The Chester Belloc #3
The Raven Den
by Connor Mortel
Welcome to the Raven Den, it calls,
Its eyes aglow with ancient magic’s might.
A twelve-foot shadow looms beside stone walls,
A beacon for the travelers of the night.
It guides the town, its will both firm and keen,
At Coffee Den, the stories twist and brew.
In Smoking Raven, meals are smoked and clean,
The legend lingers with each taste anew.
From sacred texts, the raven’s roots take flight,
Elijah’s bread and meat it swiftly bore.
The first from Noah’s Ark in search of light,
A symbol of God’s promise evermore.
Yet Ravenden Junction fades without a sound,
Its shadow slips, no trace is ever found.
Primordial Intuition: A Response to Skepticism
by Caleb Brown
We all know of it, we all hear it. The times when we feel brave enough or blessed enough to say what we believe or to speak about God to someone and instead of engaging with the claims, the other guy, in a strange attempt to appear knowledgeable by claiming ignorance, casts the most destructive words to the pursuit of knowledge: "Well, we can’t really know anything. All we can really know is that I exist." And there we have the skeptic's feigned retreat. In most cases, this either ends the conversation, as it is not the time or place to engage in a complex argument over the senses and how we come to know what we know. And even if you do engage, it’s like the Pevensies trying to convince the dwarfs they’re in Aslan’s kingdom and not a dirty stable.
Skepticism as a Cop-Out
This tactic of the non-believer is a performative skepticism that one clings to when presented with an idea that, if true, would cause them to change the way they are living. We, as Christians, ready to spread the good news and overcome physical or intellectual obstacles, should be able to respond in a way that answers the false claim of the skeptic while also preventing a complicated conversation that most people would rather avoid. After all, most avoid the gym where physical muscles are tested—why shouldn’t they avoid the mental gymnasium that tests the strength of the mind?
Extreme Skepticism and Its Pitfalls
This extreme skepticism is hard to overcome because unless taken on directly, they can claim, "But how do I know you are real? You could be a hallucination, 'a bit of undigested gravy.'" The quickest and, in my opinion, simplest way to undercut this common skepticism is to take it a few steps back—to what French philosopher Jacques Maritain called "the primordial intuition" or "critical realism." Before we hear from Maritain, let’s examine this skepticism.
Addressing the Skeptic's Rhetoric
This piece is not the place to explain how and why this Cartesian skepticism took root in the common psyche of today’s men and women, but a short exploration will help illuminate understanding so that we may better respond to this eyes-shut mentality. In short, it’s a cop-out. It’s a way to sound wise through doubt rather than ignorance. It’s "I know that I know nothing," taken to the autistic extreme. Even Socrates knew he was a Greek man named Socrates. But more important than the appearance of wisdom this claim gives off, it’s a simple rhetorical trick that ends the conversation and moves the goalposts from trying to prove God to trying to prove reality outside the mind.
The Flaws of Skepticism
At first, this claim of doubt may seem plausible or at least plausible enough to pause any conversation on God, but it falls apart under serious scrutiny. The simplest way to disprove it is to give your partner a small slap on the back or arm and say, "Was that real?" A physical sensation like that calls into doubt the skeptic's claim of doubt. But for those not wishing to assault their interlocutor, they may find Maritain’s critical realism approach more fitting.
Jacques Maritain's "Primordial Intuition"
Maritain's "primordial intuition" is the idea that our first act of knowing is a direct recognition of "the other"—reality outside ourselves. However, this recognition often operates below the level of conscious awareness and only comes to be fully understood through critical reflection on our thoughts. For instance, a baby reaching for a toy doesn't consciously reason, "The toy exists"; instead, the baby acts on an intuitive grasp of the toy's reality. Similarly, when we flinch at a sudden loud noise, we respond intuitively to something external without needing to consciously deliberate on its existence.
The Bedrock of Knowledge
Maritain argues that this fundamental act of knowing—this direct grasp of reality—is the bedrock on which all other knowledge rests. Descartes may start with "I think, therefore I am," but as Maritain demonstrates, the act of thinking presupposes a world that is already known, however vaguely, through our senses. Thinking itself is a response to what we encounter, not the starting point.
Critical Realism Approach
Maritain argues in Chapter 2 of his gigantic work Degrees of Knowledge that the senses do apprehend reality as it is before us, but the recognition of that claim is proved through further deductions about how thoughts arise. Descartes is correct when he posits, “I think therefore I am,” and while that may be the first conscious thought, that realization comes at the end of primordial intuition that we only come to notice through a critical explanation of our ability to reason. Thinking is always a reactive action.
Observations and Thoughts
We can see this in the development of babies: they know other things exist like toys, mother, father, and food long before they notice that they are a thing too. Our thinking comes out of observations. Let’s compose a hypothetical: an intellect comes into being in a state of absolute nothingness (and I mean nothingness, not just a dark room where all you can make out is the color black). What would the intellect be thinking about? It wouldn’t be thinking “Where am I?” for it has no sense of itself as an “I” because it has nothing to differentiate from. Unless something else popped into the void of nothingness, it would not have a single thought. So “I think therefore I am” is a valid statement, but it comes at the end. It is: “I observe, I think about what I observe, I notice that I am thinking, I think therefore I am.”
