Sharks and Community

There are, as I’ve said, two major problems with contemporary American culture, both of which the church, if it were smart, would key in on. One is the absence of deeper meaning in our culture. The shallow explanations offered by our secular world regarding the serious issues of life surely fail to convince or assure.

But another big issue is community. We seem starved for a genuine version of it, rather than the pale abstractions that define our nondescript, theoretical, modernist sense of community today.

With the advent of the large administrative state, citizens have been freed from the responsibilities that ought to go with the freedoms our culture provides. Viktor Frankl, the famed holocaust survivor, neurologist, psychiatrist, and author even suggested that we erect a “Statue of Responsibility” on the West Coast as a corollary (and antidote) to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

With this ever-expanding administrative state, individuals are free to choose their own lifestyle without any real concern for their neighbor. In the past, of course, relations with one’s neighbor were unavoidable. Today we can blithely pursue our own interests, confident (or so we assume) that the administrative state will take care of our neighbor. We needn’t get involved.

Thus is produced the worst-case scenario envisioned by the great French political scientist and historian, Alexis de Tocqueville. In his landmark book, Democracy in America, published in 1835, Tocqueville reported on the nascent form of democracy he had found in his earlier travels to the New World.

While he greatly admired the America he found, he also saw a tendency he feared might ruin the entire project.

What made America work, as Tocqueville saw it, was the health of its mediating institutions, the family, the church, and its various local political and civic organizations. It was through these mediating institutions that character was formed (absent an overbearing government) and where free, emancipated Americans learned and practiced self-governance.

Of course, self-governance required a virtuous self. But it also required local institutions where the virtuous self could make decisions and enact policies that directly affected one’s neighbors as well as oneself.

With the advent of the federal leviathan state such as we have today, what Tocqueville feared has come true, that decision-making has been transferred from local governance to distant bureaucrats who operate by means of bland generalities and impersonal, “objective” policies and norms.

A case in point can be seen in the dramatic increase in the shark population in the surrounding waters of Cape Cod, where I live. For years, the local fisherman would cull the seal population. The reason? Seals, as I understand it, eat between 30-40 pounds of fish a day!

But years ago bureaucrats in distant Washington, D.C. mandated that the seal population must be protected. As a result, the seal population in and around Cape Cod has exploded, not only diminishing the livelihood of the local fisherman, but drawing in sharks looking for a meal!

In fact, the team mascot for the new regional high school in the town where I live is now a shark. And every year, tourists and other beach-goers are urged to stay close to shore for fear of shark attacks.

What is lost here is the natural wisdom of the local population in deference to some universalized, one-size-fits-all policy that not only doesn’t make sense but, not surprisingly, doesn’t work.

Another example I recently read about took place on the northernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai. A few years back a major storm ravaged one of its towns in the southwest part of the island, washing out a bridge and a road leading to the town beaches and park, both integral to the town’s tourist trade.

After discussions with state officials, they were told repairs would likely take about a year and would cost at least 4 million dollars, if, that is, the money could even be found.

The local residents and merchants decided they had neither the money nor the time it would take for the state bureaucracy to act. They’d go broke first. So they formed their own neighborhood group with the help and funding from one local businessman in particular, and fixed the road and bridge in about 2 weeks. And it cost them only $100,000. The town was saved.

What makes this especially remarkable is twofold. For one, the administrative state was rejected as the solution. Local wisdom and local incentive was mobilized instead. Perhaps most significantly, the radical, non-communal individualism produced by an over-reliance on the bureaucratic state – one which passively waits for the state to solve its problems – was abandoned as well. Instead, the townspeople banded together in an act of genuine self-governance.

You see, for Tocqueville, what made American democracy work was townspeople banding together for the purposes of self-governance. What we see today, as I’ve said, is a large, bureaucratic state that has taken charge of all local and national matters, thus forcing the now disempowered individual to live a free, though meaningless existence born of subjective lifestyle choices and isolated living.

What American democracy ought to strive for, then, is not radical individualism fostered by the mediocrity of an overarching “nanny state,” but local self-governance directed by free individuals, individuals shaped and molded not only by the specificity of their unique life circumstances, but by the character and wisdom born of living a life vitally connected with one’s neighbors.

One of the main reasons today’s elite don’t “preach what they practice,” as Charles Murray put it, is that they see no connection to their neighbors. It’s the task of the state, after all, to take care of such things, leaving them free to pursue their own interests unencumbered by the wishes, desires, and/or needs of those around them.

So, as I’ve said repeatedly, the church, having fallen prey to the universalizing tendencies of modernism and its dulling collectivist blandishments, has diminished the essential role it once played in forming character and unleashing the wisdom and acumen of the local community as expressed in genuine self-governance.

Can such a thing be reclaimed today? Perhaps new opportunities will arise as the bureaucratic state increasingly flounders and fails.