Without Borders, Ltd.
Mark T. Mitchell on Bailout Schemes & the Loss of Limits
A question: What do these two books have in common? A Garfield the Cat book and My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One Night Stands. Or these two: A book on Mother Teresa’s spirituality and Holy S**T: The World’s Weirdest Comics, featuring, on the cover, “Tales from the Leather Nun,” complete with a bare-breasted woman. Answer: these books are paired alongside each other at my local Borders.
Presumably, the Garfield book was intended to attract the kids, whose parents, perhaps, could then browse through the confessions of a randy woman while they waited on their tots. I’m less sure about the intention behind the second pair. Part of me hopes that these incongruities are the work of an employee who is silently, but symbolically, rebelling against perceived social norms. Unfortunately, in all likelihood, no such person is at work, and these juxtapositions are the result of completely random acts of carelessness.
I find this second possibility to be far more disturbing.
Our Cultural Astigmatism
If the book arrangements were intentional, that would indicate a sense, or at least an awareness, of propriety and a desire to offend. Rebellion requires a set of norms that are pushed against. Or, to put the matter in religious terms, heresy requires orthodoxy. And if there is an orthodoxy, there is hope, for that means there is a stable set of beliefs and commitments by which a community lives, and against which some rebel. An orthodoxy can change, but even in the change, there is continuity, and that continuity provides structure, stability, and a communal sense of propriety.
On the other hand, if, as I suspect, those books were placed together on the displays at random and for no particular reason, we have good reason for concern. In such a case, the sense of propriety (against which one might rebel) has been replaced by apathy—or perhaps not apathy so much as a lost ability to make distinctions. When we lose the ability to distinguish between the silly and the serious, between the public and the private, between the sacred and the profane, we have lost the ability to live as civilized human beings.
These book displays at Borders can, I think, stand as a symbol of our cultural astigmatism. And as odd as it may seem, I think we can learn something about our current economic troubles from them, for, at root, our problems are not economic at all. Rather, they are complex issues tied invariably to a culture that does not recognize the impropriety of placing a book on Mother Teresa’s spirituality beside one depicting the bare breasts of a cartoon vixen.
Such a world is one in which limits have collapsed. In our headlong rush to embrace the fruits of our individual freedom, we have forgotten that freedom without propriety leads to irreverence, irresponsibility, and, ultimately, disintegration. The economic turmoil our leaders are laboring so mightily to stave off is the product, not of anonymous market forces, but of our failure to respect limits.
A sense of propriety provides limits for both individual and corporate action. Limits create stability; they give form and meaning to society, as a skeleton gives form to the body. When a broad consensus on what constitutes propriety is lost, the sense of limits collapses. Form is reduced merely to a massive lump where distinctions are lost: where sacredness means nothing and therefore nothing is profane; where all things are made public and privacy loses its meaning; where the silly and the serious mingle and no one knows whether to laugh or to mourn.
The Harder but Better Way
Mark T. Mitchell teaches political theory at Patrick Henry College in Virginia. He is the co-founder of Front Porch Republic.
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