Dramatis personæ and Original Cast

Mamaluk 1……Ryan Roberts
Mamaluk 2……Mary Grace Stamos
Margaret of Provence, wife of King St. Louis……Philomena Wallace
Beatrice of Provence, sister of Margaret……Elizabeth Vennari
John Tristan, Margaret's newborn……Joseph Sinclair Wallace
Chevalier……Jordan Pacheco
Scambio Doria, a Genoese merchant……Jeb William Wallace

ACT THE ONLY

NARRATED: We are in Damietta, a city in Egypt. Damietta is on the Nile River, close to the Mediterranean Sea. A strange group of people lives here, when our story begins: Egyptians, Frenchmen, English, Scots and Italians; the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller. King Louis' crusaders have captured the town, but King Louis and his knights are now well on their way down the Nile River to Cairo, in the hope of defeating the Saracens. We have no news of them. Damietta is currently under the government of King Louis' wife, Margaret of Provence, who has given birth to a son. Our story begins in her bedroom, where she suffers nightmares of her husband's fate. Enter two mamaluks: Saracen mercenaries. 

MAMALUK 1	
Look for the Frenchman's wife, and whisper news
Of tragedy at Cairo. Let her weep
Before she dies, and, dying, let her lose
Only the will to weep. 

MAMALUK 2				
                                       She cannot weep
When we've cut off her head.

MAMALUK 1			   
                                                    You are a fool
And have no head to speak of.

MAMALUK 2
			                             Did you see
The king die?

MAMALUK 1			
                         Yes, he sank into the Nile,
Chastised by mud, and sick with wandering
Across the desert. In his company
Were once upon a time strong infidels,
But now heat-fractured, hollow specimens.
We took some pris'ner, others left to roast.
The king's now drifting to his native coast.

MAMALUK 2	
And shall the queen float with him?

MAMALUK 1						
                                                                No, she'll rest
Where she has suffered most, for she is blessed,
Or cursed, now with a child so frail and wan
And tear-born that she named him Tristan John!
The queen shall die tonight but shall repose
Where by the sand-grains she has counted woes.

MAMALUK 2	
Here in Damietta?

MAMALUK 1				
                                 You are slow to bite.
But what is sharp wit in the dead of night?
Sharp steel is more effective in dark dens.

MARGARET (waking) 
Out, out, out, out! You rasping Saracens,
Sultans or mamaluks or traitors, out!
I will arouse the palace! 

They disappear, as if by magic, and she pauses to recollect herself. 


MARGARET						
                                          Phantoms again,
Only these nightly terrors that assail
My sleep––reflections of the daily grief
That's plagued me ever since my king departed,
Left me too anxious to be broken-hearted.
One night I dream that he is dead, or taken
By Saracens; another night I dream 
Like Ariadne that I've been forsaken
Here on a heathen coast. The shadows seem
To mock my doubt and to rebuke my fear.
(looking out the window) Damietta lingers on a silent sea,
Not peaceful but alert, ready to hear
Of any news: massacre, victory.

NARRATED: Enter Beatrice of Provence, Queen Margaret's sister. Beatrice is also waiting in suspense for news of her husband, the king's brother. 

BEATRICE		
Madame, my sister, did I hear you call?

MARGARET		
Another nightmare, Beatrice. That is all.
But we have husbands both out in the night,
And many more have women seas away,
So why should I be dignified by fright?
I'll sleep again.

BEATRICE				
                           You worry more than they,
Because all Christendom is in his heart,
And he in yours, and now your grief is born
Into a son. Your sadness is the part
You play in this old drama. Mothers mourn.

MARGARET		
I have no time to mourn. Till he returns
This city needs a steward. Beatrice,
Find me an old knight with a watchful eye
But fixed in spirit on eternity
To sit beside my bed, and if I cry
He'll quickly comfort and admonish me.
Beatrice, you are wiser in your faith
And have petitions of your own to make.
Let us trade husbands, then, and dream them safe,
Not for their own but for each other's sake.

BEATRICE		
Sister, I'll fetch you such a knight and pray
That queenlike dreams follow you into day.		

Beatrice exits.

MARGARET		
Damietta, Gateway City of the Nile,
You spread your tentacles into the wave
And gather, like the sea anemone,
The sweep of Christendom: the bold and brave,
Thieves and crusaders, pillagers and queens!
What is your providence, that you would knit
An enterprise of such unequal skeins
And mixed intentions? Who can govern it?
(addressing the child) My sweet John Tristan, will you be an heir
To peaceful Christendom and rule a race
Who worship and believe? Or will you fare
As those before you fared, who built the place
Their fathers could not leave them? Each son, I guess,
Is only his father come again across
The Lethe, Nile of forgetfulness,
Whose mudded waters tantalize and toss!

NARRATED: Enter an old chevalier, a French knight. Though she believes him sent to keep her company, he has in fact come to warn Queen Margaret of trouble in town. The Genoese and the Pisans are impatient in the absence of King Louis. They have been spreading rumors, at the instigation of a merchant named Scambio Doria. The knight encourages her to flee, but Queen Margaret resolves to speak with this rabble-rouser.

CHEVALIER		
Madame, Your Majesty…

MARGARET	 
                                            Ah, Chevalier!
You have the honor of a humble task
Too gentle for crusaders, and too bold
For women––suitable, perhaps,
For Jacob, who wrestled angels in the dark––

CHEVALIER		
Madame, I am not here for gentleness,
Not here to wrestle with grim fantasy,
But to entreat your hasty exodus.
The Genoese have brought mutiny
And certain are to storm the palace soon!
They cry out, "Famine!" and they give no reasons,
Inciting terror by predicting doom;
Inflame the natives and the nervous Pisans
And find a million scandals to exhume.
They claim the ships they lent us, and they cite
Debts, crafty contracts, letters of the law,
Impossible conditions made to bite
The hand that fed them, and to grease their paw.
When they have plundered here, they will set sail
To watch from safety where the battle tends,
Or rest at home from worry and travail,
Until the next crusade pays dividends!

MARGARET		
Have they a leader?

CHEVALIER					
                                   Scambio Doria,
A man half-merchant and half-wizard, who
Is full of spells. He has no special trade,
Except to reap where other men have sown.
Bakers and blacksmiths, poets and warriors
He claims as clients, urges them to place
Their fortunes in his fat and ample hand.
He says, "I'm not an expert in your field.
I cannot forge or bake, pillage or rhyme,
But I can manage, maximize your yield,
Increase your customers and your leisure time."
They crown him Manager and give him keys
To vaults and cellars, secrets and debtors' bills,
While Scambio Doria manages at ease
Upon a throne of other people's ills,
Or dines with kings and has them, in an hour,
Beseeching him to manage all their power.
For such a man does your Damietta pant
In hope of calm from war's uncertain twists.
He flatters and rewards the sycophant
And quietly poisons anyone who resists. 

MARGARET		
He is not married, then?

CHEVALIER						
                                           And if he is?
MARGARET		
Then she's no woman. There's no man alive
Who manages his wife as you describe.
Send him to me.

CHEVALIER					
                             But Madame!

MARGARET							
                                                     Chevalier,
You have one craft tonight.

CHEVALIER						
                                                Which?
MARGARET				             
                                                              To obey.
Send me this Genoese in the night.
He may bring weapons with him, if he fears
A queen, but let him not expect a fight,
Except, perhaps, of wits; and there I'm sure
I'll manage him into a mood demure.

CHEVALIER (bowing) 
Your Majesty.				

Chevalier exits. 

MARGARET						
                         This is a lively twist
Cooked up to cure my fear of far defeats,
For near at hand now is the battle surging
And makes its progress up the city streets.
Time has a winsome wit that's good for purging
Poetic vanities. How shall I engage?
Storm his conceit with queenly confidence
Or batter down his threats with viper's rage?
Cajole, as Christian modesty permits,
Disarming him with smiles and pretty stealth;
Or face him with a martyr's insolence
And dare his conscience to reject itself?
I am no king, no vanquisher of crowns.
I cannot bring an empire to its knees.
But I can shape the fates of little towns
And make great things of local vanities.

NARRATED: Beatrice arrives to warn Queen Margaret, and Margaret reassures her sister that she will defeat Scambio Doria by trickery. 

BEATRICE		
My Sister, there's an army at the door!
Already men lie fallen by the gate.
Others, they say, are clamoring at the shore,
Beginning rumors of King Louis' fate.
What shall we do?

MARGARET					
                                 Courage, my Beatrice! 
But hold John Tristan, that he may better see
And master a French queen's diplomacy.
I've called the rabble-rouser up to speak.
He will not fear me, knowing that I'm weak
And can do nearly nothing. Only sound
Can serve my purpose now. I'll stand my ground;
But you and Tristan, go behind the bed,
Crouch where the pillows crowd the wood-frame head.
Only repeat whatever words I utter
When I say, "Oh, alas!" and seem to shudder. 

Chevalier enters.

CHEVALIER		
Madame, the man you seek is in the hall,
Eager to parley.

MARGARET (to Beatrice) 
                            Quickly, to the wall!

Beatrice, with John Tristan, crouches behind the head of the bed.

NARRATED: Enter Scambio Doria, the slimy Genoese. 

SCAMBIO (bowing ostentatiously) 
Madame, I'm humbled to address the queen
Of France, and sorry that so bleak an hour
Should mark our meeting, when the alleys teem
With petty tyrants scrambling for power.
Our food is gone, they say––a blatant lie,
We know, but calculated to foment
An insurrection, as they cast an eye
Towards the palace. Rebellion's immanent.
The anxious Genoese claim their ships.
The Pisans lean towards an exit fast,	
And many a malicious native quips
That queendoms without kingdoms cannot last.
These sad affairs can only end by strong
And skilled manoeuvres. I implore you, then,
To let me lead your guards against the throng.

MARGARET		
Good Scambio Doria, do not hesitate,
But do not call me "queen." Would that I were!
The tender-hearted queen, who was of late
With child, has lost her wits and will not stir
From hiding. See, she crouches in the dark
And raves each evening, crying, "Oh, alas!
The Saracens are climbing through the glass!"

BEATRICE		
The Saracens are climbing through the glass!

MARGARET		
And, since the tidings of the king's return,
She frets of his displeasure when he sees
Her mad condition, weeping, "Oh, alas!
What tragic victory has come to pass!"

BEATRICE		
What tragic victory has come to pass!

SCAMBIO (visibly shaken) 
Good Heavens! And is the king, then, on his way?

MARGARET		
No farther than Mansurah, so they say;
But that was two days since, so I am sure
He can't be farther now than Fariskur.
But if this talk of famine has some truth,
We should obey the gossipers and flee!
I am her sister Beatrice, and I
Can claim some interim authority.

SCAMBIO		
And risk the king's displeasure when he's come?
No! Heavens, no!  

MARGARET					
                              But something must be done.
Good Scambio Doria, do as I command.
Buy up the granaries, commandeer the flocks.
Whatever price the natives may demand,
Pay them; and tell the rebels at the docks
The king will very generously pay
All who have helped you buy the peace today.

SCAMBIO (bowing) 
Madame, I will––but, when the king is here,
Inform him of my actions.

MARGARET						
                                               Never fear!
Your just deserts shall be a tale recorded,
Of treachery suppressed and faith rewarded!

NARRATED: Queen Margaret and Beatrice rejoice in the success of their trick, but the chevalier reenters with tragic news. King Louis' army has been defeated on the Nile, and the king taken prisoner. Queen Margaret resolves to remain strong and govern Damietta in his absence, knowing that the future of Christendom does not lie in a single battle.

BEATRICE (laughing) 
My Sister, what a day for Beatrice!
I think the tale may do her greater credit
Than she deserves.

MARGARET					
                                  Would that the tale were true!

Chevalier enters.

MARGARET		
What news, Sir Knight?

CHEVALIER						
                                         Madame, how can I dare
To heap up griefs where there is barely room
For more? A messenger has just arrived,
In secret, with the news we prayed away.
The army's lost. The king is prisoner
In Fariskur, until a ransom's paid.

MARGARET		
We'll meet the terms––but now, no word of this
To anyone. For, though the kingdom shakes,
Damietta sits and patiently awaits
A steady hand. Christendom will prevail––
If not in kingdoms, in these little towns
Well-tended. These events have been a balm
And strangely put my aching heart at ease.
Fear is an easy way of life, but calm
Is always something of a masterpiece.

BEATRICE		
What of John Tristan?

MARGARET					
                                        Sister, who can tell?
We are not fighters. We do not win wars.
But let us hope, and trust, and Providence
May bring us victory by little cures.
John Tristan, come! We'll see another day,
For nothing's desperate, and there's time to play.

Walkability means creating environments that make it easy for people to get around by walking (or wheeling), and forms of urban planning that so far as possible bring basic provisioning within reasonable distance of people’s homes.1

The authors connect walkability to what they call “community cohesion,” which means “urban designs promoting density, connectivity, … mixed use, … and the social vitality of public space.” They propose “spending time in public spaces” as an antidote to the “evolving loneliness” of modern life.

While ostensibly discussing “cohesion” and “connectivity” as crime deterrents, the authors make quite another point in the form of a thought experiment.

Imagine two neighborhoods with the same population total, [etc.] … The only difference is that Neighborhood A is defined by an urban design where spending time outside one’s residence is an appealing activity[,] while Neighborhood B lacks spaces conducive of human interaction in public.2

The explicit point is that Neighborhood A may be safer in terms of “victimization per interaction,” even if its total crime count is higher than B’s. However, the authors imply that Neighborhood A is simply a happier place to live. It provides certain intrinsic social goods that would be worthy of choice even if they did go hand in hand with higher crime rates. Cohesion, connectivity and social vitality, however ambiguously conceived, are clearly upheld in this essay as basic goods, not mere crime deterrents, and the same may be said of walkability.

Pina-Sánchez and Loader are engaged in a not-so-subtle defense of a particular social philosophy that goes far beyond the practical question of crime. Otherwise, their enthusiasm for the New Urbanism, and their contempt for “right-wing populists” critical of the 15-minute city, would be nothing but superfluous in an essay on crime prevention. The really interesting questions are lurking in the background. Why is public life an intrinsic social good? How can it be defended on its own terms, instead of being instrumentalized as a safety measure? How are people fundamentally organized in a healthy society? How do they interact? What kind of spaces should they occupy? What is public life trying to achieve? The authors fail to address the underlying concerns motivating critics of the 15-minute city, LTNs (British Low Traffic Neighborhoods) and New Urbanism. For at least some of these critics, the concern is not whether public life is desirable, but whether it’s engineer-able; whether monopolized design and political lobbying can have healthy effects in places where there seems to be no cultural consensus about the nature of the social Good. Indeed, the authors’ tack of packaging a social philosophy as a public safety measure suggests that the authors themselves are not altogether confident of their view.

If the concept of cohesion is ambiguous, “community cohesion” is doubly so, because the word “community” has come to mean many things. We speak of groups of people as “communities” if they share a trait, interest or activity (a young adult community, an Italian community, an academic community). If we speak of “the” academic community, we mean the sum total of people in the world who work in research and higher education. Community in this sense is not a geographic concept. We can also use “community” to mean definite historical kinds of social place: neighborhoods, towns, cities, states, nations and empires. Finally, by “community” we can mean a general feeling that we trust our neighbors as sharing our traits, our structuring activities, and our sense of purpose. Consider what it means when someone says, “I moved to New York City, but I’m lonely because I haven’t found my community.” Here he expresses all three senses of community in opposition: the city of New York as a community in itself; a group of people within New York who share his purpose; and a feeling of similarity to the man on the street.

New Urbanism and other such movements are concerned to identify the points of intersection between these three senses of community. Is it possible, they ask, to build the kind of places that will tend to foster the common sense of purpose that leads to a feeling of community? Moreover, if our human nature is already a significant point of commonality, is it not possible to produce a common sense of purpose simply by designing places that are more human? These imply other, more speculative questions. What comes first, the space or the solidarity? Is urban design an effect or a cause of belonging? How do spaces become places? These are good questions that cannot be answered legislatively or quantitatively. They are not questions of means (the best way to achieve an agreed-upon result) or of “how much” (more or less crime). They are questions of basic goods, or intrinsic goods; questions about human nature and, specifically, the social dimension of human nature.

Movements like the New Urbanism have at least an implicit philosophy, and one that must be taken seriously. This philosophy could be described as follows. A healthy society is in part a result of well-organized spaces, where “well-organized” means conducive to a specifically human mode of existence. Human beings require friendship and regular interaction, and specifically the kind of interaction that is simultaneously physical and intellectual. We could call this mixed kind of interaction “integrated.” Integrated interaction requires integrated spaces and arteries like open-air markets, piazzas and pedestrian-centered thoroughfares. New Urbanism is harshly critical of suburbanism, motor culture, and economies that automate or monopolize commerce at the expense of traditional “social life.”

It is helpful to consider opposing views before proceeding to a deeper analysis or evaluation of the New Urbanist platform.

Paul Heyne is an economist of the Austrian school who wrote an introduction to economics for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. In this introduction he makes two rather startling claims: that “we don’t need many friends in a well-functioning commercial society,”3 and that community itself may be obsolete. He writes:

Those who are tempted to suppose that the loss of community is too high a price to pay for the advantages of a market-coordinated economy should reflect carefully on the full range of benefits that “capitalism” has brought with it.4

Heyne’s reasoning is clear enough. The purpose of an economy (he thinks) is to provide all of its members with the goods and services they want or can reasonably expect. Within families and very small, local economies, the exchange of goods and services presupposes a degree of trust: an agreement about the exchange value of objects (in a barter economy) or the monetary worth of an item of spiritual, aesthetic or cultural value. Informal, neighborly investment calls for knowledge of people’s character and intentions. Everything just mentioned demands a “community” in the sense of a group of people who are real or potential friends: whose economic decisions are based on a feeling of participation in a common cultural discourse. In such a community, it matters how the goods I sell will be used, and whether you can appreciate them. In a “market-coordinated economy,” such as Heyne imagines, friendship of this sort is no longer necessary for a commercial transaction to occur, because the “market” determines value.

Two outcomes are possible in Heyne’s “well-functioning commercial society.” Either community vanishes altogether or it reemerges in the form of a luxury, a phenomenon I call the “community market.” Capital One Cafes are a good example. In an age of digital banking, Capital One Bank spotted an opportunity to transform the obsolete bank lounge into a social commodity, a place where lonely people could rediscover the ambient company that had been sacrificed to automation. The effect is twofold. First, semi-private spaces with non-commodified benefits, like running into a neighbor, can now be thoroughly commodified, even though the sense of “running into” changes when nobody has to be there. What was once a necessary social space, and to that extent larger than the bank itself, has now become a brand-dominated space engulfed by the Capital One identity. Snacks, drinks, and “customer perks” like reserving a “nook,” are not only goods in their own right but also commodifications of a social experience that used to be taken for granted as part of the daily routine. Meanwhile, however, the essence of that routine––the necessity of physical presence that opened up social life––has been technologically removed. It is also worth noting that the Capital One Cafe has even attempted to commodify elements of cafe culture that do not traditionally have a price tag. The “reservable nook” replaces the stammtisch, or regulars’ table, held by longstanding patrons of the cafe. The second effect of the Capital One Cafe is to change our expectation of what society as such ought to provide towards healthy life. As social existence becomes less and less a predictable part of our routine, and ever more a luxury requiring its own time, effort and money, we are led to believe that company is a reward for a healthy life, and not in fact a necessity.

