Above: ‘Spring, Upper Slaughter’, Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-1989)
In the summer of 2020, amidst the chaos and uncertainty of that unhappy time, my family having lost its longstanding business and I having just learned that my wife was expecting our first child, with no source of income and unable to afford a house, I set out to build a town.
THE OLD URBANISM
Why Without it a Truly Integral Catholic Culture is Absolutely Impossible
…And How an Unlikely Ragtag Group Of Friends Has Been Trying to do Something About It
Our Lord explains in the Parable of the Sower that the seed of His love will only grow in a certain soil–and that is the soil of Christian Culture, which is the work of music in the wide sense, including as well as tunes that are sung, art, literature, games, architecture–all so many instruments in the orchestra which plays day and night the music of lovers; and if it is disordered, then the love of Christ will not grow. …The restoration of culture, spiritually, morally, physically, demands the cultivation of the soil in which the love of Christ can grow, and that means we must, as they say, rethink priorities. . .
— John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture
John Senior, that apostle of Christendom and lone voice calling out from the spiritual desert of the last century, describes the soil of Christian culture as “the natural environment of truth, assisted by art, ordered intrinsically… to the praise, reverence and service of God Our Lord”. In other words, Christian culture is the milieu in which the worship of God is both cultivated and made manifest in society, the seedbed that feeds and nurtures the natural and supernatural ends that together make up the common good. But if Christian culture is prerequisite for a healthy and rightly ordered society, what then is required for the flourishing of culture itself?
Since the nearly complete triumph of our modern era of progress over and against the supposed ignorance and superstition of an embarrassingly crude and unenlightened past, a nagging suspicion has been growing within many a disillusioned and spiritually starved soul. An uneasy feeling that, more and more quickly, turns into a realization that we have, in many ways, been the victims of a catastrophic sleight of hand. Fooled, as it were, by a deliberately fabricated patchwork of lies that has been repeatedly presented to us our entire lives, we have unwittingly exchanged our birthrights, as heirs of the most noble cultural inheritance, for the absolute mess of pottage that is the spiritually impoverished dark-age in which we live.
Thankfully, where the darkness of sin abounds the bright light of grace abounds all the more, and so there has been a budding reaction to this suicidal descent into barbarism which, though still quite small, has been increasingly garnering momentum and has even now begun to bear what are not insignificant fruits. This awakening can be seen most clearly — as much by its advancements as by the raging opposition it conjures from its enemies — in the area of liturgy. The besieged traditional Roman Rite forms, as it must, the beating heart of this recalcitrant counter-revolution, this new and unabashed reconquest, wherein the faithful sons and daughters of Holy Mother Church advance the banner of Christ the King for the restoration of all things in Him.
It is perhaps the liturgical renaissance that has laid bare the poverty present in other spheres of life – in music, art, literature, architecture, political and economic thought, education, agriculture and so on, reaching all the way down to the forgotten seasonal household customs of the family throughout the year – and occasioned a desire for a rediscovery of the neglected treasures of our rich cultural patrimony. Various burgeoning movements working towards their recovery have taken deep root within our newly emerging communities, promising a future flourishing and abundant harvest – but can these sundry efforts properly nourish the kind of soil where the seed of His love will grow?
As positive and praiseworthy as the aforementioned developments may be (and, indeed, there is very much to praise and take hope from), I would argue — in fact, I will absolutely insist — that there is in all of it a missing element without which every advancement will be stunted, fail to culminate in anything resembling a restoration of Christian culture, and ultimately prove to have been for naught.
PHYSICAL COMMUNITIES, THE PRIMORDIAL SOIL OF CULTURE
Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain,
— The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith
Where health and plenty cheer’d the labouring swain,
Where smiling spring its earliest visit paid
And parting summer’s lingering blooms delayed:
Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,
Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,
How often have I paus’d on every charm,
The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
The decent church that topp’d the neighboring hill
Let us begin by stating what ought to be obvious: community is an absolutely necessary prerequisite for culture. The musical symphony that is culture (to say nothing of civilization) requires a diversity of musicians harmoniously united in a grand unity of purpose. It is never something that can be produced by a mere individual or even a single family. And rightly so, for we are by nature, as our entire tradition teaches, political animals who can only find their true purpose and flourishing within the context of community.
