Laws Of Association And Their Contravention
By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
Contra Thomas Hobbes and his fictional state of nature, it is the family that is nature’s first form of association, for only within the family can human life survive. It is within the context of the family that the infant is nourished and for years provided with his basic needs, food, shelter, and education. By virtue of kinship, families are united with others and bond to form a village.
When I was a child, I lived in a small village in southern Indiana where it seemed that through my mother I was related to nearly everyone in town — well, maybe half the town, because the town was divided into Catholic and Protestant. In addition to the bonding of families, St. Mary’s Parish created another level of association. There was the annual Church picnic that drew many from neighboring towns, and the county fair, where competition in animal husbandry and culinary arts bought hosts together on an annual basis.
It makes a difference whether you are from Floyd County or Marion County. Athens is not Sparta. A Cherokee is not a Seminole. For the rest of your life you are likely to identify with the geography of your origin, although you may settle and vote in a distant region. Your voting habits further identify you. Then, too, you may be a Yale man by virtue of education, and that is likely to distinguish you from a Sewanee graduate. Bonding is in the first instance natural, although later by choice.
When Abraham Lincoln offered Robert E. Lee command of the Union Forces, Lee chose to accept that of the Army of Northern Virginia, given his sense of duty, identifying with and preferring to lead his own people. The philosopher Etienne Gilson, when offered a chair at Harvard University, thought that the gracious thing to do was to personally call upon the president of the university to decline the honor. President Charles Eliot, upon acknowledging Gilson’s decline of the offer, said, “I know, you want to be with your own kind.”
Loyalty follows unity. Unity itself not only permits but generates concerted and focused activity. At any level of society factions will emerge in spite of common allegiance. The intellectual or spiritual bonding of a populace is forever a challenge to leadership. President Putin of Russia, to the dismay of liberals everywhere, has declared Russian Orthodox Christianity to be the indispensable unifying feature of the nation. John Dewey, the architect of American public education, wrote A Common Faith to express a common creed. It remained for subsequent generations to find that, absent Christianity, a purely political creed does not bond.
Absent a sense of unity, a social entity is ripe for the assertion of power on part of someone or some faction with an agenda. One does not need to consult history for multiple examples. We have in our generation experienced the usurpation of power by Brussels and Washington as dissent is effectively suppressed though appointments and regulation. No one has seen this more clearly than Pierre Manent, who, in his study, Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 5) identifies the city as the primary locus of self-government, “for it is in the city that people discover that they can govern themselves and learn to do so. They discover and learn politics. . . . The city is the shaping of human life that makes the common thing and the execution of the common thing.”
But in a diverse society, the “common thing” is forever elusive. The globalist or cosmopolitan drive for diversity contravenes what may be called the natural law of association. Where diversity actually prevails, communities and even nations as in Europe, not only face the loss of their cultural identity but are rendered vulnerable to control from without.
Robert D. Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard University, in a comprehensive study of attitudes in Canada and the United States has found that even those who believe diversity is a good thing hate to live in it. Summarizing his research in an address entitled, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twentieth Century” (Online library: Wiley.com), he relates: “Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skins, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, and vote less.” People, he concludes, prefer to live with members of their own ethnic group or race.
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(Dr. Dougherty is dean emeritus of The School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.)