Sometimes when you sit in the pew you get the feeling that the preacher is talking to you. Of course, this impression is magnified when the preacher loudly calls your name from the pulpit; you cannot help but feel self-conscious when congregation turns to stare. This is certainly the feeling I got reading Caleb Stegall’s Further Clarity.
So let me make one point very clearly: the comment about language was not a “crack,” but the very core of the question. The only way to be human is to be so through culture, and the only route to culture is language, and both language and culture are creations of community. Thus to be human is to be in community, linguistic and otherwise, with one’s fellows. And what is the Front Porch Republic if not a formal recognition of this fact?
The question is often posed to us under the guise of a false dichotomy: you must be an “individualist” (whatever that is) or a socialist. I call this a false dichotomy because in reality it isn’t even a difference. Persons considered as “individuals” and stripped of community tend to become wards of the state, and this is never more true than in the person who claims to be “self-made,” people who are usually the beneficiaries of huge state subsidies. Individualism and statism go hand in hand; this is simply the historical reality, and person who preaches the one preaches the other, intentionally or not. The only real bulwark against the state is the community; the front porch is there to welcome neighbors, to be sure, but also serves as a rampart against state power; the community conscious of its rights will not let the state trifle with them.
The very absurdity of the question is shown by the absurdity of the example, Sarah Palin, herself a creature of an indulgent media and an absurdist politics. Indeed, in this case life has not merely imitated art, but excelled it, since the Theater of the Absurd cannot produce a parallel, despite the most imaginative efforts of its authors. And as in the history of the real Theater, the absurdist theater of politics will shortly be followed by the politics of the Theater of Cruelty and the Theater of Violence. Pulp Fiction is our future, because it is the future of every individualist ideology. Some object that we have concentrated on the example rather than the question, but we did not choose the exemplar that was used to illustrate the question. Further, I think the person who did choose the example was correct: this was the right person to illustrate the ideology of individualism, rugged or otherwise.
The ideology of individualism presupposes an “ownership” of the self. But of all the things we can own, the one thing that is excluded is our own self. We cannot own our selves because we cannot seize control of our origins. Each of us is called into being through an act of love, and called into the ready-made community of the family. We receive our being, our name, our language, our culture as pure gifts. And being called into being, we are also called into radical dependency; none of us could have lasted a day without the help of others. Ideally, this dependency is filled by love, particularly a mother’s love. And while this is not always the case, this is always the ideal which all recognize even when they haven’t received it.
This dependency never leaves us; I am no less dependent on others today than on the day I was born. I might survive a few more days without the contribution of others, but these would be days of sadness. So what then is the difference between the man and the boy? It is that the man must make a decision about how much to contribute. If we are dependent on others—as clearly we are—then someone must be making a contribution. That is to say, someone must be using the gifts he receives to give more than he gets. In a healthy society, this someone will be everyone, or at least everyone of a certain age. Honor consists in acknowledging the gift as gift and passing it on with our own improvements and our own stamp. And it is honor, not individualism, that is the issue.
I think the proper framework for this question is given (as in so many questions) by the Fathers of the Church. They discussed the question in terms of autarkeia and koina, self-reliance and community. These were not things opposed, but complementary. Self-reliance was rooted in community and presupposed production not just to supply the person and his family, but to have something left over to contribute to the community, both in the form of charity and the form of commerce. The gift one gives to the community is commonly (in complex societies) given in the form of an exchange. However, it would be a mistake to read this only at the level of a commercial transaction. The brewer, the baker, the blacksmith share their gifts with the community as an exchange, but the exchange only funds the gift, and the gift cannot be reducible to the exchange. The products and services embody their givers, are an expression of their personalities. They must be funded, as every gift is funded, but they can never lose the quality of gift, if both social order and economic rationality are to be observed. If the transactions are merely a way of getting, and not a form of giving, then anything is possible, even any evil thing, and justified in the name of profit.
