the New Pantagruel

Practicing the Discipline of Place

by Caleb Stegall

This article first appeared – along with an accompanying essay, “Epistemology of the Supermarket” – in what became the final issue of re:generation quarterly (Spring 2003). In the years preceding RQ’s demise, the New Pantagruel’s founding editors first encountered each other at RQ’s online discussion forum. There, in the crucible of many arguments, the basic ideas and aesthetics behind tNP were developed. With the termination of RQ, tNP was conceived and established online in August 2003. Drawing a slate of like-minded contributing editors and writers, it began operating as a quarterly online journal, its first issue debuting in January 2004. tNP received attention in The New York Times just a few months later as a voice for a new kind of conservatism, although tNP is best described as a new voice for old ideas, such as those discussed here in “Practicing the Discipline of Place.” :: Eds.

OMMENCEMENT speakers sum up the wisdom of the age, and last May, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anna Quindlen did so with particular clarity. “I have seen your salvation, and it is you,” she told the graduating seniors of Sarah Lawrence College. “Custody of your life belongs in full to you and you alone. Do not cede it to anyone else,” she warned. “Why should you march to any lockstep? Our love of lockstep is our greatest curse … because it tells us there is one right way to do things, to look, to behave, to feel, when the only right way is to feel your heart hammering inside you and to listen to what its tympani is saying.” For Quindlen, conformity of any kind is our original sin, and salvation comes when we discover and express an authentic self unencumbered by the demands of others.

“One Flesh” by Scott Kolbo :: Mixed Media Drawing

But there is plenty of evidence that the more intensely and dogmatically our culture has embraced the freedom to march wherever our hammering hearts take us, the less free we have become. John Adams wrote that should the citizens of this country surrender “for any course of time to any one passion, they may depend upon finding it, in the end, a usurping, domineering, cruel tyrant.” For most of Quindlen’s audience, the realization may dawn too late that they are not, in fact, a triumphant phalanx marching together for their rights, but a confused assortment of individuals cut off from family, community, and every other meaningful connection.

In fact, one has to wonder why Quindlen herself has not noticed that unrestrained individualism is on the defensive. Alarmed by individualism’s less appealing fruits–corporate fraud, sensationalist television, sexual licentiousness, voter apathy, to name a few–everyone from communitarian activists on the left to family-values proponents on the right is taking up the call for “civil society.”

Civil society–a ubiquitous phrase these days–generally refers to some conglomeration of voluntary associations, from family and church to PTAs and community volunteer programs to Little League and book clubs. These “mediating structures,” as they have been called, negotiate between the two competing freedoms of a liberal democracy: the freedom of the individual and the freedom of the community. Only the structures of civil society, it is said, can nurture what Fletcher Moulton called “obedience to the unenforceable”–the consensus that restrains individual freedom enough to make a community livable, while still honoring individual particularity in a way that government and the marketplace cannot.

It is now conventional wisdom that civil society is failing. Robert Putnam’s article “Bowling Alone,” which catalogued America’s declining stock of “social capital,” was in the vanguard, followed more recently by the essay collection Community Works: The Revival of Civil Society in America and Putnam’s own book-length follow-up. Putnam and others warn that the decline in voluntary association in American society is symptomatic of a deeper sickness, which could imperil democracy itself.

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