"Insofar as both liberalism and capitalism tend to devour and erode the institutions and communities that made them possible, they end up parasitically consuming the host and thus engendering their own demise, starved by their own hunger.
"We want the fruits of stability without its demands; we want the free-flying feeling of liberation without the anchored foundations that launched us.
"'To learn from nostalgia, we must let it guide us not merely toward 'the way we were,' but toward what was good about what we miss, and why.'
"The creative way forward, then, is to recover a culture of solidarity in the face of atomistic individualism and an abstract state.
"Social conservatives must therefore make a positive case, not just a negative one. Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people's eyes and hearts to the alternative: to the vast and beautiful "yes" for the sake of which an occasional narrow but insistent "no" is required. We can do this with arguments up to a point, but ultimately, the case for an alternative that might alleviate the loneliness and brokenness evident in our culture requires attractive examples of that alternative in practice, in the form of living communities that provide people with better opportunities to thrive."
No comments:
Post a Comment