However, and perhaps less obvious to us uprooted, placeless moderns is the fact that — despite what we may have naively been fooled into believing through the influence of our increasingly displaced and ephemeral modes of life — we cannot have, or hope to ever build, real community without the actual physical proximity and fixity of place through which those relationships that form community are able to be cultivated and nurtured.
We are incarnate beings — not disembodied minds floating through the ether. We are flesh-and-blood creatures dwelling within a sacramental cosmos and we require the proper physical structures necessary for human flourishing – which means that we have to create and inhabit the kinds of environments that foster community.
And, I might add, — and God forgive those who even consider this — you cannot have remote communities based on placeless, digital “social” networks;even if such networks serve as an evermore compulsory means of communication and as an even necessary form of staying “in contact” with others and, at times, may even result in the occasional physical gathering. Real community, by contrast, requires not only physical interaction but a sense of permanence, together with proximity, that allows authentic interactions to be a regular occurrence of everyday life.
Planned visits meticulously scheduled, days and even weeks and months in advance (however regular and consistent they may be), do not offer the social sustenance required for community, for community demands the little noticed, and oft-forgotten, essential ingredient of spontaneity. The knock on the door by the neighbor offering freshly baked goods, the friend down the block stopping by to see if we’re up for a drink, the chance meetings with familiar faces as we go about our daily affairs or enjoy a moment of recreation – these kinds of encounters and artifacts of community life are all completely dependent on the way in which we order our physical living environments. There is no technological substitute for them, and never will be.
Our anti-incarnational, digital environments are, in fact, the “cultural” manifestations of a gnostic and dualistic (one can add, trans-humanist) ideology. A religion. Or, more accurately, an anti-religion, manifesting what can only be properly described as an anti-culture.[1] However, in many ways the ongoing digitization and physical disembodiment of every function and aspect of our lives form but the latest stage of an ongoing revolution that began with the destruction of the traditional town and village more than a century ago — and which progresses ever towards the complete alienation of man from man and, ultimately, God.
THE DESOLATION OF OUR BUILT ENVIRONMENTS
These were thy charms, sweet village; sports like these,
— The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith
With sweet succession taught e’en toil to please;
These round thy bowers their cheerful influence shed,
These were thy charms–But all these charms are fled.
The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
For those of us living among the bleak, spiritually sterile ruins so dispassionately referred to by the technical term of urban sprawl, more accurately described as the abomination of desolation of our built environments spreading endlessly across our collective living spaces like a cancerous growth — particularly those of us living in North America — characterized by the domination of expansive highways; ever wider multilane roads; strip malls; giant parking lots; placeless, homogenized suburbs; and generally gargantuan environs that grossly violate any notion of human scale set within a disorienting landscape lacking any kind of physical center or spacial cohesiveness, it is difficult, living as long as we have in such spaces, to stress just how much of a seismic shift has occurred, only within the span of a few generations, in the way we as human beings view and interact with the external world around us (and that is to say nothing of the vapid, uninspired and materially impoverished architecture itself).
A monumental change was imposed on society through the proliferation of the automobile. I say imposed because this transformation was not so much due to the initial demand of the people but, rather, as is often the case, to the chicanery and massive lobbying of industry. It was pressure from the automobile lobby that brought about the government subsidization of the destructively expansive highway systems and subsequently, through deranged zoning and traffic codes, the institutionalization of sprawl that, in effect, enthroned the car and traffic congestion as the pinnacle and summum bonum of urban life.
Contrary to the promise that, due to the speed of the motorcar, distances would drastically dissipate and make for a more cohesive and interconnected society, we have instead experienced a world in which enormous lengths must be traversed using expensive machines — that are now absolutely required, and from whose use are excluded the young as well as the old — in order to reach the remote distances artificially created by city codes that protect, through the coercive power of the state, the inhuman and desolate landscapes they have themselves generated through the embrace of bureaucratic madness. Instead of contracting and allowing for more interrelatedness, our urban environments have stretched endlessly outward swallowing up vast swaths of our precious arable lands and beloved natural landscapes — while also razing to the ground once bustling intercity neighborhoods and displacing tens of thousands of their residents along the way — in order to create the homogenized blob of highways, overpasses and parking lots that forcibly coral and take hostage everything from the parish church and village green, to the corner store and walking schoolboy, to the point where it has begun (and now nearly completed) cutting its grotesque anti-social figure into our very minds and habits of life.
