The following paper was read at the conference “The Idea of a Village,” May 2016. A video of the lecture can be found here.

We of the twenty-first century look for the village in legend and folk tale, to some extent in history and there, much more as we look back, less and less as we come forward.  This is no accident, for reasons I will go on to point out.  This fact and a few others make much of what I am about to say seem ‘abstract’ and ‘ideal’.  Yet what I say here about the village is utterly ‘practical’ and ‘realistic’.  Man cannot—I propose—have healthy familial life and just political order unless these take root and find support in village life.

At the same time, what I am about to say is not ‘immediately’ practical.  To live a true village life at this time is virtually impossible, is in most places illegal, and has been made ludicrously burdensome by the modern cult of convenience.   Some few remote, impoverished places may still hide villages.  Those wealthy enough can play ‘village’.  And heroic souls can strive to reestablish village life, but not, at present, without an unnatural and unhealthy dependence upon and interference from the modern, global ‘city-state’.

My insistence upon speaking about the village ‘in its purity’ does not arise from a refusal to face reality, from an unwillingness to appreciate what is good in things that are imperfect, or from a desire to depreciate the work of those who strive to live village life as well as they can, while I stand by only talking about village life.  Rather, I want to encourage those interested in village life in two ways.

I want them to see how critical the village is to the whole human race.  I also want to help them avoid the temptation to believe that the compromises necessary to any village in our day constitute improvements on the village.  I would suggest that one cannot improve on the village.  The village is one thing man has got right, or rather, had got right—albeit in many different ways.

For many reasons, we cannot hunt, sew, sing, farm, cook, dance, or wash clothes as could those who have lived in villages until very recently.  We have exchanged such abilities for many advantages, especially long lives and material possessions.  I propose here that the loss is much greater than the gain—in some sense it is infinite.  I propose that we have lost the interaction with nature that allows us to cultivate our own, human, nature in a manner conducive to happiness—by which I mean true, human thriving and fulfillment—not merely living, but living well, the good life.

The basic claim of these remarks is that, while the village is not sufficient for human happiness, the village is necessary for such happiness.  To defend the claim, I will do three things.  First, I will briefly discuss the dependence of human social and political order upon nature.  Second, I will compare the roles proper to the village and the city in achieving happiness.  Third, I will argue that only in the village is man able to experience the natural world and within it, his own nature, in a manner that will fit him to found healthy cities and to live happily within them.

Now, when I was ten years old, my cousin Charlotte lived with us for several months.  As she stood over the floor heater early winter mornings, she would often describe life growing up on an Indian reservation as well as her vagabond life as a hippie.  I can still hear her hearty laughter as the warm air puffed up her flannel nightgown.  Then one morning my mother asked her, ‘What do you hippies have against society?  What’s your criticism?’

I looked up at Charlotte’s face.  It had become serious and thoughtful.  ‘We think society has got too far away from nature,’ she said.  ‘Society is too artificial.’

I cannot now recall whether their conversation continued; my thoughts had started on their own course.  I felt sure immediately of two things.  Society had separated itself too far from nature, though I felt less sure in what way it had done so and why.  More fundamentally, I ‘knew’, without yet seeing why, that a society could only remain healthy so long as it remained united to nature in the right way.  The clearest image I had was of a hippie commune I had seen on television, where the members lived by raising goats and making cheese.

Now I have thought continually about these questions ever since.  I struggled to express this in an essay written a few years later.  ‘Man has become estranged,’ I began to write, and then I stopped.  Should I say, ‘from nature’ or ‘from his nature’?  I thought about this some time.  I went back and forth.  I finally wrote succinctly, ‘Man has become estranged from nature.’  And I understood then and still understand the reality described by these words to mean this, that man, by surrounding himself with human contrivances and thus insulating himself from the natural world has lost his understanding of that natural world to which he himself belongs.  Precisely because man is a natural being and not artificial and man-made, he has at the same time lost his understanding of himself.

I have tried, therefore, most of my life to uncover that natural world that still lies hidden and masked all about us and thereby to find human nature and to understand how to fulfill its various powers, especially by those habits we have traditionally called art.  In using this word I do not have the fine arts principally in mind.  Yet I do not exclude them. First and foremost, I mean the habits of mind and body that make a man able to cultivate the material world.  The habits that make him a farmer, a hunter, a seamstress or tailor, a cobbler, a house-builder, a doctor—that is, a medicine man.  In the village where these arts begin to thrive, the fine arts also begin, in the embellishment of pots and jars, in the design of chairs and tables, in the cut of briar pipes, in placement of windows and doors and the thatching of a roof, in the songs and dances on summer evenings.

My search for human nature and its natural abilities led me first, through socialism and communism, to anarchism, which I professed from the age of eighteen to twenty-two.  In some sense, during my years as an anarchist, I sought nothing more than the restoration of village life.  But more penetration into my answers about human nature led me to abandon anarchism and the left.  I had come to see, beneath the opposition of left and right, a deeper alliance.  I will say almost nothing here about the reality and importance of their opposition.  When it comes to questions of world-wide social order, to the choice between a world filled with villages and cities or a global order, granting a centralized, mechanized life to all its inhabitants, I have come to see the agreement between right and left as something more fundamental and more dangerous than their opposition.  This agreement, to my mind, concerns precisely the understanding of man and nature that I have held since my tenth year.

