I have just started reading Leviathan 2.0, by Charles S. Maier. I could not find a Kindle edition when I was ordering the book. Here is a quote from p.5-6:
The winners were the well-organized representatives of Europeans and their American or African or Asian descendants organized into the most efficient engine of expansion and governance that the world had seen for centuries: the modern nation-state. This was a large-scale unit organized to permeate and master territory, to pursue sedentary agriculture and industrial technology, possessing complex legal systems that allowed the preservation and transmission of family and individual property, the salaried employment of large-scale private and public workforces, the rapid communication of commercial and policy decisions by electrical telegraph, the ministerial archives and records that ensured institutional memory, and ideologies of rivalry and group purpose that generated intense loyalties.
Reading this passage, I came up with a catch-phrase “Modernity is a package.” Libertarians see the evils of the state–wars, inefficient and harmful policies, rent-seeking–and they imagine a utopia with a minimal state or no state at all. Progressives see the evils of capitalism, and they imagine a utopia with minimal or no use of markets.
But both capitalism and the state are deeply embedded in modernity. To eliminate either is to pull the rug out from under the system that supports prosperity an innovation.
To take a less politically fraught example, consider urbanization. We know that in small villages people feel a stronger sense of community. They know one another’s names. When they meet on the street, they take time to have a conversation, whereas in a large city people hurriedly rush past one another–friends might say “Oh, hi! We should have lunch, strangers might mutter “good morning.” People look out for one another.
And yet, the overwhelming majority of people who migrate from one to the other move from small villages to large cities, not the other way around. The city offers better employment opportunities, more variety of consumption options, and more overall effervescence.
The city represents the package of modernity, both good and bad. You cannot enjoy both the pre-modern charm of the small village and the modern wonders of the city in the same place.
One might almost say that if you’re not for civilization, you’re for barbarism.
” You cannot enjoy both the pre-modern charm of the small village and the modern wonders of the city in the same place.”
I am not so sure. Consider the old immigrant-enclave, ethnic-cultural neighborhood in the midst of the big city. Chinatown. Little Italy. Hasidic areas today. Or small urban colleges where the ‘campus community’ tends, in the nature of things, to mostly hand around itself. Not exactly “the best of both worlds”, but I’m guessing lots of people would find this hybrid it a slightly higher optimum than either pure alienated metropolis or small village. Especially if there were lots of such ‘towns’ to choose from, based on different organizing and selection principles.
Indeed, since I think increased urban centralization is inevitable given the logic and incentives of current economic trends, if there is to be any hope of ‘community regime variety’, it will probably be on the level of a diversity of tight-knit residential areas of a few city blocks close to each other.
Most people I know who once lived in neighborhoods like that are nostalgic about them. Many of these people were reluctant refugees to the suburbs, never really wanting to abandon those urban neighborhoods, but compelled to do so by trends in crime, demographics, and politics.
Obviously the trouble is the coordination problem of maintaining the character of these places given modern pressures, without recourse to sovereign prerogatives, and under tremendous pressure from antidiscrimination policy.
The Hasidim – kind of an urban Amish in some ways – use religion and the credible threats of social ostracization, shunning, and denial of opportunities for community-based endogamy to solve the coordination problem. But that is not easily or generally applicable to other groups.
The question is how to solve it for other groups, without the same tool set.
But, unfortunately, the current antidiscrimination regime would be quick to pounce on any effort to accomplish this. So whoever attempted to get something like this off the ground would have to be incredibly (probably impossibly) sly in under to fly under its heresy-detecting radars, to the point where even the selected residents themselves don’t notice the men behind the curtain, and believe their little enclave is ‘innocent’ of conscious selection and merely a spontaneous and self-perpetuating order.
Conservatives also see the evils of capitalism and unbridled freedom and see a utopia in the past in its subservience to state and tradition but modernity insists on being modern.
This has a whiff of the argumentum ad Somalia to it. While the noisiest libertarians may not be satisfied until we privatize the court system, I think the vast majority would be delighted if, just once, politicians of both parties demonstrated a modicum of doubt that the best solution to a new problem was a new law. as it is, modernity feels like a cable bundle where, in order to get “the internet” for $15/mo I also have to buy “federal micromanagement of healthcare” for $500 per month plus $400 for each additional box in the house.
“And yet, the overwhelming majority of people who migrate from one to the other move from small villages to large cities, not the other way around. ”
But they really haven’t. Over the last 50-100 years, people in the industrialized world have been moving out of both small villages AND large cities and into suburbs and exurbs.