Br. Mark last week crafted an excellent post criticizing his own political views which generated some interesting back-and-forth commentary.  It comes highly recommended.  Mark asked other members of the League if they might follow suit and that got some ideas kicking around between Mssrs. Scott, ED, and myself.  So this post marks an initial foray into that venture,  which I believe Scott is calling Ideological Dexterity Collaboration.

For the first round anyway Scott has agreed to play his skilled role of moderator.  He sent me this question to start us off:

So Chris, as one of the two people at the League who likes to remain ideologically amorphous, do you see this tendency as a bug or a feature of your writing and analysis?

For those not in the know, Scott is the other ideologically amorphous member of the League.

So before I answer Scott’s very penetrating question, a bit of background on my ideological amorphous-ity (sidenote: that’s the word of the day, though I’m not even sure if a non-word can constitute word of the day but there it is).

Most readers know that my background is in history, theology (mostly the study of mystics from various religious traditions), and philosophy.  Related are side interests in the history of technology, philosophy of science, and the study of military warfare.  My study of political science comes through those lenses–lenses that emphasize large historical change, technological eras and science/technology as the driver of economic history.

I’ve been very influenced by the work of Philip Bobbitt whose book The Shield of Achilles lays out a theory of the evolution of Western politics at the nexus of military, technological, legal, and economic changes.  Bobbitt talks of the current paradigm as the Market State which has replaced the nation-state as a guiding construct.  While that notion is true socially and economically we live in a weird time when the governments of the nation-state are still around and politically hold much power, but nobody has bothered to tell them their time is up.

In that sense, it’s hard for me to be identified with any particular political point of view, as I generally see them as secondary to the real drivers of change.  At most I think of the various political points of view as coherent philosophies that are largely questions of how to best deal with the conditions already coming into existence–mostly through science and technology and the drive of consciousness.  I realize of course that isn’t how the various political philosophies see themselves.

My amorphousness is perhaps seen as amorphousness (which perhaps it isn’t) or at least complicated by a further issue which is that to the degree that I have a political view it is not one of liberal democracy and capitalism. My views on what I would actually implement were I philosopher-king would be so radically different than what we have now that there’s really no way to get from here to there.  What I adhere to goes under various names but basically is subsumed under the concepts of mutualism, resilient communities, distributism, sociocracy, and possibly Christian socialism (emphasis on the Christian part).   Similar trajectories include left-conservatism and Scott’s burgeoning concept of glocalism. Terms essentially no one knows or understands (myself probably included in the non-understanding part). Though an interesting part to start would be this essay by John Milbank.  [Read more →]

I think it was smart that Mark walked his arguments around free trade and globalism back a few steps in the light of well-founded arguments presented to the contrary. Not only is it the intellectually honest thing to do, but I think it gives us an opportunity to breathe and take a look at what it is that we’re actually arguing about.

In some senses I find these discussions about localism and globalism, free-market economics and distributism/protectionism, interventionism and isolationism to be among the most interesting and exciting discussions going. It’s my own humble opinion that the issues grappled there within are perhaps the most pressing and vital on our collective plate, both because they lie at the heart of the question we all face on a day-to-day basis (whether we choose to acknowledge it or not), “How shall I live?” and because that question is the pulse that lies within the veins of so many other truly daunting and important questions (economics, environment, politics, culture, technology, architecture, the list goes on).

Alternatively; however, I also find these conversations truly frustrating because the tendency for their participants is to get caught in dichotomous tropes, well worn pathways that inevitably lead to brick walls of disagreement and intractability. To wit, Mark and his interlocutors all chose to frame their discussion in either/or language; we either go local or we go global, period (Dr. Larison explicitly titled his well-received rejoinder as such). There is always some benefit to strongly stated cases and arguments flying about on either side, but at some point you come to an impasse when the letters “vs” are stuck into your articulation — and this is all the more the case when it comes to issues that are as well debated as globalism and localism. For me, the truly fascinating space of the debate is that sliver of an opening that suggests that both sides have a good deal of proprietary truth they bring to the table, but still possess enough cracks in their master plan to allow for a certain intellectual legoing of the ideas offered.

