Lots of interesting feedback on my last post.  Kevin Drum and Ryan Avent  both focus on the notion that the sort of choice Bramwell describes is only available to higher-income families, leaving poor Americans and their children to waste away in subpar schools in broken neighborhoods. (Avent called my defense of public schools regrettable, though I think he focused entirely on Bramwell’s argument instead…)

My point, however, while riffing off of Bramwell’s initial argument, was simply that schools are a secondary issue, and won’t be fixed until the neighborhoods and communities are fixed first.  Without fertile soil for public schools to grow and improve in, all the school choice in the world will have negligible effects.  Even the sort of choice Bramwell claims we already have.  A couple quick thoughts:

• School choice not only undermines public schools by draining their coffers, it creates a “brain-drain” on communities, often pulling the most determined, driven students out of the local school and placing them elsewhere.
• Notably, many voucher-proponents are wealthy, and as is the case with many charters, it seems likely that the already wealthy would benefit the most from any voucher program. 
• School choice does not address the problems of affordable housing, restrictive zoning, and lack of business investment in many of these communities.  Avent makes a really good point about zoning in particular:

But that doesn’t mean that the issue of affordable housing should just be forgotten. It’s really important. The quality of schools isn’t the only thing capitalized into the price of a home. So too is the value of neighborhood amenities, including things like public safety and convenient grocery stores. And of crucial importance to home values is access to employment centers, and the stronger the local labor market, the higher are home values. You’re not just paying for a building or a piece of land; you’re paying for a location that secures for you certain opportunities and a certain quality of life.

I just think it’s strange — and really troubling — that writers of all stripes shrug off the huge set of regulatory and legal restrictions that hold down housing supply and density in the country’s strongest economic centers. There are serious consequences to these rules, and we should take them seriously.

I think that while many Americans can move across town to a better school, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a charter or magnet nearby as well.  Some school choice, I believe, can be a net benefit to a community.  Too much, and I think you’ll start to see an even greater divorce between schools and communities than already exists.  Focusing instead on creating cities that have mixed zoning, better opportunities for low-income families to live in nicer areas, and better climates for business investment in areas that are currently low-income will do a better job at addressing the problems with our public schools than simply busing students off one by one to better schools elsewhere.

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I think this Amanda Marcotte piece is pretty interesting.  She touches on the idea of work and community and how the modern workplace has, until very recently, served to cut us off entirely from our loved ones during the day.  This, she asserts, was not always the case.  People used to come into more contact with their loved ones during the day in the past and this served to create a more organic, more humane work place.  She riffs off a TED talk by Stefana Broadbent (below) which talks about how modern communication technology has actually allowed people to regain some of this ability to communicate with loved ones during the work day.

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day.  If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work.  (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist.  Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day.  Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

But of course, since the isolation was the product of culture, we can’t expect culture not to strike back.  Broadbent notes how people who work in many low status occupations, like bus drivers and factor workers, are facing increasingly punitive monitoring to make sure they don’t check in with family and friends during the day.  Broadbent treats this like a human rights violation, and I’m inclined to agree. If people are getting their work done, monitoring them to make sure they don’t use their downtime to talk to people they love is only going on in order to debase them and suggest that their personal lives don’t count.  I’ll go a step further and argue that the monitoring is valuing debasement and control of working class people over actual economic concerns like profit and saving money.  It uses resources to monitor workers, after all.  But more than that, I’m skeptical of the idea that unhappy people are better workers.  People who can’t communicate with loved ones often spend a lot of their mental energies worrying about those loved ones, in my experience.  Communication that you can control doesn’t offer nearly the distraction that your colleagues can offer by barging in and demanding your attention whenever they want, too.

This makes sense to me.  Then again, the average high school student in America spends five and a half hours a day in front of a screen, and there is little doubt in my mind that this sort of always-online-or-watching-tv culture is bad for society in the long run.  Nor is our increased sedentary lifestyle exactly beneficial to our societal health or temperament. 

