FROM THE ARCHIVES
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Re: Civil society
[Rod Dreher 03/28 06:03 PM]Frederica, it’s true that we can’t prepare adequately for a disaster as total as something like Katrina. But what concerns me is how civil society would enable people to live with a relatively severe level of hardship. I am amazed at the stories my father tells about being a kid during the Great Depression, and how poor everybody was. In his telling, the kind of suffering Americans endured back then was unlike anything most of us can even imagine today. But he says people took care of each other, and most people had a strong internal sense of order and discipline that kept society from going off the tracks. You had to know your neighbor, because no man could afford to be an island under those conditions. That’s the kind of thing that concerns me – how we’ve allowed our civic character to atrophy because we haven’t had to know our neighbors for a long time.
I mention in the book the examples of Katrina and Rita. We know how bad civil society broke down in New Orleans after Katrina, though happily many of the initial claims proved to have been exaggerated. What made an impression on me was three weeks later, when Hurricane Rita hit the Cajun country. I was down in south Louisiana that weekend, and it was instructive to watch the TV coverage of the aftermath on a Lafayette TV channel. Those rural and small-town Cajuns took care of each other. They got into their boats and went out to help. The NYTimes a few years ago wrote a story about how sociologists have discovered that there’s no place in America where people stick around to the degree that they do in Acadiana. Folks just don’t leave. They’ve got their problems, but as Caleb has pointed out throughout the run of this blog, there’s value to sticking around. You know your neighbors and develop a sense of loyalty that you really count on when the chips are down.
I have concern, maybe even fear, that the radical individualism and materialism that we’ve been cultivating for so long in the USA will be the downfall of us if we ever have to face a critical and sustained crisis. When I think about my dad’s stories of the Depression, and try to imagine people today, soft as we are, trying to hold ourselves together in that kind of trial, it’s hard to be optimistic. That’s why I believe that we have a responsibility to do what we can to build and strengthen the little platoons today.
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