Self, Other, Community: Meditations on Social Order and Social Breakdown

By George A. Kendall

This is a book about two forms of energy—binding and expansive—and how getting the relationship between them wrong is destroying us. The modern world sees society as a collection of autonomous individuals, held together to some extent by the self-interest of its individual members, but excluding any notion of community—i.e., relationships that bind persons to one another in a way that transcends self-interest and individual autonomy, something we used to call love. When we talk about love at all, it is as one of the “frills,” something pleasant that we can get along without, but playing no role in the “practical” business of making the world work. This turns social reality upside down. The truth is, love—of God first, then of neighbor—is the binding energy that holds communities and their institutions together, that makes possible strong families, strong neighborhoods and towns, and everything else. Yet today, we see both the State nd the corporate world waging endless war against genuine community, sacrificing community to supposedly more ultimate goods like wealth, utopian social engineering projects, and so on. At the root of it all is the loss of the sense of cosmic order and unity, something only the Catholic Church has ever been able to embody and impart. Hence these essays rely heavily on Catholic social teaching and the vision of reality at its foundation.
Self, Other, Community is a collection of essays, written over a decade or so, examining this situation from a variety of perspectives: things like authority, bureaucracy, wage labor, our obsession with college education for everyone, the “pregnancy pact,” sexual chaos, the legitimacy of a government which relentlessly attacks human communities, why I am a Luddite (who publishes electronically), and so on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: George A. Kendall
• Release date: Jun 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9780965108089

George A. Kendall

George A. Kendall was born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1942 (canned bios tend to studiously avoid giving any clue to the person’s age, so I thought, being something of a contrarian, I would make this one the exception). He has a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Detroit, and got to the A.B.D. (all but dissertation) stage at Michigan State University, where he studied sociology. He has been a contributing editor of The Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly newspaper, since 1986 and has published numerous articles (probably in the hundreds) there and elsewhere, including several in journals of philosophy and theology. An old bachelor, he has lived for a number of years now in the tiny village of Grand Marais in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He credits Grand Marais with doing much to deepen his understanding and appreciation for community, as well as being the most beautiful place God ever created.

Book preview

Self, Other, Community:

Meditations on Social Order and Social Breakdown

by George A. Kendall

Smashwords Edition

Published by the St. George Press

Grand Marais, Michiga

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: ESCAPE FROM THE BLOB

THE SACRIFICE OF COMMUNITY TO PROGRESS

MORE ON THE TWO KINDS OF ENERGY

WHY I AM A LUDDITE

SOME THOUGHTS ON WAGE LABOR

WORK: MAN’S SHARE IN CREATION

SEPARATION OF COMMERCE FROM RESIDENCE

ECONOMICS: SERVANT OR MASTER?

SUBSIDIARITY FOREVER

MOBILITY

CLARIFICATION ON SUBSIDIARITY

SUBSIDIARITY AND THE MARKET

BUREAUCRACY AND SUBSIDIARITY

THE MANAGEMENT DELUSION

MOBILITY AND DISENGAGEMENT

VILLAGE LIFE

GREED AND THE LOSS OF COMMUNITY

TRUST

HATRED OF ORIGINS

ECONOMIC DETERMINISM

AUTHORITY: PERSONAL AND BUREAUCRATIC

THINKING OUTSIDE THE ENLIGHTENMENT BOX

HEALTH CARE: NO SOLUTION OUTSIDE CHRISTIANITY

IS COLLEGE EDUCATION REALLY A GOOD IDEA (FOR MOST PEOPLE)?

THE PREGNANCY PACT AND THE CLUELESSNESS OF THE ELITES

LIBERALS AND CHANGE

SEX AND AUTONOMY

SEX AND THE SPLITTING OF THE PERSON

GOOD ENOUGH IS GOOD ENOUGH

YOU CAN LIVE IN THE PAST

GRATITUDE AND RESENTMENT

OBNOXIOUS ADS AND WHAT THEY REVEAL

EDUCATION FOR HUMILITY—A RADICAL IDEA

CAN WE REALLY LIVE IN THE PRESENT? SOME THOUGHTS ON TIME

IS OUR GOVERNMENT LEGITIMATE?

RESISTANCE TO TYRANNY: HOW DO WE GO ABOUT IT?

IS GOVERNMENT A NECESSARY EVIL?

