In the spirit of Chesterton's Fence: the value of extensive labor markets and state infrastructure isn't just that they reduce the overall labor-intensiveness of production, it's that they provide a way for people to exit toxic personal and local relationships by taking refuge in the impersonal and the large-scale.
This is the dark side of local community: it can so easily be abusive and repressive if a family member or local elder decides to take advantage of the power their intimate relationships and commitments give them. In the precapitalist era, people typically had no recourse against that abuse. State and market both helped reduce that abuse greatly during the 19th and 20th centuries. Any plan for the reinvigoration of localism needs to preserve enough of a robust, practically viable right of exit to prevent backsliding.
I keep thinking of Jacob Levy's _Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom_ here. You're proposing an expansion of pluralism and that probably is, on the current margin, what we need. But the reasons for rationalism, and the problems with pluralism, that Levy discusses aren't inherently easier to address now, so they need more explicit addressing if a pluralist resurgence is actually to be net beneficial.
Very good points. Traditional Gemeinschaft was something you were born into and had little option to leave; the dark side of its rootedness was its capacity for suffocating oppression. As Levy correctly argues, there is no lasting stable tradeoff between rationalism and pluralism, but moving in the direction of more cohesive communities that are voluntarily chosen and from which exit is possible seems like the most promising path to me.
May 25, 2023·edited May 25, 2023Liked by Brink Lindsey
I think one impediment to building community is that life at home has become so incredibly satisfying in modern America.
I live in a "third world country" and one thing foreign visitors always talk about is the vibrant street life. Friends meeting at cafes until 10pm on weekdays, kids playing in the streets every afternoon/evening, people sitting outside on plastic stools, etc.
But to a large extent all of that is the result of being poor. People meet at cafes because their homes have 8 people in 600 square feet. Kids play in the streets because nobody has backyards, there aren't any parks, and the schools have gates that literally lock after classes so you can't even use their playgrounds (and staying in the house sucks because it is 600 square feet....). People sit on plastic stools because the food cart owner can't afford rent on a decent place with air conditioning and nicer chairs.
Meanwhile I visit family in the US and the only reason they leave their house during our 2-week visit is to go to work or go buy something. And with work from home and online shopping there were precious few instances of that for 2 of the 4 family members. And my brother works at a grocery store so they never even need to go grocery shopping...he just picks stuff up after work. But I get it! They have nice furniture, a pool, multiple TVs, a stocked fridge, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, streaming service, a basketball hoop, two dogs that are fun to play with, a nice coffee machine, a freezer with even more food. Bedrooms big enough you can hide out there all day if you want your own space. Two living rooms so grandpa can watch sports all day and the rest of the family can watch a movie.
I feel like you almost need some kind of stick to go with the carrot. Something to make being at home so unpleasant people will go out and meet their neighbors. Unpleasant enough that you'll keep meeting them despite all the little frictions (the house on the left is weirdly overprotective of their kids, so we don't really bother talking to them and whatnot) that would make it easy not to when just staying at home is so nice, so easy.
This is an excellent point: one important reason social connections are unraveling is that it's never been more convenient, comfortable, and entertaining to be home alone. But the main reason we live geographically isolated from our friends and family is that we all have different jobs and where you live is heavily influenced by where you work. To the extent that work moves back into the home or neighborhood, it becomes much easier for extended family and friends to live in close proximity to each other and share all those great domestic amenities. This seems like the best way forward: not making it worse to be alone, but making it easier to be together.
You're right that jobs are a major factor. Also throw in having kids. It is pretty common for people to move house to get to a better school. But then you're further from your family and network.
Then have other things like retirees (e.g. someone's parents or grandparents) wanting to downsize or move to warmer climate or get out of the city.
There are just so many centrifugal forces pulling us apart. And they all make sense. For us personally. In the short term. But they often seem to be bad for society at large in the long term.
We are fully capable of fixing what we have broken. The only question is how much pain it will take for us to open to change. Walter Scheidel wrote The Great Leveler. It tells the story we refuse to hear. Timothy Snyder is giving a free on-line class on Ukraine. Class 20 is on the uprising at Maidan. It is the story of deep pain and revolution. It is a story of what the human animal can be in a state of desperation. Your story might well happen, but it will take the complete failure of the present system.
