Where Have All the Neighbors Gone?

By Anthony Esolen Think Globally, Act Locally, goes the bumper sticker, which I could never see or hear without rolling my eyes, since it demands the impossible. I cannot "think globally." Nobody can. We are bodily beings, dependent upon our experiences in place and time. We can, with our venturesome minds, travel to faraway lands to meet strange and fearful people, such as the neighbors next door. But the saying seems to require an intimate knowledge of the conditions of life everywhere in the world: of soil and its fruitfulness, of climates, of natural resources, of cultures, of political opportunities and political obstructions, and so on. I cannot solve all the problems in the world. I cannot even know what they are. I can, however, do something more impressive. I can ask Immanuel Kant's question, modified. Where does the logic of my actions tend to lead if everyone were to do what I want to do, for the same reasons? For that, I do not need to know the price of tea in China. I need to consider my neighbor. It appears to me that current talk about childbearing and work misses this crux of Catholic social thought: that there ought to be such a thing as society, a real social life, which by its nature cannot be trammeled within the walls of a house or a workplace. And certainly cannot be secured when so many of everyone's hours are spent away from where they dwell - if they dwell, rather than go to a flophouse called "home." The discussion has focused on individual choices for individual reasons. Would you want to be old and have children to visit you in the nursing home? Or, as one defiantly childless person put it, would you rather fly first-class? Would you want to marry, and to burden yourself with duties that have nothing to do with your talents? If ever the discussion does touch, gingerly, upon someone besides the individual, it is to require that there be "high-quality day-care" for children, paid for by the state. Nobody calls it a high-quality substitute for love, or for a child's freedom in the home and the yard and the street. When I was a boy, as economically depressed as my hometown was, many people still ran family businesses, so that work did not remove all the men from regular encounter with children and with people in the neighborhood. We had five grocery stores within a ten-minute walk of our house. Within that same distance there were also two hairdressers, a barber, a tailor, a family restaurant, the fire station, several saloons, a pharmacy, a hardware store, a shoemaker's shop, a bank, the American Legion, a gas station and auto repair shop, a dress factory, and the funeral home. I am not saying that we can return to that same state of affairs, or that we should try. I note that many people were at home and at work at once, that their shops were essential to neighborhood life, and that such a life, even if you worked outside of the neighborhood, was good for everyone, children especially. Unless there are children on the streets and in each other's yards, getting into everything, you will have no real neighborhood life, and "society" will fade into an abstraction. If everybody is at work, nobody is at home, social life withers, and people flee the neighborhood, just to flee loneliness. What about talents lying fallow? The consideration cuts two ways. Almost everything you do in the workplace is subject to standardization and routine, involving a narrow focus, a narrow range of interests and skills. A doctor finds that half of his day is devoured by paperwork. An English professor meets, year after year, the same ignorance of grammar and style, and corrects the same errors with the same comments. The doctor used to play the piano, but now has little time for it. The English professor had once taken up Portuguese, but there is no place for it in his schedule. If you want to give free play to one of your talents at the expense of the others, the workplace is for you, if you are lucky. But if you want to ...