the Little Platoons may not be feasible. It seems to me that the world has professionalised, with more technical, domain-specific knowledge, which is a barrier to those with moderate interest or casual observers.
The strongest institutions of civil society used to be broader and shallower. Churches were more important when more people lived in smaller communities and more people attended them. Trade unions used to be larger. Schools used to be less segregated by income class (although more segregated by race). Organizations like the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, and the NAACP were much more welcoming to Republicans. Such organizations have become narrower, deeper, and older. They are less capable than they once were of representing or mobilizing large numbers of people.
Let me suggest that civil society still exists (it is wrong to say that we are bowling alone), but that there are now many more associations, each with a narrower constituency that is more deeply committed. Think of television. “I Love Lucy” dominated the culture of the 1950s. “M*A*S*H” was pretty well embedded in the 1970s. I don’t think any program comes close today, even though people still consume a lot of TV-like media.
Recently, my wife and I were guilty of going to the Everly Set, a tribute duo playing a house concert setting. The whole concept exemplified narrower, deeper, older. It was also very enjoyable.
The commenter raises the issue of what it means for our role vis-a-vis government. As the shallower, broader institutions of civil society become weaker, this makes people more willing to defer to government expertise. Yuval Levin expresses similar concerns in The Fractured Republic, which I am confident that the commenter would enjoy reading.
I do not see the broad, shallow institutions making a comeback. I do not see how the narrower, deeper organizations can provide viable alternatives to government. Fifty years ago, Charity meant the United Way. Now, it means GoFundMe. Will the narrower, deeper model really work, or will we continue to think in terms of government as the primary distributor of charity? Yet I do not see how government can be sufficiently competent to handle the responsibilities that people are willing to cede to it. It looks as if we are stuck.
In terms of Baby Boomers I hear a lot of complaining about the decline of local institutions & community while the decline of young people moving around the country. And if memory serves right the high point of people across state lines was 1985 and has declined ever since. (Accelerated declines after 2001.) It seems to me that the young Baby Boomers rejected the local community in the 1970 and 1980s and moved around more which led to continued decline. So the next Generation X and millennials learned that local community was not that important and grew up differently than Baby Boomers. (FYI I was moved at 10 from a WWC town in Maryland to California suburbs during the 1980s.) Several other points:
1) I wonder how much the decline of local communities is the increase of women in the labor force? So the local church lost their source of volunteers to run the church and interact with the community. I still say the Reagan economy with falling working class wages grew with higher labor force participation but lost the cultural war as more people worked out of the home.
2) I still think a lot of the love of local community is rose colored nostaligia for yesteryear. I really don’t see how the schools are segregated by income today versus the 1970s and 1980s to be honest. Maybe the 1950s? But I believe this was exaggerated and the forced race segregation enforced this community. How much of the message to poor white people was at least you are not black? Or black schools ‘message’ was you need us to protect you from greater society.
3) How much did Milton Friedman influence this change of the company should focus on profits on place in community? How much did these communities need the company multiplier and intereacted with local government institutions and churches? So in rose colored 1950s how did this happen? At 20, Johnny did his 2 year military stay but got Jenny in trouble. Jenny goes to the church factory owner wife that if Johnny married Jenny, he would get a union card at the factory. And isn’t this this story of Bruce Springsteen The River? I have worked at large corporations and giving back to community today is simply Giant Checks to United Way and no way to they really interact with the communities.
We might well look to the changes in the conditions and factors that form initial individual motivations and their subsequent development.
Former forms of civil associations reflected the objectives (which arose from, and were shaped by, sufficient commonalities of motivations) of the individuals involved.
Many, if not most, of those former forms have been altered to accord with (but not necessarily conform to) changes in objectives, largely attributable to changes in motivations (and, certainly, to changes in their commonalities).
A plausible case can be made that many of the more current forms of associations have come into being as means to ends; the choices of neither of which have sufficient commonalities to sustain them without external agency such as governments (at one of the three levels). That takes us to reconsider the observations of Mancur Olson and Carroll Quigley.
Social orders generate facilities (including modes of associations) to meet the needs of social interactions. Those interactions, and the circumstances in which they occur, are constantly “evolving.” That evolution seems heavily impacted by changes (recession and suppression) in the functions of individuality in western social orders; and changes in the factors and circumstances of the formation and development of individual motivations.
I think like we need a better typology of “little platoons.” Even a 2×2 matrix like the ones that C. Wright Mills said (in the appendix to _the sociological imagination_) that he drew habitually.
There are platoons for
1. who you are (ascribed or inherited traits) versus
2. platoons for what you do for a living versus
3. platoons for how you like to spend your spare time.
Some of these are extremely easy to enter and exit. Others take a long time to get into and a long time to disengage from. Call these
A. Easy to enter / leave, or “rapid turnover” versus
B. Hard to join / Hard to Leave.
that gives us a 2×3 matrix. Just on the fly, without claiming it’s especially good.
With respect to church, there seem to be more people who switch congregations or denominations now.
also there is the issue of “nominal religious affiliations switching to ‘none'” as Yuval Levin said.
Meanwhile, there are the lobbying and fund-raising groups that seem to proliferate. Write a check to one, and soon you will hear from 10 similar groups…
If I remember, Robert Putnam asked people if they were members of these groups and a common response was “I’m not a member, I give them money”
Well, as gov’t gets more responsibility, and less competent due to human error, there will be increasing calls to automate gov’t.
