I agree with Brink regarding the fact that democratic societies are disintegrating. Brink gave us a partial list of the indicators of such, and there are others, of course.
As I see it, there are some competing tendencies in modern American conservatism. On the one hand, we have the neoliberal tendency with its devotion to a (largely) free market. On the other hand, we have a traditional or social conservative tendency with its devotion to a strong civil society comprised of various kinds of social groups that are independent of the state and the market.
Here's the issue: neoliberalism is a driving force behind the disintegration of the very social structures that traditional or conservatives wish to maintain.
You don't have to be an economist to see that many Americans are in dire financial straits. And yet I know few people who just sit around and collect welfare. Most adults I know are hard-working folks, and yet life is more and more unaffordable for so many. This leads many to take on more jobs, side hustles, in order to make ends meet. And many people I know who work a mere 40-hour week often end up working more hours outside of their official work schedule.
How can people (especially neoliberal conservatives) expect that Americans seek a life of meaning that involves participating in social group activities when so many people have less time and energy to devote to their own families, let alone to social groups? Where I live, many moms get limited time off for maternity leave, and child care is super-expensive. Across the river in Ontario, Canada, moms get much more generous maternity and parental leaves, and child care is much less expensive than it is here. Our economic system expels squeezes labor from us as an olive press expels oil from the olives. It grinds, and grinds, and grinds, in some cases until nothing is left. And in some instances, what's left is the hull of a person who's so disconnected from their community, who's so desperate that he or she grabs a gun and kills and wounds people. It happens in other countries, but to the extent that it happens in the US? Nope: we are unique among developed world liberal democracies in this regard, and I believe that the economic system we choose to participate in has a major role in the atomization, isolation, and then radicalization of individual citizens.
But woe to Democratic and Republican politicians and would-be politicians who ignore the average worker who depends more and more on the State for their resources. Populist voices on the left and right (think Sanders and Hawley, respectively) have arguably gained some traction over the last decade, and I would bet that as life gets more expensive and more people fall behind, the winners of elections will be those politicians who offer a message of economic security to the masses (a message of cultural security may be equally attractive if cultural progressives push too far, as well).
First of all, the lede got to me a bit since I'm a bit outside of the target audience. For now, I don't care about the government databases: it's Amazon's that worries me.
Otherwise this essay is quite illuminating. My thought about "rationalism" goes even further: I see it as permeating society far beyond ideas about government and management. Rationalism has been creeping up on us since the Enlightenment. Brink's research and summaries indicate that it's been tracked from the beginning by philosophers of all stripes. Nevertheless, too many post-modern individuals have internalized hyper-rationalist scientism and allowed it to suppress and crowd out the rest of their humanity. (Maybe I'll just apply "soft despotism" here: a centuries-old legacy that generates and regenerates itself by means of a kind of hyper-masculine peer pressure.)
Brink's evocation of Communism is important, because it's the only recent inspirational ideology I can think of that had enough massive global attraction to shift some the world's massive systems. Further, it was instituted locally, both geographically and culturally (if sinisterly so). In Viet Nam, villagers are still waked up by the PA system leading morning calisthenics. Communism there is deeply Vietnamese.
Christianity, of course, has also had this kind of global impact over many centuries, sometimes to the greater good, sometimes not.
"The Humanitarian Party" as Brink describes it is a subculture of the young, like The New Left of my generation, so I'm not too worried about it. Too many mature people on the left disagree with the extremes of "wokeness" and are questioning the widening attraction of identifying oneself as a victim. Future scholars of "critical theory" will hopefully open the conversational doors and start mining more practical and universally inspiring ideas from its dogmatic roots.
In the meantime, non-profits and local governments don't have enough resources to pay much attention to the voluntary victims at the margins, despite all the pronoun-indicating and virtue-signaling rituals at meetings. When it comes down to local professionals who are face-to-face with the genuinely "vulnerable," in order to be effective they must have nuanced, straightforward, and simultaneously respectful and cynical attitudes towards their clients. (As an urban resident of Portland, I know this firsthand.) Of course, becoming tutelary is certainly something to be vigilant about. Centering in on "the local" is a hedge against this.
Maybe a watchword might simply be "Go Local." I agree with Brink that we need to re-evolve "the intermediate institutions that lend structure and coherence and solidarity and workable consensus to the superhuman scale of contemporary mass society".
But what does "Local" even mean these days? My parallel, more temperamentally liberal train of thought wants to caution against trying to restore past social structures and traditions in toto. We have moved into totally new territory, partly because of society's ubiquitous "technocratic scientism", but also because of the fracturing of society and culture that has occurred along with the rise of the internet and social media and other "flat world" developments.
"Local" and even "face-to-face" might actually be online, geographically dispersed communities that nevertheless provide intimate connection to their members. Most of us have already developed social skills from participating in online groups: my first ones date back to the nineties. Of course these can support and encourage local action and community building, especially in terms of developing broader inspiration. But I'm probably only illustrating one of Brink's primary paradoxes: how to midwife a national or global counterculture that has the power to restore geographical intimacy and local culture to society.
Nevertheless, we're in a new age now. What's coming up will be wildly incomprehensible. We can't make the generations who have grown up with their phones put them down: we have to accept this new society and whatever follows it as a given. What we wiser ones can do is use our collective wisdom and innate morality to guide what comes next, even though (especially when) its alienness comes across as confusing and downright repugnant.
My own hope is that humanity's next chapter will eventually be deeply rooted in a love and spiritual connection with mother Earth, so that it restores humility to our species as "just" another creature within our miraculous universe.
As someone who is more or less a technological determinist, I think of what's left out of this as the primary problem. Which is that we keep piling up existentially destructive technologies that gradually over time ( but not very long in historical terms) becomes available to smaller and smaller groups, down to individual human beings. We are for the first time giving the power over the survival of the entire species to individual actors. Bathtub bioengineering is an example of this. How can one think about political economy in a remotely realistic or utilitarian way with out this being front and center in one's starting assumptions? Long term species survival is a choice. It will not happen by accident, pre-industrial revolution business as usual, sanctifying evolved human nature imperatives, or blindly appealing to past philosophers for direction who could not have imagined us in this situation.
