Thinking Christian

This came in to my RSS reader just after I wrote on something very similar in a comment.

It seems as if we have flattened our discussion of liberty to two dimensions, namely, what I feel like doing, because I am what is called an “individual,” and what large government machines want me to do, in order to secure some ideal like equality or the End of Poverty or Peace in our Time. Gone is all notion of the community, and of those small groups — families, fraternities, school boards, volunteer firemen, whatever — that are essential to a fully human life, and that themselves are the means for the exercise of, and enhancement of, liberty. We don’t have a notion of what I’ve called in these pages an Individualism of Responsibility, an individualism built upon my competence to perform the duties expected of me by my neighborhood and my community. That is, we don’t have an individualism founded upon the shared expectation of virtue.

[Link: Touchstone Magazine - Mere Comments: Life, License, and the Pursuit of Pleasure]

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