Fidelity to Place
By James Matthew Wilson, Public Discourse:
Fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character. We first learn to be faithful husbands and wives from the unchosen example we witness of our own parents. We first learn to be faithful citizens as we explore the small postage stamp of terrain that we did not choose to go to, but simply awakened to with our first dawn of consciousness.
Editor’s Note: This essay is the third in a symposium that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here.
As Aristotle held, human beings are by nature political or social and are ordered to community of necessarily limited size—the appropriate size being that of a polis. We come together to achieve certain ends essential to our flourishing, of which the act of being together is itself an important part. When we sense—and it most often indeed will be just a vague sense—that the communities to which we belong no longer support us in our flourishing, then we will naturally, perhaps without even knowing what we intend, redirect our attentions elsewhere.
This is exactly what many of us have begun to do. In his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam documents the ever-increasing solitude, loneliness, withdrawal, and alienation of Americans from their long traditions of communal life. Rod Dreher recommends reconnecting with one another by turning to small communities in The Benedict Option. Still, our society has made a general choice along the lines Putnam describes in favor of withdrawal, on the part of modern Americans (and modern Westerners more generally), from community. The social map, even as these new, intentional communities that Dreher describes come into being, persists in its general trend toward fragmentation and alienation.
What is missing from modern life is fidelity—and not just fidelity in general, but fidelity to those things that are given us and that we can never, at least fully, choose for ourselves. By this I mean our places of birth—our block, our neighborhood, our village, our state—and the families and communities into which we were born.
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