That being said, I think the benefits of technology should not be overlooked either, and if new avenues of communication are allowing friends and loved ones to keep in touch more, that’s undeniably a very good thing.

I’ve always thought a more likely reason for our atomization was our car culture.  The ability for families to spread out over such long distances, and the need to drive to get anywhere at all have led to people living further and further apart from one another.  My mom had seven siblings other than herself, and each one lives in a different city now, with their own families.  Only one stayed in her home town.  This was unheard of a generation previously.  Now it is the status quo.  My family has chosen a different path, and has decided to stay in our home town where our families live so that our children will have deeper and stronger ties to their community than we did growing up. 

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general.  In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance.  Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Watch the TED talk after the leap.

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Below the fold is a photograph Matt Yglesias took in Freiberg, Germany: [Read more →]

I have been rather harsh in my treatment of the “rugged individual” in these pages, and yet have come to an essentially libertarian position on most economic issues.  At the heart of libertarian philosophy is at least some degree of faith in the individual to make the best, or at least the most rational or most predictable, decision.  (Faith may be the wrong word….)  Still, I believe my social critique of the “rugged individual” is compatible with classical liberal economics (as opposed to economic populism, socialism, or distributism etc. etc.)

Individualism, properly understood, is a different animal altogether than the “rugged individual” of American myth – and even further distant from the entitled individual born into our own senseless era of wealth and purposelessness, severed from our communities and our history and our culture.  Individualism means more than what it has come to mean in either of these senses.

The “rugged individual” has been mythologized as the bootstrapper – the American business mogul who pulled himself up from humble beginnings into a position of power and wealth.  The entitled individual is spoiled, shallow, skeptical of the value of hard work, more interested in selfish pursuits than in helping others, detached from consequence, and possessed of an odd expectation that they deserve a great job, great pay, lots of toys – all for simply existing.  Both are examples of the so-called American Dream – one its myth, and one the consequence, perhaps, of that myth. [Read more →]

I stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast this weekend in a charming old mining town on a little mountain in the desert.  It’s now home to dozens of artists and artisans – painters, potters, glass-blowers, musicians, etc. – and a favorite for both bikers and tourists alike.  Lots of old somewhat dilapidated or restored houses and crumbling streets.  I thought to myself – it would be fun to live here.  Everything is so old and quirky.

After a while, though, I realized I’d quickly tire of it, run out of options and things to do, run out of choices that I take for granted now.  The aesthetics drew me in, much as the aesthetics of any old, charming place might.  Indeed, I think much of the real visceral appeal of localism has a great deal to do with the aesthetics of charming places, with our notion of what such charming places must be like rather than the often less-interesting reality. [Read more →]

“If you think of your home as property, rather than a place, and your community as a brand, rather than people, then you have decided to take a businessman’s approach. If you become a selfish individual, trying to extract value out of every person you meet, then you are a corporation. That is the logic of corporatism: Instead of creating value with others, you extract value from others, in a zero-sum game.” ~ Douglas Rushkoff, in an interview with Elizabeth Nolan Brown

But isn’t this overstating the case quite a bit?  Most people don’t think this way, and yet we certainly have migrated to a world dominated by corporations and have certainly become more detached and less “community-oriented.”   Before homes were thought of as “property” and merely as “places” this was largely due to the fact that someone – perhaps your feudal lord – could simply raze it to the ground or take it away from you.  If anything ever added meaning to place it was property rights.

And who thinks about their community as a “brand”?  Unless you’re being paid to promote tourism or business growth, you probably think of your community as a community, or a town, or a city, or whatever.  Maybe you think it’s just boring. I think people have always grown bored with their surroundings.  And unless I’m very mistaken, people who try to “extract value out of every person” they meet are generally regarded as somewhat sociopathic.  I’m not sure it describes many people at all, regardless of the fact that we may all be, to one degree or another, selfish and self-centered.  We always have been, I’d wager, and we likely always will be.