But a gift presupposes a gift-giver, and if we do not own ourselves, where is the origin of the gift? While we cannot own ourselves because we cannot create ourselves, we can and do own our actions. These actions, repeated, become habits, and the collection of habits, good and bad, virtuous and vicious, form the personality. We do not create ourselves, but we do (to a degree) create our personalities. This is still not an effort of pure individuality, because it depends on the quality of gifts we get (and nobody gets the same gifts) and the culture that surrounds us. But for all that, there is a decision which is ours, and it is in the quality of this decision that honor consists.
The only alternative to honor is self-interest. But self-interest, considered by itself, is pathological, and a person, a family, a firm, or a nation that looks only to self-interest will be dysfunctional. There is, of course, a certain self-interest in honor, but honor always exceeds self-interest. I am a member of the most self-interested generation in American history, a generation that has consciously decided not to pass on its gifts, but to appropriate them all for ourselves, in the name of rational self-interest. But of course, pure self-interest can never be rational, can never be correctly proportioned to the reality of the human condition. Hence it is no surprise that we have left them with debts they cannot pay, wars they cannot win, obligations they cannot meet, and have denied them the education that allows a man to know where honor lies and the social infrastructure which allows him to make a living and a contribution of his own.
Culture is how communities answer the questions posed by our being. There are a variety of answers, but the same questions. But the culture of self-interest considers that the questions are not worth answering, because the answers may limit our self-interest, and hence asking them is self-contradictory. Self-interest is about to have its final victory, which will turn out to be its final defeat, because no culture or country can survive the defeat of the common good. Those who long for a rugged individualism will get it; mostly they have gotten it already. But they will soon have a rugged individualist for a president, a congress of the self-interested, and a court that is a servant of corporatism. And as in the collapse of the Soviet Union, it will be nothing but a wholesale looting of whatever remains to be looted. And then the night.
And then, perhaps, some honorable men can start rebuilding. But in order to do that, there needs to be some clarity about what it means to be human, and where our honor lies.
This post is a testament to Medaille’s character. He is responding to two posts that are juvenile, paranoid, superficial, confusing, and fairly mean spirited. He responds with an essay that is complex and careful. Instead of bashing Stegall, he offers a vision of community that is nothing short of inspiring.
excellent – better expressed than my feeble attempt in the comments.
A thoughtful and considerate response. And while I mostly agree with it in its entirety, I find much to appreciate in the contributions to the Porch of both Mr. Stegall and Mr. Medaille. While there are fundamental differences that run through their views, let us not allow these differences to to turn into rift sown with bad blood. Surely there is more that binds us than there is to feud over.
This post provides much to agree with, but it strikes me as a serious (and perhaps willful) misreading of Caleb’s posts. I read Caleb as making a very practical point regarding the importance of grounding any reform movement in the actual history of the people and place for which reform is sought.
Caleb lives in Kansas not Rome or Vienna. As Russell Kirk once put it, “Human society being complex, remedies cannot be simple if they are to be efficacious. The conservative declares that he acts only after sufficient reflection, having weighed the consequences. Sudden and slashing reforms are as perilous as sudden and slashing surgery.” Caleb seems to me to have given close attention to this point in thinking carefully about the proper form for any work of restoration in his actual community. The responses strike me as blind to this point, the product of thought abstracted from our real time and place. Recourse to the schoolmen is a fine thing, not to be neglected, but for those interested in working out what it means to restore a culture committed to human flourishing in a place like Kansas we must also have recourse to the admittedly cruder and simpler tools that lay closer at hand in our own history.
No one who has read much of what Caleb has written, and certainly no one who knows him, can respond with more than a chuckle when confronted with the crude caricatured of his position presented in many of the comments attendant to this discussion. What Caleb suggests seems clear enough, that all of those who claim love for the ideas of continuity and place must humble themselves and give attention and respect to our actual real time and place, and the messy history that comes with it, in positing any program for reform. To fail to do this is hubris.
