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Posted on July 17, 2023 | 92 Comments
Before I wade into blogging about my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, I’d like to take a step back and try to characterize some of the broader political contours that have now put me in a different camp to George Monbiot, the main antagonist in my book, despite our similar starting point on what some people would no doubt characterize as the ‘far left’.
One strand of that left-wing starting point emerges out of Marxism and the history of Marxist regimes, with a strong influence on the left beyond those who explicitly identify as Marxist. It emphasizes state power and dirigisme, technological ‘progress’, an emphasis on science as truth in the arena of politics as well as the biophysical realm, and (in my opinion) a rather paternalistic form of class alliance between a middle-class intelligentsia and ordinary people, the former aiming to use the ‘truth’ of its scientific knowledge to improve the lot of the latter. This has been the dominant strand of socialist thought, and I believe it’s the one that Monbiot is working within. Perhaps we could call it the modernist left.
A subordinate and more libertarian strand on the left is on the contrary suspicious of centralizing bureaucratic political power, leans towards pluralism and anti-universalism in its conception of politics and class alliance, invests more attention to ideas like meaning and virtue than ones like truth and progress, and is not overly committed to manufacturing and engineering technologies as a way of delivering these goods. This is the strand that I identify with, and that I’ve explored over the years on this blog in relation to traditions like agrarian populism, producerism, civic republicanism and anarchism. Let’s call it the anti-modernist left.
In 2016 I published a review of Monbiot’s book How Did We Get Into This Mess? in which I diagnosed a tension in it between “whether you address problems in the manner of the rational-bureaucratic planner, asking how best to deliver services to the population, or whether you address them in the manner of the autonomous native, asking how best to inhabit and thrive in the land you call home.” In his book, I wrote, “he stands at the doorway of the producerist or agrarian populist vision I believe we need if we’re to create a just and sustainable future. But he doesn’t quite step through. In future books or collaborations I hope he will”.
Well, I think I can now safely say that he didn’t. In fact, he turned on his heel and headed the other way, back to Route One modernist leftism. Whereas I guess I’ve stepped further through the door into an agrarian localism less oriented to familiar leftist trappings, albeit still committed to equity and social justice. So – two different camps.
From a left-wing perspective, each of these camps can easily find itself consorting with some curious bedfellows. The whole dirigisme/state power/science-as-truth thing with its logics of efficiency, population-level scaling, breakthrough technologies and consumerism-as-progress easily connects with private sector corporate monopoly. Hence books like People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism. Hence also, I’d suggest, the enthusiasm of Pictet Asset Management for George Monbiot’s takes on the future of food.
On the agrarian localist side, scepticism about big scale, centralized government, scientism and solutionism can easily connect with a basically conservative critique of modernism and liberalism. For my part, I’m happy to embrace a large portion of that critique. Unashamedly, I’ve been influenced by people like Wendell Berry, Christopher Lasch, Alasdair MacIntyre and other intellectually subtle exponents of that tradition. But conservative localist critiques of big government can easily veer into more problematic territory around any number of issues: religion, social and gender identities, migration, climate change, deep state conspiracy theories and so forth. There are some tricky lines to negotiate, and sometimes I fear I’ve been a bit wrongfooted by them in online discussions.
“I fear…” – well, what exactly do I fear? Maybe I can frame an answer to that in terms of two events, one very small, and one very big.
The very small event was the hatchet job review of my book A Small Farm Future shortly after it came out by a pair of Marxist bros. Their main beef with it was basically that it isn’t Marxist, for example in the way it takes seriously categories such as kin relations and private property that Marxist orthodoxy generally wishes to abolish.
Perhaps the real issue is that Marxists tend to think that only Marxism is proper, clear-seeing (‘scientific’) leftism, with other strands of leftwing thought corrupted by their partial, situated, bourgeois values. Whereas for my part I tend to see Marxism as thoroughly imbued with bourgeois values, and situated within a partial, modernist logic of technocracy and progress which is rapidly running out of road.
More on that another time, perhaps. Coming back to the question of my fears, I was tentative in A Small Farm Future on issues like family and property because I was conscious of their unorthodoxy within the leftwing circles that still felt like home to me at that time. The book review irked me at several levels when it came out, but it’s been liberating in the long run in my journey to free myself from the need to necessarily take Marxist orthodoxies more seriously than those of other political ideologies (I should add that I still believe there’s much to be learned from subtler variants of Marxist thought).
Anyway, after writing A Small Farm Future I deliberately opened myself up to engagement with a wider range of political voices, including conservative ones that my earlier political self might have dismissed out of hand as not the right kind of people to be talking with. I can’t say it’s always been easy, or – as I said above – that I’ve always negotiated the terrain as expertly as I’d have liked. When people have talked about ‘filthy socialists’ or ‘degenerate libtards’ the best way to respond has been obvious enough: don’t respond at all, and seek the nearest exit. But there are some trickier grey areas.
One thing I’m pretty sure of is that there isn’t going to be a socialist revolution that sweeps away all this supposedly incorrect thought – not one that lasts for any appreciable length of time, anyway. And while it’s easy to walk away from it online, it’s not so easy to walk away from it in real life as localization and conflicts over access to land and resources hot up. Still, most of the online antagonism I’ve experienced from the right has come from the USA. I don’t live there and I don’t think its politics are particularly representative of the wider world, so maybe I don’t need to invest more than I already have in those debates. In fact, probably less. Having said that, I do think there’s an interesting anti-government homesteading space in the USA which might prefigure a wider global politics – and it occurs to me that there’s more political diversity within this numerically tiny group than there is in the multitudes still invested in modern consumer society and its forms of governance. More on that another time too, perhaps.
I’ll now move on from the very small event to the very big one, namely the Covid19 pandemic. I’m going to preface my remarks by stating that as a multiply vaccinated and devoutly lockdown-fearing man, my personal stance on it has been very mainstream. All the same, it feels like something a little strange has happened politically on the mainstream left in recent years, and I wonder if the pandemic has something to do with it.
The package of measures that most governments adopted to deal with the pandemic involved asking their citizenries to follow a raft of top-down directives, to believe what health experts told them ‘the science’ suggested was necessary, to avail themselves of medical high-technology, and to adjust their behaviour to forms of social control consistent with public health requirements. In the case of the pandemic, I think these were the right things to do. But I can imagine other scenarios, for example ones connected with energy and land use, where governments might reach for a similar rulebook and where I would dissent entirely from the narrative.
In the aftermath of the pandemic, large elements of the modernist left seem to have become heavily invested in pandemic-type responses as a generic form more than as something that was pragmatically necessary in that context – centralized directives, following ‘the science’, high-tech solutionism, and responsible citizenship as judged from the political centre. They also seem to have become more invested in excommunicating rather than debating people who dissent from that narrative – particularly in relation to the pandemic, but also with a worrisomely wider net.
It seems likely that governments will be resorting increasingly to the authoritarian rulebook in the future as system shocks proliferate and they’re called upon to manage ever more complex and demanding crises within an increasingly ill-equipped apparatus of governance and value extraction. These governments might lean more right or more left, but the fact they lean towards centralized, high-tech solutionism and authoritarianism may prove more significant. As a (once?) wise man once said, the present reality is a captive state, subordinated to corporate interests. So while its reins of power might incline more politically right or left at any given moment, the overall direction of travel is much the same. It’s surely revealing when a social democratic figure like Jeremy Corbyn prompts such vilification from media organs like The Guardian and the BBC.
What’s surprising to me and potentially fear-making as a dissenter from the modernist left is how monolithic and angrily dismissive of other leftist positions it’s become. Criticising the likes of Bill Gates and his infernal foundation shouldn’t be that controversial a move on the left, yet it suddenly feels a bit dangerous, as if it aligns the critic with dumbass right-wing conspiracy theories about vaccine nanobots or suchlike against the supposedly scientific certainties of technocratic governance. I suspect this heat may have to do with the waning agency of people in professional elites, such as academics and journalists – people whose work and importance derives from their proximity to a centralized power whose own ability to control the political narrative and the flow of historical events is waning. Their personal politics might be more socialist or more capitalist, but their proximity to power and what it gives them, and their disdain for those who challenge it, becomes the more salient fact.
When it comes to something like the furore over fifteen-minute cities, the approach of these folks is generally to ridicule it as a deluded narrative pushed by bad faith rightwing influencers. Well, it is a deluded narrative pushed by bad faith rightwing influencers. But I think the modernist left should note what fertile ground those influencers are cultivating, and look a bit more self-critically at how much they’ve helped to fertilise it. As governmental and expert-led initiatives increasingly fail to meet the multiple challenges upon us, I fear there are real dangers in doubling down on the governmental and the expert-led.
That, actually, is something I fear more than getting lumped in dismissively with rightwing conspiracy theorists. So perhaps I should burnish my civic republican agrarian populist left libertarian quasi anarchism and steel myself for the battles to come, which I suspect I might be waging against the modernist left almost as much as the corporate right, not least because the two are increasingly indistinguishable. There are, however, other ways to play it, and I’ll come to that in my next post.
A final point. It seems that some of my allies in this fight might be people who the modernist left are anxious to wash their hands of. A look inside the front cover of my new book at those who’ve endorsed it might give a flavour. I’ll mention just one of them by name – Paul Kingsnorth. I haven’t read everything Paul’s written, and of the things I have read, I don’t agree with everything he’s said – if that’s even necessary to state, since presumably the same could be said by more or less anyone about more or less any writer.
I have read Paul’s essay Against Progress: the Case for Reactionary Radicalism and I agree with almost every sentence in it. I can’t happily mobilise under the ‘reactionary’ banner given the connotations of the word – though, saying that, every word in the political lexicon has troubling connotations of one sort or another. Still, it’s as well to be aware that every politics is a reaction to something, and one of the cardinal errors of modernist politics that’s delivered us into the present mess is the conceit that it somehow isn’t reactionary.
Anyway, I’m with Paul in his idea that defending or building moral economies locally rather than trying to solve global problems at the global level with one-shot techno-fixes is the right thing to focus on. But building moral economies brings us back to the difficulties of finding common ground in the local homesteading space – difficulties so grave that I’ll have to leave it to a whole other blog post to overcome them. What I would say, channelling my reactive anti-modernist leftism, is that I’m not expecting governments, experts or public intellectuals to be of much help.
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But building moral economies brings us back to the difficulties of finding common ground in the local homesteading space – difficulties so grave that I’ll have to leave it to a whole other blog post to overcome them. What I would say, channelling my reactive anti-modernist leftism, is that I’m not expecting governments, experts or public intellectuals to be of much help.
I could counter that, given the pandemic response as an example, I’m also not expecting local moral economies to be of much help in solving global problems.
Part of the issue that I have with the pandemic response is that, from my perspective, we now have incontrovertible evidence of widespread airborne, aerosol-based transmission of viral disease, and also of serious longer-term health effects from same. We already had some idea of airborne transmission because of measles and chicken pox, but there had been a lot of hand-waving about droplets Vs aerosols. This is on a par with learning about water-borne pathogens such as cholera, or the importance of handwashing before assisting in childbirth for preventing puerperal fever, but… it isn’t being treated as such.
I’ve been able to do quite a lot, but I haven’t been able to organise my communities to take low-tech preventive action like ventilation and mid-tech action like filtration seriously. It’s simply too hard to organise these non-pharmaceutical interventions locally in the wider context of capitalist expectations about getting “back to work” (and school and the pub and the gym and the crowded restaurant). Instead, my household is about the only one I know of where nobody has had COVID. Given our relative economic privilege (my spouse and housemate both work from home, and most of my work outside the home is outdoor, voluntary or both; additionally, none of us are going to be fired for being a bit weird) it hasn’t been insurmountably difficult: we just wear masks that actually protect the wearer for all indoor interactions outside our own home. Yes, this means we are not back at the pub. It has meant giving up hobby activities we once enjoyed. It also means we haven’t had so much as a cold since February 2020.
A state with better focus on health and safety could easily bring in measures that would help, but… that is not what is happening, either. I am not particularly pro-state, but where states can excel is in looking at large problems and fixing them on a scale such that the rest of us don’t have to worry about it: making sure human waste doesn’t end up in wells, or legislation to remove lead from paint, or stopping production of asbestos insulation. We could argue the toss on whether things like child labour laws, a minimum wage, and the existence of weekends are a state thing or a union thing, or even whether they are good. But I think it’s fair to say they wouldn’t have happened without state intervention.
Honestly, I’m still hopping mad because I spent most of my adult life getting a few bad colds every winter, washing my hands a lot and trying to avoid getting coughed and sneezed on directly, and giving those colds to my asthmatic spouse who would take a month to recover from each. It was clear my efforts weren’t helping much but the official line was that there was nothing we could do. That turned out to be nonsense: all we had to do was avoid breathing other people’s lung air in enclosed spaces without filtering it first. I’m not going back to that if I can help it: not because I’m that frightened of getting COVID or whatever other airborne lurgy is going around, but because I am not happy with the risk of passing something on to someone else and killing them. (This is also the basis on which I had three or four doses of a new vaccine, despite there being at least some risk involved.) For a while it looked like maybe we could proceed on some kind of “assess the risks based on the data” basis, but then the various powers that be lied about the risks and took away the data. With no reliable information about general transmission rates, and no consistent non-pharmaceutical steps being taken to lower them, the safest assumption is that everyone else is an asymptomatic plague carrier.
Meanwhile a number of people who ought to know better think I am delusional or have woolly thinking on the topic. I’m afraid that I see it very, very clearly indeed: the state will not inconvenience capital for the wellbeing of citizens, and neither will individuals or small groups in most of the communities to which I belong exercise their own agency in providing safer spaces if it isn’t mandatory. There are a multitude of good excuses for this, and even more bad ones.
So if we as a household want to make use of the (now very strong) evidence about airborne disease transmission, we are basically on our own. I am incredibly grateful that within my household, we are all willing to die on this particular hill.
But it doesn’t bode well for either state or localist models of preventing further climate damage, and it doesn’t give me good ideas about how to bring along as many people as possible into a more resilient, more local, more compassionate small farm future.
In fairness to localist models, none of the community groups I am referring in discussing the broad failure of such groups to learn from the COVID pandemic exist in some innocent state of impartiality, free from the influence of state or capital and allowed to decide on and implement best practice locally without interference or falling afoul of legislative barriers.
But neither will whatever movements capture power in the wake of failure of state governance, and I think this has been happening for some time.
So: perhaps my stance on which banners I am willing to hoist is different from yours partly because I am less worried about being mistaken for an advocate of some kind of repressive modernist technocratic “socialist” dictatorship than I am about encouraging those on the right who I believe to be equally dangerous. The authoritarianism I am most concerned about doesn’t come from either of the two lefts you have described here, though I think the modernist strand with its focus on centralised technological solutions is probably more vulnerable to appropriation by the far right.
I do think it is possible to get good things done by working with people who have different political views than mine; at the end of the day, spuds are spuds. But it is hard work, probably harder than most people today realise — so many only relate to and talk with people who have a similar background and take up similar opinions.
I don’t think you are “…delusional or have woolly thinking on the topic”
Your experience and point of view has been very similar to mine. I know 2 or 3 other housholds besides mine who haven’t gotten Covid.
I wonder if there might be many of us with this point of view, but mostly keeping out of sight.
Thanks.
Thanks Eric — it is good to know we aren’t the only ones.
Our next door neighbours on one side managed to last until this spring, but with the precautions they were taking (on the advice of their GP, grr) it was really only a matter of time.
I always wondered thru all of covid why no one ever asked those that know about biological warfare what they thought ,ya know the military , having been thru some training I wondered how any talking head could recommend masks , it they worked why does the government spend tens of thousands on military bio weapon suits with battery powered forced air filters if a face mask would do , trying to stop covid with a face mask is like trying to catch flies with chain link fence .
It’s not quite as simple as that!
Masks do help, but different ones are useful for different purposes, and they need to be worn properly and consistently.
If you want to protect the wearer from aerosols you need a very good fit — elastomeric is best. And you need to not take the mask off unless there are no aerosols around.
If you want to protect people *around* the wearer from larger droplets (like those produced when coughing or sneezing), surgical masks or cloth masks will do, but they still need to fit properly and it’s no good wearing them around your chin, under your nose, or taking them off to talk, eat or drink.
Early in the pandemic when there was a shortage of PPE for medical workers and it was believed the main risk was from droplets and not aerosols, there was a lot of mixed messaging about masks. That messaging has not been corrected, even though we are now not in a shortage situation and we do know that COVID is airborne.
Surgical masks and cloth masks do still slow down transmission of disease spread by airborne aerosols, but it is “slow down” not “stop”. So in a context where everyone is using them and there are other non-pharmaceutical measures in place (ventilation and filtration of indoor air, and getting people to test and then stay home if positive so that they aren’t as likely to be contagious in crowded public spaces), they are still worthwhile, but in a situation where that isn’t happening, someone who wants to not get covid will need a more robust mask.
In my house we wear 3M 6000-series respiratory masks with P3 filters in public indoor spaces outside our home. These only protect others if an outflow filter is also used, but if we don’t get covid then that protects others instead. I did buy some outflow filters anyway. The masks are big and bulky and durable and even the filters last months, so environmentally they are a much better deal than disposable masks of any kind. However, they make conversation very difficult.
If I need to actually speak with people I wear Stealth Lite-Pro FFP3. These last a month (probably longer, but they are rated for a month of daily use for 12 hours/day; I find they tend to start getting smelly after a while), and still have an elastomeric seal so air is not coming in around the edges. I can buy a five pack for £20 (the same price as Chris’s speaking event tonight). They do have an outflow valve and I haven’t found a reliable way to filter that, but if I’m in a room of unmasked people then honestly my exhaled air is a pretty low risk to others, compared to that of every other person in the room. I am.much easier to hear in these masks, and they are smaller and more convenient to carry than the 3M 6000-series.
For a single-use mask we’ve found the 3M Aura masks are pretty good, but the fit does deteriorate every time you take it off and put it on. As these fold flat, I often carry a spare one in case something goes wrong with one of my masks (hasn’t happened yet) or a person I’m speaking to has cold symptoms and no mask.
I don’t generally wear a mask outdoors unless it’s crowded. UV light and large amounts of fresh air reduce outdoor risks considerably.
I would like to find a good elastomeric mask with a clear window, for better conversation with people who lip-read, but what I’ve been able to find so far is either not elastomeric, doesn’t have the filter certification I want, or isn’t available to purchase in the UK.
Thanks Chris for this.
I’m with you: “…I tend to see Marxism as thoroughly imbued with bourgeois values…”
For me the most salient fact is that many Marxists think (have thought?) that a dictatorship is a good and necessary thing.