This isn’t to say that all is well in community-land.  We could do better.  We could build more organic neighborhoods.  We could stop thinking always in terms of the car-culture.  We could buy locally more often and more importantly, perhaps, even think locally.  We could walk more and spend more time with our families and getting to know our neighbors instead of watching T.V.  We could focus more on our local arts and culture and on the creation of vital, creative young minds in our local schools.

But this just seems like a stretch to me, to say the least.  And I generally feel quite a bit of antipathy toward corporatism myself.  I want to read Rushkoff’s book, and I’m going to have to read the whole interview as well, but I think I’ve retreated in many of my localist tendencies to a position which can be largely summed up with the phrase, all that glimmers is not gold.

I had the privilege of chatting with Joe Carter and John Schwenkler on their respective takes (linked to by their names) on the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the state and role of policing in America, and its corresponding relationship to communities everywhere. It goes without saying that both Joe and John are sharp guys, so the conversation was pretty engaging (my bad joke at the end not withstanding).

Check out the audio after the jump. [Read more →]

(h/t: Tim Lilburn for the title)

I’ve been a bit off the map of late due to a pick up of busyness in my personal life. As some have read in a variety of places, I am getting married in seventeen days and am moving into a condo that my soon-to-be-wife and I recently closed the deal on two days after the nuptials. Getting married and buying your first home is a lot to take on in the same time span, admittedly, and it has kept us running pretty fast from place-to-place and task-to-task for the past couple of weeks.

We chose to overlap the two in the way that we did because if you’ve got the work and the down payment to swing it, now is a pretty good time to be in the market for a home. And, well, the wedding has been scheduled for some time now. So I guess we represent one of the few bright stories from this economic catastrophe: we were able to take advantage of a depressed market to maximize our equity and leverage ourselves into a pretty fantastic home that has pretty much everything that we were looking for (including more than 1100 square feet of space).

More than a few people have commented that for the price we paid for the condo we could have bought a perfectly lovely house, which is true. We chose not to buy a house because we couldn’t afford one in the corresponding neighbourhood in which we wanted to continue living and so went about finding a condo in which it would be feasible to begin raising a family (hence the relatively monstrous square footage).

Now, there is more going here than just a snobbish desire to live close to downtown on our part and it relates back to our ongoing discussions around g/localism. Granted my soon-to-be-wife and I have a loathing for the idea of having to move ourselves out to the suburbs if we want to start raising a family that is perhaps only rivaled by our loathing for the community association in the neighbourhood we are moving just outside of. It is fair to say that we like our neighbourhood and were not prepared to give up for the promise of a house. But we also happen to be philosophically opposed to the notion that for younger people, having a family means leaving the downtown core. [Read more →]

Following Chris’ very kind comment on Friday, I thought I would resume my digging into what my sputtering about glocalism and glocalization really means. It’s all fine and well to talk about “globalizing the local” (Chris’ summary) and maintaining global networks and interconnectivity that avoids visiting a corresponding violence upon local cultures and communities, but what is necessary for this idea to spark a real discussion is something approaching a coherent outline or structure. I’m getting there in bits and pieces, slowly but surely; however, the challenge here is that in some senses I’m still building the boat as I set sail. So I imagine that the whole project comes off a touch disjointed and schismatic.

I think Chris’ framing the discussion in terms of trying to introduce some verticality into Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Multitude is helpful and it is true that I have actually drawn some vague and abstract inspiration from Hardt and Negri’s vision. Truth be told, though, I have started and stopped Multitude three times now, never really getting into the meat of it. Most of my understanding of what Hardt Negri outline there within comes from conversations with a good friend who speaks both highly and critically of the work and a handful of videos on YouTube that I’ve watched primarily featuring Michael Hardt.

However, Multitude is back on deck in terms of my reading schedule and the last time I had started I was actually quite into it — coincidentally, I suspended that reading to take on Barnett’s Great Powers. I intend to make a sizable dent in the book over the course of this weekend and am hopeful that doing so will flesh out some ideas in some interesting ways.