I agree with you. In my earlier essay "The Case for Plan B," I wrote: "But perhaps the single most unnerving tendency associated with technological progress is the one that bends toward putting ever greater powers in the hands of ever smaller groups of people."
I think of Levin's vision of local-communal self-government as complementary to Tanner Greer's. I'd be interested to see how you would view local economic empowerment as interacting with it. I'd note also that among institutional reforms that might facilitate local self-government, the substitution of sortition for elections seems especially promising: jury service is already one of the most formative governing institutions that ordinary people participate in, and expanding the scope of jury-made decisions would only increase that formative effect (and also potentially make the existing problems with jury service more severe!).
Thanks for your comments. Yuval is a friend and extremely insightful, so I look forward to reading this piece. I too am very interest in sortition as a way to revitalize democracy and intened to write about it down the line.
Apologies, but while I loved the post (and always appreciate a Matthew Crawford callout as he’s criminally under appreciated) what in the world is:
“a partial, semi-radical withdrawal from organization at superhuman scale — in pursuit of abundance within face-to-face communities”
What does this contemplate? Any guidance would be appreciated but this sounds contradictory on its face. Superhuman scale is the very key to abundance. How can you possibly dismantle the first without sacrificing the second?
Check out my earlier essays "Rebalancing Capitalism" and "The Need for a Counterculture." Bottom line: a lot of our labor force is current stuck in low-productivity, low-satisfaction service jobs, and I think we should look for ways to help these people reduce their dependence on the labor market by providing more for themselves. Capitalism should focus on high-productivity sectors, and the majority that don't have a lot to add to that effort should focus on building strong families and communities rather than chasing dollars from the back of the pack. Labor force participation is in long-term decline, anyway; I'd like to focus on creating arrangements that can actually lure people away as opposed to just dropping out as they do now.
I agree with you. A semi-radical break from managerial overspecialization and all the attendant anti-human ideological bias is the most desirable exit. The tricky thing is, how do we enable that? Like you said earlier in this essay, people willed this managerial elite into being, and now they’re dependent on it. Your argument against postliberalism, the same as my own, is that we voluntarily created woke big government that we claim to despise, thus right wing big government can’t logically be the solution. It’s hard to see a necessary voluntary exit after we voluntarily submitted. Even reactionaries like Lyons seem to authorize further succumbing to it, that’s how addicted we are to management that not even those of us who oppose it the most radically don’t even think it’s possible or desirable to escape it. We need a culture or a consumer demand moreover that favors spontaneous organization and believes in the individual human agency, the diversity that freedom in a society fosters first before we can hope to withdraw from managerial capture. And I don’t know how the hell we can have that. When I look around, it’s so clear that people hate freedom. They hate anyone who is different from them. The desire to remake the world to conform to your most fickle emotional fancy is too deep and entrenched.
Very good questions! The biggest obstacle I had to overcome before starting this Substack was my lack of confidence that a good answer to your "how?" question can be found. I overcame my reluctance by deciding that it's enough for me to try to explain our problems and offer constructive responses. Whether there is actually any appetite for reversing overspecialization is an open question, but my hope is that by writing about the possibilities I might in some small way increase that appetite.
As an economist, you can’t hope to reverse the cultural decline that makes people so complacent as to reject markets. But the least you can do indeed, is try to answer the question why we got here in our politics.
Generally agree with your arguments here, while there are certainly problems with atomization most post-liberal thinkers go way too far. There needs to be nuance in any discussion this large. However, I want to push back on your thoughts here:
"at one point Lyons refers to the novel coronavirus, which likely killed more than 20 million people, as “relatively mild.” It hardly needs to be said that I don’t believe that trying to protect people from a deadly infectious disease outbreak constitutes mindless “safetyism.”"
I'd argue that the response to the Covid pandemic was *absolutely* safetyism, in the worst way. Yes trying to protect people from a virus is important, but we went far beyond that. The lockdowns that were instituted were genuinely totalitarian in areas where they were actually enforced. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the Western world were irrevocably lost, sending families that had worked sometimes for generations to build wealth into penury due to government fiat.
Not only that, but children were forced out of schools into awful distance education programs. The children who were affected by these lockdowns will not only have issues in learning, but more importantly socialization. Due to the atomization you mention here, I shudder to think how difficult it will be for the coming generation to maintain the social fabric after they had to deal with the trauma from two years of being locked down and taken from school.
And all of these massive harms were done to protect the elderly. Yes elders are important, but a society that destroys the lives of so many of its youth and adult population in order to protect from a virus that disproportionately killed the elderly is the sign of a sick society in my mind. We have lost, as Burke says in the quote you mentioned, our partnership with the youth of tomorrow. Our society due to its atomization cares less than ever about handing our children a bright future, and the response to Covid was an undeniable example of this dark turn.
If you truly want us to follow the "pursuit of abundance within face-to-face communities," I'm shocked that you are so blasé about the lockdowns for Covid. Why does it not concern you more?
I wrote about US covid policy in response to an earlier comment, and my full thoughts are available here: https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Incapacitated.pdf. Bottom line: I agree that there was plenty of mindless safetyism on display during the less-than-effective US covid response. But if you look at countries that responded effectively in the pre-vaccine phase, they were able to minimize fatalities and economic disruptions.
I appreciate the reply, and clearly you've investigated the pandemic on a policy level far more deeply than I have. I'll admit that it's not my hobby horse, despite the fact that many newly minted online writers have mounted anger at the covid response as their steed.
My frustration with the response you wrote there - and frankly my frustration with all the covid apologetics - goes back to the lack of focus on school, children, and the worsening of the social fabric of Western countries. You do have one line, in a footnote, discussing how children were kept from school longer than necessary.
