Posted by
David C. Innes on Friday, July 31, 2009 7:14:20 PM
In the recent issue of
The City,
the fine journal that comes out of Houston Baptist University, Wilfred
McClay reflects on what cities mean for our souls ("The Soul and the
City;" it's not accessible online but you can and should
subscribe for free).
Large urban centers are not unambiguously good things, but they are
also far from unmitigated evils, or what Benjamin Rush compared to,
"abscesses on the human body," which is to say, "reservoirs of all the
impurities of a community." After first reflecting on the shape of our
surroundings which not only we have shaped, but which then have shaped
us in turn, he backs up and asks a fundamental question: Never mind
cities; why do we bother with each other all?
Our
reflections need to begin, then, with a consideration of what cities
are, and are for, what they accomplish that can be accomplished no
other way. Indeed, given the strong emphasis on the individual in our
times, we would do well to begin with an even more fundamental
question. Do we really need to dwell together?
That's easy: Yes,
we do. It's a fundamental part of our nature. Aristotle argued that man
is by nature a political animal, and that a man who lives outside of
the city is either a beast or a god. For Christians, this emphasis on
relationship is at the very foundation of things, because God Himself
is, in the Trinitarian understanding, defined by relationship in his
fundamental being. The Bible consistently relies on our human and
natural relations to explain God's nature to us: as Father and Son, for
example. Or as in the act of marriage, as laid out rather mysteriously
in the Letter to the Ephesians, which explains and is explained by
Christ's relationship with His Church, which is also His body, or the
body of which He is the head. For our purposes, what this means is that
relationship with others is not something we do but something we
are--we may shape our relationships, but we are more fundamentally
shaped by the need for them, and we cannot understand ourselves without
reference to them (pp. 8-9).
Americans are individualists
to their core, and, it seems, always will be. But that does not mean we
are, or have always been, simply individualistic. Just as America has
always been a mix of classical, Christian, and modern Enlightenment
influences, though, as the United States, we were formed primarily by
Enlightenment thought (Bacon, Locke, Montesquieu etc.), so too we have
always thought and acted for the most part as self-reliant individuals,
but humanized and civilized by Christian charity and classical notions
of honor. As we have, on the one hand, thrown off Christianity, and on
the other hand forgotten how to blush, our life together has become
ever more unmanageably individualistic, resulting in both socially
pathological solipsism and slavish submission to statism. Individualism
needs the covenant life of Christianity as well as the ancient
aesthetic appreciation for noble deeds and revulsion at what is
shameful in order to correct it excesses and make its virtues
sustainable.
Strangely, David Brooks wrote on the same topic in his column yesterday, "
The Power of Posterity."
Prodded by a blog he likes to read (Marginal Revolution), he attempts
to think through the consequences of an imaginary pulse from the sun
that sterilizes one side of the planet (let's assume it's our side).
Essentially, it's nothing much at first, but with no hope of another
generation to follow your children (if you have children), he
reasonably projects that people would start living for the moment,
i.e., for themselves. They would become ever more radically
individualistic
and for that reason unambitious. (We generally think for the most ambitious people being the most individualistic. But it's not simply so.)
Without
posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high ambitions.
Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose meaning
because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the here and
now.
If people knew that their nation, group and family were
doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not
strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with
the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.
There would be a radical increase in individual autonomy. Not
sacrificing for their own society’s children, people would themselves
become children, basing their lives on pleasure and ease instead of
meanings to be fulfilled.
Aristotle gave classic expression
to that organic view of the meaning of the life we live together. After
more than 2,300 years, we continue to see sage insight in his statement
that,
[I]t is evident, then, that the city (polis,
political community) exists among the things that exist by nature, and
that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city
through nature rather than chance is either a mean sort or superior to
man....For it is peculiar to man as compared to the other animals that
he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other
things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a
household and a city....One who is incapable of participating or who is
in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of a city,
and so is either a beast or a god (The Politics, 1253a1-28).
Passing
from general revelation through the mind of the philosopher to the
special revelation that God gave through his Apostles, Paul wrote to
the church in Corinth regarding how the covenant community of
Christians, God's redeemed community of new humanity, is to view the
life of the body politic in Christ.
For just as the
body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body,
though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we
were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all
were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist
of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a
hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a
part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye,
I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of
the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of
hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of
smell? 18 But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one
of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body
be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
The eye cannot
say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the
feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body
that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the
body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our
unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more
presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body,
giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no
division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for
one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member
is honored, all rejoice together.
The seventeenth century
poet, John Donne, wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every
man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main" ("Devotions Upon
Emergent Occasions").
Conservatives understand (I mean genuine
conservatives, not just the surviving classical liberals among us) that
if American individualism is not to undermine and defeat itself, then,
as the Founders of our nation understood, we need to give proper
attention to our natural and spiritual ties with one another,
supplementing the commercial spirit and the concern for simple
self-interest with biblical love for God and noble love for country.