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.