I don’t “…fear there are real dangers in doubling down on the governmental and the expert-led.”
Rather than fearing this, I’m certain of it.
I have also experienced the closing of my friends’ minds.
As you do, I believe this is somehow related to the Covid experience, but here in the US, it also correlates to the Trump experience. Though in retrospect, I can pick out threads going back further into the recent past.
I remember standing on the corner in front of the county courthouse in 2002/3 with an anti-war sign, and how surprised and confused I was by the vehemence of the reactions of the people who disagreed with me. Even though this is a college town and there weren’t all that many of them.
But the tone of those disagreements was as if those people felt that I was taking something valuable from them.
The only thing I could think I was taking was their ability to mindlessly plunder the world for their own convenience and amusement.
Interestingly, now I have similar experiences with some of those same people who stood beside me on the sidewalk holding those anti-war signs.
I don’t believe most of my friends really want to mindlessly plunder, but I do get the sense that there is a general feeling that the future is shrinking. It seems as if this makes everybody feel defensive of what little they can claim for themselves. Like the pie is way too small for all of us, even if only for those of us who aren’t insane and thus don’t need a billion.
Could something like this explain the “…excommunicating rather than debating…”?
What if everyone is busily trying to push the people they don’t like out of the dining room so they don’t have to share the pie?
Personally, I haven’t found any group that has the patience to listen to my political rantings, so I’m not in a position to excommunicate anyone from anything.
Even so, when these issues come up in conversation, I often have to remind myself that I don’t argue with children.
“…their proximity to power and what it gives them…” Seems likely that this is a big contributor to the general level of (civic?) immaturity. Isn’t that the benefit of paternalism? Dad will take care of it. If you’re nice.
“…the difficulties of finding common ground in the local homesteading space…”
Yes.
We don’t really have a local homesteading space where I live, but we do have some remains of various local experiments that were started 30 – 50 years ago. More evidence that it is really hard to live outside the mainstream.
Thanks.
Your experience of the “closing of friend’s minds “ is relatable. It almost feels like i have to leave my friends and the life i built behind me behind in order to “transcend” And make sense of the world at large and my place within it as a part of nature.
I always thought from what I’ve seen of if that the main difference between the Left and the Right is that the people in each camp just get angry at different things on TV, everything about their lifestyles is similar. This essay potentially reveals a new way that the divide lies these days.. naturist vs industrialist? Co-creator vs consumer?
IMHO we all ready have two lefts. for example you have the UK NHS run by bureaucrats supposedly working for the people and the common good then there is Google owned by one of the left-wing richest supporters , neither works for the proles . If bureaucracy runs it we can expect incompetent empire building , Google et al more billionaires .
The age of globalism is all ready over , not the talk, the results , trying to find parts for anything has become a nightmare , made in China not available , made in Taiwan not available , made in India not available , made here no chance ! It will only get worse.
Ha! , civic republican agrarian populist left libertarian quasi anarchism huh?
Well the was a valiant try to self define in these confusing times, where societal norms and assumed commonly held sets of facts have been disintegrating badly.
I struggle with labels and self definition as well, and wonder if finding “my tribe” is possible or worth the effort. I guess that is a big part of why I hang out here. Still looking for illumination and the insight of others that seem to be on parallel paths.
Kind of ironic, since we are all hundreds and thousands of miles from each other, will very likely never meet, but the future we are midwifing will be local, based on the people and resources within a day’s walk or so.
My take on the fractious times where blocs and national coherence are fracturing:
Everywhere, some nations more than others, but nearly everywhere, the obvious but unacknowledged decline (Eric’s shrinking pie) is having subliminal impact, and the self preservation instinct is driving polarization/tribe forming in response. I don’t think many even understand that is what is causing the angst and motivating their urgent efforts.
Hard to stay nuanced when you hear the wolf scratching at the door.
“Those X over there are going to take your jobs/food/housing/resources” is a classic scare tactic. I wish it didn’t work so well. In the past decade in Britain I’ve seen it used against migrants, visible minority descendants of migrants, disabled people, unemployed people, smokers, fat people, trans people, union members (rail workers, teachers, and nurses come to mind), and probably others I can’t think of off the top of my head.
It’s hard for me to see awareness of the shrinking pie as “subliminal” when reference to it is so blatantly weaponised in mainstream news outlets on a regular basis. I don’t really see growing awareness of the reality of our situation: rather, I see growing political exploitation of our survival instincts used in attempts to gain power. Many of those attempts are at least partly successful.
Perhaps the media where you are is more wholesome? Perhaps clickbait headlines aren’t a thing in your world? Perhaps social media where you are isn’t funded by advertising, rewarding content and interactions that get people emotionally riled up (and therefore more likely to stay on the app or site or etc longer) over content and interactions that give people impartial information and encourage collaborative connections to be formed?
The thing about scarcity is that it doesn’t take a whole lot of gardening experience to realise that small scale production can be, well, very productive — but doing it without fossil inputs is a lot of work.
I hope that at some point fossil energy will become so scarce that instead of seeing our fellow human beings as yet more mouths to feed, we see them as people who are capable of contributing their labour (not necessarily field labour, or even physical.labour at all) to the project of ensuring that we can all live dignified and fulfilling lives.
Wholesome media- nope, strictly profit driven here, and thus coopted and antithetical to societal good. Yes, the hair on fire strident media will cover the symptom of the day, but never delve into primary causes or the nuance of complex systems.
Subliminal- What I was trying to get at is how so much recent discord seems to be about cultural side issues, “wokeness”, “treehuggers” and other epithets being used as distractions from root causes of stress. Overshoot and all its various knock on effects is seldom consciously linked to the cause of all the fractious behavior.
The end of fossil fuels enabling the view of our fellow travelers as productive resources instead of more mouths to feed? I don’t think the odds are promising. Intergroup conflict over resources well preceded the fossil fuel era, and we are what we are. Striving to maximize compassion, and minimize the selfish impulse will be with us forever, at whatever scale future societies might end up progressing/regressing to.
All the more reason to keep social structures small and diffuse, as centralized power seems to me to create more catastrophic violence events. I wonder if historians and archeologists will ever come to solid conclusions on that. Graeber and Wengrow would say bigger is not necessarily more violent, but I think it most often is.
I think I would go with “bigger is not necessarily more violent,but when it is, the consequences are greater”.
Overshoot might not be discussed much, but resource scarcity certainly is — and very often used as a justification for one sort of violence or another against whichever group is allegedly taking more than their fair share. To me this doesn’t seem hidden or subliminal at all.
Of course, just because resource scarcity is used as a scare tactic or to justify violence doesn’t mean that resources aren’t scarce.
Perhaps my tendency to see others as potential helpers father than extra mouths to feed is due to my involvement in small church communities that do a lot of voluntary work serving the wider community. In the current economic climate our biggest limitation is having enough volunteers. I’m pretty sure that having, for example, a second person with even half my gardening skills would more than double the Soup Garden yields, at the same time as improving soil health.and biodiversity, and also probably discouraging people from doing drug deals (and other things we rather wish that they wouldn’t) in the churchyard.
I think we are in the same camp. As for Marxism, I do think its historical materialism has some merits and in general Marxism is a useful approach for underastandning the transformations the world went through with the introduction of capitalism. Even if Marx never used the word capitalism I believe he described industrial capitalism well, and the main value of Marxism is still its ability to reveal the effects of capitalism. But I don’t see that the “socialist” left is really anti-capitalist anymore, which you point out. The “communist” got stuck in the class struggle rethoric and hence the dictatorship tendency. The “socialist” got stuck with capitalism and married capitalism with a strong state, which did and does deliver welfare, but it is also authoritarian. I do see the covid response as very authoritarian in most countries.
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef
Worth keeping an eye on.
From that UC Davis article:
“Even the most efficient beef production systems reviewed in the study outperform cultured meat across all scenarios (both food and pharma), suggesting that investments to advance more climate-friendly beef production may yield greater reductions in emissions more quickly than investments in cultured meat….”
““It may not lead to environmentally friendly commodity meat, but it could lead to less expensive pharmaceuticals, for example,” said [lead author] Risner. “My concern would just be scaling this up too quickly and doing something harmful for the environment.”
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/lab-grown-meat-carbon-footprint-worse-beef
As for the other, non-marxist left, I fear it may not be coherent at al.
For example, I find that many of the proponents of small scale farming and localism have an uncritical view on markets, competition and property. The problem with markets and competition are explained with to much corporate power, monopolies or government meddling. But I have seen no convincing argument for how a “free” market will avoid capital accumulation or how competition will not lead to the same agriculture treadmill (https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/the-agriculture-treadmill-eliminates) where farmers have to invest and increase productivity in order not to lose out to competitors. Ownership is often seen as a protection from eviction, but it can actually be the other way round which can be witnessed in many places in the world today, where the process of privatization of land i ongoing. Combined with private property, a free market will end up in capitalism, accumulation and dispossesion.
In my version of the second left, perhaps the third(?) we should seek to limit market AND state control as much as possible. Tenure of land need to be secure, but not unconditional and land should not be something to be bought or sold.
Gunnar,
I will read your post properly later today if I get another piece of work done first, but just wanted to say that I think the principle of subsidiarity might be related in some way to putting limits on capital accumulation and the formation of monopolies; that is, governance designed with subsidiarity in mind might be relevant here.
As for competition, I think a focus on self-provisioning is a partial safeguard against this. It’s also important to recall that many of the “economies of scale” that currently appear to outcompete small farms in terms of productivity per human labour hour are in fact economies of fossil energy, and actively uncompetitive as soon as fossil energy becomes sufficiently expensive. That isn’t much help right now, when the industrial model farmers still have the upper hand, but it won’t always be the case that whoever can buy more petrol or bigger tractors to farm more land can sell more grain. (I wonder if agricultural subsidies have a role to play, too. Small diverse farms that focus on a blend of self-provisioning and local markets don’t, in my understanding, have access to much in the way of government subsidies — though Chris would obviously know more about it than I do.)
Basically, what we see now is not a free market by any stretch of the imagination, and while a totally free market will tend toward concentration and monopoly, I wonder if the tendency might not be quite so strong.
Kathryn,. Well I agree that fossil fuel and globalization turn competition and concentration in overdrive. And I also agree that farming for self provisioning and provisioning of the kin is very different – and it is very much non-market oriented. As for local markets, we should keep in mind that in the old times those local markets were never “free” but in various ways regulated. Also you suggestion to regulate capital accumulation and tendency of monopoly, that is then not a “free market” no more. In my view the desirable hierarchy is: 1) Self provisioning, 2) non-market exchange with kin and community, 3) local market not based on competition.
Gunnar, in your view of what’s desirable, what would (3) look like (local market not based on competition)?
How would prices be determined, and by whom?
Steve, I have no very simple answer to this in a similar way as I have no similar answer to how exactly one should determine who has the right to occupy a specific piece of land. Clearly, in most parts of human history these things (land and food) have not been governed by free markets. Poalnyi gives a very elaborated account of this in his Great Transformation. I summarize some of it in my book Global Eating Disorder.
“For most of us it is probably hard to visualize what life looked like in pre-industrial European farming communities. In many parts of Europe, even if land was held ‘privately’ by tenants or farmers, the agricultural calendar was governed by a village commune or the court of a manorial lord who owned the soil. There it was decided when to sow and harvest and when land would be open for grazing. Beyond the fields were pastures and woodlands which mostly were commons, used for collective grazing and fuel collection. Animals were often kept in a joint village herd, overseen by a communal herdsman. The number of animals kept was restricted and crops, wood or even manure could not be removed from the village without a permit. All in all, it was a very different society and the influence of markets was weak.
The markets were also not particularly free; there were many regulations on prices and over who could trade and where. In medieval England there were laws regulating the price for many foods; an 1378 ordinance of the City of London regulated the prices of hen pies, roast snipe, larks, herons and pigs, to mention just a few. In 1529 there were new laws with maximum prices for meat. Authorities regarded bread as fundamental for the subsistence of the population and did not leave its production or distribution to the market. The Assize of Bread from the reign of Henry III in the 13th century regulated the price and weight of bread in great detail. These rules were in force, with some changes, until the beginning of the 19th century. Similar rules existed for beer. A Swedish ordinance from 1622 required that a permit to be issued for each animal to be slaughtered and defined the cost of slaughter, quality classifications and the price of the meat, if sold. Meat prices were even seasonally differentiated. etc etc. ”
I don’t think that those earlier systems in anyway was perfect, just that they show alternatives.
I think the main challenge is to get out of the market economy’s straight-jacket both economically, but even more so in our minds. The prevailing paradigm has made most people unable to see a future where you are not primarily producing for a market (whether directly as a farmer or indirectly as a laborer) and primarily consume things from the market. And even if there are “markets” they certainly don’t have to be based on competition. Most of the stuff I sell is sold directly to consumers and competition play no big role at all in the relationship between us and our consumers, even if there is of course somewhere in the background an idea of what is a reasonable price colored by the prices in the larger market.
Thanks Gunnar. The more desirable (1) and (2) seem much less complicated than (3) ‘local market not based on competition’.
‘Building moral economies locally’ is an appealing encapsulation. However, it seems that it’s not sufficient to be merely *for* something like this, it’s necessary to do what one can to make it happen locally while resisting the opposing forces aligned *against* it. I am challenged by this.
Finding common ground in the local scene might happen more readily in the context of a shared resistance to increased state control and authoritarianism (for whatever disparate reasons the subgroups may have).
For example, adoption of a Central Bank Digital Currency might be resisted by some neighbors because they want to start a local currency, while other neighbors will resist the CBDC because of privacy concerns.
Yes, the old political alignments seem to be shifting these days, making the “left-right” dichotomy increasingly incoherent. I agree that whether someone supports the whole modern-industralist project or accepts ecological limits is a more useful dividing line for the twenty-first century. And also that this last decade has led to finding some very strange bedfellows. I’ve also found myself more willing to listen to people I’d have dismissed as awful reactionaries back in 2010, and like many I feel out of step with both the right and the left. Like you, I find myself increasingly drawn to some kind of anarchism, even if I’m not fully convinced.
Sure, the reactionary right is still around, but these days most of the really unhinged authoritarianism seems to come from a certain faction of the left, if it can even be called that. Thankfully it’s better here in this corner of northern Europe than in the US (and UK?), but we’re not wholly immune. I’m absolutely not a fan of conservative Christianity or Ayn Rand-style libertarianism, but at this point I’m willing to lend an ear to anyone who’ll stand up for freedom of speech and conscience.
I also agree there was something very weird going on with the pandemic. The censorship and propaganda have simply been unreal over these last few years. Maybe I’ve been naive, but it’s been disappointing, disturbing and downright chilling to see how quickly our governments and much of the population have been willing to gut the principle of freedom of speech, and even enthusiastic about doing so. Including one Mr. Monbiot, I might add, who came out in support of censoring vaccine dissenters in his column.
Things took a turn for the worse from 2020 for sure, but I don’t think governments would have gotten away with all the censorship as easily if there hadn’t already been a culture among many people (especially but not only on the left) of “the ends justify the means” and “freedom of speech is for people we agree with”. Like you alluded to in the post, establishing a constant crisis mindset and an acceptance of censorship and uncritical trust in experts/The Science has certainly been one very useful outcome of the pandemic for the powers that be. On my part, the pandemic response obliterated what little trust I had left in Western governments, media and academia.
I think freedom of speech is one of the few genuinely good aspects of “modern” culture, and I’m sad to see so many casually throwing it out when it’s inconvenient to them politically. Your words in earlier writings about the need to preserve the civic sphere (was that the term?) seem prescient now.
Going forwards, I suspect there’s going to be more of this kind of thing flung against those of us who won’t go along with the mainstream narrative(s), including arguing for localism and small farms. Anything that’s remotely critical of the official line is now “misinformation” and subject to removal. Plus there’s always that handy “eco-fascist” label they could dust off again. I’m also concerned about the possibility of governments weaponizing digital banking, like with the Canadian trucker protest. I know most commenters here probably disagree with the protesters, and of course that’s fair, but who knows who could be on the receiving end next? At least it’s one more reason to grow more of your own food… 🙂
One more observation about the pandemic that’s semi-relevant to this blog: isn’t it striking how the elites were willing to basically crash the whole economy overnight? For so many years they’ve been putting economic growth ahead of literally everything else, and sneered at any suggestions to lower consumption. Now they’re willing to do stuff like, say, shutting down all pointless tourism by fiat, but doing the same thing to deal with the environmental crisis would be an unthinkable deprivation even if that crisis is a much bigger threat to humanity than the pandemic.
Still, it does show that they can be persuaded to take drastic and heavy-handed action, including slaughtering their sacred cow of eternal growth, under the right circumstances and far short of a revolution. That’s interesting to know. (Personally I kind of like the conspiracy theory that they used the pandemic as a pretext to induce an economic crash that was coming anyway and so escape the blame, but I’m not sure I actually believe that)
I don’t think the rich needed the pandemic as a pretext for an induced economic crash; the conspiracy theory is unlikely but also unnecessary as an explanation of what actually happened.
I think they were well placed to profit from any upturn or downturn in the markets, and that is what they did.
Contractors selling PPE to governments made a huge profit, as did supermarkets. The further concentration of wealth that happens in an economic slump is very, very profitable indeed for those whose hands it is concentrated into.
Similarly — reopening after the lockdowns was largely a matter of attempting to revive profits for commercial landlords.
Personally, I expect that there will be other, more serious pandemics; at least now I have some idea of how bad the response might be.
And yes — the response to protest has been very poor indeed in the West, and that is indeed a good reason for not getting all your livelihood from a failing system. At the talk last night someone asked why the British farmers are not protesting as the French and Dutch are, and I bit my tongue and didn’t shout “because we’ve outlawed protest”, but I do think that is at least part of the reason.
Yeah, you’re probably right that there’s no need for conspiracy when good old cui bono will do. Fair points.
And I agree re. new pandemics too. Sadly it’s been in the cards for a while, with our whole globalized civilization. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at all meaning to downplay the grief and suffering of those who lost family members or livelihoods to the Covid pandemic, but from a bird’s eye perspective I think we got off lightly all things considered. I’d say the manmade impacts were much worse than the illness itself, very much including the economic unfairness you mention.
One more problem with the response is that the authorities were so heavy-handed and nakedly authoritarian I’m concerned a lot of people (like me) will now tend to be defiant and skeptical by default when and if we get another one, even if that pandemic turns out to be much more serious. Kind of a “boy who cried wolf” situation.
