Editorial – October 2021

I have given this month’s issue of Position Papers the title: “The flight from community” as this is a clear theme running through virtually all our reviews this month. This flight is in a certain sense encapsulated in a quote Michael Kirke takes from a recent interview with the Irish novelist Sally Rooney, who when asked about religion replied: “So yeah, I don’t know. I like Christianity. I’m a fan of Jesus and his whole philosophy, but not the social teaching aspects of it, of course.” Kirke points out that for Romano Guardini the individualism manifested here goes “back to early modernity and the emergence of a new consciousness of individuality”. 

Carl Trueman explores precisely this evolution in his The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In this much talked about book he shows very convincingly how modern individual consciousness – which he terms “expressive individuality” – has been shaped in particular by Jean Jacques Rousseau, the English Romantics, Sigmund Freud and the New Left. The consequence of this evolution has been to produce a self which – almost solipsistically – sees itself as the creator of its own identity. In the light of that it is interesting to hear Bishop Barron’s warning of where “expressive individuality” is going. Barron, in his discussion of D. C. Schindler’s The Politics of the Real, shows how a society built around such “grossly exaggerated valuation of private feelings and the concomitant denial of objective truth and moral value” is in danger of succumbing to totalitarianism, for totalitarianism can only flourish where truth has been closed down.

We see sociological evidence of the flight from community in works by Mary Eberstadt and Robert Putman/David Campbell. Mary Eberstadt, in her How the West Really Lost God shows how the biological family and religion rise or fall together – they are inextricably linked like the two spirals of the double helix in her imagery. And this should not come as a surprise. The same dynamic of belonging is at work in the family, as in religion and also in the larger communities to which we belong. Membership of a family requires “‘godly things’ like sacrifice and selflessness” – but so does membership of a religion or a country. Unsurprisingly the individualism which leads a person to opt out of one of these three types of community will equally affect their relationship with the remaining two. As Hickey says in her review: “‘Sound families’ make ‘sound societies’ as well as dynamic churches…”.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us by Robert Putnam and David Campbell, as reviewed by James Bradshaw, reveals the same dynamic at work: “… religious people are more generous and community-focused than their non-believing countrymen: more likely to volunteer and donate to charity (including for secular causes), more likely to belong to community organisations and to hold positions of responsibility therein, more likely to vote in elections and participate actively in civic life, and more likely to have high levels of social trust.” It is interesting to see how sociological evidence backs up what we always suspected: religion is bad for egoism. It doesn’t work for solipsists who wish to endow their world with their meaning. 

However in a second book by Robert Putnam reviewed by James Bradshaw, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy we find a strange anomaly: religiosity appears to reduce civic spirt, rather than the contrary as we suspect.

“Catholicism in Italy constituted ‘an alternative to the civic community, not a part of it,’ and the researchers found that manifestations of religion such as as Mass attendance were negatively correlated with civic engagement – over half of regular Mass-goers said they rarely read a newspaper and that they never discussed politics, leaving Putnam to observe that Italian church-goers ‘seem more concerned about the city of God than the city of man’.” This may, in Putnam’s view, “be a legacy of the Vatican’s Non Expedit policy which discouraged Catholics from becoming involved in political life in the newly-unified Italy”.

Finally, and paradoxically, we are given a glimpse of community in its deepest sense from a prison cell – Cardinal George Pell’s solitary confinement cell in the Melbourne Assessment Prison to be more precise. Tim O’Sullivan, in his review of the second volume of Cardinal Pell’s Prison Journal describes how “The Cardinal received thousands of letters – ‘candles in the darkness’ – while in prison and benefited from a global network of prayer, love and support.” I think Cardinal Pell might point out to Sally Rooney, that the teaching of Jesus is social or it is nothing.