Manhood, Self-Governance, And More

Recent op-eds in the New York Times and the Washington Post both bemoan the perception that men don't have a model for manhood on the left. The Scholar's Stage blog, well off the beaten path, quotes a historian and reaches back to the 19th century U.S. to aptly address the dilemma:

In the face of suffocating managerialism or institutional decay, it is easy to lionize the outputs of previous eras like the nineteenth century. Many imagine the great American man of the past as a prototypical rugged individual, neither tamed nor tameable, bestriding the wilderness and dealing out justice in lonesome silence. But this is a false myth. It bears little resemblance to the actual behavior of the American pioneer, nor to the kinds of behaviors and norms that an agentic culture would need to cultivate today. Instead, the primary ideal enshrined and ritualized as the mark of manhood was “publick usefuleness,” similar, if not quite identical, to the classical concept of virtus. American civilization was built not by rugged individuals but by rugged communities. Manhood was understood as the leadership of and service to these communities.

The same analysis also highlights "the benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal", a "commitment to formality", and "the usefulness of scale and hierarchy". Noting that:

The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. . . .

Through practical experience, nineteenth-century Americans realized that formality was an important tool of self-rule. Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action. . . .

an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…. neither hierarchy nor scale is inherently opposed to agency. Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems.

These chapters thus not only served as vehicles of self-rule at the lower level but also prepared leaders for successful decision-making at higher levels of a hierarchy. Wielding authority at the lower levels of a nineteenth-century organization closely mirrored the experience of wielding authority in its highest echelons. Absent such training, leadership does in fact become the impenetrable closed circle that disturbed the advocates of “human scale.” Centralization, not hierarchy, caused the demise of local dynamism.

The blog's analysis is embedded in the theme that:

America was once a place where institutional capacity was very high. Americans were a people with an extraordinary sense of agency. This is one of the central reasons they transformed the material, cultural, institutional, and political framework of not only the North American continent, but the entire world. That people is gone. The social conditions that gave the Americans their competence and confidence have passed away. Where Americans once asked “how do we solve this?” they now query “how do we get management on my side?” . . .

Self-government is communal. It comes with the confidence that you and the citizens around you are capable of crafting solutions to your shared problems. Self-government is less a particular set of institutions than a particular set of attitudes. If the institutions needed to solve a problem locally do not exist, the citizens of a self-governing community will create them.

The author makes some important points, but I don't wholeheartedly agree with this analysis either. 

The focus on brotherhood didn't have to be male exclusive and their rituals now strike the average educated person as stupid and childish. Formality taken too far leads to wasted time, stilted and empty discourse, and undue emphasis on lawyer-like parliamentary procedure skills over more useful knowledge. Hierarchy is prone to harmful centralization and bureaucracy if the organizational garden is not subject to perpetual and ruthless pruning.

I've spent plenty of time in far-left political circles and can attest that extreme aversion to hierarchy is as problematic and self-defeating as excessive centralization. It leaves you disorganized and forces you to walk through the social mud of endless meetings and consensus building to get anything done even when the right course of action should be obvious. 

Certainly, "agency", which is to say a belief that it is your place to make things happen in your own life, is the lifeblood of change in business, civic society, and politics. But taken too far, an excessive sense of "agency" can lead to unjustified dismissal of developments that are sweeping the larger society, and of the importance of being part of the larger society and the broad social movements within it, which can leave people too trapped in their own bubble to be aware of their larger context prone to making decisions that are ill-informed. Self-determination often entails copying the ideas of others and implementing those ideas in your own community, in order to allow your own community to participate in progress.

The author isn't wrong that a capacity for self-organization is a remarkable national virtue when it is present, and is deeply rooted in a nation's culture. The British and the Japanese, for example, are both much better as self-organizing than Americans, something that is apparent during natural disasters and when citizens of the respective nations were interned in prisoner of war camps, for example. 

More generally, the author's focus on the importance of a healthy civic society isn't wrong. But, later research, by scholars such as Richard Florida, has also shown that Robert Putnam's civic capital, which can be so strong in small towns, can also stifle innovation despite the sense of agency that these communities possess. Innovators do better in societies where they have large fragile networks of shallow acquaintances and society's power to sanction people who break the mold is weak. Communities with unshakeable networks of smaller numbers of people with whom leaders have deep bonds that have the institutional capacity to regulate behavior tightly in their communities, look agreeable. But they are also stagnant and are prone to being backward.

I have a more jaded opinion of local self-government than the author. When I worked as a lawyer defending county governments in Western Colorado from lawsuits, our informal wisdom was the the smaller the government, the less competent its leaders were, and the harder to defend its grossly misguided, petty, and personal their wrongdoings became. Small local governments lack the professionalism, competence, and even handedness of larger local governments. I've seen the same trends in the rural small towns where my parents grew up where I still have many relatives.

As I was taught in introductory political science classes in college, politics is about both power and choice. You need power to implement your choices, and you need to make good choices for your exercise of power to produce good results.

But back to the beginning, and building new scripts for "manhood", I prefer to favor as a starting point, the image of manhood associated with the notion of a gentleman to the image of manhood associated with chivalry. A gentleman understands that powerful, effective people eschew violence when not absolutely necessary, embrace acting honestly but act with sophistication and civility, and are at home in the urban environments that are the center of modern civilization. In contrast, chivalry is the modern embodiment of the values of a warrior class of the thinly populated rural estates of the anarchic dark ages, for whom episodes of violence are their raison d'etre. Chivalry also often crosses the line into being patronizing.

The modern scripts of manhood should also embrace at least two key virtues: effectiveness (a term I prefer to competence, as effectiveness implies better than competence the importance of working well with others and seeking guidance from others when appropriate to achieve one's ends) and unselfishness (which captures a mix of generosity, charity, heroism, and loyalty to others).