In my city (Columbia, SC) there is a clear division in council chambers between those in favor of rampant development (with some of the council members actually being developers) and those who steadfastly oppose the increasing attempt to drain the city out into cookie cutter suburbs. Ironically, while the races are officially non-partisan, its overwhelmingly the liberals and minority community members that stand against development that creates white-flight. The ability to hold such decisions to a stand still has kept Columbia from seeing its urban neighborhoods written off entirely. As all council members (plus the mayor) get a zoning board official (if I remember it correctly) that means a vote for a developer is a vote for more development. So keep that in mind at the local voting booth.

Depending on the size of your city, unfortunately, city council seats may be a ward-politics affair. And that makes things significantly harder. But certainly in smaller towns its not un-reasonable for individuals to potentially win a seat.

…living lives of deep commitment to places that are at once home and outside the cosmopolis…

I understand the importance of place (a concept which I consider distinct from location) but I don’t see how it’s more important than the relationships and commitments we make to other people.

The point is that this is a religion (Moldbug calls it, aptly, “Universalism”), and moreover that it is the thoroughly entrenched American State Religion (infecting not merely agnostics and atheists, but “moderate” members of virtually every religion). The PCUSA pastor and the Unitarian Universalist minister might well disagree on the number and nature of the godhead, for example, but they surely won’t disagree one iota on the primacy and goodness of the UN Human Rights Charter. Universalists don’t sweat the small stuff (e.g., the godhead), but will brook no dissent on doctrinal purity where it really counts. [For a full explication of Moldbug's theory, start here and work your way forward.]

That Universalism is overwhelmingly dominant may be seen from the progress of history over the past 500 years. The Left always, in the long run, wins. The right, even where occasionally successful, always ultimately fails. Now this hits close to home because, in truth, the American Revolution was a leftist one (revolutions always are). Of course “we” won, only because leftism had, at the time, almost completed its victory in Britain as well. The Whigs, who held power in Commons, didn’t really want the Brits to win, and if they had, Britain would have (kinda like the US in Vietnam). But the American Revolution is only the tip of the iceberg; you can look to the Civil War, WWII, McCarthy-era, Rhodesia, South Africa, etc. WWII is a very interesting case study since, as it is well-known that Stalin (leftist) was just as bad a bad guy as Hitler (rightist), and by body count alone, moreso, yet the Allies demanded and got complete destruction of Hitler’s Germany (and equally rightist Japan), whereas Stalin’s USSR picked up half of Europe. (Sure, they had to work for it, but still…).

To this day, it is non only not an impediment to express some sympathy for socialism in Western halls of power, but positively fashionable. Conversely, to express any degree of sympathy (beyond perhaps an ironic suggestion that Mussolini got the trains to run on time) for Facism will be met with complete anathema: it may be one of the few ways (along with perhaps prepubescent child molestation) for a tenured university professor to lose his tenure. Why? Because the left has won, is winning, and will, being so thoroughly entrenched, will continue to win.

This power of Universalist religion over the United States Government (USG) is maintained by what Moldbug calls the “Cathedral”, which roughly equates to the American University System plus mainstream media outlets. Since the USG is governed by popular opinion (i.e., democracy), and the Cathedral controls (almost absolutely) popular opinion, the Cathedral therefore controls the USG. And politics, therefore, do not. Most of the actions that USG actually takes are decisions of unelected and permanent officials in an elephantine bureaucracy. And the nine people who occasionally have to make a judgement call are equally insulated.

So I say all this to say that I, as a generous supporter of Ron Paul last year and of various “real” conservatives this year, don’t have a lot of hope for democratic politics, especially those on the national level. The best we can hope for is to turn back the clock, but unless we’re willing to turn back the clock all the way to the mid-1600s or so, and drive a spike through the head of whiggery in all its manifestations, what good can it do if the ideological machinery that led (inevitably I think) to our present troubles remains? The severance of the American Union would be a great starting place, but only that. Then, and only then, would hard work of restoring humane culture even start. To say this is generational work, is to put it very mildly; it is to put it in terms that offer no actual hope of restoring public, but only of restoring virtue to their own lives, and those for whom they are responsible. Either that or root for financial and/or environmental apocalypse, which hardly seems Christian.

Which, in a far more roundabout manner than I had envisioned, leads me (and perhaps fairer and stronger minds than my own) to ponder one glaring success story in this otherwise fetid swamp of modernity: The Amish. They have basically checked out of modernity to a sufficient extent (not totally of course) that the present ills seem not to affect them; they appear, in fact, very well positioned for any potential apocalypse, and maintain (again, as near as I can tell) a humane culture largely uninfected by modernity’s convincing heresies. They are notoriously fertile, become relatively rich by their virtue, and do a decent job of bringing up their children to follow them in their (admittedly strange) faith? So what about the Amish? And to what extent are they a model for traditionalists, localists, and small-A anarchists everywhere?

