Rethinking Localism
When driving on a country road, I’m a more hyperaware driver than I am normally, especially at night. If I see an approaching vehicle, I am cognizant that we are both driving at high speeds and the only thing separating us is a thin line of paint on the ground. My safety depends on the other driver’s staying on his side of that line. Is he looking at his phone? Has he been drinking? My ability to progress at normal speeds hinges on a level of trust in a person I don’t know. Without that trust, something as simple as driving a country road would soon become impossible.
Think about the implicit levels of trust that inform our daily lives. I expect clean water to come out of the tap when I turn the handle. I expect the lights to go on when I flip a switch. I expect the sewer system to carry away waste safely and effectively. These actions require trust in systems often designed and run by anonymous persons. Our natural confidence in the efficacy of these systems may occasionally be misplaced, but they would have to fail repeatedly in order for that faith to wane completely.
We don’t, however, interact only with systems: we interact with our fellow humans as well, and they often prove less reliable than systems. Our interactions are often determined by our knowledge of the other person. If I know the driver in the other car—that he doesn’t look at his phone or drink—then I’m more likely to default to my normal driving behavior. It’s harder to trust those you don’t know.
But not always. Sometimes those we know best show themselves unworthy of our trust. We might rightly regard them as unscrupulous or mean-spirited or self-centered, and these qualities might make their behavior either unpredictable or, worse still, predictably noxious. We structure much of our conduct around our expectations of how other people will act. People who break promises are untrustworthy not simply because they break promises, but because we plan so many of our actions around the anticipation that the promise will be fulfilled. A broken promise doesn’t just disappoint us; it undoes our ability to plan, thus disrupting our relationship to our own future.
Our ability to trust and the ability of others to keep promises uncorrupted make navigating social life possible. There is in the formation and running of any system and any social institution a series of implicit and explicit promises that undergird the enterprise; and if those get undermined in any fashion, we will witness the delegitimation of those institutions to the point of collapse. They will cease to have any serious authority because they no longer perform the functions expected of them.
The confusion of proper institutional function is a defining feature of our age. We have a representative system of government, but whose interests are being represented? We have a banking system designed to hold the value of our currency and investments, but we see it engage in financial speculations that can leave us bankrupt. We count on our churches to help raise our children in the faith, only to see those leaders sexually abuse and exploit those very children. We count on our teachers to educate our children in essential skills and knowledge, only to find that those teachers are indoctrinating rather than educating.
It is difficult for me to think of one social institution that my generation is passing on to its progeny that is in better shape than when we found it. The so-called greatest generation may well have given birth to the worst. I have nothing but sympathy and respect for the young people who are trying to make their way among the ruins. Nor should we condemn them for recognizing the ruins as such, or for feeling lost among them, or for resenting us for what we have wrought.
The problem compounds when institutions become imperious, attempting to take over the functions of other institutions. This can result in either the colonized institution losing authority or the colonizing institution delegitimating itself. Lots of institutions can fight for social justice, but only the academy can do the kind of research and instruction that is its unique purview; and when it loses its focus, it also loses its legitimacy. When the federal government absorbs the function of other social institutions, such as the family, it not only accrues more authority to itself, but it also crowds out the normal and properly scaled efforts of human beings to cooperate with one another.
The evidence of broken institutions and the concomitant decline in public trust are all around us, nowhere more consequentially than among young people, who will bear the costs of our shoddy stewardship. Their hesitancy about forming enduring relationships, about bringing new life into this dying world, about risk-taking, about engagement in civil life all testify to a kind of despair born of powerlessness.
I think these young people find themselves pinched by two symbiotic and confounding factors that have intensified institutional decline: the rise of global capitalism and a concomitant cosmopolitan ideology. Surely declining patriotism among young persons, especially those who have attended college, is in part attributable to these factors. The maxim that one has no moral obligation to act where one has no capacity to act either turns morality into mushy sentimentality or makes it a series of arbitrary choices in the infinite problems of this world. Worse yet, it turns it to despair since our moral intentions can find no concrete object.
The only two social institutions capable of ratcheting backward are the family and the church, because only those institutions are firmly grounded in the nature of what we are as creatures. The history of modern totalitarian politics demonstrates that those two institutions consistently provide the ground on which people can find the firm footing of resistance, which is why totalitarian regimes always attempt to take over or dismantle those institutions.
One of the most cheering developments of the last twenty years has been parents’ reclaiming from the state control of their children’s education. Families serve primarily educative and economic functions, and parental authority operates out of love rather than control, which is the state’s principle of action. The formative development of children, spiritually and intellectually via education and physically via a healthy household economy, on principles of affection contrasts sharply with the state’s interest in adjustment to the mass civilization of modern capitalism. Affection alone can provide a stable platform for healthy development, while contemporary politics and economics are notable only for the constant churn of social life.