I just reread Caleb’s posts. I certainly don’t think this is his main point at all. To me, it’s an argument about the relationship between self-reliance and community. Caleb seems to be arguing that self-reliant individuals make true communities. John is arguing that there are no self-made men and that it is healthy communities that produce greater individual virtue and self-reliance. The argument is worth having, but Caleb makes it here in a manner that relies more on emotion, hyperbole, and name dropping than it does on any sort of rigor. Some of his other posts have been quite good, but I stick by my initial assessments of this pair.
I take the following paragraph to be the core of Caleb’s argument:
“I posit that in order to sustain any measure or hope of “success,” every movement or outbreak of localist, decentralist sentiment in our particular political historical geographic moment must not be, in any fundamental way, anti-American, and must venerate, though not necessarily without criticism or caution, the ideal experience of the self made man.”
His argument is prudential, asking what resources might a localist movement draw upon in order to achieve some lasting measure of success in a real live community in America in 2010? He opines that the proper form for such a movement to take is not reactionary (and thus revolutionary). He instead suggests that real and salutary reform of a localist nature can only come from those who love an actual place with an actual history. He asks us to consider if it is really possible, in the time and place where providence has placed us, to do justice to the localist principles of custom, convention and continuity while at the same time denigrating “the ideal experience of the self made man.”
In short Caleb’s posts seem to me to be concerned with whether FPR is about struggling together toward a vision of human flourishing that engages real front porches in a real republic; or if it is merely a place to mock as rubes those we rub shoulders with everyday who we can only see as “other” and to pine for an ideal community created after one’s own image and abstracted from the real lives of real people in real places, with real histories.
Lance, I just noticed your comment and only have a minute.
I have been hanging around the porch from near its beginning and I think there is merit to your observation in your last paragraph. In my humble, perhaps rube-ic, opinion, some of the posts on this site are of the “mock as rubes” variety.
Various posts and comments have denied pining for the pie not quite in the sky, but the lack of any movement that I can see to move the real situation closer to the porch, or vice-versa, would leave the “movement” here open to the criticism that it is “after one’s own image and abstracted from the real.”
There is a flavor of survivalism here. I get the idea that if there is an internet after the collapse that is often predicted here–not an unreasonable prediction in this rube’s opinion–that a post will appear the gist of which is, “See I told you so.” Quickly followed by another that reads, “Leave my stash of food alone, or else!”
Granted this is still a young group. One of the editors told me that he hoped that Porchers would do more than sit on the porch and jaw. I like much of what I see here, I hope so.
It seems that thus far everything on the Porch is “too” for another resident of the weathered flooring–too agrarian, too libertarian, too gun-totin’, too evangelical, too etc. etc.
My whiskey-drinkin’ buddy Bob, left. It has been suggested that he found it too. Maybe others found him too. Others from tractor drivin’ farmers to PowerPoint-projectin’ proffessors (& some do both) put up with one another–hey, they are mostly nice to even me. They have articulated some core values. I hope they will actually do something.
Caleb presented a real person. “Can we get behind her?” Or even a real sort of person, “Can we support this kind of person?” The answer was mostly a chorus of multi-tonal “TOO!” Unheard was the hoot of an owl in a distant tree who wisely asked, “[then] Who?”
Mark raises a real problem that I & maybe my wife will face when I/we fly to Guam, in a couple of months (I work with an outfit that has global interests). My real feet will be in a real airport. I will be xrayed by a real machine, or patted by a real person. Most of the answers offered to Marks post seem to me to be “abstracted from the real lives of real people in real places,” “If you have to fly I feel bad for you. I’m gonna stay on the porch.”
Maybe that is the best we can hope for. I hope not.
Permit me to offer my awestruck applause. “All things fall and are built again / And those who build them are gay.” (Yeats)
In summary the rugged individualist is dependent upon the good or ill will he or she generates from others.
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