Snow shovels and civic virtue

Wow again. Our leaden skies started dropping freezing rain late yesterday afternoon, then overnight we had around 6 inches of snow. This morning I was out, once again, shoveling the sidewalk. Of course I thought of this post from JWN ‘Golden Oldies’ section.
What, indeed, if Dubya had to shovel his own sidewalks and clean up his own messes in life?
So I had that strong feeling of deja vu all over again. The difference was that the hunk who came to help with the shoveling this time was actually my very own spouse. So that was companionable and we got the job done.
Another dump of the white stuff is, I think, expected for tonight. Dump Bush, I say.

9 thoughts on “Snow shovels and civic virtue”

  1. Your post title insired an entirely different idea to me. You see, when it became obvious to me that my government was about to launch a war against Iraq, I realised I had to set my affairs in order and take up activism. It seemed something I was uniquely unsuited for. Hitherto, I had been afflicted by despair, unmanagable anger, depression, and other diseases of isolation. I was easily embarrassed and felt overwhelmed when confronted by wildly antogonistic attitudes.
    But I went ahead and began plodding off to meetings, took up making posters (art work sample), speaking at rallies, and generally banging my head against the wall.
    Now, back to shovelling snow: I’ve always lived in places where it does not, indeed, ever snow. But as a lad I recall pleasant memories–no, really–of shovelling the shoulder near my parent’s cabin in the San Gabriel Mountains. First, people were generally glad I was doing it; they were thankful, even when they helped me (this was what made it possible to shovel most of the length of Oriole Drive); they would talk to me and sometimes invite me into their homes.
    Now, this brings me to the point I really wanted to make. First, activism is a public good with positive network spillovers. That means that my activism helps non-participants, even if they disagree with me (because the issues are crystalized and outlined), and the network spillovers arise as others join in. More modalities are supported–for example, big public demonstrations become possible, which means that more visibility and more interpersonal interaction occurs, which means more people feel comfortable as participants in society.
    Participation in society. No state agency can take its place.
    It seems to me that this participation is what we’re lacking and what we need more of. I grew up craving it and lamenting as people withdrew to the managable squalor of their television-viewing chambers (houses). Perhaps I could take up mending wall…

  2. The other point I wanted to make is that resentment of other groups is a poison that is propagated by, and propagates, non-participation in society. And for now, it seems to me that that is the overall disease of which the GWB Administraion is only a symptom.
    Resentment of other groups is a society-killing disease that also has to be fought against, and I’ve done what I could at my own site to resist it and defeat it. For example, in the region of the blogosphere where hostility to the Administration is thick, I’ve noticed a rapidly intensifying tendency to villify Americans generally. Actually, the linked site is not even close to being an anomaly, but rather, a taste of what I’ve usually been hosed down with as a result of my encounters with many Western expats. I’m not exactly sure what I’m expected to do as a result of these insights, because they counsel despair.
    Allow me, if you don’t object, to use the example of the Yorkshire Boy’s postings on the subject (since virtually all of my interactions with people from the EU tend to involve similar rants). Since the rant was directed against the USA rather than, say, Holland or Canada, let us ponder for a moment what he would think if he were faced with the imminent possibility of the USA turning into a scaled-up version of one of those countries. While this would not entirely resolve the matter of us being a horde of pathological psychopaths, ignorant yahoos, and rabid monsters, it would probably solve a few immediate issues.
    (Why did I pick Holland or Canada? Both countries have similar demographic and economic profiles. Levels of consumption are about the same and both are multi-ethnic.)
    Now, let us pause for a moment and imagine we are problem-solvers. We are trying to define a problem very specifically and design a path to its resolution. What are some suppositions we could make about this path?
    I humbly submit one would be a greater, not a weaker, commitment to society. One of the problems that the opposition faces in this country is not patriotism at all–it is the weakness of social fabric. The reason why the corporate sector is pernicious is not because it is focused on profit, but because it has supplanted–by default–a receding social fabric. People look to it to meet a growing menu of needs, and as we do, the scope of democracy recedes.

