I was gratified to receive a number of responses to my Cultural Confederacies posting a few weeks ago. Perhaps the most endearing was the guy who suggested I find the nearest airport to fly out of the country and don’t let the loading ramp hit me on the way out. I love reasoned arguements, don’t you? I did enjoy however, the furtive comment of several people that in their heart they wished the North had just let the Confederacy go. To them I say, better late than never.
Its hard to think of oneself as a traitor, at least for me. Far from it. I rather consider myself a proto-patriot, trying to figure out how to work towards a humane organizing system which will nurture most of my fellow citizens as we ride the roller coaster of the next half century. If the current undercurrent of anger and frustration is any indication, then things are about to change, especially here in an America where the bankers have staged a quiet coup. If you don’t believe me on that, perhaps you would believe someone with more credibility. what about Bill Moyers?
Meanwhile Glen Beck continues urging the Religious Racist Right to plot the overthrow of Obama while most of the country is mesmerized by trivial parlor tricks like the balloon boy hoax. Don't people get it that they are being had?
America is falling apart while most of us just watch it like another version of reality TV. Those of us who care need to make at least feeble attempts at alternatives plans. Rather than continued anger at the failure of the various systems or vague hope that the existing systems can be saved, I think it is time to generate some ideas which answer the real challenge of the moment. That challenge is to accept that things are deeply broken and to provide some rational thinking about how we can humanely put things back together. There are no guideposts in this quest, so its worth trying to come up with a new logic.
One interesting question that kept coming up in response to the Confederacies pos: was, Well, how do you foresee getting from here to there? How would these 5 new countries happen? Yes, that is an interesting question. Actually it is a conversation, and it seems that conversations should start with a clarification of my premise.
The basic premise is that we need to find some glue which will hold people together into some kind of voluntary decision structure which can loosely be called a government. The pursuit of money, or was that “happiness”, seemed to suffice for a couple of hundred years. As things have been imploding for the past few years, a number of folks seem to be realizing that there may be real limits to that concept. So we get a natural return to the old isms as the answer (socialism, anarchism etc.). I suspect we need a new model of social organization altogether.
I would start by taking biology and the popular trend towards voluntary simplicity into consideration. An elegant approach to new governance could build on small scale, simple answers rather than the overly complex mega system of governance and finance we have created of late.
So my first step was to think of the basic building block of our systems of cooperation, values and direction. This led to the idea that shared culture was the key component to building a system in which most of the participants felt secure and nurtured. Cultural Confederacies is based on a simple assumption that our cultural connections are deeper and more emotionally resonant than our political and economic associations, American mythology not withstanding.
For the formative idea of culture I take my cues from Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West. He gives a primacy to “Cultures” which he sees as
“spring with primitive strength from the soil of a mother region to which it remains firmly bound throughout its whole life cycle: each stamping of its material, its mankind, in its own image; each having its own ideas, its own passions its own life will and feeling, its won death.”
Spengler also see the undermining of culture as it mutates into “civilization” which begins to provide more importance to its structural values than that of the human participants. His critique of the West is deepened by his jaundiced view of democracy which is ruled by money and is therefore easily corruptible. A simplistic way of looking at this might be that money is not the corruptor of democracy, but rather that democracy uses money to corrupt culture.
Though there is a certain Germanic density about his work, Spengler is a remarkable multiculturalist. As am I. He saw the decline of culture into civilization as the way that people loose their vitality and vision. There seems to be a lot of that lost vitality in today’s world as the forces of privilege and corrupt religions buy the public attention.
For a moment, imagine a devolution into multiple culture based states, each developing its own internal strengths and directions. The diversity of this system would provide the possibility of some real vitality in the nurturing of individuals in safer environments than now offered by our rampant compeititveness.
I am also proposing this because part of me doesn’t want to accept the historical inevitability of decline as projected by Spengler. Might there be a way of helping stoke the dampened fires of culture to rediscover the authenticity of experience. For instance, as the world becomes more intertwined with its electronic nervous system, might those virtual links obviate the need for the grosser infrastructure of civilization like the megastate? Small is beautiful. In a small state we share a lot of positive values which bind us through the shared memes of our culture. These same values can metastisize into social disfunctions when they are imposed through the larger state. Regional religious culture is a good example of how that happens.
Perhaps we can consciously work at fanning the flames of our dying cultures rather than accepting the march of “progress” towards eventual decline.
Here I would like to mention another important book on our varied Anglo-American cultures. Its Albion’s Seed by D. H. Fischer. In it, he explores the origins of the American regional cultures and how they grew out of disparate English cultures which migrated to America in the 17th century. When I read it, I was amazed to see the continuity of these cultures in our lives and politics. In his thesis you can understand the deep basis of divisions of the cultures of New England, the South and Appalachia.
Even science seems to be getting involved in affirming the key strengths of our cultural bonds. Last week in the Times, David Brooks had a piece on the Young and the Neuro, on how neuroscience has begun to understand the ways behaviors and preferences get imprinted. One friend suggested that this research will only lead to a pill which will “cure” culture. Of course he sees domination based conspiracies everywhere. I more suspect such research will reveal how complex, varied and deep are the roots of culture. There will be no cure, nor should there be.
That is my rationale for the base line of finding natural cultural boundaries which would define the new governance. Obviously I am still struggling with an elegant logical presentation, but the foundation blocks are becoming firmer. This conception is still formative and the next challenge is to address the path from here to there.
For that path, I suspect there will be many branchings and dead ends. We are entering a extended period of political and economic chaos after all. We do ourselves no favors to imagine that tomorrow will look like today. Rather, we need to imagine a vision of tomorrow which might help fix the damages of today. That vision, as it is built can provide hope and direction. In that, I don't mean the Obama hope that we can craft a consensus around the status quo. I mean a hope that we can all join in a great adventure to find a new path through the frightening near future.
My culture based systems at least offer some prospect of internal cohesion and support. They would offer a small respite from the carnage of today’s status based decision systems since the culture wants to protect its own.
Next time, we can talk about the political vision which might make such human scale entities possible. I am betting that it has some melding of Progressivism and Libertarianism.
