"The Quest for Community." It's not a light read, but it is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how to maintain a free society. It's a prescient work, and it helped me understand where so much of the alienation and eerieness of this current election cycle has come from: the brokenness of civil society, the continuing dissolution of strong community ties.
I find it fascinating that Nisbet was writing about the breakdown of community and alienation back in 1953. This was half a century before Robert Putnam wrote "Bowling Alone" and 60 years before Charles Murray examined the devastating effects of family breakdown on community in his 2012 work "Coming Apart."
As the ties that bind people together fall away -- family, church, civic societies and private associations-- alienation and loneliness in society grow. But Nisbet noted that as this happens, the strong human impulse for community would remain. We would merely grope around for a substitute. So as social brokenness grows, people turn to the government to replace those ties.
It's so bleak to consider all of this, because it's happening with ever greater speed before our very eyes. Worse, too many people cannot comprehend the irony of it all: dependence on the mass state only leads to even greater atomization of the individual. Even greater alienation. Is there anything cuddle-worthy in the mass bureaucratic state? Absolutely nothing. All it can deliver is even greater loneliness.
Here's an excerpt from Nisbet's Preface, dated December 1952:
"The real significance of the modern State is inseparable from its successive penetrations of man's economic, religious, kinship, and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of function and authority. These, I believe, are the penetrations and dislocations that form the most illuminating perspective for the twentieth-century's obsessive quest for moral certainty and social community and that make so difficult present-day problems of freedom and democracy."
And in the preface to the 1970 edition, Nisbet noted this about youth and apathy:
"It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age. . . By alienation I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it. For a constantly enlarging number of persons, including, significantly, young persons of high school and college age, this state of alienation has become profoundly influential in both behavior and thought."
Wow. And that was 45 years ago! Think about the mass cluelessness all around us today. Think about students' utter lack of knowledge of history, of civics, of the humanities. Consider the lack of connection they must be feeling as they grope about, trying on all sorts of personas whether it's a new gender identity persona or the persona of "social justice warrior." The divorce culture has rendered more than half of all children in today's America the wards of broken homes. Sure, children can be resilient. But they so often feel broken and alienated as a result of the disruption in their ties with parents. It takes its toll. Pathologies abound while folks scramble to find safe haven in the State. And here's the catch: at the same time that the state gives free stuff to individuals, it takes away from the individual's personal relationships and associations. As those relationships continue to weaken, State power grows. Let's not forget that our families, our institutions of faith, our civic and private associations have always served as buffer zones balancing the freedom of the individual against the power of the state. We've no choice but to defend and rebuild them.
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