In my opinion the fallout towards community structures and the shift away from in person meetings to online meetings is the single most significant negative harm from Covid. Yet almost none of these apologetic write ups discuss this problem in depth. We have already been struggling with community since the days of bowling alone.
It seems that before the pandemic, there was a struggling tower being built to redo some of the social fabric, but the lockdowns acted as a wrecking ball destroying the new efforts.
Anyway my point has meandered a bit, but I would be very curious if you did a write up specifically on the lockdown's effects on in person communities, especially the fact that churches and schools were closed for so long.
Thanks for your comments. My focus in looking at the US covid response was on the failure to contain the virus and keep people alive and safe, especially in the critical early weeks and months. In other words, the question I was trying to answer: how does the richest country in the world with the most well-developed infectious disease expertise in the world end up letting a million citizens die? So I was looking at the huge sin of omission -- what the authorities failed to do -- rather than looking at the various sins of commission -- what they did that was wrong. I agree with you that the biggest sin of commission was excessive school closings and that the long-term toll on kids from that lost school year is a heavy one, but I haven't written about it. From what I've read, my take is that this was more of a political failure than a technocratic expert failure: the extent of closings varied widely from state to state and reflected to a considerable extent the relative political power of teachers unions in the state,
No problem, appreciate your meaningful engagement with critiques. The covid pandemic and the ensuing response is of course a massive topic, so I understand not being able to focus on every part of it.
Your point about teachers unions and the political differences behind school closures is interesting. I'm also curious if that maps regarding church closures - I'd imagine closing schools would be related to closing churches and other businesses but I may be wrong.
Would love to see your analysis if you feel inclined to write on this topic in the future.
On the bright side, because so many different areas had differing levels of closures, this will be an excellent natural experiment to track over the coming decades. I wonder if people are already planning on tracking the rates of mental illness/socialization issues/autism etc. based on how long schools closed in different states.
I don't have a subscription but 200k failed businesses seems to be the number. So my 'hundreds of thousands' of claim is correct. Also again this was in April of '21, so I'm sure many many more businesses failed as the PPP loans dried out etc.
Also I like your name. Lois McMaster Bujold is a legend.
Thanks, on both accounts. I've had the pleasure of meeting LMB several times.
Assuming the accuracy and scope of that data, I guess the remaining question is how many businesses would have closed anyway, without any government action, in response purely to the medical aspects of the pandemic, and how much worse/better the medical aspects would have been in the absence of the government action.
I'd love to have you on my podcast thingy to discuss the increasing complexity and life its effect on the layperson. For lack of a better way of reaching out, I'm requesting an interview here :)
Great post. We do have the ability to answer such complicated questions. Some of the answers are in this post. The problem isn't finding answers. The problem is acting on those answers. History has shown that no action will be taken until what we have is destroyed. Read Walter Scheidel's, The Great Leveler. I'm not sure how we will put this puzzle will back together. but I am sure we will put it back together. Billions may die in the process. Our brilliance is only surpassed by our ignorance and hubris.
I've read Scheidel and am appropriately humbled. Whether we succeed or fail in averting catastrophe is beyond any of our individual capacities to determine. All we can do is do our best.
The author writes: It hardly needs to be said that I don’t believe that trying to protect people from a deadly infectious disease outbreak constitutes mindless “safetyism.”
But if the measures tried are "mindless" - many of them were - and those measures are imposed with strident authoritarianism one can only conclude society is governed by tyrants. Greer, Crawford and Lyons see the problem. So did CS Lewis. People governed by moral busybodies live in constant torment. The busybodies are so sure of themselves and their program they are relentless in expanding the dictates of their control.
This is Totalitarianism and American society is in the thick of it. As with all tyranny, society is bled of its humanity and the people are stripped of life and meaning. The people are made poorer.
Covid policies were disastrous to human thriving. The moral justification for the COVID tyranny was that any action made with the belief it could reduce ones chance of being infected by a ubiquitous germ was good and needful. But humans are designed to be exposed to germs! The question that mattered was not how to avoid the virus but what was the risk of being exposed. And on this question the authorities lied and did so with horrible consequences.
The tyranny of "safetyism" pervades Western society. Climate change policies are the most tyrannical. Here we are told that because the earth is warming society must be made less prosperous. The industrial revolution made the planet much safer and prosperous! Now it is being blamed for creating existential risk.
On the moral platform of "saving the planet" policies of mass economic destruction are being imposed. The mindlessness of these policies is that they are manifestly futile. For every carbon "savings" Western countries realize, China and India are spending double. And yet the do-gooders refuse to yield to reality. Government authorities admit Climate policies will reduce quality of life - less heating when cold, less cooling when warm, and higher inflation and less availability of personal transportation - and yet they justify this oppression on their ideological conviction it is absolutely necessary.
This tyranny is driven by the managerial class, which has become a massive, faceless bureaucracy where no one is accountable. Individuals of the managerial class are occasionally excommunicated for heresy. Failure is actually cause for promotion.
Yes, the power of the managerial class must be decreased. Centralization of systems and controls must be reduced. But how? I see failure as the only option. Not by sabotage. But rather the sheer complexity of life and the world will prove too much for the central planners. Breakup is inevitable. It would be preferable if decentralization was planned, but I am not counting on that.
The tragedy of US covid policy prior to the availability of vaccines was that it offered only two options: surrendering to the virus and letting it run rampant, or hiding from it indefinitely. Countries with effective responses during that time (Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand) actually suppressed the virus through effective testing and tracing and were able to minimize both fatalities and economic disruptions. I agree that there was lots of ill-considered safetyism in the US response -- the long school closings being the most serious. But there was another way. If we had had a competent response at the outset, not only could we have saved hundreds of thousands of lives lost during 2020, but I think we could have avoided the polarization that developed and so badly undermined vaccination rates (which resulted in hundreds of thousands of additional avoidable fatalities). Here in Thailand, a middle-income country, fewer than 100 people died in 2020, mask wearing was widespread and uncontroversial, and despite the US having a big head start Thailand pretty quickly exceeded the US vaccination rate. The cumulative death toll here is about one-seventh that in the US. So I don't accept that effective protection from the pandemic amounted to mindless safetyism, but I do concede there was plenty of that on display in the less-than-effective US response.
