The New Feudalism?

Hilaire Belloc wrote this, in Europe and the Faith (1920) about the fall of the Roman Empire. 

All that happened was that Roman civilization having grown very old, failed to maintain that vigorous and universal method of local government subordinated to the capital, which it had for four or five hundred years supported. The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence, and sundry soldiers benefited by the slow (and enormous) change, occupied the local "palaces" as they were called, of Roman administration, secured such revenues as the remains of Roman taxation could give them, and, conversely, had thrust upon them so much of the duty of government as the decline of civilization could still maintain. That is what happened, and that is all that happened.

All that happened? Belloc was known for hyperbole and he was busy refuting a false view of history in the wake of World War I. Still, his insight into the murky transition of the Western Roman Empire into the Dark Ages and medievalism is well worth the read, to my mind at least. 

Check it out if you have the time. But what's always grabbed my attention is this, The machinery of taxation gradually weakened; the whole of central bureaucratic action weakened; the greater men in each locality began to acquire a sort of independence.

His point being that power began to coalesce into the hands of increasingly wealthy landowners at the expense of central government. Landowners who were effectively exempt from taxation and at the command, he argues, of military force. A small step from that to feudalism, and so to today.

According to Zerohedge and Forbes, Bill Gates in his wisdom has acquired over 200,000 acres of farmland in the US. Likewise, media mogul John Malone owns 2.2 million acres and CNN founder Ted Turner 2 million.

That's a lot of land, which by the way isn't being made anymore, and it doesn't take a vast amount of insight to draw the Roman parallel. Where will it end? Most obviously, to people being villains, serfs and tenant farmers on their billionaire socialist rulers' land. Also to devolution and Balkanization. History evidently rhymes.

Ad maiorem Dei gloriam,

LSP

Europe and the Faith

Belloc

Every year or so I read Europe and the Faith, written in 1920 by Hilaire Belloc. In it, Belloc sketches the history of the late Western Roman Empire, explaining its evolution under the aegis of the Church, into what, for him, was the high watermark of European civilization, the Middle Ages of the 13th Century. He then describes the Reformation and its aftermath, the dislocated culture of the past four centuries, in which the human soul and her endeavor has become increasingly alienated, fragmented and miserable. 

As an aside, the author believes that the Reformation only succeeded through the defection of a civilized Roman Province, England, to the various forces in mutiny against the Church and her culture. An interesting theory and one which, I think, originates with Belloc alone.

Whether you agree with him or not, Belloc's unconventional, clear-sighted and always sharp reading of history is certainly provocative, sometimes aggressively so, and, for me at least, always entertaining. I find his conclusion prescient:

So things have gone. We have reached at last, as the final result of that catastrophe three hundred years ago, a state of society which cannot endure and a dissolution of standards, a melting of the spiritual framework, such that the body politic fails. Men everywhere feel that an attempt to continue down this endless and ever darkening road is like the piling up of debt. We go further and further from a settlement. Our various forms of knowledge diverge more and more. Authority, the very principle of life, loses its meaning, and this awful edifice of civilization which we have inherited, and which is still our trust, trembles and threatens to crash down. It is clearly insecure. It may fall in any moment. We who still live may see the ruin. But ruin when it comes is not only a sudden, it is also a final, thing.

In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.

Orthodox catholics will love this book, others perhaps less so. I count myself amongst the former, albeit from an Anglican perspective.

Stockpile ammo, go to Mass.

LSP