The liberation of the individual was supposed to lead to mass empowerment. But it turns out that people can effectively pursue their goals only when they know who they are — when they have firm identities.
Strong identities can come only when people are embedded in a rich social fabric. They can come only when we have defined social roles — father, plumber, Little League coach. They can come only when we are seen and admired by our neighbors and loved ones in a certain way. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Other men are lenses through which we read our own minds.”
.. When we are situated within something it is because we have made a covenant. A contract protects interests, Pally notes, but a covenant protects relationships. A covenant exists between people who understand they are part of one another.
.. People in a contract provide one another services, but people in a covenant delight in offering gifts.
.. In an interview with Bill Maher last month, Senator Cory Booker nicely defined patriotism by contrasting it with mere tolerance. Tolerance, he said, means, “I’m going to stomach your right to be different, but if you disappear off the face of the earth I’m no worse off.” Patriotism, on the other hand, means “love of country, which necessitates love of each other, that we have to be a nation that aspires for love, which recognizes that you have worth and dignity and I need you. You are part of my whole, part of the promise of this country.”
Rod Dreher & Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove on the Benedict Option [Part 2]
For us on the traditionalist side, it is a matter of justice too, “justice” being the right ordering of things. Noncelibate gay partnerships and gay marriage doesn’t make sense within our Christian conception of order ..
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Nicholas Wolterstorff taught me that there’s a basic difference between understanding justice as the “right ordering of things” (i.e. “justice from above”) and understanding justice as a systemic effort to listen to the oppressed (i.e. “justice from below). His Reformed colleagues in South Africa justified apartheid as “the right ordering of things.” They forced him to reimagine justice biblically as God hearing the cry of Israel in Egypt.
.. Our problem is not so much with liberals (= Democrats and their fellow travelers) as it is with liberalism as an individualist mode of thought and politics that emerged from the Enlightenment. Conservatives — that is to say, Republicans and their fellow travelers — are as captive to liberalism, in this sense, as are their political opponents.
.. Sex is not the whole of the Gospel, of course, but fidelity to Scripture on sexual purity is precisely the area on which the world will push hardest against us. – See more at: http://www.redletterchristians.org/rod-dreher-jonathan-wilson-hartgrove-on-the-benedict-option-part-2/#sthash.LisFnw0Y.dpuf
Expanding Individualization: Why Don’t the Poor Rise Up?
Placing an exclusive stress on the expansion of rights and freedoms of individuals by disregarding or underrating the concomitant rise of individual responsibilities brings about social pathologies. They undermine solidarity as the glue of social life.
.. The differing consequences for those at the top and those at the bottom are visible in the class-based responses to a key element of individualization: changing sexual mores.
After a period of turbulence and high divorce rates in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the well educated are coming to terms with the sexual revolution by postponing marriage and delaying fertility as divorce rates for this class have stabilized or declined. The children of the affluent are, in turn, prospering.
Conversely, the less well off – from all backgrounds — have struggled with high levels of family dissolution, father absence and worklessness, leaving their own prospects, and those of their children, bleak.
.. All of which brings us back to the question of why there is so little rebellion against entrenched social and economic injustice.
The answer is that those bearing the most severe costs of inequality are irrelevant to the agenda-setters in both parties. They are political orphans in the new order