An analogous situation arises when Shark Tank fads like Bantam Bagels sell “merch” designed to promote their identity as neighborhood fixtures. A neighborhood resident can then simulate a personal relationship with a store, even if both parties have only been around for a week. This sense of community is manufactured, creating what Bernard Stiegler calls a “short circuit,”5 a false substitute for the forging of organic communal ties. When a family bakes bread for two generations, and the neighborhood knows its bakers by quality and by face, an organic tie is forged. When a bakery puts up a “family business” sign on opening day, and sells t-shirts, the connection is short-circuited.

What, if anything, is truly wrong with the community market? Does the idea of a short circuit beg the question, whether an organic community must be a physical community? To answer these questions, we must come up with a working definition of community. According to Aristotle, “every community [koinonia] is established with a view to some good.”6 This is consistent with the possibility of many communities based on the conquest of many different kinds of goods. However, this specialized sense of community, as a group formed to achieve one particular end, cannot be the only sense. Otherwise, it would not be meaningful to speak of “community” without qualification, which we very often do. We imply that having no community is a bad thing, regardless of what a person is trying to achieve; and that finding a community is possible even when a person is not sure what he wants from it. Usually, in fact, the discovery of goods worth pursuing arises from, not before, the experience of community. What, then, is “community” in the unqualified sense?

Aristotle makes it clear that there is an unqualified sense of community, when he writes that political community is “the highest of all” communities and “embraces all the rest.” Political community “aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.”7 According to Aristotle, this highest good is the life of virtue, which is the meaning of happiness and the purpose of the human soul. Simply, then, the highest community, the political community in Aristotle’s language, is the community of man as such; the community in which all of man’s faculties and components can come to fruition together, in a way that honors their unity. While the success of such a community depends on an accurate picture of human nature, one principle is clear to everyone, namely, that any essential part of human nature must be built into the structure of any community that claims to be perfectly human. We can therefore suggest the following definition. Community, in an absolute sense, is a group of people formed to achieve happiness in the sense of a complete human life. This is different from a group of individuals each of whom is trying to achieve happiness, because the existence of any community is premised on the assumption that whatever end defines the community is achievable only by the group as such. A fishing club, for example, is not premised on the assumption that human happiness is a group effort, but only on the assumption that the enjoyment of fishing is a group effort. A political community, however, is premised on the assumption that human happiness itself is a group effort, or, more specifically, that human happiness requires friendship.

Aristotle develops the connection between happiness and friendship. Let us consider his position briefly. He thinks of happiness as an activity that “lies in living and being active.”8 Human happiness, specifically, is an activity of perceiving and pursuing “that which is good by nature.”9 It is the activity of enjoying the Good. In this respect, human happiness is markedly different from the fulfillment of other animals, which are said to be good only by virtue of performing their natural functions, without any additional need to perceive these functions as good. “[L]ife is among the things that are good and pleasant in themselves,” and yet “life” in the case of man is not only defined by perception (”life is defined in the case of animals by the power of perception”) but also by “thinking.”10 To be virtuous is quite simply to delight in the Good as such, for “that which is good by nature is also good for the virtuous man.”11 Thus, there is no distinction in fact between a life of virtue and a life of delighting in virtue, as there would be between the excellence of a flower and delighting in the excellence of a flower (for a flower cannot delight in its own excellence). From this marriage of the practical and theoretical, or speculative, in human happiness, arises the paradox that “we perceive that we perceive” and “perceive … that we think” and take pleasure in perceiving that we take pleasure (”to perceive what is good present in oneself is pleasant”12); for “life is by nature good,” and good men “are pleased at the consciousness of what is in itself good.”13

Because human happiness involves this paradoxical reflexivity––this practice of the Good for the sake of its goodness, and happiness in knowing that one is happy––we have a special need for friends, who represent “another self.”14 Aristotle argues that we need friends because “we can contemplate our neighbors better than ourselves and their actions better than our own.”15 “[T]he blessed man will need friends … since he chooses to contemplate worthy actions and actions that are his own, and the actions of a good man who is his friend have both these qualities.”16 “[A]s his own existence is desirable for each man, so, or almost so, is that of his friend.”17

He needs, therefore, to be conscious of the existence of his friend as well [as his own existence], and this will be realized in their living together and sharing in discussion and thought; for this is what living together would seem to mean in the case of man, and not, as in the case of cattle, feeding in the same place.18

With these points in mind, and considering our definition of community in the absolute sense (which is Aristotle’s notion of political community), we can piece together an objection to the community market. The community market addresses our need for company––that is, for physical proximity to other people––but not our need for friendship. Capital One Cafes provide us with selective spaces of leisure, but not spaces where the whole range of human needs––physical, economic, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic––is represented as a unity. Without such spaces, our neighbors can only ever be represented to us in one particular capacity at a time; never as other men, as “other selves.” In other words, the “community” of the community market depends on a more fundamental fragmentation of political community into separated sectors.

New Urbanism is correct to call for a spatial reunification of community. Without recognizing an underlying anthropology, New Urbanists seem to intuit that a community of friendship demands definite kinds of spaces, and that the absence of these spaces promotes an absence of community. In other words, political life requires a particular physical structure. This physical structure operates on the level of ordinary commerce and interactions, work and play, leisure and recreation. Two conclusions follow from these reflections. First, just as human life and friendship is particular, so political community must be particular. It cannot exist in an abstract or global state, because men themselves do not exist in an abstract or global state. Every kind of community, even the absolute kind, exists in the plural. (Family implies families; economy, economies; political life, political communities.) Second, if each kind of community has to exist as a concrete particular with a definite end, then each kind of community must have a specific material cause conducive to its end. This means that the political community must have a definite physical structure, a definite arrangement of geographic space, conducive to the end of friendship and, through friendship, to the pursuit of a complete human life. What is this physical structure of all political community? What are its essential components and boundaries? And what word can we give to it insofar as it represents the primordial political “unit”?

There was a girl named (let us say)
	Samantha Brewster Brown
Who painted nearly every day,
	Which puzzled all her town.
They sent her, after fruitless pleas, 
	To study with her kind
Across some very lengthy seas,
	In places hard to find.
She came back in a couple years,
	A little worse for wear,
With foreign objects in her ears
	And multicolored hair,
And straightway opened up a shop
	Called "Avant Garde Boutique,"
Where city visitors could stop	
	For trinkets twice a week.
Now, Sam Brown had a cousin with
	Ambitions less pronounced,
The kind who reimbursed her kith
	In greasy checks that bounced.
Her natal name was Janie Jill,
	Which matched her lack of flair;
But Janie changed her name at will
	And also dyed her hair.
She skulked about the village bar
	And posted little clips
And strummed some things on her guitar
	And shouted, "Bleep the Blips!"
Which pleased a lot of people who
	Were brain-befogged at 5
And found it ether-clearing to
	Observe her "going live."
So Janie Jill, she struck it rich
	And funded many schools,
While Coz Samantha, with a twitch,
	Continued breaking rules.

An old man sweats, his bronzed, red-freckled flesh
Flat like a carcass on the steaming block;
Limp like a seal beached on the sidewalk where
Brown-rubber gum spots spackle the cement,
He sunbathes and he dreams. His boombox croons
To the shriek of cabs down Seventh Avenue.

Wind bakes in the tar on the avenue,
Sticks like seal wrap to the naked flesh,
Sticks to the quilt-caped beggar where he croons
His sad Opheliac anthem for the block;
Sticks to the mildewed tunnels, wet cement,
Winds of the PATH-train scent from Who-knows-where.

Here stroll the cream of city gentry, where
Soot-painted rats scavenge the avenue
And Mona Lisas on the white cement
Are chalked in smiles of pink anemic flesh;
Where kings of commerce cup their phones to block
The beggar’s lewd, unfathomable croons.

On rainy days the gutter-piping croons,
Drips on bricks and green cloth awnings where
Brow-furrowed clerks tap smoke ash on the block
And belt their chat across the avenue
Through mists that blur the meeting-lines of flesh
And wind and kings and beggars and cement.

But poetry is wasted on cement—
To symphonies and jagged urban croons
The same bleak rock, to rubber tires and flesh
The same stone patience of the wayside where
Things wither. It’s an aimless avenue
Of blind impartiality. The block

Is parched and chapped and takes it like a block.
If, set upon some part of the cement,
Between two numbers on an avenue,
The bell of an old church tower lowly croons,
Who stops? Who cares to think to wonder where
We go, this whole hot city-herd of flesh?

And still an old man sunbathes on cement,
Dreaming of something, while his boombox croons
To the shriek of cabs down Seventh Avenue.

Are tools and technology “morally neutral,” and in what sense? And what exactly do we mean by a tool? If a tool is neutral, is it neutral because it’s a tool, or because it’s an inanimate object? Let me give a frinstance.

Back in 2020, a group of Catholics in St. Louis got together to defend the famous (or infamous) St. Louis statue in Forest Park. The statue, which is formally called the “Apotheosis of St. Louis,” was presented to the city in 1906 by the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company. There is no indication that Charles H. Niehaus, the statue’s sculptor, was motivated by piety or devotion to St. Louis. The very concept of “apotheosis,” which means “God-making” or deification, is a pagan one that tends to be used in Neoclassical styles to praise political and national heroes, not saints. Think of the Apotheosis of George Washington, in the U.S. Capitol. In other words, there is no confusing the statue of St. Louis with a formal icon, or even the kind of statue you might see in church. Nevertheless, when the statue came under attack from the far-Left, Catholics in St. Louis flocked to pray rosaries and venerate the saint. Curiously, both sides of the battle seemed to agree about one thing. The statue was either good or evil. Nobody said, “It’s only a statue”––or, if they did, it didn’t seem a very convincing argument. Condescending Wonka never came around saying, “Please, tell me more about how statues are anti-semitic…”

This anecdote suggests that people don’t actually see objects as “morally neutral” just because they’re objects. In fact, popular behavior suggests that we see objects as morally important, not only by association, but also intrinsically. For example, a Catholic would not say that he venerates a statue of St. Louis simply because the statue happens to make him think of St. Louis. If that were the case, we could easily resolve statue conflicts by agreeing to associate the statue with whomever we like. Liberals could agree to associate the statue on Art Hill with a fictive homosexual rights activist of the 13th century, and Catholics could go on associating the statue with a saint. But that isn’t how statues work. Rather, the statue of St. Louis has an intrinsic dignity because of what it formally depicts––which is why we can speak of statues and other religious objects being “desecrated:” having their sacredness violated.

This doesn’t tell us why, or in what sense, artificial objects are morally significant. It merely tells us that most people tend to think that they are morally significant. But what most people tend to think is important, as Aristotle understood. The purpose of all science is to clarify observation, not to correct it.

Before we go any further, an important distinction is in order. The statue of St. Louis is not a “tool,” but it is an object with a purpose. I am going to speak about tools, in particular, but what I have to say really applies to all artificial objects: objects that combine an intention or an idea with a preexisting substance. Let me explain.

Tools and works of art fall under a class of things that Aristotle calls “artificial substances.” Aristotle writes, in Book II of the Physics, that “[o]f things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes.” He argues that the key distinction, between a natural and an artificial substance, is whether the substance has “within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness.” In other words, is the substance capable of growing, resting and behaving specifically as the type of thing that we name it? Edward Feser uses the example of Tarzan’s liana vines (which are a natural substance) and a hammock made from liana vines (which would be an artificial substance).1 A natural substance, a liana vine grows and reproduces. It has an internal principle of change, that is, a tendency to stay a liana vine and to grow as a liana vine, all by itself. The name that we give it reflects this thing that it tends to be. A hammock, on the other hand, does not behave like a hammock or remain a hammock all by itself, or without opposition. It has to be constructed and maintained. Without external force and maintenance, a hammock tends to behave––not like a hammock––but like a vine, or whatever composes it. This is because a hammock is an imposed form, or what is called an “accidental form.” The name that we give it reflects the thing that it is made to be by design and by maintenance. Unlike a natural substance, an artificial substance always contains multiple forms: the form or forms of its material, and the imposed form.

Artificial substances include anything man-made: shelter, clothing, prepared food, tools, works of art. Artificial substances are analogous to natural substances in that they have to receive their forms from something capable of expressing an intention. Animals can make tools, because animals have intentions; that is to say, they have an innate tendency to recognize individual objects, actions and situations as harmful or beneficial. Man is even better suited to make tools, because man––in addition to intentions––has ideas, or the capacity to recognize forms as such.

Artificial substances are still substances, even though their forms are externally imposed. Being a substance means having both a defining purpose, which Aristotle calls the telos, and a form. The telos, or “final cause,” is the reason for the form, and the form is the organizing principle. For example, Tarzan’s desire to hang out and drink a coconut is the final cause of the hammock. The form of the hammock determines what shape and qualities and materials the hammock will assume. You can’t have a form without a purpose. An artificial substance possesses a purpose just as truly as a natural substance does. When I fashion a knife, I have fashioned an object with qualities that are specifically directed to the purpose of cutting. Even if I decide to use my knife as a bookmark, it remains a knife, by virtue of its organization or design. An artificial object does not change its form according to the will of the user. Having been designed, an artificial object acquires a certain degree of independence. The idea in the mind of its maker has really been impressed upon it, like a stamp. The knife has an objective character, a tendency to promote certain outcomes and not others.

This is an important point, because modern culture tends to promote the idea that artificial objects––tools, technologies, works of art––are really whatever an intelligent user wants them to be. When you go to a modern art gallery and are told to “interpret” at whim, the message being conveyed is that works of art have no intrinsic character. We are led to believe that a work of art has no purpose, which means it has no form. What matters, we are told, is the agency of our own minds, which relate to all of reality like a painter to a color palette. Man is made out to be a universal artist in a world of pure, unformed possibility. This is ironic, because, in such a world, a person could never actually do what an artist does, which is to create something with a character and value of its own. Really, modern culture would like us to be artists who are surrounded by possibility and never actually make anything. This problematic view applies just as much to our use of tools. If artificial objects have no character of their own, but are only pure possibility in the hands of the user, then no tool or technology could be intrinsically good or bad. But this is obviously false. Let’s focus specifically on the class of artificial objects that we call “tools.”

Contraceptives and recreational drugs are tools. So are torture devices and poison. Are these morally neutral? Can we imagine a situation where a contraceptive might be put to good use, or an LSD trip might be the best way to solve a problem? Is the Swiss suicide pill something good to keep around the house just in case? What about a torture rack? It is true that any of these tools might actually come in handy by accident. An assassin in your house might see a glass of wine laced with arsenic and drink it; but that doesn’t make the arsenic-laced wine a good thing, any more than a loose rafter in your house would be a good thing if it happened to fall on the assassin. Notwithstanding happy accidents (which are “accidental” to the nature of the tool itself), there are some tools that simply have bad purposes and bad forms, and we call these tools “bad.” It would be very odd to say that contraceptives are morally neutral objects that happen to be used in all cases by bad people for bad ends; and the same goes for recreational drugs. Nor does it make sense to speak of people using these objects in a disciplined or an undisciplined way. A contraceptive used by a disciplined or self-controlled person is still an undisciplined act, because it is an evil act.

We also recognize some tools as inherently good. If I were to show you a series of pictures––say, a watering can, a spade and a flower pot––and ask you, “Are these good things?”, odds are you would say “yes.” Most people wouldn’t hem and haw and say, “Well, it depends how they’re used,” because a watering can, after all, could be used to water the flowers over the spot where we hid the dead body. The intended or designed use of the watering can––the reason it was made––is a good thing, and most of us, when we think of the watering can, think of its intended use. This use is precisely what gives it its name. We call it a watering can, not a body-hider. If I were to catch you all off guard, and ask you whether “tools” in general are good, you would say “yes.” Why? Because goodness remains the standard by which we measure things. Our mind does not turn instantly to bad tools, because evil is never a normative way of understanding reality. When we think of the human body, we think of a healthy body. When we think of a party, we think of a party that has not gone horribly wrong. When we think of a tool, we think of something that helps us to accomplish a good and necessary task. This is not because evil doesn’t exist, but because evil makes no sense except as a failure of the Good. The concept of a tool, then, is essentially a concept of a good thing, even if specific tools can be bad.

Experience and philosophy, then, give us the following picture of tools. Tools are objects that help us to accomplish good and necessary tasks. Certain tools, however, don’t do this: contraceptives, recreational drugs and torture devices. But what about the things we call “technologies?” What about the internet, which seems to be good but abused? What makes a tool easy to abuse? To answer this question, we’ll have to make some more distinctions.

Let’s begin with a few dictionary definitions. The Fifth Edition of Webster’s New World College Dictionary gives us the following definition of a tool. A tool is:

any implement, instrument, or utensil held in the hand and used to form, shape, fasten, add to, take away from, or otherwise change something by cutting, hitting, digging, rubbing, etc.: knives, saws, hammers, shovels, rakes, etc. are tools.

This should surprise you. It’s an extremely manual definition for a dictionary published only ten years ago. A tool, according to this definition, is primarily an extension of the human body, and therefore an extension of the agency of the human person. It is an object that facilitates a task posited and conceived by an individual.

What about technology? Webster’s Dictionary begin with an unusual definition of “technology.” Technology is “the science or study of the practical or industrial arts, applied sciences, etc.” This definition is based on the historic and linguistic meaning of “technology,” which comes from the Greek techne (for “craft”) and logos (”word” or “meaning”). Thus, technology is similar to all the other “-ologies” (psychology, biology, sociology) as being a “study of.” In this sense, “technology” is not a thing or an object in the way that a tool is a thing or an object. Instead, it’s a general way of understanding and studying tools and the theories that produce tools. Webster gives us other interesting definitions of technology: “applied science;” “a method, process, etc. for handling a specific technical problem;” and, finally, “the system by which a society provides its members with those things needed or desired.” It is striking that none of these definitions identify a technology as a kind of object.

What do these definitions tell us? First, they suggest that a technology is not a “thing” in the way that a tool is a “thing.” A child could easily identify a tool, but not a technology. It is true that we often use the word “technology” to refer to a tool; but, even then, “technology” seems to imply an object plus something else. For example, if I invented a new type of pen with manual pressure settings, like a typewriter’s touch control, we wouldn’t call this a new “technology,” because there wouldn’t be any novel force or principle involved; just a recombination of preexisting mechanisms. Gadgets are not “technologies.” But the computer is a technology. So was the printing press; which suggests that a “technology” is a tool with a certain amount of influence over our view of the world.

