Introducing Peter Maurin's Easy Essays

 NOTE: In 1975 Stanley Vishnewski wrote the following introduction to Peter Maurin's Easy Essays The Essays are reproduced on the SOCIAL ART page of https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/

ter Maurin's Easy Essays were never meant to be written. His Essays were intended to be declaimed in public. Peter did not consider himself to be a writer. He was inclined to look upon himself as a modern Troubadour. One who would tour the length of this industrial society preaching in his singsong method the thoughts that he had painstakingly gleaned from his voluminous readings and studies.

It was only when people would refuse to listen that Peter went to the trouble of writing out his Essays and leaving them with people who he thought would be interested.

Peter was a classic example of not judging a man by his appearance. I recall one evening when I was with Peter in the auditorium of a church where a forum on Social Justice was being conducted. I remember how the chairman persistently refused to recognize Peter because of Peter's shabby appearance. But somehow Peter managed to get to speak and in a few minutes he had the audience enthralled as he recited his Easy Essays and the applause was thunderous.

Peter was a thinker and a synthesizer of history. He had a great grasp of history -- a knowledge that caused Father Parsons S.J., then editor of America, to comment that Peter was the best read man that he had ever met.

Peter was a man with a message. It was a simple message, so simple that it was a stumbling block to many who wanted a complicated program of action. Peter's teachings were based upon Cult, Culture, and Cultivation.

By Cult, Peter meant the Liturgical Cycle of the Church with its yearly cycle of festivals and ceremonials. A worship of God that would use the whole man (the holy man) in the worship and adoration of God.

By Culture, Peter meant the study of literature and the great classics. The cultivation of the mind by the intimate knowledge of literature.

By Cultivation, Peter meant the return to the soil -- The Green Revolution. The establishment of Community Life in a strongly individualistic society.

When Peter Maurin met Dorothy Day in 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, he came with a program of action based upon his message. Peter, in his wisdom, realised the futility of preaching to men who were homeless and had empty stomachs. ("You can't preach to a man on an empty stomach," a saint was reported to have said.) So the first plank in his program was the establishing of Houses of Hospitality. These would be centres (many times store fronts) where those in need would receive help from those who came to serve them at a personal sacrifice.

Once the needs of people were taken care of and they no longer had to worry about their next meal or a place to sleep then it was time, Peter taught, to start the second part of his program, which was Round-Table Discussions. By means of discussions, talks, leaflets, papers, people were to be given an understanding of history. People were to be led to understand for themselves what there was nf history that led up to the Great Depression and was the cause of unemployment, war and their own misery. Once they understood this, then by studying the present they could slowly prepare the groundwork for a new social order.

The Catholic Worker paper was established to carry out the second part of Peter's program. The first issue of 2500 copies was launched by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in May, 1933. From this small beginning the paper, as the organ of The Catholic Worker Movement, spread throughout the world. Today (1975) some 90,000 copies a month are printed.

A great deal of controversy surrounded the publication of the Catholic Worker. The issues of land reform, unionisation, war and peace, industrialism vs agrarianism filled the pages of the paper.

But there was little controversy on the first part of the program: Houses of Hospitality. The ideal of taking care of the poor and the needy at a personal sacrifice appealed to hundreds of young men and women -- many of whom gave up comfortable homes and good jobs to live with the poor. It was Peter's idea that the voluntary poor should live with the involuntary poor to give them hope and love.

Before long there were 35 Hospices in the United States -- most of them falling victim to the slum clearance that followed the Second World War. But today as I write (1975) there has been a complete resurgence of the Hospices and Dorothy Day tells me that there are now 46 Hospices, with new ones coming into existence from time to time.

The third part of Peter's program was more visionary. It was the establishment of Farming Communities. Peter dreamed of a society where it would be easier for men to be good. He dreamed of Farming Communes where those unemployed would find work and security. Peter wanted to restore the ideal of Community in a Church that had forgotten the ideal -- and because Churchmen had lost the ideal, the heresy of Communism had sprung up.

