Alien Nation

When Pope John Paul II would arrive in a new country, his first action was always to drop to his knees and kiss the ground. This gesture of reverence was usually portrayed in the media as a sign of respect and of love for the people of that country—and it was that. But for the Polish-born pontiff, it was more an expression of his deep understanding of patriotism, a recognition that there can be no people without a place, a soil from which that people has sprung.

The idea of a nation (natio) that is rootless—not tied to a particular land (patria)—is an absurdity. It is the flip side of the idea of a “nation of immigrants,” which arose in the late 19th century and took hold on the American imagination between the two world wars. White nationalists who find, say, Texas, Montana, and Northern Virginia equally interchangeable and open-borders “nation of immigrants” dreamers both elevate the centralized state above any actual nation, political citizenship above true familial and cultural ties (much less ties to the land). Neither type of nationalism is compatible with the patriotism of a John Paul II, who noted in his final book, Memory and Identity, that “Catholic social doctrine holds that the family and the nation are both natural societies, not the product of mere convention,” and warned that, therefore, “they cannot be replaced by anything else”:

[T]he nation cannot be replaced by the State, even though the nation tends naturally to establish itself as a State. . . . Still less is it possible to identify the nation with so-called democratic society. . . . Democratic society is closer to the State than is the nation. Yet the nation is the ground on which the State is born. The issue of democracy comes later, in the arena of internal politics.

The replacement of the nation by the state, of the destruction of natural society by some form of nationalism, whether ethnic or civic, is both a product and a cause of political and cultural centralization. Patriotism, on the other hand, tends in the opposite direction. Since a true patriot understands that the nation is an extension of his family, and, like his family, is tied by its very nature to a particular place, he is more likely to keep his horizons limited, to concentrate his imagination and his efforts on the place in which he lives and the people with whom he shares that place in a way that both types of nationalist find not only unacceptable but threatening to their overarching political vision.

Robert Nisbet, as I mentioned last month, believed that centralization—political and economic—is both a cause and a result of the increasing alienation from which modern man suffers. Psychiatrists and psychologists refer to the effects of alienation as “depersonalization” or “loss of identity,” and both phrases are telling. A person, unlike an individual, is defined not with reference to himself but in his relationship to others—family, friends, neighbors, coworkers. Just as importantly, he is not defined by his relationship to Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, or to the masses of white or black or yellow or red people within the boundaries of the United States or across the globe, because he has no real relationship—or even the possibility of a real relationship—with any of them.

Whether I know my neighbor or not is a matter of greater importance to who I am as a person than whether I voted for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton (or, as I did, wrote in Pat Buchanan). It is more important than physical traits over which I have no control, like my left-handedness or my extreme nearsightedness or my skin color. I may have over a thousand “friends” on Facebook, but if I have no friends in my hometown, with whom I share a common place and experience, then my identity will largely revolve around my alienation from others. I may try to overcome that alienation through online “communities” or the adoption of a political ideology, but those who know me only through the Internet or within the context of political activity can never be adequate substitutes for the family and friends and neighbors and coworkers who anchor one in real life, in a real place.

I moved to Huntington, Indiana, last June; my family joined me a month later. Our new friends and acquaintances here frequently remark that they are surprised by how quickly we have become a part of this community. We eat at local restaurants and shop at local stores. We’ve joined the parish of Saints Peter and Paul; I sing in the choir, and the children belong to the youth group. The older girls have thrown themselves into swimming and track and Academic Super Bowl and the winter musical at the Catholic high school; the younger ones have added to the life of Huntington Catholic, on whose board I now sit. I’m a member of the local council of the Knights of Columbus, and Amy has joined the ladies’ auxiliary. I belong to the board of Junior Achievement and am part of a working group, organized by the mayor and other civic and business leaders, planning Huntington’s Constitution Day celebration in September. Our family knows our neighbors, and we have invited a few dozen of my coworkers over to our house to celebrate Epiphany.