The printing press is a good example. We can easily think of the printing press as a tool, an object that quickly and repeatably imprints large written texts onto a piece of paper, typically in the form of a book. In this sense, it is an elaborate and complex extension of the human hand. It is also a limited extension of the human hand, since a printing press cannot do as many things as the human hand can do. However, in a world that had never before experienced mass printing and best-selling authors, the printing press wasn’t just about making books. It was about determining the role of the printed word in popular culture. It created the best-selling author (Martin Luther) but it also created the popular reader (the German “burghers” and princes) and the popular fan-base (the hoards of German peasants Luther eventually threw under the bus). Though ostensibly bound to one particular function––putting letters on paper––the printing press actually represented a range of outcomes that was not entirely foreseen. This range of outcomes, because it was so wide, lent itself to confusion with a particular view of the world. This tendency is latent in all tools to some extent. The more we can do with a tool, the more we assume that the tool can do everything. When a tool comes to be involved with a novel concept or force or principle, the emergent horizon of possible outcomes eventually dominates the perception of the tool itself. Thus, the printing press came to represent, not only the mass production of books, but also the interpretation of all thought, communication and reality as semantic or “word-based” (something that Plato had strongly condemned centuries before).2 In a world where anything verbal could be quickly disseminated, it was easy enough to believe that anything worth thinking or communicating had to be verbal or literary. Language was easily confused with thought, and thought with language. Consider how easy it is to think that a concept makes sense just because you have a word for it. The situation is not all that different from our modern use of memes, slogans and soundbites.

It is fairly easy to determine whether a tool is good or bad, because a tool is defined by a specific physical outcome. A hammer is good because it fastens things in a way that is conducive to survival. A contraceptive is bad because it merely destroys the sexual act (that is, it separates the purpose from the form of the sexual act, without creating anything new). As a rule, any tool that merely destroys is a bad tool; technically, we could call it an anti-tool since it produces nothing. Tools that produce something real are good, while tools that only destroy something real are bad. Tools are not morally ambiguous, because the thing they do is specific. A hammer qua hammer does nothing but fasten, and a contraceptive as such does nothing but prevent life. A tool cannot have its own goals; nor can a tool choose for itself from a range of goals. This is because a tool is an artificial substance with no internal principle. Artificial substances cannot think, choose or decide.

Technologies, on the other hand, are not easy to categorize as good or bad, because––although they are objectively tools––they give the appearance of having their own moral agency. Why? Because they are tools that come to be confused with theories and worldviews. We saw this in the case of the printing press: a tool (a good tool) that came to be confused with the idea that all knowledge is semantic. This brings us to another possible definition of a technology, a definition that was not given in Webster’s dictionary. We could define a technology as a tool that comes to represent a worldview. In this sense, the automobile is also obviously a technology: a tool for transportation that has become a worldwide symbol for the idea that individual liberty is the end and foundation of political life. A contraceptive is also a technology: a tool for preventing life that has become a symbol for bodily autonomy and a rejection of our status as creatures.

It follows that, if we want to know whether a “technology” is good or bad, we have to begin by separating its character as a tool from its character as a worldview. For example, taken as a worldview, the automobile is not so much a solution to a problem (the problem of transportation) as it is a particular plan for the division of society into discrete individual and family units separated by large stretches of apolitical space. Taken as an object, the automobile is a tool for personal and recreational transportation that has a good but limited use. In the U.S. it has become nearly impossible to distinguish the character of the automobile as a worldview from its character as a tool. The distinction is still evident in many parts of Europe, where the car has limited value in societies that are more densely populated and more culturally saturated. Technologies tend to be self-perpetuating in the sense that the worldview widens the application of the tool. The more we separate people politically, the more practically necessary the automobile becomes. Some technologies––like contraceptives––are evil both as worldviews and as tools. What about smartphones?

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Digital Revolution has been the de-materialization or de-objectification of tools. This is reflected in the vocabulary we use. Where we used to talk about matter and form, or matter and concept, we now speak of “hardware” and “software.” According to the Corsair website, the hardware is “any physical component that you can touch,” and the software is “a catch-all term that describes the intangible digital computer stuff.” Now, as mystical and spiritually elite as this sounds, the “intangible digital computer stuff” is nothing but the more essential material part of the tool. The mystical etherealization of software has the effect of suggesting that computers, smartphones and other complex digital devices are not artificial substances but natural substances, with their own, internal principles and will. We are led to believe that what is actually the material of the tool is in fact the soul of the tool. The now-fashionable description of complex machines as “intelligent” merely entrenches this earlier category confusion. The result is that digitalization has become the easiest way to blur the distinction between the artificial object as tool and the artificial object as worldview.

When I pick up a smartphone––or my laptop, which is basically my smartphone––I am not picking up a tool. Rather, I am doing something much more like walking into a toolshed, but a toolshed that is made to look like a tool. This is clear because the smartphone does not correspond to any particular physical outcome. Unlike a tool, a smartphone has no practical purpose. It is, rather, a space in which a very wide range of practical purposes are curated. In this sense it is not unlike a museum exhibit: a range of objects chosen according to a particular interpretive theme. The difference, again, is that a smartphone does not look like an exhibit or a space. It looks like a tool. It’s a Trojan horse.

What kind of tools do I find in this horse? A lot, some good and some bad. There are tools for composing text, tools for handwriting, tools for telephoning, tools for learning; tools for finding attractive people who like novenas; tools for looking at pictures of attractive people who definitely do not like novenas. There are tools for designing and tools for playing games; tools for listening to music and tools for watching videos; tools for being led places and tools for reading maps. The illusion of unity of all of these tools means that many of them are confused with each other. What looks like a tool for designing is actually a tool for playing games (because you’re only creating within narrow and arbitrary parameters). What looks like a tool for writing is actually a tool for composing (writing and composing are not the same thing). What looks like a tool for dating is actually a tool for comparing pictures of people. What looks like a tool for reading maps is actually a tool for being told where to go. What looks like a tool for hearing music is actually a tool for watching a video, and vice versa. The blurring of all of these tools also involves a moral blurring. Some of the tools I have described are bad, and others are good, but the distinction is never clear when we are operating under the conception that the space itself––the smartphone––is the tool. We are encouraged to decide whether the smartphone as a tool is good or evil, but this conversation is a red herring. The smartphone is evil, but not in the way that a tool is evil. The smartphone is evil because it perpetuates a massive category error: a confusion between a tool and a worldview. In this sense, the smartphone is the technology par excellence, the worldview masquerading as a tool.

If the smartphone is not a tool but a worldview, that what exactly is the worldview? It is simply the worldview of materialism itself: the belief that everything we think, say and do is reducible to a physical outcome or event. Just as the printing press encouraged a reduction of all meaning to words, so the smartphone encourages a reduction of all thought to action. There is a tool for everything, because everything is just physical movement. A conversation is just a transcription of text. A memory is just the retrieval of a stored image. Translation is just the substitution of one word for another. Entertainment is just a procession of images. Reading is just the dissemination of text. Listening is just the reception of sounds. The smartphone is not just a tool shed masquerading as a tool, but also a tool shed masquerading as all of reality. In this sense it is a kind of meta-technology, where the worldview in question is the apotheosis of all tools. It is the view of a world with no meaning; only events.

So what’s the solution? There are many; some of them perfect, and others not. The perfect solution? Walk out of the toolshed. Throw away your smartphone. Try doing real things. You’ll realize very quickly how much you thought you were doing one thing but actually doing another––like obeying a moving line, when you thought you were navigating; or following images, when you thought you were listening to music.

Walking out of the toolshed isn’t feasible for everyone. One imperfect but effective solution is to call the smartphone’s bluff. If it’s pretending to be a tool, begin treating it like one. Ask yourself what you’re doing with it, do that thing, and then stop. Don’t wake up in the morning and ask it to plan your day. Don’t ask it to find you a romantic partner. Pretend sometimes that it’s just a phone, and pretend sometimes that it’s just a word processor. It’s interesting how some technologies––when they have lost their glamor––go back to being tools. That’s why people assume I’m working when I’m on the computer.

Another imperfect solution, which is hard but easily attainable, is to go after the mental habits that the worldview produces. Chief among these is the expectation that every problem has a quick technological fix. The smartphone creates people who panic when they’re lost, freeze when they forget something, freak out when they’re bored, and melt down when they receive an ambiguous text. These are all, in a way, different states of uncertainty; and uncertainty is part of the human condition. Stop acting like uncertainty is evil. When you’re lost, look around; when you’re bored, stay bored for a while. You’ll find yourself needing your phone less and less.

None of these strategies will change the fact that the smartphone is an insidious technology. It is designed to pretend to be something it isn’t. It’s not unlike the Portuguese man o’ war: a colony of tiny organisms masquerading as a single animal. This is not technologically elegant, since elegance and beauty require a distribution of labor and a diversification of tasks. A restaurant is more elegant than a cafeteria; an orchestra is more elegant than a CD player; a museum gallery is more elegant than a slideshow. Compactness for the sake of compactness only blurs categories and confuses real distinctions with conceptual ones. Ultimately, the smartphone is not a human tool, because it is not an extension of the human person. It is only a place to get lost.

First, “law” can be understood to mean order itself, which is why the creators in mythology are often characterized as legislators. The Zeus of Hesiod’s Theogony is said to be the father (literally) of Lawfulness and Justice, but also––at the same moment––of the Seasons. These three share a mother, Themis, whose name derives from a Greek verb, tithemi, meaning “to put” or “place.” In other words, law, justice and the seasons are divers expressions of the same principle: the diversification of nature into parts with specific functions. Zeus’ role as co-creator of natural order mirrors his role as the distributor of “titles and privileges” among the other gods.1 Organization and creation dovetail, and “law” becomes simultaneously universal and practical order. A lawgiver is both one who facilitates the practical function of things, by establishing auxiliary rules, and one who perfects Being by making what is ambiguous more precise.

Thus, for example, the seasons perfect creation by separating, containing and accentuating latent qualities, especially qualities (such as cold, sleep, moisture and roughness) that exist in opposing pairs. This perfection by differentiation, which affords creatures the space to develop their nature, is analogous to the behavior of human legislation, which distinguishes all kinds of human activity by assigning them names, obligations, honors, restrictions and even locations (for example, driving on the right side of the road). All law, human and divine, is the creation of order through differentiation. This is precisely what Marduk does with the body of Tiamat in the Enuma Elish, as Edward S. Casey observes.

Precisely as an amorphous nonobject, that is, as herself the Deep, Tiamat can be conquered in a cosmomachia2 wherein the architectonic triumphs over the unstructured and the mastery of the matrix is asserted.3

Casey’s thesis is that order, in this sense of structuring the amorphous, or objectifying the nonobjective, is related to the phenomenon of “place.” Place is to space what architecture is to the Deep, what order is to chaos, and what Marduk is to Tiamat.4 Wherever a space becomes a place, order has been created, and law––whether human or divine––is established.

Law can also be understood as “human law.” However, we must be careful to distinguish between two categories of human law: customs and ordinances.

Aristotle ends Nicomachean Ethics with a nod to politics, arguing for the necessity of laws “written or unwritten” to encourage virtue. His reason is that arguments are insufficient to cultivate virtue in any but an intelligent elite.5 It is difficult to see how even an intelligent elite could be made virtuous by arguments alone, considering the gap between speculative and practical reason. Further, the intelligent elite, like all men, have to be raised from childhood to come into full use of their faculties. According to Socrates, this involves becoming ennomos, “lawful”––not “law-abiding” (which implies an externally-driven movement) but, rather, “attuned” to the order of the cosmos; which is why Socrates’ course of education begins with music and poetry.6 The first step toward virtue and the first step toward scientific knowledge are one and the same, namely, to develop an appetite for order, an expectation of order in all things. In terms of Scholastic psychology, we might say that order is the foundational intention of rational perception (we perceive harm, benefit, utility, etc., all with reference to order). “Internal” rhythm, meter and harmony are the first fruits of a soul that has become lawful. In a sense, we could say that the very first ignorance to be overcome is the ignorance of nihilism: the false belief that knowledge is not possible because the world is not ordered. The human appetite for order is the origin of human law. Thus, the first expression of human law is not the external imposition of rules by an authority––which I call ordinance––but instead the internal governance of a well-formed soul. Individually, this psychic self-governance can be identified as virtue; socially, or communally, as custom. A custom is a rule of practical action that follows from the cooperative reflection of the community. An ordinance, by contrast, is simply a rule of practical action promulgated by a recognized authority. Written ordinances I call legislation. Unwritten ordnances are what we generally call common law (e.g. England’s “unwritten constitution,” or the United States’ use of legal precedent).

“Law” can be taken teleologically or ergonomically: teleologically, as a question of how human beings participate in a broader phenomenon of order; ergonomically, as a question of how ordinances can eliminate ambiguity in the relations between people. The first is a question of culture and the origin of political community; the second, a question of stability and the continuity of political community. The two approaches are compatible and, ideally, mutually sustaining. However, the teleological is more fundamental and closer to the Aristotelian definition of the polis; and many problems arise when it is neglected in favor of ergonomic political theory.

First, an ergonomic theory has the tendency to try to obviate community entirely by promoting sources of social stability that are allegedly free of human “error.” Paul Heyne, as we saw, claims that community is unnecessary in a “market-coordinated economy,” suggesting that community itself––even in its most civilized form––is a means of promoting economic stability, and not the other way around. Taken to its logical extreme, such a view raises the following questions. Is the purpose of human society simply to regulate our interactions, so that no conflict or ambiguity exists between individuals? Or is it rather to make of the individual something that he cannot be by himself? Does society exist primarily to sustain or to develop the individual? Can a true political community hope to replace unity of intention (that is, community) with homogeneity of interaction (market- or regime-governed) and remain fundamentally a community?

Modern technology has forced this question already, because digital commerce has effectively given us the option to have societies without communities. Eating, buying and selling, learning, recreating (or at least entertaining oneself), and even procreating, are all possible to do now without having to enter a teleological group, a group with a shared vision of human nature. The result is that the holistic function of language––namely, to lift practical action into the sphere of speculative reflection––is obviated by non-linguistic, functionally specific modes of interaction. Geographic proximity, the strongest incentive for language, has been replaced by virtual environments that allow us to opt in and out of language at our convenience. Unfortunately, clicking a button is only ever clicking a button. Asking a baker for bread is entering a conversation, and all conversations are potentially spiritual. Forming function-specific “spiritual” or “intellectual” communities does not solve the problem, when the gap remains between the spiritual and the practical: a gap that only language can fill. Communication through music and dance, picture, sculpture and architecture, becomes similarly divided, between the mechanically practical and the spiritually aloof, when the linguistic paradigm has been overthrown. Modern man is left psychically and geographically homeless in a society of systems.

One symptom of the technological strain in ergonomic politics is the loss of the notion of craft. Practical actions that require a process––speaking face-to-face with a shopkeeper, or handwashing dishes, or even walking to work––are reduced to their most explicit objectives (stocking up, sanitizing, commuting) without any regard for their power to edify, that is, to lift practical action to another plane (which is arguably the meaning of “civilizing”). Such a reduction makes it possible to replace the process with an operation that achieves only one objective at a time, which is commonly called “labor saving”––though in reality it is only labor-dividing. This reductionism at the expense of craft is preached by the likes of Henry Hazlitt, who writes the following in his Economics in One Lesson.

In the railroad industry, the unions insist that firemen be employed on types of locomotives that do not need them. In the theaters unions insist on the use of scene shifters even in plays in which no scenery is used. The musicians’ union required so-called stand-in musicians or even whole orchestras to be employed in many cases where only phonograph records were needed.7

Implicit in Hazlitt’s criticism of unions (which in itself may be justified) is the assumption that an orchestra, and any other community of craft or labor, exists for no reason but to achieve the fungible result. Making music and providing (or selling) music are assumed to be the same thing.

I want to propose a new, or at least a neglected, basis for conceptualizing the polis: a basis that is thoroughly Aristotelian and avoids the errors of an exclusively ergonomic approach. I argue that the primary content of political community is cultural and geographic; its primary mode of continuity is custom, or what Alasdair MacIntyre calls practice. Thus, the terms state, legislation, regime and market structure all are political only in a secondary sense. Nation is an ambiguous term, but––whether understood ethnically or constitutionally––it does not posit sufficient conditions for a polis. The word “city” is more promising, and, indeed, “city-state” remains the best historico-philosophical translation of polis. Nevertheless, I maintain that the essence of political community, as Aristotle explained it, is best conveyed through a word that, in English, has remained free of “politics” in the liberal-ergonomic sense. That word is town.

Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which would supersede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other.

Thus Paine gives us an alleged deduction of conceptual from practical separability: a society and a government are distinct, because one can exist without the other. Paine’s position is clearly unlike Hobbes’ (whose state of nature is not only lawless but societyless) and also unlike Locke’s, which places more emphasis on the possibility of local contracts within the state of nature but does not consider this a feature of society: “for truth and keeping of faith belongs to men, as men, and not as members of society” (Second Treatise of Government, II.14).

What is missing from Hobbes and Locke––and curiously present, albeit dimly, in Paine––is the notion of society as a positive fulfillment of the individual; as a nomos (order, law, custom) that imposes natural obligations on individual liberty. The liberal protestant tradition does not deny that such obligations exist but treats them as immanent to the individual, where they take the form of “conscience.” Liberal thought has no room for the Classical conception of nomos as a social order through which the individual comes into himself, or into his humanity, by way of culture, language and education. Rather, the man of “conscience” is self-legislating, which means that, from a social standpoint, individual liberty and “conscience” are the same thing. Society cannot know the individual better than he knows himself. The interesting political implication is that society and government are essentially the same thing, namely, a violation of liberty by means of an externally imposed law. Paine’s appeal for a cautious distinction between society and government is all the more striking, given his squarely liberal position in every other respect (he attributes the necessity of government to the postlapsarian dimming of individual “conscience”).

The liberal confusion of society with government is glaringly obvious in contemporary uses of the words “state” and “nation.” For example, Aristotle’s polis is frequently translated “state” (cf. Jowett’s translation of the Politics), notwithstanding the fact that a polis is a natural extension of family and village, according to Aristotle, while a state has no essential feature but legal fiat. Similarly, the Compendium for the Social Doctrine of the Church pursues a confused line of reasoning that attributes everything to “the State” that Classical thought attributes to the polis (cf. §168-170 of the Compendium). The state is posited as the natural complement of individual existence (”[t]he responsibility for attaining the common good, besides falling to individual persons, belongs also to the State”). In place of a natural progression of family to village to polis, we are presented with a natural progression of “the individual person, the family or intermediate groups” to the state. This is odd. Families and other “intermediate groups” are treated simply as arrangements of individuals, which hearkens back to the liberal substitution of individual conscience for communal nomos. To confuse matters further, the state is identified with “the political authority” (a phrase related to polis) and simultaneously with “the government of each country.” No effort is made to distinguish the body politic, as a discrete and natural form of community, from the institutional and legislative body represented by the government. Nationalists like Pierre Manent commit the same error as the Compendium when they equate the identity of the body politic with national identity.