Regarding Class 20, I avoid stories of "deep pain and revolution" for my psychological health. However, now I'm wondering about Ukraine's culture as a prior Soviet Republic. People are still alive whose parents and grandparents taught them about the famine and WW II. In the former SSRs, the sense of having no control over one's life continues to this day because of corruption. In the meantime, something better beckons from Europe and the U.S. and has permeated those cultures with hope.
The people of Ukraine have been passing down a kind of dogged, stoic resilience for generations, maybe even through most of their history. I hate to think how our culture would confront such hardship.
If you follow CJ Hopkins (who has a free substack), he writes from the diametrically opposite view of the optimism here, and his latest post is aformulation of his analysis of capitalism as a values decoder. He uses Yeats's "The Second Coming" to make the point you make here.
Things have to be destroyed before we can get to the rosy future of pioneer communities and better social arrangements.
The powers that benefit from the current system aren't going to be leveraged out of power with a gradualnwithholdingmof our labor. Something while have force the issue.
I'm constitutionally incapable of "the worse, the better" thinking -- i.e., seeing apocalypse as the only way to a better world. Things could turn out that way, but in my view that would be a colossal failure, not an inevitability.
My library hold on Pieper's "Leisure: the Basis of Culture" finally became available, just at the right time to follow these essays.
The direction I take with the "how to fix" question is what does it take for a society to evolve some kind of movement (or religion, since my background is theology) that puts people in touch with humanity's "better angels" both personally and collectively? What was going on that gave Buddhism, Christianity and other world religions (and Communism for that matter) their head start? Why is Judaism still around? Christianity evolved after the fall of Jerusalem, but only after Paul opened it up to anyone around at the time who was looking for new path in life. And through the ages, there has always remained something essential about Christianity (for example) to inspire people and communities, counteracting the natural tendencies of any human institution towards pathology, exploitation and evil.
And so the next question would be: is complete collapse a necessary condition.
BTW - the problem with my ideas is that so many concepts regarding religion (or Communism for that matter) tend to be instantly reviled in our extremely rational culture. Hope that's not the case here. Trying to look at it from the perspectives of all the social sciences combined (anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology) along with my own actual, positive experience with religion.
Odell appears to have read it as a source for _Saving Time_ and pulls out the intriguing concept of "vertical time" in the context of Pieper's well-founded authority on traditional religious aspects of time in worship and human experience. (Otherwise Pieper has plenty of mystical mind-tripping from Plato, Aquinas and others, as well as still-timely criticisms of secularism.)
Odell's approach is conscientiously and rigorously secular, which is wise given today's cynical environment. I think her ideas about time, nature, the environment, and grieving have a lot of potential for keeping us going.
(Yep, I have tons of leisure, including the privilege of completely useless leisure.)
"Vertical farming, artificial meat, renewable energy, and 3D printing are among the new technologies that make the transition to human-scale abundance imaginable." Speaking of artificial meat, what do people think, so far? I've tried Impossible Foods' Wild Nuggies, and they're not bad with ketchup.
Great essay! In human terms, we definitely need each other. I liked the creative thought about shifting legal frameworks on IP. Our complex world is awash in restrictions and protections. While there are good reasons for how this complex arrangement developed, society can suffocate with the accumulated weight of legal frameworks. Thoughtful reforms are needed. It's great to hear all the optimistic ideas.
I've been thinking about one point you make in the last couple of instalments, and I'm not sure I follow it.
You've argued that measures to reduce the cost of living (land deregulation to reduce housing costs, technological progress to reduce energy costs...) would encourage a shift towards less market work. But I don't really see why that would be the case.
What's surprised many people in the decades since Keynes' "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" is that even with a drastic increase in real hourly wages, average paid hours worked per week haven't fallen very much. (I'm not going to look up the numbers but I suppose that over a large part of that period it's actually been increasing, because of the movement of women into the paid labor force.)
Higher real wages are a good thing, whether they result from higher nominal wages or from falling prices. But I don't see why increased affluence delivered in the form of lower prices would be free from the bias (if it is a bias) in favor of rising consumption over rising leisure.
Bear in mind, as well, that falling real prices for specific goods won't normally lead to a fall in the general price level, even if those goods happen to be a large share of total living costs. Macroeconomic policy would adjust to keep the general price level stable or slightly rising, so in practice all these deregulatory and technological gains would still show up in the form of higher dollar salaries. If there's a good reason to nudge people towards less paid work, some other measure is needed.
