I've read two essays today that, while primarily focused on distinct themes not more than tangentially related to each other, come to a common conclusion about the centrality of place among human needs.
At Reason, Stephanie Slade asks, "Is There A Future For Fusionism?" Fusionism was the term used by National Review's original literary editor Frank S. Meyer to describe the melding of social traditionalism and free-market advocacy that became the basis for what was recognized as modern conservatism for many decades. The fusion held together during the Cold War because both camps shared a common alarm regarding the threat communism posed to a West primarily concerned with the thriving of the human spirit.
She spends a few paragraphs pointing out that a significant portion of the traditionalist camp has, in recent years, acted as if it hadn't much use for economic liberty. Marco Rubio, for instance, has spoken with an unmistakably dismissive sniff about "free market fundamentalism." Oren Cass's American Compass project has advocated
. . . subsidies for American manufacturers, reducing "toward zero" the number of visas granted to Chinese college students, and legally requiring corporations to put the common good ahead of profit seeking—perhaps by ordering them to include labor representatives on their boards of directors, thus "short-circuiting the default assumptions of shareholder primacy by including workers among those to whom management is accountable."
Champions of this kind of top-down direction of the market's resources - let's be candid; it amounts to industrial policy - say they put it forth in the interest of shoring up the viability of communities that no one can argue have been in decline for some time.
A certain kind of libertarian argues against this way of proceeding from the standpoint of the material advancements that freedom with no end other than itself has brought humankind. This type feels that that outweighs the proliferation of such ills as rampant addiction and suicide and declining marriage rates and church attendance:
Some libertarians are less bothered by these concerns. Many prefer to focus on the ways market-driven technological advances have vastly improved our quality of life. Others go further, arguing that widespread acceptance of a greater range of lifestyle choices make this the best time ever to be alive. Virtue is overrated, this cohort might say, or at least misunderstood—and if you're reading this magazine, you may be inclined to agree. If people are using more drugs (see, for instance, the cover of this month's issue) while having fewer children, that's fine and dandy so long as it's their choice.
What has led to free-market advocacy and traditionalism drifting away from each other, according to Slade, is a misunderstanding of what fusionism is:
Understanding what fusionism is—and what it is not—is more important than it may seem. An arrangement in which traditionalists and libertarians are merely allies can easily become a game of tug of war in which each side jockeys to ensure that, on balance, its own priorities predominate. If one side finds itself too often on the losing end of that jockeying, it might reasonably move to dissolve the alliance altogether.
But if fusionism is a discrete philosophical worldview—and a pervasive one at that, with a pedigree that runs through the American founding and with roots in the Hebrew Bible—then post-liberalism looks infinitely more radical. Remember: The new conservatives don't just call for a collective recommitment to the pursuit of virtue in the private sphere; they explicitly insist that power be exercised in the government sphere, with a goal of forcibly reorienting society to the common good.
She makes a cogent case - and I'm trying not to excerpt any more than is truly necessary here; you should read the whole thing - that the state is completely unequipped to address the sociocultural end of the fusionist bargain:
The central insight of fusionism is that the common good is best achieved when the state stays focused on protecting rights and liberties, leaving individuals and voluntary associations to do the rest. To be clear, there is nothing easy about that answer.
The primary concern of Jordan McGillis, writing at Athwart, is the accelerating effect the pandemic has had on trends already underway that have nearly obliterated our sense of the local community. His essay is called "Scrolling Alone," an obvious play on the title of Robert Putnam's 2000 book Bowling Alone.
He points out that 1950s thinker Robert Nisbet had seen this coming decades ago:
In the early 1950s, Nisbet catalogued the myriad ways mid-century Americans groped for meaning as bonds that traditionally structured daily life began to dissolve. To us today, Nisbet’s concerns may seem premature. With the war won and countercultural disillusionment still a decade away, was not the Age of Eisenhower when America reached its social apex? To Nisbet, things did not look so rosy.
Consider his elegy to our associations:
”Historically, our problem must be seen in terms of the decline in functional and psychological significance of such groups as the family, the small local community, and the various other traditional relationships that have immemorially mediated between the individual and his society. These are the groups that have been morally decisive in the concrete lives of individuals. Other and more powerful forms of association have existed, but the major moral and psychological influences on the individual’s life have emanated from the family and local community and the church.”