Right and left agree that man cannot find his proper nature until he dominates nature in such a way as to free himself from the natural world.  Sustainable domination would be preferable to an unsustainable domination.  Still man must not only rise above it; he must rise out of it.  Apparently, he must not only control and recreate the body nature has furnished him with, by making its properties and operations suitable to his desires.  He must even escape the earth itself, must find some other planet fit for the ‘creation’ and cultivation of a new ‘natural’ world agreeing with the dictates of the sciences of chemistry, biology, and sociology.

This view, I propose, is the enemy of anyone who wishes to live in a village.  The reason is quite profound.  The principle I grasped at ten years old, first articulated distinctly by the Greek philosopher Aristotle and taken up by Catholic social teaching, belongs to the perennial wisdom that belongs commonly to the human race: man is naturally social and political.  The most fundamental impulses of human nature call forth various ‘societies’: first the family, then the village, and finally the polis or city, at least, in the true sense of that word.

Now, while still anarchist, I began to form an understanding of the village, of its distinction from and relations with the city.  This understanding led me to suspect that the left, including anarchism, has neither the interest in protecting or establishing village life nor the ability to do so.  My experience growing up in a highly developed capitalist commercial society had already led me to see the focus on consumption so necessary to this economy as hostile to the village and its proper relation to the city.  Incidentally, I have since heard it claimed that before the rise of Dutch and English capitalism, households produced 95% of what they consumed.  Today it would be heroic to produce merely 5% of what one consumes.

So, first, I will look at the difference between village and city and the relations that follow this difference.  Aristotle begins his book on political life by arguing that there are distinct orders of human society.  These do not differ merely in size but rather in the order or rule proper to each society.

The distinction in order and rule follows from something more fundamental, the purpose or end that defines each of the societies.  The family exists insofar as man naturally pursues what he need for daily life: food, clothes, shelter, and thereby the nourishment and education of children.

In the village man aims at something above the daily needs.  Here families support one another by providing, one for another, some aspect of their daily needs.  This allows another order of fulfillment, one more proper to the village.  Families can share, compare and refine experience.  Insofar as they obtain relief in the pursuit of daily needs, they can enjoy common recreation in music, poetry, and dance.

Yet there is something lacking.  In the village, through its small size and its proximity to the extended family, justice cannot exist in its purest form, as something abstracted from the prudence of particular men and women.   Nor can the village defend itself sufficiently.  Villages come together into cities to obtain such justice in their exchanges and their common actions and common defense from enemies.  Villages surrounding such cities also seek justice and safety from those cities.  Cities therefore exist for the sake of peace in a very fundamental sense of the word.

Here in the city, however, man not only finds justice and safety but the full flourishing of his nature.  Precisely insofar as peace frees him from constant attention to survival, man can pursue the good life.  He comes together in families and villages to live; he comes together in cities to live well.

One might conclude from this understanding that the village is necessarily a passing phase in the development of social order.  The village is a stepping stone, it may seem, to the city and passes out of existence once cities come about.  I suspect this has led in one way or another to the view common in our time.  Socialism and capitalism agree deeply that this is so.  We now see economies founded on socialist principles employing capitalist principles and vice-versa, in a common effort to establish one political and social order throughout the modern state.

But this view misunderstands social order.  The village looks to the city for safety, justice and other excellences of human nature.  But the city also looks ‘back’ to the village for a prior fulfillment of human nature.  And this fulfillment is necessary to the health of city life.  In a similar way, both the city and the village depend upon families for something that neither can provide or cultivate.

The city looks to the village above all for cultivation of an understanding of nature and of man as a natural being.  In the village man recognizes himself a being that rises above the nature of his body, through reason’s cultivation of the natural world, yet as one that remains a natural being in his body and its interactions with other beings of the natural world.  In the city man can realize the highest aspirations of his spiritual nature, which most of all contributes to well-being.  But in cities he can also misunderstand what constitutes living well.  In the village man cannot delude himself with false conceptions of his relation to the natural world.  There he necessarily concerns himself with living as it concerns the human body.

The ancient philosophers, so far as I can see, pay little attention to the dependence of the city on the village.  They cannot imagine a world in which the village is a whim and a luxury.  Industrialization and technology, especially as applied to agriculture, and the tremendous abundance that follow these developments make the elimination of the village possible.  In my understanding, its elimination is necessary to the view of man that arises from and corresponds to these developments, a false understanding of man freed from his dependence on nature.  Man needs the village in order to maintain a proper understanding of human nature.  Only while man sees himself as a natural being in a natural world, can he properly conceive human happiness as the fulfillment of that nature.

Now, what makes the village capable of providing such an understanding of man?  Answering this questions demands elaboration of something I have already proposed, that the village is much closer to nature and to the family as the family arises from man as a natural being, as a certain kind of animal.  At the same time, as in the family, life in the village provides man with a clear view of himself as an animal of a certain kind.

All animals necessarily feed upon plants and other animals.  The higher animals take some kind of shelter and protect themselves from ‘the elements’ and from natural enemies.  Further, the higher animals all reproduce through the cooperation of male and female.  In doing so, they complete and fulfill themselves insofar as each is male or female.  Each species of animal has natural impulses by which its nature incites the members of that species to feed and reproduce and to protect itself and its offspring.  The nature of each species conditions the manner in which that species pursues the goods involved in the survival of the individual and the species.

