Civil Society

“Mama, mama, you got some money for me?”

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This part of Chicagoland tells a story and it’s a pretty familiar urban tale: the rise and fall of a neighborhood. Rickety houses in complete disrepair mingle with neatly kept bungalows – the stalwarts, I like to call them – whose trimmed lawns and white painted bars over windows and doors tell a different story. Someone here has a job.

The stories people tell me and the stories I’ve run across.

During the mid nineties, I rotated through the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office for a few months during one of my medical resident rotations. One of the autopsies I witnessed involved a suicide in jail. The pathologist had gone to the jail, as I recall, and brought back some personal artifacts in order to put the case together properly. One of the artifacts was a suicide note and I was allowed to look through it. I remember something like this: “noone ever loved me my mom wanted to abort me noone wanted me noone wanted me.” The words aren’t exact, but I remember the white notebook paper the words were written on and the round loopy “running together” handwriting as clear as day. I always say none of this stuff gets to me but I remember a few details with such clarity that I wonder if it is really true.

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An Uncomfortable Intimacy

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Following up on Lex’s point…

For most  of the course of human events, mankind lived in tribes.  Behavior was regulated by intimate and persistent relationships, many with blood relations. The prolonged development required by human children assumed prolonged immersion in a cultural torrent fed by close physical proximity to fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and the occasional stray outsider. Through this immersion, acceptable behavior was impressed on a child’s mind through a mix of deliberate and accidental lessons cumulatively applied over decades. When personal survival depended entirely on face to face relationships with others, the incentive to conform to what the tribe found acceptable was strong.

As Peter Turchin discussed in War and Peace and War, every human group, including tribes, is made up of three kinds of people:

  • knave: puts individual  interests before group interests
  • saint: puts group interests before individual interests
  • moralist: conditionally puts individual interests before group interests

If moralists can punish knaves for not pursuing group interests, they will willingly put group interests ahead of their individual interests. If moralists can’t punish knaves, they opt out of pursuing group interests and only pursue their individual interests.

Since any human group is roughly ¼  knave, ¼  saint, and ½  moralist, this potentially pits ¾  of the group against the knaves. Within a tribe, knaves face an additional problem: the size of a tribe is usually smaller than Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number is the “number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained” within the limits of the human mind. If group size is less than Dunbar’s number (around 150 people), moralists can know who’s a knave and who isn’t, allowing them to monitor and punish known knaves.

Consistent face to face intimacy with saints or moralists makes knavery difficult.

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An Interesting “Collapse” Hypothetical

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the famous Reagan administration economist and now an embittered and cranky paleoconservative social critic, penned a short but intriguing American “collapse” scenario set in the near future. Some of what Roberts writes fits neatly with the thesis in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies:

The Year America Dissolved

….As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
 
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money. With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.
 

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Who would be a Nazi ?

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This essay is dated but very pertinent today. Dorothy Thompson is just a name to most who are younger than I am but she had things to say that still speak to us 70 years later. Of course, Nazis are extinct, at least in the classical sense. They survive, however, as a type. This is as up to date as a guide to personality as it can be.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many timesin Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generationthe
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

This part of the essay is an anachronism since Nazism and Jews were two sides of an argument at the time. Let us, however, rename the two sides “leftist and Israeli.” Makes more sense doesn’t it ?

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at worka type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

At any rate, let us look round the room.

The gentleman standing beside the fireplace with an almost untouched glass of whiskey beside him on the mantelpiece is Mr. A, a descendant of one of the great American families. There has never been an American Blue Book without several persons of his surname in it. He is poor and earns his living as an editor. He has had a classical education, has a sound and cultivated taste in literature, painting, and music; has not a touch of snobbery in him; is full of humor, courtesy, and wit. He was a lieutenant in the World War, is a Republican in politics, but voted twice for Roosevelt, last time for Willkie. He is modest, not particularly brilliant, a staunch friend, and a man who greatly enjoys the company of pretty and witty women. His wife, whom he adored, is dead, and he will never remarry.

He has never attracted any attention because of outstanding bravery. But I will put my hand in the fire that nothing on earth could ever make him a Nazi. He would greatly dislike fighting them, but they could never convert him…. Why not?

Beside him stands Mr. B, a man of his own class, graduate of the same preparatory school and university, rich, a sportsman, owner of a famous racing stable, vice-president of a bank, married to a well-known society belle. He is a good fellow and extremely popular. But if America were going Nazi he would certainly join up, and early. Why?… Why the one and not the other?

Anybody think of John Kerry just then ?

Anyway, read the rest of it. It is startling and sobering to think how little has changed but the names. Credit for my finding it should go to The Anchoress

Another brief thought occurs, maybe this is a repeating theme in our history.

We think of ourselves as a meritocracy but we all know someone who wanted just a bit of a thumb on the scales. Maybe more than a thumb. I think my one complaint about Dorothy Thompson is that she might give more credit than is due to family and background. I think the blood of such families has gotten very thin the past 50 years. Many years ago, in Boston, I knew a few men who had used their family fortune to allow then to seek achievement in medicine and to ignore the necessity of earning a living that would support a lifestyle like that of John Kerry, although not so flamboyant. One such was J Gordon Scannell, chief of thoracic surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1965. As Scannell Moving Company trucks passed outside, he spent his life in a taxing profession. Another, who became famous (although unknown as a real person) was Edgar Kahn, whose life was fictionalized by Lloyd C Douglas in his novel, Magnificent Obsession, in 1929.

I see the parallels today and wonder about human nature and how little it has changed.

Angelo Codevilla – America’s Milovan Djilas

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Older readers may recall the once famous but now largely forgotten Cold War figure of Milovan Djilas. While other dissidents from Communism like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Whittaker Chambers acheived a more epic historical stature, Djilas was the first high Communist official, the adviser and likely successor to Yugoslavian dictator Tito, to turn against Communism as a system. More importantly, Djilas wrote New Class in 1957, a damning analysis that accurately castigated the hierarchy of Communist Party and government officials an exploitive and tyrannical ruling class that in the Soviet context was later termed “Nomenklatura“. For this act, Djilas would suffer in Tito’s prisons, but he outlived both Tito and Communism and his Party enemies were never able to shake off the truth of his bitter critique.

As related here in his post the other day by David Foster, Claremont scholar and Boston U. international relations professor Angelo Codevilla has published in The American Spectator a very lengthy, often brilliant, sometimes meandering, essay that is part analysis, part cri de coeur, but primarily the most devastating attack on America’s emerging, bipartisan, technocratic Oligarchy that I have ever read:

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

….Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

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