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The Need For Monks (and Farmers)
[Ross Douthat 03/08 10:27 AM]Sorry for the radio silence (I have all sorts of thoughts on Homer and crunchiness, but I haven't yet been able to give them coherent shape). I was struck, though, by Rod's correspondent's argument that "this way of life may not be for everyone" — which is a statement I completely agree with, but which gets at the heart of our current dilemma. As Caleb and Bruce have been quick to say, an agrarian way of life isn't for everyone (it's probably not for me!), but the more important point is that it is for someone — Victor Davis Hanson's ten percent, perhaps — and when it disappears that disappearance comes at great cost to society. It's similar, I think, to the traditional Christian attitude toward monasticism, poverty, celibacy, and so on — which wasn't that every rich man needed to sell all he had and enter a monastery, but that some did. Christ told the rich young man to give away all his possessions and follow him, but he didn't tell that to everyone he met — it was a specific mission for a specific person, or kind of person. At the moment, though, that mission seems to be vanishing into the shadows of American Christendom, forced out of the limelight by megachurches, bestselling pop theologians, and preachers for whom a large congregation and a swank auditorium are the only necessary signs of God's grace.
Right now, I'm struggling with an article about Christianity and money in modern America, and this point keeps hitting home for me — that our difficulty is not so much the presence of commercial capitalism as the absence of alternatives. We're a rich, post-industrial country, so of course most people are going to live in cities or amid suburban sprawl, shop at Safeway instead of the farmer's market, let their kids watch too much TV, worry too much about money, and so on. And conservatism, like Christianity, needs to be attuned to the needs, political and spiritual, of most people — the Homer Simpsons of the world, the non-crunchy and consumerist man who can still be virtuous or even heroic. But it also needs to cultivate alternatives. We need farmers and artisans the way we need monks and nuns, as leaven in the loaf, and we don't have enough of either.
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