Wendell Berry, from “The Work of Local Culture” (1988):

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. […]

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 influence of salesman.

Wendell Berry, from “Horse-Drawn Tools and the Doctrine of Labor Saving” (1978):

It is important to remember that ‘labor’ is a very crude, industrial term, fitted to the huge economic structures, the dehumanized technology, and the abstract social organization of urban-industrial society. In such circumstances, ‘labor’ means little more than the sum of two human quantities, human energy plus human time, which we identify as ‘man-hours.’ But the nearer home we put ‘labor’ to work, and the smaller and more familiar we make its circumstances, the more we enlarge and complicate and enhance its meaning. At work in a factory, workers are only workers, ‘units of production’ expending ‘man-hours’ at a task set for them by strangers. At work in their communities, on their own farms or in their own households or shops, workers are never only workers, but rather persons, relatives, and neighbors. They work for those they work among and with. Moreover, workers tend to be independent in inverse proportion to the size of the circumstance in which they work. That is, the work of factory workers is ruled by the factory, whereas the work of housewives, small craftsmen, or small farmers is ruled by their own morality, skill, and intelligence. And so, when workers work independently and at home, the society as a whole may lose something in the way of organizational efficiency and economies of scale. But it begins to gain values not so readily quantifiable in the fulfilled humanity of the workers, who then bring to their work not just contracted quantities of ‘man-hours,’ but qualities such as independence, skill, intelligence, judgment, pride, respect, loyalty, love, reverence.

Richard Lints:

The contemporary democratic ethos may look askance at evangelism and proselytizing in the public square because of past abuses. Changing the ethos with respect to evangelism may well require us to think of evangelism less in terms of defeating an enemy and more in terms of showing hospitality to the stranger—that is, showing respect in the face of our important differences. [A] distinctive Christian contribution to late modern democracies should be the introduction of mercy and compassion as unifying virtues, reflective of the gospel we profess.

Richard Lints:

Democracy highlights the significance of diversity and encourages us to see more fully the splendor of God’s diverse creation. Democracy has also illuminated human brokenness and our long history of stereotyping and exclusion. It has provided a minimal set of procedures for dealing with our important differences, though it is often more frustrating than fruitful. Neutral procedures by themselves will not right the wrongs of exclusionary practices. Righting wrongs is a necessary moral project and thereby requires a moral framework. Democracy has taken us on a journey, but when we have reached a fork in the road its only counsel has been, “You are free to choose whichever fork you prefer.” When the fork in the road is the choice between inclusion or exclusion, absolute freedom is not an adequate grounding for making a responsible choice. Responsible choices require morally responsible agents, and morally responsible agents require a moral framework to which they are accountable.

Where can we find the moral principles to deal with the underlying pathologies of discrimination and exclusion? It is not enough to say that we all know these actions are wrong. There must be a moral framework that explains why discrimination across certain kinds of differences is wrong. Defining ourselves outside of a moral tradition inevitably leads to arbitrary claims of victimhood or entitlement. Stripped of a moral tradition, biological or geographical or group identities will not satisfy the deep longings of the human heart for enduring significance and security.

Richard Lints:

Doing justice both to the history of discrimination and the complexity of cultural formation has been the challenge of American democracy’s public discourse on diversity. Glossing over the complexity of cultural formation simply leaves stereotypes of cultural groups in place and doesn’t allow for genuine identities to form outside of those stereotypes. However, the existence of stereotypes undoubtedly forms the conceptual backbone in the narrative of discrimination across America’s history. A fine line has formed between recognizing the reality of stereotypes that have been placed on others and accepting those stereotypes as defining their key identity markers. Turning generic ethnic or racial categories into defining cultural frameworks pigeonholes individuals and communities into the very stereotypes that created the problems in the first place. It also imposes undue obstacles to the emergence of transethnic and transracial communities, and thereby makes it more difficult to fully engage the work of reconciliation across these differences.

Re: the placing of stereotypes on others and the receiving of those designations from others, I’m reminded of a Phil Christman quote from How to Be Normal.

Richard Lints:

The polarization of our contemporary cultural conversation has resulted in the loss of confidence in democratic liberalism even as democratic liberalism provides the structures by which it is possible to complain about the polarization. Without a common civic morality to restrain large consumer forces, the public square is not only empty but also alienating. People tend to look for social reinforcement of their own self-identity in homogeneous communities when there is not a set of shared goals promoting the common good. Ironically, the greater the yearning for a common good, the more suspicion there is about any one group imposing its sense of the common good on others. The fracturing of the sense of belonging to others becomes the dominant paradigm. “If you are not for me, on my terms, then you are against me.” But the more tribal the search for self-identity is, the more polarized our common life becomes and the greater our tendency toward conflict. Without a larger perception of the common good, or at least of some form of commonality among all our differences, our social polity is doomed to failure. It is not an accident that democracy itself seems tenuous in an age of global capitalism, corporate corruption, identity politics, and theocratic terrorism.

Richard Lints:

An important irony is the ever-growing disparity between the descriptive diversity of contemporary culture and the actual homogeneity of the communities in which we experience day-to-day life…. Under the pressures of pluralization, we tend to socially migrate to safe havens of unity. Social conservatives tend to listen to socially conservative commentators. Social radicals tend to read other social radicals. We migrate toward homogeneous communities as a response to the increase of diversity around us.

Matthew Crawford argues this point persuasively in The World Beyond Your Head. He points out how beneath all the rhetoric around freedom, choice, individuality, self-expression, and self-actualization, we are actually manipulated consumers, addicted to our tech and prone to groupthink. For all the apparent diversity, we inhabit a mono-culture. As Crawford demonstrates, the task of “becoming an individual” is not as simple or straightforward as we might assume.

Richard Lints, on the experience of diversity in modern life:

We are ever more conscious of diversity—not only in terms of Christian worship but across a broad array of factors: we encounter diverse political communities, ethnic and racial communities, vocational and economic communities, even communities with passionate diversity of sports loyalties. Our social contexts are pluralized in countless directions and experienced at many levels. The “contemporary” is often marked out from the “traditional” purely by the plurality of experience, with the contemporary connoting a much higher volume of diversity—diversity of music, of religion, of vocation, of culture, of language. Tension in each of these spheres arises as different communities bump into each other.