More "Village You Didn't Build"

The Great Books podcast discusses The Quest For Community by Robert Nesbit.  Written in 1953, Nesbit accurately predicts the decline of the family, the church, and other institutions between the individual and the state in size, the "little platoons*" of society that have actually been the society for most of its existence. 

Nesbit's take is that these in-between loyalties, of something larger than ourselves but not the state, are crucial to community, but the state has treated them as competitors and sided with the individual in its jurisprudence at the expense of the groups. Our idea of liberty and rights has over time has indeed focused on the individual. I'm not sure how it could have gone any other way. Even while agreeing that the disempowering of the family, the church, or the private group has had a gradual negative effect, I'm not sure what we would give back at this point. I don't want my family of origin or my extended family to have had any more authority over me than it did, thanks. My time-travel reveries usually start with me getting out of there and going to college earlier.  When you have children, the idea of going back to arranged marriages suddenly looks very sensible; but I can guess who my family would have fixed me up with. Not that this is one of the rights Nesbit or anyone was thinking of restoring to families or churches, but just as an example of the sort of "little platoon" encouragement that we weren't thinking about when we praised it so much.

And yet there is something to the fact that the growth of government has often been built off protecting individuals from the abuses of groups. The village of DC has sided with you in trying to break free of Springfield or First Church or you paranoid Dad thinking that torture is authorised by God in order to get you to obey. First they came for the nutcases, and maybe they should. But now that the federal government has eliminated most of its competition - even states have a hard time asserting rights against it, never mind zoning boards - the worry is that there is nothing that stands between you and them anymore. They rescued you from the frying pan.

*Okay, maybe I shouldn't have used that phrase