Deneen: “Many observe rightly that its arguments are almost everywhere and always paradoxical, if not contradictory – arguing on behalf of communities and a culture in which choice and escape and individual self-assertion is subordinated, yet urging the embrace of these ways as a matter of choice and self-assertion. This paradox is forced upon anyone making these arguments by a culture that renders everything into a choice.”

To push back against this criticism, I’ll note that lots of people are by no means living in a “culture of choice.” Circumstance, health problems, and lack of opportunities encourage many people to stay put without ever having to make an explicit rejection of “choice and escape.” While George Bailey almost left Bedford Falls several times, some of us never even became near-escapees.

FPR writings and other localist works help those of us who, because of forces beyond our control, have been extricated from the meritocratic amoeba but wonder why we are nevertheless content.

Any sharpness in my prolixity is a direct result of the company here…who are kindly indulgent enough to let me erect my soapbox and start yawping every now and again.

Organized Religion is tax exempt however but then, like the Indians of pre-settlement Ohio, I’m (to quote those who argued against Federally funded missionary education for the Natives) “dangerous enough already”.

“Yes, I was incredibly naïve. I learned later that this proud display of my nativeness went over badly – it was discerned as a compromise of what should have been my true and only motivation for seeking employment at that institution, which was its objective and universal academic excellence.”

That sounds incredibly creepy, the faculty sounds more like a cult than anything else.

Which I suppose they are.

“Who knows if to live is to be dead,
and to be dead to live.”

Voegelin was not only participating in a noetic analysis, restricted by existential consciousness, but also in examining the Christian/gospel movement that penetrated more deeply into metaxical existence by making man’s tension toward the Unknown God the truth of reality. In a way, Dr. Deneen did the same thing when he reveals to his readers that he “returned” to the faith of his fathers. In essence Deneen experienced the “pneumatic irruption” that presented the possibility of a ‘metaxical’ existence, an existence established within a tension defined by the poles of immanence and transcendence, and an existence that defines what it is to live as a true human being. To make a point, those that do not exist within this Platonic metaxy live a deformed life, a life that supports and exascerbates the deformations and deculturations of the West.

It is this direction, toward an explication of the transcendent pole of existence, that I wanted the Rev. D.W. Sabin to go in an earlier thread. I should note that Brother Sabin may be the sharpest mind among a group of very impressive intellects.

The writers here have successfully explicated the deformations inherent in modernity and initiated the call for, or the discussion of, a “recapturing” or a “return” to a human existence. What is needed, I think, is a thorough philosophical/theological examination
of the truth of reality that has its center “not in the cosmos at large, not n nature or society or imperial rulership, but in the presence of the Unknown God in a man’s existence to his death and life.”

Dr Deneen, thanks for the essay, much enjoyed. I look forward to reading and thinking about the essays that appear here at FPR.

One of the ideas that was missed is the connection to the land, to food, that is essential to a sense of place. We have chickens, and a thriving garden in our little house with a little yard. We hang our laundry on a clothesline. (I checked before we bought the house that there were no onerous regulations.)

And, lastly, the internet can make it possible for those in more remote areas to have businesses that allow them to stay in those rural places; I know numerous stay at home moms that can stay at home because they sell their handwork over the internet. Its the modern version of taking in washing or wetnursing. It ought to be celebrated, as well as patronized.

Wonderful essay. You are right. There is no textbook first step to changing a culture other than changing yourself, and making common cause with other like minded souls.

Community can be found anywhere. The geography is secondary. It is the humans who make it wherever they may be. Suburbs, Exurbs, Small Towns, or the great Metropolis’ of Meritocracy. Plant roots, get to know your neighbors. Walk somewhere. Ride a bike. Buy local. Drink local. Be local.

Your piece reminded me of a quote from George Weigel’s excellent biography of JPII, “Witness to Hope”;

“As a Pole who had reflected long and hard on the fact that the Polish Nation had survived when the Polish State had been abolished, he was convinced that culture drove history over the long run. The realists were wrong, not because military and economic power were unimportant, but because culture was more important.” – p.296

Culture exists in the intermediary organizations, between the individual and the state. As Nisbett points out in “Quest for Community”, the communists and national socialists both knew this, which is why their first order of business was to strike out to break up the Union, the Co-op, the Guild, the fraternal organizations, and co-opt them into the apparatus of the state. The path back from where we are today as atomized individuals ruled over by the Leviathan is the reverse. Build up the local, the small group, the parish, the human scaled business and organization. They are the places where a cultures “values”