NOVAE MILITIAE

The other day I walked into my classroom to see, neatly listed on the blackboard, a pretty list of adjectives describing the characteristics of an “ideal community.” It was clear that the students who came up with the list were either utterly unacquainted with communities, ideal or otherwise, or were dulled into providing the requisite clichés: “tolerance,” “inclusive” (the listmaker was happily careless of grammatical consistency), “helping others,” “diversity,” “equality” – you get the idea.

Odder than the insistence upon things like “diversity” that, etymologically at least, suggest a pulling apart at the seams, was the absence of anything that would really unite a people. One might have well listed synonyms for “niceness” – but niceness does not a community make. What does?

The altar does. Without a God, you have no people. Without at least a principle of surpassing worth, without a single precious tradition that you would, in necessary, defend in blood, your own or another’s, you have no community. You may have, if they are wealthy and pudgy and silly, a group of affable people who will not obstruct one another’s selfishness. I’d rather live on a mountain alone.

(Anthony Esolen, “It Takes An Altar”, Touchstone, January/February 2007, p. 6)