As for outlawing protest, that’s a good point too. Looking in from the outside, I have to say it’s been very concerning to see these new anti-protest laws in the UK. Freedom of assembly is another crucial right that seems to be eroding. As the expression goes here in Norway, it’s all pretty reminiscent of “countries we don’t like to compare ourselves to”.
Again, maybe I’m just naive, but I can’t help feel there was a brief historical moment in the later twentieth century when the Western nations at least pretended to live up to their “enlightened” values sometimes. These days it all seems to be thrown out in favor of tribalism and political expediency by many both in and outside of government, which makes me both sad and apprehensive for the future. I guess that’s what happens at the end of the age of industrial abundance, but still hard to see it unfold.
I think we did get off relatively lightly with COVID in terms of the case fatality rate. It doesn’t compare at all to, say, measles or smallpox in naive populations. Of course, we’re always only one mutation away from a more deadly strain, and the more transmission is allowed to continue unchecked, the higher the statistical likelihood that we will hit that particular genetic jackpot.
I also think there were an unacceptable number of needless, entirely preventable deaths, and an unacceptable level of longer-term disability. Both of these were, as with so many other diseases, disproportionately likely to affect people who live in poverty.
I can’t comment too much on the 20th century; I was born in 1980 and in economic governance terms it’s been neoliberalism pretty much the whole time since then. It is certainly hard to watch, but in some ways it’s all I’ve ever known. The more important question is how we can respond constructively.
IMHO , they called the pandemic to cover for the energy crisis caused by the ban of Russian gas and oil, problem is that the energy crisis has not gone away and is causing real hurt to European economies , VW is in real trouble as is most of industry ,a full one third of German industry is looking to move overseas , it can’t help but be when buying LNG from the USA costs three times the price of piped NG from Russia , anything manufactured in is uncompetitive on the world market , hense collapse in government tax revenues , in the USA The interest on government borrowing is about to hit one trillion $ ,near a third of government income , the can can’t be kicked down the road any further , either the government stops spending or the currency collapses, the lock down brought the problem to a head , deindustrialsation and lower standards of living are here now , for the West the days of cheap abundant energy is over but hubris rules over the political establishment , lock downs , fifteen minute cities the ban on overseas holidays are all the early stages of energy shortages blaming global warming is just a way of keeping the pitchforks in the barn .
Thanks for a rich set of comments. I’m catching up after a trip to London and I’ll have to keep my comments brief and gnomic. But there’s a lot of good stuff to ponder here and no doubt we’ll return to it.
I’m quite conflicted on science and public culture. Part of my intellectual background is in public health, which I consider a benignly motivated tradition oriented to improving the human condition that got politicised in all the wrong ways during the pandemic. But there’s a problem inasmuch as you can only really work on public health in the context of state politics which is not benignly motivated towards improving the human condition. How valuable is the scientific knowledge that you shouldn’t shit in your water supply when such knowledge is conditional upon a politics that it’s okay to shit in your water supply if it pays? Perhaps the answer depends on how conditional you think such knowledge is on such politics. Pretty deeply IMO.
Another frame for that: arguably, there was a post WWII ‘never again’ moment of global reconstruction, decolonization and inclusive public culture that has gradually been eroded over the succeeding decades. Is it possible to rebuild such a global moment? Did such a moment really even exist?
And another frame: for sure, local moral economies cannot solve global problems. But to what extent do global problems actually exist in a world of successful local moral economies? Even a pandemic manifests mostly locally, even with a worldwide spread?
I’ve written before about civic republican agrarian populist left libertarianism (or crapll – it’s bound to happen!) I feel the need to throw in a nod to anarchism. States can operate as risk-sharing institutions, but I don’t think that’s really what they’re about for the most part and I don’t think there’s much chance of diverting contemporary nation states into that role.
What do folks think of this from C.S. Lewis: https://libertarianchristians.com/2013/07/31/is-progress-possible/ ?
I can see it going in a right-wing libertarian direction that I couldn’t subscribe to. But I largely agree with it, given some quite fine-tuned parameters.
On rightwing vs leftwing authoritarian states, I acknowledge the fearful possibilities of full-on violent fascism, but I’m also concerned how the fear of those possibilities might smooth the path to forms of right or left authoritarianism which involve surrendering almost as much autonomy. Seriously, I’ve come to think that the dangers of leftwing ecomodernist authoritarianism are also grave.
The banana debate in US leftwing circles currently is interesting, chiming with Greg’s point: https://twitter.com/arne__ness/status/1681660954696663040
From bananas to Kathryn’s spuds. As I’ve argued previously, there’s a lot to be said for keeping local conversations grounded in the things that really matter – so potatoes, not politics. But ultimately politics always insinuates itself. Even in the case of potatoes. Agree that defining what we’re *against* is also important … but tricky ground.
On Marxism & Gunnar’s points, yes agree. We discussed some of this in relation to Chapters 13 and 14 of my previous book. I’m all in for secure, non-monetizable tenure and self-provisioning! Then we can just talk about potatoes.
On protest … hmm, I’d argue there are many ways to protest and oppose that don’t fall foul of the new protest laws. I think the reason has to do with deeper seated matters of politics and culture. But these are changing, and I think we can expect farmer/rural protests in the UK soon. More on that here in due course.
On people defending their shrinking entitlement, maybe that’s so … or maybe indeed this is largely a divide/rule/extract value politics at the moment. If it is about shrinking entitlements it sits oddly with ecomodernist ‘you’ve never had it so good’ narratives. But maybe that’s just me – as far as I can see *everything* sits oddly with ecomodernist narratives.
On subsidies, well I best not get started. My preference is for moral economies over govt subsidies. But maybe there’s a ‘merit good’ case for small farm payments in the current situation. The UK abolished payments to farms with less than 5ha entitlements a few years back, and tbh I wasn’t too sorry to see them go with all the bureaucracy involved. Other European countries just paid a flat fee to small farms – more sensible. But now we’re out of the EU anyway. I haven’t followed all the twists & turns of all the ELMS stuff, but with the UK desperate to sign questionable race-to-the-bottom trade deals and also apparently penalising farmers in general and upland farmers in particular, the whole rural land use situation looks like a complete mess. My holding doesn’t get any public money anyway, for which I’m quite grateful.
Thanks for the link to the CS Lewis essay.
I think the post-WW2 “never again” impulse was largely a “never again for the West and the financially wealthy”. Lewis’s comment about the contemporary starvation in the East is a sober reminder of this.
I think I largely agree with Lewis that the paternalism of a completely planned economy is contrary to what is best for human beings (and other life on the planet). But I also see it as entirely hubristic; systems as large as the economy of an entire state are simply more complex and unpredictable than humans can manage, whether those humans are technocrats or politicians. We have some good computer models of certain systems now, but they lag behind reality the way a printed paper map lags behind the reality of an area of land, and like maps, they require training and an understanding of their context to use well. So I feel like technocratic solutions that oversimplify production or distribution (such as studge vats or whatever) are doomed to fail, and therefore not really worth worrying about too much in the long term. They can, of course, still do substantial and potentially catastrophic damage in the short term, and it is right to be concerned about that.
Besides, the moves toward control and coercion that I actually see in the world today are from corporations, the states they have captured, and somewhat populist leaders (often also captured by corporations and capital) spouting right-wing rhetoric. Perhaps this is a West-centric view, but it is what I see. When I look at the left, I mostly see a circular firing squad. It’s not that there are no authoritarian tendencies on the left: there certainly are. And that would be dangerous if the left had a significant chance of gaining any kind of political power.
Lewis writes of punishment vs rehabilitative justice, and implies that to try to “cure” people of their crimes is to make them into objects (a means to an end) rather than subjects (ends in themselves). Yet how much of the removal of what was once a decent welfare state has been achieved by implying that poor people do not deserve to have a basic dignified standard of living? What is “deserved” by the people who are ready to sell off the NHS, or who effectively ended the building of council housing? What do the politicians deserve, whose rule brought in the necessity of food banks, and a huge increase in the numbers of people sleeping rough or relying on shelters? Or, rather: why do those people who are rich and powerful “deserve” a level of basic security they would (and do) deny to others? Does the answer change if those others are children? Refugees? Trafficked slaves?
I would answer that they don’t. Lewis seems awfully certain, for someone who lived through rationing, that in his free world of people being allowed to work freely for their own livelihood or sell themselves into slavery for it, he would be one of the “few freemen”. I think his privilege is showing; I certainly don’t expect that for myself. I also think that arguing that the poor are somehow morally better off if we leave them to fend for themselves than if we try to meet some of their basic needs is just as paternalistic and disempowering as the “government technocrats know best” caricature he is criticising.
Systems are complex and that means we can never catch every person who falls through the cracks of whatever support we set up; it means we can never control things so completely that we can guarantee children will be free from hunger or the elderly free from neglect. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least attempt to set up some kind of mitigations: rationing or social housing or a subsistence income for people who cannot work or a national health service. Will those mitigations look different under different systems if governance, and with different available resources for implementation? Sure. Will they generally be better than the alternative? Usually, yes. There is nothing “free” about the person who has been evicted because of not showing up for a Universal Credit appointment with the right form of ID after her passport was stolen. There is nothing “free” about the person with malnutrition as the cause of death on their death certificate. There is nothing “free” about the person engaged in sex work to try to keep a roof over their child’s head. I don’t mean to say that any of these people lack agency (except maybe the dead one). I mean to point out that their poverty and suffering are not the result of their own free choices but are the results of a system that, quite frankly, is rigged against them.
CS Lewis was writing before South American liberation theology was really something the rest of the world was aware of, so I’ll let him off the hook for some of his apparent ignorance of the interconnectedness of economics and the systemic and systematic nature of oppression. But he was a notable Christian apologist of his time, and so as a Christian myself I would ask how he might justify his views in the light of Matthew 25:31-45.
Interesting – my interpretation of his remarks is quite a bit more generous, but – as I said above – I can see how they could drift into the kind of defence of privilege you rightly criticise. It’s a bit like distributism – a highly promising doctrine IMO but one that can easily be coopted by local business elites to justify their self-interest.
I think Lewis is saying something important about the way states slip from seeing people radically as ends in themselves, to seeing them more contingently as ends within the larger end of the state – and of a conception of science as a means of defending that larger end. To me, this is a problematic aspect of modern states, with which the technocratic ‘progressive’ left is thoroughly implicated, and I think Lewis nails some of the reasons why it’s problematic.
I wrote an entire long comment and then lost it, drat. I’ll try to recreate the main points….
I think the tendency to see humans (or citizens?) as means rather than ends is a problem common to states, not just the left-wing ones. It’s sometimes not as obvious on the right, because the ends are framed as things like prosperity and economic growth, but it’s still there when the state leaves citizens with no choice but to further the goals of capital for survival, rather than regulating capital to serve the best interests of citizens (a basic part of this, I think, is simple limits on power in the form of anti-monopoly laws in some sectors, and strictly enforced legal requirements for provision of basic services in others.) And “science” (or half-truths or outright lies about science: eugenics, “covid is over”, trickle-down economics) can be misused for either. The left doesn’t have a monopoly on that.
The socially liberal/progressive technocrat eco-modernists are not, as far as I can tell, actually very left wing at all. I haven’t seen advocates of, say, precision fermentation campaigning for public ownership of these protein factories as a utility or even co-operative ownership by workers; where allegedly re-wilded land will be stars owned it will be for carbon credits rather than for the common good. It’s markets all the way down, and global ones at that. Many people who are left wing insofar as they believe nobody should go hungry or have to sleep in a park or churchyard are quite content to be told that markets are the only way to sort all of that out, despite evidence to the contrary. Many people who are progressive insofar as they support gay marriage or gender inclusivity frame these ideas in terms of individual rights to autonomy regardless of the opinions of their community, rather than in terms of the fuller and more joyful common good that so often arises when communities come to truly accept full diversity. The Overton window is now far enough to the right to make them look pretty left wing, maybe. Disability inclusion activists are in general a bit further to the left, but get caught up in the technocracy stuff largely because trying to live a dignified life without technology is actually really hard if human communities are so messed up that we don’t care for one another. Things like speech recognition and text-to-speech software now available in even low-end smartphones have hugely enriched the lives of blind people I know, for example — because before they existed, the human labour to carry out the same functions was both under-valued and scarce. (That doesn’t mean low-tech must always be inaccessible; but like growing food, full inclusion is more labour intensive without fossil energy and high technology.)
I’m not trying to no-true-Scotsman the left here. But if the right believes markets are the best way to steward resources and the left believes some kind of public or community ownership is better, I am not sure the current crop of technocrats can be said to be left wing at all. They do lean authoritarian, insofar as I am sure they will have no hesitation in asking states for whatever legislation makes their products most profitable. I wonder whether the cultural trappings of historic leftism (much of which has been authoritarian) are muddying the waters here, just as many people struggle to recognise fascism if it isn’t covered in swastikas.
I have also observed similar governance problems in organisations that are not states. It can be a particular issue in churches when, trying to obey the command to preach the gospel to all nations, baptize new believers and make disciples, we forget to respect people’s humanity and therefore their agency and autonomy, and resort to manipulative or coercive measures. I believe that when this happens we fail to fulfil the relevant commandments.
I don’t have a good solution to this problem. I have some thoughts on how to avoid that particular failure mode in churches, at least, but the types of churches where it happens most aren’t asking me for advice. Anarchy seems like a good solution on the surface, as being against both corporations and states, but even anarchists have to organise and power relationships get complicated fast. To have any governance at all — to be able to coöperate with people outside our own households — we both give up some individual freedom, and introduce a potential threat from whatever governance structures we set up. We can design that governance to have some checks and balances against inappropriate use of power, but it is never going to be perfect. I might lean more authoritarian myself if I thought it would get us out of the ecological mess we’ve made, but I don’t think any authoritarian government is competent enough to manage that.
If I am particularly hard on Lewis it is because I think his focus on personal freedom, without acknowledgement of how the freedom to concentrate wealth or exploit others systematically leads to grinding poverty and lack of choice for some, reflects badly on his Christianity. (And on his reading of Adam Smith.) While liberation theology wasn’t really around at the time he was writing, the moral obligation to care for the basic needs of the poor runs through Christian scriptures; in my own voluntary work it is starkly clear to me that the people who aren’t getting enough to eat are in that position because others have the freedom to exploit them or deny them resources without legal consequence. I try to remember that he was very much of his time, and writing primarily to reach people who were already quite a bit like him.
State owned, not stars owned
I really shouldn’t type anything substantive on my phone.
Yes I mostly agree. I completely agree that a means-focused approach to citizenship characterizes right-wing states as well as left-wing ones – indeed, often more so. I didn’t intend to imply in my previous short reply to you that this was specific to left-wing states.
Regarding Lewis, I don’t see him taking a position on personal freedom that effaces inequality and exploitation in that essay. Maybe he is and I’m just not seeing it, or maybe he does so in other writings that I haven’t read? I interpreted him as arguing for economic independence – not for the few at the expense of the many, but for everyone. This aligns with my basically distributist orientation. It doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t care for the poor. There are certain strands of explicitly anti-left distributism that do push that view, but I disagree with them. But distributists and socialists may not agree on what caring for the poor entails.
@Chris, the bit which makes me think Lewis is in favour of economic independence for the few, even at the expense of the wellbeing of the many, is this passage:
I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that’s the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none.
Lewis doesn’t seem to recognise anywhere in his essay the degree to which the man eating his own turnips and mutton might be dependent on others for such things as selective breeding (of turnips and of sheep), access to and management of common land for grazing, not dumping sewage into the river upstream, or trade in salt and spices to make said turnip and mutton curry a bit more palatable. He appears to be setting up a false hero here, a self-made man, entirely economically independent, who succeeds or fails by the work of his own hands with no help from or accountability to the wider community. That’s not how the real world works, though. Our mutton-eater may or may not also be a carpenter, a thatcher, a cobbler or a cart-maker or a cooper, but it seems unlikely that he’s an expert in all of these things. So either he lives very primitively indeed, or he is interdependent with other people.
We’ve discussed the laughable fantasy of complete self-sufficiency a number of times in comments here so I don’t think I need to convince anyone here that going it alone is really practical. But the thing about economic interdependence is that you get markets, and as soon as you have markets you need to take steps to guard against monopoly, rent-seeking, financialisation and exploitation. Otherwise our mutton-eating farmer is feeding the local warlord while going hungry himself. That pattern is common enough in history, we just have corporations instead of warlords now. Well, mostly.
The organisation that puts those safeguards into place can be called a lot of things but it is functionally a state. And measures to meet people’s most basic needs are, I think, some of the most effective ways to *avoid* the kind of economic exploitation I am talking about. My spouse, who is a little older than I am, sometimes discusses an era when the local council was an “employer of last resort”: if any business was mistreating or underpaying workers, they knew they could get a better deal literally cleaning the streets. I suspect it was never quite that simple, but someone in secure, state-provided housing with a weekly welfare payment that is enough to feed and clothe themselves and their children is far, far less likely to be exploited by a corporation (or a drug gang, or a trafficking ring) than someone trying to survive on the streets.
Now, I haven’t read Montaigne, so maybe I’m misinterpreting Lewis very badly here. And I’ll certainly grant that there is a substantial difference between total economic dependence on the (or a) state, and self-provisioning alongside economic integration and interdependence with nested networks, starting with local community as the largest and most important. But Lewis is talking about the disadvantages of one without admitting the realities of the other.
Well it’s true he doesn’t talk about the necessary interdependence, but I wasn’t seeing that as evidence he’s unaware of it – more that he was focusing on a strong degree of personal economic autonomy from the state, not personal economic autonomy from everybody. Not quite sure where he’s going with the ‘few freemen’ point at the end of the passage you cite, though. Anyway, I agree with you of course about the fact of human interdependence.
Where I might disagree is in your quick resort to the language of markets and states as mediators of the interdependence. Historically, there have been plenty of non-market resource allocation methods worldwide. And plenty of forms of political organisation, including redistributive mechanisms, that haven’t been ‘states’ in the sense of total institutions claiming a consistently higher juridical power over community self-organisation. It’s this point that I think Lewis makes quite well. I’m not massively wedded to his particular take – other people like David Graeber are probably better sources.
But I’m interested in Lewis’s thought and Christian thought generally in the connections sought with premodern political and economic conceptions – “ Our intellectuals have surrendered first to the slave-philosophy of Hegel, then to Marx, finally to the linguistic analysts. As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died.”
Maybe you could argue that the surrender was baked in and it’s necessary now to cast the net elsewhere. Basically what I’m saying in this post is that I’m interested in any such elsewheres, and in classical political theory, but no longer so much in Hegel, Marx and the linguistic analysts – although that’s not to say that this modern triptych is lacking all virtue.
