In both individualism and collectivism the result is isolation and loss of community. In the first case, when we refuse to participate in the common life and withdraw to private life, we become mere atoms circling around each other. In the second case we idolize the therapeutic society that relieves us of our responsibility for the wise use of our freedom. We sacrifice to government our particular identities with family, parish, neighborhood, and town. In so doing, we also sacrifice love of our particular place, and, as Edmund Burke pointed out, there can be no love of country without, first, love of a particular place.
Modern society suffers from both atomization and collectivism.
As a consequence, it has become increasingly secularized. A secularized society, however, does not meet human yearnings for community. Sensing that a polity divorced from the sacred is unworthy of them and is no community at all, people begin to think that it has no authority to oblige them, and so they think of themselves as their own individual rulers with authority to do as they please. The real need of man at the end of the millennium, according to Russell Kirk, is for roots. True community does indeed provide roots.