That’s the heart of it, really. Liberalism is loneliness. The state isn’t our sibling; the market won’t be our mate. And the more either the right or left’s solutions attempt to fill in the gaps — “more markets, for you to attempt to buy back what has been destroyed! More regulations, to protect you when you can’t!” — the more obvious it becomes that the entire concept is flawed.
– Christine Emba, talking about a book by Patrick Deneen
This is simplistic, and many have said the same thing with much more sophistication – but it’s as good a summation of the complaint as you’ll find anywhere, I think. It’s a complaint you hear a lot, from a lot of different people, at least if you inhabit my little corner of the blogosphere.
And I all I can think is: you poor dumb fuckers.
It’s like watching a nerdy kid reading epic fantasy novels and wishing that there were real danger and violence in his life, so that he could be a hero, so that he could feel like his existence has purpose.
An un-liberal society – an embedded society with a thick network of connections and strong role-based obligations – would fucking destroy you, pal. There are people who can weather that kind of thing, there are even people who thrive in it…much like war…but if you’re reading this, the odds are very very slim that you are anything like such a person.
I understand that there are important things missing from your life, I earnestly sympathize with your desire to make a world where you don’t have to be alone or adrift or whatever-it-is, I think that the people who mock and shame you for your plight are probably vile, but this is actually a hard problem and you need a better answer.
I understand your impulse to take this dichotomy seriously and look at the extreme version of tribalism compared to modern individualism, but that’s not the only contrast possible.
I would say geek culture in the early 00′s and 90′s (and especially in the 80′s) was more tribalist (with a lot of warm fuzzies based solely around the question of “are you one of us”) than geek culture in the late 00′s and this decade.
And this is a split with all the usual trade-offs: there really is less discrimination against women and minorities now, and geek culture really is more open to the general public.
It’s also brought with it a lot of poison and problems, many of which are connected to “we don’t trust each other” and “trying to universally apply rules without consideration for context or mercy for human failing.”
I think a lot of people are unhappy with the change in geek culture, and are correct in thinking they would have been happier in the previous version.
It’s not just “would you have survived in a bronze age patriarchal house.”
As much as I love fighting with you – and I do – I think this one is mostly a talking-past-each-other deal.
I’m not talking about Bronze Age anything. I’m talking about the widespread-in-certain-corners wish for a society with much stronger family ties and “thick” networks of reciprocal obligation into which you’re born. This is not an archaism. You can find plenty of those in the world today; you can find plenty of them in the US.
It’s just that they’re terrible, and especially terrible for anyone who’s not good at playing social politics with an inescapable coterie of random unselected neighbors.
To the extent that people are saying “I wish I were more able to belong to an exclusionary group with a sympathetic culture,” yeah, I sympathize with that a lot and think that it’s probably a sensible preference overall. But that’s not what I hear them saying.
In particular, in between “I want to be embedded in a carefully handpicked group of people who share my idiosyncrasies” and “I want to be embedded in the group of people who happened to come from the town where I was born” lies all the mastery of elements. That first thing is probably key to a happy healthy social life, and it can’t exist at all without the power to escape social networks and form your own according to your own preferences.