Today many of the communal forms of life that might once have been thought to link the fates of the strong and weak are attenuated or all but dissolved. There has been extraordinary geographic sorting, a result of extensive educational sorting (even President Obama sends his daughters to the Sidwell Friends School). We are engaged in the human equivalent of strip mining, identifying “rational and industrious” young people in every city and town and hamlet through standardized testing, extracting them for processing at one of our refining centres (universities), and then excreting them now as productive units of economic production to be conveyed to an hub of economic activity while leaving behind a landscape stripped bare of talented and industrious people that God thought wise to distribute widely.