A Christmas Meditation: St. Augustine on the National Question

The Center for American Unity ^ | December 23, 2001 | Chilton Williamson Jr.

[annalex]

one could hypothecize associations and community strertching across national and geographic boundaries.

... such as the Christian Church, with which St. Augustine was somewhat familiar.

[x]

I'm not so sure Augustine works as support for Williamson. It's more that he shows that what Augustine was advocating was not multiculturalism. And that has some validity. There is a difference between the City of God and earthly states, and there's always been some tension between the national and supranational or international in Christianity. Take away one pole and you weaken the culture, though both the culture and the religion have had supporters who prized one pole exclusively and disdained the other.

Paul Gottfried is the latest to write about the decline of the old middle class culture and of the nation-states that rose with the bourgeoisie. Older ideologies of democracy and classical political and economic liberalism were grounded in that older proprietorial middle class, which has disappeared. The new global, multiculural order brings with it a more managerial and therapeutic order. Whatever is coming, if it's given free rein it won't resemble much what came before.

I don't think race is at the core of the dilemma. It's culture. But here's the rub. The very technologies and media that make an assimilationist culture so powerful, are available to minority groups within it to develop their own culture and ideologies. When a certain critical mass in demographic terms is reached, real and turbulent conflict is sure to follow. The new managerial and therapeutic order may or may not be able to manage, gloss over or numb these ethnic conflicts for the time being, but they'll remain a source of instability.