The modern sensibility has induced an extreme condition

The following is striking to us because it’s so radically alternative to our Ways:

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A Small Country of Few People
People do not travel far.
They have boats and carriages but little use for them.
They have armor and weapons but do not display them.
Their food is plain but good. Their clothes are simple but fit well. Their homes are secure.
Most live within earshot of neighboring villages. They can hear each others’ roosters crowing in the morning and dogs barking in the evening. Yet they rarely feel the need to visit; they are content where they are, satisfied in place.
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Community/culture that could be perceived as nativist. Tribal.

We tend to invoke a “parochialist” critique. Valuing freedom, liberty, autonomy, choice, the modernist can’t countenance the restriction, the implied conformism. Born into it … bound within it … pressured to base one’s identity within it, to accept, to conform.

So limited, so limiting.

Yet:

We all have to accept … much.

For example: It used to be that a person was expected to be accepting of, conforming within, a continuator of the religious tradition of one’s heritage.

It used to be that a person was expected to accept the marital relationship, the person of the spouse. In modernity, valuing freedom, liberty, autonomy, choice … we regularized divorce and serial monogamy.

I guess it’s psychologically liberating to have a sense of an ability to end something bad or uncomfortable. But there are issues in either direction (liberty or restriction). We know of cases of serial relationships where the instability outweighs any gain in satisfaction. We know of cases where a couple feels a pressure to stay together and then works things out with ultimate compensating satisfactions re: household and family stability; where there’s no choice but to grapple with any and all issues.

Avoiding what strikes us as the absolute of life bounded to a community and a place, “A Small Country of Few People” at least suggests that we now might be suffering from a condition of hyper-autonomy, hyper-mobility, hyper-instability … and would benefit from backing off from what historically would be recognized as an extreme: ephemeral commitment to relationships, little commitment to community, almost no sense of place.