Figuring out what is still there to be conserved versus what we have failed to conserve points us to an unavoidable but long ignored question:
What do we need beyond our own families? A lot of things, it turns out: resources and markets with which to meet our basic needs,* and other institutions to meet our higher needs and fulfill our higher purposes: wider family networks, churches, schools, the arts, recreation, township, health, and political institutions to identify, protect, and coordinate all of these things. When we say we are political animals, we mean that we flourish, that we are fully human, only in well-ordered communities.
When we make this survey, which institutions among us still serve these purposes in an authentic way? When we consider what they once did and what they do now? When we consider the trajectory they are on?
A detailed catalog of failed institutions is discouraging. And yet to return to flourishing human culture and communities, it can't be looked away from. An easier and still useful place to start might be to ask: what still works well? It is a much shorter list of course, but it orients us to our few but very important successes, and reminds us that we do not how to both conserve and to build anew.
*We should also remember that while resources and markets can be seen as only serving our basic or material needs, they also enter into our higher needs and purposes. We exercise dominion, and we order our exchanges with each other not just with a view to sheltering and feeding ourselves, but as modes of excellence, or creativity, and common enterprise. And the balance between pursuing our basic material needs and our higher needs and purposes is itself one of our higher needs and purposes.
Complicated business.
(We spent the last two years founding a classical catholic high school, joining a law partnership, and thinking through the principles of the first three posts in light of those experiences.)
Where were we? Right, marriage and education. Right, then:
A large and growing cohort of Americans have conserved marriage and education. Not as legal or cultural institutions that shape the broader society in which we live, but as reinvigorated practices that open the door to human flourishing, and as foundations on which a new civilization will slowly rise. This post addresses marriage, the next will deal with education. Keep in mind that these two will lead to the argument that marriage and education are not enough, and that we need to add markets and health to the human capabilities that we are keeping real in a world losing its mind, heart, and soul.
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In spite of the disaster that was American marriage from the 60s to the 80s, young people (many more than one might expect) from the 90s to now have ...
Two institutions that have been at least partially conserved are marriage and education.
What, what?
Marriage is collapsing in most directions one looks, and education has largely descended into hideously expensive mind killing. How are these even survival stories, let alone success stories? Isn't the widespread failure of these two key elements of human culture one of the inarguable failures of conservatism in America? Well, yes. Of course they are. If the defense of these institutions had been successfully waged, who knows what better world we would live in now.
And yet.
These two areas are the closest to our horizon, the nearest problems at hand for conservatives, because they are the ones that most directly threaten our children. And because we will not stand by and watch them harmed if we know how to prevent it, many many of us have taken emergency action to rediscover the possibilities in marriage, to shore up our marriages, and to help our friends and neighbors in theirs. As in...