All animals—apparently even animals as simple as the amoeba and bacteria—use knowledge to pursue these goods.  The most simple ‘smell’ out their food and the toxins they must avoid and move toward or away, albeit erratically.  Other animals use hearing and sight, together with smell, in various strengths and proportions, arising from and adapted to the overall structure of their bodies and the movement proper to those bodies.

Above these senses, one finds in some animals distinct operations of imagination and memory that allow them to pursue these goods in a manner that begins to rise above the limitations of place and time.  While bacteria move in the general direction of their food, the ant and the bee find fixed routes to theirs and they can communicate knowledge of this route to fellow ants and bees.  Many other animals can form a ‘map’ of their territories used in hunting and reproducing.  In raising offspring they often exercise the powers that form such ‘maps’ in the offspring.  Likewise, as one ‘ascends’ through the higher animals, one finds that memory makes possible the storage of food, learning from experience, and even the rudimentary use of instruments.  Hence, Aristotle speaks of each animal as having a kind of ‘prudence’ proper to it, especially among the higher animals.  In the highest animals, adults even ‘cultivate’ this prudence in their offspring.

In the midst of the natural world, man quickly recognizes himself as distinct from other animals in the very fulfillment of his animal nature.  Like all other animals, he pursues food and shelter for his survival as an individual and he produces offspring for the survival of the species.  He uses his senses, his imagination, and his memory in performing these operations.  Yet in doing so he transcends the limitations of place and time in a unique way.

Man pursues these goods through the use of reason.  Reason involves an awareness of man himself and other natural beings he lives among not only as he finds each determinately in some place and time.  Reason also considers each of these beings according to its nature.  He asks what each is and strives to obtain the goods that he needs through his understanding of its being or essence and its nature.

Insofar as man’s understanding of some essence and nature appears as the cause of the goods he pursues, that nature explains how to attain it.  It appears as the reason in our reasoning about how to attain these goods.  In this way our knowledge of what constitutes health allows us to attain health.  Some understanding of what constitutes health is the reason we do the things we do in our pursuit of health.  This knowledge will be more or less exact and complete, more or less appropriate to a man’s particular needs.  Yet always reason displays itself as a universal knowledge of many particular things.

For example, man has some conception of health, through which he pursues the things conducive to health.  This understanding of health does not differ in differing places and times, except insofar as those places and times have some character that influences health.  What is healthy in winter may not be healthy in summer; what is healthy in the north may not be healthy in the south.  Yet health is in some way the same in summer and winter, in the north and the south.

This example concerns health as found in man and thus it suggests another.  Man has a conception of health as a general property of all animal bodies.  Just as he can make this conception proper to his own body, he can conceive of the health of the horse, the health of the dog, the health of the cow, and so on.  We not only conceive of health generally; we also conceive of health as it belongs to each species of animal we encounter.

Each of these examples reveals two sides of reasoning: its abstractness and universality and the singular, material natural beings known in an abstract and universal manner.  While reason never exhibits one of these sides without the other, in his reasoning a man is usually concerned with one more than the other.  The philosopher and the scientist reason principally to know something universally, in all times and places.  The farmer, the carpenter, the musician, that is, the maker and artist reasons to know some singular that he senses in the here and now.  I will call these abstract and concrete uses or concerns of reason.

Now the more abstract concerns of reason—for at many levels one can distinguish the abstract and the concrete—‘belong’ in a certain sense to the city.  There philosophy and science, the arts in their most refined and sophisticated state, especially as something taught in schools and especially the fine arts, all have an opportunity to flourish in the city.  Again, the leisure available in the city makes it possible for philosophers to consider the existence and nature of God and other immaterial and spiritual beings.  The religious worship that rightly follows the knowledge of such beings belongs in a particular manner to the city.  For this reason, the Catholic Church bears the name, ‘City of God’.

Still, the more concrete concerns of reason, especially those involved in the very use of the arts of farming, hunting, fishing, pottery, and so on, belong properly to the village.  There the purposes of life can be pursued in a manner determined to the character and needs of particular men and women, particular families, and particular places with the climates and seasons proper to them.  To some extent, the village even has some determination of what we call race.  The Inuit or Eskimo peoples live a life that reaches toward the village.  This life may not bring forth every possibility of man’s various powers.  But it reflects one way in which man’s reason and his other powers can cooperate in the fulfillment of human life.  This—in its own integrity—manifests man’s nature in a way no other life, as lived by no other people, can.

Yet more important for human life ‘as a whole’, the concrete, determined use of reason that is typical of the village, the use that is perfected in experience and art, remains so close to nature that man cannot forget that he is one of many animals, among many living beings, in a natural world that exhibits order.  One critical order is that between man’s own powers of knowing, sensing, and moving and the powers in animals and other natural substances.

Many aspects of these beings, such as their atomic constitution, the powers of their souls, the nature of DNA, and so on, become clear to us through the use of reason proper to cities.  But some are known best in the village.  There are things about the horse known best to the man who rides one.  Much about the pig can be seen in the pork we buy in plastic wrapper or pre-cooked.  The knowledge of these things belongs most of all to men in villages.