Words like “state” and “nation” serve to obliterate the distinction between society and government, in effect leaving us with two unacceptable alternatives, individualism and totalitarianism, both of which depend on the reduction of nomos to “legislation.” In other words, the reduction of society to government depends entirely on the reduction of all law to legislation. We are thus manoeuvred neatly into an exhaustive standoff between individual conscience and social legislation––a false dichotomy that informs American conservatism and progressivism alike. Perhaps even Paine would be disappointed.

American culture lacks, and probably never had, any sense of political life as a form of community, and this shortcoming is reflected in the vocabulary of oppositions that shape American debate: individual and state, country and city, private and public, freedom and law, choice and force. Whatever is not of the individual, which is to say of liberty, is of the state, which is to say of legislative force. This would be a very odd framework in which to view other natural communities, such as the family. Typically, when we speak of the decisions, actions, responsibilities and goals of a family, we do not mean to imply that these in any way inhibit the individual members of the family. We do not mourn marriages as losses of individual freedom (at least, most of us don’t), or consider it a necessary evil that children are born under the authority of parents. Quite the opposite. We view membership in a family as a perfection of the individual, and one that, if it imposes restrictions, does so in the sense that form restricts matter, namely, by concrete actualization. The example of the family shows that we are not in the habit of regarding natural community as a loss to the individual. If we view political society as a necessary evil, that can only be because we have lost the sense of the polis as a natural community. The American view, which belongs to the liberal school of political thought, is comparable to a situation in which the identity of the family were reduced entirely to the principle of paternal command, such that paternal command, far from being a service to the family, became its only distinguishing feature. In such a case, families would be a benefit only in situations where the father could offer protection from an outside threat. This is more or less how liberals (including conservatives) view political life.

The blurring of the distinction between society and government is not peculiar to America, or even to British political theory. In the ancient world, the transition from Greek philosophical to Roman bureaucratic culture involved a transition from understanding political community in terms of natural purpose to understanding it in terms of practical structure. While Plato and Aristotle viewed political life teleologically (in terms of purpose, or telos), Cicero appears to have viewed it ergonomically (in terms of function, or ergon).

The shift from Greece to Rome is clearly indicated by Cicero’s making law the crucial criterion of community, at least on the level of the res publica. In a famous definition, he sets out, lawyer-like, to define what constitutes for him the heart of the matter. The problem is how a people may be defined. In De republica we read: “A people is not any and all gatherings of men brought together in any way, but a gathering of many who are associated by agreement on law and by community of interests (utilitatis communio) …” This definition of the people as a legal community follows Scipio’s assertion that the res publica, the commonwealth, is res populi, the “affair” or may be even the “property” of the people. (Carl J. Friedrich, “The Concept of Community in the History of Political and Legal Philosophy,” in Community, 6).

An ergonomic approach to community has both legalizing and pluralizing tendencies. It dos not necessarily reject the teleological character of a community but chooses to focus, instead, on the mechanisms of stability that preserve the ordinary ease and comfort of the community, or what John Rao likes to call “business as usual.” Let us consider the difference between teleological and ergonomic approaches through examples.

On the feast of St. Anthony, the city of Lisbon becomes largely a place for grilling sardines. The narrow streets of the Alfama, the Moorish hillside neighborhood, are packed and blocked with backdoor grills, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a restaurant from a household party. The general effect depends upon an unspoken consensus, religious in origin, which manifests itself as a common activity that blurs the lines between private discretion and public identity. It is this capacity to act harmoniously and specifically, in a gesture expressive of a definite character, that distinguishes a community. This can only occur in a sustained way if the members of the community share a hierarchy of goods. Once people resent having to step over a grill, because getting to work on time is more important than celebrating the feast, the community has begun to dissolve. If people don’t resent such things––feasts, processions, public recreations and pervasive architectural motifs––it is because these things collectively provide a context in which individuals, more and less reflectively, can make sense of living well. Thus, individual and social purpose are inseparably connected in natural community. This is most true in a political community, where no essentially human activities––labor, commerce, consumption, worship and recreation––are left out.

Even healthy communities require an elaborate complex of institutions and laws to ensure the smooth and painless performance of the activities and customs suggested above. A community acquires a recognizable structural identity as a result. It is a democracy, a monarchy, an agrarian or a mercantile society. The elaboration of these structures eventually permits a certain latitude for diversity and disagreement within the population. Visitors and other strangers, whose hierarchies of goods diverge from that of the community at large, can nonetheless become members if they are willing to abide by the explicit rules of the community. Over time, this might produce a considerable plurality of cultures within the community––especially if the community in question becomes an empire, as Rome did. A culture is not imposed quite so easily as an administration, and so a community can much more easily become an empire if it defines itself by structure (that is, ergonomically) than if it defines itself by purpose (teleologically). The reverse is also true. A community that wishes to be defined structurally is wise to become an empire. This is precisely what Madison had in mind when he argued, in the tenth Federalist Paper, that an expansion of American territory would prevent the ascendancy of any one culture.

The smaller the society, the fewer probably will be the distinct parties and interests composing it. … Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.

Madison’s advice could be published under the heading of “Tips for Making Sure Your Community Never Becomes a Culture.” Step 1 is “write a constitution.” Step 2 is “build an empire.” We have followed these tips to the letter.

The ergonomic approach, when it sacrifices the teleological, is very well suited to the Anglo-American ethos. Culture becomes a private affair; society, a legal one; politics, the art of refereeing among competing individual interests; and community, any happy coincidence of individual cultures. Ironically, politics and community become opposites, which is the farthest position possible from Aristotle’s. The ergonomic approach also does much to explain the character of the conservative, who admires the Classical virtues but prefers to acquire them at home, preferably from a book. He is suspicious of any talk of the “common good,” and despises public initiatives that presume to take anyone’s spiritual dispositions for granted. He is a great fan of law and order, understood as rules that protect him from his neighbor’s judgment; and, for the same reason, he is infatuated with technology. He is happy to praise communal cultures, especially if they are safely historic, but he is loathe to produce them, because they are fragile and a bad investment. They depend on sustained clarity of purpose rather than well-oiled machinery. He would much rather have his culture dead in a museum that alive on his street. He is a great fan of clubs and other elite associations, which are flattering but safely distant from the autonomy of his home. He reveres money, because money neutralizes goods and saves him the trouble of having to look for commerce with people who share his worldview.

The difficulty of building community on a teleological footing is that it requires collaboration, good will, virtue and even holiness: all things that we have been taught to see as hinderances to a stable, successful society. Better a mediocre system than an excellent culture. But we no longer have much of an alternative, when the efficiency of the system depends on the dehumanization of its parts. For example, we are so habituated to a systemic definition of community that we are happy to give the name “community” to any network at all, even one that eschews geographic unity, face-to-face contact, interpersonal dependence and diverse commercial habits. Modern man has happily consented to live in a vast deconcentration camp, a placeless, cultureless expanse governed by rules that require him to treat other people as mathematical objects. Sooner or later, the only remaining obstacle to a perfect society will be the man himself.

The rationalist-empiricist dichotomy continues to foster an intellectual culture where the Cartesian Grail of absolute certainty is claimed either for the mind alone or for sense data alone. Inferentially, the same is true of error, which is said to be caused entirely by the mind or entirely by the senses. Unsurprisingly, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Aristotle gives us the answer in an unassuming claim from the De Anima, III.6, that “falsehood always involves a synthesis.” In other words, pace Descartes, we are never deceived by sensory objects per se––only in how we attribute them. Let me give an example.

Just the other day, I noticed that a tree on the far corner of my block was flashing red and blue. I tensed, because I am not enthused by the tendency of my neighbors-at-large to treat long stretches of sidewalk like their personal property––especially around Halloween, when it is often impossible to stick to a sidewalk without running into a tribe of ghosts hanging from spindly pavement trees. Nor am I a fan of flashing string lights in any form, and my affection for Nature goes so far as to wish the verdure free of them. I walked towards the end of the block, only to discover a police car parked about two yards away from the tree and flashing red and blue siren lights. Needless to say, I felt silly.

Aristotle was right. I had been deceived, neither by my senses strictly speaking, which were perfectly correct to see red and blue illuminating the tree, nor by my mind strictly speaking, which quite reasonably interpreted the image according to past experiences. Rather, I had been deceived by a false synthesis, a false attribution of the lights to an intrinsic, or at least an accidentally intrinsic, cause. The remedy for such an error is not better sensory perception (for the senses can only receive their proper objects), nor is it improved reason (there was nothing irrational in the possibility that a neighbor had strung lights). I might have verified that the lights really looked like they were attached to the tree, but why? I would have to be either an inveterate skeptic, who went around double-checking everything (which is a great disadvantage in ordinary circumstances), or I would have to imagine, based on prior experience, that a police car was a probable cause. Indeed, now that I have been deceived once, I am quite likely to double-check in the future, especially if the lights are red and blue; but that is precisely how experience works. Perceptions inform imagination, which in turn informs the practical intellect. Even the speculative intellect is influenced by imagination. If you had placed the picture of the tree in front of me, as an hypothetical scenario, I could have named any number of possible causes, including a police car; but if you had asked me about the most likely cause, I would have still referred to experience––that is, to my “imagination” (in the Classical sense).

What we experience informs how we think, and nothing influences experience more than recurring patterns of association (or “synthesis”). If my predominant experience of entertainment is ten-second video bites, or if my predominant experience of dining is drive-thrus and TV dinners, or if my predominant experiences of public space are highways and isolated patches of greenery; then it is reasonable to conclude that my concepts of entertainment, dining and public space will be more or less accurate as these particulars are more or less faithful expressions of their essence. It is the task of “culture” to provide us, not only in childhood but always, with faithful representations that reflect nature and also perfect nature. While it is very far from the case, for example, that all sacred objects and acts are physically beautiful, it is nevertheless imperative that we represent them as such. Physical beauty is the natural expression of physical order, which in turn is the most potent analogue of supernatural order. Physical beauty engages the appetite for order and opens the soul to the possibility of a hierarchy of order (as Plato shows in the Symposium). This applies to practically every area of human life. Wherever we intend to cultivate ordered action (“ordered” in the metaphysical sense of a thing being guided to its final cause), we must first establish a sensory environment that is conducive to proper judgment. These sensory environments must be related to each other, as well, because even the judgment that our actions constitute a unity is dependent upon a corresponding sensory experience of environmental unity.

Not all examples involve making things physically beautiful. For example, an accurate cultural representation of sex is actually complex. It involves representing every dimension of married life and marital responsibility, from the difficulties of fidelity to the pains of childbirth and parenting. That rosy, recreational presentation of sex which is popular on sitcoms may be “pretty,” but it is not accurate. It is not a faithful expression of what sex is, and a young person formed by such images will develop a distorted concept. This distorted concept––again––is not a failure of sensory perception per se, nor a failure of logic, but a failure of association or “synthesis.” Similarly, a man whose activity is spread across isolated environments––house, church, office, gym, bar, etc.––and who spends no time in integrated places––such as neighborhoods, town squares and marketplaces, and functionally diversified streets––will form a corresponding image of himself as an agent of mutually isolated functions. This, I believe, is the primary spiritual sense of “homelessness,” or exile, namely, to have no place associated with oneself as a whole. (One can be “homeless” in a house.) Churches serve this function for many Catholics, and yet churches––unlike whole towns––are functionally distinct from other domains of activity like work and recreation. We can only be at home in a place that contains all of our ordinary functions.

Catholic culture cannot be Cartesian or Kantian, which is to say, it cannot posit a rationally transcendent individual who is always the critic, and never the effect, of his sensory environment. Catholic culture cannot be empiricist either, which is to say, it cannot posit a helpless consumer of sensory stimulations. Rather, the intelligent Catholic must be actively engaged in building his sensory environment, just as the disciplined eater is actively engaged in limiting and shaping his dietary choices. The first step of culture-building––which is the first step in all habit formation––is to limit; to choose a place: a literal, geographic sphere of action that will constitute the “stage” of our behavior. Our technomaniacal age has lost any knack for this, because we have forgotten that virtual “place” is merely a figure of speech. The rediscovery of sensory environment (which entails geographic unity) is the only avenue to recover clear thought and action.

Ferdinand was a normal boy
Who wanted what he would enjoy
And learned, through trial and education,
The perks of scheduled satiation.
Hubert was not a normal child
And seemed to think the world defiled.
He pondered suffering for days
And then went on a sugar craze.

Ferdinand discovered quickly
The ways to butter his bread more thickly
And soon became a trusted light
To boys of weaker appetite. 
Hubert was injured, I recall,
From musing near a basket ball 
And garnered dubious reputations
For his perceptual vacations.

Ferdinand, in the prime of health,
Moved collegeward to study wealth
And charmed the populace at large
With eagerness to be in charge.
Hubert, wond'ring what to do,
Enjoyed excursions to the zoo
And dabbled (when he wasn't low)
In portraits of the animaux.

Ferdinand entertained the press
By lecturing about success.
He made his millions pulling strings
And generally improving things.
Hubert (who liked a glass at night)
Sold real estate and did alright,
And, in his free time, showed his prints
Of jungle cats and elephants.

Ferdinand, sensing his demise,
Looked to the metaphoric skies
And made an elevated start
By buying all of Hubert's art.
Hubert retired on the fee
And moved at once to Italy,
Where––if you coax him from his laurel––
He may provide you with a moral.

The problem is more specific, however. Many conservatives––certainly most Christian conservatives––happily renounce their individualism within certain domains and up to a point. To maintain, for example, that the father is head of the family, that a wife owes obedience to her husband, or that the family, precisely as a unit, becomes a microcosm of the Church, is quite obviously to renounce individualism. (How powerful the individualist pull remains, becomes obvious the moment someone has a gay son. Conservatives have a Houdinian knack for becoming progressives overnight.) The same non-individualism is visible in Catholic sacramental life, especially in Traditionalist circles, where the formative influence of the liturgy clearly subordinates the identity of the individual as such to his identity as a member of the Church (John 3:30, 1 Corinthians 15:31 and Galatians 2:20). Where is conservative individualism conspicuous, then, if not in the family or the church?

There is an interesting essay by one Fr. Robert E. Brennan, entitled “The Thomistic Concept of Culture.” Having put forth an account of the purpose and content of culture, an account that he believes is continuous with Thomistic principles, the author draws a very strange conclusion. “Culture, therefore, cannot be blamed if men decline into evil ways.” Fr. Brennan’s conclusion is starkly at odds with Platonic and Aristotelian views of paideia and nomos, a considerable defect in any position that pretends to Thomism. Socrates believed that only a daimon, a divine inspiration, could save a soul in an unjust society, while Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics ends with a nod to the necessity of a treatise on nomos (“law” or “custom”), since most men cannot be made virtuous by pure argument. They must be persuaded, pressured, habituated to becoming virtuous. Nothing is so antithetical to Classical culture as the libertarian position that social structures––customs, traditions, institutions and governments––have no hand in the moral formation of the individual. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah with an individualistic theory of culture. Are we to believe that all the men there declined into evil ways, quite coincidentally at the same time, apart from any influence of the culture?

Fr. Brennan’s conclusion is characteristic of the English legalism latent in the American conservative cultural view––a legalism that draws its anthropology and ethics from a profound cynicism about the possibility of cultural consensus (a cynicism motivated, historically, by protestantism and the European experience of the Wars of Religion). According to this view, culture is not a formative context but rather a product. Personalities make culture, but culture does not make personalities. The individual remains always backstage, a rational puppet master whose only concern is to negotiate his rights beside the other puppet masters. Culture is a “production” from which the individual can freely withdraw if he wishes. To suggest otherwise is to violate the rational autonomy of the individual, an autonomy precious to modern philosophers from Descartes to Kant, but also (as seen above) to some modern “Thomisms.”

The most detrimental effect of cultural “rationalism” in America has been the decline of public spaces. Family and church are, in a very superficial way, palatable to an individualist, because the choice to “opt into” a marital contract or even a creed can be cast as a rational individual choice (hence the importance of Rumspringa and other protestant iterations of the moment of mature assent when a man becomes a voluntary member of the church). Political life, the life of custom and the public square, is a different affair entirely. One cannot opt out of life in a traditional town without leaving the town and moving to another one; nor, to this day, can a resident of Rome, Assisi, Orléans, or even Prague and Paris, simply opt out of experiencing a pervasive Christian imagery, a Christian sensory experience. Cultural life in the traditional sense––which is to say, the geopolitical sense––could be defined as the sensory experience of a worldview. It is the reason why we built cathedrals, monasteries and mausolea, painted public icons, erected public shrines, went on public processions and pilgrimages, designed sacramentally-centered towns, and composed sacred music that inspired whole musical epochs. From the American rationalist perspective, all culture in this sense is a violation of personal autonomy; a rude, totalitarian insinuation that the individual needs any help living a virtuous life. To the American mind, all public culture is tyranny. Our response––a response recognized by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century––has been to domesticate society, to abolish all cultural locales outside of the home and the parish church.

A “socialist,” I fear, is anyone who maintains that the family man, in his well-insulated domestic and parish life, is nevertheless seriously incomplete. A “socialist” is anyone who maintains that political life (the life of the town) serves something more than a recreational purpose; that a well-ordered public life is an ethical, intellectual, aesthetic requirement of the soul. I do not condone this definition of “socialism,” nor do I deny that “socialism” has a more particular sense; but, as matters stand, the word is very frequently used as a roundabout means of baptizing individualism.

It is helpful to ask ourselves what exactly it would mean to win the “culture wars.” I suspect that for many conservatives it would not look all that different from our current situation. The sad truth is that American progressives control what remains of our public life, not because progressives are especially persuasive, but because conservatives have never wanted the public square. Like Alexander the Great, we would quickly abandon the territories we conquered. Only a renaissance of Christian political maturity, a renewed self-awareness in our nature as political animals, can restore the vision necessary to build a new Christian civilization.

“This is our home,” he replied. “We enjoy this park very much.”

“I mean your house––where you live.”

“Do you mean the place where I sleep? I usually take a room at the Savoy, downtown. My wife here has several friends in the county who happily put her up. The kids enjoy sleepovers, or sometimes they crash with me or the Missus.”

“Don’t you eat together?”

“Sure! We go out all the time. Bit gourmandish, actually. We like to eat French, also Spanish. There’s a wonderful Spanish restaurant on the East Side.”

“And your friends don’t mind hosting you?”

“O, we all move around a bit. Nobody’s ever long in the same place in our circle.”

