Burkean Communitarianism — A Critical Frame
Prompted by: Jakub Grygiel, “Your salted caramel mocha latte is destroying society,” Washington Post, March 2026
The Argument
Edmund Burke argued that liberty requires self-restraint — people are “qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites.” Applied to contemporary culture: hyper-individualized consumer choice (specialty coffee, bespoke everything) erodes shared norms and communal identity, producing the loneliness epidemic. Italy’s espresso culture is offered as a counterexample: simple menu, shared ritual, actual human interaction.
The remedy implied: limit customization, restore conformity to common rituals, recover cultural unity.
Where the Instinct Is Right
- Shared rituals do create community. Bellah’s work in Habits of the Heart (Bellah) confirms this — common practices are a “second language” that individual self-interest can’t replace
- Hyper-individualism does corrode solidarity — this is well-supported by Putnam, MacIntyre, and the Loneliness Epidemic data
- The Italy observation has a real kernel: the bar functions as a third place (see Oldenburg - The Great Good Place) and the espresso ritual is downstream of that infrastructure
Where It Breaks Down
1. Correlation laundered as causation. Specialty coffee and loneliness both increased since 2011 — so did smartphones, remote work, suburban sprawl, social media, and the collapse of third places. Grygiel picks the one that irritates him personally and treats it as cause rather than symptom.
2. The Italy comparison is doing unearned work. Italy has walkable cities, strong regional identity, multigenerational households, robust public space, and shorter working hours. The espresso is downstream of that infrastructure. Crediting the espresso for the community is like crediting Dutch wooden shoes for low obesity rates. The hardware precedes the ritual — see Community is Easy, Actually - Happy Urbanist.
3. Burke is misapplied. Burke’s concern was political liberty requiring moral self-restraint — he was writing about the French Revolution, not beverage customization. More importantly: Burke’s conservatism was about preserving existing community structures. Applied consistently, the same logic would defend America’s existing Starbucks culture, since that’s now the inherited norm.
4. The individualism diagnosis is right; the remedy is backwards. The solution to hyper-individualism isn’t restricting individual choice — it’s building the hardware (walkable neighborhoods, accessible public space, less overwork) that makes incidental community possible. Forced conformity in coffee orders doesn’t create the Italian bar experience. It just removes the oat milk.
5. Who is being criticized? People ordering elaborate drinks are disproportionately young, neurodivergent, or managing dietary/sensory needs. The contempt embedded in “wasting other customers’ time” and “desperately searching for meaning” is doing quiet work — pathologizing difference rather than examining structure.
6. The actual cause (per Hank Green). See Authenticity and Manufactured Culture: the hollowness of contemporary communal life isn’t caused by individual taste-expression. It’s caused by the ad-revenue model colonizing shared spaces — Times Square, network TV, the internet. The Planet Fitness hat on the ball drop is the problem. The oat milk latte is not.
The Seductive Part — Why You Might Lean Into It
The Burkean frame is appealing because it correctly names something real: not all expressions of individuality are equally generative for community. Performative uniqueness-signaling is different from genuine difference. “Lifestyle enclaves” (Bellah) that cluster people by taste aren’t the same as communities that hold people across difference.
The trap is accepting the diagnosis (individualism bad) and sliding into the implied remedy (conformity good). That’s where it breaks from what CLT actually believes — which is that community accommodates genuine difference rather than flattening it. See Sacred Pathways and Mutual Aid for the alternative: multiple on-ramps, unconditional welcome, flexible structure.
Philosophical Anchors
For a more rigorous version of the communitarianism that’s worth engaging seriously:
- Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue — virtues require community context; modernity stripped that away
- Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart — “lifestyle enclave” vs. genuine community; loss of the second language of commitment
- Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit — liberal neutrality has hollowed out civic life
- Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place — third places as the actual infrastructure beneath rituals like the Italian bar
Source
- Jakub Grygiel, “Your salted caramel mocha latte is destroying society,” Washington Post, March 9, 2026
- Edmund Burke, letter on the French Revolution (quoted in above)