@Chris
In haste —
The “few freemen” thing is really what got my goat, so if you do figure out what Lewis means here, let me know.
Fair point that there have been or could be systems of governance that aren’t states, and systems of distribution that aren’t markets. I’m not as familiar as I would like to be with systems of distribution that aren’t either markets, or explicitly designed to protect people from the worst excesses of markets, and I do think markets emerge quite rapidly in most informal systems of exchange. I suppose since I have lived my whole life subject in a large degree to both states and markets it’s a bit of a “water to a fish” problem. (I am not a particularly strong swimmer, in this analogy.) I will try to do better at this.
If CS Lewis wanted to champion some system of governance that is not a state, he had plenty of words in which to do so. As far as I can tell, he didn’t. This essay of his strikes me much more as conservative polemic than Christian thought.
I think there is something to unpack here about the differences between dependence on a bottom-line safety net and being controlled, but it’s late and I am tired.
On Christian thought:
Leviticus is pretty dry but does contain a system of instructions on how to care for the poor and also support a priestly caste. It’s best read with an understanding of the wider cultural context (e.g. women were generally considered property and so an unmarried woman not living in her father’s household would be extremely vulnerable), and an appreciation that the Hebrew scriptures were not written in the sequence they are presented in as part of the Christian canon (or as part of the Jewish canon for that matter, which uses a different order anyway). Later on in the Hebrew scriptures there is a whole big tangle about judges vs kings, and in some ways that never really gets completely resolved. The book of Acts is more focused on building churches than economics as such, but there is some stuff in there about how the early church did manage finances. The Gospels themselves are pretty strong on both social inclusion and caring for the unfortunate, but they don’t really include “how to set up your system of governance” instructions, and again, the context is super important (Jerusalem under occupation by the Roman empire). Worth reading anyway, though, if you haven’t. You already know about Chesterton and probably have read more of him than I have; I’ll have a think about other avenues to explore, not least because I would like to integrate more of my own thought on this than I have managed to so far…. I do wish the Ship of Fools message board was still going as I’m sure there would have been people there who would have been happy to give more suggestions.
Part of the issue is that Christian scripture, and therefore Christian thought, is pretty diverse, and therefore has been used and misused to uphold just about every other system. For small community stuff, it might be worth reading the Rule of Benedict. I wouldn’t necessarily use it as an instruction book, but it’s certainly not the individualist 20th century mainstream view.
Late. Tired. I’m preaching tomorrow so really must sleep now. I harvested some wheat from the Soup Garden on Thursday (early because some of it was ripe and I was worried about the combination of rain and fat pigeons) and it’s the parable of the wheat and tares, so I have an actual sermon prop, like the enormous dork that I am. Probably most of the congregation haven’t heard of landraces before, so I guess they’ll learn something…
Sweeping generalizations and fears about ‘liberals’ seem cringeworthy to me, and so do similar generalizations and fears about the ‘right wing’ (and I think I detected some of these in the comments above). I see such generalized antagonisms as playing into the ‘divide and rule’ strategies of the ruling class. There seems to be more which we have in common, which connects us than separates us, especially when there’s work to be done.
That being said, I’ll move on to a comment about the C.S. Lewis essay. Like Chris concluded, ‘I largely agree with it, given some quite fine-tuned parameters.’
However, Kathryn wrote, ‘Lewis seems awfully certain, for someone who lived through rationing, that in his free world of people being allowed to work freely for their own livelihood or sell themselves into slavery for it, he would be one of the “few freemen”. I think his privilege is showing; I certainly don’t expect that for myself.’
I didn’t take that to be what Lewis is implying. The paragraph immediately prior to the passage quoted by Kathryn says this:
‘Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.’
What I got from that previous paragraph is that Lewis was recognizing the dilemma that moving forward with ‘an increasingly planned society’ might take away even more of what he values, but (a) he (and we) are now like ‘tamed’ caged animals, (b) we won’t be retracing our steps back to an untamed state, and (c) we would probably starve if we got out of our cage. Hence the dilemma, and his implied entreaties against further increases to our ‘increasingly planned society’.
I take his talk about ‘economic independence’ to not mean complete self-sufficiency nor be so literal as to ignore the contributions from others in society. Instead, he puts ‘economic independence’ in the context of what the ‘new society’ is ‘now abolishing’ (in his present tense), especially regarding the government’s increasing control of education and employment. “Who will talk like that [and criticize the State] when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer?”
Lewis’s stated dilemma about his (and our) irreversible tamed state is further compounded by his admission that even ‘when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few.’ Thus, his ‘horrible suspicion’ (or fear) about ‘few freemen’. This doesn’t mean that Lewis is claiming one of the ‘few freemen’ positions for himself. He is already a tamed caged animal by his own reckoning.
The ‘few freeman’ fear is just one of the fears that Lewis talks about. Yet, when he brings up the ‘reminder that millions in the East are still half starved”, he admits that “To these my fears would seem very unimportant.”
His main fear, and the main point of the essay, seems to be expressed in these paragraphs near the end:
‘We have on the one hand a desperate need; hunger, sickness, and the dread of war. We have, on the other, the conception of something that might meet it: omnicompetent global technocracy. Are not these the ideal opportunity for enslavement?…’
‘The question about progress has become the question whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing all personal privacy and independence. Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State’s honey and avoiding the sting?’
https://libertarianchristians.com/2013/07/31/is-progress-possible/
I do agree with Kathryn that ‘there is something to unpack here about the differences between dependence on a bottom-line safety net and being controlled.’ I imagine it depends on how it’s set up and implemented. I’ve seen contemporary fears being expressed about people eventually becoming dependent on Universal Basic Income payments made with Central Bank Digital Currencies (which could monitor and control what the funds are spent on), with the continuation of payments being dependent on Social Credit Scores which could penalize individuals for certain behaviours (such as participating in protests).
Further thoughts on areas to explore in seeking Christian thought that doesn’t necessarily frame itself in either market capitalist or Marxist state ideologies:
– early Christian humanism
– Christian anarchism
– disability theology
– liberation theology (much of which accepts Marx’s observations but not Marxist conclusions)
Disability theology and liberation theology are going to end up positioning themselves against the state or against capital a fair amount, though, because states and capitalism are two real sources of serious oppression. It might take some digging to get from there to a positive framing of alternatives
But this is basically just a list of what else I would like to read. Maybe in winter when the evenings are longer and I’m spending a bit less time outside…
Most of the ecological theology I have read is not particularly deeply grounded in either Christian theology or ecology, and most of it makes a lot of theological assumptions while falling prey to the same “anti-state and anti-markets without providing an alternative” problem I slipped into above. This is particularly frustrating, as I feel like deep links there do exist, but I lack the ability to articulate those links adequately. I suppose like any other Christian I am stumbling toward something larger and more meaningful than I can possibly comprehend. But if I find anything specific that jumps out at me I will let you know..
I think Terry Eagleton’s “Reason, Faith and Revolution” was an interesting atheist attempt to reconcile Marxism and Christianity; I haven’t read it for several years, though, so the best I can say is that I liked it at the time.
Forgive me for jumping into an estabished thread here, but what strikes me about Lewis’s attitude in this essay is opposition to big-G Government at a funamental level. He protests about the tendencies for increasing governmentality in his own day, and we can find many resonances in our current conjuncture, but besides all this he seems to think very little of the utility of Government to achieve anything at all.
I wonder here if he’s shaped by his academic positions at Oxbridge. These universities defined their own power and privileges for centuries as vatious forms of immunity from the governments of the day – ‘immunity’ and power were essentially synonyms in medieval western Europe. In his day, and even now, the Oxbridge colleges construct themselves as little pocket worlds, supported economically by endowments of money and land that allows them to maintain this sense of immunity. University life is, of course, another form of governed life, one he presumably approves of, but it never even occurs to him that external Government could play any of the same roles for those not privileged to be part of the university.
I also find this passage interesting:
‘If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.’
Rulers in Christian Europe did in fact become owners in the early medieval period when most of the population were pursuaded that they possessed souls requiring salvation and that the intercession of priests governed by bishops was a necessary part of that process. ‘Men’ were ‘made’ (baptised) and ‘unmade’ (excommunicated) at their pleasure. Now I don’t mean to launch an anti-religious polemic here – I have a Christian background myself and do not see religion as something to be fought – but I’m struck by Lewis’s blindspot as a privileged Christian. His views on government and control are less secure than he presents them to be.
Thanks for these further comments. I’ll ponder them.
@Steve
I’m far more concerned about Universal Basic Income turning into what Housing Benefit has turned out to be: a transfer of public money from the welfare state (or what still passed for it) to rent-seeking landlords, driving up rents for everyone else too. UBI without sufficient protection for tenants (maybe in the form of rent ceilings, maybe in the form of some kind of property tax that is devised in such a way that it cannot be passed on to tenants) is kindof a horrible idea. A majority of MPs are landlords, though, so this doesn’t look great.
Universal basic services are, I think, an idea worth exploring. But they do need to be universal (not conditional on having a sufficiently high social whatever score), and basic in the sense of being sufficient to actually meet people’s needs. For some things this makes a lot of sense; waste disposal and processing, parts of road maintenance, and a number of other functions are all rolled into the services provided by my local council. Utilities could be (and have previously been) managed on a national level and subsidised to a greater or lesser degree. And of course we have the NHS, which is a very much more complex set of services that remains,for now, free at the point of use. University education was free here too for a while, though that’s long before my time.
But universal basic service provision does get difficult; people do, in fact, have differing needs after a certain point. Under rationing there was some kind of exchange system whereby vegetarians could hand back their meat ration cards and get an extra weekly allowance of cheese, while diabetics could hand back their sugar ration cards and get extra meat or cheese. After a certain level of complexity in providing universal basic services, a flat payment starts to look pretty sensible. Probably the closest thing we’ve seen to that in the UK is child benefit, but I’ve witnessed even people who consider themselves quite left wing getting very upset and claiming that one class of people or another are “only having babies in order to claim the child benefit”.
I suppose on some level I also get tired of people who benefit hugely from a system that asks some behavioural compliance for the common good, complaining about said behavioural compliance, and then claiming that people are not allowed any more to criticise the government. The other day someone said to me that it’s a shame that you don’t see people smoking in pubs anymore but that she was “not allowed” to say that. I am never sure how to respond to that kind of thing; she was not, in fact, immediately struck down by the Thought Police. It’s likely people have disagreed with her on this and other topics before.
I am certainly in favour of freedom of speech, even where people use that freedom of speech to complain about worker protections like the smoking ban which I broadly support. But disagreement is also part of that freedom of speech.
If I understand correctly, Lewis is concerned not with censorship of words, but with top-down shaping of our thoughts to the point that we can’t possibly think for ourselves, can’t even mentally rebel against whatever the “new society” decides is beneficial. But again, that is not currently a threat I perceive from the progressive leftists working for a better means of meeting people’s basic needs, but from the technocratic right seeking to extract wealth and exact rents. They might call themselves socialists, but most are transparently not working for the common good.
That doesn’t mean the left is never paternalistic and damaging or never has been before, but we’re 40-ish years into neoliberalism (and I include Blairism in this), and people are still worried about the political left having too much power and I am frankly baffled.
Andrew claims that C.S. Lewis had a blindspot (as a privileged Christian) regarding Christian rulers in the early medieval period, but Lewis makes it very clear in his essay that he detests theocracy and is against religious grounds for obedience to government. He is similarly against scientific grounds for government.
“Thirdly, I do not like the pretensions of Government –the grounds on which it demands my obedience– to be pitched too high. I don’t like the medicine-man’s magical pretensions nor the Bourbon’s Divine Right. This is not solely because I disbelieve in magic and in Bossuet’s Politique.4 I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands ‘Thus saith the Lord’, it lies, and lies dangerously.”
“On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They ‘cash in’. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants’ ‘science’– they didn’t think much of Hitler’s racial theories or Stalin’s biology. But they can be muzzled.”
Thanks Steve. He also mentions ‘a Church that can save us from Hell’ as one possible enslaving entity, something I missed on my first reading.
However, that doesn’t really change the broader point. His fears about the way technocratic government might limit ‘independence’ overlook all the ways on which his notions of a good society are already dependent on collective arrangements.
Take his framing of the ‘old’ view of crime, for instance. Retributive justice is not essentially Christian, but in England, the responsibility of the ruler and his government to implement it was originally a product of theocratic kingdom formation in the medieval period, and the notions of just deserts that Lewis refers to are thoroughly shot through with that history, relying on common understandings mediated through juridical institutions. And yet he doesn’t see any of that as a break on his independence – the judicial system doesn’t get a look in as a stifling piece of technocracy in his essay.
Look at what he regards as good:
‘To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death — these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man.’
The wish list of a lord of the manor – an Englishman’s house is his castle! But if you are not to suffer repeated invasions from neighbouring castles you’re going to have to need a society that is collectively dependent on notions of ‘right’ and ‘obligation’, as he puts it, together with appropriate enforcement mechanisms, which, if they are not to be reinvented every year, will involve some amount of technocracy.
That’s not to invalidate specific criticism of certain increasing trends of governmentality in his time. But his invocation of a very specific form of independence from society is itself socially situated, and notable stark from a comparative point of view, and blind to the elements that do in fact connect him to the society in which he lives
Interesting details and views from Andrew about the C.S. Lewis essay.
Andrew says that Lewis’s ‘fears about the way technocratic government might limit “independence” overlook all the ways on which his notions of a good society are already dependent on collective arrangements.’
I disagree, since Lewis’s focus is on the *further* limits on independence which could result from a technocratic government. Lewis didn’t overlook the existing dependencies on collective arrangements, he implicitly accounts for these when he acknowledges that he and his contemporary society are like irreversibly tamed animals in a cage. Thus, society members were already in a situation with compromised independence (to gain the benefits of collective arrangements, including the judicial system), and Lewis was concerned about ‘whether we can discover any way of submitting to the worldwide paternalism of a technocracy without losing *all* personal privacy and independence’.
I think it’s clear in this context that Lewis’s usage of the word ‘independence’ does not mean absolute independence, but is relative. (For example, ‘independent living’ or ‘independent housing’ arrangements for seniors are not free of any dependencies or collective arrangements.)
The ‘castle’ Lewis brings up is a common expression, not a literal ideal. Lewis says that the wish ‘to call his house his castle’ is ‘deeply engrained in civilised man’. I don’t want to read too much into this use of the word ‘castle’, especially since Lewis mentioned earlier in the essay that he considered himself (and his society) as already being irreversibly tamed in a cage, and he was wary of further increases to our ‘increasingly planned society’.
Meanwhile, I have entirely missed out on banana discourse, and it is way too late and I am way too tired to look into it properly now.
Subsidies for large (probably industrial monoculture) farms and not for small (probably mixed and more human-scale) farms is about what I suspected, and to me seem like a symptom of corporate/capital capture of the state.
‘Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future’ was reviewed by Irish Tech News (‘Ireland’s No. 1 Online Tech Publication’), and they liked the book and “would recommend reading it.”
“Smaje’s analysis and arguments are carefully reasoned and walked through. We would not necessarily agree with everything suggested in this book, but Smaje does argue reasonably and with the intent to be fair and draw on legitimate sources. This book is definitely thought provoking, even if we found the title a bit clunky. We liked it, and would recommend reading it.”
https://irishtechnews.ie/saying-no-to-a-farm-free-future-reviewed/
Thanks for that Steve. Do please let me know folks of reviews you see, as I might miss them otherwise!
I found this very thought-provoking Chris – there’s a lot going on, and as ever I found myself nodding along to much of it but wary of some points within it. In found it hard to get purchase on any one through-line of thinking here, so what follows is a set of impressions more than anything else.
I think it’s worth noting that the whole things is framed as contribution to discourse foused on ‘the Left’ – to invoke the Left is a universalising move, indicating some sense of shared mission, but as your analysis of different strands indicates, it is itself a site of struggle over the the purpose and fulfilment of that mission. I take it that you consider the mission to be grounded in a commitment to ‘equity and social justice’, the telos that, you state, serves as a remnant of common ground between you and the ‘modernist Left’.
It’s important, I think, to recognise that many of the right-wing or conservative thinkers, whose analyses you have some sympathy with, would not accept that ultimate goal, instead favouring some kind of persistent social hierarchy (in which they, of course, find themselves towards the top end). So when you talk aboiut negotiating ‘tricky lines’ or find right-wing thinkers among your ‘allies’, I take it that the essential disagreement remains nevertheless, and is likely to form a stumbling block witin collaborative projects.
However, leftist thinkers are by no means immune from creating and maintaining hierarchies of their own, even if they’d rather not frame them in that way, and I think you’re right to point out the tendency for some leftists to exclude others rather than engage more productively – particularly egregious when those excluded are members of the working class whom they consider their intellectual inferiors, worthy only of waiting passively to be rescued. And of course, as you rightly say, this is because many leftists themselves belong to various strata of the middle classes (a classification I’m leaving deliberately vague for now!).
I’m not sure about your labels. In describing the ‘modernist Left’ you seem to mostly home in on the eco-modernists, the standard label and a better one, I think. There is talk of self-professed ‘Marxists’, and certainly one finds many such people among the eco-modernists, but Marxism is embraced by many more among those contesting ‘the Left’ and its mission and I’m uneasy about hitching Marx’s name to the eco-modernists – you yourself state that you’re open to ‘subtler variants of Marxist thought’. You may mean more by the ‘Marxist’ label than just those among the eco-modernists – I wouldn’t consider Heron and Heffron to be ecomodernists – but if so I’m less sure there about the tendency you’re describing.
The ‘anti-modernist Left’ appears to me as much more of a mixed bag – although you name several of the strands important to you, I don’t see too much coherence there, probably because the kinds of projects that might unify those strands aren’t yet very developed. This isn’t necessarily a problem, and as a way of setting out a direction of travel and promoting such projects it works, but it certainly feels like the existing field of discussion and activity in this area is fragmented when compared to a greater consensus around the eco-modernist project (perhaps in part because, as you say, eco-modernism is so friendly to corporate capture). I certainly share your unease and fear of being wrongfooted when exploring these anti-modernist landscapes.
