My understanding of communal being is more exact and more explicit than the traditional understandings of our social natures. This is to say that traditionalists are vague enough about their understanding of our communal ties that they sometimes speak as if not so far from various sorts of radical individualists. No matter how committed to communities as far more than just voluntary gatherings of individuals, they have little in the way of concepts and words to talk about communities as being real. All it takes is to acknowledge each of us has communal being and we’re on a different plane of understanding.
How can this be? Is their some magical and invisible stuff which ties us into true communities?
We are entities created by relationships, starting with God’s love for us. We are entities shaped by relationships, including very importantly the love our mother bears for us when we are in her arms and we suck at her breast. Our beings are altered by these relationships, as I’ve claimed in various writings. See two of my freely downloadable books for reasonably complete views of my understanding of our human nature: Human Rights: An Evolutionary and Christian Perspective and A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.
Human being is both individual and communal. We sin as individuals. We sin as members of communities and are tied into even the sinful communal acts we disapprove of and maybe fight against.
We inherit some share in the sins of our fathers and the sins of our neighbors and those of our leaders. More than that, those sins lie upon our communal beings as our individual sins lie upon our individual beings.
If we tolerate or even prefer leaders who lie or wage criminal wars, those sins are absorbed that much more deeply into the deepest regions of our beings. If we nurture jingoistic rage or ecstasies in our individual selves and our communal selves, if we ignore or downplay the damage we do in the rampages generated by those rages and elations, we commit mortal sins and willingly take on evil characteristics. How many cheered or at least felt good as they watched us pulverize Baghdad and then went to church the next Sunday, feeling so good and holy and not even realizing that Catholic and Protestant traditions both teach that such a direct attack on a civilian target is a major sin?
Being a member of a community is to be part of multiple organs or cancerous organs or parasites of the Body of Christ as it develops in this mortal realm. You are shaped as members of communities and, if some of your communities do evil—certainly if they celebrate the evil they do, you are being shaped as a member of a community which is evil. There are few, if any, morally pure communities, but we who are adults in 2013 have lived through a period when we have, unless willfully blind and ignorant, learned that Lord Acton was right in warning about the dangers of power. In Are Serious Historians Conspiracy Nuts?, I wrote:
Lord Acton had said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and also had noted that powerful and centralized governments tend to attract men with the moral characters of gangsters.
It’s hard to separate ourselves from most of our human institutions and sometimes worse than staying and trying to protect your own self and those around you as much as possible. We have to morally muddle along at times and even to fly blind at times.
There is a small example of our moral decay which says much about this issue. Students in religious education no longer memorize Bible verses. Students in public and other schools no longer memorize important speeches or parts of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. Instead, they to home to fill their empty memories with biographical knowledge of disordered cretins in the entertainment industries; they fill their hearts with the lyrics of songs about sexual violence and recreational drugs and disordered teenaged anger; they shape their habits to their own immediate desires rather than learning the habits and customs of their traditions.
As for me, I make a deliberate effort to read good historical books and also biographies of great political and military leaders even when I grow weary of the subjects of government and economics and warfare. They had clay feet and a normal, but usually not excessive, share of moral failings. I pray the Psalter (by way of the traditional liturgy of hours), go through periods of reading the Bible and the writings of holy men and women. I try to fill my head with what is good and noble, to shape my habits and other acts to what would make my better ancestors proud.
When modern men and women fill their own beings with trashy thoughts and feelings, when they allow their children to be also filled with trashy thoughts and feelings, they show they are truly brothers and sisters, voluntarily share the communal being, of the political and military and business leaders who have committed so many crimes and other sins in recent generations. Too many modern men and women shape their own selves to desire what is morally unhealthy and then claim they’re good men and good women and on their way to Heaven, so long as they sit and cheer for war-crimes and violent sports rather than committing crimes with their own bodies.
They are members of the modern herd which moves to the rhythms and words of a great civilization sunk into moral degeneracy.