Civil Society

The Political Bazaar and the Political Cathedral

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Last night I got an excellent education in politics from a local old master at how they play the game in Lake County, Indiana. Halfway through it, I had an epiphany, that the whole internal system, top to bottom was largely based on “Cathedral” style thinking straight out of Eric S Raymond’s influential essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar and I had long ago decided that the bazaar had the winning argument, at least for this generation.

That moment cleared up a lot for me and clarified my thinking. I was having this discussion because the Indiana Republican Liberty Caucus had just organized a Lake county chapter and I was elected chairman. I was calling around and letting the town chairmen know that there was a new player in town on the GOP’s side and oh, could I stop by to introduce myself and the LC-INRLC at their next meeting.

The old master went on and I paid attention but my entire perspective shifted because I had realized that the fight I was in was a different fight than the one he was describing. Imagine building a cathedral in a bazaar. It’s a bit annoying to the rest of the bazaar but if you’ve got the scratch to reserve that much space, the bazaar will accommodate. Now imagine building a bazaar in a cathedral. The cathedral people will hate you because, inherently, your activities often won’t respect the day to day pieties of the cathedral you’re working in. Nobody has found a perfect solution to this, though the best of the cathedral builders in the software world have learned to make their peace and to change their structure to accommodate the bazaar builders that they rely on and compete with.

The ideological struggle with the left just got company as my top priority. Party building a GOP bazaar just snapped into focus as a major challenge.

Self Reliance

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Emerson can lead to naval-gazing and even solipsism. Googling one of his aphorisms, I find powerpoints from assertiveness training and slick empowerment seminars. Sure, that is true; as I’ve gotten older I sometimes have less patience with that cheerful old group. Still, reviewing Robert Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, I was struck by his summary of the ideas Thoreau found so congenial in Emerson. And it reminded me that felicity may be the most reliable and most important consequence of a restrained but dominant individualism (and its byproducts) – and the first victim of policies now being contested:

The danger in setting society at a higher value than the individual, the trouble with encouraging people to identify themselves primarily with some group, was that it then became easy to transfer the blame for one’s own shortcomings to that group. If one looked to society for one’s identity and one’s satisfactions, then surely society should be held accountable for one’s dissatisfactions, lack of identity, alienation. Emerson had already set himself against this view, and Thoreau was now thinking along the same line. (34)

A Culture War in Miniature

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A debate about a 4th-grade basketball game illustrates, on a very small scale, some of the primary cultural and political divides facing America today:

A few days before the game, Jay’s father called me. He and the other parents of his son’s team were “very, very concerned.” Even alarmed. Apparently, as the championship game neared, the boys were doing a lot trash-talking at each other. Surely we could all agree that the real reason for the competition was to teach the boys cooperation and sportsmanship. Playing the game would mean one of the teams would lose, which would lead the winning team to “bragging rights in the schoolyard.” And that would not be healthy. It would undermine the real lessons to be learned about self-esteem and mutual respect.

He dwelled on these points for a while, finally landing heavily on the notion that this was a wonderful opportunity for us, as parents, to “frame the situation as a teaching moment.” Eventually, he got to the money point: He and the other parents of Jay’s team wanted to cancel the championship game. After all, we could all agree that both teams were already winners, right?

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Religions of the Chaos Lords

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Pamela L. Bunker and Dr. Robert J. Bunker at SWJ Blog

The Spiritual Significance of ¿Plata O Plomo?

Conventional wisdom holds that narco gang and drug cartel violence in Mexico is primarily secular in nature. This viewpoint has been recently challenged by the activities of the La Familia cartel and some Los Zetas, Gulfo, and other cartel adherents of the cult of Santa Muerte (Saint Death) by means of religious tenets of ‘divine justice’ and instances of tortured victims and ritual human sacrifice offered up to a dark deity, respectively. Severed heads thrown onto a disco floor in Michoacan in 2005 and burnt skull imprints in a clearing in a ranch in the Yucatán Peninsula in 2008 only serve to highlight the number of such incidents which have now taken place. Whereas the infamous ‘black cauldron’ incident in Matamoros in 1989, where American college student Mark Kilroy’s brain was found in a ritual nganga belonging to a local narco gang, was the rare exception, such spiritual-like activities have now become far more frequent.

These activities only serve to further elaborate concerns amongst scholars, including Sullivan, Elkus, Brands, Manwaring, and the authors, over societal warfare breaking out across the Americas. This warfare- manifesting itself in ‘criminal insurgencies’ derived from groups of gang, cartel, and mercenary networks- promotes new forms of state organization drawn from criminally based social and political norms and behaviors. These include a value system derived from illicit narcotics use, killing for sport and pleasure, human trafficking and slavery, dysfunctional perspectives on women and family life, and a habitual orientation to violence and total disregard for modern civil society and democratic freedoms. This harkens back to Peter’s thoughts concerning the emergence of a ‘new warrior class’ and, before that, van Creveld’s ‘non-trinitarian warfare’ projections.

Cultural evolution in action, accelerated by extreme violence. More on the cult of Santa Muerte here ( hat tip to HistoryGuy99)

Cross-posted at Zenpundit.com

Worthwhile Reading

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David Brooks argues that the crime wave of the 1970s has had a long-term effect on the American psyche, and especially on parenting. (via FFOF)

Victor Davis Hanson reflects on small-town America.

Paul Levy describes redesign of the pharmacy in the hospital he runs, making use of Lean principles, including mock-ups and heavy participation from those who will be using the new space. (via Lean Blog)

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