Covid was not a killer virus. Never was. Panic and bad treatment were lethal. The world elite needed a pandemic and so they created one by labeling cold and flu a novel disease and giving it a name.
Everything the western world did was to sell the need to panic, to be afraid. The lockdowns, the masking, the social distancing. And the testing! Can't have a pandemic without lots of tests. These were all pandemic theater. Without these visible actions no one would have known there was a problem.
Oh, we are seeing the acting again. The classic "wear a mask until you start speaking" idiocy. There is zero scientific merit to that behavior. But the politicians are doing it. Why? It is sell the lie that we must be afraid.
I choose not to be afraid. I choose not to go along with lies. Please consider the lies. When officials demand children mask - all too common in USA, why are they lying? What is the reason? It is not about a virus. What is it about?
"People governed by moral busybodies live in constant torment. The busybodies are so sure of themselves and their program they are relentless in expanding the dictates of their control."
When you speak of these moral busybodies, do you know whom I think of first? Much of American cultural right Christian religious warriors. Their official and semi-official leaders (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and all the way back to Jonathan Edwards) constantly involved themselves in the moral life of the nation, butting their noses into peoples' bedrooms and then bemoaning practices that went against their puritanical religious beliefs (among other practices they disagreed with). For many on the political right, this was satisfying. But when the political left adopted the same tactics in more recent times in relation to social justice themes, many of those on the political right took umbrage.
None of the Christian Right leaders forced anyone to wear a face diaper in order to fly on a plane or get an experimental drug to keep their job. None of them shut down normal life for two years.
What you present is a false comparison. Having and expressing an opinion may stir feelings in others. But everyone is welcome to have an opinion. Everyone is welcome to petition the government. In 2020 the busybodies not only had an opinion but they imposed it with great coercion.
The US political system needs to have a separation of church and state. This separation is greatly challenged today as Liberal / Progressive ideology is being imposed by the US government on the citizenry with ever greater coercion - actual threats to career and education opportunity to those who dare speak heresy against the approved ideology.
Would be great if he lived as we did in the late 20th century where a diversity of opinion was welcome and all ideas could be openly discussed and debated.
What you present is ignorance related to mask-wearing and the importance it plays in the transmission of the virus. In short, I've met lots of folks who've expressed the same opinions regarding mask-wearing and the vaccines. Some of them are dead now, unsurprisingly, and others are dealing with long Covid. Wearing masks and getting the vaccine was no guarantee of a perfect outcome, but most of us fared better than those who refused to do both.
Over 81% of Americans took that shot, btw, which includes lots of conservatives, as well. They did it because it was the safer option.
Your argument is untenable except among the libertarians. Which is fine, of course; and for that, among many reasons, I'm happy that there are and will always be a small number of libertarians.
Please explain how a chain link fence keeps mosquitos out of the yard. I'm very curious how that can be
As for the shot, if it worked, why doesn't it work? Why are people who have been vaccinated for Covid getting Covid? I'm old school where inoculation meant you had immunity - were protected from getting sick from the disease. The authorities had to change the dictionary so they could call the Covid jab a vaccine. Reminds me of what Orwell wrote in his book 1984:
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
....
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth."
Vaccinated people get Covid because they don't wear masks. I haven't had it yet as far as I know and I'm still masking in stores, on planes, on the bus, but not outside, not in small groups with people I know. I deeply trust the masks, will never know whether a vaccination staved off an infection.
In the meantime, I pay attention when people talk about kids not being in school for too long, mothers having to work while trying to monitor the classroom zoom session, but still complaining about "face diapers" and shots is kind of, I dunno. Wait until you get old. You keep getting your one-time shingles and pneumonia vaccinations and then they come out with new ones and you have to do it all over again. All this stuff over and over again. At least I've got a hoard of masks, a lot of knowledge, and a successful risk strategy for when the next pandemic comes along.
Glad to see your coverage of this pov. As I have already said in previous comments I see a lot of (caveats:depending on the country and how recent its origin) the "populist right" as very definitely a backlash against increasingly unpopular policies. Often these include immigration but again that may be due to sudden huge increases and subsequent impacts on housing, school places hospital capacity. That's been the case for a decade or more in the UK and more recently in Ireland. It may be highjacked or seized upon by pre-existing very much in the minority hard-rightists, and then that gives the elites the opportunity to label any opposition as bad and wrong.
I agree very much with most of your analysis. I am not familiar with Greer, but have read some of Crawford and I find NS Lyon's analysis terribly depressing. The trouble with that kind of theory is that it gives the idea that there is nothing to be done about any of it.
Finally, I agree with the commenter above that the covid response was an enormous overreaction. Maybe caution was justified initially but once we knew the at risk groups there was no justification for most of the measures, especially those which are now being shown to have caused damage eg excessive school and workplace closures, excessive fear mongering, encouraging social isolation, fining and punishing people for disobeying, mandatory measures for all without discrimination of risk/benefit. This is why there are a lot of us who do have a high need for having control over our own lives who are part of this so called populust backlash. That is what you were called in Ireland if you protested against mandatory measures (vaxx passes, masking of kids in schools) you were far right.
Brink, nice review. With regard to safetyism and bureaucracy, indispensable and problematic, you might be interested in "Bureaucracy and Populism," an excerpt from Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
I agree with Brink regarding the fact that democratic societies are disintegrating. Brink gave us a partial list of the indicators of such, and there are others, of course.
As I see it, there are some competing tendencies in modern American conservatism. On the one hand, we have the neoliberal tendency with its devotion to a (largely) free market. On the other hand, we have a traditional or social conservative tendency with its devotion to a strong civil society comprised of various kinds of social groups that are independent of the state and the market.
Here's the issue: neoliberalism is a driving force behind the disintegration of the very social structures that traditional or conservatives wish to maintain.
