My friend & fellow PoMoCon C.J. Wolfe wrote about our friend James Patterson yesterday. James has a new essay at Law & Liberty, “Institutions have consequences,” attempting to remind conservatives that political knowledge is practical & that if you do not have experience of institutions, nothing gets done & most things are even unintelligible. James offers as an example & a resource for study his Prof. at UVA, James Ceaser—who was himself a PoMoCon when my predecessor, Peter Lawler, ran this association. This is all by way of saying two things. One, I have some remarks largely trying to add to James’s insistence on empirical political analysis in that essay. The other: James, won’t you join us at PoMoCon?
James offers an important idea for conservatives who want to take America seriously & in turn be taken seriously:
We should start assessing the structure of American economic life, & how it depresses the formation of republican virtue. Even more urgently, we should turn our attention to what habituates the public to isolated, self-radicalized individuals. The place to start is in the study of the American corporation as a political institution. This could be a site for policy reform that defends the natural rights of American workers against the too-often high-handed, increasingly minute regulation coming down from Human Resources & Legal Departments.
I am not about to go doing sociology in America’s corporations or start crunching the numbers with the best number crunchers in the land, I admit. The closest I get to practical concerns is observation. But I do have a gift for provocative statements: It occurs to me that social media should largely be considered the office politics of the American corporation. Not only is the corporation the only kind of organization that achieves some success or prestige that most ambitious people know nowadays, but it is also the major school of conversation they have after college. Corporation-talk may seem at first to be merely a continuation of college, but on examination, this will be seen not to be so: In corporations people get promoted or not, occasionally fired, & corporate resources are dedicated to one crazy thing or another. So there are more practical things to fight over, the possibilities & horizons are rather more impressive, both on average & at the top. Besides, colleges scam undergraduates out of money & graduate students out of self-respect; they have no future. Corporations, however, seem like the only future, even if it is a perpetual present, so to speak. They are almost immortal, one could say…
Now, I’d like to add some thoughts on motivation. James very decently left that to the readers. Corporations do two things that people now rather want out of life. First, Americans feel entitled to democracy, to equality as a social condition as Tocqueville says, & that leads them to impatience with & skepticism of common efforts. Corporations, in their impersonality, seem to demand so little—one’s life, merely—that they do not give insult. Corporations offer adults so much at this level: An identity, just like entertainment does for their kids. Money, without which nothing can be done, & prestige, however little, without which no one can believe in himself. These desires met, or engaged, people—employees—would have to find some kind of daring in themselves to unite for a purpose of their own, something separate from the specific work they do or their own narrow experience. That daring, rather than an opportunity, is mostly lacking. Citizenship isn’t really an ambition, perhaps primarily because politicians are such mediocrities that nobody of any ability can believe they accomplish anything. Corporations do accomplish much—they seem to give structure to the world. The collapse of American society, the institutions James is talking about—or Yuval Levin, whom he quotes—is experienced by people who succeed in the not-quite-yet-digital economy as confirmation that they are not fools. They mind their own business; America beyond the precincts where they feel at home is collapsing. Social media is an adequate replacement for society under these conditions: It creates a fictional public audience for private concerns; it preserves the feeling with which people are most familiar—that other people are strangers.
Secondly, social media is experienced by people who don’t believe society exists as a recompense offered to them by their professional success, as well as some kind of escape from that life. Social collapse follows from the collapse of moral demands that people experience as all-American. But in those ruins untold numbers of visions of love, friendship or community have appeared, almost all of them now on the internet. However fantastic or banal, they are morally-psychologically necessary—they are the way in which people can bear the crushing weight of the majority, of conformism, of the egalitarianism that defines them. Social media is that desperate attempt to put together fake communities, from the point of view of its willing, not to say eager victims. People already believe they’re nobody in America; they might be somebody on social media, which is something different from America, it allows for individuation in the way music did two generations back… More than the economics of the corporation, the moral trouble of these fantastic communities precludes any political reform, because people experience public concerns as an attack on the particular fantasy to which they are habituated. Something would have to enlarge their hearts for improvements to do with character to be possible, which is in turn necessary for private matters & public matters both, since the American way of life in the family has collapsed just as surely as in the Senate… These are thoughts that follow from Tocqueville’s analysis of individualism, of course, applied to our situation. An empirical political science would need to put together the organization of the corporation & the motives that make sense of experience.