One of the great tensions of modern life is how to rebuild a genuinely human culture in a digital age.
Civilization Begins in the Ordinary
modern life beauty digital age embodiment civilization
I walked down the stairs today of my home today, past the drying rack where my many delicate, natural-fiber clothing pieces have been hanging for several days, dried and still wrinkled, calling out to me for attention, and started thinking:
Civilization starts with the laundry. Civilization starts at home.
Of course, it’s easier to philosophize about the laundry than it is to actually do it—I came back in after my errand to write this piece and walked right by it again on my way in—but the philosophizing must be done, lest we allow ourselves to live in abstractions beyond our purview of influence, lamenting our state and doing nothing effective to transform it. We will miss the daily opportunities for redemption laid out right in front of us.
The good news is that our homes and intimate lives are exactly where it all starts, and from where this grand vision many of us have extends out to a culture built for human flourishing rather than ugliness and destruction.
The woman who owns the home where I live, in her eighties, still prunes the roses and the jasmine and the plumerias whose scent floats up through my front window in the spring. She maintains her corner of the world beautifully, in the way that so many others on this street do—the many others whose constancy and diligence we will miss as they disappear behind the veil one by one over the coming years.
I can’t shake that absolute clarity: that even aside from a redemptive perspective on human action so knit into a Christian framework such that every action can be made profound in love, our small actions are exactly the building blocks for the edifice of civilization. We can, in fact, fight against the overloaded experience so many of us have in the digital world and channel this toward the rebuilding of a truly human culture.
The opposite is also true, and we are beginning to appreciate increasingly more as modern society in many ways collapses: the seemingly small actions of those who have learned and chosen to be undisciplined and disruptive in public or with their own spheres of influence, often degrading themselves and those around them, cause a fragmentation of the societal order we all need to thrive.
In fact, this disruption, I would argue, is often a cry for significance. But that tantrum unnecessary; by existing in order, we are all enormously significant to the whole project of civilization.
For this intrinsic importance to land, however, we do have to understand that we belong to each other and are agents of each other’s fulfillment in destiny, however small of a role we may seem to play.
The Small Actions That Shape a Culture
We are faced, daily, with decisions about order, cleanliness, generosity, health, vitality. We can choose to pour ourselves out into so much of the meaninglessness online or flow out in disorder in our lives and to those around us, or we can be curators of our time and sensibility, spending time and energy more on those things which matter—which doesn’t exclude the wonders made possible by technology, but does often point us quite urgently outside of it to the real and embodied things that shift the physical world.
The reality is that a well-kept yard and home with its own either actual or metaphorical jasmine and roses is a pronouncement to every passerby that we are made for dignity, love, order, and honor—just as the badly kept one a few doors down is a reminder of the tendency to entropy we are always fighting in our nature and at large.
This applies, too, to the decisions we make for our interior space, as well as for our most interior space—our bodies.
It matters that we do the dishes and can therefore function better within an ordered environment.
It matters that we are clean and nourished by good food and water, encouraging health and attention in and through our physicality.
It matters that we have a few beautiful clothes that bring us into contact with our higher nature.
It matters that we leave the house clean and groomed and peaceful so that we can be a sign of the great calling it is to be human to all of those we encounter.
Why Order, Beauty, and Embodiment Still Matter
The reality is that as much as we need ambitious people taking on the larger, systemic strategies that can build more beautiful spaces and cause more of us to share in intentional humanity and civilizational activities, every word we speak and every action we do has a ripple effect outward, for good or evil or gradual degeneration. The language we choose, the way we speak and present ourselves, the fact that we choose agency over impulse in a million ways throughout our lives—it all matters.
Now, remember: I began this piece with an admission that my laundry has been left undone, which inspired this piece to start with. I am no clean freak, and there are many ways I am aware that I fail in my desire to build the civilization I crave from the inside out.
But just because it’s hard and we will continually fall short does not mean a reminder isn’t due and useful.
It’s ultimately an encouraging message: that because we constantly shape one another in conversation (whether spoken explicitly or not), every day of our lives has immense value and bursts outward to others in more ways than we would ever even believe.
We can tend our own gardens (metaphorically if not in reality) and see what kind of world it grows into around us.
KAY CLARITY ARCHIVE 