But I must admit to being more wary of some fellow anti-modernist travellers than you are. I used to enjoy Kingsnorth’s writing, but I often find it objectionable these days, largely because I think it’s often dishonest. I’ve only read the free Unherd version of the essay you link to above (https://unherd.com/2023/02/who-will-stand-against-progress/), which is probably abridged, but presumably still gives his gist. He talks about the ‘ideology’ of the eco-modernists – fair enough – but explicitly disavows any ideology of his own, instead invoking a ‘stance’ or a ‘politics’, although he also claims that his own stance ‘does not fit easily into any Left-Right paradigm’. In my view it is not possible to escape ideology, even if our varous ideologies are more or less coherent, more or less consciously held. For him then to invoke the work of Mary Harrington of all people (whose ideology of ‘reactionary feminism’ certainly falls into the incoherent category) sets alarm bells ringing loudly.
I don’t think he escapes the ‘Left-Right paradigm’ either, insofar as his politics, his ideology, is pretty plainly stated and pretty accepting of naturalised hierarchies – he values ‘tradition’, ‘home and family’ and ‘religious faith’, he desires ‘a society based on a notion of virtue, which itself is drawn from the cosmic realm’, not one based in the ‘abstract ideals of utopian justice’. This is all pretty basic right-wing stuff. Like the rest of us, he cannot escape being shaped by the world we inhabit, cannot escape the anxieties that are raised by the structures we occupy in our socieities. To me, his views resonate with those of those of people at the precarious fringes of a category he claims to reject: those in love with ‘private property and the sovereign individual’. He fears totalitarian government, whether driven by the missions of the right or the left (a fear many of us here would empathise with, and that you draw out with your Covid example), but he also appears to fear non-authoritarian/totalitarian forms of collective politics that have emerged among the proletariat, instead throwing his lot in with the the ‘artisans, farmers, [and] small businessmen’ in between, providing a classic defintion of what’s usually called the petty bourgeoisie (and as an aside, I’d recommend Dan Evans’s recent book ‘A nation of shopkeepers’ on this intermediate class).
Historically different parts of the petty bourgeoisie split right and left depending on circumstances, often appearing in the vanguard of both revoltions and counter-revolutions – I suppose in that sense they cannot easily be assigned to the right or the left, but they essentially embodied the tension between them – their lives expressed the difficulty (as well as the luxury) of choosing between revolution and reaction, but I would argue that that just highlights the significance of the choice, and the idea that you can actually be a ‘reactionary radical’, whatever that’s supposed to mean, is just silly.
And so finally I come to an idea that I think needs tighter definition, but also one I’m predisposed to be wary of: ‘moral economies’. The word seems to imply something concrete, and I’ve not read Calhoun’s book, which apparently informs Kingsnorth’s definition. I have read E.P. Thompson’s essay, in which he (I think) coins the phrase, and it’s clear that there he’s using it to describe a field of resistance against big capitalists fought on a moral terrain. What he doesn’t do is use it as a label to describe a particular form or structure of society, and yet that is what it seems to do in Kingsnorth’s post and in yours above, so I’m curious as to the intended meaning. What I fear here (certainly in Kingsnorth’s usage – I’m just confused by yours!), is that it is being used to describe a society in which naturalised hierarchy takes the place of a democratic collective politics.
Any exploration of the latter is missing from Kingsnorth’s writing – indeed, I think he fears it, hence his appeal to naturalised categories such as ‘home and family’ as an alternative entry into local politics. We’ve gone over that ground many times on here, highlighting the differences between family as hierarchical fetish and family as a synonym for the relationships contingent on creating productive household-scale units – the latter can exist within broader collective formations geared towards local flourishing, the former deliberately stands apart from them, asserting an immunity fromt the claims of broader political society. To return to the beginning, this is about the distinction between leftist and rightist politics in an anti-authoritarian context – I think it’s crucial to maintain a distinction between them, even where the waters get muddied by the heightened axieties swirling at the peripheries of property ownership and access to resources – issues more prevalent at the small scale outside the ambit of big government.
Thanks for this response, Andrew, which has helped to clarify some of my own thinking.
Hi Andrew, thanks for another thought-provoking comment.
I’ll reply to a few points, but hope to come back to this more fully in the future.
I’m increasingly finding the left/right designation more of a hindrance than a help in understanding the contemporary political scene. People on the right aren’t necessarily in favour of private markets, corporate power or inequality, while people on the left no longer necessarily seem fundamentally against them. I imagine that the duality will eventually crumble along with the collapsing edifice of modernism, but in the meantime it feels like there’s still a need to delineate certain defining features.
I used ‘equity & social justice’ as shorthand to refer to some left-wing concerns, but I think it’s unfair to suggest that conservatives are unconcerned about these and merely want to create unequal societies with themselves at the top. I concede that’s an occupational hazard in conservative thought, but it’s not at all where the people I mentioned like Berry, Lasch and MacIntyre are coming from.
Equity isn’t the same as equality, and there can be different conceptions of justice. We’ve debated before my take on this in terms of transactional strategies. To put it crudely, in my idealised position as an economically autonomous farmer with a valued place in my local society, I don’t really care if a wealthy aristocrat at court considers themselves superior to me. For my part, I scorn their dependence and practical incompetence. Are they superior to me? Not as I see it, not in my realm of action. The modern left’s characteristic inability to reckon with complex and multivalent forms of status reckoning tends to align it with the aristocrat’s worldview, even as it opposes the aristocrat’s supposed superiority. Probably it dismisses my own sense of status as false consciousness that connives at the real structuring of power. I think this is fundamentally mistaken. The bigger issue for me is creating enough opportunities society-wide for economic autonomy and status, not for equalising the pie per se, though it’s usually necessary to push in that direction as a matter of practical necessity.
I basically agree with your delineations of Marxism and modernism, and it’s true that I focused my discussion mostly around eco-modernists. Not all Marxists or modernists are boneheaded techno-fixers and there are many complexities here that I can’t unravel in a single blog post or comment. It’s said that Marx’s comment on ‘the idiocy of rural life’ was a mistranslation, but something like it invests a lot of modernist and Marxist thinking – increasingly so IMO. It’s there in Heffron & Heron, and in spades in Monbiot. Possibly I’ll explore it more another time.
I also agree with you that the anti-modernist left is quite a mixed bag, perhaps because of the historical ascendancy of modernism and violent value extraction that make it a roster of ‘some other ideas that never really got a look-in’. But their time might come.
Another point of agreement – ideology is inescapable. And yet how much we yearn to escape from it, in Marxism and modernism as in many other doctrines. Modernist plays to escape it such as science, progress or truth haven’t in my opinion been successful and I’ve come to think are intrinsically incapable of being successful – this has led me to take other plays like God, tradition and natural law more seriously than I used to. I think we’re in agreement that these have their issues too. The problem as I see it is that people need to ground politics in some sense of an authentic or non-ideological source. Saying that no such source exists doesn’t circumvent the problem.
Some points of disagreement:
Tradition, home, family and virtue may be ‘basic right-wing stuff’ but I would argue largely because the left has opted to ignore or deride them – and in my opinion the culpability there is on the left. This almost non-existent reckoning with them on the left and the bad reckoning with them on the right lies behind a considerable part of our grave contemporary global problems.
You say the idea that you can be a reactionary radical is silly – well, as I argued above, I think all politics and all radicals are reactionary in a sense. As I see it, Marxism/modernism erred in supposing there was some bigger more universalist struggle that would deliver true authentic life emerging out of the new clash between industrial capital and landless wage labour. It was more a Hegelian affectation than a historical analysis and it’s hobbled left-wing thought down to the present, with left-leaning ecomodernism as the farcical descendant of 19th century industrialism’s founding tragedy. Hence the tendency in Marxism to demote what you call fighting on a moral terrain as compared to fighting on a structural terrain. Calhoun/Kingsnorth are arguing that early popular opposition to capitalism was grounded in a pre-existing rural-cultural-economic order, whereas later proletarian activism has largely been about redistributing or possibly at best slightly reconfiguring the spoils of capitalism – which is the game the ecomodernists are playing. Kingsnorth argues that the challenge rather is to rebuild different local orders, different moral economies, and I agree with him.
Something to work on:
I do agree with you though on the need to define the specifics of new moral economies, and not just assume they’re a good thing. And I agree that there are dangers of what you call naturalised hierarchies. But I think your notion of democratic collective politics as the alternative is doing a bit too much work. I mean, you could say Britain’s present government is the result of democratic collective politics and there are endless issues here about tyrannies of the majority, factions, parties, patronage and so on. I see the challenge as more about developing good culture than developing good political procedures. Which might sound conservative, but it’s not necessarily supportive of naturalised hierarchies and in my opinion it points to issues neglected by the modernist left that underline its limitations.
Hear, Hear!
Well stated.
Which is to say that I agree with you, and I think you explained yourself well.
I think “…developing good culture…” is especially important.
Not long ago, I would irritate my friends by calling myself a conservative.
This during the Iraq years. I’d explain that there is nothing ‘conservative’ about spending a $trillion on wrecking a country.
Nobody thought that was funny but me.
I confess to know nothing about Marx, but perhaps ‘the idiocy of rural life’ could be reimagined as ‘the mindlessness of rural life’ – in the Taoist sense.
I truly believe that many of Western Civ’s problems stem from an over- reliance on human intellect.
What to replace human intellect? I’m not sure, but I lean much more toward empiricism than philosophy.
Thanks.
Thanks for an engaging reply Chris. A few responses.
I’m not as familiar as I should be with thinkers like Berry, Lasch and MacIntyre, but a bit of Googling suggests to me that they’re not really right-wing thinkers anyway, but rather denizens of that varied and challenging anti-modernist landscape – which perhaps supports your point about the increasing redundency of the left/right distinction. I agree, though, that engaging with the distinction is still important, given the extent to which it informs and shapes current political strategies more broadly. The ‘conservative’ label appears most suitably applied to them in the cotext of their views on gendered power within the family and/or the control of reproductive potential (manifest in opposition to abortion) – issues that would concern both of us I imagine, but also not necessarily central to their thinking on many other matters. From what I can tell, their thinking on modernism and economic liberalism appears innovative, and not really ‘conservative’ or right-wing at all.
Nevertheless, to the extent that there are right-wing elements in their thinking, they are indeed about establishing the hierarchy of pater familias over subordinate wife, and all three thinkers are men! (That’s not to say some women wouldn’t also argue this position of course). So to the extent that I associate rightism with nturalising social hierarchies, I may find myself being unfair to those for whom this represents only one aspect of their thinking, but I think we live in a world in which the comprehensive rightist package is far from uncommon, and accounts for many of those in positions of power, essentially as an effective strategy for keeping that power.
On status, I think that if all you had to worry about was what the courtly aristocrat thought about your lowly position, you could pretty much ignore him and cultivate your own alternative sense of status as an autonomous farmer. However, the problem lies in being prevented from doing that because the aristocrat’s own status is built on imposing a material reality that isn’t conducive to it – this is the problem of access to land in a nutshell of course. I’m not entirely sure where you’re coming from when you align the modern left with the aristocrat (except insofar as many leftist suffer from superiority complexes!). On equality vs equity, do you mean to contrast the dramatic and explicit levelling of all estates with a more targeted intervention aimed at equalising capacities or capabilities, leaving other forms of status reckoning intact?
On ideology, I’m not sure I agree with your contention that ‘people need to ground politics in some sense of an authentic or non-ideological source’. What work is ‘authenticity’ doing here, and how does it contrast with ideology? You use the word again when describing the end goal of modernist Marxists – ‘authentic life’ – in this case communism I suppose, a form of society on which Marx was notoriously vague when it came to the details. I agree on the naivete of the great Hegelian dialectic, its uselessness as history and the danger it presents when taken seriously as a basis of political action. But ideology is not limited to explicitly argued grand plans – it structures all human social and political life, including, I would imagine, ‘authentic’ lives. I’m missing something here.
On the grounding of early radicalism in a pre-capitslist ‘pre-existing rural-cultural-economic order’, I can’t really agree with this, except in the most superficial sense, that before capitalism was dominant people drew on pre-capitalist ideas and structures. But the ‘rural-cultural-economic order’ was never a monolithic thing, it was always fractured along various faultlines – hierarchies of status in a variety of fields. During England’s seventeenth-century crisis, when Kingsnorth’s petty bourgeois types were often at the vanguard of challenges to those in power, there was no singular ordered sense of the world radicals were fighting for. Indeed, some of the trappings of a capitalist order were grist to the radicals at the time, such as opposition to royally imposed trade monopolies. The civil war Putney debates are a useful microcosm of some of this, especially debates around inxcreasing the parliamnetary franchise and its relation to landholding and wealth.
Notions of radicalism and reaction are useful here I think – negating the distinction between them by claimning all politics are reationary throws out a useful tool. Societies are always structured around different forms of power, more or less firmly estabished, and it’s useful to be able to distinguish between people acting to challenge them and people acting to defend them. There are nunances of course – some of those at Putney, previously acting radically against royal authority, decided they would turn reactionary when it came to the prospect of propertyless men voting for MPs. But the point is that a single life can contain both reactionary and radical choices and attitudes, not that people can be somehow reactionary in their radicalism, or vice versa. The choice is always made, and made again and again.
On moral economies and future prospects, I’m all in for trying to ‘rebuild different local orders’, and to do so as a ‘leftist’ of some stripe promoting ‘democratic collective politics’ against naturalised hierarchies. Sure, the notion as it stands is doing way too much work, but you don’t need me to tell you that Britain’s current political process is not what I have in mind! I’m eager to explore alternatives – Enrique Dussel’s work has lately given me much food for thought – but whatever the precise form of that alternative, and the difficulties and challenges it gives rise to, I can’t imagine a better world without it. I don’t really understand the distinction you raise between ‘good culture’ and ‘good political procedures’, in that the latter would always form part of the former as I see it. What do you understand by ‘culture’ that excludes political activity?
I’m increasingly finding the left/right designation more of a hindrance than a help in understanding the contemporary political scene.
Ah! At last … 😉
Thanks for that Andrew – interesting. Only time to pick up on a few threads.
On the matter of status orders in an agrarian society and reactionary radicalism, let me try this out as a kind of ideal-typical historical scenario.
Suppose I’m a farmer or a farm community with secure land access and modest prosperity – my own ‘immune’ little Oxford college, if you will. I pay dues to the kingdom, a portion of which find their way to aristocrats at court. I find the dues irksome, but affordable. There are also poor and landless people in my society, scraping by one way or another.
The aristocrat may consider me of lowly status – a commoner forced to work with his hands. I find this a laughable conceit coming from a parasitic drone who’s incapable of doing the things that actually count in the world. I may bow and scrape in some ritualised performance of power (maybe I’ll reverse that subordination in some other ritualised performance), but no, I don’t consider myself inferior. I think the left too often buys into the aristocrat’s monadic view (even though trying to subvert it) and not the more multivalent one. In your comment, there’s a kind of ‘determination by economic/political power in the last instance’ vibe. Not necessarily, in my opinion.
Anyway, suppose the dues exacted from me intensify, but the powers that be try to buy me off with a few privileges denied the poor and landless, who are increasingly coopted as urban wage labourers by a growing industrial class. If I allow myself to be so bought, in the reactionary/radical framing that we’ve been discussing that would make me a reactionary. If, alternatively, I conclude that the days of the independent small farmer are numbered and real status, real freedom will be won long-term by allying with the urban wage labourers and releasing the abstracted energies of the industrial system for all, that would make me a radical. And if I defend my way of life and seek to make it more widely available to all by fighting the exactions of the aristocrats and the industrialists and allying with the poor, that would make me a reactionary radical.
Oversimplified in many ways of course, but maybe it clarifies what I’m driving at?
You’re right of course that pre-existing orders aren’t monolithic and are fractured along various faultlines. The critical issue perhaps is whether you still choose to found a politics on that order and wrestle with its faultlines, or whether you subscribe to a future-oriented imaginary which supposes the existing order and its faultlines will be superseded and improved out of existence.
I think this is to the point right now in what I see as a class conflict that’s bubbling up over land access and land use in the UK and elsewhere. On one side, various interests clustered around governments of different political hues, corporations, some kinds of environmentalist and (urban) consumers are mobilising for a basically farm-free future. Whereas other kinds of environmentalist, farmers, and political dissidents of various hues are mobilising for peopled and farmed rural geographies. There are many faultlines within this latter group. Nevertheless, I am with them and I am against the former group.
My point about ideology and authenticity is basically that without the latter you end up having to espouse a kind of conventionalism that crumbles before the critique of a Carl Schmitt. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge the failure of claims around authenticity, because doing otherwise usually also ends in murderous politics – Marxist regimes provide many examples of this, but of course are far from the only offenders. This is a tricky area I need to think about some more.
I agree with you that ideology structures all social and political life. Which is one reason why the left’s special hatred for kin relationships bugs me. The notion that patriarchy or domination can be eliminated by eliminating family relationships seems to me false and patently falsified, yet it lingers on. I don’t necessarily agree with Lasch or Berry on everything they say about family and gender relations, and I confess I’d like to read some more on thinking in this area – I’d have thought there’s scope for taking feminist positions around family relationships without endorsing Sophie Lewis. I’ve found Eve Rodsky’s writing very thought provoking, but it’s not political theory. Any recommendations welcome.
Regarding my point about culture and politics, it’s not that I think good culture excludes good political procedures, it’s that your point about democratic collective politics sounded to me too procedural and no defence against naturalised hierarchies if that’s what the political culture embraces. Sort of brings us back to the notion of authentic politics and how to define the ‘good’.
Thanks.
Thanks for this reply Chris, I’ve been pondering it, and I think I have a better idea of what you’re saying.
Firstly, on the matter of sides, I’m certainly with you in terms of the interests you describe ranged against each other, and would certainly accept the need to ‘dig where you stand’ so to speak, working with existing communities, their capacities and resources. I’m also up for some iconoclasm along the way – but that’s certainly not the same as imposing Improvement, Progress, change for change’s sake, etc.
I still baulk at the notion of a reactionary radical! If you ‘seek to make it [your way of life] more widely available to all by fighting the exactions of the aristocrats and the industrialists and allying with the poor’ that makes you a radical in my book, because you are not acting defensively against those otherwise actively excluded from your way of life – on the contrary, you are trying to include them, to let down the ladder, not pull it up – and you are trying to nullify the power of those who create the exclusions. Whether that means you also change your way of life to some extent in the process is a moot point, but there’s certainly nothing reactionary about it – I think the embrace of a ‘reactionary’ label ultimately indicates an approval, at some level or to some extent, of exclusionary power, and I’m glad you rejected it in your post. There is perhaps a ‘determination by economic/political power in the last instance’ vibe, as you put it, in my approach to this – largely because for some (the ‘poor’ in your example) it probably is the most influential determinant.