But what was the alternative? Evenings spent surfing Netflix and Facebook? Nonstop viewing of CNN, MSNBC, or FOX News? Endless arguments online about Trump and guns and immigration and trade?

I’ll leave those activities to the nationalists of both stripes. Our 12-year-old daughter, Cordelia, is trying to decide which part of the backyard we should dig up for our garden, and together we’re going to get down on our knees and plant our hands in the soil of our new native land.

First published in the May 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Quest for Community

“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future.  The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs.”

— Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

The trouble with labels—whether adopted voluntarily or applied by others—is that they are inherently limiting.  Robert Nisbet is often described as a sociologist or a libertarian, and sometimes as a libertarian sociologist, depending on what the person labeling Nisbet desires to emphasize.  It is true that Nisbet was a sociologist by training and profession, but the term sociologist today usually calls to mind a professor in an ivory tower who regards free will as a delusion, at least in a practical sense, because the constraints of political, social, and economic institutions keep men and women (and men who want to become women) trapped in the particular circumstances into which they were born.  Historically, Auguste Comte is regarded as the father of sociology; in practical terms, sociology as practiced in the academy today finds its roots in the opening sentence of Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”

The average libertarian may not care much for the practice of sociology, but he, too (no need for diversity of pronouns here, because libertarians are predominantly male), is a Rousseauian at heart.  A glorious future would await us if only we could throw off the social and political chains of the past, and allow man to embrace fully his nature as Homo economicus.

Nisbet certainly believed that political and economic power have become far too centralized in the modern world, to the detriment of culture and society and personal freedom.  He also believed that such centralization—embraced by nearly all as a sign of progress—has led to social restrictions on acceptable thought: “The greatest intellectual and moral offense the modern intellectual can be found guilty of is that of seeming to think or act outside what is commonly held to be the linear progress of civilization.”

But like Comte, and even more like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, Nisbet did not believe (as both sociologists and libertarians do) that man is too bound by all social and cultural structures.  Rather, he held that increasing alienation from those structures closest to him—his family, his parish, his neighborhood, his community—is both a result and a cause of political and economic centralization.  That centralization has restricted personal freedom in the name of an amorphous hope for a better future.  The best guarantee of personal freedom lies in a return to the social and cultural structures of the past, which kept power diffused, set limits on destructive human desires, and forced men and women to work together for the sake of the good of their families and communities.

Nisbet was no premodern reactionary; he saw value in the modern emphasis on personal freedom, but he understood that such freedom required the preservation of social structures and cultural institutions that recognize the needs and limitations of human nature rather than ignoring or attempting to rise above them:

The liberal values of autonomy and freedom of personal choice are indispensable to a genuinely free society, but we shall achieve and maintain these only by vesting them in the conditions in which liberal democracy will thrive—diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority.

Ah, but there’s the rub: To what extent are “diversity of culture, plurality of association, and division of authority” even possible in a world in which politics has subverted culture, most of our “friends” may be people we’ve never met in real life, the word community is almost always preceded by either the word virtual or another label (e.g., “gay”; “black”), and the 24/7 cable news cycle keeps our eyes—and even more importantly, our imaginations—focused on Washington, D.C., and Hollywood?

The answer may seem surprising to the sociologist or the libertarian, but the possibilities remain because the social and cultural structures of the past, however attenuated, continue to exist.  No one is keeping us from eating dinner with our families, and getting to know our neighbors, and taking an active role in our parishes, and treating Facebook or Twitter and FOX News or MSNBC as sources of information rather than necessary parts of our identities.  No one forces us to obsess about Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi, Harvey Weinstein or Jennifer Lawrence; we freely choose to do so.

And in doing so, we freely choose to give up our freedoms, to cut our ties to the past that still exists in the people and places nearest to us, to place ourselves in the role of the voter and consumer who stands in relation to centralized political and economic power as a slave stands to his master.  We choose the illusions that feed our desires rather than the concrete realities that can be maintained only through effort but which provide the restraints on our impulses that allow us to rise above our fallen human nature.

