Comments on: Friendship in Between ‘Romance’ and Loneliness

By: jason taylor

jason taylor — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:13:08 +0000

Except “city” has a different meaning for us then for Aristotle living as we do in megacities. Cities are where there is minimal community indeed often where that is what you want; the community of amiable anonymity you find at the mall or coffeeshop should not be disrespected; it is just not like Aristotle’s City. Aristotle would have been thinking of a “polis” like Athens which was fairly small and had a sense of it’s distinct identity. Our cities today are better compared to Perseopolis or Babylon in those days then to Athens. Therefore the metaphor of “city” is unfortunate except to a classicist. Perhaps a better term for that would be Assembly as that will get what would have been in Aristotle’s mind more easily and will also fit a number of community organizations including subsets of a “city”(like the New York Hassidim under the Rebbe’s sternly patriarchal rule in The Chosen) which better fit what Aristotle had in mind.

By: Gian

Gian — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 05:41:25 +0000

Dan C is exactly right. And the cure is in Aristotle. There are three irreducible levels in the society: the City, the Family and the Individual.
The error of conservative lies in reducing the city to the collection of families.
The libertarian futher errs by reducing family to the comprising individuals.
The progressive never understood the image of State as the Roof of the People (Solzhenitsyn). The roof must be so that people can stand under it and it must not fall in and crush the people.

By: Dan C

Dan C — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 03:27:52 +0000

And to this I say “community.” The conservative, in the idolatry of family, fails to acknowledge community. For the Catholic right winger trying to co-opt Dorothy Day, it is hard to manage to avoid what she has to say about community and one has to cherry pick her writing extensively to avoid community as a topic. But then, that is what the right wing has been doing.

The same for any of religious talk or really Benedictine life of the past 1700 years, the answer is “community” in the quest for stability.

The right wing created an idolatry of family and forgot that the Christian family actually serves the community, which upends the conservative dynamic which expects the community to serve the family, since the family is God.

The language of the conservative regarding communal obligations is so primitive, somrarely invoked, that folks not in a family feel alienated, and conservatives themselves remain bewildered by folks unmarried, or without children and are alienated therefore by many of their neighbors.

Community and communal bonds do exist, are long-lasting, I just think that comservatives do not value these.