Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 1

The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil's last work, The Need for Roots, was written in 1943, the year of her death, and published posthumously in 1949, as well as being translated into English in 1952 with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. The Need for Roots offers a passionate call for helping the French return to a sense of true patriotism, tied not to the State, but to place and ideals. In the first part of the book, Weil explores briefly fourteen "needs of the soul" before focusing on her chief concern, the 15th and perhaps most comprehensive need--rootedness.

1. Order, by which Weil means a sense of epistemic coherence. The soul needs a sense that a balance of the forces of the universe exists, that they have a beauty to them, a rationality at some level.
2. Liberty, that is the ability to choose within a system of rules that we trust because they "emanate from a source of authority which is not looked upon as strange or hostile, but loved as something belonging to those placed under its direction." None are free unless they operate out of goodwill and obligation to others, she contends.
3. Obedience of a healthy sort is "necessary food for the soul," and the one who is forced to obey a tyrant must partake of the sickness of such a society.
4. Responsibility of a real sort, that is, of type that actually impacts the person and his or her fellows in a meaningful way.
5. Equality in degree of respect and with a degree of opportunity. There must also be a way for movement to take place up and down the ladder of social equilibrium.
6. Hierarchism, that is a proper veneration of one's superiors who are symbols of what we each desire.
7. Honor in being a part of a noble tradition with a proud past of examples of virtuous actions.
8. Punishment that restores the one who has moved outside the circle of obedience--fully for the one who is truly repentant, and partially for the one who refuses. "Punishment is a method for getting justice into the soul of the criminal by bodily suffering."
9. Freedom of Opinion, that is an unrestricted freedom to explore all opinions, though this pursuit is conducted by one who serves the truth.
10. Security from constant, debilitating fear or terror.
11. Risk that keeps one from boredom even while not descending into terror.
12. Private Property such as owning a piece of land and one's own tools, because these are the means of a necessary and bodily life.
13. Collective Property, a feeling of ownership in public monuments, parks, and ceremonies.
14. Truth: "The need for truth is more sacred than any other need," so we must do all we can to curtail lying in print or in public speech.
15. Rootedness. She defines rootedness in the following way:

"A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by the way of the environment of which he forms a natural part."

Christopher Lasch on the Need for a 3rd Way

The late Christopher Lasch is perhaps best known for his classic work of cultural critique The Culture of Narcissism in which he examines how the turn to a therapeutic culture set American society on an inward course that undercuts the basic civic structure necessary for healthy and fulfilling social life. The danger is that of the "Promethean self" that evaluates all of life's goods by its own self-centered calculus. In his sequel, The Minimal Self, Lasch examines how amidst an environment of threat and danger (e.g. escalating crime, terrorism, arms races, etc.) people turn from the Promethean self to a reduced minimal narcissism that seems to combine both self-sufficiency and self-renunciation. Survival and pessimism become the centers of such selves. Both options are fianlly deeply inward and selfish.

Lasch's last important work was The True and Only Heaven, a history of the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its criticism both of the unfettered market system and of the liberal state and the planned economy. In the last few pages of his groundbreaking history, Lasch offers his own opinion that any new populism would learn from the old populism in its critiques but it would have to offer an entirely different vision of wealth and community.

Lasch was something of a pundit, hated by both the Left and the Right, and was even a measured critic of the communitarianism of those like Amitai Etzioni, which he criticized as being concerned with political agendas without being concerned with moral life and personal change. Here's an example of his basic analysis:

"On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle--the cardinal principle of liberalism--that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their own happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speal for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except that of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church--all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself--schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes--to become a business proposition, to pay its way, to show black print on the bottom line. . . .

"In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens social trust; undermines the willingness both to assume responsiblity for oneself and to hold others accountable for their actions; destroys respect for authority; and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Consider the fate of neighborhoods that serve so effectively, at their best, as intermediaries between family and the larger world. Neighborhoods have been destroyed not only by the market. . . but also by enlightened social engineering. . . .

"Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that, in a democracy, trust can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balance by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole--its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members--than in the responsibility of individuals. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good." ("Communitarianism or Populism? 60-1, 64)

True Community & Health Care

The following is from the essay "The Work of Local Culture" by Wendell Berry. While Berry is discussing the general failure of community life and place in the United States, his insights on trust, story, local place, and doctors, I think have ramifications for how we should think about the prospect of a national health care system in this country. First, Berry:

"When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another, and this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another’s help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.

"We don’t trust our “public servants” because we know that they don’t’ respect us. They don’t respect us, as we understand, because they don’t know us; they don’t know our stories. They expect us to sue them if they make mistakes, and so they must insure themselves, at great expense to them and to us. Doctors who are in a country community must send their patients to specialists in the city, not necessarily because they believe that they are wrong in their diagnoses, but because they know that they are not infallible and they must protect themselves against lawsuits, at great expense to us. . . .

"Several decent family livelihoods are annually paid out of the county to insurance companies for a service that is only negative and provisional. All this money is lost to us by the failure of community. A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends on itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside-unlike most modern populations that depend on distant purchases for almost everything and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influences of salesmen." (157-158)

"The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and loving used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly."(166)

(From the 1990 collection What Are People For?)

Berry argues that local culture is dependent upon relationships of face-to-face trust and mutual life and involvement in the day-to-day business of work and worship and play. Without that trust, we have a culture of personal protectionism and tort that renders our healthcare fraught with impersonality and consumerism. While Berry does not suggest this directly, I think his chief insight is that healthcare should not be commodified to begin with. Medicine does involve money, but when we make medicine and health a matter of market relations we have already started down the road to a broken system, one lacking personhood and genuine compassion; that is, one that is is neither healthy nor caring.

Of course, I am not denying that doctors should have a reasonable livelihood, as should medical researchers and educators. (Though, pharmaceutical reps are another matter entirely. . . ). Nonetheless, we currently have a system where much of our health and sickness is turned over to people we do not know and that we must trust despite our lack of any true knowledge of who they are or what their characters are like. And because we have commodified medicine and medical care, the natural and unnatural inequities in wealth have given rise to a state where strangers decide whether our sickness is worth giving much or any attention to, and where expensive procedures may easily devastate poor and working families in short order. We decontextualize health by making it a matter of management and numbers, rather than persons, their stories, and our relations with them in our communities.

A national system, which hopes to fix these problems, may or may not help curb the current excesses, but I doubt whether it can finally heal them. It participates in the anonymity and dangerous policy-decisions of technocrats who believe they know best what others need, though in all honesty, these are just numbers on a ledger to be balanced. Any system that robs us of our personhood and reduces us to an aggregate of material individuals is already shoddy in its workmanship from the get go.

If you demand of me money for numbers on a ledger to serve those I do not know, then understandably, it might feel like robbery, but if you speak to me of helping Toby and his premature twin daughters or David's cherished aging father or my own brother with mental retardation, then health and care become meaningful again, matters involving people whom we love.

Theological Reflections on Moving

A very interesting set of personal and theological reflections by Gilbert Meilaender on changing homes and cities after 18 years: "Creatures of Place and Time: Reflections on Moving."

Here's one typical paragraph:

"I now realize that I had forgotten one little matter-what we call the doctrine of creation. Wholly apart even from any work-related questions, over eighteen years one carves out a life in a place. Except in the most extreme of circumstances, I suspect that it doesn't even particularly matter whether that place is generally perceived as desirable. It becomes home, the place where one is located. One walks certain routes, enjoys certain trees, recognizes certain people. We have doctors and dentists, grocery stores and shopping malls, baseball fields and banks, churches and schools. All become deeply embedded in a pattern of life. As Dr. Johnson is supposed to have claimed to refute Berkeley's idealism by kicking a stone which turned out to have its matter quite securely in place, so moving after eighteen years is a refutation of any supposition that our self is not in good part a body located in space and time."

But, really, the whole piece is worth pondering.