One
of the two commandments the Lord Jesus Christ gave to His disciples to follow
was to love our neighbor as ourselves.
However, in the modern United States of America, we no longer have
neighbors. We either have ideological
allies; or we have ideological opponents, who keep us from enjoying the right
to say or do this or the right to be equal to that. The object of our affection is not men and
women made in the image of God but cold, dead, national legalisms, the sharp
claws and fangs of the all-devouring god of the Constitution. It is no wonder that the love of many has
waxed cold.
Our
loyalties have gone all out of order. We
need to refocus. We need to contract our
sight a bit, from the interstate to the local, from the general to the
particular, from the rights of people to people themselves.
For
help in this endeavor, let us turn to colonial Virginia, the cradle of Southern
culture, and to her basic social institutions.
Prof David H. Fischer describes them for us. One was the vestry of the parish church; the
other, the county court:
Both were dominated by
self-perpetuating oligarchies of country gentlemen—the parish through its
vestry, the county through its court.
About
the county court in particular, Prof Fischer writes,
Its principal officers
were the county justices, the county sheriff and the county surveyor, who were
nominally appointed from above rather than elected from below. In practice they were controlled by the
county gentry, who regarded these offices as a species of property which they
passed on to one another. . . .
On court days a large part
of the county came together in a great gathering which captured both the spirit
and substance of Virginia politics.
Outside the courthouse, the county standard flew proudly from its
flagstaff, and the royal arms of England were emblazoned above the door. The courthouse in Middlesex County actually
had two doors which symbolized the structure power in that society—a narrow
door at one end of the building for gentry, and a broad double door at the
other for ordinary folk. Inside, on a
raised platform at one end of the chamber sat the gentlemen-justices, their
hats upon their heads, and booted and spurred . . . . To one side sat the jury, “grave and
substantial freeholders” who were mostly chosen from the yeomanry of the
county. Before them stood a mixed
audience who listened raptly to the proceedings. Outside on the dusty road, and peering in
through the windows was a motley crowd of hawkers, horse traders, traveling
merchants, servants, slaves, women and children—the teeming political
underclass of Virginia.
--Albion’s Seed: Four
British Folkways in America, Oxford UP, 1989, pgs. 406-7
Here
is a community; here are people with a healthy, normal interest in other people
as people, not as political objects to be manipulated, not in the political
abracadabra of amendments and clauses.
They experience the wider communities of State and Mother Land precisely
through the county courthouse, through the ‘county standard [flying] proudly
from its flagstaff’. Today, we have
inverted the order: We experience local
life as a little appendage of the national life emanating from Washington City,
groveling our thanks that we can be part of the Great Experiment of deluded
Puritan messianism and corrupt corporate cronyism.
But
the union is too vast and abstract for us to properly love. We must know and love the local, what we can
see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. I
cannot experience a snowstorm in the Dakotas or the steady rain in the
evergreens around Spokane. But I can
touch the snowbells growing in my yard in Louisiana, and watch and listen to
the creek flowing behind the house.
The
county presents a limit for our affections.
The average size of a county in the 50 States is about 1,200 square miles. This would make a square of about 35 miles
long and wide, with a border length of about 140 miles in all. If a man walked an average pace (3.5 mi/hr) around the border 8
hours a day with no breaks, it would take him no less than 5 days to complete
the circuit.
But
within that boundary lies an astounding variety of life. . . .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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