Peter's philosophy of action, as he was the first to admit it, was not a new philosophy at all, but one so old that people had actually forgotten it. The Church, Peter taught, had a message that was so revolutionary that to preach it would rock the social order from one end to the other. But what had happened was that Catholic scholars had sealed the message in pious tracts and that it was now the mission of the Catholic Worker to explode the dynamite that was inherent in the teachings of the Church. These thoughts of Peter are here in this slender volume of Easy Essays that the Chicago Catholic Worker Hospice had reprinted. They will bear careful reading and studying. They are the distillation of a lifetime of serious studying and thinking of the problems of our age. The money from the sale of this book will be used for the work of the Chicago Hospice and I am happy to be able to add these words of mine to the memory of a man whose greatness will one day be recognized. Stanley Vishnewski, Catholic Worker Farm, Tivoli, New York (1975)

NOTE: The Easy Essays are reproduced on the SOCIAL ART page of https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/

Stop, Read and Listen

 In former days, when life was slower and calmer, a child would be told to pause at the roadside, to "Stop! Look! and Listen!" before proceeding to cross.

In a similar way Ernst Wolff's address to the Wachstum Erde Frieden Freiheit – (‘Growth’, ‘Earth’, ‘Peace’, ‘Freedom’) in Davos, Switzerland demands our full attention. Presented on 21st August 2021 and now available in German, with English subtitles, the speech is being widely circulated in print.

Whatever you may be doing, it is time to put it aside (Stop), look at the printed version (Read) and then to watch the recorded version (with English sub-titles) in the original German (Listen) before selecting some of the salient points to discuss with your circle of colleagues.

1. Uncovering the Corona Narrative. The title speaks volumes. We are being fed a pack of lies. The question is - why?

2. "Nothing happens accidentally in politics ..." The use of the word "alarming" is not OTT.

3. " ... problems are not being addressed and solved, but magnified and multiplied ... "

4. Note what is said about the "premeditated change of power in Afghanistan .."

5. The whole section on the power of the "digital-financial complex" gives much food for thought.

6. "The IT industry is nothing other than a tumour ... stands far above all governments ..."

7. In short ..." They will drive society into chaos in order to present the introduction of digital central bank money as the solution to all problems. Namely, in the form of a Universal Basic Income (UBI)."

The whole gives plenty of food for thought. There are no easy answers, no short cuts to easy solutions that would enable us to go back to the Old Normal of business as usual. But at least we have a basis for informed discussion.

Ernst Wolff - Uncovering the Corona Narrative - Aug 2021
https://odysee.com/@LongXXvids:c/Ernst-Wolf-speech---summary:3

The full text is available in the Michaelmas 2021 issue of New View.

Luddites for Life

by Murray McGrath

Where is modern technology taking us?

Effective techniques every day are making us

Work, when we need to replace faulty parts,

New joints, and new livers, new kidneys and hearts.

New arms and new legs like Oscar Pistorius

Doing the job in a way that's quite glorious.

But treatments for flu, hypertension, and gout

Are doubtful at best, we're finding this out.

Failing with super-bugs, cancers and aids,

With the risks and the side effects, confidence fades.

They're studying parts, that get smaller and smaller

But profits get bigger, make many a dollar.

And how does it help in our everyday lives?

Does it ease all the worries of husbands and wives?

And their children, so precious, to have vaccination,

Do they know what they do without full information?

Interfere with the body, you're asking for trouble

Far from fixing your problems, they'll soon end up double.

So follow your heart, look after your health

Live a natural life, it doesn't take wealth

With a spring in your step and a smile on your face

You can show how it's done to the whole human race.

NOTE: Murray McGrath (1934-2020) published his Rhymes for Reciting in 2019.

The Importance of Books

"Put down all your pens and notepads. Bring out your knitting, and listen. When I want you to write something down, I'll tell you what to write!" So spoke the economic historian David Eversley as he addressed a class of young undergraduates at Birmingham University in the early 1960s. We took his advice, and I have never regretted it. The only facts we were instructed to note were the authors and titles of the books being introduced to us. We were instructed to find the books and read them for ourselves so that we could form our own opinions about them in order to write our own essays.