In cities, men easily lose the sense of themselves as natural beings.  There great errors about reality arise: that things do not really exist outside me, that nothing can really be known, that all truth is relative, even the ‘noble’ error that only God exists.  Among the most important errors bred in cities in our time is the belief that non-living beings, mere matter, are the most real and fundamental of beings.  On this view, life and spirit are hardly more real than an hallucination, if they exist at all.

Farmers may not delve into the speculations about God’s nature, but they rarely fail to see that behind nature lies some divine being or divine beings working in and though nature to provide for all things, especially the living.  They rarely fail to see that the most real being, the first being that causes all others, must be alive.

We see all around us the consequences of these views about reality and human nature.  I will just point out two: our detachment from the earth expressed in fantasies about restarting the human race on another planet and confusion about the distinction between male and female.  Both express a deep psychological inability to feel at home in this world.  Such feelings must thrive in a human race divorced from nature.

Only villages can prevent man’s embracing such errors.  The modern philosopher Hegel imagined that various peoples and cultures scattered throughout the world exhibited the stages of political development.  He thought further that this exhibition served reason’s grasp of the nature of that development.  By looking at those still living in more ‘primitive’ stages we who live at the highest can see the ‘movement’ that constitutes political ‘progress’.

Far more important I would say is the existence of villages around our cities.  Only there can man observe himself as interacting with nature.  There he survives through nature’s powers working within himself and in other natural beings and by exercising his own powers.  There he learns to feed himself, to clothe himself, and to amuse himself.  There he discovers the ability to do these things within himself.  He is capable of living together with others in the natural world.  He can be happy on earth.  Earth is his home.

Once the city has wholly dominated human life it become possible to have many goods but they almost always come from somewhere else.  Our clothes come from China; our music and our dances come from Los Angeles or New York.  We do not sing.  We download songs.  A generation has grown up that conceives of music as essentially something bought and sold.  We live in a world in which folk music is an historical being, a world in which folk music is the product of a music industry.

I could speak at length about the nature of such errors and the order among them.  Rather, let me conclude with an attention to one kind of error that manifests itself everywhere in our society.  I will also point out the particular opposition of this kind of error to Christianity.  The various errors I have in mind all involve fertility.  Some of these arespeculative but perhaps they are more frightening insofar as they are practical,

In some sense, T. S. Eliot announced this in one of the most important poems of the twentieth century, The Wasteland.  Saint John Paul had this in mind when he spoke of the culture of death.  Almost every aspect of contemporary society manifests some contempt for fertility.  Yet fertility is the work identified by Aristotle and even by Saint Paul as most proper to nature.  Likewise, fertility is the work of nature which peoples have from time immemorial associated above all with God and the gods.

We see contempt of fertility and thus for nature in many ways.  Most obvious contraception attempts to prevent fertility in much of, if not most, sexual intercourse between men and women.   Almost as a rule, women artificially make themselves infertile.  While fathers stand by apathetic, women regularly chose to abort children.  Paradoxically, they do so in the name of feminism, though fertility in some sense defines the feminine.  Again, there are plans underway, the plans of cities, to control all seed, to own seed, to make seed no longer the work of nature but something essentially bought and sold.  These have produced crops that bear no seed—should they accidentally do so, the corporation owns that seed and not the man who planted those crops.  There are those who propose to ‘own’ DNA, which seems to be nature’s principal instrument of fertility.  The same people hope to manage and control all livestock in the world—for purposes of health—though I have little doubt they will look closely at the reproductive powers of such livestock.  I will speak metaphorically and point out the World Wide Web as an impediment to man’s observation of nature and interaction with it.  The internet has become an intellectual contraceptive.  Man now dreams of a world in which the powers of life we find in nature belong to him—one more illusory fulfillment of the serpent’s promise to Eve: You shall be as gods.

Perhaps some of you have recognized already what the Catholic must see as the most sinister aspect of this contempt for fertility.  Our religion, with all its promises and hopes, relies upon the fertility of nature in its defining mystery, the incarnation of Jesus in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  There we believe God worked in a manner that surpasses his usual operation in human conception both by instigating conception with his own active power without the instrument of male seed and by his Son taking on the human nature, the body and soul, formed in that act of fertility.  Anti-fertility is a manifestation of the ancient enmity between the serpent and the Woman, between his seed and her seed.

In conclusion, let me point out one last aspect of the contempt of fertility in our culture.  If the understanding of social and political order I have been developing since I was ten is right, the family is a kind of seed to the village and the village is a kind of seed to the city.  The family and the village each express human nature in a manner disposed to a further, more complete and complementary expression of human nature.

This understanding appears in Euripides’ tragedy, The Trojan Women.  There Andromache speaks to Hecuba, the mother of her fallen husband, Hector.  She says, ‘Hear me while I reason through this matter fairly.’  She then proposes how much better things are for the dead and for those never born.  She expresses the view all too common today under names such as ‘nihilism’, ‘pessimistic philosophy’, and, quite expressively, ‘anti-natalism’—a movement opposed to birth itself.

But then Hecuba, the former queen of Troy, dreams that her grandson Astuanax, the son of Hector and Andromache, might one day rebuild the city.  She also reasons through the matter: ‘This boy / my own son’s child, might grow to manhood and bring back, / he alone could do it—something of our city’s strength. / On some far day the children of your children might / come home, and build.  There still may be another Troy.’  In a fine film based on the play, Hecuba adds, ‘One thought leads to another.’