Regarding authenticity, I’m less clear, and this is perhaps something I need to keep an eye on in future posts, to try to understand where you’re coming from. Perhaps this links to our old discussion about metaphysical foundations and where one grounds one’s values.
Finally, the family. I think this is an area in which ‘the left’ is usefully conceived as a site of contestation rather than a monolith with a single view, but I can sympathise with your view in the case of some of the more inflammatory ‘burn it all down’ declarations. Sophie Lewis interests me – I’ve not read much by her, and I find her style quite dense, but I do wonder if even there, she would ‘abolish the family’ in the same way that Lewis or Kingsnorth would ‘abolish progress’ – they don’t want to abolish people making progress with their lives’ projects, but they stand against the particular structure of power and ideology that makes a destructive form of ‘progress’ such a hegemonic force across the world. Likewise, I don’t think Lewis wants to abolish the cultivation of closeness and care within the everyday groups in which we construct our belonging, but she stands against that ideological power structure we would call the ‘patriarchal family’, which has caused much misery and yet enjoys considerable social hegemony. Again, this is perhaps something to leave bubbling for now.
Interesting take on rural life here
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/23/whats-a-girl-like-me-doing-in-a-welsh-valley-kiran-sidhu-on-moving-to-the-country
Thanks for linking JB – enjoyed that article
In relation to this from Kathryn –
“If I understand correctly, Lewis is concerned not with censorship of words, but with top-down shaping of our thoughts to the point that we can’t possibly think for ourselves, can’t even mentally rebel against whatever the “new society” decides is beneficial. But again, that is not currently a threat I perceive from the progressive leftists working for a better means of meeting people’s basic needs, but from the technocratic right seeking to extract wealth and exact rents. They might call themselves socialists, but most are transparently not working for the common good.
That doesn’t mean the left is never paternalistic and damaging or never has been before, but we’re 40-ish years into neoliberalism (and I include Blairism in this), and people are still worried about the political left having too much power and I am frankly baffled.”
For me, the convergence of green-left figures like Monbiot with ecomodernism and the inability of public culture to take low-energy localism seriously without resorting to insults like ‘bucolic idyll’ and so forth exemplifies exactly this trap of top-down statist thinking. I don’t see it as a problem of the left as having too much power, but of statist technocracy which has left and right-wing versions as having too much power. Localist alternatives to statist technocracy also have left and right-wing (or conservative) versions, with the conservative ones perhaps being more fully articulated. IMO it would be good for people on the left to learn from and connect with those versions, rather than getting lured by the siren song of technocracy per Monbiot – a large part of the reason why I wrote the book.
I acknowledge that if you want to make life a bit less terrible for people in the here and now, then working within the existing state within a broadly left-wing framework is probably among the most effective things you can curently do. But I can’t help feeling that ultimately it amounts to tweaking an apparatus that’s in a terminal state, and the most important work of institutional renewal lies elsewhere.
I’ll try to explain this in a little more detail in the next couple of posts, and of course would welcome comments, objections and alternative perspectives.
I don’t actually see Monbiot as being coherently on the left at this point. Technocratic, sure. But to me, it seems very difficult to argue that we should have these large-scale cultural adoption of technological solutions while being a bit hand-wavy at best about public Vs private ownership, who develops the solutions, who is displaced by their implementation and so on, and still claim to be on the left. We’ve seen what happens when technological solutions to resource constraint are in the hands of private companies acting within financialised markets, and the answer is shareholder profit at whatever cost. So if someone is proposing a technological solution within the current system they need to also propose how to keep it from being yet another form of extraction or rent seeking.
Has Monbiot (or another prominent ecomodernist) made a serious case that the technology they promote as world-saving actually will be, or must be, publicly owned and controlled? Or exist for license only to worker-owned cooperatives maybe, anarcho-syndicalism style? Or will be patent-free so that it can be replicated easily by other groups? Or… are they enamoured of the tech, but kinda hoping someone else (someone they think of as a politician maybe) will make sure corporations don’t do the same thing with it as they did with the Green Revolution?
I am not asking the eco-modernists for a complete “how to get there from here” on moving away from corporate control of food or other resources, though I’d welcome a how-to from them as much as from anyone else, given that I sure don’t know either. But I don’t see anything in their discourse that suggests their politics is primarily that of the left, rather than simply “opposed to traditionalism on general principle”. Perhaps I haven’t been paying sufficient attention. Perhaps Monbiot is further left than I am giving him credit for, but aware that serious attempts at discussion of broadly left politics would reduce his audience and influence. Perhaps he believes if we can just (!) sort out the climate crisis we can “fix” politics later, because that has always worked out so well for the left previously (sigh). I don’t know. To me, the precision fermentation solution he seems to think will help us probably requires some measure of state or corporate coordination in order to be implemented (because it sure as heck doesn’t have enough production efficiency gains over literal growing plants to be worthwhile economically), but I don’t have anything to indicate that this would be from a leftist or left-ish political position.
It’s possible that I simply haven’t paid enough attention to Monbiot in years to have a good idea of what he says his political position is. And I’m not the final arbiter of what counts or doesn’t count as “left” anyway.
I am not a very coherent lefty myself, having worked out most of my positions in a fairly ad-hoc way from incomplete knowledge of eclectic sources. I probably reinvent the wheel a lot. But I’m also not a public figure writing for a major newspaper.
I don’t need a complete and coherent political theory to act in solidarity with the poor in my own community or to make attempts to increase the ecological (and therefore economical ) resilience of my household and neighbourhood. I don’t care that much whether a neighbour I share tools with is a statist or anarchist or something in between or even, shock horror, a Tory. (I can’t think of many situations in which I would vote Tory, but I don’t mind lending one a digging fork. Spuds are spuds, again…)
I do expect a higher standard of political coherence from public figures, and — in the current political climate — if I have heard of their arguments for some specific technology they are championing, but I have not heard of their realistic plans or suggestions on how to make sure it isn’t used as a tool by corporations to further exploit people and planet for their own enrichment, I assume they are fine with that happening.
Am I missing something? Am I being unfair to the eco-modernists, or to Monbiot?
This is a stark contrast to your own work, incidentally, despite your uncertainty on whether a right/left dichotomy is even meaningful. I think you state clearly that a small farm future could be quite congenial but could also be pretty grim politically, depending on how people work out ways to manage and distribute resources and power. You make a strong case for choosing consciously a small farm future, rather than being forced into it, as one way to maximise the chances that it might yet be congenial, and you engage seriously with obstacles to doing that, such as access to land.
Meanwhile:
I think I agree about there being a difference between working within the existing state (or system?) to make life a bit less terrible for people, and the kind of institutional renewal we actually need for a future where more people thrive rather than merely surviving.
Someone the other day told me about a shiny new electric car factory, and I very nearly said “let the dead bury their dead”. While I am not generally anti-technology (any more than you are), I do think it should be used responsibly and appropriately, and it’s hard to see what’s responsible or appropriate about moving two tonnes of metal in order to move one person (or even four) when much more efficient and less destructive ways of moving about in the world are available. Car culture probably has to go, and corporations that currently build cars need to be so deeply transformed as to be almost unrecognisable to us today, and anything less than that seems like a giant waste of time. Neither of those are the state, but they’re certainly part of the current system.
But… I suspect it’s likely a case of needing to do both, and I don’t mean only about the cars, because as things currently stand we are so dependent on the current system that sudden shocks to it cause genuine hardship.. We have the following dilemma at church, which I think I’ve written of before: if we compensate for the failure of the state by feeding the people who are hungry (sometimes using grants administered by the state, and accordingly, operating within boundaries the state sets for certain types of charitable activity; mostly with food that comes from fossil agriculture, itself subsidised by the state, to the detriment of soil and farmers and, I dunno, hedgehogs or moles or some other part of the ecology), then on some level we enable the state to continue in its failure. If we don’t feed the hungry, then they may well die. That’s aside from the problems of applying aid “to” people rather than working with them, and the multitude of other things we can get wrong.
I still don’t think the electric car factory is a great idea, but if we really do want institutional renewal, then at least some activities the here and now are still important.
Visualizing all of the cars in the world
https://rword.substack.com/p/visualizing-all-of-the-cars-in-the?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Fcars&utm_medium=reader2
A little history
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/22/the-climate-witch-trials/
A brief attempt to link the C.S. Lewis thread of discussion above with the wider discussion about the left. Thanks everyone for the stimulating discussion.
To take one of the Lewis passages quoted by Andrew:
‘To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death — these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man.’
I get how this can sound like a right-winger’s fever dream, and I agree with Andrew that these things are only possible in the context of a wider collective politics that makes them possible (I also agree with Steve that Lewis probably wasn’t quarrelling with this). If I were writing a similar statement of my own, there would be some more collective points in it – care, education outside the household as well as within, and some aspects of joint work and joint worship and celebration. But I’d also emphasize most of the things on Lewis’s list. In my new book, I talk about ‘autonomy in community’ and IMO the autonomy is just as important as the community.
In the real world, not everybody gets to call their house their castle or enjoy the fruits of their own labour. An insight of the left is that this is usually due to the structural obstacles people face, and not because of their individual failings, as a common right-wing narrative holds. To overcome those obstacles requires a different and more inclusive kind of collective politics. Where I think the left has gone disastrously wrong is in dismissing out of hand the kind of things on Lewis’s list and in assuming that a more inclusive kind of collective politics has to be more *collectivist*, and has to put that collectivism into the hands of a supervening, bureaucratic state.
Practically, the result has been a choice: either social democracy, essentially neoliberalism with a smiling face, per Tony Blair and, I think, George Monbiot; or else some variant of Marxism with its strange enthusiasm for a kind of industrial-bourgeois collectivism as a corrective to the excesses of industrial-bourgeois individualism.
No doubt there are other forms of leftism, but I do think there’s a danger of the ‘true Scotsman’ argument Kathryn invoked if we search for them too hard. The collective politics I’d like to see is basically an agrarian populism that might realise Lewis’s vision for (almost) everyone on the farm “…to call their house their homestead, to enjoy the fruits of their own orcharding work…” albeit, as I’ve said, with a few more collective elements than Lewis allows – but probably a few less than most radical left-wing positions do.
I’d also like to see any would-be politics to replace the present waning order stress-tested over several generations in renewably farmed landscapes. I think a predominantly (but not exclusively) household-based agrarian populism would probably be the strongest contender to emerge out of that.
Thanks for this.
I am curious what you think about social democracy before neoliberalism; essentially, post-WWII but before Reagan and Thatcher (or Milton Friedman and whoever else was in Chicago at the time)?
My own opinion, not having been around for it, is that it sounds pretty good, but was probably a lot more colonial than I was taught, and I’m wary of the assumptions of essentially infinite economic growth that are baked into, say, Keynesian economics. Which is a shame, as the idea of a state as a sort of buffer, investing more in services during a bust cycle and then allowing economic growth to support the population more during a boom, sounds all right too, if somewhat unpopular to implement in practice.
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that neoliberalism with a social democrat face isn’t, really, very left wing. And I suspect some people who would previously have been further to the left found themselves there on account of Blairism, and haven’t really found their way to anything different.
I’d also like to see any would-be politics to replace the present waning order stress-tested over several generations in renewably farmed landscapes.
That, I think, is going to happen whether we want it to or not.
Meanwhile, I am at the point of foisting some of the fruits of my labour onto the neighbours or donating them to the soup kitchen, as the bean situation is getting really out of hand.
“I’d also like to see any would-be politics to replace the present waning order stress-tested over several generations in renewably farmed landscapes. I think a predominantly (but not exclusively) household-based agrarian populism would probably be the strongest contender to emerge out of that.”
The only divergence I have from this picture is that I see households, in sane and reasonable societies, as members of villages or neighborhoods, just as individuals are (or can be) members of families. I do not see families as the “base unit” of human lives or communities. I see villages and neighborhoods as that.
From a simply practical point of view, villages and neighborhoods are more functionally cohesive as a whole than any family homestead can be. People need one another, and we share out this needing one one another at this immediate local scale better than we do at scales smaller or larger.
Villages also naturally appear where and when they can, as they should — and will. So we’d better get used to that idea, I would say. And embrace it.
As no man is an island, no family is a village.
Kathryn –
I’m not at all religious, in the usual sense. I’m not a theist. I’m not a Christian…. But neither am I an atheiest or a scientistic modernist materialist.
I like the way you speak of/from your religion. I like its open-mindedness and open-heartedness. Thanks.
Thank you, James, that’s encouraging to read.
Thanks for the further comments. It’s been an informative discussion. I’ll probably leave most of the issues to bubble for now, as Andrew says. But briefly on a couple of points:
Interesting question from Kathryn on postwar social democracy. My feeling is that in periods of prodigious economic growth it’s easy to buy off the poor without fundamentally changing the structure of economic entitlements, which is basically what happened. And yes it was quite colonial – upon people and upon nature. I guess there was a decolonial postwar moment which was quite powerful, but ultimately the rich countries flunked it – perhaps inevitably, given their perceived need to keep buying off their own poor. And now we have to face the consequences.
Regarding James’s point, I guess I see households or families, neighbourhoods and wider political cultures as more or less equally foundational, and I think societies run into problems when they decide that one of them is the true foundation. In the matter of this post, perhaps you could say roughly that the right tries to make the family foundational whereas the left tries to make the wider political culture foundational and both run into problems in doing so.
Making the community or neighbourhood foundational in low-input agrarian societies is a particular interest of mine. For sure, it’s hard to run a family homestead without a wider community supporting it. But it’s also hard for a local community to provision itself easily without breaking that task down and delegating a lot of it to households.
I could argue that postwar social democracy did foundationally change social entitlements, insofar as the middle class grew and maybe flattened somewhat (both from the working class attaining what were formerly middle class living standards, and a number of upper middle class or minor mobility families finding that, in fact, they needed to start deriving their income from work rather than ownership), though I suspect this was part of a much longer process involving enclosure, industrialisation and so on.
I also wonder how household size and makeup fit into all of this. A white western nuclear family with 2.4 (or 1.8 or whatever) kids is a very different proposition, in economic terms, to an intergenerational-plus-some-farmhands household of the sort some of my ancestors lived on, though all four of my grandparents did in fact form nuclear households of their own, and not all were from large households. That intergenerational-plus model is seen as stifling by some people, and I’ll confess that I think I would be pretty miserable today if I lived with my parents while raising children; the option to leave abusive situations is incredibly important to me. But I feel as if the nuclear family in a patriarchal context is a sort of bait-and-switch, a promise that every man might have his domain (if perhaps not his castle) in which to rule, rather than the messy mishmash of aunties and grannies and uncles and Jim-who-helps-at-harvest-time and cousins and siblings and that kid who turned up on the doorstep at 14 and turned out to be pregnant but has now become part of the family, all pitching in as they can. I see the latter as almost a “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” arrangement which, I think, is much harder to achieve in a smaller household, even with all the conveniences of the modern world, and also much harder for one patriarch to control (though some will always try). In a larger intergenerational or intergenerational-plus household there is an economy of scale and a diversity of skills and labour which, in my tiny household of three adults of roughly the same generation, I frequently feel the lack of. And it really isn’t any double the work to feed six people at mealtimes instead of three, or to grow twice as many squashes. I do strive for that sort of hospitality and community in my own life, though not having lived in such a situation I don’t always know what I’m aiming for. And I do have close relationships with a handful of people outside my own household, and can even imagine, at some future point, moving to a household set-up where we could live together or at least much closer. But that isn’t where I am now, and thirty miles through the Surrey hills *is* a long way for a non-driver like me, and almost everyone I know was born and raised in the more atomised model I was, so if changes in energy availability or governance lead to the necessity of larger households again, I think it could be quite the culture shock for all concerned.
I digress (as usual) and I expect you’ve gone into this before, but I wonder if the problem we’ve stumbled on in talking about “the left” (or what passes for it these days) is also applicable to “the household” or “the family”. There is, I hope, room for all shapes and sizes of household and/or family in a congenial small farm future, including not only intergenerational-plus households but hermits, childless couples, and intentional communities (religious or otherwise). Nevertheless, when many people (of all political persuasions) hear “family” or “household” they are probably thinking of two parents and some number of children who will move away once they are adults. That’s not the only way to have a household.
Regarding the post war social democratic, welfare state.
It was all made possible because of oil. And to gaurantee access to that oil, Britain (and the US) staged a coup in Iran against Mosaddegh in 1953. All because he had the cheek to nationalise Iranian oil.
It was access to this oil that allowed Britain to rebuild after WWII and create (dare I say it) institutions like the NHS.
Post war Social Democracy was very much a colonial affair.
“Regarding James’s point, I guess I see households or families, neighbourhoods and wider political cultures as more or less equally foundational, and I think societies run into problems when they decide that one of them is the true foundation. In the matter of this post, perhaps you could say roughly that the right tries to make the family foundational whereas the left tries to make the wider political culture foundational and both run into problems in doing so.”
I didn’t really mean to suggest that villages and neighborhoods are “foundational” exactly. I did use the phrase “base unit,” which phrase is suggestive of the notion of foundations. But the word foundation really drives home the notion of everything setting upon it, as is the case in houses and buildings. And that’s not what I meant to indicate.
Mostly, I was meaning to reject the notion that a household should be conceived as an independently existing unit. I wanted to point out that neighborhoods and villages are as important as households are to the formation of a whole pattern of functioning relationships. I emphasized the village and neighborhood because most everyone (at least where I live) de-emphasizes these.
Here in the USA, a vast proportion of the population has never experienced any kind of belonging within a neighborhood or village. Most folks don’t even know their neighbors at all. And neighbors tend not to enter into any kind of collaboration with their neighbors. And I see this as an enormous social and cultural catastrophe, for a thousand good reasons. To me it is simply bizarre that in suburban and urban neighborhoods where lawns are ubiquitous that every household has its own lawnmower, for example. How does this make sense? It makes no sense whatsoever! How many things could be shared around which are not?
I have envisioned converting such places into village like places of sharing and cooperating as neighborhood and village units. Lawns become gardens. Merely ornamental plants and trees become food producing plants and trees. Where needed, rooftops become part of an integrated water catchment system. Composting toilets enable brown water sewage systems to become grey-water systems…. Permaculture could be practiced at an integrated neighborhood scale, rather than everyone being on their own. Every neighborhood or village would have an integrated community composting system. Tools are shared out in the neighborhood, as is labor, with no need to sell our labor to one another by the hour.
But I tried to organize such a thing (to encourage it’s gradual emergence) where I live, and nothing came of it. And I believe this is because we (the general population) doesn’t yet see this as necessary, or worth the bother. But soon enough it will be necessary and well worth the “bother”.