You don't have to be an economist to see that many Americans are in dire financial straits. And yet I know few people who just sit around and collect welfare. Most adults I know are hard-working folks, and yet life is more and more unaffordable for so many. This leads many to take on more jobs, side hustles, in order to make ends meet. And many people I know who work a mere 40-hour week often end up working more hours outside of their official work schedule.
How can people (especially neoliberal conservatives) expect that Americans seek a life of meaning that involves participating in social group activities when so many people have less time and energy to devote to their own families, let alone to social groups? Where I live, many moms get limited time off for maternity leave, and child care is super-expensive. Across the river in Ontario, Canada, moms get much more generous maternity and parental leaves, and child care is much less expensive than it is here. Our economic system expels squeezes labor from us as an olive press expels oil from the olives. It grinds, and grinds, and grinds, in some cases until nothing is left. And in some instances, what's left is the hull of a person who's so disconnected from their community, who's so desperate that he or she grabs a gun and kills and wounds people. It happens in other countries, but to the extent that it happens in the US? Nope: we are unique among developed world liberal democracies in this regard, and I believe that the economic system we choose to participate in has a major role in the atomization, isolation, and then radicalization of individual citizens.
But woe to Democratic and Republican politicians and would-be politicians who ignore the average worker who depends more and more on the State for their resources. Populist voices on the left and right (think Sanders and Hawley, respectively) have arguably gained some traction over the last decade, and I would bet that as life gets more expensive and more people fall behind, the winners of elections will be those politicians who offer a message of economic security to the masses (a message of cultural security may be equally attractive if cultural progressives push too far, as well).
First of all, the lede got to me a bit since I'm a bit outside of the target audience. For now, I don't care about the government databases: it's Amazon's that worries me.
Otherwise this essay is quite illuminating. My thought about "rationalism" goes even further: I see it as permeating society far beyond ideas about government and management. Rationalism has been creeping up on us since the Enlightenment. Brink's research and summaries indicate that it's been tracked from the beginning by philosophers of all stripes. Nevertheless, too many post-modern individuals have internalized hyper-rationalist scientism and allowed it to suppress and crowd out the rest of their humanity. (Maybe I'll just apply "soft despotism" here: a centuries-old legacy that generates and regenerates itself by means of a kind of hyper-masculine peer pressure.)
Brink's evocation of Communism is important, because it's the only recent inspirational ideology I can think of that had enough massive global attraction to shift some the world's massive systems. Further, it was instituted locally, both geographically and culturally (if sinisterly so). In Viet Nam, villagers are still waked up by the PA system leading morning calisthenics. Communism there is deeply Vietnamese.
Christianity, of course, has also had this kind of global impact over many centuries, sometimes to the greater good, sometimes not.
"The Humanitarian Party" as Brink describes it is a subculture of the young, like The New Left of my generation, so I'm not too worried about it. Too many mature people on the left disagree with the extremes of "wokeness" and are questioning the widening attraction of identifying oneself as a victim. Future scholars of "critical theory" will hopefully open the conversational doors and start mining more practical and universally inspiring ideas from its dogmatic roots.
In the meantime, non-profits and local governments don't have enough resources to pay much attention to the voluntary victims at the margins, despite all the pronoun-indicating and virtue-signaling rituals at meetings. When it comes down to local professionals who are face-to-face with the genuinely "vulnerable," in order to be effective they must have nuanced, straightforward, and simultaneously respectful and cynical attitudes towards their clients. (As an urban resident of Portland, I know this firsthand.) Of course, becoming tutelary is certainly something to be vigilant about. Centering in on "the local" is a hedge against this.
Maybe a watchword might simply be "Go Local." I agree with Brink that we need to re-evolve "the intermediate institutions that lend structure and coherence and solidarity and workable consensus to the superhuman scale of contemporary mass society".
But what does "Local" even mean these days? My parallel, more temperamentally liberal train of thought wants to caution against trying to restore past social structures and traditions in toto. We have moved into totally new territory, partly because of society's ubiquitous "technocratic scientism", but also because of the fracturing of society and culture that has occurred along with the rise of the internet and social media and other "flat world" developments.
"Local" and even "face-to-face" might actually be online, geographically dispersed communities that nevertheless provide intimate connection to their members. Most of us have already developed social skills from participating in online groups: my first ones date back to the nineties. Of course these can support and encourage local action and community building, especially in terms of developing broader inspiration. But I'm probably only illustrating one of Brink's primary paradoxes: how to midwife a national or global counterculture that has the power to restore geographical intimacy and local culture to society.
Nevertheless, we're in a new age now. What's coming up will be wildly incomprehensible. We can't make the generations who have grown up with their phones put them down: we have to accept this new society and whatever follows it as a given. What we wiser ones can do is use our collective wisdom and innate morality to guide what comes next, even though (especially when) its alienness comes across as confusing and downright repugnant.
My own hope is that humanity's next chapter will eventually be deeply rooted in a love and spiritual connection with mother Earth, so that it restores humility to our species as "just" another creature within our miraculous universe.
Thanks as always for your thoughtful comments.
As someone who is more or less a technological determinist, I think of what's left out of this as the primary problem. Which is that we keep piling up existentially destructive technologies that gradually over time ( but not very long in historical terms) becomes available to smaller and smaller groups, down to individual human beings. We are for the first time giving the power over the survival of the entire species to individual actors. Bathtub bioengineering is an example of this. How can one think about political economy in a remotely realistic or utilitarian way with out this being front and center in one's starting assumptions? Long term species survival is a choice. It will not happen by accident, pre-industrial revolution business as usual, sanctifying evolved human nature imperatives, or blindly appealing to past philosophers for direction who could not have imagined us in this situation.
I agree with you. In my earlier essay "The Case for Plan B," I wrote: "But perhaps the single most unnerving tendency associated with technological progress is the one that bends toward putting ever greater powers in the hands of ever smaller groups of people."