The quest for community is, at heart, an attempt to return to the Garden, to recover what we lost when our first parents fell.  But so, in its own way, is the desire for political and economic utopia.  The difference is that the former embraces the past and the limitations of our fallen nature, and recognizes that true freedom requires restraint; while the only thing the latter finds desirable in the past is the Tempter’s lie, echoing down through the ages: Ye shall be as gods . . .

First published in the April 2018 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Chronicles of Culture

“Culture does not exist autonomously,” wrote Robert Nisbet in The Quest for Community; “it is set always in the context of social relationships.”  The implications of Nisbet’s statement should be obvious, but in the age of “social” media, when we speak of “long-distance relationships” with “friends” we have never met, the obvious too often gets lost in a cloud of abstraction.

For there to be a “context of social relationships,” there must be at least two people.  And those people must be part of a society, because that is what social, as an adjective, not only implies but demands, the fantasy worlds constructed by Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams notwithstanding.  And a society is a community, and a particular type thereof: not simply a random collection of people thrown together in time and bound by geography, but one ordered to the common good, and sharing a common history and customs.  Those customs, deriving from and informed by that history, form the barest skeleton of what we call culture.

Culture, then, is built from the ground up, and from the basic human community—the family—outward.  A culture is resilient to the extent that the society which gave rise to it is healthy, and that health implies a certain stability.  Too much mobility, in the form of either immigration or emigration, disrupts the social relationships that make it possible to order a community to the common good.  Shared history is lost; shared customs break down.  The common culture collapses.

Culture develops organically; it cannot be imposed from the top down.  Anything that we call a culture that does not arise “in the context of social relationships” is at best an ideology.  It takes years, even generations, of social stability to develop the common history and customs that make a true culture possible.

Thus, a true culture has an upper limit as well as a lower one.  Just as an individual cannot a culture make, so too a mass of men among whom any social relationships are tenuous at best cannot truly share a common culture.  Most people would probably recognize that to speak of a “global culture” is abstraction at its worst; but to speak of, say, “Christian culture” is not much better.  There are cultures that are Christian, but each arises from a shared faith in Christ among a people who share a common history and customs within a true community bound by space and time.  Two Christians from different Christian cultures obviously share much; but a single common culture is not one of the things that they share.

I once wrote in these pages that,

The subtitle of this magazine notwithstanding, there can be no single, deep, and lasting “American culture,” but there have been and still are many American cultures, local and regional, and the stronger they are, the more likely it is that the country as a whole will manage to survive.

Furthermore, in a country that spans a continent, there can be no single nation, since a nation is bound together not only by common descent and geography but by a common culture.  That does not mean that there cannot be a governmental confederation (or, more strictly speaking, an empire) that extends over such a large span of territory, nor that the many American cultures do not have more in common with one another than they do with other cultures beyond the physical boundaries of the North American continent.  But unless the word culture is to become the kind of abstraction that Robert Nisbet abhorred, it must always be bound by the limits of a true society—limits imposed by geography, shared history and customs, and social relationships.

In our continental empire, anything that pretends to the title of a national culture is by its very nature a threat to the real cultures that continue to exist (and sometimes even to thrive) in such places as Spring Lake, Michigan; Rockford, Illinois; Huntington, Indiana; and thousands of other villages, towns, and small-to-medium-sized cities across the United States, as well as in neighborhoods within cities that are too large to sustain a true culture of their own. Such cultures are dismissed as backward and parochial not only by liberals, for whom culture must give way to abstract universalism, but by putative conservatives whose nationalist abhorrence of cultural patriotism is less universal but no less abstract.

America, such conservatives say, is not a “proposition nation”—except when the proposition in question is not that “All men are created equal” but that a culture does not need a specific soil and a particular people to give it birth.  But this, too, is a type of abstract equality that denies the importance of the actual social relationships that give rise to and sustain true cultures.  The person—a word that always implies a relationship to another—is replaced by the individual, whose only relationship (tenuous as it is) is to the mass known as the nation.

And thus does culture die, at the hands of those who should be its protectors.

First published in the December 2017 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.