on Imperium and Dominion

At the foundation of classical Western political method and order is the synthesis of what the Bible refers to as “dominion” and what the ancient Romans referred to as imperium. That synthesis is a metaphysic of authority in regard to people and place. Politics is not simply about procedures or preferences. It is about who has the right and responsibility to order a particular people in a particular place toward the good.

A civilized people settles, cultivates, and takes responsibility for a place—as rulers and stewards over it. Man’s responsibility to rule over and steward the land is derivative of his rational nature.

The classical ideal of a self-governing citizenry ought to be distinguished sharply from the liberal concept of the “autonomous individual.” We do not have the right to pure autonomy, because duty and responsibility are baked into human life. We are born into families, into places, into communities, under fathers and mothers, pastors and magistrates. The settler, not the tourist, is the model of the citizen.

(a) The modern ideal of the autonomous individual is not far from the pre-political savage (see below). The savagemight actually be the purest example of autonomy there is - unconcerned with agriculture or high culture, nomadic and utilitarian, enslaved to appetite and unfit to seek the common good. So too the modern man: he migrates from fifteen-minute city to fifteen-minute city; he dismisses literature in education and thus starves the moral imagination; his work is reduced to industry, his wages ordered toward consumerism, and his religion to utility - if he practices it at all. Thus emerges the post-political techno-savage. Unlike the pre-political man, who is merely unformed by civilization, the post-political man has been malformed by it and proves himself unfit for self-government.

(b) The term 'savage' in its most plain and classical sense is someone who is incapable of participating in political community. Radical individualism continues to atomize and alienate the American people - furthering our drift toward lawlessness, division, and selfishness. This widespread individualism has resulted in the emergence of a post-political class - a class of people unconcerned with higher culture and public virtue. This is, without a doubt, the dehumanizing effect of industrialization, modern education, and consumerism. In other words, the insanity of our time cannot be separate from our movement away from rooted life. 

(c)  When a people degenerates into savagery - when they scorn custom, duty, and law  - they forfeit their capacity for self-government. Seneca warns that 'no man is free who is a slave to his body,' and the man who refuses moral restraint becomes just such a slave: a servant of passion, not of reason.

(d) Liberalism disintegrates political society by ordering public life toward 'autonomy' rather than integrity. The liberal's allergy to social solidarity renders him incapable of ordering communities toward real justice. 'What does it concern you?' or "I'm not hurting anybody!' he will say. But our actions have echoes, because no man is truly autonomous. The individual enslaved to voice does not merely harm himself... Additionally, man is a mimetic creature; vice spreads.

(e) If the post-political man cannot be governed by his own laws and customs, he must be restrained by those who are civilized. This is not oppression but the charity of order - the same charity displayed by a father who lovingly disciplines a child. 

Thomas Aquinas writes that law, properly speaking, orders to the common good and belongs to one who has care of the community. The ruler, no less than the farmer, seeks to structure life and vocation in accordance with the natural order. As the farmer must live in harmony with the seasons and the soil, so the ruler must harmonize the wills  of men under the law of human nature. Thus, the man who pushes the plow is not so different from the man who wears the crown. The farmer and  the ruler both extend reason over a given field - one of soil, the other of souls - for the sake of order and fruitfulness. When that harmony is intact, culture grows like a well-tended vineyard.

When public school curriculum is written as if no child has a hometown, no God, no ancestors, and no soil, that curriculum is catechizing a post-political class. When a curriculum binds students to their fathers, their place, and the older canon, it is doing something far more radical than any 'innovation:' it is preparing a people to rule.

(a) Education either forms citizens or it manufactures consumers. It either cultivates love for the true, the good, and the beautiful, or it trains appetites to chase novelty. A civilization that no longer knows how to educate for virtue will soon be forced to govern a people uneducated in virtue.