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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   38154 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.

...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.

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.

I agree with @Soriek, while the early settlers and people in previous historical communities didn't control everything that happened around them, there were faces they could either love or hate depending on their circumstances. They could go to another person, beg forgiveness or extension, and generally make sense of their world in a more comfortable way.

The modern issue of dealing with "machinations in a distant court" is the exact problem here. Humans have lived with tribes and been comfortable dealing with powerful people in their direct, personal experience for almost all of our history after language, probably even before. Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I'm of the opinion that this alienation is why so many modern movements are focused around spite and anger, such as the Alt Right or whatever name they go by now. Our current way of living in the Western world forces us to constantly repress anger, and there's no good outlet for that anger because we don't personally see the people screwing us over.

Edmond Dantes was in deep despair while imprisoned in Chateau D'If for an unspecified crime on the accusation of an unknown person. Only when he finally deduced what his "crime" had been and who was responsible for his wrongful imprisonment did he regain his will to act.

I think this is an accurate reflection of how many people internally experience oppression by a specific person with intelligible motives versus oppression by an impersonal, alien force to which they are merely unnoticed collateral damage.

"Why is my rent going up this month? Isn't there anything you can do?" "Nope, sorry, the computer system says your rent goes up $125 this year. Corporate sets the rules, there's nothing I can do."

Indeed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Without a "why," the "how" is often unbearable.

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