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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38184 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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From Institution Building to Identity Building and Back Again

Tanner Greer’s “Lessons from the Nineteenth Century” is the latest in a series on the decline of American self-governance and institution building.

He offers a comparison between the reaction to the Spanish Flu and Covid-19. In 1918 Americans sprung into action, organized committees on sanitation and medical care, delegated responsibilities, held regular meetings. When the crisis was over these committees had stern handshakes all round and then disbanded, not to burden America with ever more bureaucracy.

In contrast, during the early months of Covid no one seemed to know who was responsible, the major agencies all gave contradictory information that varied week-to-week, grassroots initiative was scattered and weak.

Seemingly we've forgotten how to do what our recent ancestors easily could. Nowadays Americans largely don’t practice addressing problems by creating their own organizations with formal structures and set goals. But back in the day if you were in one of America’s countless settler communities and there was a problem with bandits, or fallen trees covering the road or whatever, there was generally no higher authority to appeal to. If you wanted irrigation, you got together with your friends and you dug some darn ditches.

consider the situation faced by the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager. If he had settled near the frontier, he would had been involved in creating and manning the government bodies that regulated aspects of communal life—the school board, the township, the sheriff’s department, and so forth. Even if he was not a frontiersman, he was a regular attendee at the town, city, county and even state government meetings most relevant to his family’s concerns. Between his wife and he, his family participated in a half dozen committees, chapters, societies, associations, councils, and congregations.

In the last century these self-governed settlers have had their local autonomy worn away by the twin forces of modern bureaucracy and late stage capitalism, rule from the capitol beltway and the corporate boardroom. Greer speaks ably to how bureaucracy's distant web of control weaves through our lives from thousands of miles away. I’m more interested in what capitalism and wage labor have done to the American psyche, taking us from a world of self-employed farmers, builders, artisans, and shopowners, to a nation of people who show up when we’re told, eat during designated breaks, and ask permission to go to the bathroom. I’ll quote one of my favorite passages from T.J. Stiles' biography of Vanderbilt:

Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence ... More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household...But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883...these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”

The collapse of bottom-up institution building into the modern age of subjects-rather-than-citizens is Greer’s answer both to dilemmas raised by the left, but even more by the “New Right” (notice how different the portrayal of the self-actualized American settler is from the reactionary trope of the idealized beach bum-citizen, unconcerned with his distant dictatorial government). No, Greer says, the malaise in modern society didn’t start in 1776, or with the Enlightenment, or with the reformation. It started when people lost the ability to have a say creating their own world and had to turn solipsistically inward to feel any agency at all:

This week I finished listening to an episode titled “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self.” The parallels between the Hellenistic trends Metzger describes and the problems of the current moment are worth pondering...

Destroyed: a world of cohesive, tradition bound city states whose citizens were joined together by shared loyalty to a polity whose fate was set by these same citizens’ own sweat. In its place: a tangle of marauding empires whose political outcomes were decided by the machinations of the distant few in the despot’s court or the mercenary’s camp...Men who led small and bounded worlds now found themselves the playthings of inconstant forces operating on imperial scales.

The intellectual response to these developments was to turn inward...New faiths were focused less on public goods than private salvation...No longer did great thinkers squabble over the form of the ideal polity, or ask what political communities must do to foster good character in their citizens. Hellenistic philosophy was not focused on citizens. It was obsessed with individual ethics...Like the new religions, their focus was on the soul within a man, not the community of men outside him...

To explain this all Metzger quotes historian Peter Green: “The record we have… speaks with some eloquence to the dilemmas that faced a thinking man in a world where, no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul.”

The modern obsession with “expressive individualism,” whether it be gender-bending woke idpol, or right wingers joining neo-paganism or contrived versions of internet catholicism, is what happens when people have no influence over the outside world and instead must turn inward to the only place they have control over: their own identities. It's all just a desperate screaming attempt to regain a semblance of control in a world that has taken that from us. Everyone could win their modern culture war wishlist, but you still won’t have addressed the root issue that’s driven us from the real world and inward down endless black holes.

To end on a positive note, I’ve been a tiny cog in other machines my entire life, but I’ve tasted the kind of self-governance Greer describes. A long time ago I helped run a campaign for a local politician; the whole team was me and my friends, if we needed more staff we had to convince people to work for us, if we wanted people to vote we had to meet them face-to-face and make our damn case. It wasn’t an important race or anything, but the giddy feeling of having a tangible influence on the world around you, of creating something from scratch with your own willpower, has stayed with me ever since. Not so long ago this was just American life. America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice. As the shocked Toqueville said of the people he met in the United States:

there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.

