The
Work in the Shire
David
K. O’Connor
The
collapse of friendship into citizenship
For
Catholics, everything new is also renewed, and we embrace our work as
stewards
of a precious inheritance. Every renewal is a return to our sources,
and
ultimately
to our One Great Source, Jesus Christ. Renewal by return: this is the
meaning
of the motto of St. Pius X, a pope much admired by St. Josemaria
Escriva:
“Renew
all things in Christ!” When we look to friendship as a model for a
“new”
citizenship,
of course we also return to older sources of reflection on this
topic.
If
you graduate from college and
you have not read Plato’s Republic,
you should
demand
your money back. As with so many of the great questions of political
philosophy,
the question of how friendship can be a model for citizenship gets
its start
in
Plato’s book. Socrates argues that a political
community will be better to the extent
that
it is more unified, more like a single person. He argues that
friendship is what
makes
a political community unified. “Friends share everything in
common,” as the
proverb
says. This celebration of friendship as unity, above all other
community goods,
sounds
noble, idealistic, at least until Socrates follows it to its logical
conclusion: There
should
be nothing private at all, he suggests, and even spouses and children
will be
community
property. In the book that starts philosophical thought about
politics in
Western
culture, friendship is a model for citizenship by destroying ordinary
private life,
and
the ordinary connection people have to their work and their family.
Solidarity with
all
of one’s fellow citizens
replaces utterly the subsidiary goods of private life.
Now,
in this as in many other cases, if you are driven to a logical
conclusion that
appears
absurd, even immoral, you had better check your starting points.
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