Space Enough, and Time

One of the things that has been most beneficial for me from reading Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is that it has given me better language to describe the situation we find ourselves in.  Case in point: Levin’s discussion of the difference between community and identity.  Both terms are deeply personal, but both terms have also been abstracted to our detriment.  Having asserted the need for a “mid-level subsidiarity” for common life, he tackles the difference.

This is why subsidiarity is not multiculturalism, or balkanization.  And it is also why a subcultural conservatism would have to be embodied in actual, living communities—rather than in identities, which can be hung on individuals.  Identity politics is the logical conclusion of the premises of our era of radical individualism.  A subcultural communitarianism is a counter-balance to that logic.  Once more it is the institutions of community and civil society – standing between the individual and the state—that turn out to be most needful in our time.

Community and identity are not the same them.  But the difference can be hard to grasp, because we have lately come to use the word “communities” to describe what are essentially just joint identities.  A genuine community is not an intangible mass grouping (like “Jewish Americans”), but a concrete, tangible grouping (like “our congregation”) that gives you a role, a place, and a set of relationships and responsibilities to other particular human beings.  Community involves a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them, and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life in common.

We tend to balk at such notions, partly because we want to be captains of our own ships.  Dependence and obligations can be difficult realities to embrace.  And our fleeing to a digital reality often compounds the situation.  “Life in common” that is meaningful will also probably be difficult, it keeps us from hedging our bets.  The national level would work best, then, when this is true of life at the local level.

The notion that you can only understand your place in American life by conceiving of yourself as living in the national community is not a communitarian idea, however, but a form of radical individualism, because in a nation as large as ours, it is not possible to live in actual community with the entire society . . . National cohesion  . . . is not the same as interpersonal community and cannot ultimately substitute for it.

(image from placebrandobserver.com)

Yuval Levin spends the first chunk of The Fractured Republic noting trends and making connections in American life over the 20th and 21st centuries.  In the last chunk of the book, Levin attempts to articulate some way forward from our decentralized-yet-concentrated culture.  A good part of that involves a discussion of subsidiarity (which involves giving decision-making power on levels that are literally closer to home).  In the chapter “Subculture Wars,” Levin discusses how church and religious communities (or any group outside of the mainstream) can navigate things, particularly in the areas of fight or flight.

A few cultural critics have been pointing in the first, darker, direction for decades.  Especially notable among them has been the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.  At the end of his groundbreaking 1981 book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, MacIntyre drew some parallels between the contemporary West and the Roman world as it declined into the dark ages.  “A cultural turning point in that earlier history,” he wrote, “occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify with the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.”  Instead, the sought to build around themselves the kinds of human communities they believed essential to the survival of their way of life, and used those to escape a collapsing civilization.

And if you’re going to bring up MacIntyre, you’re going to bring up Benedict.

Something of the same spirit is necessary for traditionalists to confront the challenges of our time, he argued.  “This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers,” MacIntyre warned.  “They have already been governing for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

Rod Dreher over at The American Conservative has been talking about Benedict for a few years now (and I’ve mentioned his thinking a few times here).  Levin seems to get a good sense about Dreher’s argument (most recently articulate here).  “The Benedict Option” has often been maligned as escapist, when really it’s an opportunity invented to reconnoiter and strengthen what little culture particular communities might have left.  From Levin:

A resurgence of orthodoxy in our time will not involve a recovery of the old mainline churches or a reclaiming of the mainstream, but an evolution of the paraphernalia of persuasion and conversion of our traditional religions and moral communities.  Those seeking to reach Americans with an unfamiliar moral message must find them where they are, and increasingly, that means traditionalists must make their case not by planting themselves at the center of society, but by dispersing themselves to the peripheries as small outposts.

I don’t think many conservative Christians in America see this yet (partly because such a “reality” has been a way Christians have articulate their place in the world for centuries).  And it may never come to the point that Dreher (or Levin) ultimately argue.  But it is a word of wisdom to those who would listen.

(image from the remains of a monastic community in York)