My hunch is that there really is a market failure in the consumption/leisure balance, and that it probably stems from the fact that people gain social status by having more consumer goods than their peers, but not by working less than their peers. If I'm right about that, it creates a "hamster wheel" effect in which almost everyone works more hours per year than they would prefer, assuming a constant hourly wage.
And if you want a targeted government intervention to fix this problem, it's very simple. Conservative economists are always reminding us that income and consumption taxes are distortionary because they reduce the incentive to work. But if status competition creates a collective bias towards overwork, then those types of taxes are also antidistortionary, and it's not at all clear whether an increase at the margin would raise or lower total welfare.
So the case for raising those taxes to provide things like free health care and very generous cash child benefits is drastically strengthened. There's your policy prescription.
You keep hearing from right wing economists how in Sweden doctors and lawyers do their own home repairs due to the cost of hiring laborers and high income taxes. It’s interesting to think of that as a feature, not a bug.
Doing your own home repairs isn't really "leisure", though?
I do think cooking can be leisure if you enjoy it and are reasonably good at it. So working less, earning less and eating in restaurants less might be a choice that improves your quality of life, and higher income tax or VAT rates would nudge people in that direction.
It's true that the work week stabilized at around 40 hours, but that doesn't mean we stopped trading consumption for leisure. Rather, the trading shows up now, not in the length of the work week, but in the length of the working life. Lifetime working hours are in long-term decline, thanks to more time in school and earlier retirement. I agree that there may be a collective action problem that's propping up the work week, but I still expect greater wealth to translate into less work effort. If people want to work full-time for a couple of decades and then have a long retirement, I don't think that's necessarily inferior to working part-time all along.
One of my first thoughts reading this was, "omg, those community meetings would never end and it would be awful". But then I considered that maybe the worst aspects of participatory local government in the U.S. are caused by the kind of atomization you've described - there's really no need for most people to care about specific local issues, so only a handful of eccentrics (e.g. me) show up to push their ideas, and they show up a lot. But in a more self-governing community, a lot more people would have an interest in showing up, and it would be harder for the wacky few to push policy in weird, self-serving directions.
Thanks for another very thoughtful essay. The end-state has much intuitive appeal, regardless of if or how we get there. Since status-seeking seems to have such a powerful hold on us, channeling it in productive ways seems critical. Status based on production (making excellent bread or building attractive stone walls) seems more promising than status based on consumption.
Thanks, John. WFH isn't the ideal beachhead, as it's so much easier for well-educated professionals to pull off than it is for most ordinary workers whose job requires physical presence. But it's still a promising development that I think needs to be actively encouraged.
There is no way to get there from here. It would require at least one political party to propose something like that and since both of our political parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of oligarchy there is no chance. I don't care how ideal or how popular something might be with the general public. Capitalist logic forbids it from happening if either 1. It would make a significant number of oligarchs less rich or 2. it does not make someone some oligarch much richer. And if that isn't true explain to me why we can't get single payer healthcare in the US. We are on a one way train towards feudalism, or anarchy. those are literally the only options.
We had our shot to do it the non-violent way. But the Democratic party met the iron law of institutions. They literally argued in court that they have no obligation to uphold even the pretense of a democratic process in nominating presidential candidates. This country has been ruled exclusively by the top 0.01% worst people that have ever lived since the 70s.
Recently I pondered that the 'work from home' movement could result in a sort of 'return' to the agrarian lifestyle--where all the work was at home--without being 'agrarian.' I'm intrigued by the idea and its ramifications (...and its plausibility).
But for much of these suggestions, Mr. Lindsey, I'm left wondering how your suggestions are, fundamentally, different from a small town or neighborhood. It seems like what you are suggesting is and idealized something-like-towns-or-neighborhoods, that grow more food. You want people in close contact, who can and do help each other in life, and who make sure everyone's basic needs are met. Well... I mean, sounds *great*, but not *new*. Could you clarify how what you're suggesting is different from "a return to the way things used to be, but we have smartphones and laptops to do our business at home."
Pardon the very slow response, but I just saw this. Yes, at the heart of what I'm trying to visualize is a way to bring back some of the qualities of life that obtained in small towns. Most of those towns have lost their economic rationale (businesses that serve the needs of local farmers), so the idea is to reestablish close-knit communities on a post-economic basis.
