It may seem unlikely, but the world you live in is smaller than Glen Rock, New Jersey. It is said that the average American meets about 10,000 people during the course of his life, making the 2.7 square mile borough—about 15 miles northeast of Manhattan and populated by about 12,000 men, women, and children—larger than the entire world. Even if it happened that the real count is 100 times larger, the world would still be smaller than Philadelphia. Regardless of the exact number, it is undeniably true that none of us approach reality in its true proportion.
This past summer, I came across a Victorian house in a Delaware shore town and observed a flag hanging from the front porch. It was one of many flags on one of many such porches—most of which bore stripes of either patriotism or pride—but this one was different. Unlike the rest, on the flag waving in front of this house was an image of the Earth on a dark blue background. It took a second to decipher the oddity, before it dawned on me that while a citizen of the United States may fly an American flag, a “global citizen” may fly an “Earth flag.” I suspect this terrestrial allegiance is not a rarity in contemporary Western civilization. A global orientation has been the basis of the West’s foreign and economic policy since the end of the Second World War. Many Americans work for global corporations, drive foreign cars, concern themselves with news of distant lands, donate to charities supporting children thousands of miles from home, and see nothing even remotely spectacular about eating foods from halfway around the planet. The global mindset, then, is understandable, but, ultimately, a fantasy.
When we think globally, we think of things that do not actually exist to us, while ignoring the very real people we see every day. We hear of a war in Ukraine and very rightly pray for the Ukrainian people who face bombs and bullets, but it is God who knows these people for whom we pray, not us. We have merely created images in our heads of theoretically beleaguered Ukrainians. They are stand-ins for a reality that, to us, is obscure. It is not necessarily bad when we do this in prayer, because prayer is not a zero-sum-game, but we can fall into something of a trap. The trouble stems from a dirty trick played by one who would have you think you are virtuous, while leading you away from real charity. It is preferable to this wicked one that you love imaginary things—that you devote time, emotion, and even prayer to that which is a fantasy. The intended result is having you divert your energy and attention from the loving charity you are capable of affecting in the lives of people you know and encounter daily. Those of us who have worked in finance, or the corporate world more broadly, know the experience of going out of our way to please a client we may never even have met, felt virtuous for doing so, before returning home to exact bitterness and impatience on those with whom we live. There is little to no virtue in the work done for the client, because it is void of genuine love. To love is to will the good of the other as other, so how can you will the good of the other—how can you love the other— if you don’t really even know who the other is? This is true in charitable works as well, when that charity takes the form of sending money to a distant population in need of it. While certainly materially good and, as an act of giving of oneself, spiritually beneficial, this sort of impersonal charity lacks the love associated with more tangible local charity.
Distant charity, however, may be spiritually fruitful if it is the best option available or if it is the extension of charity shown to more proximate people. Indeed, the sin inherent in the globalist view is in putting the imagined before the real. It is a disordered prioritization of obligation. In the Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas lays out a natural order of charity. In essence, he sets out a hierarchy of obligations based on the people to which one is united. A man should, for example, love God more than himself, his own soul more than his neighbor, his neighbor more than his own body, a person he is related to more than one he is not related to, etc. Thomas’ answer to this question of order is especially pertinent to the issue of globalism when he argues, “[the] very act of loving someone because he is akin or connected with us, or because he is a fellow countryman or for any like reason that is referable to the end of charity, can be commanded by charity” (ST II-II, q. 26 a. 7). This suggests that the nature of charity itself requires one to love more someone to whom one is more closely connected. He further explains, “we ought out of charity to love those who are more closely united to us more, both because our love for them is more intense, and because there are more reasons for loving them” (ST II-II, q. 26 a. 8). To make this principle clear, however, Thomas is not describing an exclusive love, but rather a rightly ordered starting point for love. This non-exclusivity is made clear when he argues the order of charity will be maintained in Heaven, a place characterized by love, stating “the order of charity given above is derived from nature; since all things naturally love themselves more than others. Therefore, this order of charity will endure in Heaven” (ST II-II, q. 26, a. 13).
Instead of the globalist approach, we must adopt the localist approach. Instead of prioritizing what is distant, as Thomas suggests we must prioritize what is near before moving to what is distant. This ordering is implicit in the philosophy of localism as set forth by GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Localism, or distributism, as Chesterton called it, by his own admission did not have an exact structure or lay out a hard model for the economy or society, but rather embraces principles that localize power and decision making. In essence it seeks policies that “discourage the sale of small property to big proprietors and encourage the break-up of big property among small proprietors”—this, I dare say, includes the small versus large business dynamic—while also protecting small property/business from the tendency to be dominated in legal disputes by larger entities that can also afford the burdens of regulation that their smaller competitors cannot (Chesterton, A Misunderstanding about Method). The local scale of a system produced by Chesterton’s principles would be more in line with the world as it is actually experienced. He argues, “the universal habit of humanity has been to produce and consume as part of the same process; largely conducted by the same people in the same place” (Chesterton, Reflections on a Rotten Apple). A localist-oriented system, then, would encourage robust communities in which people are supported by the work of their neighbors and can be assured that their work is helping the people they see everyday in a meaningful way, not just creating theoretic utility for imagined personalities.
Localism, then, embraces reality by seeing the world the right way round. It begins with the harsh and incarnate realities set before us, then works its way to more distant and imaginative concerns. It embraces the very principle of unity and obligation that define who we are. Given the identity crisis our society faces, where countries no longer hold their traditional values and individuals lack knowledge of their roles in society, this is no small feat—indeed it might well bring us back from the brink of disintegration. More importantly, however, it follows Christ’s imperative to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” To Christians, this is such an obvious and often heard commandment that we consider it in much the same way we consider the paint on our walls or the tree by the driveway. It is quite nice on those occasions when we actually notice it, but most of the time we might as well be blind. The Latin word for “neighbor” used in the Vulgate (St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible) is “proximus” which is where we get the word proximate. Our neighbor, then is the proximate one—the one who is near us. When Christ tells us who our neighbor is in the parable of the good Samaritan, the Samaritan tends to the robbed man he finds left for dead on the side of the road. The man was passed by those who shared his culture, faith, and allegiance. The Samaritan was the robbed man’s neighbor simply because he was there and loved him. The good Samaritan did not hear about the plight of robbed Jews discarded in ditches and send money to Judea for their relief. He saw this robbed Jew right in front of him, went down into the ditch and took care of him. The good Samaritan was in a particular place at a particular time and loved the best he could. In this, we see the proximate and incarnate nature of love.
Our God is not an abstract God who looks down on the Earth in order to ensure the prosperity of all humanity. Our God is a concrete God who stands beside each person offering to carry each and every soul, one by one, to Heaven. Our God became man—flesh and blood—subject to pain and temptation in one particular place, at one particular time. In His Earthly ministry, He who had at His disposal the Roman roads and trade routes that brought his evangelists to the distant corners of the globe, never ventured outside an area the size of New Jersey. His world at that time, like ours now, was about the size of Glen Rock. Why do we persist in this aboriginal sin of thinking we are wiser, greater, and more virtuous than Our God? If we are to be Christians, or, at very least people who attempt to will the good of the world, we must acknowledge the smallness of that world and work to be charitable where and when the opportunity presents itself in the flesh.
Frank J. Connor is the author of The Ridiculous Man and The Progressive Reports. He is a former journalist at Fox News and worked as an analyst at a prominent bond rating agency. Frank graduated from Villanova University in 2019, where he earned a degree in economics and wrote his first book. After years of discernment, he responded to a call to the Catholic priesthood and entered the Order of Saint Augustine in the summer of 2021 where he is currently in formation.
