[Angelo Matera 02/23 12:48 PM]A point about the Rod vs. Caleb thing about whether we’re obligated to live close to family: The “rootedness” of the past that traditionalists yearn for was mostly involuntary. People stayed close to family, stayed married, etc., mostly because they had no other choice. Now, we’re called to do these things because we want to.
The rootedness of the past was based on a combination of social coercion, limited choices, and psychological/cultural dependency. (About the latter, the Amish, in their wisdom, allow their children to run wild for a few years in their late teens, a rite called Rumspringa, before giving them the choice to re-commit to the community. Do the vast majority re-commit because of free choice, or because of fear of the unknown? I don’t know).
I’m not saying those cultures were bad, of course. As a Crunchy Con, I’d say they were generally better. However, we can’t go home again. Karl Marx was right — the material basis of society goes a long way towards dictating culture. Thanks mostly to capitalism and prosperity (and probably liberal democracy), freedom is a fact of life, and as Francis Fukayama has said, it will continue its march across the globe, despite periodic setbacks caused by backlashes like the current Islamic reaction.
Now and in the future social bonds will be voluntary. Cultural renewal is about adjusting to this reality, primarily by making “sacrifice, self-discipline, putting others before oneself” attractive. That sounds superficial, but it’s not. I can only speak as a Christian, but that’s what the Church, in the ecumenical sense (and the creative communities within the Church) is about — attracting the world into a communal life where we freely choose to lay down our lives for others, where people not only do what they ought to do, but love to do what they ought to do. That’s what the real meaning of “proposing, not imposing” means. Anything else is just moralism, and too often, results in hypocrisy. Let’s face it, we all do what makes us happy.
And as Dostoevsky said, “love in practice is harsh and dreadful compared to love in dreams.”
As a Christian, I believe only the love of God can get me to freely choose to lay down my life for another, or love my enemy. In the end, cultural renewal that doesn’t take into account the new role of freedom is just sentimental. This explains Pope John Paul II’s (and now Pope Benedict XVI’s) relentless emphasis on both faith AND freedom, and why in the end conservative cultural renewal must not fear freedom, but embrace it.
