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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.

I think we have been institutionalized to a very large degree and that’s why COVID responses didn’t really form the ad-hoc organization. Most of us don’t do that anymore and in fact it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost. In fact the skills that form group cohesion are being eroded as well, which is why the cry-bullying seems to grow by the day. Such a thing cannot work in a situation where members of the group hold autonomy. They’d simply kick the malcontents out. But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.

it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost

I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

What about stable diffusion for art? Surely the barrier to entry for art is very low and falling rapidly! I was always rather hopeless at drawing but a decent GPU is within reach of most. Or Midjourney? Or writing a story with a word processor?

Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

I disagree with all the other comments on here. I was just in East Asia for half a year, no one cooks at home- people don't even have ovens in their homes, and food is so good and plentiful and cheap there that no one eats at home. Americans cook way way more than that, everyone I know from my mom to my brothers and sister to my friends in NYC to my friends in the midwest are into cooking their own food. Eating out is very expensive in the US. My dad, recently deceased, ate out every meal of his life after leaving home, but he was particularly rich and an outlier in many other ways. Everyone else in my family cooks for themselves and their families.

I met this woman at a friend's birthday party who was early 30s, corporate lawyer, she said the last thing she had cooked herself was something like 6 months earlier and it was an egg. She and her partner just order out for every meal. Very real in big cities in America.

Less and less, I think. I have friends with persistent delivery habits, and though I regularly cook for myself, I'm tremendously lazy about it - fry some meat in a pan and have some kind of simple starchy carb with it.

It's a significant decline from the Boomer/Xer generation from my read.

I haven't met a single zoomer who can cook. When they attempt it, it's aggressively bad. Millennials tend to be outliers - either they are horrendous cooks who subsist mostly on takeout or they consider cooking a hobby and absolutely crush it (my friendsgivings are almost universally excellent for every dish).

When it comes to DIY items it seems like everyone gives up and has someone else do it for them. Some folks can't even be bothered to get multiple quotes. I know that I personally am absolutely shitty at maintaining a house compared to my parents, and I'm still the guy people call about house problems etc.

Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

In the full sense of "buy fresh ingredients from a grocery store and prepare a meal from scratch" I would say the proportion of Americans that regularly do that has been in continuous decline since at least 1945. The idea of a nice home-cooked meal to a typical Amerikaner might be a can of tomato sauce heated up in a pot with some prepackaged meatballs served over spaghetti with some mozzarella dust from a jar sprinkled on top, so about the only skill needed is knowing how to turn on the stove and boil noodles. If our hypothetical home cook decided to splurge and get better tomato sauce it might even have recognizable bits of vegetables in it.

Well if there's a pan involved, then it's cooking IMO. I put vegetables and meat in a pan, stir it around a bit, rotate at times.

I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

Within certain classes of people generally no. Between fast food restaurants, full service restaurants, meal prep/delivery services, ready-made meals, frozen meals and meal replacements it is quite possible for Millenials and Zoomers to never operate anything more complicated than a toaster, a microwave and maybe boiling water on a range. Especially if the skillset was not deliberately passed down by Boomer/Gen X parents whose own skillset may be lacking/atrophied compared to their parents' generation. What level of cookery is necessary to prepare a dinner of hamburger helper or pasta from a box paired with sauce from a jar, after a breakfast of cereal from a box with toast and a lunch of factory sliced cold cuts/cheese/bread sandwich and a bag of chips?

But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.

Ironically, if I haven't inundated this forum enough with his blog, Greer makes much the same case, arguing that modern victimhood isn't a cultural quirk but a pretty reasonable response to a society where the most effective way to get things done is earning the sympathies of the vast, impersonal powers we all live under.

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