One by one, your proposals of important domestic activities met with more or less plausible answers. In fact, this family seemed quite active. They went to the movies together, dined at fine restaurants, roomed at good hotels and periodically went on vacation. Still, something seemed off. If they really were a family, where was their common place? Where did they belong, not individually or occasionally, but always and as a family? A domestic community ought to occupy a domestic place, a house at least.

The situation I describe would certainly seem bizarre to anyone, and yet it is quite common in the United States. It is not typical of domestic communities, but it is typical of political communities. To an ancient Greek, or a medieval Italian, a description of the social life of an ordinary American would raise a similar kind of question. To what place does this person belong? He works in one settlement and buys his food in another, and he owns a house in a third settlement that appears to consist entirely of people who also work and buy elsewhere. When he wants company, he visits other houses in neighboring settlements, and he worships in the farthest settlement of all. He claims to have a social life, and yet, socially speaking, he belongs nowhere in particular!

To be town-less, in fact, is much worse than to be homeless; or rather, being without a town is a much more serious kind of homelessness than being without a house. Throughout history, exile has been perceived as a great spiritual loss, from the legend of Aeneas to the life of Dante and the tragedy of King Lear. In our age, however, displacement is generally accepted as a low cost of domestic comfort and economic wealth. Friends, towns, local customs and institutions come and go, and at the very best only our domestic community, our family, is deemed sacred enough to weather the vicissitudes of changing whims. What happened to the town? What happened to political life itself, that it no longer deserves a place of its own?

I am convinced that a proper understanding of what the town is, and why it is important, demands a revision of our modern understanding of “politics.” Plato and Aristotle can furnish the foundational insights, and modern scholars, such as the urban historians I will cite in this essay, help us to grasp the physical implications of philosophical principles. I hope to show that the institution of the town belongs alongside the home and the local church, in a category of what might be called “essential places,” or places entailed by human nature itself.

Plato’s Republic is the greatest synthesis of politics and ethics that has ever been written. Recall that the project of the dialogue is to uncover the meaning of a “just man” by way of establishing what is meant by a “just city.” In the course of the project, Socrates draws two important conclusions. First, the human soul is comprised of three parts (appetitive, passionate, rational), and psychic justice (justice of the soul) is defined as harmony of these parts. Second, psychic justice can be achieved only by the submission of the person to an external social order that mirrors this harmony in a magnified and embodied form.1 Education in music and poetry is a vital first step in this submission, because the appetite for order must be cultivated before the process of self-ordering can begin. A student who has discovered rhythm, poetic meter and musical harmony is prepared to encounter the world at large on the same terms, that is, with the expectation of an objective order, a cosmic rhythm and harmony. In a sense, the perennial temptation to psychic disorder cannot be addressed until the temptation to nihilism has been cured.

Anyone who has taken up an instrument like the violin has experienced the difficult phase of surrendering his arms, fingers, shoulders and chin to the awkward manipulation of a teacher. Before his body can gravitate naturally to the right posture, it must be controlled and guided by an external agent. The same is true of dancing and good diction. Internal control comes very gradually and by means of external control. Ethics operates on the same principle. The internal control of a just soul is cultivated gradually, and very seldom completely, by the external control of a noble society.

It is crucial to note that we can express Socratic social philosophy thus far without any reference to government or to codified law, let alone to any particular kind of legal “regime,” or what Socrates calls a “constitution.” These will become necessary, but they are accidental to the essence of communal order, of “politics” in the primary sense. We might pursue the analogy of musical instruction. Musical instruction requires many things: a teacher’s salary, a place to teach and, often, the support of a larger school with an administration. Nevertheless, we would not think to define “musical instruction” in terms of a school administration, a salary or the architecture of studio spaces. The written contract between teacher and student is secondary to the unwritten contract of submission by the unskilled to the skilled. This unwritten contract is made up of three elements: student, teacher and (most crucially) a regular system of physical communication. Similarly, the specific difference of politics is the institution of a regular system of communication between the wise and the ignorant. This system is what we call “custom,” which is one sense of the Greek word nomos. The other sense of nomos is “law.” Politically, nomos in the sense of written law, or legislation, is secondary in importance to nomos in the sense of “custom,” as Socrates reveals when he observes that a badly-ordered city requires more legislation than a well-ordered one.2

When we view political custom from the standpoint of the wise instructor––that is, in terms of its authority––we call it “tradition.” When we view it as a comprehensive set of parts, a complete set of what MacIntyre would call “practices,”3 for the good of the whole soul, we call it “culture.” On closer inspection, however, there is a third element, falling somewhere between the definition of “musical education” and the enumeration of accidents (like a school). Along Aristotelian lines, we might call it an “essential property” of musical education. This third element is the lesson itself, the definite boundary of space and time within which the event necessarily unfolds or, literally, “takes place.“ Every human act or experience demands a physical expression that results, inevitably, in a concrete unit of space and time, with a beginning, a middle (or center) and an end. Viewed from this angle, political custom is called a “town.” A town can be defined as the smallest spatiotemporal unit required for a tradition to inform a complete culture.

One of the great questions of our age is whether technology can liberate us from this spatiotemporal boundary: whether industrial capitalism and digital communication (now, digital dialectic) can effectively de-spatialize and de-temporize our experience of culture. We should recognize just how much is at stake in the dismissal of the town, even before we debate the possibility of any such dismissal. If man is not essentially town-dwelling, then he is not essentially spatiotemporal. He does not require boundaries. We should also ask ourselves if other platial units, like family, parish and state, are really capable of filling the gap.

Like Plato, Aristotle begins his masterpiece of political philosophy, not with a treatise about government, but with an analysis of community itself as an anthropological requirement. He dedicates less room to the ethical and psychic purposes of community, for two reasons: first, he has already discussed these in Nicomachean Ethics, and, second, his approach is always “phenomenological” (he considers what people typically do and say before extrapolating what they ought to do and say). I read Aristotle’s Politics as a practical development of Plato’s metaphysical and ethical work; and, certainly for our purposes, we can treat them as largely in agreement. What, then, does Aristotle add?

Plato’s Republic has one great limitation that seems to plague political philosophy, as we see later in Hobbes and Locke. It is the tendency to over-chronologize a dialectic, in such a way that discrete conceptual parts of a society are expressed as discrete historical moments. Thus, for example, Hobbes’ “state of nature” appears to be a real moment in the evolution of societies, instead of an image for what causes men to desire political life. In his concern to relate the parts of society to the parts of the soul, Socrates posits a class of citizens (farmers and craftsmen) whose motivations are purely appetitive, with the strange result that division of labor, and economic prosperity, are established without any mention of families. By the time he reaches questions of procreation and filial piety, the classes have become so clearly demarcated, by functions of appetite, passion and reason, that no room exists for so complex and integrated a community as the family. Aristotle knows (and perhaps so did Plato) that this is quite simply inaccurate. Even at very primitive moments in the development of a civilization, people form organizations and institutions that are motivated by the whole soul. There is no purely economic moment in the rise of societies, nor any purely intellectual moment. We must be careful not to conflate dialectic and history. For this reason, we can appreciate that Aristotle furnishes Plato’s metaphysical architecture with a bit of realism, proceeding in terms of natural communities rather than idealized social classes.

Three communities constitute a society, according to Aristotle, and these have distinct ends. Aristotle, too, introduces them chronologically: oikos, then komé, then polis. The oikos occurs when a man and a woman join for the sake of companionship, reproduction and survival.

In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely of male and female, that the race may continue …, and of natural ruler and subject, that both may be preserved.4

The community of the family is driven by sexual instincts. Procreation expresses the “natural desire” of husband and wife “to leave behind them an image of themselves.”5 The result is a primordial economy, a division of labor that satisfies sexual appetite, and also bodily needs for food, clothing and shelter. “The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants.”6 Our word “economy” is a cognate of oikos, which could be translated “family,” “household” or “domestic society.” As I noted at the outset, the oikos has a proper place so intuitive that our word “home” has the double meaning of a domestic society and a building.

Next comes the komé, which Aristotle describes as a kind of network of households, which serves the purpose of extending the division of labor for the sake of greater economic comfort and stability.7 The word itself is interesting. Unlike oikos and polis, komé has no familiar cognates in English. In The Cambridge Greek Lexicon it is given two definitions: “village,” defined as “un unwalled settlement,” and a “district (of a city),” or what we would call a “neighborhood.”8 The most obvious feature of a komé, then, is residential proximity, since any regular exchange of goods and services traditionally calls for physical proximity. The proportionate distance of one komé from another also serves to clarify where economic responsibilities begin and end. Like a family, a town is an expression of the need for a practical limit to one’s ordinary obligations of care, loyalty and the like. Geographic proximity is the “kometic” analogue of the family’s sexual bond. Aristotle dedicates very little space to the komé, which for his purposes could be translated “town,” “village” or even “tribe.” Two details are worth extrapolating, however. First, Aristotle clearly has something more in mind than an agglomeration, or else he would treat the komé simply as an activity of the oikos. To be a household in a komé means something more than conducting many transactions with other households. Second, the economic demands of the komé produce something quite original in physical and cultural terms. Sustained economic activity demands a marketplace and even strategic points of defense. As R. E. Wycherley observes, the Greek agora, the center of urban life, was a cultural synthesis of the older Mycenean acropolis (a raised citadel) and other Minoan-Mycenean places of “festal and possibly political gatherings,” including religious worship.9 The progression from oikos to komé marks the creation of public space and, if only as a consequence, the creation of public life. Public life requires non-sexual ties between people in regular economic contact; ties that are aesthetically, ethically and emotionally charged. Inevitably, the economic purpose of the komé comes to reveal points of human communication, and desires of the human soul, that are hidden to the more visceral oikos. These desires, and the souls they disclose, are first thrown into relief by the institutions and challenges of public places.

In the komé we have the first clear expression of economic life as a catalyst of spiritual life. Looking ahead, we can identify this catalytic function as an essential feature of civilized economics. Any society that inhibits this spiritual function of economics fails to be a complete community, that is, to cultivate the complete soul. When economic activity is prevented from becoming spiritual, then spiritual activity is inevitably exiled from the economy. In other words, the human city comes to be divided between “purely economic” and “purely spiritual” domains of action. We see this, for example, in the modern tendency to separate friendship, as a form of spiritual recreation, from business, understood as an amoral kind of economic exchange. This distinction is less pronounced in towns, where the physical paths of friendship and commerce are likely to cross, notably in the public square. We will return to this question later.

Aristotle’s third community is the polis.

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state [polis] comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.10

The polis originates “in the bare needs of life” but exists “for the sake of a good life.” In Ernest Barker’s translation, it “grows for the sake of mere life” but “exists for the sake of a good life.”11 Four things should be noted about the polis. First, it exists for the sake of the complete human soul, which means it embraces but also adds to the purposes of oikos and komé. Second, it originates from oikos and komé. Third, its driving mechanism––its analogue of domestic sexuality and kometic proximity––is human speech. Fourth, unlike the oikos and the komé, it has no essential physical difference compared with its predecessor. In other words, from a purely physical standpoint, there is nothing necessarily different between a komé and a polis. The difference is purely teleological and exists in potentia already in the komé.

While all animals pursue goods, and the satisfaction that goods provide, only human beings can distinguish between the experience of a good thing and the experience of a thing being good. Simply, animals experience “goods,” but only human beings perceive the Good. To call something “good”––that is, to relate it in some way to the absolute Good––is to assume a theoretical attitude, a de-centralization of Self that allows us to consider things for what they are––that is, in their nature––as distinct from what they are for us––in their utility. This intellectual orientation of human nature is not limited to stereotypically academic questions. Intellectual experience is built into the simplest of human interactions.

The mere making of sounds serves to indicate pleasure and pain, and is thus a faculty that belongs to animals in general. … But language serves to declare what is advantageous and what is the reverse, and it therefore serves to declare what is just and what is unjust. It is the peculiarity of man … that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust… ; and it is association in these things which makes a family a polis [italics added].12

Human speech is comparable to public space in a significant way. Both originate from practical need: the need for survival, or economic community––and yet both have an essential tendency to reveal supra-economic, spiritual needs. Human speech quickly discovers itself to be incapable of fixing onto particular goods without simultaneously reaching for the Good. One reason for this, or one proof, is that theoretical discourse clearly serves many of the same functions among men that instinct serves among beasts. Men do not instinctively eat, drink and procreate in moderation, but have to establish in theoretical terms what is the right and well-ordered way to do anything. Even the most practical economic tasks require ethical reflection. Of course, neither speech nor public space can be said to create ethical reflection, but they do catalyze it. Just as the oikos required public space to expand the humanity of the family, so the humanity of the komé is expanded by more formal institutions of discourse, such as fora, theaters and universities. This is why Aristotle treats the polis as a discrete community, a community ordered towards living well and not merely living.

Translating “polis” presents unique difficulties. Historically, what Aristotle had in mind was the Greek city-state, a place like Athens, Sparta, Thessaly and Miletus. This was not entirely a reflective description of the way that Greeks, or their Minoan-Mycenean and Cretan ancestors, happened to live. As Wycherley and Frederick R. Hiorns both observe, Greek colonization of Italy and the coast of Asia Minor allowed for the development of “more deliberately planned and more rapidly developed”13 cities that reflected “the cultural, religious and political evolution of the Greeks.”14 Notably, the 5th century architect Hippodamus redesigned the sacked Ionian city of Miletus according to what Hiorns calls “a preconceived plan that left nothing to chance in the fundamentals of disposition.”15 This plan shows a “chessboard” system of “straight streets crossing at right angles,”16 as well as the quintessentially Greek agora, which Wycherley considers to be the single “[m]ost important” element of Hellenic town planning.17 According to Hiorns, “Aristotle … says that, under the influence of Hippodamus, the main crossing [the main intersection of a city] became a natural determining point for the agora area.”18 The agora of Miletus, in particular, “suggests a plan disposition, dignity, and coherence of arrangement without parallel in that or preceding ages.”19 Hippodamus designed the rebuilt Piraeus (the port of Athens) and also the rebuilt Sicilian city of Selinus, notable for a courtyard-centered style of housing.20 Plans such as these gave intellectual intentionality to ancient public spaces like the acropolis and, crucially, embodied “the Platonic-Aristotelian principle of the subordination of personal interest to the public good.”21 Here the “public good,” of course, does not denote the collective economic good, any more than the individual economic good, but instead the good of the soul or, as Hiorns puts it very well, the good of “the citizen as representing mankind.”22 The Greek cities of Aristotle’s time were becoming as much a reflection of a worldview as the worldview was a reflection of Greek cities.

We can define Aristotle’s polis and the historic “city-state” along similar lines, as a town (komé) that has modeled its unity and excellence after the unity and excellence of the human soul. Nevertheless, the translation “city-state” for polis presents at least three challenges. First, the compound translation fails to suggest the same conceptual unity as “household” and “town.” Is the polis a city or a state? Which is more important: unity or autonomy? Second, to the modern ear the word “city” tends to evoke differences of scale, wealth and industrialization, rather than humanization. If anything, industrialization has lent cities the connotation of de-humanization, compared with smaller places like towns and homes. Third, the word “state” evokes a different notion of politics altogether and one that has more affinities to ancient Roman than Greek political theory. Benjamin Jowett and certain others have simply translated “polis” as “state,” which I think is the worst mistake of all. It is crucial to my argument that we understand the polis as a community rather than a regime––that is, a body of customs (or “practices”), as opposed to a body of written laws (or a “constitution”). The latter may follow from the former, but without the former it is mere administration, not community.

I spoke earlier of the Platonic axiom that psychic harmony must be modeled, or cultivated, by an external practice. I borrow the word “practice” from MacIntyre’s After Virtue, where it has the sense that I intend here. MacIntyre’s own definition is confusing, but by “practice” I understand him to mean a repeated activity that can reveal its purpose, or purposes, only by execution. When a violin student “practices,” he prepares for an activity by doing precisely what he is preparing to do, namely, play the violin. In the course of his practice, he discovers qualities of the violin, from subtleties of tone, and range of expression, to his own range of muscular control, that motivate his practice. Compared with a man picking up a screwdriver to drive a screw into a door hinge, a violin student, especially a beginner, has a very indefinite notion of what he is trying to achieve until he has actually begun achieving it. The farther he gets, the more he discovers new standards of achievement. The reason for this paradox is that desire itself, and the capacity for willing, is bound up with the general excellence of the soul. We can only imperfectly will what we only imperfectly know. If this is true of limited skills, like violin playing, it can only be truer of the desire for absolute excellence of the soul! It is only by practicing order that we become orderly. Communal life is a practice, or rather a complex set of practices. When I go to a store to buy a loaf of bread, I exchange words with a checkout clerk; I interact with other shoppers; I go with a friend or a family member. In the course of this errand I learn more about being human. I get better at being human. I refine my virtues and acquire information. I test theories about what it is I truly desire in life, and what makes me happy––and, most importantly of all, I converse with people in highly specific situations. All this is inevitable to some degree, but more or less, depending on the level of integration available within my community. The less integrated the community, the more each of my activities, economic or intellectual, will come to resemble the man with the screwdriver instead of the violinist. Why should that matter?

If we take Greek political philosophy seriously, it is clear that the institution of the polis has to transform the life of the oikos and the komé (just as the town transformed the family). Only in the polis is man completely visible, in the complexity and requirements of his soul. The visceral and economic ties of family and town are insufficient to satisfy human desire for the Good and for knowledge of the Good. On the other hand, our pursuit of the Good is naturally structured in terms of those preceding ties. Just as the intellectual part of an individual soul is never released from harmony with the appetites and passions, the polis in its intellectual character cannot be separated from the functions of family and town, so long as the purpose of political life is to model, or cultivate, the just soul. In other words, having come to perfection in the polis, family and town can never return to being isolated entities, not without claiming disproportionate autonomy for themselves. A family that appropriates to itself the ethical functions of public life will devolve into a Godfather-esque insularity that magnifies the faults of the pater familias (indeed, The Godfather is a spectacular fable about the decay of a town-less family). A marketplace that actively resists becoming a place of ethical inquiry and responsibility will, in any situation, prefer whatever means offers the quickest physical satisfaction. The psychic disciplines of writing, research, memory and navigation will cede authority to Grammarly, Google and GPS. The psychic discipline of dining has long ceded control to fast food, and artistic creation will quickly cede authority to “fast art,” unless we build towns. A disembodied digital marketplace happily discards economic “confrontation” (literally, coming face to face with another) as superfluous to the delivery of physical goods. The effect is that all the valuable, spontaneous encounters of a healthy community are devalued as secondary to appetitive satisfaction. Modernity has witnessed a double rupture: “dis-agorazation” of the family (the removal of the family from public places) and dis-location of economies from natural geographic boundaries. The result is a homeless soul, a schizophrenic soul that has no place of its own. The soul without town or city is encouraged to compartmentalize itself, to divide its activity into hermetically sealed categories: economic pursuits that have no ethical bearing, sexual ties that have no room to mature, and ethical-intellectual activities without physical relevance.