That kind of community organising can be hard work, and usually takes multiple tries.
Every year we lend our next door neighbours our scrumping stick, and they give us some apples. Lots of other things go back and forth too. But that started with getting to know them, and inviting them for meals from time to time. And it hasn’t worked with everyone.
In reply to Kathryn & James –
– Yes, possibly I was a bit ungenerous to aspects of postwar social democracy. But I think you’re right they were part of longer term trends that weren’t of state rulers’ making.
– Regarding patriarchy & family structures, we’ve covered this before but I’m inclined to argue the contrary case. Ramifying kin groups organized around livelihood resources can make for a lot of brothers, sons, uncles and cousins oriented to protecing family ‘honour’ against supposed female infractions, and social climbing within the patriline. It seems deeply unfashionable now within anthropology, but I wonder if there might be something in the older studies that contrasted the predatory, militarized and patriarchal structures of pastoral societies organized around segmentary patrilineages with the more inclusive structures of matrilineal horticultural societies. There might be less room for patriarchy when the household unit typically comprises just one adult woman and man. Probably, patriarchy can insinuate itself regardless of kin structures – and I agree with you on the need for structures to be flexible and to accommodate escape from abuse. But I’m also struck by how common restricted household kin structures are in many societies historically, despite the modern tendency to think it’s a recent, bourgeois innovation. I understand the critique driving that view, but I also understand firsthand some of the difficulties of larger household forms. It can be great to have kinsfolk to come and help with the harvest. And also great to bid them farewell when it’s done…
– …on the other hand, I agree with James that the isolation of families & households within neighbourhoods has often gone too far in modern times and it’s a great idea to try to prefigure more neighbourhood self-reliance and commoning because indeed it’ll be worth the bother soon enough. But then we get into some of the difficulties of commoning – indeed it’s crazy for everyone to have their own lawnmower, but lending precious tools out to all comers … hmm, been there, done that (and I’ve also been the klutz when someone else has foolishly lent me theirs). Note how professional building contractors always use their own tools. So it’s complex … But maybe if everyone had their own scythe…
There are a lot of ‘on the other hands’ to reckon with!
Thanks for the correction re: larger family households; I am not enough of an anthropologist to be able to offer more than conjecture. Horticultural vs pastoral seems like an interesting axis, and I wonder whether there is much to observe with regard to hierarchy, patriarchy etc in current trends within regenerative/renewable/etc food production.
The Left v Right debate in politics is relatively new and was born out of the industrial age.
The debat is on how best to distribute the wealth created from an industrial/expanding economy.
Now that that growth has stalled and the economy will start to contract as energy availability reduces, it’s no surprise I guess, that the political narrative starts to change.
I doubt that the debate between Left and Right as we know it today, existed in, say, medieval England?
Well, if there are any medieval historians reading this who’d care to answer…
I’m currently reading Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s ‘Carnival in Romans’ which bears on this – a discussion for another time, I think.
Norman Cohn’s ‘The Pursuit of the Millennium’ is another interesting one – arguing that Marxism is a latter-day version of medieval religious egalitarian millenarianism.
Renouncer religious traditions among impoverished people interest me. The modern ‘economic determination in the last instance vibe’ discussed with Andrew above I think inclines us to dismiss it as people simply making a virtue of necessity, with the economic determination seen as implicitly more real than the renunciation. But what if the renouncers are onto something?
Have you read “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn? I don’t think of it as a scholarly work, and again it is many years since I read it, but it is certainly relevant to the topic of renunciation.
Then there are all the formal religious orders involving a vow of poverty; it would be interesting to contrast these quite hierarchical structures with the various millenarian movements. I’ve been reading Norman Cohn’s book, on your recommendation, but very slowly. (I don’t have a lot of time for reading in summer.)
In The Liberation Theology Podcast by David Inczauskis, SJ I heard a recommendation of the book The ideological weapons of death : a theological critique of capitalism
by Hinkelammert. Copies are hideously expensive but it looks like it’s possible to borrow a pdf from the Internet Archive. In the same episode, David Inczauskis mentions an encyclical by Pope Francis (I don’t remember which encyclical) which posits a refutation, of sorts, of the alleged natural right to private property; if my understanding is correct, where the right to property clashes with the natural right to the use of the fruits of creation, usufruct wins. This sounds to me like it’s consonant with some indigenous North American attitudes toward private property.
Soup Garden spuds have got blight, sigh (as it isn’t an allotment site, I decided to take a chance and grow several varieties that aren’t blight-resistant alongside the BR ones). I am planning to save seed from the fruit on the blight-resistant maincrops. and do the same at the allotments. I know potatoes cross easily, but in a landrace that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Meanwhile, though, I am glad that at least most of the tomatoes are blight-resistant varieties. And a landrace of blight-resistant tomatoes is already on my project list, it’s just a matter of whether I try to dehybridise some of the commercial F1 cultivars first, or just chuck their F2 seeds in anyway and cull any plants that get blight. The latter seems like more work, in all honesty.
…I meant “the latter seems like less work”
I don’t know whether that’s an autocarrot error or my own brainslip but it’s clearly time to stop typing for the night.
Meanwhile my own personal practice of renunciation is twofold.
There is the obvious stuff like trying to choose a lifestyle that reduces my personal draw of fossil fuels, which translates roughly to renouncing consumerism. I am actually very bad at this — my natural inclination is more toward gathering and storing-away, and toward redundancy for the sake of resilience; I am a terrible minimalist, even if I am aware of the need for a kind of simplicity of life. So I focus on the big things like transport and food, and try not to worry too much about owning multiple trowels, and at least the awareness is there. It’s a work in progress for sure.
The other part of this, though, is more like a move away from modes of production that are legible to corporations and states, and toward modes of production that are… harder to quantify. I mean, yes, I can weigh my spuds, or the apples and plums I forage from parks, and then I will know how much I got. I can even compare them to the going rate for organic produce. But… these don’t show up in GDP. The apples I don’t buy don’t really turn up in the accounts if the supermarkets, either. And while there are probably estimates somewhere of allotment-grown produce, they likely don’t take into account the Soup Garden, or the increase in carrying capacity that I am aiming for (and starting to see) with my soil-building activities. The practice of tucking food crops into bits of untended land is also part of this renunciation of many of the current systems of governance (which I think are very much more geared toward protecting capital than protecting people). But it certainly isn’t a renunciation of abundance; it isn’t a vow of poverty. Instead it feels to me more like a commitment to a different kind of wealth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
A medieval historian, you say? Well, I think that John’s right on one level – the explicit ‘left’/’right’ political division is rooted in the French Revolution and has been used thereafter to describe and organise political beliefs and strategies in Europe and increasingly the colonial peripheries. Looking for it in earlier periods risks anachronism.
But at another level it can be a useful analytical tool when looking at earlier histories, a use which recognises the way that even today ‘the left’ and ‘the right’ draw in all sorts of different political approaches – hence this post I suppose. Again, there is a risk – that you end up viewing history as an eternal conflict between two transhistorical social groupings – an approach that most historians would complain was ahistorical, neglecting the substance and the detail of what actually happened. Really it all depends on what you choose to consider fundamental in ‘left’ and ‘right’ and whether this is in any way meaningful when looking at different histories.
Personally, as my earlier comments show, I consider hierarchical structures and attitudes thereto to be at the root of the left/right divide, and I think this does offer interesting historical perspectives. I wouldn’t necessarily identify left/right groupings in medieval England though – it’s more about identifying those who built and maintained hierarchies and those who tried to subvert them, however partially or incompletely.
In medieval England (as in western Europe more generally) hierarchy was increasingly articulated around ‘orders’ – famously those who fought, those who prayed and those who laboured. While we can point to evidence for the dicontent of serfs under their lords, it’s important not to interpret these hierarchies through a purely econmic lense (‘in the last instance’). Orders were maintained as almost caste-like, denoting different kinds of people with different capacities, and resistance and subversion followed this grain. So, for example, those who prayed – monks especially, but also the clergy – did so on behalf of everyone else, to save all souls, but their role was challenged by people who did not think they were spiritually pure enough to do it effectively. Counterintuitively perhaps, renunciation was a means of creating the ‘ordered’ hierarchy, of attaining a spiritual authority, and worldly entanglements (e.g. clerical marriage, monastic wealth) were considered to threaten this, so many of the ‘radical’ movements of the period were led by people who were spiritually rather zealous, who challenged the conventional piety of the monks and clergy, even if they weren’t themsleves of the ‘praying’ order.
Where I think this gets very interesting is in the period between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, kick-started by the demographic faultine of the Black Death. Serfdom declined precipitously and a greater emphasis was placed on delineating the forms of property that allowed the higher orders to maintain their distinction from the lower. Eventually, in my view, ‘property’ replaced ‘order’ as the organising principle of society, in both worldly and spiritual spheres. This is particularly apparent if you consider the way in which significant numbers of the labourers by whom the European empires were built – enslaved people – were conceived entirely as property by those entrenching the new hierarchies.
Today, it’s easy to reduce the significance of property to the idea that the left wants to level property and the right wants to maintain a propertied hierarchy, which is broadly true but doesn’t get us very far. I think looking at other histories is a useful way of seeing that whatever the dominant principle around which social hierarchy is articulated, other fields intersect with it in crucial ways. For example, naturalised ‘orders’ of a sort are apparent in how some people experience class (which is otherwise determined by property ‘in the last instance’), whether through notions of social status, gender, race, etc.
The left and the right were therefore probably always complicated and incoherent, even if less so than now. One thing I think the left suffers from particularly is the fact that, while most may agree on the importance of levelling property, it’s far more difficult to agree on how that might be achieved – fragmentation and distribution across society on the one hand, state-managed ‘public’ ownership on the other, are in fact only two of many other possibilities. Histories often offer more evidence of hierarchies than they do of their subversion, one of the reasons that left-wingers often seem to idolise glittering but doomed historical moments of rebellion and resistance.
All of which is to say, long-windedly, that the left-right divide may be less useful than it perhaps once was, but more fundamental issues of social hierarchy and resistance, of which it is just one form, remain fundmental, just as they were before our modern epoch emerged. Apologies for the mini essay, but you did ask…
Thanks Andrew – very interesting!
And thanks Kathryn – also very interesting. I’ll try to follow up those references when I get a chance.
On a very general note (I stay away from detail )……
Having listened to some entertaining and informative history podcasts lately, (The Rest is History) I’ve realised that history is subjective (shock, horror!!!!). That one’s political beliefs shapes the historical narratives one tells. It’s as much a reflection of the present as it is an understanding of the past.
The telling of history is as much about what is left out of the story as much as what is left in.
Andrew
Thanks for this — fascinating, and it’s interesting to see how mediaeval ideas around religious orders, in particular, have artefacts in some of the C of E today (there is a bit in the 39 Articles about the validity of the sacrament not being dependent on the holiness of the priest, for example; and most churches are still in parishes, with clergy being assigned to share (with their bishop) the “cure of souls” for a particular geographical area. If you live in England you probably live in a parish, and there will generally be a person who has a legal responsibility to pray for you as part of their terms of office.)
I have generally thought of the left/right divide as about distributed vs concentrated ownership of property and this being important in terms of who owns the means of production and therefore holds power — quite a Marx-grounded view, I suppose. But while I am uneasy with hierarchy insofar as it serves to concentrate power in the hands of smaller numbers of people, I’m not sure it is the case that hierarchy must always do this. Again turning to C of E governance, there are a number of different levels of organisation, with the result that many local decisions are indeed taken locally. At its best, the existing hierarchy supports local decision-making while ensuring compliance with best practice in certain areas. It’s very much not a magisterium and people get very irate if it is treated as such. At its worst… well, like any chiefly voluntary organisation, committees are populated by the people who have time and energy to sit on committees, and this is not always helpful.
So I’m thinking a lot about hierarchy Vs organisation, and how to “bake in” structures that protect local autonomy while still supporting good practice more widely. I’m also thinking a lot about how to avoid the problem of a committee of eight friends doing all the local decision-making. I’m trying to explore how churches formed in a time when churches often dominated community life and charitable provision and had substantial support (from tithes and rents) and authority can engage meaningfully today in our local communities in a pluralist setting. I have a lot of half-formed thoughts on this myself, but I would be interested in your perspective.
(I suspect there is a difference, here, between a 12th-century village church, and a Victorian barn thrown up in response to the Industrial Revolution and the huge growth in city populations; and also a bunch of my own thoughts have a lot to do with the way technological advances in communications have shifted the balance of power within the church. But I think both suburban Victorian barns and mediaeval village churches could have a role to play in a) having an honest discussion about the links between the cost of living crisis and the mess that is our current farming system and b) supporting a congenial small farm future of some kind. So I am not ready to write off either as irrelevant.)
Chris, if this is too far off-topic I am happy for you to give my email address to Andrew, though I think the structure Vs hierarchy question of governance is probably worth exploring or I wouldn’t ask. I’m also happy to be told to go away and read more if my lack of knowledge is a bigger hindrance than my curiosity is a benefit.
Thanks for this Kathryn, I’m happy to carry this conversation forward here if Chris is happy with it.
I’m less familiar with the modern Anglican church than I am with its medieval forebear! I have some experience of it – I attended my local Anglican congregation regularly when I was young, but haven’t maintained that link in later life. Obviously there are important differences – the bishop and his local parish priest are not now responsible for defining the bounds of the whole community in the way that they were, the sacramental authority of the clergy is now something that many choose to accept while cultivating their lives within the church, but it is not necessary to do so to be a member of the local congregation.
I think this relates to the dominance of ‘property’ in grounding modern societies. Spiritual being is part of what each individual possesses in themselves, so we end up expecting people’s religious journeys to be personal to them, and likewise that they will keep their religion to themselves in other collective or political contexts. ‘We’ are of course a particular demographic in the global core, but this seems to me to describe the thrust of a dominant kind of modernism.
So I’m interested in what you’re saying about church governance, but also in what is actually being governed here. Do you see a larger role for church governance in local societies, beyond the structures necessary for the cure of souls? You mentioned charity, which is interesting from a historical point of view, as it was often the vicar and church wardens who managed charitable bequests to the poor well into the nineteenth century, until the charity commission began usurping some of those powers. Poor relief also involved the creation of hierarchies to a degree – the definition of the boundary between the deserving and the undeserving poor, and so who was included and who excluded from the community.
But I do recognise that, on the ground, hierarchies can get messy – the interests promoted are not always simply those of whatever overarching power defines the structure. Your contrast between hierarchy and organisation is a crucial one I think, and the way they interleave at a local level lays the grounds for the kinds of projects and struggles we will all end up involved if we are able to develop a small farm politics. The goal of finding some way for communities to organise themselves without maintaining various local forms of petty tyranny sometimes looks like an unreachable ideal!
I mentioned Enrique Dussel in an earlier comment, because he’s been on my reading list recently. But serendipitously he makes much of a similar contrast between two kinds of power: obediential and fetishised. He is a scholar of radical democracy, particularly worried about the relationship between the governed and the governors. In his view, the only legitimate power is obediential, in that the person who wields it must do so in obedience to those that give it to them. In contrast, fetishised power is power made into a thing and usurped by people who want to hold onto it without consideration of those who gave it to them. The heart of the problem becomes the maintenance of a politics in which the connection between governed and governor remains open and alive. This is interesting to me because it walks a middle path between those who would see hierarchy as a necessary and natural thing to be embraced, and those who see it as something always to be escaped, something that could never do us any good at all (Lewis’s big-G Government).
I’m not sure how well this fits into the issues you’ve raised, by I’m happy to keep exploring them. I’d be interested to know more about your thoughts on church governance or organisation, and also what historical elements you’ve been looking at.
Thanks Kathryn & Andrew for this interesting discussion – no, not too far off topic at all. I like to think I’m generally quite relaxed about what counts as ‘on topic’, having only once in eleven years brought down the guillotine, as you may remember.
Anyway, I’d just like to add my voice briefly on a couple of points but hope we will come back to this in due course.
I’m not entirely sure of how you’re understanding ‘hierarchy’ in this discussion. People tend to use it as the antonym to ‘equality’, conceiving of it as a ladder-like ranking such as a football league table, contrasted with the situation where everyone has the same points on the table. But as I’m sure you know (and perhaps we’ve discussed before?), especially in religious contexts its more technical meaning is a system of differentiated parts within a larger encompassing whole. I’m interested in how this might condition the discussion here, especially in relation to ideas like subsidiarity and distributism.
My political starting point has been socialism, which places a strong emphasis on equality. Where I’m at now is closer to distributism and to civic republicanism , which emphasizes non-domination. To work in practice, that requires considerable equality because it’s too easy to turn inequality into domination. But it’s conceptually distinct – I care about my autonomy and freedom from domination more than my quantitative standing vis-a-vis other people.
Then there is the question of quantiative standing of what? In his book ‘Inequality Reexamined’ Amartya Sen makes the point that almost all distributive ethics emphasise equality of *something*. Socialists tend to emphasise income, wealth or welfare, whereas market liberals emphasise equality of utilities and libertarians emphasise equality of rights to action. I’m interested in pressing a discussion of exactly what it is we wish to equalise and why.
Thanks Chris. ‘Hierarchy’ is definitely one of those words it’s easy to use and harder to define!
I would want to fuse the two definitions you give, I think, in that both offer something I would consider essential to hierarchy: for me it signifies qualitative differentiation within a larger whole in which the parts are explicitly ranked – one kind of element is recognised as better in some way than another kind. Perhaps, drawing on your own terminology, ‘domination’ is roughly synonymous; or to paraphrase you, ‘qualitative standing vis-a-vis other people.
But what that means in a social order articulated around ‘property’, is that quantity becomes significant as a way of recognising or resisting domination – specifically, how much capital you have relative to others. I would say this means that socialism could be viewed as a project of non-domination within capitalist societies.
In non-capitalist societies (as well as in certain arenas within capitalist societies as well – gender or race for example) hierarchy or domination will take other forms, as I suggested earlier with the medieval example, and so approaches to non-domination also take other forms.
So what would we try to equalise in a small farm society? I’m not entirely sure! The capacity for each person to be nourished and sheltered? This equalising process need not take solely quantitative form, but might vary accordingly to local circumstances, although there would of course be a need for some way of recognising equality within this field.
One area we might talk more about is non-domination within social organisation, bringing the discussion more explicitly within the remit set out by Kathryn. Does ‘autonomy’ require economic self-sufficiency, or can certain political approaches generate autonomy within a more institutionally structured framework? Put another way, what field of hierarchy or domination does ‘autonomy’ specifically resist?
Thanks, both.