This radical change in our most basic daily customs — this complete revolution in physical habitat — has had enormous consequences with regards to our ability to form and even retain community. The idyllic small-town and village settlements of the past that are now so nostalgically yearned for have become, not only impossible, but due to building and zoning regulations, almost entirely illegal. Community life has quite literally been criminalized. The quaint American small town with its charming walkable main-street, the splendid cities of the New Spains with their signature plazas mayores, the bucolic medieval village, the Italian city-state, and, stretching all the way back to Antiquity, the Greek polis — the sort of arrangement that has formed the common experience of most human beings has become a nearly extinct novelty.
THE SO CALLED “NEW URBANISM”
As a response to the dismantling of our built environments — whose urban (and consequently also rural) destruction, itself the logical consequence of the progressive and industrial elements that began to dominate Western societies in the 19th century, came into full force during the post-World War II period and has only accelerated since — there arose a reaction that was eventually galvanized into an organized movement, later to be termed The New Urbanism.
Through their observations and study of old villages, towns and cities — consider, for instance, the grandeur of Rome or the charming homeliness of the small villages and hamlets of England’s Cotswolds region — they distilled a set of principles that universally conformed to every lovable and properly functioning human habitat. As opposed to the urban sprawl or suburban model — where the automobile takes pride of place over the pedestrian, and where neighborhoods, towns and cities – indeed, our lives – are segregated by their function and use (commercial, retail and residential zones) forcibly separating and distancing one from the other and thus necessitating the use of the automobile and ensuring that daily social interaction only take place between cars rather than people — the New Urbanists’ desired aim was the creation of walkable environments, where family and friends, church, school, marketplace and work could be drawn together within close proximity of one another to form an integrated whole. Their objective could be summed up as the following: to create human-scaled, mixed-use (meaning, allowing for the integration of home and workplace, stores and neighborhoods, etc.), pedestrian-friendly environments that facilitate community and human flourishing — rather than being antithetical to them. Not only would such principles make for a significantly higher quality of life but would consequently also dramatically increase the efficient use of available land and space. (It may be difficult for the average American to wrap his head around the fact that the traffic congestion and endless expansion of sprawl that we continuously encounter as the very air we breathe has in fact not been the result of necessity due to a combination of population growth and land scarcity, as is commonly concluded, but rather has been something artificially created by design.)
Although much has been achieved by way of the numerous New Urbanist developments that have been built over the decades,[2] operating entirely within the erosive market forces and lacking the necessary cohesive and robust cultural framework that promotes long-term economic viability (by which I mean a strong, interconnected local economy of the various social classes that can supply for a large portion of the necessary jobs and material needs of the community) the developments have tended to become stale, artificial communities of the more well-to-do — often coming to resemble more of a theme park than a true organically functioning neighborhood or town — where less affluent families (or those simply left out due to lack of supply) drive in on the weekend in order to escape the lifeless monotony of the suburbs for the span of an afternoon in order to experience, if for just a brief moment, a trifling taste (in a commercialized, flavorless and watered-down form) of some of the lost charms of urban life. It can be said that many of these places tend to become victims of their own “success” in that desirability and demand to live in them becomes so high that the initial affordable entry level prices which would allow for young families and the working classes to purchase homes in them quickly skyrocket to obscene heights barring any possibility of achieving an integrated economic social strata that is one of the fundamental components of any authentic community life. These homes are often even then put into a rental pool to service a growing tourist market.
This is in no way the fault of New Urbanism’s proponents, working as they must with the available raw social material that they are invariably presented with. In fact, many of the movement’s leaders have been tirelessly working to help create a subsidiary model of incremental development to, in effect, both cut through the bureaucratic red-tape and devise creative financial solutions that would allow for more organic grass-roots developments of such communities. In addition, many of their most successful efforts have been accomplished by way of retrofitting the problematic urban and suburban landscapes through infill and through restructurings, as well as very creative reinterpretations, of zoning codes through a form of bureaucratic judo. This serves as an important reminder that communities aren’t necessarily always best created out of whole cloth. Many times the best place to start is where you already are.
AGRARIAN OR URBAN?
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
— The Deserted Village, Oliver Goldsmith
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
A time there was, ’ere England’s griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread the wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more;
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth.