America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice.

The skills may be waiting, but they are behind barbed wire, with a stern Bureaucrat handing us a dozen forms that may as well be in another language before we are allowed to touch them. Any unauthorized attempts will fine you into permanent poverty or get you thrown in a rape cage.

Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

I few months back I was reading a post by someone in my local subreddit about them attempting to navigate the permitting process to do some work by themselves on their own home. The entire system was literally set up so that he could not possibly complete it. It required his "business's" tax ID and other registration information. And no bureaucrat he spoke to about this could provide him any solution. They just robotically repeated that he had to complete the forms in full with all the required information. Not sure how, or if, that ever resolved itself.

watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

This is true, but I should like to say that this is because of a surfeit of local control, not central control. It wasn't because of some faceless bureaucracy that he was thwarted, it was the people who lived amongst him that stopped him, wielding of course tools granted them by central government, but nonetheless it was local NIMBYs who got up and stopped him, not some civil servant dispatched from Whitehall. Indeed, if we are going to start building again in Britain, power must move closer to the centre, not further from it.

I’m pretty sure no one actually gets permits to work on their homes. My dad sold his house a few years ago with a completely unpermitted fire place, the only consequence was the inspector reporting this to the buyer. No one cared and they still closed the deal.

I think it's important not to over-doomer it, regulations don't necessarily last forever. Part of the value I got out of the comparisons to ancient Greece was that this stuff always rises and falls in major societies over time. Diocletian's taxes and price controls were abolished, the Sassanians abandoned their mass standardizations, in recent history the American progressive movement made significant process cutting red tape and reducing bureaucratic bloat. Reform is always possible. Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?

Insofar as things carry on at a larger scale, it's at least in part because there's little meaningful opposition to this state of affairs. I didn't include it for brevity's sake, but the remainder of the first blog post, and in this piece for Palladium, Greer outlines what he seens as the actual muscles America needs to flex and train to regain our organizational prowess: 1) the importance of public usefulness as a virtue, 2) a commitment to formality, and 3) the proper use of heirarchy and scale:

The benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal:

...First, institutions cultivated a sense of public kinship and brotherhood, sometimes formalized by sacred oaths. Just as citizens took oaths to the republic or upon the Bible, social and political associations took their bonds of loyalty no less seriously. The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. They required earnest oaths that committed their members to a life of charity, public service, brotherhood, and the betterment of their fellow men. Lodge leaders developed these rituals and treated their oaths with great solemnity. This required their culture to have a functional role for solemnity and seriousness at all. When irreverence becomes a universal norm, attempts at seriousness degenerate into performative role-play.

A commitment to formality:

The famously irreverent Boomers were the first generation of Americans born in the shadow of the new managerial society. The “New Left” counterculture of the 1960s was, in turn, the first attempt to break the shackles of bureaucracy and conformity. New Left radicals condemned the “bewildering dependence” of Americans on “inaccessible castles wherein inscrutable technicians conjure with their fate” and identified the “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy” as “the greatest problem of our nation.” Their movement ultimately failed, however, to create viable counter-communities capable of agency.

A central reason for their failure is that for all of their talk about “participatory democracy,” the radicals of the New Left were not interested in the discipline, formality, and commitment to reasoned debate that made the actual participatory democracy function. Associating rationalism and rules with the suffocating bureaucratic structures that they rebelled against, New Left radicals ended up mounting a titanic effort to liberate themselves from the very intellectual and organizational tools that successful institution builders use to assert their agency. The cause of self-liberation ended up in conflict with the cause of self-government….

Self-government meant a deep commitment to an otherwise mundane set of tasks...Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action.

And finally, the usefulness of scale and hierarchy:

The third virtue was, instead, an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems...

Many of the modern institutions which have most successfully retained their nineteenth-century commitment to decentralized local leadership—such as the LDS church or the U.S. Marine Corps—have famously rigid hierarchies. These institutions integrate clear chains of command with a structure and culture that encourages initiative and independent problem-solving by leaders at the lowest level of the hierarchy. The leaders of these institutions understand that the only way to train someone to effectively lead large organizations is to give them practice acting autonomously on a smaller scale. Empowering people down the chain to make mistakes lets their leaders up the chain prevent them from happening at a larger scale.

Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?

People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances. (for bonus points, places attempting to limit anonymous tips have often found themselves facing ACLU opposition), across a wide variety of locations and cultures and jurisdictions.

((For even more fun, it's not just a matter of getting the permit; it's quite possible to get a wholly-correct assembly together, and then have code enforcement decide to call you out years later for a final inspection asking to see things literally buried under feet of dirt.))

They're not even always wrong to do snitch! If someone's laying a hilariously bad electrical fire risk, or pouring 90psi of water at your front door, or propping up a giant hammer with a little piece of string aimed at your property, there's no magic ward at the edge of your property.

But it's often not about that. And short of finding places where the law doesn't touch at all, or having such a large remove from other parcels that there's no one to report, it's just something that comes with home ownership. And this isn't specific to building ordinances.

There is a small industry of ADA testers that will find any business that doesn't meet their standards, even if they didn't intend to actually buy that businesses's products or services. There's EPA and Army Engineers if you want to build on a wide variety of parcels -- and even if you think your land isn't covered, the right advice right now is to get them to actually give you that in writing instead. And this is just the easy universal stuff! God forbid you do something dangerous like deal with chemicals, or firearms, or anything financial. There's thousands of these things.

There are two things ordinary people will fight like rabid dogs over - wills, which tear apart families where siblings will cut each other's throats over who gets Granny's good china tea set, and neighbours - did you trim the hedge? did you not trim the hedge? is a branch of a tree in your garden growing over their boundary wall? are you encroaching two inches on their property? are they encroaching two inches on your property? are they/you parking their/your vehicle outside their/your house, and does this block them/you off from access to their/your own property?

Ordinary people can get bloodthirsty vindictive over cutting three inches off an overgrown hedge.

People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances.

No denials at all that latticeworks of these kinds of building regulations absolutely do exist and weave through American life. But these examples all happened in Miami, Nashville, Atlanta and its suburbs; the smallest polity here is Lancaster Ohio, whereas my comment was about rural areas farther removed from the modern reach of the state. When I say "neighbor" I mean it in the sense of someone you know personally and have a relationship with rather that someone who moved next door but you don't interact with.

I don't doubt that someone could find an isolated example of this kind of behavior in nowheresville, but it's assuredly much less common. As an example, my old boss decided he wanted to build a guest house on his property that he could rent out. When we laid the permanent foundation I asked him if he was supposed to have gotten a permit for it. He replied something like "possibly, I'm not sure." Why would he care? He was building in the middle of the woods and his property was surrounded on either side by his mother and uncle's farms. His isolation was extreme but not that extreme; most people where I grew up lived in areas with low visibility, far from the reach of your local bureaucrat, and flanked by people who cared about them; this is still reality for lots of rural Americans.

I heard a similar tale about a guy who built a barn on his farm. No permits or anything just did it because it was his property and he could get done, besides he was close with all the people who mattered in the small town including the planning board. Except he put it very close to the property line in violation of setback regulations which caused property damage to his neighbor's farm. That neighbor has since been going after him for the damage and now the town planning board because they tried to protect barnguy (a local) from this weird autistic scifi author from Boston (injured neighbor) and violated all kinds of their own bylaws (and state records/meetings laws) to try to retroactively bless the creation of the offending barn. Last I heard there's still three lawsuits on going against barnguy and the town and the angry neighbor got himself elected to the state government out of spite.

He'll be made to care if, heaven forbid, anything happens to the people renting out his guest property and they take him to court. Then it will all come out about "did you get a permit" and the rest of it.

I should clarify he was a career carpenter who had built his own house, not just a mad lad looking for a quick come up.

You might be able to get around many of those bureaucratic restrictions in the hollowed-out husk of some rust belt city, where there is minimal municipal oversight and what little there is could probably be convinced to look the other way for the right price. Everyone involved would probably have to be black, however, otherwise the kind of security measures needed to protect such a community-building endeavor would draw the wrong kind of publicity.

Or you could do it in the middle of nowhere.

Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

Amusingly, though, the solution to a lot of this stuff isn't for more local government, it's for less of it. Planning restrictions are almost all decided locally. Pesky municipal by(e)laws are - in large part - why Clarkson couldn't do most of what he wanted to do on his farm. Local government is inherently NIMBYist, especially in a wealthy rural locale, as he found out.