And there we have it. A simple way to respond to the claim of the skeptic, not through an assault on his doubt but through a critical questioning of his doubt. But remember when engaging in this critical examination of the other’s primordial intuition to begin with questions. This primordial intuition is one we all make knowingly or unknowingly and through questions we can lead the other to the reconnection of this shared experience.
Distribituism Is Alive And Well
by Connor Mortel
Even now there is something that can be done and done at once; though the things so to be done may appear to be of different kinds and degrees of effectiveness. Even if we only save a shop in our own street or stop a conspiracy in our own trade, or get a bill to punish such conspiracies pressed by our own member, we may come in the nick of time and make all the difference.
To vary the metaphor to a military one, what has happened is that the monopolists have attempted an encircling movement. But the encircling movement is not yet complete. Unless we do something, it will be complete; but it is not true to say that we can do nothing to prevent it being completed.
G.K. Chesterton wrote this in his Outline of Sanity, defending the claim that the pursuit of distributism is not a lost cause. He explains that the goal of distributism is not necessarily to reach a particular distributist utopia, but rather to move in a direction away from the encircling movement that is closing in around us. I have always found this particular quote one of the most inspiring cases for optimism. The mission doesn’t necessarily have to be to beat Hudge and Gudge outright, simply holding strong against them closing the circle and moving in a direction that protects against that.
Unfortunately, looking around the world today, it sometimes feels like the optimism Chesterton had when he wrote this is no longer as justifiable. Amazon and Walmart run the show in the entire retail industry. Restaurants are more reliably massive chains than cute mom-and-pop stores. The concept of anything even remotely like Chesterton’s vision for the world feels like a distant memory at best and a fantasy at worst. However, this pessimism was put to bed this Thanksgiving for me.
I drove from South Florida to Kansas and found that distributism is alive and well throughout America, whether Americans know it or not. Unfortunately, I didn’t record my thoughts nearly as well as Caleb has in his Path to Anchorage and his Path Home. However, I did take note of three points that skyrocketed my optimism: a little town called Ravenden, Arkansas; a little church called St. Patrick’s; and a little winery called Wiederkehr.
Ravenden (the same Ravenden of the poem in this edition of Chesterbelloc) was by far my favorite of the three. As our fearless leader here at Thomist Reviews has explained, an understanding of local history and culture is one of the easiest ways to move towards a more distributist or localist society. This is why it was so pleasant to stumble upon Ravenden.
In 1883, Ravenden Junction was founded, which has now become the quaint little town of Ravenden. There were simple, pleasant details like the fact that any chain organizations seemed to be pushed to the outskirts of town while local businesses were the central focus in the middle of the town. But the more important factor was the overwhelmingly positive local culture.
The first thing you see upon entering the town is a sign saying “Welcome to the Raven Den.” This is the first hint at the theme of the town. The majority of the businesses after this sign are raven-themed: the hotel, the coffee shop, the barbecue restaurant—everything. A cynical mind thinks of towns that have themes like this for tourism reasons. However, Ravenden is a town of 423 people that almost no one has heard of and has no serious tourism industry. These nods to the ravens are not for tourism; they are just realities of a town genuinely proud of its culture.
All of this, however, is nothing compared to the absolute best part: a twelve-foot raven statue standing as a monument over the whole town. The raven is surrounded with details regarding the raven’s status in the town, up to and including references to both Elijah and Noah with direct Bible verses carved in stone. This is the kind of culture that distributism is looking for in the world.
Next came a little parish in Kansas called St. Patrick’s. Among other things, this is the church where I will be getting married, and as such, I am quite fond of this particular spot. However, one piece stood out significantly at a Daily Mass on the Friday after Thanksgiving.
That was not any given Friday, but more specifically, it was the last day that they had a daily Mass before the Saturday vigil for the first Sunday of Advent—meaning that the Missals in the pews were officially outdated the moment Mass ended. At that moment, without any instruction given in any way, almost every single member of the parish stood up, took all of the Missals from their pews, gave them to the priest, and asked where to get the new ones to replace them.
While raven-based culture is fun, this is a step deeper into distributism. This is because, while it is said simply that distributism is just strong localism, it is more nuanced than that: it is more accurately applied Catholic Social Teaching. As such, a strong Catholic culture is vital to it.
This group of parishioners volunteering at their parish is nice, but it is not necessarily unique. The sign of optimism was that they all acted defaultly on the liturgical calendar. That being built into their routine so much that it was unspoken is the most important element of this and is an overwhelming cause for optimism.
Lastly, on the trip home, I stopped at a vineyard in Arkansas. It was pitched to me as “like eating at the Shire,” which in and of itself already struck me as a complete distributist victory. When I arrived, I realized that it was not oversold, and in many ways, that was exactly what it felt like.
The dining area was quite literally in a hole in the ground. “Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.” However, unlike a hobbit hole where the indications of Tolkien’s Catholicism are subtle and can be missed if read poorly, the culture of Catholicism was alive and well at this little vineyard.
Before even entering the little hole, all customers were greeted by a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and a large cross outside. Upon entering, one had to walk straight up to a crucifix and a Rosary hanging on the wall. All of this was complemented by the fact that all of the wine was produced literally on site. It was a distributist’s dream.
So, is society moving in a direction towards distributism right now? No. But is the encircling movement complete yet? Unequivocally no. Islands of distributism still exist and must be supported—not just supported, but expanded.
Because Chesterton is most certainly right that even if the encircling movement is not complete yet, “unless we do something, it will be complete.”