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Notes -
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.
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:
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:
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:
Is this actually true? The average 19th century Californian man likely lived surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations. These may only distantly have included the federal government in Washington but they certainly included locally powerful figures with whom he was most likely not directly acquainted and who wielded a substantial degree of power over him.
It's worth pointing out (in case it doesn't come across in my re-telling of his work) that Greer isn't arguing for anything like libertarianism or an appeal to a lofty past of rugged individualism, but rather "rugged communalism." He very much acknowledges and expects us to live "surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations," that's part of the appeal! He just wants the bonds and obligations thick and personal.
His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible. Your local rich guy may always have an outsized influence, and your own impact on any given process will vary, but ideally most of the important institutions you come in contact with, your school board, church, sheriff's department, will be built and ran by people who know you by name and face and understand and care about your concerns in a way that isn't possible on a much larger scale. A world where if you and your friends encounter a problem, the first thought everyone should have is how you can organize and address it, rather than how you can make your cause sympathetic to an institution far away.
(edit: I was+am aware these are greer's views, not yours)
But the rules I care about the most are about "the kinds of high-tech chips and electronic devices I can purchase", "copyright and intellectual property of text or image bitstrings", or "ability to reverse-engineer and adversarially interoperate with online platforms". The company I work for probably sells their product over the internet to people not only in every state, but in dozens of other international jurisdictions, how can local rulemaking work for that? Even the most physical ones would be something like "environmental regulations, e.g. on dumping and pesticide use, on farms and factories within a 12 hour drive from me". Plus, aren't two of the biggest examples of local control today pathological, development-strangling environmentalism (neither endorsing nor non-endorsing that judgement) and NIMBYism?
I should probably add that I'm mostly relating the views of someone else, views I'm sypmathetic too and would like to draw some inspiration from, but do not fully endorse. I'm not an anarchist nor a libertarian and I think there are a lot of advantages to modernity, capitalism, and bureaucracy that I would not personally be willing to trade away. But there can be reforms that ideally lead towards a happy medium between some of the advantages of both. I also appreciate his work for a meta-level take on the two different sides of the culture war being an unproductive manifestation of the same root cause, rather than a solution to our actual prolems.
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Very confusingly, this description is somewhat close to what is sometimes called American individualist anarchism or aesthetic anarchism, which is somehow a branch of libertarian socialism or mutualism? Or maybe the other way. I think the gist of the idea is that individuals should voluntarily form mutually supportive networks, but that those networks should be made via deep and direct social connection rather than a mandate enforced with a monopoly on the use of force. Some of the terminology is archaic and not in the current common usage, so IDK if the message is aligns with real libertarianism.
I'm not sure what Greer would make of the labels, but he pointed out that the movement against bureaucracy was for a long time considered the purview of the New Left, though nowadays it's more popularly associated with the right.
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Once you get into the fringes of homesteadism the lines between far left and generic kind of right-libertarianism blur since ancoms consider homesteading to be acceptable personal property + owning your own means of production.
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