“A living heritage picnics on the graves of its ancestors. That is no trespass, but is instead an act of loving continuity with the past. And the successful inhabitation of a place requires transmitting the intimacy of that fidelity, not in ‘still life’ to strangers, but across generations within the ties that bind. Those ties that bind – buttressed by a natural effect for survival under conditions of hardship and scarcity – form the only existential context within which the ghosts rest easy.”
-Caleb Stegall
Liberal democracy and individualism are a radical imposition on the human psyche. Through a deep and powerful evolutionary impulse, humans are tribal; they desire socialization and strive continuously to build a safe community for social activity. Human nature has no history. Whatever the environment, similar patterns will be present: selfishness, status-seeking, socialization, and the desire for meaningful employment. But there are universal values worth actively maintaining across generations and across environments.
Liberal democracy and individualism are a useful means of economic wealth creation but a poor means of healthy and lasting social organization. A commodity that is not a created good, such as a human person, is dehumanizing and spiritually empty, primed for emotional wreckage. Tradition, custom, and the social cohesion of family life are necessary to convey time-tested norms and tame in the excesses of public markets and personal intemperance. And so a state must never be trusted as a “living organism” that must “move” when citizens “hurt.” State organized “unity” will always disappoint; it also has been the utopian cause of tens of millions dead. Constitutions and political organizations are blunt and often counterproductive instruments without the strong, local, voluntary institutions that exist outside the jurisdiction of politics. And if the actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts, it is necessary to recognize and affirm commitment to the very cornerstone of a good society – the family and small, local groups that act as families.
What matters most in political organization is the character of the individual, the character of the community and thus the character of government. When designing policies, it’s most important for them to complement the permanent human moral aspirations – the longing for faith, meaningful work, self-determination, and family happiness. A minimization of intervening authority between the state and the citizen is destructive to personal and public character. Voluntary community associations organically formed and grounded in the nuclear family are the best protections of individual liberty, and the best foundation of faith. Morality is consecrated in the mind and in the psyche through sympathy among the like-minded, the family first among them. How humans come to manage these relations with those like us, those we can best relate to ourselves, is the foundation of rights and the foundation of extending rights and duties to others.
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