I would say that as we allow capitalism to operate more fully, in law and governance (e.g. charter cities) community and culture (neighborhoods and education), we'll get to a better place than what you are suggesting. I'm not at all attached to the end state being optimized by for profit entities - they will most likely be a combination of Ostromian diverse institutions. But I do see for profit entities accelerating progress towards a more humane future. Much of our misery is due to the endless conflict of political hatreds which simultaneously prevents innovation in the most important human domains. A world of competing for profit governance entities with a world of competing for profit neighborhood developers inspired by a world of for profit education/human development entities will reduce human misery rapidly. Part of the inspiring work associated with such a world consists of building thousands of new cities, communities, and subcultures associated with diverse practices associated with well-being. Right now, thanks to government dominance in key domains, it is easier to innovate in gambling and pornography than in happiness and well-being. Reduce the scale of the bully who keeps us all miserable (government controlled sectors such as law, governance, community and well-being) and we'll be able to innovate our way to a better world. Public schools alone cause lasting misery at an unimagined scale,
You say that this way of thinking "is not at present the program of any popular movement", but if not, why not make one? one challenge is that there are many variations of the ideas here...so where to draw the boundaries of such a movement? there is some overlap with the growing pro-natalist movement, and this: https://steader.substack.com/
First, this has been a great series, and I find all of your posts interesting, and dense food for thought.
Second, you last post reminded me that I attended an interesting event by BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) and you might be interested in their work.
Dear Brink, As you will see if you take the trouble to read far enough—the whole thing is only a hundred pages long— my advocacy of the idea of factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition whose underlying theme, at least as I understand it, is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom. You really should read it, and perhaps write about it. You would be the first. Here is the ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
In the spirit of Chesterton's Fence: the value of extensive labor markets and state infrastructure isn't just that they reduce the overall labor-intensiveness of production, it's that they provide a way for people to exit toxic personal and local relationships by taking refuge in the impersonal and the large-scale.
This is the dark side of local community: it can so easily be abusive and repressive if a family member or local elder decides to take advantage of the power their intimate relationships and commitments give them. In the precapitalist era, people typically had no recourse against that abuse. State and market both helped reduce that abuse greatly during the 19th and 20th centuries. Any plan for the reinvigoration of localism needs to preserve enough of a robust, practically viable right of exit to prevent backsliding.
I keep thinking of Jacob Levy's _Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom_ here. You're proposing an expansion of pluralism and that probably is, on the current margin, what we need. But the reasons for rationalism, and the problems with pluralism, that Levy discusses aren't inherently easier to address now, so they need more explicit addressing if a pluralist resurgence is actually to be net beneficial.
Very good points. Traditional Gemeinschaft was something you were born into and had little option to leave; the dark side of its rootedness was its capacity for suffocating oppression. As Levy correctly argues, there is no lasting stable tradeoff between rationalism and pluralism, but moving in the direction of more cohesive communities that are voluntarily chosen and from which exit is possible seems like the most promising path to me.
"stadtluft macht frei"
I think one impediment to building community is that life at home has become so incredibly satisfying in modern America.
I live in a "third world country" and one thing foreign visitors always talk about is the vibrant street life. Friends meeting at cafes until 10pm on weekdays, kids playing in the streets every afternoon/evening, people sitting outside on plastic stools, etc.
But to a large extent all of that is the result of being poor. People meet at cafes because their homes have 8 people in 600 square feet. Kids play in the streets because nobody has backyards, there aren't any parks, and the schools have gates that literally lock after classes so you can't even use their playgrounds (and staying in the house sucks because it is 600 square feet....). People sit on plastic stools because the food cart owner can't afford rent on a decent place with air conditioning and nicer chairs.
Meanwhile I visit family in the US and the only reason they leave their house during our 2-week visit is to go to work or go buy something. And with work from home and online shopping there were precious few instances of that for 2 of the 4 family members. And my brother works at a grocery store so they never even need to go grocery shopping...he just picks stuff up after work. But I get it! They have nice furniture, a pool, multiple TVs, a stocked fridge, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, streaming service, a basketball hoop, two dogs that are fun to play with, a nice coffee machine, a freezer with even more food. Bedrooms big enough you can hide out there all day if you want your own space. Two living rooms so grandpa can watch sports all day and the rest of the family can watch a movie.