Hence, my real direction in all of this is to explore the notions of how the truths uncovered by localists about a certain way of living that seems increasingly vital, especially insofar as value and integrity are concerned, might be fit together with the powerful potential of global networks with which our free-market economic adventures and resulting global cultural cross-pollination have provided us with. In my first crack at this I termed what I was trying to articulate was a sense of glocality, and appropriately warned of my neologistic midwifery. Imagine my surprise (probably not all that surprising, actually, but delightful all the same) when a couple of posts down the road, Dara Lind alerted me to the fact that my somewhat half-baked wordplay had a semi-coherent correspondent body of thought. So it is that my belief in matters large and small have come to rest on the notion that neither globalism nor localism themselves provide a full answer to the question, “How shall I/we live?” Rather, each contains some element of powerful but limited truth in the matter and that a fuller picture is best painted by finding some kind of fusion between the two.

Welcome to glocalism.
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Daniel Larison picks up arguably one of my most awkwardly worded sentences in one of my most awkwardly written posts and then writes:

It’s true that idealism would be quite heavily burdened by idealism, but if we set this odd statement aside I’m still not sure what Kain means

Quite right.  It was an odd statement.  Poorly written.  Look, I’ll reproduce it one more time:

The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision. Politics is not a time machine and we are not ever going to travel back to whichever pre-modern, small government existence that many paleos envision.

What I meant to say, I suppose, is simply that the paleo/agrarian/localist cause is often too wrapped up in its own idealism and fails largely to come up with practical solutions to the ills of modernity.  There is a lot of great writing out there on the subject.  Go spend a few hours pooring through the Front Porch Republic – Deneen, Larison, Kaufman, Stegall, Shiffman, etc. – these are all smart people writing excellent critiques of modernity, globalization, free trade, and so forth.  I find myself nodding in agreement much more often than not.

So what I was attempting to do with that post, after writing about a dozen posts in the localist, anti-corporate vein, was to try to see where the chinks in the armor were.  And quite frankly, the most glaring of these is that despite all of this very smart stuff, there is little being offered by me or anyone else that is terribly practical; or rather that offers a very concrete alternative plan by which to enact this alternative vision. Vision is all well and good, but without a map, without a plan – well, it becomes very, very difficult to implement.

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Both E.D. and Mark have excellent posts up debating and discussing the merits of individualism versus communitarianism and lamenting the marketization of moral calculation. Regardless of which inflection you happen to prefer, I think that one can find a great deal to appreciate about E.D.’s careful and biting criticism of individualism run amok and Mark’s exemplary effort to carve out an alternative and ultimately more authentic definition of individualism.

Both writers note how morality and value qua materialism is perhaps the most pressing scourge currently facing us, and I am inclined to both heed and agree with their warnings. But that said, I think that it becomes easy in such a game of finger pointing to wind up up over selling one’s case and failing to mind a certain persistent set of details that beg acknowledgment. Listen, it is certainly true that unbridled consumerism presents significant problems on numerous levels — not just the philosophical ones to which Mark and E.D. point, but also environmental/survival problems to which Thomas Friedman somewhat recently alluded in one of his op-eds. The hollowing effects of consumerism therefore present a significant edifice over which we must scale in order to both embody our authentic selves and maintain the livable space in which to mount that effort.

That qualifier out of the way, though, I think we ought to be careful about not tossing the baby out with the bathwater, especially insofar as I think that baby includes several billion additional heads who might have something to offer to the project. It is easy for us in the West to disown and ridicule the excesses of materialism because, well, we’re the ones who are drowning in its mire. But to assume that such an outlook is universal is to commit the grievous sin of ethnocentrism: our circumstances are not the only circumstances effecting this calculation. There are whole sections of the world who look at images of the wealth, comfort, and stability of our culture and ask the perfectly legitimate question, “When will it be our turn?”