But times are alter’d; trade’s unfeeling train
Usurp the land and dispossess the swain;
Let us go into the fields
— Canticle of Canticles
Deep within the Catholic milieu, ever since the industrialization of the city that resulted in the forced displacement of the traditional peasantry, there has lingered the important question regarding a return to a life lived on and rooted in the land. Agriculture, what Pius VII termed “the first and most important of all the arts” has always been a central and prominent feature of every healthy society. In addition to providing for the necessary physical sustenance of a people, the agrarian life fosters a sense of stewardship towards the God-given natural world that man has been called to till and order, as well as a deep-seated love of place, the preservation of memory, a respect for custom and tradition, and an acute awareness of our absolute dependence on the Creator of all things.
A false notion has, however, arisen, that if one is to escape the noise and chaos and altogether moral degeneracy of the modern city, while avoiding the dullness of the suburb, in pursuit of the peace and simplicity of agrarian life, then one must necessarily embrace a life of social isolation within some remote rural setting. The vision of the family farm we tend to hold in our imaginations is that of the single family homestead. “The Little House on the Prairie”,as it were,with Ma and Pa and the children banding together to meet the challenges of frontier life in their little lone cabin on the plains. To be sure, beautiful and heartfelt scenes of family life are bound to ensue within such an environment of common work. There too, amidst the elemental world of nature, in which the consequent strengthening of family ties would result in exquisite moments of shared leisure and recreation, a life of prayer would be facilitated and nurtured by the rhythm of the seasons and the witnessing of the wonders of creation.
These blessings are, without question, all to be greatly desired. But such benefits do not come about as a result of distancing oneself from the embrace of neighbors, extended family and friends. On the contrary, they form part of an abundant harvest of spiritual goods that is meant to be generously shared with others. And although the pre-conditions of a vibrant culture can be diligently nurtured within the family, it can never be produced within the realm of the single household. The colorful tapestry of culture can only be successfully woven by a larger community of families, by a commonwealth.[3] Our model should not be the isolated homestead of the American frontier but, rather, the European hamlet and village — even town and city — of former Christendom.
The village (and its smaller counterpart, the hamlet) is essentially a small, physically coherent, if spontaneously and perhaps somewhat haphazardly developed, community of farmers living in close proximity to one another and sharing together in common spaces such as the village green, the common land, and the parish church. Within it, we already see the seedbed of urbanism, which is simply the successively larger and more complex ordering of social life that finds its fulfillment in the self-sufficiency of the city[4]. And although the village, whose function and purpose is essentially agrarian, forms a desperately needed counterweight to the dismal asphalt jungles that make up our industrialized civilization, we should, nevertheless, not allow ourselves to fall prey to the modern temptation of shunning the town and city as such.
To this very day one can visit the old continent and in many places still visually witness the close-knit, symbiotic relationship between urban and agrarian life in a landscape sprinkled with picturesque small towns and densely packed villages entirely encompassed by the fields and pastures of their small farms. Even with regards to the city, this intimate relationship often holds true, as is experienced firsthand by those who routinely enjoy leisurely afternoon walks to and from some such urban centers. At the northern end of Spain, where with my family and I have been temporarily residing for a time, there’s a region called Asturias, known for its vast green pastures and consequent dairy farming — as well as its rugged coastline and Celtic culture that often make for more of a striking resemblance to the isle of Éire than to the rest of the neighboring regions on the peninsula. In its capital city of Oviedo one can, as I have, commence a delightful stroll beneath the spires of its awe-inspiring Gothic cathedral situated at its center and within half an hour (after experiencing little to no sprawl) find oneself quite suddenly in the middle of the countryside.
To further illustrate this union, I’d point you to the fact that the ancient Greek term polis, meaning city, was understood to be composed of two parts, the asty (the urban center), which housed the political, military and religious institutions, as well as its main trading activities, and the chora (the countryside), with its collection of villages and farms. Each of these, the urban center and the countryside, although distinct, came together to form the larger organism that we know as the city, with the chora comprising the majority of the population. Such is the closely bound relationship between urbanism and the land that was, until quite recently, the universal norm.
This, however, also brings us to the critical question of scale and size. Contrary to what has become our common experience through a seemingly endless, directionless and shapeless mess that is urban sprawl, the city — like the town, the neighborhood and the village — has an orienting center that simultaneously manifests both its spatial as well as cultural reference points (e.g. the church, the square, the school, the library, the theater, the courthouse, City Hall, etc.), from which extends a radius of urban development.