So the village leads to the city as two expressions of human reason working out human life here in the natural world.  This is the reason villages no longer exist.  Villages are the seeds of cities.  The ‘global village’, what Saint Augustine called the city of man, has no room for other, healthy cities, competing alongside it.  If there were villages again, true city life, true political order, would once again arise.  When there are villages, true cities will rise again.  And we can trust that the God in whom the Father eternally generates his Son will bring forth from the earth these means of human happiness and fulfillment once again.

1.  The following remarks propose to explain why I have no expectation of political gains from either right or left and why rather I distrust both movements, at least in so far as they are political movements arising within modern political theory.  Nonetheless, several things I am not claiming should be made clear in the beginning.

2.  First, I am not claiming that either the left or the right is simply speaking one movement.  Each has many elements and I have no intention of speaking to what is proper to these elements.  Rather my comments concern groups or individuals only insofar as they assent to the political principles that have formed right and left as distinct ‘sides’ or ‘factions’ in the modern political system.

3.  Second, I am not claiming there is no difference between right and left.  I shall argue that both sides work to advance things they hold in common more than those things proper to them.  These common principles (in my opinion) are or should be reprehensible to the most earnest partisans of either side.  And I do think each side has some who work with the intention of bringing about a greater good, however much I may disagree with them.

4.  Third, I therefore am not denying the need to work with one side rather than another in particular political battles.  I note however that in doing so the political battle becomes distorted insofar as the principles at hand must be conformed to those commonly accepted.  Hence, the fight against abortion becomes for the right a question of a personal right to life, since ‘rights’ are the commonly received political principle.  More fundamental in abortion is the destruction of the common good attained in sexual union.  But our political culture is too corrupt to recognize the horror of such destruction.  Again, concern for the land we live on and encouragement of small-scale farming have their champions on the left.  But this must be pursued within the exploitative, industrial conception of man’s relation to the earth that defines our political debates.  We have lost any sense that the earth provides for our needs.  Rather, we seek from it satisfaction of desires.

5.  Fourth, I do not propose these remarks with any suggestion of demonstrative certainty insofar as they contain judgments of particular political movements.  I am not surprised that I, when young, or that other young people maintain political positions with great certainty and vehemence.  I was so determined that I was willing to incite revolution, if given a chance.  But it does surprise me that many who have the air of political wisdom pronounce in the same fashion as the young.

6.  Political matters involve all the complexity of any moral judgment.  Hence, questions of motives and circumstance, concerns about consequences, dangers of misstatement and misapprehension crowd about political acts.  Further, political judgments involve the assumption of wisdom not demanded by the moral life.  Everyone must live the moral life and attempt to attain to some measure of happiness.  To go beyond the most general political truths and begin to judge in this realm is to suggest that one possesses the good attained in morality and politics in a manner sufficient to help others do so.  Even the wise must fear such a step.  (Of course, in saying this I have already opposed some principles common to both right and left.)

7.  Hence, although, in the following remarks, I will propose some things which I believe to be of complete certainty, though difficult to articulate, such things are of a general and fundamental character.  What I say against particular factions assumes that they reject, most often implicitly, these foundations of political order.  They may well assume the same things at one time or another, insofar as they lack the consistency of well conceived political opinions.  But nowhere do I claim more that a probable, reasonable certitude in judging particular political opinions or actions.  Only God can grasp these things with perfect clarity and determination.  Any partisan who claims to understand these matters without any admixture of error fools himself; as likely, he is a liar, most likely a petit-demagogue.

8.  What I propose therefore in the following remarks about particulars is incomplete, overstated somewhere, poorly substantiated elsewhere.  I would have no one agree with me by the fact that I have said it.  Rather, I urge each to reflect upon his moral and political experience, to confirm his understanding of true political principles, to judge political opinions and actions to the extent that true principles make them intelligible, and to refrain from opinions and judgments beyond these.  To the young I particularly recommend moderation.  To form political judgments is as much a burden as it is a privilege.

9.  Now to take up this burden myself.  I will first make clear in a schematic way my own associations with right and left. (10-12)  Next I will state my distrust of these movements in a general manner.  (13) Then, I will propose the political principles most necessary to true political order.  (14-26)  Finally, I will state in a specific manner how right and left reject these principles in common. (27-52)

10.  For several years, from sixteen to twenty-two, I consciously considered myself a member of the political left.  I first identified myself as a communist and a Marxist, then distinctly a Maoist—to my shame a deceived admirer of the Chinese cultural revolution—, and finally, for nearly four years, an anarchist.  As an anarchist I would have allowed myself to be called socialist or communist, so long as these terms were not taken in a particular, narrow sense.

11.  Near my twenty-second birthday I began to question various of my political principles and after several months I recognized that several were wrong, though I did not claim to know the correct principles.  Several things I never questioned: my distrust of the political influence of wealth, my sympathy with workers, my contempt for the ugliness and inhumanity of technology, my sense that man has been estranged from nature, and thus from his own nature, and so on.  This re-haul of my political thought led to a moral reevaluation and thus to my return to the Catholic faith.  But the political reevaluation came first.