The effect on the polis itself is equally destructive, because an intellectual life without geographic and economic boundaries––without meter and rhythm––can never become a practice. The abstraction of academic leisure from public life is even more destructive, perhaps, than the abstraction of economy from locale. The existence of an intellectual elite is never the same thing as an intelligent society. A society is only intelligent with an integrated culture, namely, a public life of physical practices that cultivate unity of the soul. The Greek agora was an epitome of this unifying practice.

No clear line was drawn between civic centre and market. The public buildings and shrines were in the agora; meat and fish and the rest were sold in the same agora; and agorazein means to go to market, to buy, though also occasionally to stroll about the agora. At Athens quarters were devoted to the sale (sometimes also the manufacture) of particular wares, and called after these (the fish, the vegetables––including the onions, the garlic and so on––the bronzes, the slaves, and many others). Booksellers, we may infer from Plato’s Apology … , had their stalls by the old orchestra. … The agora was the chief place to which men would drift in moments of leisure to find congenial company, in the stoas, under the plane trees, in the barbers’ shops or the wine-shops or by the smiths’ fires. … A religious element pervaded the agora; the public buildings were dedicated to deities and there were altars and shrines everywhere.23

Wycherley reminds us of an important connection, both historical and teleological, between the agora and the theater.

A certain relation can be detected between the theatre and the agora. … In the agora of Athens was a place called the orchestra, where in early times dances and dramatic performances were given, and probably temporary wooden seating was erected for the spectators. Bulle sees a simple village agora in the ‘theatres’ of certain Attic demes, such as Rhamnus, where, at the foot of a slope below the acropolis wall, there was a row of stone seats for the dignitaries, facing a large flat terrace.24

Both theater and agora are places where the unity of the soul is modeled, and cultivated, by an artistic designation of geographic space. Cultural life and dramatic plot are therefore analogically related, as the rhythmic set of human practices that occur and cohere within these spaces. Just as a human plot can only emerge under the spatial constraints of the stage, so a complete human life can only develop under the physical constraints of the town. No plot can exist without a stage, and no soul without a town.

In the historical maturation of the acropolis into the agora, we see, in a kind of fossilized form, the moment of transition from an economy into a culture, a komé into a polis. As economic, military and primitive religious activities become heavily self-aware, there is a moment of ethical reflection that expresses itself in cultural institutions (such at theater) and, ultimately, in the city itself as a cultural space. Theater is of key importance as a cultural institution, because, like some religious worship, it presents a microcosm of the whole. Crucially, the existence of this whole becomes necessary to preserve the attitude that bore it, just as––in my opening thought experiment––the existence of the home becomes necessary for the preservation of the family. The concepts held by the rational part of the soul remain functionally dependent on the phantasms, the sensory impressions, that bore them. The concept of the Good must be reinforced continually by beautiful art and architecture; the concept of the noble, by noble heroes; and the concept of psychic unity, by unity of place.

Perhaps it is not yet clear why I put so much emphasis on the town (komé), when the complete community is in fact the polis. My reason is that the physical conditions of the polis are already explicitly present in the town. Viewed in terms of physical contour, the town is the polis, which is why Wycherley calls the well-developed Greek village “an embryo polis.”25 Public place––piazza, in Italian––is the distinguishing feature of the town, and public place is the seminal physical expression of the ideal of a psychically unified life. In order for the political transformation to occur, there must already be a “stage,” a common area where the sexual, economic and intellectual ties of human life are able to converge and confront each other. This stage is the town; hence, every town is a potential polis. In a world without towns, there can be no political life, no “politics,” in the Greek sense, but only “politics” in the administrative, Roman sense.

Carl J. Friedrich distinguishes these two senses of politics very clearly.

[I]t is no exaggeration to claim Aristotle’s Politics as a treatise on community, or rather on the political community which was the polis.26 … [T]he shift from Greece to Rome is clearly indicated by Cicero’s making law the crucial criterion of community, at least on the level of the res publica. … In De republica we read: “A people is not any and all gatherings of men brought together in any way, but a gathering of many who are associated by agreement on law and by community of interests…” … This definition of the people as a legal community follows Scipio’s assertion that the res publica, the commonwealth, is res populi, the “affair” or may be even the “property” of the people.27

As Friedrich points out, some of the problems that Aristotle thinks of as “political,” like the appropriate size of a city, are not recognizably political to the modern mind, which tends to associate politics with “problems of the best constitution, the forms of government, revolution, and so forth.”28 In other words, our modern, “Roman” understanding of politics revolves around legal administration, or nomos in the sense of “written law,” while the Greek understanding focused on nomos in the sense of “custom.” Taken in the Roman sense––which has similarities to the philosophy of John Locke––political life is something possessed by the individual, a framework of legal safeguards for the preservation of life and the pursuit of personal wealth and autonomy. The individual exists to some extent in a contractual relation to political life, as one who expects the political system to function as a technology of his private will. Taken in the Greek sense, however, political life serves first and foremost to educate private will, such that the individual does not possess, so much as come to fruition within, political life. In this context, the primary function of nomos, as custom, is to bring the individual into a network of personal relations––sexual, economic, intellectual and artistic––that will perfect his soul. Consequently, the Greek notion of politics is much more closely allied with the concept of “culture,” or ethical formation; the Roman, with “administration,” or practical execution.

The Greek and Roman senses of politics can coexist harmoniously, and to a large extent they did under the Roman Empire. Larger political areas, like nations and empires, are simply too large to serve as places of psychic integration. A nation has no local unity, on a human scale, as an observably contained place to act. A nation is always around me, never in front of me. Just as a theater the size of a town could never express the coherence of a single plot, so a political community the size of a nation cannot serve as a place of ordinary ethical practices, that is, a place where I can clearly observe the unity of all my actions. The proper function of a nation is to provide a degree of administrative protection to the more crucial political activities of towns. In the modern age, however, the more crucial sense of politics has been replaced almost entirely by the administrative. Not only national politics, but all politics, is reduced to the sense of constitutional protection (even when the behavior of constitutions comes to be much more coercive, and proscriptive, than protective). When national and multinational governments behave tyrannically, conservatives protest by insisting on “subsidiarity,” which, in America, simply means autonomy of the individual, or political individualism. Most fail to see that there is a much more powerful antidote, namely, the political life of the town. Unlike individualism, the political life of the town does not need to presuppose what I call the Complete Agent: a citizen who, by possessing a perfectly formed soul, can afford to stand in a critical, contractual relation to all political organizations. Political individualism ignores the most fundamental principle of Classical political theory, that man achieves perfection only in community.

The integrity of the public sphere has been fragmented by industrial and digital culture. Industrialism has divided the traditional techne, or craftsmanship, in two parts: machine-based industries that spread production across a global area (a process described in Leonard Read’s distressing “I, Pencil”), and a luxury market of well-made objects that limit the capacity for local commerce to a wealthy elite. Digitalization has replaced personal economic encounters, further marginalizing the physical market place. These technologies work hand in hand with a political philosophy that sees no higher spiritual function in economics. Today, even the fine arts are subject to mechanization by “artificial intelligence,” which recognizes nothing in the artistic process but the physical object produced. No physical process, artistic or economic, is conceived as an activity of the soul. The result is that the only psychic activity left to us is consumption––but consumption that places us, from start to finish, in the company of machines. We are each in the surreal position of visitors to an agora populated exclusively by machines with whom we can have no intellectual commerce.

Another way to understand the modern situation is to say that the traditional customs of political life have been replaced by “tasks.” For the purposes of argument, we can define a task as an activity that has only one purpose, say, to procure a loaf of bread, or wish someone a happy birthday, or get to your friend’s house. How we perform a task doesn’t matter. The loaf of bread can be dropped off at my door, the letter can be written by a machine, and the GPS can guide me to my friend’s house. A custom, on the other hand, can be defined as an activity that has both an explicit and an implicit purpose. While the explicit purpose is easily achieved (procuring a loaf of bread, and so on), the implicit purpose––say, to express modesty––is more abiding and imposes a certain method of execution. When I take a walk in public, I put on decent clothes. When I have dinner, I don’t have it in bed, and I use a fork and knife. The implicit purposes of customs are dictated by the political culture. If the implicit purpose is to unify the soul through integrated activities, then very few activities will be mere tasks; that is, most activities will require a specific method of execution. In the modern age, almost all activities are tasks. In the absence of any underlying spatial unity, fewer activities are viewed in relation to a complete cultural paradigm. Analogously, in the absence of a stage, it would be very difficult to grasp what kinds of behavior are “in” or “out of character” for a given dramatic role. Once again, culture and custom depend upon a cohesive physical space, a place.

Returning to the original question of the essay, it is clear that any activity requires a setting. If the activity is an isolated gesture like drinking a glass of water, nothing more is needed than a moment of time and a place to drink. If the activity is belonging to a family, something more is needed: a house. If the activity is that of an excellent life, a setting is required that can discipline us to perceive all of our actions together as constituting a common plot. This plot is properly understood as political life––a life of intelligent community––and the stage it requires is the town. A world without stages cannot have plots, and a world without plots cannot have characters. In the words of Alasdair MacIntyre, “A compartmentalized society imposes a fragmented ethics.”29

I raise these questions to address a problem that is chronic in American Catholic circles, and probably elsewhere, among young adults. Quite simply, young American Catholics don’t have many friends, or, if they do, these are not the sort of friends likely to beat the attractions of higher salaries, lower crime, yard space, or an extra bathroom. Young Catholics are raised to expect displacement, in which case it is psychologically wise to regard friendship as a luxury. After all, having serious friends and habitually relocating becomes a bit like regular remarriage. Inevitably, either the institution is trivialized or we avoid the institution completely. I have noticed both sides: Catholics who foster a profound cynicism about community, and Catholics who regard community rather like a nice restaurant, pleasant but hardly necessary.

Do we really “need” friends, and do we need many of them? Several objections present themselves. First, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out, friends are not necessary for Heavenly happiness. Second, if friendship is an effect of love, and if love is free, then friendship is free, and we cannot “need” friends any more than we can demand love. Third, a man who thinks that he needs a friend is heavily at risk of finding an ephemeral one, just as a desperate bachelor is at risk of a bad romance. Finally, even if we do need friends, it doesn’t follow that we need many, and so the questions really have to be treated separately, whether we need friends and whether we need a lot of them. I will answer these objections in order. In the process, I hope to provide a theory of friendship that clearly necessitates many friends, or at least more friends than your average young American Catholic is raised to expect. Americans, if they are often eager to form families, nevertheless have no expectation of “political life” in the Classical sense, namely, a life and identity in public spaces. Thus, the problem is in one sense an American, not a Catholic, problem. On the other hand, conservative Catholics tend to have strong families, as well as parishes, both of which present themselves––on the surface––as alternatives to Classical political life. Thus, the problem is in another sense precisely a conservative Catholic problem. When liberals reject home and parish, conservative Catholics respond by rejecting everything but home and parish. The result is that the American murder of political community is reinforced, accidentally, by the Catholic devotion to domestic life.

According to St. Thomas, “if we speak of perfect Happiness which will be in our heavenly Fatherland, the fellowship of friends is not essential to Happiness; since man has the entire fulness of his perfection in God” (ST I-II 4.8, respondeo). Nevertheless, he says, friendship is necessary on Earth. “If we speak of the happiness in this life, the happy man needs friends, as the Philosopher says” (ibid.). Citing Aristotle, Aquinas does not intend this strictly in the economic sense, since he is concerned, specifically, with what is necessary for happiness. “[T]he happy man needs friends … for the purpose of a good operation, viz. that he may do good to them; that he may delight in seeing them do good; and again that he may be helped by them in his good work” (ibid.).

What exactly does Aquinas mean by a “friend?” We have some clues. “[N]ot every love has the character of friendship,” he writes, “but that love which is together with benevolence, when, to wit, we love someone so as to wish good to him” (II-II 23.1, respondeo). In other words, mere compacts of utility or advantage are not friendships, however great the advantage (such as romantic pleasure, sexual or sentimental). “Yet neither does well-wishing [benevolentia] suffice for friendship, for a certain mutual love is requisite, since friendship is between friend and friend: and this well-wishing is founded on some kind of communication” (ibid.). Here I take Aquinas to mean that well-wishing, or benevolence, may or may not come with communication, but that communication is necessary for a certain kind of benevolence, namely, the kind that becomes friendship. The point is that benevolence and communication are both necessary for friendship. A friend is one who loves another for the other’s sake, and who finds himself in a regular position to express this, as well as to ascertain that the disposition is mutual.

Two things are worth noting here: one, a parallel between the sacraments, which are the regular communication of God’s benevolence toward us, and the customs by which we express benevolence to each other. If God’s infinite benevolence requires mediation by regular institutional practices, then how much more should ours, which is finite! The sacraments, far from being the great social anomaly, are the great social paradigm, at once a primordial and a supernatural standard of communal life. It is an axiom of Catholic social teaching that what is required in our supernatural life becomes paradigmatic in our life on Earth; hence the inevitability, in Catholic cultures, of the focalization of all public spaces––indeed, of whole cities––around the physical church. The second thing worth noting at this juncture is the non-reversibility of benevolence. If it is possible to have non-benevolent relationships, in the course of ordinary life, that is only because friendship requires knowledge of the other person. Once we have come to know somebody well enough to be friends––that is, enough to will his good in a specific and deliberate way––then we cannot just as easily remove our benevolence, though we can remove our friendship. Benevolence is “non-reversible” in the sense that we are morally bound to retain it once it is born. Friendship, however, can be withdrawn if circumstances interfere with the possibility of regular and structured communication. What I mean by “regular and structured communication” will have to be explained.

Is friendship, so understood, really a prerequisite for performing good works and rejoicing in the good works of others? I can think of at least four ways in which we can do good to strangers: first, by selling a thing or a service that is really beneficial to the buyer; second, by practicing “civic virtues” of patience, gentleness, honesty and the like; third, by helping someone who is distinguished by circumstance, say, a lost tourist or a beggar; fourth, by helping a category of person who is distinguished by circumstance, such as the orphan, the invalid or the atheist. These are all clear examples, surely, of “good operations” performed without the condition of friendship! Doesn’t the parable of the Good Samaritan tell us that good works are especially commendable when they are extended to strangers?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it commits what I call the fallacy of the “complete agent.” It posits a Doer of Good whose own capacity and instinct for goodness lie securely apart from the good things that he does. In other words, it fails to account for a crucial sense of “good operations,” namely, the cultivation of our own souls to embrace a correct image of the Good. We can do good to others only in proportion to our own understanding of the Good. This need not be an explicitly rational understanding, but it should be modeled by our interactions with others who have grasped or cultivated the Good in their souls. Since every generation is engaged in this process, the source of ethical education should lie in specific authorities and, most of all, in custom. The image of the Good is produced and sustained in our souls by relations that are informed by good customs. Good operations are modeled by good cultures, and all cultures, good or bad, put us in conventional, or formal, relations to those around us. A good culture does this, not for the purpose of preventing friendships, but for the purpose of clarifying our obligations to each other, most especially the obligation to save souls.

From this perspective, we can see that a society of people who can do good to strangers must first be a society of people who relate to each other through definite structures that are designed for the good of the soul. Take the first category I suggested above. How can I sell something beneficial to a buyer without knowing what is beneficial to him and without choosing patterns of life that make such a practice viable? Fast food, mindless entertainment, birth control and addictive technology, obscene clothes and cheaply made tools are all products that a young Catholic man or woman easily finds himself in the position of selling in our society. If he works in a large company, the possibility of practicing civic virtue is also limited by a field of technology explicitly designed to eliminate the influence of personal temperament. Whether the Catholic in question is personally guilty of anything is beside the point. An equally large number of Catholics have no connection at all with the things they allegedly make. Today it is possible to be employed in making something you never see for someone you never meet without ever leaving your house. A toddler in one part of the world can become hooked on a tablet that was programmed, in another part of the world, by a model of luddite parenting. There is no question of benefitting strangers if we have not taken pains to establish enduring patterns of benefit locally. Such patterns are never just a function of individual benevolence. They require intelligent economic customs that show us our neighbor and what is good for him and allow us to benefit him in sustainable ways. Without such customs, we find ourselves in a rather bizarre situation. On the one hand, the most ordinary modes of human communication, such as buying and selling, feeding, clothing and sheltering, entertaining and even educating, become external to the geographic communities in which they are most needed. In effect, the places where benevolence will most likely occur––namely, neighborhoods, towns and other “locales”––are deprived of the most natural channels of communication. The Thomistic collaboration between benevolence and communication is precluded by an economy that does not recognize the psychic importance of commerce. On the other hand, the economy places buyer and seller in a relation that can never express benevolence, either because the product or service is bad or because the transaction is too artificial to involve any mutual knowledge. Once again, friendship is impossible because the ethical and the economic, that is, benevolence and communication, have been structurally divorced. It is no coincidence that products and services are bad in an economy where the good of the soul is a priori dismissed as a non-commercial concern. As Heyne writes, in defense of capitalism:

Most of those who complain about the “immorality” of the marketplace have misread the situation. Market interactions are not less moral or more selfish than nonmarket interactions. But they are generally more impersonal. And that cannot really be changed without giving up the benefits derived from specialization: the greater range of more attractive choices that constitute an increase in wealth. If we decide to be dependent only on those whom we know personally, we will impoverish ourselves. If we want to retain and even expand the opportunities that make us wealthy, we must consent to be dependent on multitudes of people whom we have never even seen.2

The conclusion is clear. “Wealth,” however nebulously conceived, is the purpose of economic exchange, and “wealth” eventually demands the disintegration of local channels of commerce. The paradoxical conclusion is that a wealthy individual demands an impoverished community. Hence Heyne’s straightforwardly absurd assertion that “the loss of community” is a worthwhile price for “the advantages of a market-coordinated economy.”3

This brings us to the second objection, that a friendship must be “free.” This objection is bound up closely with a suburban model of friendship that is best described as “recreational friendship,” the friendship of barbecues and weekend parties. There is nothing inherently wrong with these activities, which are, on the contrary, essentially good; but recreational friendship artificially abstracts friendship from “political community” in the fullest, Aristotelian sense. Aristotle argues in the Politics for an organic progression from oikos (”household,” or “family”) and komé (”town”) to polis. The biological and economic ties imposed by human nature naturally flow into the ethical and intellectual ties of the political community. A friendship “freed” from these ties would be like a marriage “freed” from procreation or a town “freed” from the exchange of goods and services. Such “freedom” implies a Cartesian or Kantian dualism, or a modern Schelerian personalism, that severs the domain of ethics from the goods, functions and ends of bodily existence.

