I’m not going to get involved in the exchange between our Carl and Rod Dreher. They are both among the most engaging, soul-searching, and properly provocative writers around. It could be that Carl needs a course in anger management, although he may be just a properly political blogger. He properly chastises Rod for not taking politics seriously enough, even if he might take it too seriously by exaggerating somewhat all the trends that point in the post-republican direction.
Someone — probably not me — might say that Carl is too republican (although not to the point of being purely pagan) and that Rod is not republican enough (he should be a bit more Stoic or pagan). Every Southerner who’s really a Southerner knows that we really would be screwed without our men and women who really love both God and country. Maybe that’s why Rod didn’t like American Sniper as much he should have as a portrayal of character and not as a commentary on our foreign policy.
From a more Catholic view, Chesterton says that both America and the Church are, in different ways, homes for the homeless. Surely we need them both. Admittedly, there’s work to be done to sustain the America that’s been such a good home for the Church. The Catholic Justice Kennedy who writes so memorably of the dignified relational autonomy to be accorded to every intimate personal relationship surely can be led to see the dignified relational autonomy that goes by the name “the free exercise of religion.” For now, he has some work to do in coming to understand religion as a form of relational belonging, as, so they say in the South, a “church home.” Surely every Catholic believes the Church is where we learn and experience the whole truth about our personal and relational dignity. The unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human creature is the gift of God–and so not accorded by government.
There’s something deeply Augustinian in Rod’s disappointment with his biological and ecclesiastical Dads; our personal longings really do point beyond our relationships with sinful persons to be wholly transparent before the God who sees and loves each of us just as he or she is. That means Rod did well to search for self-help in reading Dante, who has many Augustinian features.
Rod’s book on Dante is a model of personal engagement, and we need a lot more books like that, which show what the best books are for. It might be that there’s a lot more honesty or transparency in Rod’s writing than in, say, Allan Bloom’s. The point of the study of the deepest books couldn’t only be to get over our Daddies and curb our anger by becoming philosophers.
Carl and Rod do pose a question worthy of Walker Percy: What happens when going home (or returning to your “place”) doesn’t work out the way you imagined it would? Well, I was once on a nerdy TV show, that may or may not have actually aired, with Justice Scalia. The issue on the table was the coming of biotechnological memory control. The flip question to Scalia: Wouldn’t you want to be able to forget your painful memories of your first wife? Scalia responds: The problem, sir, is that I would end up marrying her again.
It’s not quite true that you can’t go home again. It’s just that, as Rod found out, you will remain too weird and alienated to get the self-help of being enveloped in what you have imagined (in your semi-forgetful selective nostalgia) to be the loving spirit of the place. And there’s a lot to be said for being screwed up and alienated. Percy said more or less that only “chuckleheads” these days aren’t. Enjoying the good things of life for what they are depends on having an ironic distance from the general looniness of our fairly clueless world, while somehow not expecting too much or too little from those you love (or yourself in relation to them).
Small towns and family farms are both better and worse than big cities, and we alienated and screwed-up types can’t help but long for a place where we could somehow enjoy the best of all worlds. Rod’s next step, apparently, is the “Benedict option” of immersing himself in the “alternative lifestyle” of a tight-knit religious community. Pardon me for thinking that our lovable Rod will still stand out as weird and alienated. Probably the monastic or quasi-monastic life ain’t for him. I’m not denying for a moment that the Benedict option might be the best one available for some people these days. It makes more sense than the agrarian option, after all.
Walker Percy’s solution (well, solution is too strong) was to move to Covington, La. — a very undistinguished place that wasn’t his place. When you move to any Southern small town as an adult, you’re stuck (in good and bad ways) with being an alien, especially if you’re a weirdly literary type who doesn’t even try to hold a real job (or go hunting or even watch football on TV).
How to live well in a real place that’s not your own place . . . Maybe that’s the self-help we need. And both Percy and Dante are, as they say, excellent resources at our disposal.