The term “hierarchy” in the C of E is frequently used to refer to:
a) the organisation of orders within the church: this currently consists of baptized laity, and clergy in holy orders: deacons (usually transitional in the C of E — that is, nearly all deacon’s go on to be ordained priests), priests, and bishops. We also have licensed lay ministers of various kinds (some perhaps analogous to the old Catholic ‘minor orders’ such as lector). Theologically, none of these groups are supposed to be seen or treated as “better” than any other group. Practically, people frequently think a bishop is somehow better or more holy than a deacon, for example. This is partly due to historical and current class politics (sigh) and partly due to the actual structure, where bishops have responsibility for the cure of souls but ordain priests and deacons to share some of that responsibility, under their authority and pastoral leadership. Likewise, licensed lay ministers of various stripes (pastoral assistants, LLMs (formerly called Readers), some children’s workers, licensed lay preachers etc) minister under the authority of the bishop, but under the supervision of the local incumbent (usually a priest but you could theoretically have a distinctive deacon running a parish) and often with the support of continuing ministerial education of some sort. So, for example, I was recently re-licensed as a Licensed Pastoral Assistant by my area bishop (+Joanne), but my working agreement and usual supervision is with my parish priest (or, since she’s on maternity leave, her interim replacement). The whole thing is overseen by the diocesan Director of Ministry, and there is someone in charge of both training new PAs and arranging continuing ministerial education for us, as well as a “PA lead” who will come to check on us every once in a while and to whom we can turn for support. My license lasts for three years; for a vicar or rector of a parish it would generally be open-ended. Similarly, I can stop being a PA if I decide that isn’t what God is calling me to any more, but I can’t be un-baptized; a deacon is still baptized, but also can’t stop being a deacon just because they retire. The idea is that with the major orders (commonly cited as bishops, priests and deacons, though I think including baptized laity as a fourth category makes sense) there is an ontological change that happens at ordination/consecration.
In addition there are people who are considered part of parish ministry who are not licensed by the bishop, but instead operate under the authority of the local clergy and PCC (see next section). Organists and other professional musicians are one common example of this.
Different orders (laity, deacons, priests, bishops) are ‘allowed’ or assigned to do different things within the liturgy. I am not a priest, so I can’t pronounce blessings or absolution with certain official wording, nor can I preside at the Eucharist. If I were to do so, it wouldn’t be seen as valid by the wider church (or at least not by any canon lawyers). A deacon can officiate at a wedding or funeral but cannot preside at the Eucharist. And so on and so forth. If I were to baptize another person, that would be considered valid, but not “licit” — that is, it isn’t how things normally work, but in gravely extreme circumstances it is permissible.
One common failure mode of this system of orders is “Father knows best”, where clergy end up doing a bunch of stuff that congregation members could do adequately (maybe with appropriate support and training) and as a result, those congregation members are disempowered or even infantilised, and meanwhile the clerge in question is running around taking care of the spiritual needs of the congregation, without engaging much with those of the wider parish. Another aspect of this can be when a priest imposes their own preferences on the parish in matters that aren’t necessarily within their remit, or simply pushes changes too fast But conversely, in situations where clergy are not well-supported they can be very prone to bullying by parishioners who threaten to (and sometimes actually do) complain to the bishop at the drop of a hat; not an easy thing if you and your family are living in tied housing, as the majority of stipendiary clergy do. I have seen all of these failure modes. I have also seen parishes where, despite considerable hardship, there is substantial collaborative ministry, with good boundaries and communication, a good balance between the needs of the congregation and the wider parish, and — perhaps crucially — opportunities to reflect on what is working well and what is not, and how that relates to our understanding of Christian scripture and theology.
b) the people making or carrying out decisions at various levels of governance within the C of E are also referred to as hierarchy. Some of this is very geographical, some not.
In terms of geography, at parish level there is a Parochial Church Council — essentially, a group of baptized volunteers who are trustees for the parish church. Roles include Churchwarden (ideally 2), PCC secretary, Safeguarding Officer, treasurer, and Deanery Synod representatives. There is also a yearly Annual Parochial Church Meeting where any parishioners (baptized and either living in the parish, or regularly attending that church) can attend and give input, and vote for PCC members. In a very large congregation, PCC members etc might be referred to as hierarchy, but this is not the experience I have had in most churches.
Next there is Deanery Synod, where clergy and representatives from each PCC in a larger area called a deanery meet to discuss various issues and exchange best practice. Members are selected (by not ducking fast enough when someone asks for Deanery Synod reps at a PCC meeting) every three years. There is a separate Deanery Chapter which is made up only of clergy. When people ask me what Deanery Synod is I usually tell them “a group of Anglicans waiting to go home” and in many places they seem to exist only as a funnel for the next level of governance, but they can be a very productive forum for working together on local issues.
Next after that is Diocesan Synod, with lay and clerical representatives from each Deanery. I can’t remember whether this is new people every three years, or every five. And then General Synod, which has new members on a quinquennial basis, with representatives from each diocese. This is the synod that is in the news most frequently; nobody cares, on a national level, what happens at Deanery Synod.
So when the C of E as a whole makes a decision, the theoretical pathway is something like this:
1) a PCC member proposes, at a PCC meeting, a motion to be taken to Deanery Synod
2) Deanery Synod says yes or no; if they say yes, it then goes to Diocesan Synod
3) Diocesan Synod then decides whether to have their representative propose a motion to General Synod
4) General Synod debates the motion; if it is carried with a two-thirds majority in all three houses (laity, clergy, and bishops), then it goes back out as how we should be doing things.
But actually, representatives at Deanery, Diocesan and General Synod level can and do propose things without it first going through this path. It is highly disingenuous if a synod member proposes something that the people they are representing would oppose, or opposes something they would accept, but it happens, because all of these categories are “people who like committee meetings”.
Similarly, if the bishops agree between themselves that something that affects the whole church should happen, and it’s a something that requires legislative change, they need to get it through General Synod first. If it’s a “pastoral” measure that does not require legislative change, they can just put it in place, and people either ignore it (if they disagree) or do it (if they agree).
This is why it takes us decades to get anything done! Having so many layers of decision-making while trying to give a voice to people from all parts of the church and requiring a supermajority is, essentially, a recipe for quite a bit of stability. It is somewhat vulnerable to entryism by people with lots of time for committee meetings, and I’m sure there are some decisions which would be better handled at a different level of governance than the level at which they are currently handled, but it seems to me like a structure that, while certainly not flat, at least includes some measure of subsidiarity.
There are various interest groups which aim to support one or another flavour of theological, social or political orientation, and which do actively engage in synodical politics. So when we were still deciding about the ordination of women, and their consecration as bishops, Forward in Faith argued against it, and both WATCH (Women And The Church) and Affirming Catholicism argued for it. Ecumenical interest groups also exist, but tend not to be as politically active within the C of E.
(There are also changes that actually require an Act of Parliament, because establishment, without any governmental financial support, is where we’re currently at, sigh. I do not want to get into the weeds on this here, it makes my brain hurt.)
c) The actual day-to-day running of things requires infrastructure and operational support too, and so you get the Church Commissioners managing various assets (including pension funds, because we legally can’t leave clergy to die in post at the age of 92 or whatever, which was once common practice), national and diocesan bodies dealing with safeguarding and safeguarding training, archdeacons helping bishops with various matters relating to clergy and parishes, people in charge of vocational discernment at diocesan and national levels, diocesan staff to deal with things like faculty applications (like planning permission but not done through the local council, who frankly don’t care whether you have a nave altar) or maintenance of tied housing, and so on and so forth.
In my experience, parishes who feel that local resources are tight and they are not getting enough support, or who have plenty of money and want to do what they like without wider accountability, will paint all of this operational infrastructure as “hierarchy” too. I am never sure how to respond to this.
As things currently stand, each parish is responsible for paying some money to their diocese, toward the cost of clergy support. How this is worked out varies, but is generally according to both actual cost and some sort of analysis of ability to pay (based on local demographics); a church in a very low income area generally does not pay the full cost of their clergy, and a church in a richer area or with higher income usually pays some extra. This money is towards costs, rather than being a contractual rent: if we don’t pay it, there are consequences, but if some urgent disaster strikes then things like “repairing the door locks” or “paying the electric bill” (churches are assessed at business rates) generally comes first.
Longer-term, parishes that can never meet even their proportionally-adjusted financial payments eventually end up getting lumped in with another parish, sharing clergy between them, in order to save on costs. This can be done well or badly. Parishes that don’t meet their financial costs do still sometimes end up with one fully stipendiary clerge to themselves if they can make a good case for it, but… it’s a precarious position to be in.
(There are weird governance exceptions and different rules for cathedrals (which may or may not also be parish churches), chaplaincies associated with e.g. universities or military bases, Royal Peculiars, and probably some other categories I’ve forgotten about. And the process for licensing a priest as incumbent of a parish gets interesting too, as some parishes are under the sponsorship of a patron and others are not.)
Perhaps non-domination here means, for example, that a neighbouring parish cannot claim that, since they are paying for some of the cost of our clergy, they get to decide what time our services should be or what sort of liturgical style we should have. They cannot tell us which organist to hire, or how to go about running a soup kitchen. And the Archdeacon is going to tell the PCC “you really need to pay the amount we’ve asked for toward your clergy if you want a full time vicar after this vacancy” (or words to that effect), but they aren’t going to tell us how to raise that money (hall lettings are a common income source in urban and suburban areas), though they may be able to refer us to a specialist for advice if we appear really clueless. Meanwhile we can join the A Rocha eco-church scheme, but we can’t force others to do so, and while we could propose a motion commending various environmental practices to go all the way through the various synods to General Synod, it’s more effective to just get on with it and communicate with other churches that are interested.
There are a bunch of rules we do have to follow, but this often feels more like support than domination. For safeguarding reasons, we do have a legal duty to have a social media policy for church communications if we use social media, but we aren’t compelled by any level of church governance to use social media in the first place. The decision to grow vegetables in the churchyard didn’t require any more than PCC approval, but putting in a permanent greenhouse over a certain size would require a faculty because of planning law. We have to use bread and wine for Holy Communion, rather than, say, pizza and orange juice, but (to my knowledge) nobody insists we must purchase one brand. The liturgical commission provides authorised words of liturgy, but the words of hymns are fine as long as they aren’t actively heterodox or heretical, and the parish priest is the person with responsibility for that.
I think part of what makes this work better than, say, UK Parliament is that there is more, not less, formal governance at the hyper-local level (parishes) where people do actually know one another to some extent. Realistically if I don’t like something and just want to whinge, I’m probably going to complain to the vicar about it, but if I actually want to get something done, I’m going to come up with a proposal for the PCC. I can’t imagine doing that with my local MP (not least because he’s never once voted against the whip). If I want to get something done with four other local churches I’m either going to talk to them myself or ask the vicar to put out feelers about whether we could work together. If I feel strongly enough about something that I think there should be a wider conversation about it, I might ask the PCC to propose it as a motion for Deanery Synod, but if what I want to do is raise awareness and encourage action on many levels at once I’ll probably start an interest group.
At the same time, I find it hard to envision a CofE church organising, say, a rent strike. Most churches aren’t likely to be able to purchase land for regenerative horticulture, or to insist that their members only wear fairly-traded textiles.
Thanks Kathryn, I wanted to apologise for not responding to this earlier – I had to run a summer school at work over the past week, and didn’t get time for anything else. Things have moved on now on the blog, but I hope you see this at some point!
Thank you for this exhaustive explanation of ‘hierarchy’ in the C of E – it’s interesting to me to see how much of this I was aware of when I went to church and how much remained obscured (the latter as much by my disinterest as a young boy as for anything else). The issue of ‘hierarchy’ becomes acute in the experiences you describe, and has made me think about the need for clarity and distinction. The kind of hierarchy that I would see it as the raison d’etre of socialists to subvert is what I earlier referred to as fetishised power, following Dussel – the kind of essentialised hierarchy that exists in order to glorify those at the top and keep the foot on those at the bottom. This is sometomes explicit – the orders of lordship, race, gender, etc – and sometimes disguised – e.g. the illusions of ‘meritocracy’.
The church is an interesting case. Clearly it was once built as a magesterium, especially from the 11/12th century in Europe, but the modern C of E is clearly nothing like its medieval forebear. There is a spiritual hierarchy there – God at the top, ‘we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table’ – but it is usually one that exists at a very personal level now. A member of the clergy can offer guidance in the cultvation of this relationship between spiritual lord and servant, but is not empowered to insist on that through sacramental means. Sacramental engagement with the church, even as a member of the congregation, is a choice.
The way you describe the structures and functions of the ‘hierarchy’ of the church suggests we are largely dealing with something else – certainly your reluctance to use the word ‘hierarchy’ suggests as much. Perhaps your word ‘governance’ is a better, fairly neutral term? How much this complies with Dussel’s notion of ‘obedientiary’ power is hard for me to say, but I get the impression that you feel empowered to some extent by the arrangement, and I think that says a lot.
One of the things that struck me was your conclusion that ‘part of what makes this work better than, say, UK Parliament is that there is more, not less, formal governance at the hyper-local level (parishes) where people do actually know one another to some extent’. This looks significant to me – obedientiary power can be prevented from becoming fetishised by insisting on formality at a local level. It is harder to dominate as an individual personality if the avenues available for wielding authority are constricted by formalised requirements of how that power should be wielded.
Of course, that doesn’t escape the problem you highlight that only certain kinds of people with time on their hands dominate the committees – clearly perfection eludes even the C of E. But I think it makes an important contrast with the kind of ego-riven localist world that is often seen as the antithesis of state control – and makes a good case for the importance of intentionally built structures of governance at the local scale. The fact that it takes a long time to get anything done isn’t necessarily a bad thing I suppose – as I see it, the fact that people can get things done, and at the same time that there is some form of accountability on getting things done, are ‘good things’. The danger is that governance structures can ossify (or fetishise) around the same kinds of people doing jobs that they have made their own, which is likely to make particiaption less available to others. There is a need for lubrication of some kind – a vital culture of democratic ‘political’ participation.
Hi Andrew
Glad you did get a chance to read my comment eventually.
Yes, ossification is a problem. But so is finding enough people with the time to give to various roles. Church wardens, for example, can have quite a bit to do (especially during a clerical vacancy), but in certain parishes it might be difficult to find a member of the community who can engage well with both the practical and the bureaucratic aspects of their responsibilities. Safeguarding officers also increasingly have big responsibilities and need particular training and support, though my own experience of this role is that the support is much better than it used to be. And my own parish is an example of this: we have vacancies on the PCC, our churchwarden is also the treasurer, our pastoral assistant (me) is also safeguarding officer, the churchwarden and I between us make up the liturgical serving team (though we are training up more people in September, we hope), and I also assist with music and take care of the garden. Our churchwarden would have liked to step down this year, but the fact is there was nobody who could replace him: I shouldn’t do it given my other roles (and I would struggle with the additional workload), the PCC secretary and other PCC members don’t have time, and most other people in the (admittedly tiny) congregation are either spending too much time working at paid jobs, or are not well enough to do the work needed. In our context we sometimes sit lightly to some minor matters of local governance (don’t tell the Archdeacon, but we put up some “temporary” shelves without applying for a faculty), and PCC meetings with a small team are short, sweet, efficient and generally not contentious, but… whatever responsibilities are not filled by the PCC are taken on by the incumbent and/or churchwarden(s), and there is a point at which a smaller team just means a greater burden on those people. The more time the vicar spends doing grant applications or fundraising or being there to open the church for the pest control guy, the less time she can spend on the spiritual guidance or encouragement she was trained for.
I tend to view this as a problem not necessarily of church governance or even hierarchy standing alone, but a systemic effect of extractive capitalism. The people who cannot participate in local church governance structures because their work shifts are too long or too unpredictable are not victims of the church, and neither are the people who are so spent by their working years that their retirement leaves them too disabled to contribute as they would like to. Their inability to participate fully is an externality to financialised corporate investors. And there is a lot we can (and do) try to accommodate as a church, but… at some point it becomes necessary to do things like plan when a meeting will be, or send some emails/make some phonecalls to find someone to cover a clergy vacancy or absence. There is sometimes talk of simplifying the whole governance structure to require less participation, but I am not sure this would help: a synod that doesn’t require a supermajority would be even more vulnerable to entryism; a parish system without deanery-level structures would leave churches less capable, not more capable, of getting things done locally.
That said, it’s also the case that during the Victorian period of urbanisation, huge numbers of churches were built in cities, and with good reason — locally in the late 19th century even the “new” churches were full to bursting (standing room only for Evensong with a thousand people crammed into a temporary iron church kind of thing). But the bottom fell out (because of WW1 and the church’s response, or the ‘flu and the church’s response, or the welfare state or prosperity making churches superfluous, or some other thing, depending who you ask; I haven’t formed an opinion on it myself), so now we have a suburban landscape dotted with far too many 150-year-old buildings that are cold, draughty, damp and Grade II listed. While nobody wants *their* local church to close, we can’t actually run on air, especially given the degree to which churches, like other community organisations, are vulnerable to the externalities of extractive crapitalism. Anxiety about this (often without recognising the wider context) leads to a stubborn digging-in mentality in many people, and in such cases any governance at all is labelled hierarchy.
I don’t know the exact history of how our current systems of governance came about; it’s clear that some of them (three orders of ordained ministry) are much older than others (diocesan synod). I have a … maybe not so much a theory, but a conceit at least, that the pre-reformation top-down magisterium was not as totalitarian as all that, simply because the costs of communication were high. The “Pope in his own parish” Father-knows-best local autocrat might well have been something of a maverick in terms of how he related to his bishop. Widespread literacy and rapid copying of written information changed that, leading to magisteria either attempting to maintain control in a top-down manner (as in the Roman Catholic church — though surely they must have at least some local governance structures too! I am much less familiar with that denomination) or bringing in some kind of devolved or subsidiary system: that is, accepting that local control of some matters is actually appropriate, and that there should be pathways for local ideas to at least be heard at more general levels of governance. How this actually played out in England (as opposed to, say, Scotland, which has a very different established church) is largely a result of wider political forces (also perhaps at least partly due to Reformation changes in communications), so I think it’s fair to say that the system we have now emerged, rather than being systematically designed from bottom to top.
I think power does accrete at the “top” or centre sometimes; issues which are too unwieldy or too destabilising seem sometimes to end up covered by a department at Church House which doesn’t necessarily have the accountability the rest of us are trying to work within. But this is (rightly) seen as a problem, and there is a limit to the measures such departments can impose on parishes.
Alas C. S. Lewis isn’t around to tell what exactly he meant !
Interesting debate though.