Let me widen my point about mobility in order not to get bogged down in analyzing when relatives are annoying enough to justify leaving. In his critically important essay “Liberalism and its History,” Eric Voegelin argues that there is no way to understand any modern political movement other than as a mode of reaction against revolution. Liberalism, the dominant movement in the Enlightened west, succeeded by appropriating and taming the symbol of revolution. Voegelin says, “The idea of peaceful change—a policy of timely adaptation to the social situation that in the age of the industrial revolution, changes very quickly—has become today a constant in all shades of liberalism. Form this point of view liberalism becomes a method for carrying on the revolution with other, less destructive means.”

Western liberalism, then, makes revolution a permanent condition, and is therefore inherently unstable (this is essentially the same argument Schumpeter makes about capitalism). Liberalism, says Voegelin, “lives to the extent that it moves.” Many social commentators have observed this quality of “mobility” as being central to modernity’s cultural and political order. The historian Christopher Lasch, for example, insightfully discussed the spiritual symbolization of society as a ladder to be climbed in a system of endless “opportunity.”

In T.S. Eliot’s equally important essay “The Idea of a Christian Society” he says that liberalism is “a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. … [I]ts movement is controlled rather by its origin than by any goal, it loses force after a series of rejections, and with nothing to destroy is left with nothing to uphold and with nowhere to go.” Voegelin adds that “revolution in the modern sense has no intention of producing a stable condition; revolution is the mental and spiritual condition of an act that has no rational goal.”

Rod’s points are good ones, and I may have slightly overstated my case. I am not condemning mobility per se. But the point of my earlier comments on this were that the corrosiveness of this spiritual aspect of restless movement — with no real end in sight other than the pursuit of desire which is never satisfied — in a liberalized society cannot be underestimated.

I will conclude with another line from Eliot for those who feel the burden of recovery of meaning may simply be too heavy: “To those who can imagine [a totalitarian democracy], and are therefore repelled by such a prospect, one can assert that the only possibility of control and balance is a religious control and balance …. That prospect involves, at least, discipline, inconvenience, and discomfort: but here as hereafter, the alternative to hell is purgatory.”