The Problem of Place

9

Part I in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church.

Devon, PA.  Several times during the last couple years, the FPR comment boxes have received protests against the supposed “placelessness” of the Catholic Church and the suggestion that more congregational, Protestant models of the Church more surely befit the spirit of localism and limits.  I can indeed imagine how someone desiring a restoration of place and limits to community might see in the newspapers the ubiquity of the Church and its clergy and conclude that if something is everywhere it is not adequately somewhere.  And, as I say, I need not imagine, because I have witnessed, how some persons consequently remark with surprise, even disappointment, that so many FPR writers should be Catholic or, as is the case with my work, should deem a web journal committed to place and community as a suitable venue to write on all things theological and ecclesial from a Catholic perspective.

But one must have little experience of the Catholic faith, or much experience of a society formed to no small degree on bigotry against it, to find in Catholicism much repellant of the particular or beholden to the modern project of relentless abstraction that would seek to render, as it were, everyplace an anyplace until it becomes a no-place.  I am sure I speak for many when I say that both everyday life in the Catholic Church as well as the theology and philosophy, or “worldview,” into which it initiates one have been themselves the source of my own commitment and devotion to the principles of natural community, local culture, and the integrity of limited, discrete polities.  Indeed, I could not maintain these commitments with intellectual confidence did I not have the resources of the Church to sustain them.  I would like to set forth a case for this claim even as I shall in the end acknowledge that there are some troubling aspects to contemporary American Catholicism that should prompt Catholics themselves to a little reflection or rather re-consideration of how they seek to proclaim the Gospel intelligibly to a society enthralled to the regime of universal liberalism.  Prior to entering into this direct defense, I should like to set before the reader a clear if crude sketch of the typical positions in contemporary debates over “globalization,” those of an Enlightenment-derived absolutist vision, which seems to be the default mentality of most persons in our age, and that minority party of traditionalists who seek to savage the Enlightenment project simply by inverting its principles.  All this I propose to discuss after the manner of the familiar essay, rather than endeavoring to document my points with the use of quotation and reference.

To take up this last point first, my sense is that many of those who shrink before the spectacle of the Church’s omnipresence do so because they have a dualistic conception of politics that is itself rooted in a metaphysical dualism.  Such persons, I propose, see the dissolution of community, local cultures and markets, of neighborhoods and neighborliness, and indeed of every continuity between one person and another, much less one generation and another, and presume that a total reaction is required.  Liberal society and the market—whether they contemn it as merely capitalist or state capitalist—they view as disintegrative forces that make goods and finally persons so fungible and mobile that place and community cease to “matter” and cannot endure.  They witness the satellite projection of a vulgar and monotonous culture around the globe and believe the world to be growing ever more unified in its idiocy, indifferent to its precious particularities, and stultifying of man’s capacity to accept, without disfigured or anachronistic gestures, the venerable and the divine.

Understandably, such persons react against this practical uniformity and against the principles that underlie it, namely, a commitment to reduction-by-abstraction—a species of ancient atomism—in which the quantifiable units of things alone count as reality.  How much something costs, how much it weighs or measures—such units, because easily abstracted, are easily intelligible, and the modern world seems thus increasingly committed to a life of geometric abstraction, where only what may be counted counts as real.

Because this reduction to quantity and its creation of a sense of fluidity and placelessness are so intelligible and convenient to all of us, the disaffected witness of its consequences says, naturally enough, the sound response is a reversal.  In place of quantity, we shall defend the unquantifiable particular qualities of things; in place of the anonymous conveniences of the global, we shall demand the hard work of keeping our eyes and hearts to the turf just before us.  At bottom, this witness concludes, the imperative to the universal has seduced us and served us poorly, and so we must, whatever the difficulties, return exclusively to the particular.

However accurate this dualism may be in its diagnosis, it does not quite discover the proper terms that might make its consequent prescriptions more compelling.  First of all, it seems to grant to the self-consciously “global society” that it is what it says it is.  We are all free to move as we will, to be part of such “virtual” and elective “communities” as we prefer, and indeed to remake ourselves as we desire, say the globalists; it is precisely the liquidity of a globalized economy and culture that makes our absolute freedom possible.  Having granted the globalist his terms, the disaffected conceive of a merely reactionary form of localism.  If the globalist claims to love the world, one must love only the irreducibly particular patches of one’s community.  If the globalist praises the universality of rationalized-because-quantified reality, then the localist must reaffirm fidelity to what he freely confesses to be the irrational and inscrutable thickets of tradition.  If the globalist likes to import sugar by the pound, we shall grow only the surly and irregular potato.

