Starting from the Voeglenian premise that no one is obliged to participate in the disorders of his age, and in fact is obliged to resist them, the overwhelming moral sense I have when surveying the modern world is one of loss. A sense that what we have left behind in our affluence and mobility is a certain kind of Good that flourishes in rootedness and struggle — a way of being human that was always understood as the good life; a kind of self-provisioning that took place within a small network of interconnected social obligations, each to the other and all to a particular place, and to the customs and rites that naturally complimented that place. The spiritual order — both personal and social — of this good life is nourished on a veneration of children, work, craft, a sense of honor in commitments, and a common responsibility.

In place of this, we have been given the atomized individual, armed with a plethora of rights, making his way in a system of "opportunity" that requires the spiritual symbolization of society as a ladder to be climbed, which leaves a wake of personal disorder, the destruction of exploited people, places, and traditional communities, and loss of meaning on a massive scale.

It is true that liberalism — which is really the engine of modernism — as an ordering principle is tremendously powerful, and now has the inertia of centuries driving it forward still, but it has some significant weaknesses, chief among them that it lies. It lies about the human condition and it lies about the reality of natural limits embedded in reality. Human freedom and consumption simply cannot expand infinitely. Eventually, the structures supporting such expansion will give way, and it remains to be seen what, if any, civilizing forces will be left to bring order out of that chaos.

In the mean time, I think like Rod that we look to the wisdom of people like McIntyre and Eliot who urged that we turn aside from the project of shoring up modern liberalism, and begin to construct new enclaves of civility and order within which a true intellectual and moral life — the Good life — can be sustained. In time, this fertile soil will likely be the only source of order to "save the world from suicide," to borrow Eliot's phrase. Of course the Church is and should be the ideal and supernatural guardian of these enclaves.

The danger in this project is one of retreat and ghettoization which can easily occur in the context of the search for a satisfactory response to political and cultural liberalism. To some extent we are caught between the difficulties of assimilating with the dominant order on the one hand and on the other, acquiescing to being shunted aside into a kind of nature preserve for rubes and hold-outs — a ghetto; a facsimile habitat mimicking liberal society but with a Christian or “conservative” spin.

Often these responses happen at the same time in a community caught in this dilemma; it's happened most obviously to Christian evangelicals. Its leaders seek access to and are granted nominal positions of "influence" in secular society in exchange for keeping the rowdies on the reservation. The problem with this is that it cuts out the church's heart and replaces it with what sociologist Christian Smith has dubbed "therapeutic deism". Christianity becomes just another lifestyle choice complete with its own marketing departments, commercial backers, support "systems," and political interest groups. In this sense, late modern liberalism ghettoizes all identity — you really are what you eat, what you wear, what you consume. The discussion on this blog has illustrated this concept well.

When I talk about new enclaves of civility and culture, borrowing from thinkers like Alasdair McIntyre and T. S. Eliot, I think the point is that communities of tradition and practice need to be rebuilt along different non-liberal lines in a way that allows a real culture to flourish again. The church can never accept life on a reservation, but neither should it position itself to run what is already a decultured and post-Christian deformity — which is largely what late liberalism has become.

Instead of syncretism or retreat, the idea ought to be to learn — and it is a learning process — to live in love within the limits of one's existence. To suffer one's place and one's people — their joys and sorrows and history which weave a network of memory to which we belong — in service of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This is the true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. And really this is the heart of what Christ and the Church Fathers teach us about Christian holiness: master one's passions, deny oneself, and love others. This is the Christian answer to the spirit of death which dwells in the old man, and which, in the increasing absence of Christian holiness, becomes writ large as a Culture of Death. I talk to a lot of Christians who are flummoxed by their relative lack of political success in beating back the culture of death, even at a time of supposed conservative ascendancy and the power of the "values" vote. Of course there are multiple reasons for this, but foremost in my mind is that it does no good to vote an anti-abortion ticket if in one's life and community there is no drive and discipline towards holiness.

When one lives as a modern — and we almost all do to one degree or another — he is implicated by nearly all the habits of his heart in the same culture of choice he believes he is voting against. When we fail to resist the symbolization of the modern world as a giant machine in which each part relates to all the others in a purely mechanical way, we give in to thinking in the most utilitarian way possible: how can I fulfill my needs and desires most efficiently? And the political question becomes: how can we configure the machine so that each part has the maximum freedom to pursue its own end as efficiently as possible, without interfering with the ends pursued by the other parts.

Society and work and even family and church become ladders to be climbed, and the central spiritual motifs of our time become mobility and choice, and the fruits of this are pretty apparent — massive dislocation, family breakup, the end of meaningful small town and rural life, center-city rot, the end of functional education, economic ruin of small producers and landholders, the devolution of political life into identity and victimization games, and on and on. The end result of which is a profound existential alienation in the soul of modern man; he is without a home.

And the pernicious logic of choice (which has a kind of weedy genius) in turn capitalizes on its own discontented and confused search for home and meaning by churning out a-hundred-and-one cheap and easy anecdotes. So we are awash in this expansive sea of popular mass culture which offers everything from Martha Stewart to easy birth control to empty entertainment to mega-lo-mart churches and discount-store religion. All of which functions to shield people from ever even approaching anything real: real faith, real truth, real meaning and contentment.

Certainly in the life of our family we have tried to figure out what to do, but there is no doubt that it is tremendously difficult to resist the disorders of the age. I think for starters, we need to clear our lives of all the mass culture weeds that choke out authentic growth. Read the classics and the Church Fathers instead of junk fiction and self-help crap. And then go about the hard work of learning the discipline of place. Get married. Have kids, lots of them. Don't turn them over to others to raise. When I finished law school I had offers to work at several large east coast law firms for twice the money I could make at home. But home was more important, so we stayed. Shortly after law school, my wife Ann and I, with our three boys (now five boys), moved to 18 acres outside of town. We try to grow some of our own food, Ann has homeschooled, we have a commitment to this place and these people that trumps most of the other things we could spend our life pursuing. It isn't perfect or anywhere near that, but it is, we hope, a decent resistance.

There is risk in all of this — commitment by its nature portends disaster. Inevitably either we fail the place or person or idea we are committed to or it will fail us. The “real” that we all crave requires real risk though. And in that crucible I think the terrible beauty and transcendent hope of the uncertain journey of faith in Jesus becomes real, and our souls become attuned to that reality.

And in the end we must always remember the spiritual truth that, as the playwright Andras Visky puts it, the situation is very good, it is hopeless.