An Invitation to Loneliness and Despair
Terry Teachout’s post about the “middlebrow moment” raises an interesting point about the inability of liberal democracies to partake of a shared, higher culture – nothing for everybody and something potentially destructive for everyone. There are many atomizing forces of culture and community, big government, big corporations, human self-centeredness, and an individualist ethos first among them. All are harmful to the small, local communities formed most strongly by the family, where morality is best learned and the common cultural values that may then extend outward are originated. Catholic social teaching conveys that justice is necessitated by virtuous forms of life from societal members – honest and effective work, respect for the dignity of workers, and charity among the less fortunate and the materially blessed. Renewal of any temporal sort should reject the individualism and collectivism that swims in so many of our political and social currents, as each ignores the public character of human needs that find little place in the market or state coercion. I think Daniel Larison is right in his argument that communication should foster common values formed in communities. Yet this is hard work. It is more fun to temporally satisfy the ego, to shout and argue. In thinking about what is beneficial to generations, our all too common exiles from family and place are not normal or desirable. We need the limits gifted to us by place and relatives, that which came to us not of our choosing. Our biggest domestic problem, the alarmingly high rate of illegitimacy, is in part a product of what we have come to value. Community, culture, and family, intimately bound together, are ultimately about membership: a group of the embedded partaking in a network of memory, belonging to one another. Far too many of our lifestyle choices and social, political structures shatter what the authentic would hold together: consumption and production, sensuality and fertility, freedom and virtue. Abstract, unrooted freedom in any totalizing form is an invitation to loneliness and despair.
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Somewhat related and just released to the world – Allan Bloom’s thesis!
http://www.archive.org/details/AllanBloom-ThePoliticalPhilosophyOfIsocratesPh.d.Dissertation
jonathan – AWESOME – thanks so much for the link to Bloom’s thesis.
I like your post, too, although I’m often left wondering what to do. This problem of community, oddly enough, is not a political problem. Or at least I don’t think it is at root.
I think the first step is to throw away our televisions. Second, we should try to start our own communities. My fiance and I are looking to start a book club! It’s not much but you have to start somewhere, I suppose.
Also a somewhat related aside – Have you heard Anthony Esolen’s talk on culture he did for ISI? It starts slow but it’s one of the most phenomenal lectures I’ve heard on the subjects of culture and community.
Rome and sermons needs to take a stand on the details of family and not just the generalities.
We’re choking on platitudes in some homilies. Children moving far away from parents is never addressed by the Church because it is sometimes necessary (the poor). But the Church should take a stand on such moves when they are not necessary (often the affluent). A woman I know in Taiwan spent tons of money sending two children to the Ivy League and now one lives in Paris and the other in London. Duh….maybe earning high salary in Taiwan rather than an astronomical salary in Paris would be kinder to the feelings of parents and their hopes to see grandchildren each week of their late years. She’ll probably know her grandchildren someday through the internet video and several holidays a year.
Years ago the media reported on how elderly people in Japan rented on weekends previously unknown Japanese young families to visit them because of such cases as I just noted of children far away. It remains the saddest article I’ve read in a magazine.
Our biggest domestic problem, the alarmingly high rate of illegitimacy,
I would tend to agree with this. It may not be my number 1, but it ranks up there. In relation to Bill Bannon’s comment, there should almost be a sub-category of illegitimacy noting the alienation from the larger family. Well, I guess we do have the word tramp for that, but the word is often used in a different sense. Being a nation of tramps or transients isn’t the healthest thing in the world either. I’m not sure to the extent it is romanticized in other cultures, but our culture seems to particularly romanticize it, think the Old West and homesteading.
Zach,
Thanks for the link. ISI puts out a lot of fantastic material. American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia and Arguing Conservatism and The Essential Russell Kirk and the Sol Reader are unbelievable resources – all published in the last two years.
I like your post, too, although I’m often left wondering what to do. This problem of community, oddly enough, is not a political problem. Or at least I don’t think it is at root.
Yes, I agree. Culture is “more important” than politics, and culture begins at home. The breakdown of the two parent family with extended relatives close is the foundation of a lot of good and a lot of bad. But can that exist in a modern, liberal democracy? Probably not. Trade-offs everywhere – my second favorite “conservative insight” after there are no lost causes because there are no gained causes (T.S. Eliot).
I think the first step is to throw away our televisions. Second, we should try to start our own communities. My fiance and I are looking to start a book club! It’s not much but you have to start somewhere, I suppose.
Agreed! And good luck with the club. One great thing about the Internet is the facilitation of personal connections, which must be done in person I think to be lasting and fulfilling.
BTW, Spengler three months ago highlighted this quote from the Holy Father:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JL09Dj02.html