Of I and We

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In a review of Jonathan Sacks’ Morality, I write

I think that the problems of loneliness and loss of meaning that Sacks identifies are due to a breakdown of covenants at a small-scale level. I wish that families were larger and stronger. I wish that neighborhoods had more continuity. I wish that the school environment for children could be informal rather than bureaucratic. I wish that long-term friendships were more prevalent.

For more on these topics, see the biography of
Alexis de Tocqueville in the Online Library of Liberty; and the EconTalk podcast episode Yuval Levin on The Fractured Republic. See also “Camping-Trip Economics vs. Woolen-Coat Economics,” by Arnold Kling, Library of Economics and Liberty, Feb. 2, 2015.
But at the macro level, I think we are better off with a society of contract than with a society of covenant. The more weight we place on “We” at the national level, the less room for the sort of community that I would like to see at a local level. As we think in terms of larger scale, I think it helps to lose the “We.”

11 thoughts on “Of I and We”

  1. “…loss of meaning that Sacks identifies are due to a breakdown of covenants at a small-scale level.”

    I couldn’t disagree with this more strongly. The covenants aren’t breaking down at a small-scale, they’re breaking down at every scale, which has cascading effects throughout a high-trust society which includes the “macro level” of a “society of contract” as he puts it.

    In the Prisoner’s Dilemma (which is exactly what we’ve had at every level of society for almost 60 years now), opting for ‘defection’ creates negative externality feedback loops which are extremely – emphasis on extremely – hard to reverse, and overwhelmingly do not reverse. Defecting sends ripples not just through the people you’ve defected on, but everyone who hears about it, and everyone who sees it, and everyone indirectly affected by it.

    The “small-scale level” he’s talking about and the examples he gives are examples of the most resolute and resilient of the societal interactions to the negative externalities of the Prisoner’s Dilemma….and they have collapsed. Nothing is helping to lose the “we”….we’ve already lost the “we” a long time ago.

    • Tend to agree.

      Cooperation used to be the default setting. Quaint now to think back to a time when gas caps on cars were not locked; one could unlatch a car hood from the outside; etc.

  2. Steve Sailer posted today a particularly apt quote from Macaulay posted on this topic:

    “I say then, Sir, that I fully admit the paramount authority of moral obligations. But it is important that we should accurately understand the nature and extent of those obligations. We are clearly bound to wrong no man. Nay, more, we are bound to regard all men with benevolence. But to every individual, and to every society, Providence has assigned a sphere within which benevolence ought to be peculiarly active; and if an individual or a society neglects what lies within that sphere in order to attend to what lies without, the result is likely to be harm and not good.

    It is thus in private life. We should not be justified in injuring a stranger in order to benefit ourselves or those who are dearest to us. Every stranger is entitled, by the laws of humanity, to claim from us certain reasonable good offices. But it is not true that we are bound to exert ourselves to serve a mere stranger as we are bound to exert ourselves to serve our own relations. A man would not be justified in subjecting his wife and children to disagreeable privations, in order to save even from utter ruin some foreigner whom he never saw. And if a man were so absurd and perverse as to starve his own family in order to relieve people with whom he had no acquaintance, there can be little doubt that his crazy charity would produce much more misery than happiness.

    It is the same with nations. No statesmen ought to injure other countries in order to benefit his own country. No statesman ought to lose any fair opportunity of rendering to foreign nations such good offices as he can render without a breach of the duty which he owes to the society of which he is a member. But, after all, our country is our country, and has the first claim on our attention. There is nothing, I conceive, of narrow-mindedness in this patriotism. I do not say that we ought to prefer the happiness of one particular society to the happiness of mankind; but I say that, by exerting ourselves to promote the happiness of the society with which we are most nearly connected, and with which we are best acquainted, we shall do more to promote the happiness of mankind than by busying ourselves about matters which we do not fully understand, and cannot efficiently control.”

    ( https://www.unz.com/isteve/concentric-circles-of-loyalty/ )

    This nationalist wisdom has been wholly supplanted by an oikophobic cosmopolitanism whose defining characteristic is contempt for normal, average US citizens. Cosmopolitanism is just a slightly different flavor of postmodern Theory. Was the pre-woke social science Ivory Tower producing a net benefit in terms of human flourishing? Are the anti-woke producing anything that would deserve our concern? Anti-wokeness is just another identity studies exercise in oppressor-oppressed narrative building. None are worth the public treasure being devoted to them. The most efficacious solution to the culture war is to defund it: human flourishing would advance without the culture war sucking up all the oxygen.

      • Don’t pay tuition or pay for other higher education products, don’t donate, avoid purchasing from allied businesses, elect officials who who will cut subsidies.

        • So…no doctors? No dentists? Look, the academics that trigger you maybe make up 5%. Business by far is the top major.

          • The 5% are killing us.

            Make the sciences and business a trade school track. Faculties of Arts and Leisure should be poor people begging for handouts.

    • of larger scale, I think it helps to lose the “We.”

      A fascinating round table discussion entitled “The Authority Blob” at Tablet (https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/authority-blob-roundtable) explores this subject in depth.

      Cutting to the chase, David Samuels renders the “We” question as “Is the cementing of ideological control over the institutional landscape in the hands of a small class of people convinced of their own rightness and eager to punish dissenters a sign of their increasing strength or weakness?” The stronger they get, the more people will be driven off the internet which paradoxically weakens their control. Learning from the Mouvement des gilets jaunes , perhaps mass strikes such as boycott the internet Fridays and mass protests locally should be attempted as means of building local networks and relationships. He Velvet Revolution has been very much on my mind as a model for leaving the current tyranny behind and forming social relationships conducive to human flourishing.

      • Thanks for the link. The roundtable presents a rather dystopian view of America. The use of Trump hatred and now Identity politics as a means to power rather than based on any real belief is something that has occured to me more than once. The idea that the elites simple command rather than even try to convince is really scary. Even Todd Gitlin, who still clings to the Trump Russia conspiracy fantasy sees major problems in America’s elites and managerial classes.

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