On the one hand, Caleb certainly is right that we need to rebuild the local ties torn asunder over the last 50-60 years as our culture has dived headlong into various schemes of centralization, hypermobility, and fungibility. Products, suppliers, and employees all seem to be just cogs in various machines, now, and too many people think this is a good thing because it makes things cheaper and frees them from recognizing their responsibilities.

On the other hand, Frederica certainly is right to say that we cannot withdraw from society. It would be good for society if more would choose the cloistered life, if more would pray for the rest of us as a vocation.

But those of us with families in important ways must live in the world.
Pastoral innocence is a good reserved for the few — those who need not live in town, who can make a living in isolation. Again, it would be better if we had more such communities, but I'll not be joining one. I value my vocation, my interaction with others who are connected with my vocation, and my intellectual curiosity about how things work (or don't work) and can, or cannot, be improved too much to give up on active engagement.

And this, to my mind, brings us to the real dilemma: how do you rebuild something you know (and I think all of us at some level, in our very natures, know) is right, but which is frayed to the point of being almost invisible? How does one rebuild character-forming communities of ordered liberty? After the destructive generation has come what I think of as the Lord of the Flies generation — abandoned to a desolate wasteland of television and authority-less mob schooling by parents too concerned with "bringing down the power" to spend time building up their children's character. All of our institutions are deeply wounded, and few over the age of 30 can even remember what a healthy society is like.

But the answer cannot be to fly into the wilderness. It is highly unfortunate but nonetheless true that ours is a national economy, with national laws and rules concerning how everything is set up. You cannot escape them through mere distance. What you must do is live at their margins, building communities that rely as little as possible on faceless "mechanisms" and as much as possible on actual people — preferably people you know, with whom you can forge friendships.

The utopians failed because they didn't recognize that our society, like every society and like every meaningful institution, big and small, is a community of communities. This connects us with both good and bad things in a society as nationalized as ours has become. We all are by nature part of the lives, not just of our neighbors, not just of our fellow parishioners, but of those who make up and order the institutions of our economic and political as well as social and religious lives. But we must encourage, as much as we can, the actual multiplication of authorities, creating "niche markets" sub-communities, associations of all kinds within which we can build decent lives. It is in the multiplicity of authorities alone that we can find any real, ordered liberty, any chance for a life of virtue. The drive to separate leads too easily into the drive to place one person or a small group permanently at the head, with all the authority and all the power. The result always has been and always will be disaster for the real people (and their families) who are told to sacrifice for a greater good only the leaders "know." The result is the gnostic fallacy Voegelin warned against. Better, then, to work with what we have where we are; to build, not walls, but communities.

To build community in a culture that has become hostile to the very idea of community will not be easy. It certainly means being called all sorts of names and accused of wanting to run other people's lives because you dare to suggest there may be something better than mindless self-indulgence. But this task of a hundred years is necessary, and surely not too hard for people who recognize that they will never be fully at home in this world.