The recently launched Fusion magazine seems very relevant to the themes of this post, and in particular this Yuval Levin essay:
https://www.fusionaier.org/post/social-freedom
I think of Levin's vision of local-communal self-government as complementary to Tanner Greer's. I'd be interested to see how you would view local economic empowerment as interacting with it. I'd note also that among institutional reforms that might facilitate local self-government, the substitution of sortition for elections seems especially promising: jury service is already one of the most formative governing institutions that ordinary people participate in, and expanding the scope of jury-made decisions would only increase that formative effect (and also potentially make the existing problems with jury service more severe!).
Thanks for your comments. Yuval is a friend and extremely insightful, so I look forward to reading this piece. I too am very interest in sortition as a way to revitalize democracy and intened to write about it down the line.
Apologies, but while I loved the post (and always appreciate a Matthew Crawford callout as he’s criminally under appreciated) what in the world is:
“a partial, semi-radical withdrawal from organization at superhuman scale — in pursuit of abundance within face-to-face communities”
What does this contemplate? Any guidance would be appreciated but this sounds contradictory on its face. Superhuman scale is the very key to abundance. How can you possibly dismantle the first without sacrificing the second?
Check out my earlier essays "Rebalancing Capitalism" and "The Need for a Counterculture." Bottom line: a lot of our labor force is current stuck in low-productivity, low-satisfaction service jobs, and I think we should look for ways to help these people reduce their dependence on the labor market by providing more for themselves. Capitalism should focus on high-productivity sectors, and the majority that don't have a lot to add to that effort should focus on building strong families and communities rather than chasing dollars from the back of the pack. Labor force participation is in long-term decline, anyway; I'd like to focus on creating arrangements that can actually lure people away as opposed to just dropping out as they do now.
I agree with you. A semi-radical break from managerial overspecialization and all the attendant anti-human ideological bias is the most desirable exit. The tricky thing is, how do we enable that? Like you said earlier in this essay, people willed this managerial elite into being, and now they’re dependent on it. Your argument against postliberalism, the same as my own, is that we voluntarily created woke big government that we claim to despise, thus right wing big government can’t logically be the solution. It’s hard to see a necessary voluntary exit after we voluntarily submitted. Even reactionaries like Lyons seem to authorize further succumbing to it, that’s how addicted we are to management that not even those of us who oppose it the most radically don’t even think it’s possible or desirable to escape it. We need a culture or a consumer demand moreover that favors spontaneous organization and believes in the individual human agency, the diversity that freedom in a society fosters first before we can hope to withdraw from managerial capture. And I don’t know how the hell we can have that. When I look around, it’s so clear that people hate freedom. They hate anyone who is different from them. The desire to remake the world to conform to your most fickle emotional fancy is too deep and entrenched.
Very good questions! The biggest obstacle I had to overcome before starting this Substack was my lack of confidence that a good answer to your "how?" question can be found. I overcame my reluctance by deciding that it's enough for me to try to explain our problems and offer constructive responses. Whether there is actually any appetite for reversing overspecialization is an open question, but my hope is that by writing about the possibilities I might in some small way increase that appetite.
As an economist, you can’t hope to reverse the cultural decline that makes people so complacent as to reject markets. But the least you can do indeed, is try to answer the question why we got here in our politics.
Generally agree with your arguments here, while there are certainly problems with atomization most post-liberal thinkers go way too far. There needs to be nuance in any discussion this large. However, I want to push back on your thoughts here:
"at one point Lyons refers to the novel coronavirus, which likely killed more than 20 million people, as “relatively mild.” It hardly needs to be said that I don’t believe that trying to protect people from a deadly infectious disease outbreak constitutes mindless “safetyism.”"
I'd argue that the response to the Covid pandemic was *absolutely* safetyism, in the worst way. Yes trying to protect people from a virus is important, but we went far beyond that. The lockdowns that were instituted were genuinely totalitarian in areas where they were actually enforced. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses across the Western world were irrevocably lost, sending families that had worked sometimes for generations to build wealth into penury due to government fiat.
Not only that, but children were forced out of schools into awful distance education programs. The children who were affected by these lockdowns will not only have issues in learning, but more importantly socialization. Due to the atomization you mention here, I shudder to think how difficult it will be for the coming generation to maintain the social fabric after they had to deal with the trauma from two years of being locked down and taken from school.
And all of these massive harms were done to protect the elderly. Yes elders are important, but a society that destroys the lives of so many of its youth and adult population in order to protect from a virus that disproportionately killed the elderly is the sign of a sick society in my mind. We have lost, as Burke says in the quote you mentioned, our partnership with the youth of tomorrow. Our society due to its atomization cares less than ever about handing our children a bright future, and the response to Covid was an undeniable example of this dark turn.
If you truly want us to follow the "pursuit of abundance within face-to-face communities," I'm shocked that you are so blasé about the lockdowns for Covid. Why does it not concern you more?
I wrote about US covid policy in response to an earlier comment, and my full thoughts are available here: https://www.niskanencenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Incapacitated.pdf. Bottom line: I agree that there was plenty of mindless safetyism on display during the less-than-effective US covid response. But if you look at countries that responded effectively in the pre-vaccine phase, they were able to minimize fatalities and economic disruptions.
I appreciate the reply, and clearly you've investigated the pandemic on a policy level far more deeply than I have. I'll admit that it's not my hobby horse, despite the fact that many newly minted online writers have mounted anger at the covid response as their steed.
My frustration with the response you wrote there - and frankly my frustration with all the covid apologetics - goes back to the lack of focus on school, children, and the worsening of the social fabric of Western countries. You do have one line, in a footnote, discussing how children were kept from school longer than necessary.
In my opinion the fallout towards community structures and the shift away from in person meetings to online meetings is the single most significant negative harm from Covid. Yet almost none of these apologetic write ups discuss this problem in depth. We have already been struggling with community since the days of bowling alone.
It seems that before the pandemic, there was a struggling tower being built to redo some of the social fabric, but the lockdowns acted as a wrecking ball destroying the new efforts.