When will Watson, or other AI programs, be able to do your taxes? Better than IRS agents? And why not release those working in the IRS and have computers do the gov’t work? Unlike business, the gov’t agencies are supposed to be following the rules, not acting on their own, and robots are already great at following the rules.
How many current gov’t social security workers could be replaced by a good Suzie Security gov’t program who can answer all your questions, according to current law, and even prepare forms for you to sign based on a chatbot conversation covering your own personal situation.
I’m sure almost every citizen now waiting for clerks at the DMV would prefer to talk to Mr. Motor about all the car registration and license issues needed.
Let the robots take the gov’t jobs! Now!
There are the equivalent of government call centers probably for the same reason there are call centers in private business. Because you need human beings to navigate the rules, which are often times incomplete or contradictory. How many of us get frustrated on phone prompts and beg for a real human being who can actually solve our problem.
I agree, Arnold. FWIW I consider some countervailing forces to be ideological change and cultural change.
I mentioned the technocratic transformation of society in recent decades as being important in this narrower, deeper, older phenomenon. It would help civil society if we moved away from that (with no comment as to whether our functionality in these domains would be improved. I’m a teacher and former policy officer and it seems that now, compared to several decades before, these professions have professionalised substantially in recent decades, and this, I understand, is reflected across all industries).
With respect to culture, Charles Murray has written in Losing Ground and In Pursuit about the government taking over civil functions and absolving people of responsibility, which may prove to be a short-term positive but long-term negative for many people. He especially talks about this as a negative for those less well endowed with gifts. For such people, happiness will more than likely come through family and community, whereas for the more able there are more opportunities and therefore a higher opportunity cost of engaging in community, suggesting that community needs to come from the poor. And, again, as per Murray (Coming Apart), it is the poor where community is really dropping off. This is a cultural issue (see Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom) as well as an institutional issue. Consider Utah – you must’ve seen McArdle’s piece on the state (link below). It has an active community sector delivering great things for the people of Utah, and it seems like it is a culturally-driven set of behaviours.
If we shifted from an ultra-technocratic society (unlikely) and we decided to change culturally to a more responsibility-taking culture (slightly more possible), we could turn this around. I say the latter is slightly more possible than the former because it seems there is a growing reaction away from distracting pleasures into more substantial endeavours again (consider ‘slow movements’, people logging off of Facebook, etc. It may become cool to be disconnected from technology and engaged in the real world.) If this happens, civil society may have a chance. But it is also hard to remove a government program, especially in light of the strength of progressive politics, which I see little chance of changing in the right direction.
Also, it is noteworthy that the intellectual and cultural change in society seems to stem from this progressive worldview, and this puts a dampener on my mild optimism. I’m in Australia and it feels like we are losing the battle of ideas. The current debate does not allow for anyone (even just one person) to be left worse off due to a policy decision. This is what Paul Bloom seems to be talking about with his Against Empathy book, and it is a big problem over here. It is fundamentally a reflection of the weakness and lack of perspective of our culture.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-03-28/how-utah-keeps-the-american-dream-alive
NDO is a profound concept; please keep wiring on it.
One somewhat dark way of looking at it is that all the old, large, broad-based, cherished, cohesive, and effective social and cultural institutions presented obvious obstacles to any radical social reform which harmed the interests of their memberships, and also constituted clear competitive rivals for influence and various forms of political power.
That made them threats to the progressive agenda, which is why they had to be undermined, suppressed, and/or destroyed, by whatever tactics were available and expedient at the time, either explicitly or as an ulterior motive or incidental benefit to some other stated, perhaps pretextual, goal.
The better an institution is at serving its members outside of government view, command and control, the less it can be allowed to exist.
Think of groups that tend, by their nature and indeed design and tradition, to generate a lot of cohesion, solidarity, and loyalty and tacit understandings of future reciprocal, mutual aid.
Groups like that, to not dissolve into the atomized mass, need a certain amount of tribalism and selectivity, which means exclusion. If one forbids selection by all but price-based mechanism, then no such group can function in a cross-class manner.
Did anyone else notice the contradiction in the last two comments?
Matt says, “The current debate does not allow for anyone (even just one person) to be left worse off due to a policy decision.”
But Handle says, “One somewhat dark way of looking at it is that all the old, large, broad-based, cherished, cohesive, and effective social and cultural institutions presented obvious obstacles to any radical social reform which harmed the interests of their memberships, and also constituted clear competitive rivals for influence and various forms of political power.
That made them threats to the progressive agenda, which is why they had to be undermined, suppressed, and/or destroyed…”
I suppose you could harmonize the two by saying that the people hurt in the second are people who don’t matter. Perhaps they are “deplorables.” Or Maybe what they are losing doesn’t matter: guns, religion, and other varieties of false consciousness.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368430211410751
” Dyads were significantly more similar on attitudes, beliefs, and health behaviors in the large campus than in the small colleges sample”
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Groups in a large campus are less diverse than those in a small campus.
One way to reduce the NDO is to support more, smaller, colleges. So those forming college friendships have fewer to choose between and more likely to include some who are more broad-minded and, especially, broad-acting.