The third objection can be met in a similar manner, though with important caveats. A man who is preoccupied with having many friends likely cares only, or primarily, for the pleasant, recreational effects of friendship. An excessive desire to be liked is not easily satisfied by the ordinary political and economic channels of friendship. However, the anxious desire for friendship is also symptomatic of a culture that fails to provide these ordinary channels. Young Catholics justifiably feel starved for friendship, because their professional, commercial, artistic and academic transactions are rarely integrated within their geographic communities, let alone their religious communities. Plenty of exceptions exist, but they are exceptions. Young Catholics are compelled to pursue friendships with an unusual intensity of intention, and the resulting friendships are likely to be recreational friendships, which––among other problems––are very difficult to sustain. Far from being a predictable resource of communal life, friendship becomes a luxury that requires careful planning and financial investment.

The foregoing discussion shows very clearly, I think, why St. Thomas ought to be read historically. The communication that he identifies, with perfect accuracy, as a necessity of friendship was an intuitive feature of pre-industrial and pre-digital society; which is not to say that every economic transaction in the Middle Ages was a gesture of friendship. Benevolence remains just as crucial, and benevolence requires grace and personal virtue, so it can only exist in potentia where there is an integrated community. Nevertheless, benevolence cannot exist even in potentia where there is no knowledge of economic and political neighbors. It is not enough to love the idea of one’s neighbors, but one must love them specifically, in their complete character as hylomorphic creatures. This requires hylomorphic communication, a communication informed by the complete set of human needs. A dinner party or a parish picnic do not represent the complete set of human needs. Reciprocally, an economy of strangers cannot foster good works if we are accustomed to perceiving commerce itself as an amoral phenomenon.

Benevolence and communication are embodied socially, as I have implied, by the dual experiences of local patriotism (which is a far cry from nationalism) and economics, phenomena which are naturally united. In other words, the structure of friendship mirrors the structure of natural society. When this structure is artificially broken, by an abstract conception of wealth, the possibility of friendship is diminished. Friendships are meant to arise out of social habits, just as the culture of the polis grows from the necessities of oikos and komé. To answer the very first question, friendship is something we ought to want, because it is an intellectual, and especially an ethical, good, not an object of pure biological instinct. However, friendship is perfect only where it is grounded in need, that is, where we are willing to form stable economic relations with the people we call our friends. This does not mean forming an explicit commercial partnership with each one of our friends, but it does mean that something is profoundly wrong with a society in which our friendships are totally accidental to our professional and economic lives. Such a society is, in reality, not one but two: a society of friends tenuously or abstractly bound, and a society of transactions without benevolence. We should want to need our friends, just as a man wants to express a free love by a marital obligation. Put differently, our friendships ought to be voluntary needs, which our societies should be designed to facilitate. Young American Catholics are generally loathe to extend this logic from the domestic sphere to the political sphere. The sacramental life of the parish, which is properly a model for political life at large, becomes merely an odd and exceptional excursion from the domestic enclave.

By now it should be clear why we do, in a sense, need many friends. If the purpose of political life is to uplift all those operations which remain necessary for human survival, then our friendships, too, should ennoble ordinary economic relations. We should seek friendships precisely where we seek other goods and services. In other words, we should live economically as if each of our economic relations could become a friendship. This is very difficult to do in a world where the economy of friendship, a luxury economy, is divorced from the rest of the economy; and, of course, it is difficult when a majority of public institutions, economic and political, are hostile to Christianity. I believe there is a solution.

Though we are not in a position to restructure the economy as a whole, we are in a position to restructure our friendships. What I have in mind is the logic of homesteading applied to political community. Recognizing the necessity of worship, education, entertainment and many other cultural goods, we can become self-sufficient in these, not individually (which is never possible) but locally, by developing economies out of friendships. We can sacrifice television and mass music for locally organized theater and live music. We can begin building our own collections of paintings and artifacts or, better, support painters and sculptors within our community. We can create opportunities for scholars and other specialists in our community to teach our own children rather than other people’s children. We can open our homes to these initiatives and begin to live more in public, even if that public is relatively small. If we make these many small but important economic decisions in existing urban neighborhoods, and other established spaces, then we will find ourselves well served by parks, cafes, walkable streets, churches and other places of assembly that were, after all, designed precisely for the good of local economies. If we fail to cultivate our own local economies, then even these pleasant urban resources will gradually give way to unsightly apartment blocks, extended highways, and commercial centers of mass culture, reinforced by increasingly global technologies like artificial intelligence and the biometric system. The difficulty of building local economies can be significant, but I believe the greatest obstacle is psychological, as it has been for a long time. Faced with the possibility of stronger communities, young Catholics will often prefer individual liberty, or its simulacra, to authentic improvements in quality of life.

I referred earlier to “regular and structured communication,” which is more or less what I mean by “custom.” Why exactly is custom important, and what does it add to this discussion? A passage from Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson sheds some light.

In the railroad industry, the unions insist that firemen be employed on types of locomotives that do not need them. In the theaters unions insist on the use of scene shifters even in plays in which no scenery is used. The musicians’ union required so-called stand-in musicians or even whole orchestras to be employed in many cases where only phonograph records were needed.4

Setting aside our natural dispositions for or against unions, we should think about Hazlitt’s equivocation of categories. Firefighting, theater and music are assimilated as areas in which we ought to wish for the quickest and easiest means to an end. There is no difference, Hazlitt implies, between a fire that is put out by one man and by ten men, so long as the fire is really put out. Nor is there a difference between music delivered by a phonograph and by an orchestra, so long as the music is delivered. Many of us, artists especially, would recognize the fallacy here. We want our music played live for the same reason that we don’t want our poetry written by well-trained robots. It’s more than a question of quality products. We want our work, just as much as our pleasure, to be intelligent, to produce an effect on our souls. The musician derives just as much meaning from playing music as an audience derives from hearing it. Probably, he derives more. A culture that aspires to remove the intelligence from work, and the work from intelligence, will produce friendships that are only recreational. Without the effort established between poet and reader, painter and viewer, teacher and student, we relate to each other merely as consumers. We lose the communicative part of intelligence, the effort of process, which is the organic hinge between komé and polis, or, in other words, between mere economics and political economy. Instead of making our work intelligent, or expressing our intelligence in work, we simply contemplate products, which are (in and of themselves) unintelligent objects. I can appreciate elements of a computer-generated painting, but I will not work hard to contemplate it, because I have not been invited into someone else’s work. The purpose of social custom, from carefully crafted letters to exchanges with a shopkeeper, is the elevation of physical work to an opportunity for intelligent communication. Without such regular opportunities, we will find our leisure sapped of energy. We lose the discipline of working at our friendships, because we have learned to place work and intelligence in separate categories.

For example, I make the case that Influencers, the kind of professional opinion-formers who dominate podcasts and social media, fill a vacuum left by the decline of small talk. Regular chats with local tradesmen, like barbers and shopkeepers, served the communicative purpose (in the context of business) of sharing news and forming opinions. In the absence of these semi-formal channels, gossip and opinion formation have become discrete markets. We, in turn, fall to the status of passive consumers of opinion. Not all professions are equal, and yet, turning Hazlitt’s position upside down, we can recognize that the processual goodness of live music perhaps does extend to lower crafts. There is something to be said for preferring a personal cashier to a machine, not because a person is faster (though he usually is), but because he turns my errand into a social experience. If time is money, it is money I should be spending on meaningful exchanges. Our time and effort are too precious to become mindless. That is the point of custom.

I have argued for the reintegration of friendship into economic relations, and vice versa. The benefits are numerous. Not only will friendship cease to be a luxury, but the value of custom––which is to say, the value of intelligent work––will become more obvious in the face of technologies intended to create a society of pure leisure. Such leisure, if it is attainable, will be as mindless as the work that made it possible. We need many friends, because we need many opportunities to restore intelligence to our work, well beyond the domestic sphere. If we want friendships, let’s create the kind that we need.

From a Lecture Delivered at the Roman Forum Summer Symposium in July 2025

In the original text of this talk, delivered for The Roman Forum Summer Symposium, I opened with an argument that the setting of Hamlet is responsible for the character Hamlet. Although set inside a political community, during a time of political turmoil (conflict with Norway), the play begins in a wilderness outside the castle Elsinore and occurs entirely within and around the castle. Hamlet’s definitive struggle and his sphere of preoccupation are framed by Shakespeare’s use of space. Space is expressed positively as a qualitative place, and negatively as the exclusion of other places (the political community beyond the palace). Hamlet is Hamlet, not only because of what absorbs him (him mother’s sin), but also because of what does not absorb him (his responsibility to the citizens of Denmark). Theater is striking for its capacity to communicate ideas, or forms, precisely by means of restricted space. I call this phenomenon containment.

My lecture is about the function of what I call cultural containment applied––not to theater––but to politics. If the stage is spatial containment for the purpose of dramatic expression––such that a play is inconceivable without a place––the town (as the primordial political place) is spatial containment of political life, such that political life is essentially “placial.” The interrelation of sacred and profane spaces, houses, streets, churches and businesses, processions and executions, collectively create a kind of stage. It follows that to communicate the correct meaning of political life requires an intelligent, artistic arrangement of space, an arrangement that is necessarily exclusive. This is the function of culture. I define containment as the act of material delimitation necessary for any artistic representation. Cultural containment is the complete designation of an ethical and intellectual space for the polis. I will argue, finally, that liberalism has left its mark in politics by disintegrating places.

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Belonging––relating as part to whole––is not purely abstract. Like all things human, it seeks physical expression. Without physical expression it forgets itself and diminishes. The purpose and mode of culture is to fortify what is spiritual by incarnating it in custom and ordinary sensation. It follows, then, that 5 o’clock is not only a time to think differently but also a time to enter a different kind of environment, a particular sort of place. This place is what we call the “public sphere,” but the phrase is problematic if we understand it simply to mean what is beyond or external to the home. In a truer sense, the home is part of this place. Another word for it is “political community,” but here we bump up against connotations of “politics” that are very far from the Classical and Christian. A third and better word is polis, which has the advantage at least of being less known.

The place of the polis is very familiar in certain parts of the world and very unfamiliar in others (I will omit names, because the comparisons are touchy). It is the life of the street, the life of shops, the life of local movement, the life of casual economic encounters, the life most of us would be leading often if we were not locked up inside of our cars. It is the life of parks and town squares, of churches from the outside and cafes from the inside. It is the life of noticing and absorbing without consuming, of allowing things we do not own, or do not own exclusively, to become part of our sensory field and to shape us. Like work and like leisure, the polis cannot be eliminated but only alienated, estranged. We can pretend not to live in it, and Americans are very good at that. It is why we do not sit on our porches and walk on our streets, and why most of what ancient Greece and medieval Europe would have called “living” we Americans call “loitering.”

The estrangement of the polis in America is not an historical accident but a program essential to liberal political theory. If the purpose of the modern constitutional state is to mitigate religious influence in the public sphere, it follows that the purpose of the modern secular state is to do away with the public sphere altogether. Religion is the paradigmatic form (if we think anthropologically) and the final cause (if we think philosophically) of all belonging. We cannot reasonably live in pursuit of what is above and behind our Selves, of what is truly, in a metaphysical sense, “public,” if we have been taught to believe that what is most worthwhile belongs to the “private” sphere. In banishing religion to the private sphere, the sphere of Self and personal will, liberalism has attempted to divorce the pursuit of meaning (of what makes life worth while) from the pursuit of the universal, of what is most intrinsically good and therefore most intrinsically “public.” This summum bonum––this, and not the freedom for collective privacy––is what Christian civilization understood as the common good.

The exile of public life, or the fragmentation of the common good, is a principle to which “liberals” and “conservatives” equally assent. Names aside, there is no disagreement between liberals and conservatives about the core tenet of liberalism. Their hostility to each other huddles around the question of which, and whether, legislation is useful for securing this paradoxical privatization of the common good. Conservatives, in true liberal fashion, insist that anything that does not pertain to the state must pertain to the individual: art, education, transportation and, of course, religion. Take, for example, the popular appeal of principled homeschoolers to the language of the “inviolable parental right of education” in Divini illius Magistri (§33), or parents as “primary and principal educators” in Gravissimum educationis (§3). Such claims, interpreted against an American conservative backdrop, cannot sit comfortably with passages like the following from the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

The responsibility for attaining the common good, besides falling to individual persons, belongs also to the State, since the common good is the reason that the political community exists. The State, in fact, must guarantee the coherency, unity and organization of the civil society of which it is an expression. … The individual person, the family or intermediate groups are not able to achieve their full development by themselves for living a truly human life. Hence the necessity of political institutions, the purpose of which is to make available to persons the necessary material, cultural, moral and spiritual goods” (§168).

A conservative reading might reduce this passage to the claim that some degree of legislative order is required as a precondition of individual freedom. Such a reading, however, would jar considerably with the language suggesting that individuals achieve their purpose “within” the State, and not vice versa. On the other hand, the “state” is almost an inexcusable word to use in Anglo-American culture if we want to indicate a place of belonging, a place of intellectual fulfillment, a place of culture. To begin with, a “state” is not even a place. The state of Italy and the place of Italy are two very different things. A state is a constitution, a legislative system. It is not something we can be in, physically speaking. How could a “state” be a place of spiritual fulfillment?

It can’t, and conservatives are stuck, because they have nothing––not even words––beyond the social dichotomy of individual and state. In a physical sense, they have nowhere to “go” at 5 o’clock, because the layout of American space has come to reflect the liberal dichotomy. We have “homes” for individuals, and we have jobs that win bread for the homes (provided we are not overly transparent about what we do and think at home), but we have no public space, culturally speaking, because we have no public thing, no res publica. It is interesting to note that many translations of Aristotle’s Politics are wrong for this reason. Aristotle, whose theory is the foundation of all Western political thought, employed the word polis, which referred to cities like Athens and Sparta. A polis was an independent, self-governing city, a “city-state.” Translations like Benjamin Jowett’s give us simply “state,” and in so doing have made a placial concept placeless. This transition, which is not a translation, accommodates the liberal doctrine that the only true place, the only meaningful place, is the private place of the individual, the nuclear home. America is a Great Indoors both physically and intellectually, a country where the only true place to be is inside. Outside is only legislation, only the machine of state under the hood of private life.

Reasonable critics may protest that the Great Indoors is an imperfect necessity when the outdoors is unfriendly to Christianity; but that is again to collapse what is not individual into the state, as well as to assume that life indoors can be completely achieved. The state is not the sole proprietor of public space, any more than a conductor can be said to produce music. People and cultures create public spaces (and vice versa). Governments only govern them. The question is not whether American Catholics can create public spaces, but whether we want to, and the answer is a resounding “no.” American Catholics overwhelmingly believe that nothing is sure but the home––even as they travel great distances to partake in the indispensable public sacraments of the Church. Sacramental life, once the overflowing spring of Western civilization, has become the odd social exception to the conservative principal of extra domum nulla salus, “no salvation outside the home.”

The reality is that every Catholic could contribute to building a polis if he wished. It does not take much money or much land or much power. If anything, it takes the desire for less money, less land and less power. It takes the desire for shared life, which is to say, for shared spaces, spaces not of the Self but of the local. It is only by venturing outside the Self, outside of the nuclear home, that we can become completely human, oriented to God by the practice of common customs. How does this look?

To begin with, we should actually go outside. Go to the bookstore, go to the park, and do it in groups, groups that can make themselves felt, especially if you’re doing something attractive like singing and dancing. Second, keep these activities sustainable. Don’t raise the bar so high that you can’t do them again. Third, stop trying to turn your house into a complete community. No amount of space will make your kitchen a cafe, your living room a theater, your sound system a concert hall, your dining room a forum, or your library a university. Once we stop trying to live completely indoors then we realize how much we need public life. Finally, ask yourself whether your profession actually has any public worth. Are you producing something, anything, that is good for people, or just “breadwinning?” In other words, are you feeding your family and your polis, or feeding your family at the expense of your polis? You could put the question another way. Does your job have any connection to your geography, and, if so, is it a beneficial connection?

Having somewhere to go, not just at 5 o’clock, isn’t a question of relaxing. It’s a question of recognizing the orientation of human life towards something universal. Men are made to worship socially, to argue socially, to walk and to recreate socially, because only socially do we come to recognize the possibility of a summum bonum, a common good that is above and behind the idiosyncratic tasks of the individual. Public spaces are to this summum bonum what homes are to the intimacy of the Faith. The domestic spirit is necessary to cultivate the capacity for great love, but the public spirit––the political spirit––is necessary to cultivate knowledge of something worth that love, something great enough to consume, not me alone or my family, but all men. The domestication of culture, which is symptomatic of the Great Indoors, can never completely satisfy a political animal.

Past the glimmer of the doorway
	Shadows bind the quiet room
In an empty chill of Norway 
	And the stillness of a tomb;
While, in the darkness, darker yet, 
	Extended to the floor,
A frail, fat, furry silhouette’s
	Cast by the open door.

Down from the cold, gray window valance,
Shaped like a lawn chair lost its balance,
Two lines indistinctly blended,
One on its back and one suspended.

Why does she, my Life, my Laughter,
	Turn her bristle-whiskered head
Close to the caviidae's Hereafter
	And the celestial pellet bed?
Why does she cough, turn pale and vomit her
	Daintiest banana chips?
Why does she lie with this thermometer
	Clenched between her quiv’ring lips?

Up in a cast, her French-fry paw’s
Hung like a question wrapped in gauze.
Quick as a flame that feels the bellows
Once was her tail that’s lost its telos.

Fie, delights! Friends, food and song,
All that I cherished, get thee gone!
All my hopes and dreams I let go.
Everything else I leave to Petco.
What of Charibdis? What of Scylla?
Come what may when there’s no chinchilla. 

Space, in my experiment, might have been called “mere space.” After all, a place is a kind of space. My living room is a place, but as such it is also a space between walls. It’s a question of emphasis. No place is a mere space. Inversely, a space becomes a place when the interval that it represents has some kind of formal identity above and beyond its boundaries. Paradoxically, however, it is often the boundaries that give us the clue to a formal identity. We walk into a strange house, and the presence of internal divisions, walls, are the first basis on which we begin to distinguish rooms, to identify places by formal function. If we can’t identify such a function, we ask, “What is this room?” But the answer that it’s just a room would be puzzling. Places are essentially bounded, but––unlike mere spaces––they are bounded for a reason.

Boundary is an essential part of being something, and physical boundary is an essential part of being something on Earth. Every person we meet, every piece of art we create, every home we inhabit, every thought we articulate, is an act of specification, or, in other words, a form expressed by the limitation of matter. We don’t exclaim, “How beautiful that statue of David is! What a shame there’s not more of it!” Or, “What a wonderful comedian! If only he were a mystic too!” Or, “What a good point! It’s a shame you only used a few words.” Perfection is specification, and specification is bounded. God is the exception, not the rule; and to say that God is “unbounded” would be as misleading as the contrary. God has no limits, but He is also supremely simple. He is identity itself, because there is nothing about Him that is not perfectly proper to Him. Any given thing on Earth has both an identity and accidents, or properties that define it and properties that don’t. Unlike God, however, nothing on Earth can be identified without reference to limits. In this sense, place is the paradigm, not only for rooms, but also for all created things. To identify something is to see what it is from the perspective of where it begins and ends. On Earth, the alternative to boundary is not transcendence but ambiguity, vagueness. Even a spiritual experience, an experience of what is supernatural, occurs by the mediation of bounded images, from sacraments to apparitions.