Naturally, the length of this radius is the result of what, on average, would be considered a convenient distance to one’s daily needs — with the neighborhood (being the smallest and most immediate unit and thus having to supply for our most immediate necessities) having a span of about a five-minute walk.[5] Quite significant for our sense of spatial orientation is the fact that along the radius of the town and city the building density gradually dissipates as it moves away from the center and outward towards the encompassing villages, farms, and eventual wilderness. This perceivable gradation and demarcation gives the particular urban settlement its defined size and shape making it not only unique but distinguishable from its immediate surroundings, forming, consequently, a rather stark contrast to the visual blur of sprawl.
Certainly, the proper proportions of scale have been gravely violated in almost everything we now see around us. Not to mention that, at least according to Plato, the ideal city maxes out at a population of 5,040 households. The City ought to be limited in numbers such that its members will be able to recognize one another, but it must be large enough to ensure its defense and assist allied cities.[6] Apart from the more obvious question of territorial scale, whatever the proper mean may actually be in terms of density, there is no question that it was, long ago, grossly exceeded; with it were destroyed also the natural bonds of community, neighborhood identity, and local culture which consequently have us now reaping the costly rewards of societal disintegration.
THE PASCUA PROJECT
Oh Pascua, my heart turns to thee
— Pascua In Our Hearts (The Proud Floridian’s Last Stand)
And ponders thy proud land
Trustful haven true and free
Where we make our last stand
Hispania, bright Christendom!
Runs through thy streams and soil
Where holy martyrs, blood flowed from
To crown thee true and royal…
Though you, Florida, abound in violets and acanthus, your flourish cannot match that of your martyr.
— Fr. Gerard Montanus, S.J. (1584-1632)
In the summer of 2020, amidst the chaos and uncertainty of that unhappy time, my family having lost its longstanding business and I having just learned that my wife was expecting our first child, with no source of income and unable to afford a house, I set out to build a town.
The idea may sound a bit rash, perhaps mad even. It all came about rather suddenly, as did much of the unexpected strangeness that occurred in those days. Of course, who hasn’t, at some point, dreamt of thumbing his nose at Mordor and building his own bastion of sanity amidst the confused mayhem of modern life? Returning to the Shire, as it were. Or, as in our case, restoring it. For me, founding a settlement had always been on the long list of things that I would do if my retirement plan of winning the Powerball ever panned out, but it was merely a faint hope and dream. Not the kind of thing one would actually attempt to do without everything first neatly and comfortably falling onto one’s lap.
Perhaps things did, indeed, fall onto my lap, but just not at all in the way that would be expected. Jobless, with the family business now gone and in the hands of a bad business partner, but, luckily, with a little bit of savings in the bank, I did what any new father feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders would do and quickly set out to find a way to provide for my new family’s future. Like many at that time, my instinct was to flee the city, seeing that the cities were more and more each day coming to resemble the totalitarian despotisms we had all become so familiar with through our books of 20th-century history and popular dystopian sci-fi novels.
My brilliant plan had been to leave Miami and purchase a small plot of land of an acre or two out in the middle of rural Florida to then have it turned into a small community of tiny homes organized in such a way so as to resemble that of a small village having aesthetically pleasing, thoughtfully planned common areas and doing everything possible to keep it from looking like the planned cookie cutter suburb that has, tragically, become so emblematic of much of my beloved Florida. In effect, I was looking to create what amounted to a glorified trailer park. A major concern at the time, as now, was the problem of housing affordability. Like countless others of my generation, home ownership was quickly becoming unattainable for me. If my grand scheme worked out, it would give me, and others like me, a feasible way of owning a decent, if very small, home within a pleasant setting.
As Providence would have it, however, one fateful morning after attending mass I was confronted with the bold question that catalyzed what would come to be known as the Pascua Project. Amidst casual conversation with my good friend and classically trained architect, Philip Rhea, I began to describe my desperate plan as he listened and commiserated with me about my current situation. We discussed things at length while he fed me valuable advice until eventually, noticeably underwhelmed by my enthusiastic endeavor, he turned to me and asked: “Instead of a trailer park, why don’t you just build a town?”