I feel like you almost need some kind of stick to go with the carrot. Something to make being at home so unpleasant people will go out and meet their neighbors. Unpleasant enough that you'll keep meeting them despite all the little frictions (the house on the left is weirdly overprotective of their kids, so we don't really bother talking to them and whatnot) that would make it easy not to when just staying at home is so nice, so easy.
This is an excellent point: one important reason social connections are unraveling is that it's never been more convenient, comfortable, and entertaining to be home alone. But the main reason we live geographically isolated from our friends and family is that we all have different jobs and where you live is heavily influenced by where you work. To the extent that work moves back into the home or neighborhood, it becomes much easier for extended family and friends to live in close proximity to each other and share all those great domestic amenities. This seems like the best way forward: not making it worse to be alone, but making it easier to be together.
You're right that jobs are a major factor. Also throw in having kids. It is pretty common for people to move house to get to a better school. But then you're further from your family and network.
Then have other things like retirees (e.g. someone's parents or grandparents) wanting to downsize or move to warmer climate or get out of the city.
There are just so many centrifugal forces pulling us apart. And they all make sense. For us personally. In the short term. But they often seem to be bad for society at large in the long term.
I think you raise great points, we have become the "victims" of our own success.
We are fully capable of fixing what we have broken. The only question is how much pain it will take for us to open to change. Walter Scheidel wrote The Great Leveler. It tells the story we refuse to hear. Timothy Snyder is giving a free on-line class on Ukraine. Class 20 is on the uprising at Maidan. It is the story of deep pain and revolution. It is a story of what the human animal can be in a state of desperation. Your story might well happen, but it will take the complete failure of the present system.
That is not nihilism, that's history.
Regarding Class 20, I avoid stories of "deep pain and revolution" for my psychological health. However, now I'm wondering about Ukraine's culture as a prior Soviet Republic. People are still alive whose parents and grandparents taught them about the famine and WW II. In the former SSRs, the sense of having no control over one's life continues to this day because of corruption. In the meantime, something better beckons from Europe and the U.S. and has permeated those cultures with hope.
The people of Ukraine have been passing down a kind of dogged, stoic resilience for generations, maybe even through most of their history. I hate to think how our culture would confront such hardship.
If you follow CJ Hopkins (who has a free substack), he writes from the diametrically opposite view of the optimism here, and his latest post is aformulation of his analysis of capitalism as a values decoder. He uses Yeats's "The Second Coming" to make the point you make here.
Things have to be destroyed before we can get to the rosy future of pioneer communities and better social arrangements.
The powers that benefit from the current system aren't going to be leveraged out of power with a gradualnwithholdingmof our labor. Something while have force the issue.
I'm constitutionally incapable of "the worse, the better" thinking -- i.e., seeing apocalypse as the only way to a better world. Things could turn out that way, but in my view that would be a colossal failure, not an inevitability.
My library hold on Pieper's "Leisure: the Basis of Culture" finally became available, just at the right time to follow these essays.
The direction I take with the "how to fix" question is what does it take for a society to evolve some kind of movement (or religion, since my background is theology) that puts people in touch with humanity's "better angels" both personally and collectively? What was going on that gave Buddhism, Christianity and other world religions (and Communism for that matter) their head start? Why is Judaism still around? Christianity evolved after the fall of Jerusalem, but only after Paul opened it up to anyone around at the time who was looking for new path in life. And through the ages, there has always remained something essential about Christianity (for example) to inspire people and communities, counteracting the natural tendencies of any human institution towards pathology, exploitation and evil.
And so the next question would be: is complete collapse a necessary condition.
BTW - the problem with my ideas is that so many concepts regarding religion (or Communism for that matter) tend to be instantly reviled in our extremely rational culture. Hope that's not the case here. Trying to look at it from the perspectives of all the social sciences combined (anthropology, ethnology, sociology, psychology) along with my own actual, positive experience with religion.
I bought Pieper's book a year or so ago but still haven't found the time to read it -- I need more leisure! Interested in your take.
Odell appears to have read it as a source for _Saving Time_ and pulls out the intriguing concept of "vertical time" in the context of Pieper's well-founded authority on traditional religious aspects of time in worship and human experience. (Otherwise Pieper has plenty of mystical mind-tripping from Plato, Aquinas and others, as well as still-timely criticisms of secularism.)