MORE ON RESISTANCE

TOTALITARIANISM: THE IDOLATRY OF THE STATE

THE WAR AGAINST SPIRITUALLY DISEASED ELITES

EPILOGUE: HUBRIS AND NEMESIS, OR, BACK TO THE PIGSTY

SECOND EPILOGUE: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT FORGETTING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INTRODUCTION: ESCAPE FROM THE BLOB

When I was a young man, living outside the Church and wandering through the dark forest (see Inferno, Canto I), I became much enamored of a kind of pantheistic metaphysics (what we would now call New Ageism) that basically saw all of reality as one huge, undifferentiated subjectivity—in essence, one huge blob—to which all the particular realities of the external world could be reduced, because all of them were illusory and only this underlying, ultimate subjectivity was real. That meant there was no self and no other, just pure identity. One day I wrote a long, tortuous, convoluted letter to a friend trying to resolve some philosophical problems in these terms, and sent it off, though deeply dissatisfied with it—sensing that I was trying to force something into a framework where it just didn’t fit. Now I’ve noticed for many years that often getting a bad piece of writing out of my system paves the way for something better (arguably the only excuse for some of my articles), and that is what happened in this case. The day after sending the letter I dashed off another one to the same friend (who must have begun to doubt my sanity) completely repudiating what I had said in the first letter, because in the meantime it had suddenly become very clear to me that without self and other as fundamental categories it was impossible to make any sense out of reality, that self and other and their relation, are the fundamental, underlying structure of reality, not identity. It was like being in a dark place and coming out into the light of a sunny day. It was, I realized long afterwards, the beginning of an understanding of the structure of being as Trinitarian. I have spent the more than forty years since that time exploring and developing this basic insight, and will doubtless continue doing that until my departure from this vale of tears. That was the day I escaped from the Blob (or at least began to).

One thing in particular that I have come to appreciate more and more during those years is how crucial this insight is to a sane understanding of human community—i.e., the social order. In what follows, and throughout this collection of essays, I will try to develop this theme.

To judge by 90% of what our politicians say, you would think that practically everything in the world was about economics—the production and distribution of material goods. It is a commonplace that people vote their pocketbooks, something summed up in Clinton’s phrase, It’s the economy, stupid. This reflects an underlying, tacit assumption that material wealth is our highest good, hence the principal object of political activity is to further its growth.

It is an assumption, in other words, about the hierarchy of goods. In contemporary political discourse, material wealth is always right at the top of the hierarchy, and other goods are automatically subordinated to it. We see that in the casualness with which people dismiss family farms and mom-and-pop stores as institutions which have been left behind in the dustbin of history, because factory farms and Wal-Mart are more efficient at providing lots and lots of cheap goods. The contributions family farms and mom-and-pop stores make to community life are dismissed, because to people who think this way community life is a kind of luxury, something not really practical, which must make way for economic efficiency. People who see anything positive in these institutions are dismissed as nostalgic.

But this way of thinking conflicts drastically with the Christian understanding of the hierarchy. For Christians, material wealth, while necessary up to a point, is probably right at the bottom of the hierarchy. It is there to serve higher goods, such as life, health, the development of the life of the intellect and of culture, and so on. And above all other earthly goods, it is there to serve the good of community.

This is something we really need to focus on, because contemporary culture seems determined to deflect our attention from it. The highest good, for Christians, the good which is, without qualification, a good in itself and not for the sake of anything else whatever, is communion with God. But communion with God is inseparable from communion with one another, as the commandment to love God and the commandment to love one’s neighbor are inseparably united in the Great Commandment. The communion of persons, with its vertical axis, the love of God, and its horizontal axis, the love of human beings for one another, is the highest good. All other goods are subordinate to it and are there to serve it. The horizontal community, the communion of persons in Christ, is embodied, above all, in the Church, but it is also embodied in lesser human communities, especially small, face-to-face communities like the family, the neighborhood, and the small town. The communion of persons in such communities is, purely and simply, after communion with God, but inseparable from it, what God created us for.

The first thing that we need to be clear on is that the self-other relation is built into the very structure of being. We don’t start with x number of individual beings, then bring them into relation with each other as if the relation were something added on. The relation is part of the being. We are made to extend, to stretch out, to the other, and to receive the other extending to us. The extension makes the being the individual being that it is. An unextended being would be a nothing, a kind of infinitesimal point. The autonomous, i.e., unrelated individual is a construct if anything ever was, a product of abstraction. So the social contract theory, in all its forms, is nonsense, with its idea that we start out with unrelated, autonomous individuals who, at some point, construct society as a way to protect themselves from one another. In fact, from the first instant of our existence, we are part of a world, a community of beings, because the extending to the other is already a part of our being. What is the first thing an embryo does after fertilization? It extends to the mother by implanting itself in the wall of her uterus. There is no time or place prior to or outside of community. It is always the primary reality. The very first humans came into existence already formed into a community. The social contract theory only has validity insofar as it means that already existing communities may find it necessary to consolidate themselves more firmly, and will do so when their members, or their leaders, act together to do so, thus, perhaps, creating something we would consider a government, when previously there had not been one, though, certainly, the activity of governing had been going on from the beginning.

But the modern world doesn’t see it that way. To the modern, progressive, way of thinking, there is really no communion of persons, because the world is made up of autonomous individuals who form relationships of their own choosing based on utility—i.e., mutual self-interest. They sometimes like to talk about love, but generally this means either sexual lust or vague sentimentality. The modern take on the institutions that embody the communion of persons tends to be that these are principally about such sentimentality. They are seen as, at best, a positive force because they support important activities like economic growth. Strong families, for instance, furnish us with a steady supply of workers. Churches can instill a work ethic in people, and that keeps the economy going. At worst, they are seen as a kind of charming, quaint remnant of the past, a sort of luxury which people can enjoy after they have gotten the really important things done, but of no importance in the practical world.