The prospect of limits, especially of limits imposed by virtue of what we are (as living things, as animals, as men), is immensely disturbing, even unintelligible, without a means of explaining why men also have access to ideas, transcendent experiences or spiritual intuitions. Why should finite beings have an appetite for the infinite? Has nature given us a hunger without a food? If the answer to that question is affirmative, then two apparently divergent actions are possible: one, to behave like brutes, to reject our infinite hunger entirely, or, the other, to attempt to manufacture the food we seek. These are the reactions of Sodom and Babel, respectively: the appetitive war against reason, and the hubristic war against finitude.

We live in an age profoundly uncomfortable with limits and, for that reason, excessively aware of them. We see the town, not as an artistic and geographic perfection of human culture––a Florence, a Venice, an Athens––but as an oppressive restriction of experience. That is why we prize openness above truth, freedom above goodness, and diversity above beauty––not because we really know what to do with openness, freedom and diversity, but because they seem to evoke an ethos of liberation from limits. The supermarket chased out the specialty store, not only because the supermarket appeared more convenient, but because, compared to the specialty store, the supermarket represents choice, freedom from limits. The same symbolism explains why our cities are populated by indeterminate office buildings and data centers. The rejection of anthropological limits has lead to the rejection of place in the most literal sense. There is not a significant difference between the rejection of real biological boundaries around sexuality, for example, and the rejection of real geographical boundaries around community. This is why the cause of communal realism, or what I call the “kometic renaissance” (the resurgence of the physical town, or komé) ought to be at the forefront of Catholic initiatives. Only creatures who understand their metaphysical “implacement” (to borrow a word from Edward S. Casey) can understand their social implacement.

Like all cultural revolutions, the kometic renaissance demands, appropriately enough, the creation of a mental place that, in many cases, has ceased to exist. American Catholics, especially, don’t know how to want platial coherence, because many have never experienced it. The town, if it corresponds to an image at all––if it occupies any room in the American mind––is a room filled with Christmas baubles, juke boxes and obsolete ice cream sodas. It is a room of nice things abandoned by the inevitable march of time. These nice things are dispensable because they are little more than nice. They seem rather quaint in an age of suburbs, supermarkets, rapid transportation, habitual relocation, remote learning, incorporeal corporate economics and, now, artificial intelligence. The trouble is, this brave new world has little room left for the creature himself, with his sacraments, homes, families and sexual biology. It has no room, certainly, for culture and art in any meaningful sense. This brave new world can only go the way of Babel. It is time for Catholics to challenge their desires, their conceptions of what is socially plausible, and their ill-fated pursuit of a placeless future.

Dramatis personæ (in order of appearance):

King St. Louis
St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
Feste Proseccosworth
Violinist
Monsignor Sal Polizzi's Ghost
The Bilious Brutalist Architect
Glotta LaLure

ACT THE ONLY

KING ST. LOUIS (looking down from Heaven)
The clouds of Heaven hold a godly course,
Rising, directing, with a cosmic eye
To that eternal eye Who keeps in force
The sacred polity of Earth and sky.
We––once a king among those low domains,
But servantlike, and, by that servitude,
Here kinglike where the King of Kingdoms reigns––
Now look with sadness and solicitude
Upon our city––not as fathers who
By consanguinity invested flesh
But with the fondness of adoption, through
The life of grace, the birth-bed of the creche.
Once––once––the missionaries over sea
Sped––sped––to light the light of patronage
Of Genevieve and (lesser) of Louis
Along the endless Mississippi's edge.
But now we're saddened, for the sacred map
Traced by the clouds of Heav'n does not obtain
In these ungodly times. The city street
Is not for pilgrimage, the sun and rain
Are not for lilies, and the patient feet
Of humble commerce in a market square
Have wandered farther from the parish source.
Methods of avarice reign everywhere,
And cultivation is replaced by force!

ST. ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE (entering)
Good King, you do your city too much wrong!

KING ST. LOUIS
Would that were true, good Sister Philippine!

ST. ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE
And Philippine it is––not philistine, 
That I should make a mountain out of mud
Or fill the throne of holy hope and faith
With shallow optimism! Look again!
Your servants among the children of that land
Have congregated, stronger for the fall,
And in the church, with Canon Coggeshall,
Are rallied once again to face, to slay
The serpent of political decay!
The pews are filled, the streets resound anew
With the pedestrian symphony of old;
Café economies perk up, and SLU
(If not responsive) has at least been told.

KING ST. LOUIS
Good Sister, I am not oblivious.

ST. ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE
Take heart, then!

KING ST. LOUIS
			Still, I hesitate for this,
That Hannibal keeps presence at the gate.
The battle is not won. One thing amiss
Could still upturn this graceful turn of fate.

ST. ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE
You think now with a prince's prudence, free
Of hasty feasting for the victory,
But, in the grating gloom of your restraint,
Show not, I think, the exuberance of a saint.
Let me, a modest Beatrice, preside,
Till your too-prudent lethargy subside. 

They step aside. Enter Feste Proseccosworth and a violinist.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Let's have the music stands here for the Great Ball, and you will play while the pig is turning on the spit. 

VIOLINIST
I would prefer to play when he turns off the spit––Good Master Feste Proseccosworth. I am not accustomed to being spit upon as I play.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Have you chosen your repertoire?

VIOLINIST
Bolero.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Ravel's Bolero?

VIOLINIST
Are you aware of another one?

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
It's rather long and has only one melody. The piece doesn't develop. It doesn't go anywhere.

VIOLINIST
There is only one pig, and it doesn't go anywhere, but the audience eats it up anyway. That's why we have chosen Bolero for the accompaniment.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
You sound drunk.

VIOLINIST
Impossible. My nerves are as steady as steel. Look (he holds out his hand, which shakes violently).

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
You're shaking!

VIOLINIST
Yes, but I'm completely relaxed about it. See, it doesn't bother me at all. Nothing fazes me, not even flying wine!

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Flying wine? What about flying wine?

VIOLINIST
I hope the audience will have enough to drink. There is nothing more discouraging to a musician than a sober audience.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Don't worry. There is a generous stash of liquor in the wings.

VIOLINIST
With so much liquor in the wings, the wine will certainly fly.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Wit without context is an easy trick. Could you move these chairs with me?

VIOLINIST (helping him)
Are we not sitting down?

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
No, we'll have you standing while you play. 

VIOLINIST
Will the audience be standing too?

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Don't be silly. They're eating the pig. 

VIOLINIST
That is good. The audience should always pork up when the musicians are outstanding.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
We have some very important visitors tonight: Glotta LaLure, the soprano, and the architect Harmann Vitruvius, who designed the piazza.

VIOLINIST
Which piazza?

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
O, haven't you seen? The good canons of St. Francis de Sales––thanks to the generosity of certain visionaries––have replaced the old parking lot with an authentic Roman piazza complete with a Baroque fountain, a small gelato shop and hoards of stray cats. 

VIOLINIST
Cats, you say?

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
We have it on good authority that one of the authentic delights of Rome is to witness forty or fifty cats napping contemptuously on the ruins of an ancient forum. Harmann Vitruvius insists on absolute authenticity, and has even hired a team of actors to portray wandering gypsies––but the actors are instructed to return everything they have stolen from the audience by the end of the night.

VIOLINIST
And this Harmann Vitruvius designed the piazza?

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Yes. The piazza will be unveiled after dinner. It is a very large veil and will take some time to remove. Miss Glotta LaLure will give a concert of Neapolitan lullabies by the fountain, and then––when everyone is safely asleep––Mr. Vitruvius will lecture. And then we will all wake up again and dance the tarantella and sing! We will vent our pipes till late. 

VIOLINIST
You will hyperventilate. 

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
Let's find another music stand.			     

Exeunt Proseccosworth and the violinist.

THE BILIOUS BRUTALIST ARCHITECT (enters)
My traffic is sheets, which I throw on the eyes
Of my innocent victims. My pleasant disguise
Is the face of abundance, of progress unchecked! 
I'm the Bilious Brutalist Architect. 
I've been titled––it's true––with unfortunate names,
But I'm really a bundle of fun little games,
Such as flattening mountains and draining the sea
And replacing your chimney with cable TV.
Beside any old mansion I'm certain to stand
With a laugh on my lips and a fuse in my hand,
All ready to build you some roads and a Mart
And a marvelous chunk of postmodernist art.
With Pruitt and Igoe I opened a door
To build civilization by killing the poor.
On the gray Cliffs of Delmar a commune I chose
Made of circuit-board homes in mathematical rows.
Though I certainly never intended offense, 
Pruitt-Igoe blew up (in the literal sense);
However, the rubble I left in a pile
Still boldly remains in the modernist style.
With bulldozers, buddies and vision'ry spark,
I dug trenches through Benton and Lafayette Park,
Which I band-aided up with an overpass set
And a metro as timely as Russian Roulette.
In Gothic cathedrals where prospectors see
A disturbing amount of religious ennui,
You will find my authority hard to deflect.
I'm the Bilious Brutalist Architect!

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST (enters)
Ma che fai? Imbecile, scemo, rompiscatole! I'll toast you hotter than ravioli when I figure out what you've got up that foul-smelling sleeve, you effeminate string-bean of processed cheese!

THE BILIOUS BRUTALIST ARCHITECT
(aside) The ghost of Monsignor Sal Polizzi! My personal Scylla-Charybdis of Jacob Marley and Vito Corleone! (aloud) Don't worry––my newest project is an assisted living center for single-minded mothers and retiring children. The blueprint features Post-Neo-Gothic-Baroque bedrooms hung with paintings in the ill-mannerist style. 

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST
Cretino! I've got your number, and I know people. Last week I interceded for a Venetian suburb that was facing an invasion by a Papa John's! St. Zita and a bunch of bilocating farmers fed fresh caprese to the construction workers, and they quit on the spot. 

THE BILIOUS BRUTALIST ARCHITECT
Please, don't worry, Your Highness. I haven't the slightest intention of stuffing any dough––at least for the moment. No dough pockets––(aside) only pocketing dough. 

Monsignor Sal Polizzi's Ghost steps aside but not completely offstage. He remains watching, unbeknownst to the Bilious Brutalist Architect. 

My scheme is ingenious and duly replete
With a mile of maleficent mists of deceit.
For, while they're all banqueting, spitting the pig,
I'll arrive with municipal license to dig,
A license I wrested upon the occasion
Of proof of the upcoming feline invasion.
Like every good villain, I fail to be smitten
By the putative charm of a cat or a kitten;
But, nevertheless, it has suited my sights
To inform the Commission for Animal Rights;
And my friends (who have hands in the treasury vats)
Said, "Darned if they rally our cute little cats!
So take a few bulldozers, cranes and a truck
And go dig us a Walmart! Good job, and good luck!"
But they gave me a wink, which I thought was propitious,
Because what I intended was much more ambitious:
A block of apartments all stuffy and stark
To envelop De Sales and the whole of Fox Park.
The blueprint is so geometrically sterile
We've thrown in a shoe store with angled apparel
So you can turn corners as fast as a batter
To save yourself time for The People that Matter.
This magnificent monument will spell a rap
For some non-geometrical blots on the map. 
We'll explode a few balconies, stoops and a bar
And an overweight neighbor who sticks out too far;
And the rest we'll conserve at an edge of the square
For a modest Museum of What Used to be There. 

Exit The Bilious Brutalist Architect.

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST (coming Centerstage)
Alas, my business in Heaven affords me little time to hobnob with the Greats: St. Rocco, St. Thomas Aquinas… Frank Sinatra… Tony Bennett! You wouldn't believe––Aiutami!––the amount of administrative chaos in the sky! Half the saints are Italian and act like there's no hierarchy, and the other half are French and want more! Yesterday St. Denis submitted a sung petition to St. Joseph for a new hierarchy of angels just to cater the appetizers. He said serving appetizers was beneath a Virtue and above a Power. St. Rocco responded by talking to St. Jerome (once you've got St. Jerome involved, nobody hears the end of it), and now we've got a bunch of Pakistani martyrs in charge of the restaurant business. When I first arrived, the Germans jumped off their clouds. St. Hildegard and St. Gotthard said, "Help! We need somebody in charge who can talk to the Italians––somebody with the sense of a German and the sensibilities of a Sicilian;" so here I am and not a day's rest since I started. I haven't even met St. Louis. He's the only one who can really help. Ah, but he's got more important things to do. (beat) No, I can't let that mascalzone turn Fox Park into Atlantic City! Maybe I can summon St. Louis now. Who knows? 

Strange Patron of French Gothic and Provel,
St. Louis! Is your unsought city well?
Anonymous upon a frozen steed
In Forest Park you innocently dwell,
But tell me! Is your unsought city well?
No more, no less, than Chouteau and Laclede
And yet the everlasting sentinel,
Strange Patron of Stone Gothic and Provel!
Will you wait with us for the bus, and bleed
Blue cracking knuckles in the winter spell,
Strange Patron of Stained Gothic and Provel?
Come, tell me! Is your unsought city well?

KING ST. LOUIS (stepping forward)
My Son, my Faithful Son, why do you weep?

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST
Our city is endangered by a creep––
A schmuck––who'd sabotage my Urban Quest
With pagan styles your laity detest!
Help us to vanquish this unfeeling foe!

KING ST. LOUIS (stepping forward)
But how?

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST
		Now listen, for I think I know
The way best to outwit him in the act.

SAINT ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE (stepping forward)
Good King, have mercy and complete the pact,
Lest villainy mar your patronal feast.
To their good will be leaven and be yeast!

KING ST. LOUIS
Willingly I renounce a skeptic's doubt,
I swear. And let this sin be rooted out!

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST
To be honest, iambic pentameter is not my strong suit. I'm a simple man. I beg leniency and a dispensation to speak in prose.

KING ST. LOUIS
It must be granted, I suppose.

SAINT ROSE PHILIPPINE DUCHESNE
Let's compromise and, for a time,
Proceed in tetrametric rhyme.

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST (clearing his throat)
The schmuck––I overheard his plans––
Has powerful bureaucratic fans
Who will equip him with a rig
To break and batter, bash and dig.
When I was just a monsignor
We fought a bloody urban war.
Our aldermen, aflame with greed,
Were keen enough to sell a deed
Of property upon the Hill
To cooks of cinematic swill,
A drive-in theater that would
Have scarred our lovely neighborhood.
I seized my megaphone in fear
And rode around like Paul Revere, 
Which really was a weighty crime,
To scream around siesta time.
But I said, "Fellas, listen good!
Let's nap around the neighborhood!
If you can sleep without your sheets,
Let's do it on the city streets!"
The tractors came with ugly scoops,
The women froze upon their stoops,
We all lay down and had a snooze
Enforced by fervor, faith and booze.
The crooks yelled, "Treason! Make it stop!
Let's shake 'em up! No, call a cop!"
But violence is an empty jest
To Mediterraneans at rest. 
Thus foiled, the barbarian course
Turned home again with Magnum Force. 
So, if we muster such a crew,
That's just what I propose to do!

KING ST. LOUIS
I laud your fervor, Mighty Priest.
Heartier times those were, at least.
But times have changed. The subtle wiles
Of subtle sin need subtle styles
More elegant, refined and French
Their surreptitiousness to quench.
Lend me an ear, and hear the kind
Of subterfuge I have in mind!

Exeunt King St. Louis, St. Rose Philippine Duchesne and Monsignor Sal Polizzi's Ghost.

GLOTTA LALURE (enters to Centerstage, warming her pipes)
(singing) Warble and burn, my sound, 
	The bitter evening through!
My Bonny Boy has up and found
	A Lady of Ladue
Ladue, Ladue, La-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo!
	She darns his socks,
	And he plays the stocks,
And then they… Wouldn't you?
Ladue, Ladue, La-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo!
	I'd write a note
	And crack her throat,
The Lady of Ladue!

KING ST. LOUIS (entering)
Glotta LaLure, refrain! Be not averse
To what I have composed for your recital
But take this part, assiduously rehearse
And save our city by a service vital!

Exeunt King St. Louis and Glotta LaLure.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH (later that evening, addressing the feasters)
Good denizens of De Sales, welcome to our Louismas feast! In typical Salesian style, we are happy to announce a modest Pig-Roast-Concert-and-Sketch-Lecture-and-Tarantella to inaugurate the unveiling of Piazza Coggeshall. Prepare, when you have dined, to greet our glorious new Baroque fountain crowned with an immortal statue of its namesake. Now please enjoy a lengthy execution of Ravel's Bolero.

VIOLINIST (running in excitedly)
Stop! Stop! The festivities cannot proceed! Alas, I have witnessed events beyond the poet's ken! 

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
What is the matter? 

VIOLINIST
Our perpetual nemesis, the Bilious Brutalist Architect, has crashed the party with a team of deadly bulldozers to uproot our piazza. They are assembling even as I speak!

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
This is heartbreaking news indeed. We must pray speedily for the intercession of our patron, King Louis.

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH AND VIOLINIST (together)
Good King, St. Louis, on our feet
We supplicate (as only meet)
To spare us feasters who engage
To celebrate your patronage!

A tremendous shrieking is heard outdoors, and the Bilious Brutalist Architect enters in terror.

THE BILIOUS BRUTALIST ARCHITECT (screaming)
The cats, the cats! Run for your lives!

VIOLINIST (caught up in the agitation)
Run, quickly! The cats have rebelled!

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH
What is the matter?

THE BILIOUS BRUTALIST ARCHITECT
I shake to recount it! I tremble with fear
For the feline cacophony dreadful to hear!

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH AND VIOLINIST (together)
What can be unfolding? I scarcely dare think!
Can this possibly be the effect of the drink?

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST (appearing Centerstage)
Do not be afraid!

THE BILIOUS BRUTALIST ARCHITECT
Monsignor Polizzi, my worst nightmare!

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST
Your prayers have been answered, good people! St. Louis the King has inspired the soprano Glotta LaLure to instruct the cats of the piazza in Renaissance polyphony. With earth-shattering precision they made short work of the rectory windows, a few street lamps and the construction crew, who are now fleeing in abject terror! (to the Bilious Brutalist Architect) We are saved once again from your pollutive peregrinations. Let us raise our glasses to his immortal majesty, King Louis!

FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH AND VIOLINIST (together)
Hooray!

MONSIGNOR SAL POLIZZI'S GHOST, FESTE PROSECCOSWORTH AND VIOLINIST (together)
St. Louis, Scourge of Modern Zeal,
Protector of the Public Weal,
We raise our thanks that you deflect
The Bilious Brutalist Architect!

Our plans persist with holy fury
To build a Rome in old Missouri
And raise the bright Salesian jewel
Of urban cultural renewal!