Why not just build a town? It turns out that, besides being broke and lacking any experience, I couldn’t really come up with a good answer. Why not, indeed? And just like that, the effort to realize Pascua was born.
Philip and I set to work immediately and tirelessly. There was so much to consider, so much to study and learn. So many people to reach out to. I spent every weekend for the better part of the next two years, and sometimes much more, on the road scouting properties across the state. Finding friends along the way that I could stay with. At times I took my wife and newborn son along, sometimes I even convinced my parents to hop in the car with us. It was a wild adventure. Gradually we built up a small team made up of a couple of passionate amateur small farmers, an urban planner, an incredible real estate agent willing to go above and beyond the call of duty, a few close friends, and a very generous and energetic real estate lawyer with all the experience in raising funds that we lacked. Some of us were already good friends while others became so along the way. We all jumped headfirst into the project, and slowly our vision began to take shape.
Pascua, the name of our proposed settlement, was taken as a homage to Florida’s Spanish Catholic roots. Christened by our Christian forebears as Pascua Florida, meaning Flowery Easter, upon first sighting her shores on Easter Sunday, 1513, our state would become home to the oldest European settlement in North America, Saint Augustine, and with it the site of the first celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass on our continent. Bedewed by the blood of many now sadly forgotten martyrs, the state boasts a surprising and dramatic, if somewhat short-lived, history of unyielding fidelity to the Faith and Holy Mother Church. Taking inspiration from this ignored, and all too often intentionally suppressed, inheritance, we proposed to plant our flag in this land of our faithful forefathers.
Among some of our most pressing concerns with regard to the project has been how to avoid the abysmal failure that is often associated with the creation of intentional communities. Common commitment and intentionality, even a shared liturgical life, although absolutely essential (and, in the case of liturgy, central), are, in the end, no substitute for practical functionality. Lacking any sort of robust economic foundation such as a shared profitable enterprise that joins common work to individual sustenance, a tight network of small farms and cottage industries, the operation of a school or university and the necessary goods and services that come along with it, or any other such cornerstones of practical social cohesion, a community will wither and at length die or else have to be propped up on life support through some extrinsic means of sustenance that is alien and ultimately opposed to its natural flourishing.
I believe that this is a key lesson that can be taken from other intentional communities and is what consistently means the difference between failure or success. A group of remote workers playing at homesteading on the weekends, however enthusiastic or large in number, cannot sustainably generate the necessary social capital for a properly functioning and economically viable community.[7] This is the great challenge we must confront in our nomadic age of increasingly abstract and disconnected modes of work in which the tradesman, the small farmer and the modest owner of real productive property are each day becoming more of an endangered species.
The road to Pascua has, thus far, been long and winding, consisting of many fits and starts, and has been anything but straightforward. Full of surprises, both good and bad, it is proving to be a rich and immersive learning experience showcasing just how wrong and backwards everything in modern society is. How the most basic and fundamental things in life like community, small businesses and a local economy; access to clean, non-poisonous food; and even just simple human shelter, to name a few, are directly under attack by a cold and ruthless bureaucratic state; large, usurious financial institutions; enormous corporations and the insidious ideology of Liberalism that have all laid a violent stranglehold on the way of life of the average American.
I’ve experienced firsthand just how difficult it is to discuss a noble, and even desperately needed, undertaking — especially one having to do with real estate, and real estate in Florida, at that — outside the framework of a Liberal economic order where everything is reduced to a mere commodity, and how absolutely essential something at least akin to a functioning aristocracy with a deep-seated sense of noblesse oblige and self-sacrificeis to the development and preservation of any kind of healthy and properly ordered society. In effect, I’ve come to realize how simply coming to the defense of the most ordinary things in life is in fact the most radical and extraordinary gesture one can make in this topsy-turvy world of ours.
Two years after that momentous conversation with Philip, our small, ragtag group of intrepid reconquistadores (or aspiring “real estate developers”, as those with impoverished imaginations and no clue of what we’re trying to accomplish may be tempted to call us) found itself in a meeting with, arguably, New Urbanism’s most well-known founder, as well as the movement’s greatest exponent, Andrés Duany. Sitting in his Little Havana office, we went over the details of our grand multi-generational project as we drank deep from the font of wisdom of a true pioneer and master of his craft. It speaks volumes about his, and his wonderful team members’, dedication to the success of the movement that on multiple occasions they have been willing to put aside time in order to meet and seriously discuss our perhaps overly ambitious musings. To have been given such an opportunity has been truly humbling and we will forever be grateful for such generosity.