As my personal tutor, Eversley advised me never to read a book first, but to read reviews. If interested, one should still not waste time reading it from cover to cover. Use the contents and index to get a feel for the book as a whole, before reading what is relevant to your thinking and needs of the time.

When, much later in life, I returned to postgraduate studies that advice stood me in good stead. Over the past three decades I have written innumerable reviews of excellent books sent to me by the editors of substantial journals. As editor of The Social Artist (formerly The Social Crediter) for nearly two decades I have introduced writers to readers, and vice versa. Copies of this small, readable, and highly portable quarterly journal are available for free download, and can be run off to be read on a journey or over a cup of coffee. Each edition contains extracts from the work of socially committed writers of the past, reviews of recent works of significance and commentary of current social issues. As such, they can be circulated to be read, shared and discussed be people of all walks of life within their own local communities.

For example, take the Winter 2014 edition, in which an extract from Aldous Huxley's Science, Liberty and Peace was quoted in the last (Understanding Life and Debt) blog. The quote continues:

"Now it seems pretty obvious that man’s psychological, to say nothing of his spiritual, needs cannot be fulfilled unless, first, he has a fair measure of personal independence and personal responsibility within and toward a self-governing group, unless, secondly, his work possesses a certain aesthetic value and human significance, and unless, in the third place, he is related to his natural environment in some organic, rooted and symbiotic way. But in modern industrial societies vast numbers of men and women pass their whole lives in cities, are wholly dependent for their livelihood upon a capitalistic or governmental boss, have to perform manual or clerical work that is repetitive, mechanical and intrinsically meaningless, are rootless, propertyless and entirely divorced from the world of nature, to which, as animals, they still belong and in which, as human beings, they might (if they were sufficiently humble and docile) discover the spiritual Reality in which the whole world, animate and inanimate, has its being. The reason for this dismal state of things is the progressive application of the results of pure science for the benefit of mass-producing and mass-distributing industry, and with the unconscious or conscious purpose of furthering centralization of power in finance, manufacture and government." Aldous Huxley (1947)

Written in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Science, Liberty and Peace sought to promote thought and discussion on political, economic and cultural thought necessary to build a better world. As all readers of this blog will be well aware, the advances in education for all (from which I benefited as a grant-assisted student), in the rights and freedoms of the Welfare State in general, and the National Health Service in particular, are fast disappearing. Surrounded by talks, news bulletins and documentaries, it is difficult to determine what or who to believe.

My suggestion, at this stage, is to take that Winter 2014 Issue of The Social Artist (see PUBLICATIONS page of https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/ ) from which the above quote was taken, and discuss the relevance of each contribution to today's current issues, news and events with friends and neighbours. In the meantime, I plan to contact all contributors to The Social Artist since 2013. Watch this space.

Science, Liberty and Peace

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Chatto and Windas published Aldous Huxley's prescient book Science, Liberty and Peace. Here are some extracts from that work:

So intense is our faith in the dogma of inevitable progress that it has survived two world wars and still remains flourishing in spite of totalitarianism and the revival of slavery, concentration camps and saturation bombing. ...

Area bombing, saturation bombing, rocket bombing, bombing by atomic missiles – the indiscriminateness has steadily increased throughout the Second World War, until now no nation even makes a pretence of observing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, innocent and guilty, but devote themselves methodically and scientifically to general massacre and wholesale destruction. Other practical consequences of our ‘nothing-but’ [man is ‘nothing but’ an animal or machine/ mechanism, so no standards need apply] philosophies of life are the employment by civilized people, with a high standard of scientific and technological training, of torture, human vivisection and the systematic starvation of entire populations. And finally there is the phenomenon of forced migration – the removal at the point of the bayonet of millions of men, women and children from their homes to other places, where most of them will die of hunger, exposure and disease. (p30)

In the past, despots committed the crimes that despots always do commit – but committed them with a conscience that was sometimes distinctly uneasy. They had been brought up as Christians, Hindus, as Moslems or Buddhists, and in the depth of their being they knew they were doing wrong, because what they were doing was contrary to the teachings of their religion. Today the political boss has been brought up in our more enlightened and scientific environment. Consequently he is liable to perpetrate his outrages with a perfectly clear conscience, convinced that he is acting for humanity’s highest good – for is he not expediting the coming of the glorious future promised by Progress? is he not tidying up a messily individualistic society? is he not doing his utmost to substitute the wisdom of experts for the foolishness of men and women who want to do what they think (how erroneously, since of course they are not experts!) is best for them? (p30-2)