If the globalist speaks of a responsibility for the peace and well being of all human beings, the “social justice” due to every society, and advocates the putting to use of the most colossal and monolithic of forces to secure these things, the localist must decry every ideological pronouncement that sniffs of “altruism” or the “universal brotherhood of man.”  He must, in fact, turn against orthodox Christianity—for he rightly sees that the ideologies of universal peace are themselves secularized perversions of Christian teaching.  I have therefore even read the words of persons who have claimed to give up Christian belief altogether and to “return” to the local deities of paganism.  Much to my amusement, someone once wrote in to FPR, from New Hampshire, explaining that he had renounced the placeless globalism of Christianity in favor of the Germanic god (or gods) his ancestors had worshiped.  One hesitated to ask the demonic fellow why local deities evidently so portable as to relocate from Central Europe to New England would constitute much an improvement on the omnipresent Cross of Christ.

In my view, this localism against contemporary globalism provides the same sort of un-compelling response to a horrendous state of affairs that the French traditionalists, such as Joseph de Maistre, articulated in response to the tyrannical universalisms of the French Revolution.  If France stood for individual reason, they would stand for collective tradition; if France stood for a brazen shining of light, then they would advocate a dusky and impassioned reverence.  There is much to be said, in fact, in favor of the work of de Maistre, or that earlier traditionalist, David Hume; but, nevertheless, something fundamental has gone awry in the traditionalist argument.

Rather than accepting the globalist’s description of the happiness and freedom made possible by, say, having friends on three continents all of whom can keep in touch by airline, cellphone, and Ipad; that is, rather than accepting his claim to live in a “global” society, why should we not simply say that a “global” society is a myth, and any “community” not tied to a particular place is a delusion?  One cannot live everywhere, for there is no subsistent “everywhere.”  One can only be in one place at a time, and if one gallops from place to place with any frequency, one probably still lives in one particular place—one just does so poorly.  I can well imagine that an American with friends in Brussels and Bangkok will have an easier time finding companions to join him at the brothel, and that he will have a grand time exchanging photos across continents afterwards, but one must have a rather weak sense of friendship if it simply involves being able to spend money on the sex trade with one’s fellow cosmopolites.  I recognize that most globe-trotters go in for slightly more decorous forms of decadence.  But spending money together is not the same as having the same final end, or highest good, as another person—unless, that is, one has a totally perverse sense of what one’s highest good is—and so I am not sure any “global” camaraderie meets even a minimal classical definition of friendship.

Rather than refusing absolutely the globalist imperative to quantify everything, why not reply in the very terms Aristotle did to those ancient advocates of quantitative abstraction, the Pythagoreans?  Being is prior to number in reality.  And so, while a real being can always in some sense be quantified, this is not determinate of its reality.  Indeed, a real being can be quantified in such an infinity of ways, that the attempt to see a thing exclusively in terms of number will always result in our giving attention to only a few numbers at a time, and this, in turn, means we will obscure a thing’s being in the process.  One hardly need resent the obvious convenience of quantification so long as one recognizes its inadequacies and the continuous danger it has posed historically to human beings inclined to hold their minds accountable to a criterion of convenience (or measurable, immediate consequence) alone rather than to reality.

On this point, localist and traditionalist arguments tend already to be pretty cogent, for the ideology of “profit maximizing” individuals and perfectly rationalized markets has been obviously destructive of even aspects of human happiness quite amenable to quantification: people have fewer lasting friendships, have fewer children, divorce more frequently, and are forced to rely increasingly on a centralized state to repair the damage of their peccadilloes, to care for the very young and the elderly, to educate youth, and to administer what good will the atomized modern consciousness excretes in its guilt.  Further, they work longer hours farther from “home,” and find themselves having to buy worse food for more money.  To bring this catalogue to an absurd close: they have to buy bottles of water.  I am confident that any way of life that, to all appearances, necessitates the buying of small bottles of water must be one that is verifiably inefficient, if one simply attends to a greater number of measures.

One must hold being in the head first, if one wishes to count things well; in surrendering, as it were, metaphysics for mathematics, the modern globalist loses his grip on reality and quantity, and tastes the consequences of this error as if it were garlic: it corrupts his palate and undermines the life he thought “placelessness” would deliver in abundance.

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James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

9 COMMENTS

  1. Much appreciated; this is a question that occupies me quite a bit too. It is more than a little exasperating to note that most Catholics here in Kentucky are at best indifferent to local culture and at worst actively work on behalf of globalism and multiculturalism. If I understand Richard Weaver’s analysis correctly, he would argue that it is actually the *loss* of contact with the universal which has produced this state of affairs.

    I’d be most interested in whatever else you might have to say about de Maistre.

  2. I think this is a better approach, but it will be successful only with those who are dissatisfied, perhaps not understanding why. What can be done with those who are content with tenuous relationships and few friends? I suspect that they have rendered themselves unable to perceive that they are missing something, either because of electronic diversions, too much work, or some other escape, but unless they are compelled by circumstances to self-reflection, they will be deaf to the message.

  3. Mr. Wilson,

    Your words:

    “…my sense is that many of those who shrink before the spectacle of the Church’s omnipresence do so because they have a dualistic conception of politics that is itself rooted in a metaphysical dualism.”

