Modernity and Medievalism

A thought coming together by reading Angels in the Architecture and I'll Take My Stand at the same time is the crisis of modernity. It really matters very little if we put it as Wilson and Jones do (Modernity vs. Medievalism), as the Southern Agrarians do (Industrialism vs. Agrarianism), or as we moderns would likely phrase it (liberalism vs. conservatism), the end result is the same.
The main thing each group is talking about is a level of responsibility. In Angels and I'll Take My Stand, both groups are arguing that responsibility is local.
The modern world wants responsibility to consist entirely of the rights and privileges of life, if they acknowledge its existence at all. They want to cut it short of the duties and labors of life. We have seen this most obviously in the creation of the welfare state. Growing up in Middle Tennessee, I worked at a grocery store while still in high school. I remember moms who would give their children a dollar food stamp each to buy a pack of gum or piece of candy. Then they would collect the change (food stamps always had cash value once they got below a dollar) and buy cigarettes (which you couldn't spend food stamps on). The welfare state has created this image. If the medieval, conservative, agrarian conception of life were still in place, we would know better.
The medieval, conservative, agrarian conception of life, its worldview, would state that an individual is responsible for himself or herself. That responsibility could and would be gladly shouldered by an entire community of like-minded folks, but never the state. Prior to Reconstruction, men say it was possible to go one's entire life without seeing evidence of the federal government. Now it is impossible to make it through a single day without their hand being felt.