12.  Returning to Catholicism, I was determined to hold to the faith in its purity.  I believed, for a short while, that this demanded I align myself with the right.  Yet I could never champion capitalism, at least insofar as the word refers to industrial or high-finance capitalism.  While I rejected the near-pacifist position central to my anarchism, I could not find enthusiasm for any of the military engagements so readily supported by the right.  And thus, for many years, since my early thirties, I failed to feel any deep sympathy with left or right.  Further, I have come to reject the distinction of right and left as an appropriate approach to political order.

13.  My sense that the distinction and opposition of left and right do not arise from the principles proper to political order coincided with the sense that left and right agree on much that each side takes for granted.  More and more it became clear to me that they take for granted an opposition to the principles that make real political order possible.  Some of these principles are found explicitly in traditional teachings about politics, especially in traditional Catholic social teaching, although others are found there only implicitly.  In effect, left and right, to my mind, are in general agreement with modern political and economic thought and disagree with how that thought should play out.

14.  To make the principles where left and right agree more clear, I shall first discuss some of the principles I understand to be central to traditional political thought.  None is more fundamental than the notion that according the very nature of man the common good gives rise to the political order.

15.  The common good insofar as it is good is a final cause.  Thus, victory is the purpose and cause of an army, and polyphonic music is the purpose and cause of a choir.  Insofar as it is common, the common good brings many into a community and orders the members of the community to it and to one another.  The nature of polyphonic music, for example, brings those capable of singing it together and makes a soprano of one, an alto of another, and so on.

16.  By means of this order to the good and to one another a society becomes one agent pursuing the good common to them.  This is to say that the common good makes the many members of the community a single agent in pursuing that good.  The common good as final cause brings into being a city as an agent cause that pursues that good.

17.  This common good must be some one thing belonging to all the members of the community.  Nonetheless it belongs to the various members in distinct ways and some share more in this good and others share less.  In the political order, the common good is nothing other than the common life lived by citizens.  This life has many elements and is conceived in many ways.  It is called ‘peace’, ‘prosperity’, ‘justice’, insofar as we pay attention to one or another of its various aspects or elements.

18.  To be a citizen, not in name alone but in reality, is nothing other than to pursue and possess this good by loving it and by sharing the power to bring it about and maintain it.  Some make laws, some enforce them, some judge those who are subject to laws, some elect those who make laws, and so on.  Each pursues and maintains the common good according to his share in political power.  But every citizen as such must love the good not merely as it belongs to himself but also as it is a whole belonging to the entire community.  Thus, he loves the common good as his own good, yet as a good greater than any private good belonging to him as an individual.  So the soldier offers his own share in the common good from love for this good as it belongs to the whole.  Likewise, Saint Paul says,

I am speaking the truth, in Christ, I am not lying, and my conscience in the Holy Spirit bears me witness: there is great sorrow and incessant pain in my heart.  I could have wished to be outcast from the Christ myself for the sake of my brothers, who are my blood kindred.

19.  While the common good belongs to the entire community of citizens, some part of the community must be dedicated to pursue and maintain this good for the whole.  This is the government, which in its very nature is ordered to the good of the whole community.  Though the government rules the community and thus some men are subject to any government, many, if not most, of those subject to government are themselves citizens.  Thus government must rule citizens not for the good of the government, but for the good of the whole citizen body insofar as they form a community possessed of a common life.

20.  Now there are many aspects of political life that must be found in all political communities: murder and stealing, for example, are wrong everywhere.  Nevertheless, since the common good is nothing other than the community’s common life, it must be determined in time and place.  Where a people lives determines many aspects of its common life: the balance of agriculture and commerce in its economy, the kinds of food cultivated, and so on.  Again, the particular history of a people influences that life.  For example, the experience of a regime particularly good or evil affects the future attitude toward that kind of regime.

21.  Two attributes of the common good demand particular attention.  The common good must be attained in a manner that is stable and self-sufficient.  These are rooted in the relation of the common good to the community that pursues it.  If it is not stable, retaining more or less the same character over time, it will not really be common to the members of the community over time.  Grandparents will not share political life with their grandchildren, or even parents with their children, but mere biological life.  If the common life is not self-sufficient, the members will depend upon other communities with which they will form a larger community.  This larger political community will possess its own life, less distinct and less in the control of the original community.

22.  Above I claimed that by his nature man is inclined to the common good.  This can be seen in many ways, but most obviously insofar as man is inclined to happiness, which cannot in fact be attained by oneself.  Man cannot be born or grow up without others.  Nor can he attain to language, knowledge, or virtue in a sufficient way without the help of others.

23.  But man cannot attain happiness, taken as perfecting himself alone or as perfecting the community, merely by means of his natural powers.  The principal cause of this lies in his passions.  Man’s sensitive desires, arising from the concupiscible and irascible appetites, respond immediately to the sensible objects that appear by the exterior senses and the imagination.  Nor are they wholly subject to reason.

24.  Hence, man needs habits in these appetites and in his will, by which he will follow the good perceived by reason, even when the sensible appetites incline toward another good.  Again, by these habits the sensible appetites will themselves incline in a manner appropriate to them toward the good perceived by reason.  Traditional political thought therefore proposes the necessity of virtue for sound political order: temperance in the concupiscible appetite, bravery in the irascible appetite, justice in the will, and prudence (which knows the good for man) in the intellect.

