The Shire and the City

Robert Royal has an article up at Catholic Thing in which he explores our ineradicable longing for intimate, small-scale communities and the major obstacles a postindustrial, interconnected world throws up against a realization of those ideals. Linking this dilemma to a larger dichotomy between faith and reason, where the dominant side has been cycling to little avail since the Enlightenment, he says:

The reaction to that hubris of a certain kind of reason, a narrow rationality as we now clearly see, set in early. Romantic notions of  Kultur , of small groups and traditional values, initially in Germany, sought to bring something humane back into the world that the allegedly humane universal rationalism had left out.

We’ve gone back and forth from one to the other, at different periods, ever since. It’s demanding to pursue both at once, in the right ways, and therefore it’s a constant temptation to give up on the properly universal or particular to make life easier and simpler. The whole history of recent times could be rewritten with reference to these two temptations.

How do serious, concerned citizens address this? It demands we imagine new institutions, he says, a far more difficult task than a reactionary would have you believe:

There’s no simple going back to the practices of a previous age. As  Peter Brown  argued in this space on Saturday, even those of us who value subsidiarity and markets, and who believe the growth of central governments everywhere are threatening civil and religious liberty and simple humanity, have to create new institutions to assure the survival of the fully human. For the moment, they do not yet exist.

Read Royal’s entire piece here .