This was an idea I threw around on the old board before it crashed. It was inspired by my studies of Medieval Catholicism. What do you think of racialism reorienting itself as a cultural movement, specifically, imitating Christianity in some aspects of organisation? I have in mind here refocusing our efforts towards creating local institutions within communities, to serve in some ways the same role the churches once served, although nothing of a supernatural nature. We are powerless because we are so isolated from our neighbours, because the social bonds that exist within our communities have eroded to such a degree.

Throwing money away on futile elections does not seem to be getting us anywhere. The political system is quite similar to a cattle pen. Elites control the system indirectly because its structure privileges some groups over others. Think of how cattle are enclosed within barbed wire fences and persuaded by the structure of the pen to operate in certain ways as opposed to others. Better yet, imagine a very long barbed wire corridor containing cattle where the cattle want to escape the pen but its structure causes them to move endlessly in one direction after a horizon that only keeps retreating. The easiest way out of this trap would be to bust through the fencing, although this will be painful.

We need to do something similiar in that we need to focus all our might on one weak point in the political structure that encloses us. But to do this will require an enormous amount of cooperation between lots of people and the only way to unite such a large number of people behind any single cause will be to convert the masses to a certain set of basic values that transcend their immediate interests which they pursue in democratic elections, hence the need for a cultural movement.

In the High Middle Ages, the Papacy wielded enormous power in much the same way I have in mind here. The Papacy was such a cultural institution that was able to bring many secular rulers to their knees. There were various means by which this was done: interdict, anathema, excommunication and so on. Any stable political system relies upon a perception of legitimacy amongst its population (notice the results of the lack of such legitimacy in a place like Iraq). We must destroy that sense of legitimacy. In order to do this, similar institutions and tools could be of enormous value.

we are so isolated from our neighbours, because the social bonds that exist within our communities have eroded to such a degree.

I know this is off topic, but could you account for the erosion of said social bonds?

See the de Tocqueville thread.

I remember this. And I remember I was supposed to post information about the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, and how it started as a cultural movement.

I know this is off topic, but could you account for the erosion of said social bonds?

Maidhcín, I don't know if you have access to this sort of book, but there's a very readable survey on the "atomization" of American life called Bowling Alone : The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743203046/qid=1089713820/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/104-1146752-6571902

The author does tilt a bit more toward "trees" over "forrest" in his analysis, but he gives a frightening amount of documentation about how atomized American life now is, and how it is getting worse. (The "revival" bit in the title is largely wishful thinking on his part, unfortunately. I have not read the sequel, Better Together, but from the reviews at Amazon it sounds like he's now completely descended into fantasyland.)

Been a bit since I read it, but I think it boiled down to this:

(1) Mobility - The average American moves something like seven times during their lives, and some of these moves are not exactly across the street. I knew a girl in college whose parents had lived in the same house for ten years. She claimed that they were longest term residents on her street. An old joke is that IBM actually stands for "I've Been Moved," although I'm not so sure that it applies to that company today. In any event, I know somebody who spent four years in NY City, four years in Tuscon, four years in San Francisco and finally quit IBM after spending time in Atlanta.

(2) Sprawl - Suburbia has given way to something called "exurbia," with housing developments pushing into areas that were once rural. Everybody demands one acre lots, attached garages to the houses, etc., which means you're less physically likely to run into a neighbor. This also means nobody lives close to where they work, which means longer commutes, which means less free time to join social organizations.

(3) Passive entertainment - Television, video games, the internet, things that either did not exist 40 years ago, or were in a much cruder form.

I highly recommend this book (and I do not ordinarily give recommendations). This is one book the gallery would profit immensely from acquiring:

Chapter 5: The Crisis of Liberal Capitalist Democracy

As we discussed in the Introduction, even before September 11 there was a widespread sense of unease about the conditions of contemporary Western societies, and I have argued that this sense of unease is well-founded; the previous three chapters have elaborated the theoretical incoherence of liberalism that governs those societies. In this chapter I will examine the practical consequences of that theoretical incoherence, arguing that liberalism's individualism, and in particular the way it takes the market for the model of all human social relations, will eventually be socially destructive.

