Many believe themselves to be content, despite the limited interaction with their friends. What can you do if they are satisfied? How does one answer this objection? Their beliefs reinforced through habit; living with strangers does not seem strange to them. They do not experience true loneliness unless something shocks them out of their complacency. Is their interaction with their wife sufficient to persuade them that they have found a soulmate, and that she is all they need to keep them company?
Cheap energy makes their diversions and private recreations possible and these facilitate atomistic living, keeping their users busy (and helping them to forget their loneliness).
Have we, then, achieved a new sort of politeia? Or are we more like the cyclops? After all, how can it really be called a form of community when the families hardly interact?
In response to the incentive to network (or engage in tribalism) to prepare for cases of emergency an Uhmerican might feign indignation that one would cultivate friends only as people to be used in order to survive (like many of the relationships one sees on Survivor or Big Brother). Now of course we should not form associations with others so that we can take advantage of them in times of need. But Uhmericans have become blinded to how dependent they are on cheap energy and technology for survival, believing themselves to be self-sufficient when they are not. It is proper for friends, and members of a community in general, to depend upon one another for survival, but this need is only foundational to the political order. It is not the "highest" good to which living in society is ordered, which is that living in society itself.
We are perfected in loving and living with others -- those who do very little to live and love others beyond his immediate family are stunted psychologically and spiritually. Lecturing them on what they ought to be doing will not cure their spiritual ailment.
It needs to be said that without grace, even the members of an community explicitly ordered to its proper end will be motivated by the love of their own good, rather than the love of God and other goods properly subordinated. This can easily degenerate into the love of his private subjective good. The problem with liberalism is that it espouses an agnosticism about man's good and its understanding of community is lacking. There is nothing to check selfishness except the 'no harm principle' and a weak sense of commutative justice. In effect, it takes the principle that man's proper end is his subjective good and enshrines it as the foundation for the political order.
A Sense of Owingness by R.J. Snell "We tend to think that freedom is the absence of responsibility." Freedom from responsibility or from coercion?
For finite beings, the generosity of existence occurs both because we are rich and because we are poor. As rich, we have existence and communicate ourselves to others. Unlike God, finite beings are poor, lacking the fullness of existence and so each tries to enrich itself by its relation and dependence on other beings. As persons, we give and receive because we are both generous and in need. While all finite being must receive, this is not a shameful imperfection but a sign of personhood. Unlike the sovereignty model where capacity for isolation is the mark of perfection, to receive is not imperfection but perfection, a mark of our dignity. I can think of myself as an empty container of freedom, as a sovereign who exists prior to my entanglements with others, but this is a paltry and ghost-like self. The person who matters is the one who is son, father, husband, cousin, son-in-law, friend, and each of those roles limits my ability to do just whatever I want, whenever. As son, I owe piety; as husband, I owe fidelity; as father, I owe gentle instruction; as friend, I owe loyalty. Consequently, I am what I am in virtue of the responsibilities I bear. Insofar as I matter as a person, I am constituted not by sovereignty, but by what I owe. And only by knowing what I owe to others do I know who I am and what I’m for; ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self.The first paragraph is fine; the second... not so much, unless this is personhood understood of creatures and not of the Holy Trinity. We are created to know and love and we are made to bring each other to perfection. As for owing -- we do have duties to one another, but the ratio for the duties of a superior to an inferior are not the same as the duties of an inferior to a superior. The latter are acts of virtues related to justice, the former are not, though they may be acts of legal justice or of charity or friendship. (Not all owing is related to a right, although contemporary Catholics believe this, having expanded the notion of justice to encompass anything that is owed. See John Finnis, for example.)
(Begun on October 28.)
Related:
Most people have about 2 people they consider friends.
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