But in terms of why glocalism’s bee is stuck in my blogging bonnet, I tend to take as much inspiration from my interactions with a variety of localists around the blogosphere and their articulation of an ideal, or at least more sustainable, enjoyable, and manageable world.

Daniel Larison, Rod Dreher, Nathan Origer, Russell Arben Fox (hell, basically everyone at Front Porch Republic), and here at the League our own E.D. Kain present what I consider to be a powerful and compelling analysis of our modern lives and the ways in which we might choose to alter those lives towards a better end. I lock horns with these characters as much as I do precisely because I am so impressed with the vision they present, which is a vision that underwrites a great many of the ways I live my life and the values that inform my life. [Read more →]

“Rather than deep moral and spiritual renewal leading to civic health, what if it’s our national solipsism and susceptibility to suggestion that pull us together, and pull us through? What if, rather than being stuck with virtue, we discover that, after a few initially painful changes in lifestyle, we can buy spray-on virtue in a can? If enough Americans decide that the TV show of their lives should feature them acting like engaged, conscientious citizens, might that not be just as good as a more “authentic” conversion?”  ~ Matt Frost

Matt has a point.  In fact, one reason why in my search for a workable localism I have dedicated a great deal of virtual ink searching for practical rather than moral solutions, is that I don’t think we will see any sort of moral sea change as a nation any time soon.  National reckonings are at best temporary.   I don’t think we will willingly change or restructure our spending habits – or even that spending in and of itself is a bad thing.  Rather we need to move back toward a style of consumerism which is more responsible - as in, less built on debt, and more on savings and hard work.  It’s much more likely that this sort of shift occurs through the tightening of credit, rather than the voluntary reduction of our appetites.

So what are these “practical” solutions?  There are a number, including reducing our dependence on foreign economies and cutting back military spending.  Restructuring our financial system is also vital.

For instance, we should seriously consider nationalizing troubled banks and then selling them back off with size or regional restrictions.  This would benefit the financial industry in a number of ways.  We need to do away with the terrible anti-capitalist notion of “too big to fail” which props up our oligarchy at the expense of the tax payer and to the detriment of healthy competition; in fact, the continued presence of these “too big” financial institutions may be directly impeding any sort of reasonable recovery that the stimulus at large hopes to usher in.  Commerce is at its best at smaller scales (even if these smaller operations do attain global reach), in which merchants, bankers, investors, etc. operate within communities and the dollars involved remain flowing through those communities, rather than bleeding out into the pockets of distant executives and share-holders, more concerned with quarterly profits than the long term.  This is not always possible, of course, but it’s worth shooting for, especially in our financial sector which obviously, when mismanaged, carries far too great a risk to the health of the global economy. [Read more →]

I want to follow up on this with an examination of Community vs. Rights in light of our transportation policy, but for now, read David Schaengold of Plumb Lines: [Read more →]

So in the continuing debate between myself and Mark about the value of protesting and the intricacies of protest culture, Mark has basically conceded my point that judging protests on the basis of affecting change and cohesiveness of message alone is to misunderstand at least one element of protesting insofar as they are community building events. However, Mark notes that the near invariability of mixed messaging involved in protesting may well generate as much apathy as it seeks to mitigate.

Mark asks,

But what if taking to the streets winds up increasing, rather than decreasing, apathy in society as a whole even as it creates a sense of a passionate united community amongst the faithful? What if, indeed, it winds up destroying a nascent movement united on a single issue? I think this is exactly what happens when more and more non-germane elements are introduced into a protest.

Sure, again if the purpose of the protest in question is to unite people on one single issue and give birth to a “nascent movement” Mark’s point would be very well taken, but that’s not what I’m referring to when I talk about the community building potentials of grassroots protesting from either the left or the right.

Listen, before I dig in to what I take to be the meat of this issue, let me get a couple of things out of the way. Firstly, it is my estimation that anyone who is going to be turned off by a plurality of messaging at a protest to the extent that they come to question the very value of mass public demonstration, then odds are they weren’t generally going to be very much involved in the first place — much less susceptible to any gravitational pull of community building that may go on in these events.
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