5.1 Individualism and Tyranny

To say that excessive individualism leads to social breakdown sees a bit too obvious, and in fact the argument that I want to make is more subtle. My argument will be adapted from the analysis of the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who argued that extreme individualism leads not to anarchy, as might be supposed, but rather, paradoxically, to tyranny. For Tocqueville, the link between excessive individualism and tyranny is isolation. Radical individualism causes people to become isolated, and isolated people are easily controlled. The individualism of modern liberalism is, therefore, utterly self-defeating. Let us examine this argument in more detail.

Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who visited the United States in the 1830s, initially with the goal of examining the penitentiary system that had been established there. He eventually made a complete survey of the politics and culture of the new republic, called Democracy in America, which was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. By "democracy" Tocqueville meant not necessarily a political system based on majority rule, but something more general -- a situation of broad social equality, as opposed to the highly stratifed structure of aristocratic societies. Tocqueville's analysis was so powerful that even today, almost two centuries and three industrial revolutions later, his book is still considered the definitive study of American society.

Tocqueville admired much of what he saw in the young republic; he thought that the democratic system he saw there was the fulfillment of Christianity and would eventually become the only acceptable type of society in the Western world. He did however, see two dangers lurking in the American system. The first of these was slavery, which he thought degraded not only the slaves but also the slave-owners, and which he correctly predicted would lead to war and numerous unresolved social conflicts. The second great danger Tocqueville saw was excessive individualism, and as indicated above, he thought this would lead to social isolation, which in turn would lead to tyranny. Tocqueville thought that individualism was a possible outcome of equality, that is, of wht he termed "democracy," and his most pressing concern was to understand how democracy could avoid generating such radical individualism. We will examine some of his ideas in this regard later, in chapter 7. For the moment, let us examine his argument that extreme individualism leads to tyranny.

Tocqueville makes his argument by comparing premodern aristocratic societies with modern democratic, and therefore potentially highly individualistic, societies. He points out that in aristocratic societies, there were two key factors that made widespread tyranny, or despotism, unlikely. First, in an aristocratic society, power was highly fragmented. Each noble ruled only a small area of land, and there were typically a variety of overlapping and competing sources of power: the church, various lower-level aristocrats, guilds, and other groups and institutions might claim jurisdiction over a particular geographical area or aspect of life. Therefore no one individual or group could exert too much power. Tocqueville observes that:

In past ages, there had never been a sovereign so absolute and powerful that he could by himself alone, without the aid of secondary powers, undertake to administer every part of a great empire. No one had ever tried to subject all his people indiscriminately to the details of a uniform code, nor personally to prompt and lead every single one of his subjects. . .

When the power of the Roman emperors was at its height, the different peoples of the empire still preserved very various customs and mores. Although they obeyed the same monarch, most provinces had a separate administration. There were powerful and active multiplicities in profusion, and though the whole government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor and he could, if necessary, decide everything, yet the details of social life and personal everyday existence normally escaped his control.
At the same time, the tightly knit social structure of premodern societies meant that every person was both highly dependent upon and highly obligated to others. Any premodern society consisted of a complicated network of long-term mutual obligations, quite unlike the market-based structure of modern societies. For example, in premodern societies, the type of work one did was typically determined not by market forces but by one's family position. Normally, a young man did the same work as his father. (One common arrangement among peasant families during the Middle Ages was that the oldest son followed his father in working the family's plot of land, the second son became a soldier, and the third son become a priest.) Similarly, marriages in premodern societies were normally arranged by parents. From a modern standpoint, these types of arrangements several limited individual freedom, but they did encourage a strong sense of obligation to others. Tocqueville points out that:

Among aristocratic nations families maintain the same station for centuries and often live in the same place. So there is a sense in which all the generations are contemporaneous. A man almost always knows about his ancestors and respects them; his imagination extends to his great-grandchildren, and he loves them. He freely does his duty by both ancestors and descendants and often sacrifices personal pleasures for the sake of beings who are no longer alive or are not yet born.

Moreover, aristocratic institutions have the effect of linking each man closely with several of his fellows.

Each class in an aristocratic society, being clearly and permanently limited, forms, in a sense, a little fatherland for all its members, to which they are attached by more obvious and more precious ties than those linking them to the fatherland itself.

Each citizen in an aristocratic society has his fixed station, one above another, so that there is always someone above him whose protection he needs and someone below him whose help he may require.