  3. Someone is no doubt going to object to my use of the word “patriotism.” Like many European or Canadian visitors, I too find the flag waving and the mottos distasteful. But I reject that this is in itself remotely related to patriotism.
    Patriotism means love of country. Like any feeling, it can be directed towards one’s polis, or–in the future–towards huge regions which have nothing to do with national boundaries. Love of anything, though, has nothing to do with objective superiority. I love all sort of people, despite knowing they are sometimes vulgar, stupid, thoughtless; that others are more beautiful or charming than they, perhaps more talented or original; or that they may have all these flaws, and be afflicted with narcissism, too. And in any community which is flourishing, one encounters amongst its members patriotism. Not regimented conformity. Not loud declarations of chauvinism. Not self-seeking insularity. And not perfection. As my Iranian friend (OK, he grew up in France) put it, a society which is not founded on love cannot flourish.
    A lot of the really ugly dialogue going on in America at present involves estrangement and acrimony among rival factions of society. Now step back for a moment from the rage and the moralizing and examine Ann Coulter as a human being. Yes, I disapprove of her quite a lot–but we’re both human beings, yet she regards me as a terrible, terrible threat. And then, on the other side, we have people such as Yorkshire Boy who makes a point of not distinguishing us–only idiots fail to see (his words, actually) that we are all of us a cancerous blight on the face of the earth.
    Is either conducive to society?

  4. You can see I really have a lot on my chest!
    I fear that many of the people who participate in our society–including expats who might have a salutory effect on our society–are locked into this vision of national identity (“American schools are bad, Americans are ignorant, Americans want to dominate and lord it over the world, the only ‘good’ Americans are those who turn their back forever on such a benighted, contemptible society”) which excludes our common humanity.
    The point I was attempting to make about Ann Coulter–BTW, I’m sorry my thoughts are rather poorly organized–I’ve really been extremely reluctant to speak up about this for over a decade–is that people who think like her represent a form of extreme resentment that festered over the years into Jacobinism. As I see it, Jacobinism of any flavor represents a frustration with a weak, underperforming state (“Why can’t the damn thing deal with bozos who enter our country to sponge off our social welfare system and then turn on us and massacre us? It’s those [*] liberals!”) (“Why can’t the [*] state supply us with decent schools? [*]this! I’m taking my child out and sending her her to Edison! And to hell with those socialist teachers’ unions!”).
    Economists sometimes refer to this a case of prisoners’ dilemma. In the nations of Europe, historical events have enabled strong state agency to allow the “prisoners” to “collude.” Excellent! This is something to learn from those societies. In the past, we deliberately and successfully developed a postsecondary system of education modelled on Prussia’s. In order to address the problem of business organization in a hostile environment, Americans consciously adopted Dutch models (the Dutch were, along with the French, big early investors in American enterprise). After the American Civil War, there was a spate of publicly acknowledged borrowing of foreign institutions, facillitated by the fact that our intelligensia was usually trained or interned in various European countries. In 1913 we borrowed the Federal Reserve System from Wilhelmine Germany; in 1933, deposit insurance, etc. from the UK.
    These were conscious efforts to adopt and adapt relatively known institutions, made possible by a high degree of cooperation and social trust. Our pledge of allegiance was written by a Socialist, Louis Bellamy; a GOP president, Theodore Roosevelt, created the national parks system. When such trust and cooperation ceases, you have a praetorian state. The state becomes impotent, incapable of facillitating collective approaches to problems.
    This leads to Jacobinism of the “left” and of the “right,” and more pernicious than the ideologies such Jacobins peddle is the climate of mutual hatred between them.
    I really think analysing problems in this manner–with, as it were, an anthropological eye–is the more helpful approach.
    ————————
    [*] = really really bad word

  6. James R MacLean: Just two simple points: Regarding patriotism, as a Canadian, I don’t object to patriotism per se, only when it degenerates into an ideology, which is what happened early on in the US and which was reinforced by the Civil War and now 9/11.
    The second is that there are really two Americas living symbiotically with each other: a decent America, who generally tries to live up to its ideals, and an aggressive, bigoted America, who indulged historically in No-Nothingism and today has been reincarnated into the neo-cons. Unfortunately, when you look at US history, you will find that it is always the aggressive, bigoted America that seems to win out over the decent one.

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