http://glad-thereafter.blogspot.com/2007/11/patriotic-idea-g.html

“It’s just the same story a doctor once told me,” observed the elder. “He was a man getting on in his years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as freely as you, though in sarcasm, in bitter sarcasm. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone Is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”

The villas and the chapels
Where I learned with little labor,
The way to love my fellow man
And hate my next-door neighbor.

–G. K. Chesterton

That says it all.

Also consider how Christianity absorbed and transformed local culture and folklore from pagan societies, instead of obliterating it. Contrast this with Islam, for example.

I remember being asked when I first moved to Jonesboro, Arkansas whether I had found a church home yet, even though I was not interested in finding one. I remember being taught as a young man all of the reasons why Mormonism was a cult. My wife, who is from Romania, simply cannot understand why United States churches send missionaries to countries such as her own or the Ukraine, both of which are Orthodox Christian countries.

I am not sure these are necessary results of Christianity at its base, but the call to preach the gospel and the claim of Jesus–”I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”–seems to be important to most varieties of Christianity. There are similar sentiments in other religions as well. If we place religion at the center of any attempt to revitalize local connections, are we not inviting, not Luddism, but a divisive undercurrent that will eat away at any attempt to build community unless all conform? We do not have to do away with religion, but why give it as important a role as Chesterson seems to do?

I was not at ND last week, but at Yale where she gave a talk.I have found that geographically, the Northeast does have its advantages over other parts of the country. I really enjoyed meeting her.

Were you at Notre Dame last week, Michael? Or where did you run into Ruth? I haven’t seen her in a while, but I consider her an old friend.

I may be missing the point, but does engendering a love of humanity require us to extirpate local forms of life? Perhaps some forms of cosmopolitanism do entail the destruction of local ties, but is this a necessary relationship?

Maybe a love of humanity does not have to dissipate local forms of life, but it can help counter the dangers of, not a “narrow arrogance” or Ludditism (if that is a word), but the often real psychological tendency of local or national affections to reinforce the dehumanization of any that do not belong.

Is it impossible to conceive of a form of life that values local attachments and affections while at the same time loving, on at least some level, all of humanity? Can there be a Christianity that is deeply committed but that also sincerely accepts other faiths and beliefs, or more importantly, lack of belief? I want these to be possible, but the strain of Christianity that I experienced (and practiced) for many years, while guided by love, could not really reach this level of acceptance.

As I said, I may have missed the point. If so, please forgive my error.

P.S. I was at a nice dinner last Thursday with someone I think you know, Ruth Abbey.

We run great circuits around the planet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and yet we cannot arrive at a scalable system productive for all…one that forms a strong structure because the foundation is strong…..one that reflects the discursive potential of our brain and it’s physical-social manifestation in the form of our as yet depauperate Discursive American Political System. All this information and we willfully dismiss it because we feel that statistics create knowledge rather than simply act as a gauge determining whether knowledge merits the honorarium of “wisdom”.

Google Dab Kili or Khojal Waziristan in Pakistan and you will be brought right into the courtyards of these agricultural hamlets and you will see the diverse language of agrariansim laid out clearly with farm fields, waterworks and habitation speaking volumes of a long history of life. And yet, we are being asked to believe that these people detest us for our freedoms. We are being asked to swallow a ruse that they hate us because we are not them and that their ancient muslim law of hospitality will never be extended to us until they adopt our ways or we adopt theirs. We are being asked to ignore the fact that the war we fight was not sponsored by these farmer citizens of Waziristan but by modern men of a global wealth class…… on both sides……. that have decided to prosecute a zero-sum War of Wills clad in a dense fabric of lies. We are in the final chapter of the Afghanistan phase of the Cold War and everywhere, local life, local farming and the wisdom and timeless strength of agrarianism is being derided as either insurgent or backward because it wishes to protect its own life and dignity.

Subversion and Hostile expressions of power are the forces that govern our lives now. That those who might like to reinvigorate localism are characterized as insurgents within their own home by a so called Representative Government that habitually sidesteps or perverts the Representative System is an indication that a great hoax is at work. A process has been put in motion where the global systems and the techno-utopian project of civilization within the modern era is put at risk because the individual whose freedoms are the rationale for the States Actions must be co-opted , subverted and perverted in order that those freedoms are “preserved” by the State. In effect, it is a groaning edifice of high-tech negation , a great an endless souk of false choices. This is the greatest and deadliest Bait and Switch in History.

When we abandon our safe yet bitter sinecure as spectator and recover both rights and RESPONSIBILITIES as citizens, the ongoing act of mass negation may be reversed. We do not have the luxury of simply withdrawing from a larger world but the State has successfully pulled off the charade that it has the ability and impunity to expel us from the wisdom and infinitely regenerative capacity of our own local life. At the very least, it has created a tax-subsidized distraction from the local scene.

Think and act locally and the globe becomes local too. Not the homogenized and deracinated negation which the Technological Deity would have us admire but a local that is humanity’s greatest expression of simultaneously modern and traditional thinking: a respect and reverence for life. This is the timeless gift we continue to rebuke because we think we have something better to do.

The bane of localists is the “Luddite” label, as if by affirming the value of living simply and sustainably within one’s means and in the community one loves is somehow jettisoning oneself from the collective boat of human achievement. This quote succintly states the truth of the matter, that although some people may be justified in characterizing certain populations as philistines and Luddites, erring on the side of caution would impel one to prefer this fate to the abuses of modernity’s destructive corporate dictators.

Another fantastic article. FPR keeps me from getting caught up in the gathering dusk and gives me hope that Chesterton’s fears, though they have come true, are not dead.