St. Austin Review: Reclaiming Culture

March 4th, 2010Belloc and Mel Gibson; Blair and R. H. Bensonby Joseph Pearce

The irrepressibly controversial Mel Gibson has been giving advice to today's politicians: "Political leaders ought to read Hilaire Belloc," he stated in an interview with the UK's Daily Mail. Praising Belloc's distributist political ideas, Gibson was presumably thinking particularly of Belloc's two pillars of distributist thought: The Servile State and An Essay on the Restoration of Property. Surprisingly perhaps, his words might have reached a number of receptive ears amongst the UK's political elites. Some of the policies of David Cameron's Conservative Party seem to be influenced by a neo-distributist think-tank. Unfortunately, however, neo-distributism is sometimes as far from real distributism as neo-conservatism is from real conservatism.

And while we're on the subject of politics, I'd like to suggest that visitors to this site read R.H. Benson's classic futuristic novel, The Lord of the World, as an antidote to the poisonous messianic secularism of Tony Blair and his American counterpart, Barack Obama. Benson's novel, published more than a century ago, predicts and prefigures the rise of secular fundamentalism as a darkly diabolical messianic force. It was published before those other classics of dystopian literature, Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, but has retained its relevance far more enduringly. I'll say no more about the novel's plot but I promise readers that they will be haunted by the ghosts of Blair and Obama as they follow the progress of the novel's evil protagonist.

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