Terry Teachout describes the losses and the gains of community as our culture becomes more fragmented. Certainly blogs both contribute to and subtract from the sense of community.
Thoreau believed: “Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. What is a house but a sedes, a seat? — better if a country seat. I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it.” Of course, if we have a common culture, we can understand his allusion – that some “might have thought too far from the village”-but he is reminding us that we don’t necessarily have the same perspective, for some of us “the village was too far from it.”
The blogosphere lets us move us along the horizontal, popping in some one else’s world, our horizons change, broaden. We remain us, but come back to our own center with more sense of other’s. Belmont Club’s allusions are often to Kipling; this may surprise twenty-first century Americans, but they check it daily. Few probably read Kipling in school (only Matthew Arnold is a deader or whiter male). But the Belmont Club (and the poets quoted) touch us. Wretchard, confident and sure of his own perspective, helps us see the world with his proportionality; it may differ from ours in some important ways but for many of us, much of what he says rings true. He writes well but we sense he also understands well.
What we find as we look around the blogosphere are fragments – this blog or that blog seems far from our way of looking at the world. And, indeed, we are unlikely to visit often. But we often see solutions, as well, to our most vexing problems.