Anyway my point has meandered a bit, but I would be very curious if you did a write up specifically on the lockdown's effects on in person communities, especially the fact that churches and schools were closed for so long.
Thanks for your comments. My focus in looking at the US covid response was on the failure to contain the virus and keep people alive and safe, especially in the critical early weeks and months. In other words, the question I was trying to answer: how does the richest country in the world with the most well-developed infectious disease expertise in the world end up letting a million citizens die? So I was looking at the huge sin of omission -- what the authorities failed to do -- rather than looking at the various sins of commission -- what they did that was wrong. I agree with you that the biggest sin of commission was excessive school closings and that the long-term toll on kids from that lost school year is a heavy one, but I haven't written about it. From what I've read, my take is that this was more of a political failure than a technocratic expert failure: the extent of closings varied widely from state to state and reflected to a considerable extent the relative political power of teachers unions in the state,
No problem, appreciate your meaningful engagement with critiques. The covid pandemic and the ensuing response is of course a massive topic, so I understand not being able to focus on every part of it.
Your point about teachers unions and the political differences behind school closures is interesting. I'm also curious if that maps regarding church closures - I'd imagine closing schools would be related to closing churches and other businesses but I may be wrong.
Would love to see your analysis if you feel inclined to write on this topic in the future.
On the bright side, because so many different areas had differing levels of closures, this will be an excellent natural experiment to track over the coming decades. I wonder if people are already planning on tracking the rates of mental illness/socialization issues/autism etc. based on how long schools closed in different states.
So you have actual data on the number of businesses that were lost?
Hmm quick google shows a Wall Street Journal article that says it wasn't as bad as predicted (although this came out in April 2021, so I'm skeptical it accounts for all the fallout): https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19s-toll-on-u-s-business-200-000-extra-closures-in-pandemics-first-year-11618580619
I don't have a subscription but 200k failed businesses seems to be the number. So my 'hundreds of thousands' of claim is correct. Also again this was in April of '21, so I'm sure many many more businesses failed as the PPP loans dried out etc.
Also I like your name. Lois McMaster Bujold is a legend.
Thanks, on both accounts. I've had the pleasure of meeting LMB several times.
Assuming the accuracy and scope of that data, I guess the remaining question is how many businesses would have closed anyway, without any government action, in response purely to the medical aspects of the pandemic, and how much worse/better the medical aspects would have been in the absence of the government action.
Hi Brink,
I'd love to have you on my podcast thingy to discuss the increasing complexity and life its effect on the layperson. For lack of a better way of reaching out, I'm requesting an interview here :)
My interviews so far: https://www.youtube.com/@champagnebulge1/videos
Thanks! Can you email me? You can get my address on my bio page on the Niskanen Center website.
Great post. We do have the ability to answer such complicated questions. Some of the answers are in this post. The problem isn't finding answers. The problem is acting on those answers. History has shown that no action will be taken until what we have is destroyed. Read Walter Scheidel's, The Great Leveler. I'm not sure how we will put this puzzle will back together. but I am sure we will put it back together. Billions may die in the process. Our brilliance is only surpassed by our ignorance and hubris.
I've read Scheidel and am appropriately humbled. Whether we succeed or fail in averting catastrophe is beyond any of our individual capacities to determine. All we can do is do our best.
The author writes: It hardly needs to be said that I don’t believe that trying to protect people from a deadly infectious disease outbreak constitutes mindless “safetyism.”
But if the measures tried are "mindless" - many of them were - and those measures are imposed with strident authoritarianism one can only conclude society is governed by tyrants. Greer, Crawford and Lyons see the problem. So did CS Lewis. People governed by moral busybodies live in constant torment. The busybodies are so sure of themselves and their program they are relentless in expanding the dictates of their control.
This is Totalitarianism and American society is in the thick of it. As with all tyranny, society is bled of its humanity and the people are stripped of life and meaning. The people are made poorer.
Covid policies were disastrous to human thriving. The moral justification for the COVID tyranny was that any action made with the belief it could reduce ones chance of being infected by a ubiquitous germ was good and needful. But humans are designed to be exposed to germs! The question that mattered was not how to avoid the virus but what was the risk of being exposed. And on this question the authorities lied and did so with horrible consequences.
The tyranny of "safetyism" pervades Western society. Climate change policies are the most tyrannical. Here we are told that because the earth is warming society must be made less prosperous. The industrial revolution made the planet much safer and prosperous! Now it is being blamed for creating existential risk.
On the moral platform of "saving the planet" policies of mass economic destruction are being imposed. The mindlessness of these policies is that they are manifestly futile. For every carbon "savings" Western countries realize, China and India are spending double. And yet the do-gooders refuse to yield to reality. Government authorities admit Climate policies will reduce quality of life - less heating when cold, less cooling when warm, and higher inflation and less availability of personal transportation - and yet they justify this oppression on their ideological conviction it is absolutely necessary.
This tyranny is driven by the managerial class, which has become a massive, faceless bureaucracy where no one is accountable. Individuals of the managerial class are occasionally excommunicated for heresy. Failure is actually cause for promotion.
Yes, the power of the managerial class must be decreased. Centralization of systems and controls must be reduced. But how? I see failure as the only option. Not by sabotage. But rather the sheer complexity of life and the world will prove too much for the central planners. Breakup is inevitable. It would be preferable if decentralization was planned, but I am not counting on that.
The tragedy of US covid policy prior to the availability of vaccines was that it offered only two options: surrendering to the virus and letting it run rampant, or hiding from it indefinitely. Countries with effective responses during that time (Taiwan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand) actually suppressed the virus through effective testing and tracing and were able to minimize both fatalities and economic disruptions. I agree that there was lots of ill-considered safetyism in the US response -- the long school closings being the most serious. But there was another way. If we had had a competent response at the outset, not only could we have saved hundreds of thousands of lives lost during 2020, but I think we could have avoided the polarization that developed and so badly undermined vaccination rates (which resulted in hundreds of thousands of additional avoidable fatalities). Here in Thailand, a middle-income country, fewer than 100 people died in 2020, mask wearing was widespread and uncontroversial, and despite the US having a big head start Thailand pretty quickly exceeded the US vaccination rate. The cumulative death toll here is about one-seventh that in the US. So I don't accept that effective protection from the pandemic amounted to mindless safetyism, but I do concede there was plenty of that on display in the less-than-effective US response.
