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Book Reviews |
What’s Wrong with
the World Revisited
The Morality of Everyday Life:
Rediscovering an Ancient Alternative
to the Liberal Tradition
by Thomas Fleming
Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2004
272 pages, hardcover, $44.95
Reviewed by John Peterson
It would be unfair to suggest that Thomas Fleming's readable and instructive polemic on morality can be boiled down to four simple words, yet these four words come close: "Mind your own business!" Fleming has taken the measure of the busybodies of the world, and he does not like what he sees.
Who are the busybodies and what are they busy at? They and their projects are legion: the World Bank's ham-handed attempts to develop third world economies; NATO's brutal bombing of civilian targets; inefficient and corrupt philanthropic organizations; and, of course, the professional educators. His list goes on from there. Fleming has harsh words for hypocritical preachers and other professional moralists who are the worst possible immoralists in their private lives; businessmen who avoid their families in order to provide them with more luxuries; ardent environmentalists who have abandoned their wives and children; protestors who riot in the streets in support of world peace; and all other true believers of the Right or the Left who ignore the plight of their own relatives and neighbors while campaigning for various versions of universal human rights. Fleming reminds us that charity begins at home.
One thinks of the two parents in Mary Poppins who neglect their children so abominably—he immersed in commerce, she in the woman's suffrage movement. Or, to use one of Fleming's favorite examples, Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, who spends all of her time solving the agricultural problems of Africa, oblivious to all that troubles her neglected, wretched, and disorderly children. Fleming even casts a suspicious eye at former and now penitent abortionists, who hector others from the platform and Op-Ed pages on the evils of that profession. Fleming wonders what they have done with the money they earned in their former line of work. It's a fair question.
The guiding principle of this book is subsidiarity—the principle
Pope Leo XIII heralded in his famous encyclical Rerum Novarum. Subsidiarity
commands that a central authority must have a subordinate function and
must perform only those tasks that cannot be performed effectively at
a lower or more local level. It has been most effectively dramatized,
Fleming thinks, in Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill, "the wisest
political novel of the last century."
Fleming's method is not that of most treatises on morality—highly abstract discussions of first principles and general applications. In fact he argues that such documents are part of the problem, or even the cause of the problem. These have, since the Enlightenment, defended individualism at the expense of family, neighbors, countrymen, and the mediating institutions of parishes, clubs, and small communities. Instead of abstractions, Fleming argues from common sense, literature, history, and tradition. And it must be said that his knowledge covers an astonishing breadth of field. He is a classicist, comfortable in discussing the moral dilemmas of the Iliad, yet he can speak authoritatively about contemporary Italian politics as well as the latest law enforcement malfunction in Belvidere, Illinois.
Some critics might find Fleming's discursive style repetitious and rambling.
In truth, this book is both enjoyable and compelling. If there is any
deficiency, it might be the author's wholesale condemnation of larger
causes. Surely, there is something to be said for saving the whales or
the planet or the starving children of Haiti, so long as family and friends
are properly nurtured and loved. I have no doubt that Fleming would concede
the point. 