Soon after the memorable meeting with Andrés, we discovered our first serious prospective property. The plan was to see if we could negotiate what would have to be a very creative deal, being that the cash we had on hand was not exactly impressive when facing off with a property of more than 400 acres in Florida at the height of probably the greatest real estate boom in all the annals of history. Nevertheless, we decided to throw caution to the wind and go for it. All but two of the dedicated Pascua families, (who lived out of state and weren’t able to make the trip) showed up at that beautiful and overlooked corner of North Florida one June morning.
There were many minivans and lots of kids that day. When we arrived on the property the two sisters who owned the land came to warmly greet us all in typical Southern fashion as one of our number stood at the back of his Honda Odyssey preparing Mint Juleps for everyone, which had been jokingly requested in passing: fresh mint, crushed ice, along with the best bourbon in the land were all dutifully brought along and put on offer for all — with the appropriate drinking glasses, of course, I might add. Thankfully, probably by some miracle of Providence, the sisters didn’t find this gesture in any way peculiar or abnormal (or a combination of both rude and completely insane, as would have been understandable). Instead, they seemed rather charmed and amused and even offered their kitchen for greater ease in concocting the cocktails.
It was a wonderful morning and afternoon as we got to know and talk to the two women whose father had purchased the property generations earlier, after returning from fighting in the Second World War, and turned the multiple parcels into profitable ferneries. We all got along quite well and bonded over the course of that typical Florida summer day that kept threatening to pour on us. Which it, of course, eventually did, forcing us all to take refuge in one of the houses on the property.
In the end, the sisters were not impressed by our offer — nor by the financial acrobatics that came along with it. Lesser people might have expressed offense. Thankfully, they were good sports about it all and even entertained a few more discussions on the matter after the fact. Still, I dream about that land and its grand old moss-covered trees in that neglected and forgotten-by-time bucolic setting. In fact, I still hold out some hope that it may yet one day bear the name Pascua and that we will once again imbibe mint juleps under the shade of its live oaks – perhaps even by retrofitting that land’s already existing adjacent small town, or some other yet unforeseen scenario. As with so much else, that remains to be seen as we continue to move ahead in earnest along this journey of discovery and promise.
THE GRAND ADVENTURE OF OUR TIMES
Flee, for God’s sake, flee from the sapped ramparts of success. Go home to the ruined neighborhoods and villages of your childhood and rebuild them. They will accuse you of nostalgia. In Greek, nostalgia means “home-sickness.” Our hearts have been pierced like the sad heart of Ruth, sick for home amid the alien corn. Contrary to the famous verse, home is something you have very much to deserve. In fact you must sacrifice your life for it.
— John Senior, The Restoration of Christian Culture
Be bold, but wary! Keep up your merry hearts, and ride to meet your fortune.
— Tom Bombadil, The Lord of the Rings
To build amidst civilizational collapse is the grand adventure we have been called to. Before us is the choice of either passively accepting a life of social and spiritual destitution amidst the ruins of a new and grotesque barbarism, or courageously embracing our vocations as the sons and daughters of the greatest and most noble cultural inheritance. If successful, this daring, almost unthinkable, recovery will, in turn, serve as our unabashed monument proclaiming Christ’s Kingship over our land and people, over our homes, neighborhoods, nations and institutions, which, after lowering ourselves and turning to the Most High, will surely result in the sweet balm of heavenly grace condescending to bestow upon us its healing remedy, so that the broken and humbled bones of our society may, once more, rejoice.
Nevertheless, every possible natural impediment has been set before us on the harrowing path that lies ahead, which will form a veritable via dolorosa of continual setbacks and falls under the weight of a fierce and burdensome opposition. Tyrannical laws that violently resist the formation of community, dehumanizing and acidic technologies that continue to eat away at the little social and cultural capital that remains, a utilitarian and usurious economic order that forcibly uproots us and commodifies the most precious things in life out of existence, a raging war against our immemorial traditions and liturgy, a multifaceted and unrelenting assault on the family, are but a few of the attacks in which we find ourselves besieged by a ruthless and implacable enemy.