Indeed, the exercise of even pontificating about certain elements of life is in some senses a luxury reserved for those who have achieved (accidentally stumbled into?) a degree of affluence that affords them the time and space in which to engage such mental gymnastics. In some regards, we ought to be careful how thoroughly we thumb our noses at the junk of our lives, it is the ability to accumulate that junk that has given us the platform from which to have the privilege of rejecting it in pursuit of even more worthwhile realizations and modes of living — there are a great many (vast majority?) for whom such intellectual abandon is simply not a reality. [Read more →]

ED’s piece yesterday calling for a neo-distributist/localist economic order is  well worth the time.  As coincidence (or synchronicity?) would have it, I have been reading some books on distributism and thinking a  great deal about its  it in relation to this current economic-social climate.

I thought I might supply some historical and theoretical background on distributism for those who are not as familiar with the concept.

Distributism is the name of a little-known, somewhat quirky, branch of political economy/philosophy founded by some early 20th century English (almost entirely Catholics), Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterson most famous among them.

Their work and distributism generally grows out of  a body of knowledge known as Catholic Social Doctrine/Teaching.  (The wiki here, for those with more time here from the Vatican).  While Chesterson was more the evangelist for the movement, Belloc was arguably the real thinker behind the process.  His text “The Servile State” is the first and in my mind pre-eminent distributist text.

The argument of The Servile State is that when capitalism meets socialism and a new third thing is born:  The Servile State.  It is neither fully capitalist nor fully socialist.

In ED’s words:

What strikes me about this is how similar this concept of modal monopolization is to the concept of an increasingly all-powerful centralized state.  Big government and big business seem to grow apace;

This is in fact the very thing Belloc predicted in 1912 (zomg 1912!!!).  Now fans of F.A. Hayek will recall hearing this argument from The Road to Serfdom.  Hayekians sadly tend to forget how much Hayek himself credited Belloc with the idea for that work.  Hayek undoubtedly added a mathematical and economic precision, a social scientific underpinning to Belloc’s more philosophical argument.  The most important of those additions being Hayek’s insight that a central planned managerial mindset simply can not deal with the complexity of so many events occurring across space and time.

But Hayek’s alternative was free market capitalism. And here Hayek breaks radically with Belloc. Hayek only took half of Belloc’s argument.  The other half of Belloc which ED picked  up on and which Mark (as the Hayekian of the group) questioned in the comments.  Namely that self-described free market capitalism tends towards monopoly.  That monopoly will lead towads a certain kind of (usually financially driven) disaster, which will create a giant vacuum which will invitably be filled by increased governmentalization.  See The Great Depression I and II for evidence to that claim. [Read more →]

“Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”

~G.K. Chesterton

The process of determining who is to blame for our current economic crisis is daunting.  This is because for each villain one discovers, one must then discern the villain’s motivations; what historical conditions facilitated or inspired the villain’s capacity to harm; and then whether those historical conditions are part of a larger systemic or cultural or socioeconomic failing.  So, for instance, when we dig a little and find the overseers of the current meltdown – the CEO’s of the financial institutions whose black magic created this fiasco – we then become compelled to dig deeper still.  After all, where was our government in this debacle?  Isn’t a government’s purest purpose to protect its citizens, both from abroad but also from within?

Then again, to lay the blame at the feet of the government is terribly short-sighted as well.  After all, the government’s lack of oversight in this matter is essentially in keeping with the general trend of deregulation and modal monopolization of markets, and especially financial markets, that has defined the past few decades.  We need to dig deeper yet.  Philip Blond describes a modal monopoly as

“a model of monopoly that extends beyond whether an individual company has undue market influence to whether a certain mode or way of doing business constitutes a cartel. For example, the great housing crash is primarily the result of the absorption of all local, regional and national systems of credit into one form of global credit.”

What strikes me about this is how similar this concept of modal monopolization is to the concept of an increasingly all-powerful centralized state.  Big government and big business seem to grow apace; and at the same time, globalization and the rise of the financial industry to a predominant position in our modern economy seem also to be directly linked.

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