In a blog today, someone called Steve Aden had an interesting point:  "In law and culture, as in all spheres of life, the “natural order” tends always to disorder. Culture, as the term implies, must be cultivated, because bad ideas drive out good ones like weeds in an unkempt garden."


He went on to speak rightly of the need to stand against abortion, but it seemed to me as I read it that it could be equally a call to stand against the foolish thinking in many other areas of political and cultural life.  


I have never read Mr. Aden before, but I think he hit on something when he said that culture comes first, then law.  And while we may understandably feel overwhelmed when we as individuals think of making or remaking laws, making culture is a matter of daily choice for each and all of us.  Culture is simply the fabric we create when we make the thousands of little decisions every day about how we will choose to live.  Will we mow our grass or not?  Where will we invest our time and money?  Dine at home or out tonight?  What shoes will I wear?  How will I arrange our bathroom cabinet?  What will we do for a living?  Do those drapes go with that couch?  


And these questions are answered only after we have answered more fundamental ones:  what do we believe is valuable?  what true?  what good?  what beautiful?  What/who do we trust to guide us when we define these categories?  


But this leads me back to the first quote from Mr. Aken.  In all spheres of life, the natural way is toward disorder.  Things, if left alone, will fall apart, not come together.  It requires energy, time, expense, focus, discipline, for good to occur.  In short, it takes a will to work to make things good.  A culture declines as soon as it thinks that good can occur without work.  If we were ever, for example, to come to the point that most people wanted to live well without working, we would come apart at the seams as a culture.  We would go down in the history books like Rome: defeated not by outward attack, but by a lack of inward commitment to the good, true, and beautiful.  Without the will to strive for these things the natural forces take over, and we decline into barbarism.  Cultures decline due to exhaustion - we can rest on our rakes, but we can't put them away.  Things don't stay neutral, they decline, so without a vision, there is no work to accomplish that vision, and thus the people perish.  The welfare state/big government issues are not my point here - big government is the natural result of what I am saying which is that making cultural decisions like what is beautiful, and what is delicious turn out to be far more important than we have been led to believe.  Those commitments to the good, true, beautiful, by millions of people, leads to civilization with wiser laws, more honest governors, truer charity, and sounder fiscal policy.  In the long run, we must be committed to principles that make a certain course of action distasteful (even if it is legal), and so rejected because it runs against our corporate vision of the human life well lived before God.  Without these inner commitments, there is no civilization in our culture.