The challenge is, in fact, stark, with little to no hope of success, and failure seems the only imaginable outcome. The wise will, undoubtedly, look on with curious amusement at what they will likely refer to as mere impudent gestures of defiance proceeding from a wildly impractical and regressive minority. Yet, unbeknownst to the jeers and scoffs of a mocking world sluggishly dragging the wearisome weight of an unchallenged dominance is the fact that the Christian — that forsaken orphan of our vanquished civilization — silently caries a secret hope within him (an exhilarating knowledge, in fact) that with the darkness and failure of the humiliating defeat of death comes the ultimate triumph of resurrection.
So, then, let us cheerfully go out to our deaths with full hearts, amidst the brightness of song and the warm camaraderie of friendship, and be that vexing stumbling block and sign of contradiction to the hubris of a decrepit world — evermore quickly advancing towards the twilight of senility — that cannot understand that our final victory, our happy and unexpected revenge, will be the thundering laughter of our children.
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Special thanks to Alejandro Selin without whose help I could never have written this.
[1] I say all this as I type on a computer and as you read from a digital screen. Such is the modern predicament that we all find ourselves in. We are like the man who makes use of the wood from the tree that fell and crushed his legs in order to fashion a set of crutches that allow him at least some limited mobility amidst his lame state. Certainly, like this unfortunate man, we use what we must to get by. But let us not be like the fool who praises the fallen tree because, as he says, “without its falling and making me lame I would never have had the wood available to make the crutches that now give me the ability to stumble about the earth forever as a cripple”. Our thinking and approach to technology, I’m convinced, must be much more radical — by orders of magnitude. Certainly, I don’t believe that we should look to one uniform approach in addressing the problem (except, of course, with regard to Senior’s command that we literally smash the television — and I could name a few other such devices to which the same course of action would, more than likely, be the correct one), but I can at the very least say this: let us not fear the Amish; rather, let us learn from their wisdom. A return to the simplicity of the Shire is not a retreat, it is a formidable advance in the direction of sanity. An escape from the shadow of civilizational darkness and a moving forward into the clear light of day. Until we can see this, I fear there will be little hope, if any, for an authentic restoration of Christian culture.
[2] Seaside, FL, Serenbe, GA, Cayala, GT, Poundbury, UK, etc.
[3] “The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants …But when several families are united, and the association aims at something more than the supply of daily needs, the first society to be formed is the village. …When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.” (Aristotle, Pol. I)
[4] “[Aristotle] shows of what things the city is made up. For, just as a village is made up of several households, so a city is made up of several villages. Secondly, he says that the city is a perfect society; and this he proves from the fact that, since every association among all men is ordered to something necessary for life, that society will be perfect which is ordered to this: that man have sufficiently whatever is necessary for life. Such a society is the city. For it is of the nature of the city that in it should be found all the things that are sufficient for human life; and so it is. And for this reason it is made up of several villages, in one of which the art of the smith is practiced, in another the art of the weaver, and so of the others. Hence it is evident that the city is a perfect society. Thirdly, he shows to what the city is ordered. It is originally made for the sake of living, namely, that men might find sufficiently that from which they might be able to live; but from its existence it comes about that men not only live but that they live well, in so far as by the laws of the city the life of men is ordered to the virtues.” (Aquinas, Pol. I, lect. 1, n. 23.)
[5] Not to be confused with “The 15 Minute City”. There has, of course, been an appropriation of the concept of “The 15 Minute City” by our technocratic oligarchs wherein they have manipulated the term to assist their pursued end of enslaving humanity. That being said, there is no doubt that our efforts to restore the principles of traditional urbanism will serve to oppose their nefarious agenda just as much, if not more than, eating red meat, having large families and generally being decent human beings who don’t share their interest in cultivating intimate friendship with Satan.
[6] Plato, Laws, 737d, 738e, 771e.
[7] None of this is to say that greatly beneficial things cannot grow out of less than ideal arrangements. We cannot make the perfect the enemy of the good and must work with what we have. Better a real failure than a perfect fantasy. But our aim, nevertheless, should always be the proper ordering of things. The end is in the beginning, as the metaphysical principle goes. We must understand what we’re trying to arrive at from the very outset. If we lose sight of this, if we fail to grasp the telos of community and with it its proper essence and form, our progress will in the end be stifled and our efforts to build truly viable and practically functioning communities will never come into full bloom.