Odell's approach is conscientiously and rigorously secular, which is wise given today's cynical environment. I think her ideas about time, nature, the environment, and grieving have a lot of potential for keeping us going.
(Yep, I have tons of leisure, including the privilege of completely useless leisure.)
"Vertical farming, artificial meat, renewable energy, and 3D printing are among the new technologies that make the transition to human-scale abundance imaginable." Speaking of artificial meat, what do people think, so far? I've tried Impossible Foods' Wild Nuggies, and they're not bad with ketchup.
Great essay! In human terms, we definitely need each other. I liked the creative thought about shifting legal frameworks on IP. Our complex world is awash in restrictions and protections. While there are good reasons for how this complex arrangement developed, society can suffocate with the accumulated weight of legal frameworks. Thoughtful reforms are needed. It's great to hear all the optimistic ideas.
I've been thinking about one point you make in the last couple of instalments, and I'm not sure I follow it.
You've argued that measures to reduce the cost of living (land deregulation to reduce housing costs, technological progress to reduce energy costs...) would encourage a shift towards less market work. But I don't really see why that would be the case.
What's surprised many people in the decades since Keynes' "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" is that even with a drastic increase in real hourly wages, average paid hours worked per week haven't fallen very much. (I'm not going to look up the numbers but I suppose that over a large part of that period it's actually been increasing, because of the movement of women into the paid labor force.)
Higher real wages are a good thing, whether they result from higher nominal wages or from falling prices. But I don't see why increased affluence delivered in the form of lower prices would be free from the bias (if it is a bias) in favor of rising consumption over rising leisure.
Bear in mind, as well, that falling real prices for specific goods won't normally lead to a fall in the general price level, even if those goods happen to be a large share of total living costs. Macroeconomic policy would adjust to keep the general price level stable or slightly rising, so in practice all these deregulatory and technological gains would still show up in the form of higher dollar salaries. If there's a good reason to nudge people towards less paid work, some other measure is needed.
My hunch is that there really is a market failure in the consumption/leisure balance, and that it probably stems from the fact that people gain social status by having more consumer goods than their peers, but not by working less than their peers. If I'm right about that, it creates a "hamster wheel" effect in which almost everyone works more hours per year than they would prefer, assuming a constant hourly wage.
And if you want a targeted government intervention to fix this problem, it's very simple. Conservative economists are always reminding us that income and consumption taxes are distortionary because they reduce the incentive to work. But if status competition creates a collective bias towards overwork, then those types of taxes are also antidistortionary, and it's not at all clear whether an increase at the margin would raise or lower total welfare.
So the case for raising those taxes to provide things like free health care and very generous cash child benefits is drastically strengthened. There's your policy prescription.
You keep hearing from right wing economists how in Sweden doctors and lawyers do their own home repairs due to the cost of hiring laborers and high income taxes. It’s interesting to think of that as a feature, not a bug.
Doing your own home repairs isn't really "leisure", though?
I do think cooking can be leisure if you enjoy it and are reasonably good at it. So working less, earning less and eating in restaurants less might be a choice that improves your quality of life, and higher income tax or VAT rates would nudge people in that direction.
Depends on if you’re having a beer while doing it.
It's true that the work week stabilized at around 40 hours, but that doesn't mean we stopped trading consumption for leisure. Rather, the trading shows up now, not in the length of the work week, but in the length of the working life. Lifetime working hours are in long-term decline, thanks to more time in school and earlier retirement. I agree that there may be a collective action problem that's propping up the work week, but I still expect greater wealth to translate into less work effort. If people want to work full-time for a couple of decades and then have a long retirement, I don't think that's necessarily inferior to working part-time all along.
One of my first thoughts reading this was, "omg, those community meetings would never end and it would be awful". But then I considered that maybe the worst aspects of participatory local government in the U.S. are caused by the kind of atomization you've described - there's really no need for most people to care about specific local issues, so only a handful of eccentrics (e.g. me) show up to push their ideas, and they show up a lot. But in a more self-governing community, a lot more people would have an interest in showing up, and it would be harder for the wacky few to push policy in weird, self-serving directions.
Thanks for another very thoughtful essay. The end-state has much intuitive appeal, regardless of if or how we get there. Since status-seeking seems to have such a powerful hold on us, channeling it in productive ways seems critical. Status based on production (making excellent bread or building attractive stone walls) seems more promising than status based on consumption.
