Dan Kelly’s thoughtful post of the other day asked us to consider who it is that we expect to join our Ferrari ride toward renewed moral consensus, what issues we might agree on, and where it is that we’re going in the first place. He also mentioned that the answers to these questions would likely be different “if we are starting in Berkeley as opposed to Branson.” I agree. But I think we should have a closer look at those local differences, which seem to be a cause for moral dispute rather than consensus, because they might actually be key to figuring out both where we’re going and who’s going with us on this moral consensus road trip.

I was recently in, well, Berkeley for a conference on Aquinas (you read that correctly – Berkeley, Aquinas), but I took advantage of the trip westward to visit a dear old Peace Corps friend in the area. Peace Corps has a way of rendering small the ideological differences that might, stateside, prevent people from forging lifelong friendships. After all, when you’re all in the trenches of homestays with Berber families, away from running water, sanitation and the English language, even radically different political ideals seems fairly unimportant, and this friendship was no exception. Back to Berkeley. I was having a chat one morning (over our granola and hemp milk, naturally) with my friend’s boyfriend, who shares her political views, and while we weren’t discussing politics per se, we were at least complaining about the current American cultural and political milieu – and finding quite a bit of common ground in the process. Most striking was a moment in which he proclaimed with a great deal of conviction that “the problem in this country is that the states don’t have enough power.” Well now. It turns out, I wasn’t the only one in the room who thinks that federalism is a good idea and that increasing centralization is a bad idea, even if he wouldn’t put it in such terms. He, a progressive San Francisco artist, would like to see more variety in our American cultural landscape, and he thinks that centralizing power and dictating top-down legal and cultural norms from Washington is not the way to get there. Who knew.

But this is just one anecdote, right? Surely we can’t expect allies to appear in such unlikely places very often? Perhaps we can, or at least more often than we might think. Our nation is deeply divided at present; no one needs to point that out. But I suspect that in at least some ways, we’re not going to get past those rigid ideological divisions towards a more unified America by tackling the issues head-on. What I mean by that is that we usually can’t expect to argue anyone who is ideologically distant from us – and, let’s be honest, that’s a lot of people – into joining our moral stance(s) on family, church, and civil society. I don’t think that my Peace Corps friend, her boyfriend, or I would have budged very far from our respective positions if we had tried to do so. But my friend and I had lived and worked both with each other – and with people with even more radically divergent religious, cultural and political ideals – for two years in Morocco and yet, somehow, we were able to get some things done and cooperate on matters that actually required some measure of moral consensus, at least for the projects at hand. In other words, we might not all agree on what education should be, but when it came to getting a community educational center in the village, we could still come together for the sake of our local community, making compromises when necessary and actually working with people with whom we disagreed, often fundamentally. I suggest that this is because we were acting through face-to-face interactions, at a local level, rather than simply picking up the local details of a top-down, centrally planned project.

The same thing can be true here in America, and if my Peace Corps friend and her boyfriend are any indicator, Americans want it to be true, at least at some level. There are places for ideas and arguments (goodness knows I spend most of my day with them), and certainly there are times when decisions have to happen at the national level. Still, achieving moral consensus also – perhaps even primarily – requires real interactions and activities, not just debates, between people at the local level, working out actual problems concerning their own communities. Doing so will mean that there continue to be different ways of doing things in Berkeley as in Branson, but that’s precisely the point – those who want a Berkeley society can live in Berkeley, and those who fit better in Branson can live out their lives there.

This is overly simplified, of course; much of where we live and who we live with is given rather than chosen. But then again, if our local politics and engagements are allowed to have any real bearing on our lives, that might be a very good thing.

I’ve been slowly working my way through Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World for the first time in ten years, and I’m wondering if this should be a once-per-decade read so as to take the pulse of American culture. Ten years ago, it was provocative theoretically, but seemingly futuristic. Today, while the brave new world Huxley describes isn’t actually here, the dystopic future it describes seems, in some senses, not all that far off, either. What has happened?

For one thing, yes, I’ve matured ten years, and that has quite a bit to do with the matter. But a recent discussion on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America pricked my brain in a spot that perhaps needed pricking, and I’m wondering if perhaps what else has happened is that our American democracy has done precisely what Tocqueville warned against. We’ve expanded the realm of contingency to, well, just about everything.

I should back up. Tocqueville saw most of American life as contingent rather than fixed, and he took this to be a mark of the new era unfolding in America – a democratic age without the fixed roles determined by heredity and class of the passing aristocratic era of his native France. Americans, he observed, act as individuals, not as the class-bound members of an aristocratic society. They are bootstrappers, self-made men, they believe in hard work and social mobility. In short, where we are born – and who we are born to – doesn’t determine who we are. We do. (For more, see Ray Charles.)

But Tocqueville saw two aspects of American culture that didn’t – and, importantly, shouldn’t – fit this mold of total freedom and flexibility. Church and family were not contingent; rather, these were the source of the very mores that stabilized and undergirded the otherwise constantly in-flux nature of American life. (Even Tocqueville’s famed voluntary associations, which partisans of civil society often tout as the cure to our American social ills, are also contingent – we can join or leave and we are free to change the nature of the associations.) For Tocqueville’s America, “liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.” He insisted that “men cannot do without dogmatic belief, and even that it is much to be desired that such belief should exist among them. I now add that, of all the kinds of dogmatic belief, the most desirable appears to me to be dogmatic belief in matters of religion…” Religion, Tocqueville observed, restrained Americans from allowing liberty to devolve into license as this people, freed from the aristocratic tethers of family name and fixed classes, built a new nation under the audacious claim that “all men are created equal.” The “main business of religion,” he wrote, “is to purify, control and restrain that excessive and exclusive taste for well-being which men acquire during times of equality.”

The family, furthermore – for Tocqueville, particularly the role of women in the family – preserved a zone of safety, stability, and nurturing in a democratic society otherwise driven by delinked individuals pursuing their own ends. That zone, though, had to remain fixed in its basic form – i.e., one man, one woman, and children – rather than join the list of up-for-grab elements of democracy, in order for America to preserve her democracy. While I’m far from advocating a return to his fairly rigid role for women, it is worth considering how much time Tocqueville spent in emphasizing the dangers of extending the drive to equality-as-sameness to the category of the sexes. Men and women are different, and that difference is the basis of the family, and the family is, with religion, the foundation of American democracy.

So why should Americans care about the decline of religion, or about the latest attempts to change the meaning of marriage? Because in dissolving these institutions, or attempting to render them as contingent as all other aspects of life, we remove the last natural safe havens for human life from society, in an ostensible effort to render all aspects of life as zones of ‘liberty’ and ‘equality.’ But as Tocqueville cautioned us, not everything can be contingent if liberty is to survive. The Americans he met were free from class strictures, but firmly tied to the “controls” and “restraints” that it is the “main business of religion” to provide.

It is naïve to believe, however, that if we remove these restraints we will simply be more free. Humans will dogmatize something, Tocqueville reminds us, and Huxley reminds us that the state is all too happy to step in and provide a replacement when we have thrown off the yoke of religion and gender difference.