25.  For this reason, because the cardinal virtues are necessary in pursuing and maintaining the common good, traditional political thought suggests that good government is something rare, not to be expected everywhere, not likely to last a long time.  This is not to say that men should not aim at good government.  But they should not be surprised that good government is so difficult to bring about and they should cherish the institutions that do so, if such institutions should be hit upon.

26.  Let me underscore one point here.  No loss in political thought is greater than the loss of the understanding that happiness, whether for one man or for a community, depends upon possession of the cardinal virtues.  However bad society became in ancient and medieval times, anyone influenced by the great civilizations, such as the Greek or the Chinese, would have heard that these virtues are necessary for happiness.  A bad man might scoff at such a position, but at least he was aware of it.  And if this position is true, it is in some way a principle of action to anyone who becomes happy.  In our day few come to know of this truth and, of course, even fewer have any share in happiness.

27.  In describing the opposition to these principles common to the political right and left (at least insofar as they are movements), I shall first discuss the notion of social contract, which is at the heart of modern political theory. (28-41)  Next, I shall propose that the political thought of right and left is founded on the social contract. (42-45)  Then, I shall propose the manner in which right and left are themselves opposed while agreeing in the notion of a social contract. (46-48)  Finally, I shall make some remarks about the United States in particular: where it stands regarding this theory. (49-52)

28.  As stated above, modern political theory in common establishes political order on what is called the social contract.  These thinkers do recognize that any society works toward some kind of good.  They display various defects in their understanding of the common good.  But all these thinkers reject the natural inclination to the common good.  The common good is not a final cause by nature.  Rather, it must be established as the good of the community by some community or some part of a community, as by an agent cause.  But, as stated, these thinker hold that that agent cause cannot come into existence through the natural inclination to the common good.

29.  Instead, the modern political theorists propose that the community comes into existence through the inclination of its members to their own private good.  Each man about to enter into community recognizes that he will attain to some private good through association with others.  This agreement constitutes a contract, generally implicit, by which the city or state is constituted.[1]  So constituted the community determines some part to serve as a government and this government pursues the good of the city or state.

30.  The relation between the good of the community to the individual citizen is not described in the same way by the various philosophers.  Nonetheless, the manner of establishing the community implies that this good belongs to the government more or less as the private good of the member, the good that prompted him to enter into society, belongs to that member.  The government becomes more or less another individual pursuing its own private good, as is said most clearly by Hobbes.

31.  There results an opposition between the good of the state and the good of the citizen.  For the citizen enters into society for the sake of his own private good.  But his participation in the state and consequent enjoyment of this private good demand subordination to the good of the state.  The state will only work so as to bring about his private good insofar as citizens work toward the good of the state.  But the good of the state is not properly the citizen’s good.  Rather it is a good proper to the government.

32.  Insofar as modern governments are totalitarian, they assume supremacy to the good of the state, mistakenly understood to be a common good.  Insofar as these governments partake in ‘Western liberalism’ (which has nothing to do with ‘liberal vs. conservative’) they recognize a citizen’s ‘rights’.  Such rights are here understood to constitute a reservation of some private good against the claims of other citizens, but more profoundly, against the claims of the state.

33.  Citizens do not live in such a social order for a common life, but each lives for his own sake a life he conceives as properly his own.  He orders his action to his own success and prosperity, to his own pleasure, perhaps a bit beyond this to his family.  He sees the political order as useful to these purposes of his own.  He does not find in it an opportunity to participate in government, whether by legislating, ruling, counseling, judging, or even electing.  If he shares in any of these, he looks to his own ends.

34.  The government likewise looks to its existence and flourishing as an institution.  Those who belong to it work to maintain themselves in power and see individual citizens either as an instrument or as a threat to that power.  The citizen is promised his private good in exchange for the maintaining the government.

35.  There is nonetheless a kind of balance that can be found, at least for a time.  The exchange of private goods allows the government to pursue its power as a private good and the citizen to pursue whatever life pleases him as his private good.  They may recognize the other’s intentions; they may flatter and deceive each other.  In either way such a system can last for some time.

36.  But this is not government or politics in the ancient sense, which demands that a people organize themselves so as to pursue a common life.  Rather, the social contract introduces a system of management by which the government offers the various elements of a satisfactory private life to citizens in exchange for its own power.

37.  Those who developed the theory of social contract were certainly proponents of virtue.  Nonetheless such a system has no need of virtue.  The citizens support the government through their inclination to their own private good.  No one needs virtue to desire this in a stable and vehement manner.  The passions incline us sufficiently to what is in one way or another our own.  In a system of ‘human management’ the passions can be counted on by a government to keep citizens satisfied with various pleasures and excitements, while it strengthens its own place in the world.

38.  Virtue may, however, be necessary to distinguish and desire what is truly good from what appears to be good.  For this reason, virtue may be an impediment to such a system.  If virtue allows someone to recognize that a truly common life, a stable and self-sufficient life shared with others in one place and through time, is more desirable than the satisfaction of passions, he becomes an impediment to such government as management.

39.  Let me briefly point out some reasons such a conception of government is incompatible with the stability and self-sufficiency that are attributes of the common good.  Since what is provided to citizens is not a common life but the satisfaction of passions, which each works out in his own way, a system of human management must provide new and various satisfactions to its citizens.  Food, sex, violence, wealth become central to any system like this.  But they must have the increase and variety that keeps the senses and the passions alert and excited.  Hence the life of citizens demands constant changes and this can be supplied at least in part by import.  This alone is reason against stability and self-sufficiency.