I was reading this thinking WFH! WFH! Very happy when I got to it. I'm thinking along somewhat similar lines but need a lot more time to spell it out.
Thanks, John. WFH isn't the ideal beachhead, as it's so much easier for well-educated professionals to pull off than it is for most ordinary workers whose job requires physical presence. But it's still a promising development that I think needs to be actively encouraged.
There is no way to get there from here. It would require at least one political party to propose something like that and since both of our political parties are wholly owned subsidiaries of oligarchy there is no chance. I don't care how ideal or how popular something might be with the general public. Capitalist logic forbids it from happening if either 1. It would make a significant number of oligarchs less rich or 2. it does not make someone some oligarch much richer. And if that isn't true explain to me why we can't get single payer healthcare in the US. We are on a one way train towards feudalism, or anarchy. those are literally the only options.
On my bad days I share your gloom, but not even trying to make things better leaves you with a 100% chance of failure.
We had our shot to do it the non-violent way. But the Democratic party met the iron law of institutions. They literally argued in court that they have no obligation to uphold even the pretense of a democratic process in nominating presidential candidates. This country has been ruled exclusively by the top 0.01% worst people that have ever lived since the 70s.
Recently I pondered that the 'work from home' movement could result in a sort of 'return' to the agrarian lifestyle--where all the work was at home--without being 'agrarian.' I'm intrigued by the idea and its ramifications (...and its plausibility).
But for much of these suggestions, Mr. Lindsey, I'm left wondering how your suggestions are, fundamentally, different from a small town or neighborhood. It seems like what you are suggesting is and idealized something-like-towns-or-neighborhoods, that grow more food. You want people in close contact, who can and do help each other in life, and who make sure everyone's basic needs are met. Well... I mean, sounds *great*, but not *new*. Could you clarify how what you're suggesting is different from "a return to the way things used to be, but we have smartphones and laptops to do our business at home."
Pardon the very slow response, but I just saw this. Yes, at the heart of what I'm trying to visualize is a way to bring back some of the qualities of life that obtained in small towns. Most of those towns have lost their economic rationale (businesses that serve the needs of local farmers), so the idea is to reestablish close-knit communities on a post-economic basis.
I would say that as we allow capitalism to operate more fully, in law and governance (e.g. charter cities) community and culture (neighborhoods and education), we'll get to a better place than what you are suggesting. I'm not at all attached to the end state being optimized by for profit entities - they will most likely be a combination of Ostromian diverse institutions. But I do see for profit entities accelerating progress towards a more humane future. Much of our misery is due to the endless conflict of political hatreds which simultaneously prevents innovation in the most important human domains. A world of competing for profit governance entities with a world of competing for profit neighborhood developers inspired by a world of for profit education/human development entities will reduce human misery rapidly. Part of the inspiring work associated with such a world consists of building thousands of new cities, communities, and subcultures associated with diverse practices associated with well-being. Right now, thanks to government dominance in key domains, it is easier to innovate in gambling and pornography than in happiness and well-being. Reduce the scale of the bully who keeps us all miserable (government controlled sectors such as law, governance, community and well-being) and we'll be able to innovate our way to a better world. Public schools alone cause lasting misery at an unimagined scale,
https://flowidealism.medium.com/are-public-schools-causing-an-epidemic-of-mental-illness-1b37b6c0ef3e
You say that this way of thinking "is not at present the program of any popular movement", but if not, why not make one? one challenge is that there are many variations of the ideas here...so where to draw the boundaries of such a movement? there is some overlap with the growing pro-natalist movement, and this: https://steader.substack.com/
I'm doing my bit by writing about these ideas, and I hope that brings me in contact with lots of others who are doing their respective bits as well.
First, this has been a great series, and I find all of your posts interesting, and dense food for thought.
Second, you last post reminded me that I attended an interesting event by BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) and you might be interested in their work.
Looking them up, it looks like they’ve rebranded as Common future: https://www.commonfuture.co/
Thanks!
Dear Brink, As you will see if you take the trouble to read far enough—the whole thing is only a hundred pages long— my advocacy of the idea of factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs is firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition, a tradition whose underlying theme, at least as I understand it, is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom. You really should read it, and perhaps write about it. You would be the first. Here is the ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Thanks, I will take a look!