The same thing that makes for a beautiful piece of music makes for a healthy society: harmony.

In a beautiful musical composition (such as the alt-folk album Appaloosa Bones that I’m listening to as I write), the notes of each chord harmonize with one another, as do the notes of the melody, and a unifying rhythm holds all the pieces together. Something in our human nature easily and immediately knows the difference between harmony and dissonance. Notes in harmony are unified. Dissonant notes are not. Of course, composers can make good use of dissonance at times, but, as a rule, a piece of music that is entirely dissonant will be ugly. It is not at one with itself.

The same holds for a culture. If a civilization lacks harmony–between all its constituent parts–it lacks something essential. I fear that America today is missing this unifying principle, this wholesome integration of all its parts. Many of our problems, I would suggest, derive from this disharmony, this disintegration.

The scientific revolution certainly brought to the West a host of benefits. But at the same time, it emphasized one way of thinking, a way of thinking with advantages and disadvantages. One of the disadvantages of the scientific mind is that it tends to continually narrow its scope, to classify, dissect, and divide. There’s a reason we often picture a scientist dressed in a lab coat, staring through a microscope. The scientific mind zeros in. It seeks to break things into parts in order to understand what the thing is made of–a useful technique, to be sure, as long as we do not forget the wholeness of the thing, as long as we do not compromise that integrity for the sake of microscopic precision. As Gandalf says in The Fellowship of the Ring, “He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”

As the scientific era has progressed, more and more aspects of human life and society have been stratified in this manner–separated out, dissected. More and more of the pieces of life have become the domain of experts and a scientific specialization that too often neglects the whole picture. Human life is ultimately one thing, not a collection of separate specialties.

Let me make this idea more concrete. Consider how much our society suffers from division and compartmentalization. In medicine, for example, most doctors specialize on a particular section of the body, often failing to take into account the health of the whole person and how physiological systems are interdependent and integrated (as a popular Tucker Carlson podcast episode recently pointed out).

In education, subjects are too often taught completely independently of one another, with no unifying vision of the world tying together the different disciplines.

In agriculture, the health of the soil, environment, local community, and even the plants themselves is forgotten and separated from the monomaniacal goal of increasing yields. In its impact on the average citizen, industrial agriculture tends to separate us from the earth that gives us life.

In politics, we seek to create a “neutral public space” separated from the influence of religion, ethics, or philosophy, as though such considerations could ever be divorced from the pursuit of the public good.

With the rise in divorce, families are frequently divided within themselves, with husbands separated from wives, and children separated from both parents via daycare.

Our technologies, when misused, tend to separate us from our local communities, from face-to-face conversation, from the natural world, and from our own reflections recollected in quiet solitude.

In our day-to-day living, we tend to isolate and fracture different aspects of the human experience: family life vs. work life vs. love life vs. rec life vs. prayer life, as though all these were somehow opposed. We even have “experts” assigned to guiding us in these various domains!

To be clear, I understand the necessity and value of analyzing the parts of something in order to better understand it. However, analysis should always lead back to synthesis: gathering together the details observed through careful examination to form a larger picture of the whole system.

When it comes to human society, that “system” is really human life itself. The Scholastics taught that a human being is neither just a body nor just a soul, but a composite of both. Thus, if we accept that premise, a healthy human society must recognize and reflect this mysterious integration present at the core of who we are, of what it means to be human.

A human being is not just a farmer, businessman, president, poet, father, husband, fisherman, runner, lover, writer, soldier, citizen, son, liver, heart, brain, soul, creature of God–he is all of these things at once. We forget that at our peril.

It is possible to imagine a culture without such pervasive atomization. Indeed, some periods in history have succeeded more at integration than others. Imagine, for example, a man who works at home on a family business in which his wife and children take part. Let’s say it’s a woodworking business. He works with his hands on wood gathered from his own property. The family grows some of their own food, food that is truly nourishing to the whole body, and they share it or exchange it with other families in the area. Those families join together, at times, to protect and nurture what they have built through political action, though they would not call it such.

Our woodworking family man emerges as a natural leader, though he considers his “political career” really an extension of his duties as a husband, father, businessman, and neighbor. If he becomes ill, the woodworker is treated by a neighbor with dietary adaptations and medicinal herbs that grow in the region.

In the evenings, the man and his family read aloud from books that contain stories possessing a universality that resonates with their own experiences, tying together the different threads of human life. Or they go to the local public house and talk with their neighbors who are also their business partners and political allies. Or they make music or play games, thus creating rather than consuming entertainment, and the recreation is not isolated or solitary but communal, reinforcing family bonds.

Finally, the family prays with each other, with their neighbors, before their political gatherings. In truth, the woodworker prays frequently throughout the day–or really, all of the time, because he offers up all that he does in his work as a husband, father, carpenter, politician–in short, as a man–to God. Family life is thus integrated with work life, work life with communal life, communal life with political life, political life with prayer life, prayer life with family life.

This image is, of course, idealistic and simplistic. But it contains, I think, a glimmer of truth, and even historical truth. Many people throughout history have lived out lives not dissimilar from the one I sketched above, and many cultures have fostered that kind of integrated life among its people. We might do worse than to look to such examples, recognizing, of course, that such a vision must itself be modified and integrated into modern life as we know it.

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Image credit: Pexels