initiatives such as the Catholic Land Movement and other similar homesteading and small-holding endeavors drive the point home.

Taking Leo XIII’s call in Rerum Novarum seriously, that “the law should favor ownership” and that it should “induce as many as possible of the humbler classes to become owners” (54), McNabb’s proposal is a relatively simple one: the family’s natural state is on the land, and it is in the state’s best interest—as that which has been entrusted the stewardship of the common good—to strive to instantiate “the ownership system as against the wage system” (55), not outlawing the wage system, but doing everything in its power “not to exclude a wage relation from the system, but from being dominant in the system” (55). In a more just and humane order, “agriculture, not industry, would be dominant” (55).

It is Fr. McNabb’s insistence on the primal and natural place of the land within the family that allows him to ply the narrow way between the various errors of contemporary economics. Rejecting the primacy of the wage-system, McNabb rejects modern capitalism; insisting on the primacy of ownership, land, and the reality of the family as the primary unit of society, he likewise rejects both socialism and communism. At a time where political divisions seem unbridgeable, and when societal polarization looks to be at an all-time high, Fr. McNabb’s rhetoric comes as a welcome salve to be embraced by all, perhaps especially by those who find both sides of the American political divide malodorous.

In recent years various solutions have been proposed for how to deal with the current realities of life in the modern state. Orthodox critic Rod Dreher has (in?)famously proposed withdrawal from modern institutions in the Benedict Option, while a small band of Catholic political theorists have begun to question the basis of political liberalism at its core (exemplified, for instance, by the four horsemen of the post-liberal apocalypse and their newly christened publication, The Postliberal Order). Regardless of one’s opinions on these and other macro-level solutions to the ills of modernity, McNabb’s genius lies in focusing in at the level of the shire, at the level of home and hearth.

As presently constituted, modern political institutions—and the cultures they inhabit in the west—are simply blind to these realities, unable and unwilling to admit how deep the concupiscence runs. The city of man, as Augustine put it, is in many ways intrinsically inimical to the fundamentals of human flourishing. As a result, there is a kind of despair that Fr. McNabb sees in the present condition of things, a condition that seems at once to mirror and intensify the conditions present in his own day:

“Both the intelligentsia and the ‘worker’ as he calls himself have given up the hope of social building with the building unit, the family. There was challenge and adventure in the old desire to adapt social condition to the family. There is no challenge or adventure, but at best only despair and, at worst, only sexual uncontrol in adapting the family to inhuman social conditions” (70).

It is no exaggeration to say that our culture is one in which families with multiple children are looked at with side-eyed skepticism. One only has to stumble upon the digital backwater of a place like the r/childfree subreddit, for instance, to get an idea of how deep the rot goes; in such a morass, parents are dubbed “breeders” (and children called by slurs even more vile). Hostility and disgust for the family is a symptom of an age that has failed to build a future for itself. Ours is an age devoid of hope, devoid of any motivation to change the world for the sake of the family, resigned to a course of action that would rather take the world as it is and mutilate the family to match.

And yet, it is precisely in the family that hope can, and must, be found. While societal mores and cultural conditioning have attempted to redefine the nature of marriage, family, and even biological sex, the instinct for family and children can never be fully stamped out. “So native to the heart of man and woman is it to have a home, and therefore a quiver-full of children that much money and all kinds of literary best-sellers have been but moderately successful against it” (95). While the presence of all manner of evils set in opposition to the family and the faithful love of spouses is all pervasive, it is not (I hope) too naïve to hope that  our current age will prove to be a crucible in which the families of the future will be purified and strengthened.

It was C.S. Lewis who advised us not to neglect old books, for it is in fact the old books that ensure our protection against the fads and whims of the contemporary age. Fr. McNabb’s little work at hand is one of these old books (published in an aesthetically pleasing new edition by Cluny Media). And if it is true that part of the evil one’s death throes in this world would be concerned with a struggle against marriage and family, as Our Lady of Fatima warned Sr. Lucia, then one would be wise to heed the wisdom of the good Dominican. Old Principles and the New Order is a fantastic work of cultural criticism—all the more precious for having a quality of timelessness about it—and a refreshing draught sure to slake the thirst of those desperate for the true, the good, and the beautiful.