The Catholic Civitas

One of the things that makes Raymond Hain's piece defending New Urbanism so interesting to me is that I detect a certain vision behind it. I call this vision, the Catholic Civitas. You find it in a heck of a lot of Catholic social thinking and I think it largely explains why so much Catholic social thinking is doomed to failure.This vision haunts official Catholic social teaching such as Centesimus Annus and it haunts seemingly secular ideas by Catholics such as Marshall McLuhan's global village.

This vision assumes that a certain kind of civic existence would be ideal for human moral development. I think the valuable service that Raymond Hain does in his piece is that he sets out the moral qualities this idealized town would have:

Finally, the most important overall human community is the city itself, a community of communities, whose purpose is to shelter the various smaller communities and make possible the discovery, pursuit, and achievement of our complete human good, happiness itself.

This is a medieval vision and we might think it is based on  actual medieval society. This supposition would seem to be supported by a lot of the literature and art depicting medieval society produced at that time and since. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Medieval society was like a shattered flywheel that had been glued back together; it was in constant danger of flying apart. Medieval thinkers lived in isolated communities under constant threat from invasion from without and division within. They read Roman texts they had in their possession and dreamed of how a new unity something like what they imagined had existed under Pax Romanus could be created without the help of a powerful, world-conquering Roman state to back it up.

The glue that would hold this dreamed of Civitas together was to be moral. It is precisely this moral glue that Catholic thinkers such as Raymond Hain so often find missing in our world. For we do live in communities that are communities within communities so what's wrong with what we have? Isn't this just the ticket?

Here is the central problem from the Catholic point of view:

Though suburbanites still live, work, play, worship, and shop, there will be very few people, if any, with whom they will have more than one activity in common. We live with people other than those with whom we work, and we pray with yet a third, different community.

In the sought after community, all these areas would overlap. Why is that good thing in Hain's view?

 Well, Civitas is a term that means both the city and the citizen and the fact that we move within different sub-communities that don't overlap means that our moral character will also be fragmented.

Typically, we have no companions who share all the various parts of our lives, but if we require the counsel of others in order to integrate these different aspects, we will need help from those who, alongside us, are a part of all the different activities that we must integrate.

We "must" integrate? Why I wonder? Logically it seems like a good thing that our entire lives should be integrated, that we should not live one type of moral life in one sub-community and then live a different moral life that is not fully commensurate with the other while interacting with another moral community. But is this really so? In practice we do just that and it seems to work just fine.

Hain's three arguments amount to one over-arching point, namely that an integrated community would help us to develop in a morally integrated way. And that is true if that is what we should desire. But we might also observe that it is easier for others to control our moral choices in an integrated community. One of the big appeals of the type of community within a community structure we actually have, as opposed to the ideal of Catholic thinkers, is that I can escape from moral environments I find suffocating or stultifying and go places where I can let my hair down.

So, should we want to integrate our communities and thereby integrate our individual moral life? I suspect my bias here is obvious but no one has to agree with me. In practice, however, I think this is why Catholic social thinking keeps failing to strike any sort of responsive chord in our culture.

Ultimately, I suspect Hain would argue that his vision, being based on natural law arguments, is better because it best represents what human beings are supposed to be. The argument against such a view would consist of a  series of reminders that human beings have never, in fact, actually lived that way. But while such arguments might undermine Hain's faith they would not logically compel him or anyone who thinks like him to change their views; for if you believe that something should be it is not fatal to your view that it is not and never has been that way.

So there we are.