American modernity emerged in full in the 1950s, as families exchanged the local and the intimate for national and distant mass culture. Nisbet fulminated against American life’s new anonymity and lamented the disintegrating mores that anchored human relationships—relationships that arise in the home, the neighborhood, and the parish.
His worries have been borne out. By just about any measure of social health (think: informal interactions, feelings of trust, or volunteering), American communities are worse off now than they were at the time of Nisbet’s writing, despite our relative wealth. Almost seventy years later, the icons of the 1950s—the suburb, the supermarket, the television—stand as enduring markers of our anonymized culture and as hindrances to developing our social capital, a term not used by Nisbet, but one that is of a piece with The Quest for Community.
As to what COVID-19 has wrought, it's shortened the distance between the ends of our noses and the screens of our devices:
The pandemic has accelerated social shifts that are both caused by and hasten the evaporation of social capital. Two of these shifts are geographic sorting and online shopping.
The departure of people of means from America’s priciest zip codes in 2020 does not indicate that America’s struggling regions will soon be replenished, that social capital will be restored. San Francisco’s tech millionaires aren’t heading to places like Salinas; they’re transposing their cultural bubbles to enclaves similar to their own but that offer more square-feet per dollar. Where is one more likely to encounter a cross-section of America, commuting each day up Market Street or trundling through Carmel-by-the-Sea to the coffee shop?
Similarly, despite warnings of supply chain doom, the pandemic has not dented e-commerce one bit. Wary of brick-and-mortar’s close confines, Americans are buying more online than ever. Amazon, in a break from historic patterns, set a new total quarterly sales record in Q2 of 2020. It then beat that mark in Q3. And in Q4 it shattered prior expectations, bringing in 44 percent more revenue than a year earlier. Amazon also expanded its logistics footprint by 50 percent in 2020, positioning itself for maintained dominance even once the virus recedes. Meanwhile, nearly half of small businesses across the country have or might soon close for good.
The pandemic has accelerated trends, the groundwork for which already had been laid. The shifts have in many ways made life more amenable for those riding the wave of the digital economy. They have made it immeasurably worse for those who serve as the social glue for neighborhoods—the barbers, the barkeeps, and so forth. You haven’t seen your local dry cleaner in over a year; you’ve seen five different Amazon delivery drivers this week.
Each of these articles is making salient points about its own area of focus, but as I say, the concluding paragraphs of each make a common point that makes clear the task before us.
Slade winds up her argument thusly:
The post-liberal temptation is to believe that government power can be a substitute for the hard labor of institution building and cultural change. It isn't. The solution must begin at home—on the front porch, around the kitchen table, and in the mirror. The law is not a magic wand. There are no magic wands, and there is no shortcut to the good society.
McGillis echoes that conclusion to a degree that makes one wonder if they didn't have a lunch over which this subject became the topic of conversation:
To emerge from this cultural crisis (no, I won’t say “Build Back Better”), we must sow seeds of reciprocity from our own actions. This is not a call for a grand national project, of which we are today awash: it is a call to eschew the national in favor of the local. Take responsibility for the well-being of your family and neighbors. Offer a wave. Shovel a sidewalk. Send a kind note and a tray of cookies. Overcome the inclination to turn inward and instead invest—within epidemiologically appropriate bounds—in the human-scale associations that engender affection, recognition, and trust. Mundane though these acts may seem, they are more substantive than any vote you cast in November and any thinkpiece you have written for an online magazine. Daily behaviors within communities are the sustenance of a free and flourishing society.
To pull this country back from the brink, we must restore our Tocquevillian heritage so winsomely conveyed by Robert Nisbet; we must re-establish what is, or was, perhaps America’s truest claim to exceptionalism, our social capital.
The way back to something that actually works for human beings will not be found in any kind of program. It starts with each of us making the moment-to-moment set of choices that has us belong somewhere, in a setting where we need those we see on a daily basis, and they need us.
That's the way our species lived until quite recently. We could start in living that way again, if we so chose.
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