So people living in an aristocratic age are almost always closely involved with something outside themselves, and they are often inclined to forget about themselves.
The result of this situation was that widespread tyranny was unlikely, because it was very difficult for any one individual or group to centralize power in the face of the numerous overlapping jurisdictions that made up an aristocratic society, and if a centralized power did attempt to control more than a few individuals, many other people would come to the assistance of those individuals. Thus although tyranny in the ancient world could be quite violent, it never extended over a large area. Tocqueville applies this insight to the Roman Empire:

It is true that the emperors had immense and unchecked power so that they could use the whole might of the empire to indulge any strange caprice. They often abused this power to deprive a man arbitrarily of life or property. The burden of their tyranny fell most heavily on some, but it never spread over a great number. It had a few main targets and left the rest alone. It was violent, but its extent was limited.
In modern societies, on the other hand, these two factors are reversed. First, despite the existence of liberal constitutions and democratic governments, power in modern societies tends to be highly centralized. The national government of any modern Western democracy is vastly more powerful and has immensely greater capacity to control its citizens then even the most (officially) absolute monarch of the past, who typically had only the vaguest idea how many people he supposedly ruled, much less what they were doing. Tax collection, for example, was an utterly inefficient process in any premodern society, with the government dependent upon tax collectors who kept much of the revenue for themselves. Eighteenth-century Britain was the first society in history to have anything resembling an organised, efficient system of national tax collection, and this is one of the main reasons why it surpassed France as the most powerful country in Europe during that time, despite having a smaller population. Even today, only a few of the world's governments -- collect income taxes; the governments of most countries lack the necessary organisation even to attempt this. This centralization of power is, ironically, partly due to the modern liberal idea of equal rights for all citizens; as we discussed briefly in chapter 2, centralized government is necessary to break down aristocratic privilege and establish equality under the law. It is also partly due to technology; modern methods of transportation and communication greatly facilitate centralization of government.

At the same time, individuals in modern societies are much more isolated, precisely because of their greater individualism. Tocqueville observes that:

Among democratic peoples new families continually rise from nothing while others fall, and nobody's position is quite stable. The woof of time is ever being broken and the track of past generations lost. Those who have gone before are easily forgotten, and no one gives a thought to those who follow. All a man's interests are limited to those near himself.

As each class catches up with the next and gets mixed with it, its members do not care about one another and treat one another as strangers. Aristocracy links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link.

As social equality spreas there are more and more people who, though neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others, have gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to look after their own needs. Such folk owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.

Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, [it] also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

When people become isolated, they are easy to control, and modern centralised governments have the power to do so on a massive scale. This is how the possibility of widespread tyranny develops in modern societies. Such a tyranny, however, would be something much more subtle than the violent tyrannies of the past. This is because of the way it would occur. Tocqueville points out that although people tend to become isolated in modern societies, humans are nevertheless social beings, and must have connections to other people. If those connections are broken, something must step in to take their place, and that something will be centralized government, or, more specifically, a suffocating web of rules and regulations created by government as a substitute for the personal connections destroyed by individualism. He compares this type of tyranny to the violent tyrannies of the past, and says that "if a despotism should ever be established among the democratic nations of our day, it would probably have a different character. It would be more widespread and milder; it would degrade men rather than torment them."

Let me make this idea more concrete with several examples. When one drives by a hospital nowadays, one frequently sees a number of people in wheelchairs sitting at the hospital entrance. Most of thse people have been discharged from the hospital and are waiting to be taken home. Why, when most of these people could walk out of the hospital, are they taken out in wheelchairs? The answer, of course, is that the hospital is afraid that if they happen to fall and hurt themselves, they will sue. Hence the wheelchairs. Tocqueville would point to this as a perfect example of what happens in a society of isolated strangers. In the closer-knit communities of the past, where everyone knew everyone else, people were much less likely to sue each other over minor occurences, not because they necessarily like each other but simply because of the social disapproval that would occur. Thus an assortment of public and private regulations are necessary to prevent such situations from occuring.

