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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:
A long time ago if you wanted to build a house you needed land and the knowledge of practical house building skills: brickwork, carpentry, plaster, etc. Today, the practical skills associated with house building are more complicated: electricity, plumbing, gas lines, scoping for major appliances, carpeting, the physical systemization of everything, a higher expected level of finish and polish on everything.
It's harder now to build a house just based on practical matters- it is less likely that a regular person will have all the skills to do it himself. He might be forced to hire a specialist or three. He may feel like he is no longer a master of his fate in this regard.
Navigating regulation is a skill of its own, which must be learned. It is not an intuitive skill. Some people aren't good at it, but I don't think it represents a phase change in personal ownership- only a change in degree.
That being said, the value/cost ratio of regulation like this is probably low in a lot of cases.
In some ways, but I think in a lot of ways building is way easier now. Anyone who's played around with power tools has to wonder "how the hell did anyone ever get anything built before these?" And I'm not just talking about the difference between a hammer and a nailgun, but literally having ready access to the nails.
And power drills and nails are designed and fabricated at locations very far from you, and are useful to you or not (supply, packaging, standardization, spare parts, etc) based on the decisions made by far away people, often times leaving you no recompensed if those decisions impact you negatively.
The glib libertarian answer would probably be that the kind of international trade that facilitates the manufacture and supply of technology is also best maximized by getting the government out of the way. But I'll bite the bullet and say that I think modern states also frequently lower transaction costs for trade, and that the kind of institutions that create power tools are likely to be large scale corporations with bureaucratic management structures themselves. I'm a great enjoyer of modernity and I think the vast, impersonal scale of our institutions is part of what drives prosperity. There's a reason why humanity generally trades off independence and self-reliance for the stultifying comforts of advanced society.
I certainly wouldn't undo that trade myself, but I want to highlight that something important was lost through the trade, something that's partially a choice and can be recovered without sacraficing everything else. The Spanish Flu response that Greer highlights was in the early twentieth century, after both industrial capitalism and modern bureaucracy had been built, and yet we still understood how to achieve wide-scale, grassroots activism and institution building. A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.
Agreed. Maybe I was taking issue with the framing, as if these skills were "just lost" like a penny in a gutter, or via some nebulous "force of bureaucracy". They were abandoned for the same reason that you cannot build a power drill yourself (or probably even a hammer).
(Though I also believe we'd be a better society if everyone knew how to make a power drill)
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