The problem is this: However unimportant the modern world may think community life is, it draws on it for its own life, but in doing so it weakens that community life and the institutions that embody it. When they are gone, the whole industrial-economic enterprise will collapse. Since the industrial revolution got into full swing, it has steadily attacked and undermined the family, the Church, the local community, the family farm, and the rest. But without these institutions there is no social order, and without the social order there is no economy, industrial or otherwise. I like to think of all this in terms of the relationship between two kinds of energy.

A number of years ago, Eric Voegelin summed up the problem of social justice more or less in this way: That a just social order balances the interests of the more energetic and the less energetic members of society—the more energetic being what we today call the movers and shakers, the go-getters, the gung-ho types who have got to change the world, to do the big things, etc. They are neither the best nor the worst people—they include the highly talented people, the great artists, scientists, etc. as well as the power-mad politicians, greedy businessmen, and such. The less energetic would be the ordinary people, people who live, or try to live, stable, outwardly uneventful lives in a traditional social milieu which doesn’t change drastically from generation to generation, the kind of people quite ably captured in Wendell Berry’s novels. The problem of social justice is, on the one hand, to keep the ordinary people from interfering with the legitimate rights of the go-getters, out of envy and resentment, and at the same time to keep the go-getters from oppressing and exploiting the ordinary people.

In my vocabulary, I would think, not in terms of energetic v. non-energetic, so much as in terms of two kinds of energy—binding energy and explosive energy. The ordinary, stable, settled people, the farmers and small town dwellers of Berry’s novels, basically put their energy into creating and maintaining bonds, among people, among things, between people and things. Creating and preserving community is what life is about. For the other type, life is about innovation, creating new things, changing the world; it is about explosive, expansive activity. Neither group is absolutely right or wrong. Without strong communal bonds, no society, not even an expansive industrial one, can survive, something we are discovering now as our expansive society more and more disintegrates in the absence of stable families, stable local communities, and a stable cult of the divine. When we cultivate expansion and progress at the expense of these bonds, we end up with collapse, because even the most expansive society needs them. On the other hand, an absolutely static society will also disintegrate. Someone needs to build the cathedrals. Someone needs to build railroads. Someone needs to provide government beyond the local level, though, one would hope, not too big or too intrusive. Someone needs to provide for defense against enemies. The two groups need to be kept in balance both as a matter of justice and because, pragmatically, society cannot survive if they get out of balance.

The two groups, of course, correspond pretty closely to the city-dwellers and the rural people. This is where we can see how out of balance things have gotten. By the very nature of things, we need to have the great majority of people living in rural areas, dedicated to cultivating the land and preserving community, supporting, by so doing, a minority who live in cities, where the go-getters can meet and exchange ideas. A world where practically everyone lives in cities can only be a gravely disordered and unhappy world, where elites dedicated to change and progress without limits oppress a majority who can never be go-getters but are no longer able to cultivate bonds of community because they have been uprooted from their place. And the absence of those bonds will ultimately pull the rug out from under the elites, who cannot survive without community any more than the ordinary people can.

It has become customary to say that in pre-industrial times, we had to have the majority of people engaged in faming just to support the city people, but that modern methods of agriculture make this no longer necessary. This is a typically technocratic analysis. The truth is, people need bonds of community at least as much as they need food, and it is the rural people who are the principal producers of these bonds. The rural people are the stabilizing element in society, and if they are not, as a group, substantially larger and weightier than the destabilizing elements, things will come apart. Cities can be wonderful places when their principal function is to bring creative people together. They become hell on earth when they function primarily as a dumping ground for uprooted peasants.

So there is the energy that binds things, that holds the world together, and there is the explosive energy that tries to transform the world. The industrial revolution has to be understood as a breakdown of the balance between these two types of energy, the exaltation of the explosive energy at the expense of the binding energy (there is a fascinating parallel here with physics—between the energy that holds the fundamental constituents of matter together in the atom, and the explosive energy of the expanding universe). When we break up the bonds of human communities, we can, up to a point, free up energy for progress, but eventually, this leads to disintegration. The modern world has been built by channeling into technological and economic progress, the energy which, in the normal and right order of things, sustains and holds together the communion of persons which is actually the highest good for which humans exist. It makes the higher serve the lower, and ultimately creates a hell on earth. Eric Voegelin summed this up well:

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrifice God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world-immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life of the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline.

We are, I suspect, very closely approaching the end of this process.

An afterthought: A few years ago, I found myself watching the PBS documentary on the lives of the nineteenth century feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Overall, it was worth the time, though as Feminists for Life pointed out shortly afterwards, PBS somehow omitted to mention the embarrassing (for feminists) fact that both these ladies were strongly opposed to