This is well worth a read. A bit:
What was Nisbet’s insight? Simply put, that what seems like the great tension of modernity—the concurrent rise of individualism and collectivism, and the struggle between the two for mastery—is really no tension at all. It seemed contradictory that the heroic age of nineteenth-century laissez faire, in which free men, free minds, and free markets were supposedly liberated from the chains imposed by throne and altar, had given way so easily to the tyrannies of Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But it was only a contradiction, Nisbet argued, if you ignored the human impulse toward community that made totalitarianism seem desirable—the yearning for a feeling of participation, for a sense of belonging, for a cause larger than one’s own individual purposes and a group to call one’s own.
In pre-modern society, this yearning was fulfilled by a multiplicity of human-scale associations: guilds and churches and universities, manors and villages and monasteries, and of course the primal community of family. In this landscape, Nisbet writes, “the reality of the separate, autonomous individual was as indistinct as that of centralized political power.”
But from the Protestant Reformation onward, individualism and centralization would advance together, while intermediate powers and communities either fell away or were dissolved. As social institutions, these associations would be attacked as inhumane, irrational, patriarchal, and tyrannical; as sources of political and economic power, they would be dismissed as outdated, fissiparous, and inefficient. In place of a web of overlapping communities and competing authorities, the liberal West set out to build a society of self-sufficient, liberated individuals, overseen by a unitary, rational, and technocratic government.
The assumption, indeed, was that the emancipated individual required a strong state, to cut through the constraining tissue of intermediate associations. “Only with an absolute sovereign,” Nisbet writes, describing the views of Thomas Hobbes, “could any effective environment of individualism be possible.”
That's one of the questions set up in this New York Times piece ("To Keep Free of Federal Reins, Wyoming Catholic College Rejects Student Aid"). A bit:
To the college’s leaders, rejecting government-backed aid was an expensive effort to defend against what they called growing government threats to religious freedoms. If you do not take the money, leaders argue, the government cannot tell you what to do.
“It allows us to practice our Catholic faith without qualifying it,” said Kevin Roberts, the college’s president, a Louisiana transplant who now wears a black cowboy hat to work in this town of 7,500. “It’s clear that this administration does not care about Catholic teaching.”
This might "work" - but, I feel sure, only for a while, only for some small institutions, and only to an extent. The regulatory strings about which Catholic and other religious institutions might be concerned are and are going to be attached not only to student-loan funds but, increasingly, to accreditation decision, contracts, research grants, sports-conference membership (!), and the like. I do not think, in the long run, the smaller institutions with very strong animating missions should think that they can avoid the struggle that the larger research institutions are going to have to wage.
Katha Pollitt has done what perhaps might be called the "service" of writing a book that argues unabashedly for what most Americans regard as extreme positions with respect to the issue of abortion. With this piece, "There Are No Abortion Cakes," she continues that work, and attempts to leverage the recent events surrounding Indiana's RFRA-type law in support of those positions. She concludes:
It's time for progressives who rallied against the Indiana RFRA to show the same energy and conviction and urgency in support of women's reproductive rights. At least thirty-eight states have feticide laws, after all—this is not an issue for just one state. (Consider, too, that about 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage.) If CEOs are concerned, rightly, that their LGBT employees be treated as equals in Indiana, they should show as much concern for their pregnant and potentially pregnant employees. The same RFRA laws that open the door to discrimination against LGBT people lay behind the Supreme Court's infamous Hobby Lobby decision, which permits business owners to use religion to deny their employees health insurance coverage for birth control.
I understand that same-sex marriage and reproductive rights are different: marriage is about love, and abortion is about freedom. There are no abortion cakes. But freedom is a bedrock American value, even when it's for women. . . .
