Continuing our look at the proper Catholic response (if there is an objectively proper response; this may in fact not be so) to the modern world, I’d like to look at the problem with cliques. Last night, I finished my old professor Dr. Regis Martin’s rather brief What Is The Church in time to pick up the collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton compiled in the book, Brave New Family.

Chesterton doesn’t waste time, so it should be no surprise that I was hit nearly straight away with this:

It is not fashionable to say much nowadays of the advantages of the small community. We are told that we must go in for large empires and large ideas. There is one advantage, however, in the small state, the city, or the village, which only the wilfully blind can overlook. The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized societies groups come into existence founded upon what is called sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique. The men of the clan live together because they all wear the same tartan or are all descended from the same sacred cow; but in their souls, by the divine luck of things, there will always be more colours than in any tartan. But the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell. A big society exists in order to form cliques. A big society is a society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention of Christian knowledge.

The salient point here is twofold: that there is a huge distinction between a clique and a small community; and that cliques are dangerous because of their homogeneity in a way that small communities - somewhat surprisingly - are not.

I think that what Chesterton is talking about here sheds some light one what modern Catholics, particularly American Catholics, face. We do not live in a Catholic society, and so if we find ourselves in a random small community it is likely not only to be filled with people very different than we - many of whom we wouldn’t care to be next to in a bowling alley, let alone have as our next-door-neighbors - but people who do not, despite this natural variety of human life that is good for the Christian soul to encounter, have any common belief with us.

That is, I think, what creates our problem. Because Chesterton is right when he says, “Sociability, like all good things, is full of discomforts, dangers, and renunciations. The club tends to produce the most degraded of all combinations– the luxurious anchorite, the man who combines the self-indulgence of Lucullus with the insane loneliness of St. Simeon Stylites. ” And this is precisely the sort of thing that catalyzes our growth as men and offers the opportunity to cultivate virtue. But because in any sensible society, at least some component of random socialization would be bound to include individuals who share our beliefs, Catholics in a sensible society would be less likely to be overwhelmed by their neighbors who have nothing to offer.

In a sense, this lends even more credibility to Chesterton’s assertion (made about a different sort of society than ours) that:

We do not dislike them [our neighbors] because they have so little force and fire that they cannot be interested in themselves. We dislike them because they have so much force and fire that they can be interested in us as well. What we dread about our neighbours, in short, is not the narrowness of their horizon, but their superb tendency to broaden it. And all aversions to ordinary humanity have this general character. They are not aversions to its feebleness (as is pretended), but to its energy. The misanthropes pretend that they despise humanity for its weakness. As a matter of fact, they hate it for its strength.

So what we are left with in our big, American society is to decide: community or clique? Because the click is every bit as dangerous in the long run as the small community of very different people who do not share our beliefs. In the former, we are left to create an echo chamber, a sterile environment in which our social immune systems become unable to cope with outside influence, and so doom us (and our children) to remain forever in our enclaves and bunkers.  In the latter, we run the risk of assimilation through immersion, being worn down by the endless tide of secularity and all that goes with it.

This is why I continue to believe that the only sensible course, if never a particularly safe one, is the middle road. Create your castle, but take care not to build too big a moat. Defend your fiefdom, but do not hide within your walls - go out and engage the world (which requires, of course, that you know something about the “culture” that informs it.) Hospitality is necessary if we are to be the leaven in society, and part of hospitality is not appearing so uninviting to the outside world that they’ll never bother with you even if they have the chance. People thrive on common ground, so the closer you appear (within reason, in the case of modesty, say) to being like them, the more likely they are to listen to what you have to say.

One never knows where the opportunity will arise to have that chance encounter that bridges the gap, but if we aren’t out there we can be sure it will never come. As I rode home the other day on the subway, God forced my hand. The first train car I hopped onto was thick with smothering heat, so at the next stop I jumped on to the one just ahead. I was standing just across from a young woman who noticed, because of our proximity, the rosary ring that I was tolling discreetly on my finger. She looked at me, looked away, looked back, and finally blurted out:

Her: “Can I ask you a question?”

Me: “Sure.”

Her: “I see you praying your rosary…I was raised Catholic, although I’m kind of fallen away. What I want to know is, God gives us free will, right?”

Me: “Of course.”

Her: “So how is it that prayer doesn’t violate that? I mean, if we were going to pray for something, say, world peace, and that depends on others changing their actions, how are we not asking God to violate their free will?”

We talked about this for a while, and exchanged e-mail addresses. I haven’t heard from her, but the encounter was a positive one. She had been asking Catholics this question for a while, and had never gotten an answer. She had even asked a priest about the idea she had that faith and reason were meant to cooperate, and he had laughed at the thought, she said. But because I happened to be there, in the teeming mass of people on the subway in this big, decadent, capital city - for all intents and purposes the modern Rome - God was able to use me as an instrument.

We have to meet them where they are. To be in the world and not of it requires, of course, being in it first.

Filed under: Catholicism, Culture Wars