The best answer is to abolish local government and make the smallest unit of government the state or - possibly - the city in the case of extremely large (4+ million inhabitant) municipalities. A 75 year old member of the town board of supervisors living in the local pristine heritage area with a valuable home they bought in 1985 is always going to veto any construction. A 24 year old bureaucrat in the capital city whose job it is to stamp forms can be instructed much more easily to approve everything. Billionaires can lobby the state, but even relative nobodies with a little time on their hands can stymy the functioning of local government.

One of Boris Johnson's core plans was to reform planning in England to make construction much easier (by making it harder for local councils to block planning permission, by simplifying the environmental review process etc). His own voters rebelled, and the Tories lost a by-election in a formerly safe seat to the Liberal Democrats (whose leader said it was "a massive mandate for those of us who were campaigning against the planning reforms"). So they cancelled the reforms.

Endless ridiculous HOA stories show that tyranny, for the most part, is local rather than federal or national. Fewer people with power might well mean more freedom for everyone.

I think the actual answer is to keep the role of government to its proper place. My right to my property must be much greater than the local council's right to interfere with my enjoyment of that property.

Okay, but, you are not allowed to buy the lot next to mine and turn it into a combination pig feed lot, fireworks factory and homeless shelter. That would financially ruin myself and my neighbors. We would follow the obvious and powerful incentives to get our local government to use zoning rules to block that.

The problem is precisely people in the local council thinking their right to their property includes their right to, say, prohibit the construction of a house in front of their own that would block their views (etc).

Outside of hyper contractualist ancapistan where things like rights to a view are priced, sold and bundled as contracts and liens attached to properties, the local council being the community consensus decision making group for balancing overlapping property interests seems reasonable. Local governments can be wildly corrupt and not follow their own rules (see #barnlaw) but the principle is quite sane.

The principle at first glance seems 'sane' but something has clearly got to change in Britain, we simply cannot go on like this. In practice, 'community decision making' means 'elderly home-owner decision making' which in turn in practice means 'sorry you can't open a restaurant because Doris might have to queue in traffic for two minutes to go to bridge'. If these committees were composed of people who dispassionately analyse the costs and benefits it would be fine, but they by and large are not.

Costs and benefits to whom? Why are the benefits to a homeowner who has a long term vested interest in their community (going to bridge) who will bear the costs of increased traffic something you think should be valued lower than a business (are they even property owners or non-permanent tenants?) catering to the kind of people who don't care enough to participate in local politics (or even non-residents). As a general rule, low level politics are dominated by people who care and people who show up.

Benefits to the entire are and indeed to the nation, not just to one small section of the community. And as other who have pointed out, it's only time-rich pensioners with nothing better to do who have the time to turn up to such things and so their influence is outsized. The problem is that planning has implications for the entire region or nation, so deciding everything at the local level means that considerations of those benefits gets lost. One project won't decrease rents much in a partiuclar neighbourhood, but if everyone takes that attitude then nothing ever gets built and we are where we are today with thirteen years of stagnant productivity growth. Something's got to give.

catering to the kind of people who don't care enough to participate in local politics

Or rather, people who work for a living and don't have time for a second job participating in local politics.

To some extent, but your average builder is also heavily burdened by restrictions from the state and federal level: environmental reviews, a litany of Executive Orders, design requirements, licensing and permitting processes, stacks of procurement, contracting and hiring regulation, etc. Good high level government would indeed fix construction problems, but it's like saying good local government would solve NIMBYism as well - the problem is getting from here to there.

Very little of the NIMBYism in, say, Berkeley, CA is coming from the federal government, though. Some of it comes from the state. Even in California, however, much of it is local.

If we're talking about nimbyism as a movement by residents to block local building, then yeah by definition it's a local issue. But state and federal regulations most certainly raise obstacles and costs to building; often they are the very tools that give local NIMBYs their power in the first place. To use your example of Berkley for instance, a federal judge blocked construction of their supercomputer laborotory because the University of California hadn't gone through the nationally required environmental impact assessment. More recently, Berkley's attempt to build more (desparately needed) student housing was blocked under California's state level Environmental Quality Act.

My argument isn't that local roadblocks aren't important, it's just that the solution isn't as simple as shifting authority to higher and higher levels, when you look at their track record thus far.

I think the point is that federal issues are more tractable. If most restrictions were at the central level, and politician X wants to build more houses, he can quietly abolish some of the more onerous ones, and there you go, national housing stock will increase. With restrictions at the local level, that kind of action will never be co-ordinated nationwide.

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