Covid was not a killer virus. Never was. Panic and bad treatment were lethal. The world elite needed a pandemic and so they created one by labeling cold and flu a novel disease and giving it a name.
Everything the western world did was to sell the need to panic, to be afraid. The lockdowns, the masking, the social distancing. And the testing! Can't have a pandemic without lots of tests. These were all pandemic theater. Without these visible actions no one would have known there was a problem.
Oh, we are seeing the acting again. The classic "wear a mask until you start speaking" idiocy. There is zero scientific merit to that behavior. But the politicians are doing it. Why? It is sell the lie that we must be afraid.
I choose not to be afraid. I choose not to go along with lies. Please consider the lies. When officials demand children mask - all too common in USA, why are they lying? What is the reason? It is not about a virus. What is it about?
"People governed by moral busybodies live in constant torment. The busybodies are so sure of themselves and their program they are relentless in expanding the dictates of their control."
When you speak of these moral busybodies, do you know whom I think of first? Much of American cultural right Christian religious warriors. Their official and semi-official leaders (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and all the way back to Jonathan Edwards) constantly involved themselves in the moral life of the nation, butting their noses into peoples' bedrooms and then bemoaning practices that went against their puritanical religious beliefs (among other practices they disagreed with). For many on the political right, this was satisfying. But when the political left adopted the same tactics in more recent times in relation to social justice themes, many of those on the political right took umbrage.
What goes around, comes around.
None of the Christian Right leaders forced anyone to wear a face diaper in order to fly on a plane or get an experimental drug to keep their job. None of them shut down normal life for two years.
What you present is a false comparison. Having and expressing an opinion may stir feelings in others. But everyone is welcome to have an opinion. Everyone is welcome to petition the government. In 2020 the busybodies not only had an opinion but they imposed it with great coercion.
The US political system needs to have a separation of church and state. This separation is greatly challenged today as Liberal / Progressive ideology is being imposed by the US government on the citizenry with ever greater coercion - actual threats to career and education opportunity to those who dare speak heresy against the approved ideology.
Would be great if he lived as we did in the late 20th century where a diversity of opinion was welcome and all ideas could be openly discussed and debated.
What you present is ignorance related to mask-wearing and the importance it plays in the transmission of the virus. In short, I've met lots of folks who've expressed the same opinions regarding mask-wearing and the vaccines. Some of them are dead now, unsurprisingly, and others are dealing with long Covid. Wearing masks and getting the vaccine was no guarantee of a perfect outcome, but most of us fared better than those who refused to do both.
Over 81% of Americans took that shot, btw, which includes lots of conservatives, as well. They did it because it was the safer option.
Your argument is untenable except among the libertarians. Which is fine, of course; and for that, among many reasons, I'm happy that there are and will always be a small number of libertarians.
Please explain how a chain link fence keeps mosquitos out of the yard. I'm very curious how that can be
As for the shot, if it worked, why doesn't it work? Why are people who have been vaccinated for Covid getting Covid? I'm old school where inoculation meant you had immunity - were protected from getting sick from the disease. The authorities had to change the dictionary so they could call the Covid jab a vaccine. Reminds me of what Orwell wrote in his book 1984:
"It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words."
....
"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth."
Vaccinated people get Covid because they don't wear masks. I haven't had it yet as far as I know and I'm still masking in stores, on planes, on the bus, but not outside, not in small groups with people I know. I deeply trust the masks, will never know whether a vaccination staved off an infection.
In the meantime, I pay attention when people talk about kids not being in school for too long, mothers having to work while trying to monitor the classroom zoom session, but still complaining about "face diapers" and shots is kind of, I dunno. Wait until you get old. You keep getting your one-time shingles and pneumonia vaccinations and then they come out with new ones and you have to do it all over again. All this stuff over and over again. At least I've got a hoard of masks, a lot of knowledge, and a successful risk strategy for when the next pandemic comes along.
Your analogy is inapt; air molecules are smaller than viruses. The former can get through an N95 mask; the latter cannot.
Glad to see your coverage of this pov. As I have already said in previous comments I see a lot of (caveats:depending on the country and how recent its origin) the "populist right" as very definitely a backlash against increasingly unpopular policies. Often these include immigration but again that may be due to sudden huge increases and subsequent impacts on housing, school places hospital capacity. That's been the case for a decade or more in the UK and more recently in Ireland. It may be highjacked or seized upon by pre-existing very much in the minority hard-rightists, and then that gives the elites the opportunity to label any opposition as bad and wrong.
I agree very much with most of your analysis. I am not familiar with Greer, but have read some of Crawford and I find NS Lyon's analysis terribly depressing. The trouble with that kind of theory is that it gives the idea that there is nothing to be done about any of it.
Finally, I agree with the commenter above that the covid response was an enormous overreaction. Maybe caution was justified initially but once we knew the at risk groups there was no justification for most of the measures, especially those which are now being shown to have caused damage eg excessive school and workplace closures, excessive fear mongering, encouraging social isolation, fining and punishing people for disobeying, mandatory measures for all without discrimination of risk/benefit. This is why there are a lot of us who do have a high need for having control over our own lives who are part of this so called populust backlash. That is what you were called in Ireland if you protested against mandatory measures (vaxx passes, masking of kids in schools) you were far right.
Brink, nice review. With regard to safetyism and bureaucracy, indispensable and problematic, you might be interested in "Bureaucracy and Populism," an excerpt from Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
https://davidawestbrook.substack.com/p/bureaucracy-and-populism