Similarly, when one opens a container of food or medicine nowadays, one usually has to remove a safety seal. The safety seal is there to prevent anyone from tampering with the product. Safety seals became widespread and in fact required by various government regulations after several highly publicized incidents in the early 1980s in which unknown individuals in several U.S. cities placed assorted poisons in foods and medicines. Tocqueville would again point out that the need for such regulations is created by the isolation of modern societies. In an earlier environment, of course, foods and medicines were typically produced locally, instead of on a national or international basis, where a huge number of people have access to them; as a result, the likelihood of tampering would be much smaller. More importantly, however, in the close-knit communities of the past, any individual who might be tempted to tamper with food or medicine would be known by the members of the community and kept under watch. Somewhat more generally, any society contains some individuals who are mentally unbalanced, but a premodern community would know who these people were and would keen an eye on them, whereas in the isolation of a modern society, such individuals are much more likely to be ignored until their psychological disorders become manifest in shooting rampages or other deranged behaviour.

Another excellent example of how rules and regulations have replaced informally enforced social codes would be the current issue of sexual harrassment. Until the last generation, social interactions between men and women in bourgeois society were governed by a set of informal norms embodied in the terms "ladies" and "gentlemen." These terms are of course derived from earlier aristocratic usage; they originally referred to people of noble birth. In the bourgeois context, they were democratized and came to refer simply to people who conducted themselves properly. Until about a generation ago in bourgeois society, a young man from any family with the slightest pretensions to respectability learned very early in life that there were certain things a gentleman never said to a lady. A man who broke this unwritten code would be subject to social ostracism. With the cultural changes of the 1960s, however, the old notions of ladies and gentlemen largely disappeared, and in short order women found themselves hearing things they didn't want to hear. Deprived of the old norms associated with the proper behaviour of ladies and gentlemen, which would allow the offended womam to point out that gentlemen do not say such things to ladies, the only alternative was to create and legally enforce codes regarding sexual harrassment. Here again, unwritten, informally enforced norms of social behaviour have been replaced by rules, regulations, and lawsuits.

Tocqueville argues that the general tendency of modern societies is toward an ever-greater proliferation of such rules and regulations, which taken at any time amount to very little, but which taken together amount to a subtle tyranny, which he terms administrative despotism. This term should resonate with anyone who frequently deals with large, unresponsive bureaucracies, which is to say, everyone who lives in a modern industrial society. Tocqueville says of the people in modern societies, "I do not expect their leaders to be tyrants, but rather school masters." He then continues,

I am trying to imagine what novel features despotism may appear in the world. In the first place, I see an innumerable multitude of men, alike and equal . . . Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest . . .

Over this kind of man stands an immense, protective power which is alone responsible for securing their enjoyment and watching over their fate. That power is absolute, thoughtful of detail, orderly, provident, and gentle. It would resemble parental authority if, fatherlike, it tried to prepare its changes for a man's life, but on the contrary, it only tries to keep them in perpetual childhood. . .

Thus it daily makes the exercise of free choice less useful and rarer, restricts the activity of free will within a narrower compass, and little by little robs each citizen of the proper use of his own faculties. . .

Having thus taken each citizen in turn in its powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government that extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform . . . so that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.

I have always thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom.

Thus, for Tocqueville, the ironic result of modern conceptions of individual freedom is a subtle tyranny of endless rules and regulations. Traffic regulations, security procedures at airports, surveillance cameras, the necessity of continually producing identification, the forms that must be filled out to accomplish the simplest task are all examples of the way modern societies engage in detailed control of individual behaviour. This control is quite striking when on compares the behaviour of individuals in the most technologically advanced societies with what are referred to as "Third World" societies. Passengers awaiting takeoff on say, Delta Airlines or Air Canada dutifully stow their carry-on luggage in the overhead compartment or under the seat in front of them, sit with their seats in the upright position, close and lock their table trays, and fasten their seatbelts. Passengers on airlines such as Air India, by contrast, stand in the aisles and smoke as the planes take off. People in present-day Western societies are taught to think of themselves as the freest people in human history, but in this case -- as in many other examples that could be given -- they have deeply internalized controls on their behaviour that are flatly disregarded in other, supposedly less free, societies.

Of course, it is undoubtedly safer to fly on Delta or Air Canada than on Air India, but this is precisely Tocqueville's point: the modern bourgeois idea of complete individual autonomy results paradoxically in a great deal of control. Injuries resulting from accidents could severely reduce one's independence so modern Western societies are characterized by a proliferation of safety regulations. Similarly, lack of education will certainly prevent one from being autonomous, so modern Western societies have established systems of compulsory education that keep children in school for many years. A particularly striking example of how the modern idea of individual freedom has paradoxically resulted in intense control of individuals would be the process of finding a job in the market economy. As we noted earlier, in premodern societies, one's work was generally determined by one's family background. In modern societies, by contrast, individuals are theoretically free to find work on their own in the market. But this means in practice individuals in modern societies are, from a very early age, subject to an unrelenting regime of examinations as school authorities and employers attempt to determine who is most qualified for particular jobs. This process of endless examination would strike premodern people as utterly tyrannical. In this sense, Tocqueville's analysis very much anticipates the development of technocracy, that is, the rule of experts, which we discussed in chapter 3.

