Faith, families and cities

Exactly what I was thinking. If there is one thing that I believe stood out in Crunchy Cons, it is about making touh decisions and enduring the sacrifices that come with them. I drive an hour each way, for example, to keep my family where they are. In NYC that's just a step across the street. Good luck.

Well, which is it? If you guys are devoted to the idea of small communities, family farms, rural settings, you have to become aware of the fact that we cannot support the current population of the globe in that fashion, let alone the future population. If unlimited reproduction is the goal, then even viewing the thing optimistically, we have to realize that factory farming (eg, something I have seen myself, a roof, covering dairy cows wading in excrement, which stretches as far as the eye can see) and global commerce is our only hope to produce enough food cheaply enough to feed everybody.

Yeh, these people do, tovart. So do I, for that matter, but it usually doesn't work out that way. :)

No one is talking about hypocrisy, Rod, don't be sensitive. You just want contradictory things, as don't we all.

We are not there yet in terms of ideas. Cities are here to stay. Daydreams about small town life are not fruitful. Cities will continue to grow and dominate, so let's figure out new ways to relate and organize our lives in cities. I think that is where real visionary leadership needs to show up. I don't mean government planning, but a social movement that changes the city in profound ways on the level of the industrial revolution that drove people off the farms. What would that look like?

Christianity thrived in the cities of the Roman empire in part because it offered community and support to people who had moved to distant cities and were without their support networks. I've lived in Chicago and suburban DC, and the Catholic churches to which I've belonged seemed to reflect the same situation - they were the support for people who moved to the metropolis from the surrounding provinces. Of course, urbanization isn't exactly thriving in the US now either. The growing place to live is the exurb, where you combine the problems of urban and rural life, or the amenities, depending on one's perspective and what one does with one's situation. As for the "Benedictine option," everytime I hear it, it grates on me a little, because it seems so ahistorical. In general, the Benedictine order thrived because it could draw upon the protection of Christendom - the Franks and later the Ottonians, the Anglo-saxon aristocracy, etc. Remember the early medieval worldview - monks pray, peasants work, nobles fight. In other words, there was a surrounding culture amenable to the work of the Benedictines, as much as there were significant imperfections in that world. Withdrawing from the surrounding culture is less like being Benedictines in 9th century France (or even Saxony). It's more like being Christians in 9th century Egypt or Syria - you've ceded the culture to forces hostile towards you, and you may endure, but you won't flourish, and eventually you'll begin to fade.

How does the issue of size of city play into this? How large does a municipality have to be to qualify as a city? It seems to me that there are big difference among the ways of life possible in communities of 1,000,000 people, 500,000 people, 250,000 people, 100,000 people and on down in population from there. The choices before us are much more numerous that New York City on the one hand and Walnut Grove on the other. Most people opt for something along the broad range of possibilities between the two.

but it's also true that there is no longer an enforceable (by custom and consensus) and clear set of moral standards governing behavior, sexual and otherwise, I doubt that's true. At least it's not true where I live (San Francisco Bay area). It may be true in other places I guess. I've lived my whole life in California, and though I know a lot about Europe - my daughter lives there - I'm pretty out of tune with the rest of the US. First, non-sex. Robbery, assault, burglary, homicide, all that stuff, is just as it has always been, so far as I can tell, except that we're much better policed than, say, the Middle Ages. People got away with a lot of behavior then which would be criminally punishable now, only because the society wasn't rich enough to afford intensive policing, to say nothing of jails. Even fairly recently wife-beating, for example, was winked at. Now domestic assault is widely seen as criminal. Now, no one has ever succeeded in exterminating criminal behavior from any society, and I wouldn't hold my breath, but we're not doing badly overall, especially if you compare us to Europe in the 1500's, the Empire in the 200's, or even this country in the 1800's. Now then, sexual behavior. There are indeed clear standards, it's just that you don't like them. Having sex in public, for example, is still frowned on (to say the least) and pedophiles are hunted down without mercy. What adults choose to do in private is indeed deemed outside the purview of law or social sanction, but I would argue that that is as it should be.

Zak -- Great post, and spot on. .

Isn't the idea of living in these Utopian communities that having high tech/intellectual trades isn't really helpful to the community? Who do you think is going to grow the food, make the food, build the homes, watch the children while you are busy on the computer? The reality is these kinds of communities also require people to abandon their privilieged lives and occupations and instead focus their efforts on the common good, not the personal ego.

If you try to enforce customs and traditions those who object will crush you in court. If you try to create a closed community where customs and traditions are enforced, you will probably end up in prison or worse, like Waco.

Zak, fabulous post. For reasons stafanie elaborated, bucolic village life doesn't exist in the US. Spiritually, it doesn't exist in the West. I travel back and forth to East Africa 2-3x per year doing mission work and experience village life of old first hand. The community expectation that all live up to a highly defined set of standards may grate on "freedom" loving Westerners and feel terribly stifling, but most of the inhabitants are mystified by our do-what-you-like disconnected way of life. Having experienced both, I wonder at what cost our 'personal freedom' has come. I'm sorely tempted to pack up and move to a Maasai village in Tanzania...