40.  But the government also seeks to augment its own power and security.  This will always suggest further control and regulation of the citizen’s life, which will demand change of one sort or another.  But it also tempts a government to interest itself in the doings of other governments.  Greater interdependence among such governments means greater power and security, at least for the government that does the most successful meddling.

41.  Now, when government is viewed as mere management of individual satisfactions, a system that does not demand the attainment of any virtue, good government will not seem to be something rare and difficult to maintain.  Rather, it will be thought to flow according to some kind of formula from mere power and will.  Good government will bring about ‘happiness’ by managing men and goods as they already are, by ingeniously shifting them about, while traditional political theory assumed that men must become good to become happy, especially insofar as they are in community.

42.  Now I do not think it difficult to see that the political right and left, at least in our times, both accept the conception of government as a social contract.  We see both pandering to the citizen’s desires for his private good.  More and more each conceives of the political order as arising from and serving individuals and not families, neighborhoods and towns.

43.  Generally speaking, both right and left conceive or propose themselves as the true defenders of the citizen’s rights.  Both conceive the opposite side as more or less totalitarian.  And each side has some justice, since totalitarian governments have at times been on the right and at times been on the left.  In fact the opposition of totalitarianism and Western liberalism is woven into the principles of government accepted by both sides.

44.  Hence, whatever their long-term dreams and utopias, each side proposes that good government is synonymous with its own establishment in power.  Right and left each propose to solve society’s problems on the condition that it becomes the government, while the other side is destroyed or fades away into ignominy and then obscurity.  For me this makes clear that neither side can ever be successful.  Even granted that each of them changes, perhaps even to become more and more like each other, neither side can bring about what they aim at, because they cannot get rid of one another.

45.  For this reason, I believe that right and left are both proceeding ‘forward’ toward a more and more perfect system of human management.  This demands global government, a fluid worldwide economy, a thorough-going leveling of individuals through society, so that no one can remain outside the reaches of this management and thus a danger to its integrity.  Everyone can enjoy his pri­vate satisfaction so long as he submits to the system, so long as he is ‘with the program’, as it is vulgarly put.

46.  Where then do right and left differ, if they are in fundamental agreement about the social contract?  I think there are many illusions lurking here and do not have time to consider them.  Let me merely propose for the moment that the fundamental difference is this: the left holds that the original formation of society is a system of oppression and must be superseded by a true social contract, while the right accepts this original formation as a binding contract.

47.  The position of the left, described in the Second Discourse of Rousseau, holds that the conditions of man when he first ‘found’ himself in nature encouraged him to establish a system of property, racism, sexism, and so on, by which he used others for his private good.  This system must be replaced by a true social contract that orders men and wealth to bring about the private good of all society’s members.  For example, the left holds that American slavery was part of the American system at its founding.  The undoing of that slavery introduced a new element of a true social contract.

48.  The right claims that the systems in place at the time the doctrine of social contract arose were more or less sufficient to bring about that good.  They may hold at one time or another that the contract has been insufficiently fulfilled, as, for example, in American slavery, but that the principles in the American social contract are sound and capable.

49.  This leads me to speak a moment about the United States.  I speak as someone who has always looked at his own country from within and from without.  From my childhood I recognized the good that I have received and share in through the American system of government.  But I have also seen this system as belonging, at least temperamentally, to the Anglo-American race, more than to my own.  I say this merely to avoid any dissembling.

50.  I believe that any true government must be founded on true political thought.  I think that there is evidence in American history of such a foundation.  In fact, one part of this is the claim in the Federalist papers, that the members of the proposed union have the same language, culture, and political institutions.  At the same time the founders used the language of the times to explain their foundation.  Some believed it fervently; others may not have.  The people themselves, I expect, conceived the political order more or less as they had when they began to live in this country.

51.  Over time, however, we have come to live more and more by the principles enunciated in our foundation.  One of the most impressive facts about American political life, one paid only the slightest attention, is that it has in fact proceeded more or less according to the words and formulas used in its institution.  I do not deny that these have been used with more and less precision and with changes in meaning.  Nonetheless, our government has in fact gone forward more or less according to these ‘instructions’.  This is something very rare.

52.  As we have stuck to these principles, we are therefore living more and more according to the contract theory embedded by the founder’s in their account of the foundation.  Hence, we have lived more and more for the rights of individuals and we have established the government more and more as an entity that serves its own ends in opposition to our own.  As we continue forward, however much we imagine that we go right or left, we will be furthering a system of government that consists in human management.  The only true direction is back, not back in time, but back to the true principles of human political order.

[1] Editor’s note: The author is somewhat simplifying matters. There are certainly modern political theorists who do not conceive of the state as being constituted by a contract. Hegel, for example, rejects the idea of a social contract (for example in Philosophy of Right, § 75). But all modern political theorists propose something other than a natural inclination to the common good as the foundation politics. Thus, Hegel replaces the natural inclination to the common good with history. The dialectic of history brings about the political community, and this dialectic is certainly driven by “desire” for private goods, but the coming into being of the community is not based on an implicit agreement between already existing individuals (contract)— rather it is only in the community that desire becomes self-conscious and individual subjectivity comes into being. Nevertheless, the result is similar to that of social contract theory; natural inclination to the common good is excluded. — Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.