How to turn the corner? Reflections on the way forward

Technology operates by defining goals clearly, breaking situations down into their simplest components, and finding the most effective and reliable way to deal with each piece of the puzzle.

That approach is effective with simple problems like growing lots of wheat and destroying an enemy in battle. It’s less so in dealing with complicated ones, like education, government, and social life at large.

The alternative to a technological approach is some combination of tradition, good sense, and philosophical reflection.

Traditions differ. The post-1776 order in the United States represented a very specific one, based on the newness of the country, which inhibited hereditary greatness, the ready availability of land, which promoted personal independence, and the protestant and congregational tendency in religion.

It also tended toward the technological, broadly speaking. The new Federal Constitution defined the basis, powers, and goals of government as clearly as it could, and established institutions and procedures in accordance with those definitions. So a tendency toward technological ways of doing things can also be considered a tradition, and can be criticized in whatever way other traditions can.

This technological tendency was generally considered progressive, and the French and others soon followed and overshot our example.

It was thought progressive because traditional ways can be inefficient, and they are deeply affected by events that are sometimes random and sometimes a matter of raw force. Injustice is often the result. The development of tradition can sometimes redress the injustice, but usually only slowly and with much backsliding. The disappearance of slavery in Europe under the influence of Christianity, which took many centuries, provides an example.

The aspiration toward reform and the lure of wealth and power have therefore led to a movement away from traditional and toward technological forms of social organization. Instead of custom as modified by experience and reflection, along with chance historical events, we now have experts, markets, elections, bureaucracies, and seemingly endless processes, along with complex systems of regulation to enforce whatever solutions result.

But there are serious problems with the latter approach when it’s handling something as complex and subtle as human society. It’s too hard to define and sort through everything relevant, and often impossible to achieve goals in a straightforward way.

I’ll take the relation between the sexes as an example. It’s messy, and as Proverbs 30:18-19 notes, basically incomprehensible. But it’s also fundamental to human life, so we have to deal with it somehow.

The traditional response was to recognize the sexes as somewhat different in kind, and accept the more or less settled roles and expectations that grew out of centuries of experience that mostly enabled the sexes to cooperate productively, fulfill the natural function of sexuality, and generally carry on life together in a reasonably satisfactory way.

People eventually decided they didn’t like that. It was inefficient, since it made women less usable as productive resources in commerce, industry, and government. It was also thought oppressive, since it assumed particular goals as intrinsic to human life—which was inconsistent with individual autonomy—and unjust, since it placed restrictions and expectations on men and women that were different, not tailored to individual situations, and not necessarily even-handed.

The technologically oriented response was simply to deny the mystery, define the sexes as interchangeable and their relations as wholly voluntary, and back what was intended as a great simplification with endless campaigns, public and private, to make social reality line up with these rather unnatural principles.

But the attempt to make the relations between the sexes simpler and more rational failed. They find each other more incomprehensible than ever, lack settled ways of connecting and cooperating, and often respond to the resulting chaos by assuming the worst of each other. Women, who were expected to benefit from the changes, have gone from more happy to less happy than men. And the longer the attempt goes on, the worse the results: young women, who believe most in the changes, and supposedly benefit most from them, are doing especially badly, and young men are not doing so well themselves.

Similar comments can be made about the Church—another situation in which we are dealing with something fundamental that, to a large extent,is beyond our comprehension. The pre-Vatican II order relied largely on the principles of tradition, hierarchy, and philosophical and theological reflection. These resulted in an order that mostly ran itself, freeing the faithful to pay attention to God and to concrete ways of helping their neighbor. Some post-Vatican II changes meant more reliance on choice, bureaucracy, and endless processes, programs, and documents.

These changes were intended to make the Church more suited to modern times. Instead, they created the impression that she has little of her own to offer, leading modern man to largely abandon her.

In both cases, the result of what was intended as rational reform has been less trust, loyalty, and commitment among the people, and a failure to advance basic goals—stable and productive relations between the sexes in one case, growth in holiness in the other.

But what to do?

The strength of tradition is that it is largely organic and accepted as a matter of course, since it’s felt to be part of what makes us what we are. But that means it cannot simply be reimposed after profound disruption. As some have noted, it’s easy to turn an aquarium into a sort of fish soup by heating it, but very difficult to reverse the process. And to make matters worse, our own tradition tends to be anti-traditional.

But we must go forward from where we are. A good life cannot simply be delivered to people. They must build their own, individually and in cooperation with others. So we must make it easier for them to do so, starting from institutions that are mostly bad and traditions that have become nonfunctional.

Since we want to build a better city, an analogy with urban planning may be useful.

The New Urbanism was an urban planning movement that responded to the glass, steel, and asphalt wastelands created by postwar urban planning and regulations by allowing mixed uses, so there could be shops, service providers, and employers where people lived. It then made neighborhoods seem more like neighborhoods by limiting building heights, and by bringing building fronts up to the sidewalk and requiring them to extend over most of the lot frontage.

The result was the elimination of the planning process in favor of a few clear rules and streets that looked like walkable streets, rather than a miscellaneous assortment of buildings and parking lots with a highway passing through. The approach has been successful enough that a major complaint is that the intended mixed-income feature of the approach has not panned out: they are so desirable as places to live that prices get bid up.

The implied lesson is that a better society requires “rules, not plans.” You cannot tell people what to do in any detail. Instead, you need restrictions that inhibit bad things and promote good things, for example, by encouraging networks of solidarity, cooperation, and exchange.

These restrictions are hard to define from first principles, so it seems best to start with the constraints that have, overall, produced a livable order.

We can start with natural aspects of human life, such as the relation between the sexes. “Family values” is a vague term, but at bottom, it refers to social standards that help stable families form and thrive. These include ordinary Catholic sexual morality, which channels the sexual impulse toward family life. They also include what has been called “benevolent sexism,” which at bottom is the view that the differences between the sexes are real, important, and good for both sexes, because they enable them to complement each other in a way that usually works. Such things must somehow return.

But what about the Church?

Here again, we should start with what has been shown to work. Many pre-Vatican II practices worked better than what succeeded them. With that in mind, why fight against those who want to take them up again? The growth of traditions and practices among the people, subject to the Church’s teachings and some clerical restraint, enables the Church to reflect the outlook and concerns of her members. That works better than formalizing and bureaucratizing the process, as with the current form of synodality. So why emphasize the latter?

But I’ve only hinted at a few of the issues and possibilities. Much more needs to be said about politics as well as family life and religion, and I hope to do so in future columns.

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