    As a Protestant or one who has grown up a Protestant, I have never shrunk before the spectacle of the Church’s omnipresence because at an early age I had been given to understand that our Lord is not a polygamists: He has but one Bride, and she is holy, and she is catholic. As I have been graced with a little more understanding, I have, in fact, come to see the Protestantism, particularly in its ever morphing Baptist idiom which is the medium of my experience, as the more apparent handmaiden of the heresy of Modernity.

    “…for he rightly sees that the ideologies of universal peace are themselves secularized perversions of Christian teaching. ”

    One of the Christian teachings which the ideologies of universal peace have turned into a secularized perversion are the following words of St. Paul found in Galatians 3:28:

    “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

    The spin of Modernity is that Christ Jesus is the incarnation of the false goddess of equality. Quite obviously, from the text and its context, being one in Christ does not end our being Jews or Greeks, being bond or free or being male or female. In Him, those realities – being a Jew, being a Greek, being a slave, being free, being male or being female – are affirmed but placed in new relationship through His transcending grace. Subsidiarity is sustained; we are not subsumed into a oneness which destroys our uniqueness; rather our uniqueness is given in Christ a new context, of being members of His body, the body of His bride, however, humble given membership in that body might be.

    A glance at the history of Western civilization should tell even the most superficial observer of that history, even the most anti-Catholic and dedicated “localist,” that it was precisely in this age, the age of the universal Church, in which localism in all of its variations and color flourished. It is in our Renaissance, Protestant and Enlightenment ages and their combined aftermath known as Modernity that subsuming oneness, in the paradox of the ever encroaching Hobbesian state and the one and single individual, the would-be Promethean individual, is welding the two-edged sword of reductionism and equality to level the landscape into a bland banality.

  4. Charles C. Mann (in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus) argues that the source of modern globalism is the Catholic Church’s involvement in Latin America. He argues that the Catholic Church is the globalist institution par excellence and is a model for later institutions like McDonalds and WalMart.

    But regardless how globalist the Catholic Church is by nature, there’s no doubt that on the issue of immigration (the most important issue of our day), as someone recently noted on a religion email list, “The Catholic Church today sides with the Third World against the West.” I can count of one finger the number of Catholic clergy (Patrick Bascio) that oppose the mass immigration invasion of the West and he largely does so not for a love of the West but for economic reasons.

    From my perspective, the Catholic Church as it is TODAY is the arch-enemy of localism. (Perhaps things were different 1,000 years ago.)

  5. After re-reading what I wrote, it may come off as a little too anti-Catholic. What I write above is a criticism of the Catholic Church as it is today. Even the Catholic writer Thomas Woods has written at length criticizing the globalist aspirations of the current Catholic Church, including the Pope’s recent demand for a “United Nations with teeth” and the need for the UN to override local governments.

  6. A supranational authority that cares for the common good of all humanity makes sense, but it need not take the form of the United Nations, nor would it necessarily have a superior authority to that of a polity in all areas. (It does not seem to me that the current notion of subsidiarity is sufficient to allow for this, as it is rather minimal.)

    Nonetheless, I would have to agree that the American bishops, at least, are wrong-headed in their approach to immigration, but this may be due less to a “globalist” mentality than a lack of proper formation in the science of politics and not being raised in a proper political community. If they just lived in an aggregate with other individuals (or families), without sharing a life together, then what difference does it make to add a few more individuals to the mix?

  7. Localist writes : “the Catholic Church as it is TODAY is the arch-enemy of localism.”

    The Church is universal and local. Both are exemplified by Waugh because we are at once perfectly at rest in the ageless universal.:

    “And then later—how much later he could not tell—something that was new and yet ageless. . . to the end of the room where two candles burned. The priest turned towards them his bland, black face. ”
    “Ite, missa est.” From a Handful of Dust by Waugh

  8. The penultimate paragraph nicely describes the consequences of disintegration of the local and the transfer of moral responsibility to a soul-less centralized “authority.”

    Well said.

  9. If you’re at all appreciative of de Maistre, even ambivalently, I greatly hope you are familiar with his influence on Orestes Brownson’s writings on the American Constitution and the Civil War. He often hides the influence, but it is nonetheless clear. I do not think Brownson is succesful in his conservative interpretation of the constitution because I do not think such a project can be succesful, but his concept of “territorial democracy” is a specifically American and specifically Catholic vision of localism (or something like localism) that ought to be more widely discussed.

    Perhaps you’ll get to this in your later posts on the subject, but I recall Chesterton having a quip (I think from Orthodoxy, but maybe The Catholic Church and Conversion) to the effect of “the nationalists hate us because we acknowledge the brotherhood of man, and the internationalists hate us because we acknowledge the virtue of patriotism.” Certainly the real version must be more clever, but it is not hard to see that “nationalist” could be switched out with “localist” and “internationalist” with “globalist.” Don’t have time to look it up right now, but I suspect you’re already familiar or can easily find it yourself if you’re not. I should probably know it from memory, as I’ve often thought it was the most succinct and appropriate summary of the issue.

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