One extremely important point should be made here. Tocqueville may superficially sound like present-day conservatives, who are greatly concerned with centralized government power, and who often make the argument that extensive government regulations amount to a kind of tyranny, but in fact he is making a very different argument. This is because present-day conservatives, that is, classical liberals, promote precisely the kind of individualism that Tocqueville sees as creating isolation and therefore administrative despotism. Tocqueville argues forcefully throughout his analysis that the market economy and the process of industrialization, by shattering traditional social bonds, contribute decisively to the process of social atomization. Thus to see his argument as conservative in the present-day sense is to misunderstand it rather seriously.

A particularly good example of this point is the vast expansion of the welfare activites of modern governments. Present-day conservatives argue that the extensive provision of welfare services to the poor is destructive because of the way it places the poor under the control of government rules and regulations, thus undermining self-respect and initiative. Tocqueville would agree -- indeed this is precisely the argument he makes about modern society as a whole -- but he would also point out what present-day conservatives can't, or possibly won't, see: this extension of government welfare services is made necessary by the breakdown of traditional social structures, such as extended families, church communities, or simply the charity of wealthy neighbours, caused by individualism and the market economy.

Finally, although Tocqueville's argument can share considerable light on our current situation, it seems to me that there are three places where it needs to be modified somewhat, or rather, three twentieth-century developments that it does not antipate. First, although Tocqueville sees government as the primary source of administrative despotism, many of the rules and regulations we are subject to actually come from private institutions, especially in the workplace. Tocqueville's analysis stresses the effect of capitalist markets in breaking down traditional social institutions and creating isolation, but it does not foresee the possibility that private corporations would be a major source of rules and regulations themselves. Second, Tocqueville's analysis fails to anticipate one of the most important developments of the twentieth century, that is, the rise of tyrannies that were both widespread and extremely violent. Finally, although bureaucratic rules and regulations can indeed amount to a kind of subtle tyranny, a strong argument can be made that an even better example of such a subtle tyranny would in fact be the present-day consumer economy. I think the first of these issues is relatively obvious, and indeed has been illustrated in several examples above. The other two issues, however, are more complicated, and I shall examine them in the next two sections.

Murray Jardine, The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself, (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), pp.113-121

This was an idea I threw around on the old board before it crashed. It was inspired by my studies of Medieval Catholicism. What do you think of racialism reorienting itself as a cultural movement, specifically, imitating Christianity in some aspects of organisation?

Mass media is the tool of mass persuasion now, transmitters are modern cathedrals, and Hollywood is the new Rome.
Here must one concentrate to tell people some different story from one Goldwyn-Mayer's' grandson has to offer.

What do you think of racialism reorienting itself as a cultural movement, specifically, imitating Christianity in some aspects of organisation?
I think this would be a disgusting rape of systems that have proven effective for religion.

See the de Tocqueville thread.
I posted in that thread a long time ago, and you didn't reply (well, at least not in any worthwhile way).

I should have known you would find de Tocqueville (whom you probably were not interested in until you discovered 'racial communitarianism' or whatnot) useful in advancing your ideological goals. To tell the truth, I do not like the idea of using de Tocqueville's ideas as a means to a 'racialist' end; not at all.

>>>I think this would be a disgusting rape of systems that have proven effective for religion.

How so? The Church freely borrowed from secular sources: art, philosophy, administration and so on.

>>>I posted in that thread a long time ago, and you didn't reply (well, at least not in any worthwhile way).

I usually have a dozen threads or so going at any one time.

>>>I should have known that you would find de Tocqueville useful in advancing your ideological goals. To tell the truth, I do not like the idea of using de Tocqueville's ideas as a means to a 'racialist' end; not at all.

I was not aware that Tocqueville believed in racial equality.

P.S. My critique is drawn from communitarian sources that draw upon Tocqueville in several respects.