* * * *

What is needed is a restatement of the Emersonian doctrine of self-reliance – a restatement not abstract and general, but fully documented with an account of all the presently available techniques for achieving independence within a localized, co-operative community. These techniques are of many kinds - agricultural techniques designed to supply the basic social unit, the family, with its food supply; mechanical techniques for the production of many consumer goods for a local market; financial techniques such as those of the credit union, by means of which individuals can borrow without increasing the power of the state or of the commercial banks; legal techniques through which the community can protect itself against the profiteer who speculates in land values which he has done nothing whatever to increase.

* * * *

Furthermore [modern warfare] cannot be waged successfully, except by nations that can mobilize their entire man-power and woman-power in universal military or industrial conscription. But universal conscription is most easily imposed where large numbers of the population are rootless, propertyless and entirely dependent for their livelihood upon the state or upon large-scale private employers. Such persons constitute that dream of every military dictator – a ‘fluid work-force,’ which can be shifted at will from one place or one unskilled job to another place or job. Again,big centralized corporations and their wage-earning employees can be taxed much more easily and profitably than small-scale farmers working primarily for subsistence and only secondarily for cash, or than independent or co-operative producers of commodities for a localized market. For this reason anything like a popular movement in the direction of decentralization could hardly be tolerated by any government desirous of becoming or remaining a ‘great power.’ Extracts from Aldous Huxley, Science, Liberty and Peace, Chatto & Windas, (1947) For further extracts see The Social Artist, Winter 2014.

COMMENT: Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World (1932) anticipated a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy. Huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning combine to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual. Uncanny echoes of 2021?

Adult Education and Democracy

One of the world's many best-kept secrets of recent times is the extent and vigour of the working class self-help education movement. Supported by all classes, that movement dates way back to the early decades of the 19th century, if not earlier. Many key political and literary figures, such as Nye Bevan (the politician behind the introduction of the National Health Service) and Sue Townsend (novelist, Adrian Mole and social commentator), came from the poor working class families. Like so many who left school at the minimum leaving age, they set about their own self-education, study-reading leading authorities on literature, history, politics, economics, philosophy, psychology and so on, and attending classes on the wide variety of subjects made available though the adult education movement.

The 1928 Report on The Tutor in Adult Education: An Inquiry into the Problems of Supply and Training observed, a century ago:

"It is a commonplace that democratic institutions can only work successfully where there is a genuine public opinion as opposed to mere mass-suggestion. But such a public opinion is only possible in a community in which a large number of persons have formed the habit of considering and weighing different points of view before reaching a decision. This habit of mind is more readily acquired from adult education than from any other form of training."

Personal and group study was integral to the development of the Welfare State. Study took place in the trade union movement, in socialist political associations, amongst paternalistic capitalists, in the Co-operative movement, in universities and colleges, and in student organisation and associations of many types. Debate took many forms, in various locations. It took place in local chapels, working men's clubs, mechanics institutes, University Extension courses, Women's Institutes, Allotment Associations, the Workers' Educational Association, the trade union movement, and so forth. The NHS and the provisions of the welfare state flowed from those studies, debates and discussions. Far from being irrelevant to the world of economics and politics, non-vocational adult education provides the only route to a truly sane and sustainable future.

Sadly, in the aftermath of World War II, the forces of materialism and 'sound finance' were allowed to rampage across the world. They declared that it was all very well having fancy ideas about abolishing the five giants of Poverty, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. But, realistically, where was the money to come from?

The battle cry was for economic growth, for ever-escalating mass production of material goods, of weapons of massive destructive power, of agribusiness and Big Pharm products. According to departments of economics across the world, the financial show had to be kept on the road regardless of the cost to the real, embedded economy of nature and community. For lack of informed public debate, the "plunder of the commons" has continued unabated through the two decades of the 21st century. (See Guy Standing (2019) The Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth)

By the 21st century the terms 'education' and 'training' have become hopelessly muddled. We seem to have lost the ability to see that you may train your horse to do your bidding, but you cannot make it think. Similarly, the 'powers that be can insist that waged and salaried slaves follow their orders. But you must educate yourself to serve the community.