Churches have only unevenly at best offered themselves as a counterweight to the accretions of federal power, but sturdy families have flexed their muscles and must continue to do so. Perhaps national lobbying organizations can enjoy some success in mitigating state power, but getting in bed with the devil rarely turns out well. Families work well at scale on a principle of solicitous care. The state has no interest in regulating smart phone use (unless it is censoring content), but parents certainly do. The generation-long effort to wrest control of education from the state is already producing salutary results, the children of such efforts being more capable, less anxious, and living more well-rounded lives than their peers.
Additionally, more parents have come to realize the corrosive effects of mass culture, with its insipidity and broken moral compass. There, too, parents are well advised to keep their children away from screens of all kinds and engage in the types of face-to-face interactions for which human beings were made. Only by active engagement with the physical world and others can young people become mature, responsible, and independent adults.
Charity begins at home and radiates from there, but the home fires can spread their warmth only so far. The farther from the sources of charity, the weaker the effects. One function of churches is to spread this familial heat into a larger community of souls, whereby charity gets distributed on a broader basis. Unlike public assistance, this communal care works to the betterment of both recipient and giver, further ennobling the recipient by providing opportunities to return the favor; without this social life could never be leavened by reciprocity. Taking resources from people against their will, and funneling them through an opaque system of redistribution to dependent recipients who have no chance to express gratitude through either word or deed, degrades social life and its members. It is unworthy of us.
Government action lacking in transparency and performed by nameless and faceless bureaucrats erodes the familiarity and comity that alone build social trust. We may not be able to opt out of that system completely, but we can do the difficult yet rewarding work of revitalizing local life. Much of the fruit hangs low. In Indianapolis, “porch parties” have brought together neighbors and often result in integrating the poor and the elderly more fully into social life. Neighbors concerned with the flow of traffic on their streets can find creative ways of slowing it down and making it safer for children (my favorite example of which was placing bales of hay in the middle of the street). Intersections with obstructed views can be handled by a few handsaws, and dangerous road crossings managed by smartly designed, low-cost egresses.
Gary and Patricia Wyatt in Akron, Ohio have demonstrated how citizens working locally can have a great impact on their community. By remaining rooted and keeping their eyes and ears open, they have not only espied problems and provided immediate and humane solutions, but they’ve been able to prevent even more severe situations. When in 2022 Jayland Walker was shot more than forty times by local police, Gary and Pat were instrumental in maintaining the peace after the grand jury decided not to indict. Having, in advance, spent the time repairing relationships between the police and the black community, the city had enough social capital and resilience to keep its own citizens from burning it to the ground. Pat works tirelessly in the local schools to address issues of each individual student that might negatively affect that child’s learning. Only this kind of fine-grained attentiveness can constructively effect change. Our public institutions are not revivified from the top down, often by persons who have no skin in the game, but only from the bottom up by people who care about these places and the people who live there.
Democracy is a face-to-face enterprise. Alexis de Tocqueville reminded Americans that if our experiment was to survive it would require citizens not to look upward toward the government or inward toward themselves but outward toward one another. Anything worth caring for requires attentive seeing and hands-on nurturing. None of that can be done from a distance.
None of this is easy. G. K. Chesterton observed that Christ admonished us to love both our neighbors and our enemies, often the same person. Local politics requires getting your hands dirty and not simply casting a ballot or filing a tax return. It is, however, the path to having control over the events that matter most in life.
What we can’t get by without is the formation and maintenance of healthy families. Every piece of social science evidence we have reinforces the conviction that no better or more fun way of creating and raising children has ever been invented. As I indicated above, parents serious about the task of raising children have increasingly seized back the reins. They attend school board meetings, or form their own schools, or school their children themselves. They attend local council meetings. They get out of their house and from behind their screens and engage the institutions of civil society. They curate the contents of school curricula and local libraries to do the obvious task of limiting the ideas their children are exposed to, until those children can engage with those ideas sensibly. Sure, there will be friction, but that friction can create a heat that warms rather than melts.
I’ve long found young people to be counsel against despair, but if they become consumed by despair then our horizons narrow. Despair emerges in part from a sense of powerlessness or helplessness, and that sense is best corrected by the simple act of rolling up one’s sleeves. Young people need to experience both the successes and the overcoming of failures that strong families provide in game-playing and in task-performing. The latter especially places something stable and abiding in the world that a young person can regard with pride. This rightful pride, particular and placed and connected to real things, nurtured in solicitous parental love, is the spur to activity that transforms the world.
Image licensed via Adobe Stock.