Presently, educational systems are all too often training highly skilled technicians to maintain a political economy by following orders. 'What's in it for me? What can I get out of it? is the guiding principle.' And the end result is very like that so uncannily predicted by E.M Forster and others.

All the predictions are that humanity is fast heading towards a combination of all the dystopias predicted by Forster in The Machine Stops, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, George Orwell in Nineteen-eighty Four, Ray Bradbury in Fahreneit 451 and so on. If that is not to happen, it is essential for local community groups to come together and seek to understand how the corporate world, through the financial system, controls economics, politics and learning. Only in that way will it become possible to move beyond pleading protests and to take effective action by building communities.

There are precedents. See, for example, how, faced with economic ruin during the Depression years, the farmers of Alberta fought to educate themselves in order to minimise the power of finance. In 1935, the evolving story of the Alberta Experiment was followed by communities all over the world. News of their first electoral victory, relayed by radio, was greeted with uproarious cheers in Town Hall Square, Keighley. (I was told this by people who were there.) The story is told in full in Understanding the Financial System, available in hard copy and free download on https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/ .

Towards Triopoly

 "Let us have the candour to acknowledge that what we call the 'economy' or the 'free market' is less and less distinguishable from warfare. Though its political means are milder (so far) than those of communism, this newly internationalised capitalism may prove even more destructive of human cultures and communities, of freedom, and of nature. Its tendency is just as much toward total dominance and control." Wendell Berry

In 1920 Rudolf Steiner's Die Kernpunkte der Socialen Frage was translated into English and published by George, Allen & Unwin under the title The Threefold Social Order. Subsequently published by several publishers, and under differing titles, the book was widely read, discussed and quoted in the wide variety of social reform circles that existed throughout the English-speaking world in the interwar years.

Throughout his works Steiner insists that man is a spiritual being, not in any vague or mystical sense but in an exact scientific sense. This being the case, a social system which fails to offer scope for the free activity of man’s spiritual nature cannot but descend into chaos. The spiritual is not something private, to be set aside from the mainstream currents of the life of society, reserved to a 'spare time' activity. Rather it is of central importance within all aspects of human social interaction. In the absence of an understanding of the spiritual nature of humanity, attempts to reform the political and economic institutions of society must flounder because they will inevitably fail to meet human needs. It is absolutely essential to liberate science, religion and art, i.e., education in all its forms, from dependence upon the corporate political economy.

Steiner's explanation of the interlocking elements of society is highly discussable. Ideally, each element operates to complement the others, so that they form a coherent whole. The three spheres can be summed up as Liberty (in the cultural sphere), Equality (in the rights sphere) and Fraternity (in the economic sphere).

l. A cultural/spiritual or educational system covering ‘all that of necessity proceeds from the individual and must of necessity find its way from the human personality into the structure of the body social’.

2. A political or equity system dealing with ‘all that is made necessary in social life by the relations between man and man’.

3. An economic system having to do with ‘everything which is requisite for man’s regulation of his material relations with the external world’.

Steiner looked to a future in which the three spheres, though forming the one body of the social order as a whole, would work freely and independently. He saw that the social order was being run as a monopoly. Since he wrote, a century ago, the economic aspect of life has, to a great extent, overspread all aspects of social interaction:

"It [the economy] has outgrown both political and cultural life. It now acted like a suggestion on the thoughts, feelings and passions of men. Thus it becomes ever more evident that the manner in which the business of a nation is carried on determines, in reality, the cultural and political life of the people. It becomes more evident that the commercial and industrial magnates, by their position alone, have acquired the monopoly of culture."

The present social chaos is a direct result of the failure of the schools of economic and political science to break free of the world of monopoly culture, finance and practice.

NOTE: For documentation see Understanding the Financial System, Frances Hutchnison 2010. Free download and hard copy available from https://www.douglassocialcredit.com/.