July 28, 2018 Dear Reader

A very miscellaneous chapter, not formed:

Chapter 30:

The Bourgeoisie Enacts Speech

The syllogism: Capitalism is cooperation, not mainly competition. After all, mercantilist republics and ancient empires competed economically with each other, often to war and conquest. (Athenian ideas of empire in Thucyd.) These are zero sum. But what is notable about capitalism is that it is positive sum. Cooperation depends on sweet talk, not coercion. Therefore, the amount of sweet talk is an index of cooperation. Thus Smith to Hayek. The creativity of talk: find deals (minor part), find new ideas together, and habits of such talk carries over to individual thinking, dialogic and non-authoritarian.

Arjo Klamer's way of looking, independently discovered by Fiske, and Arendt, and numerous others:

Logic of Exchange Logic of the state

"Not" chps. Nationalism, planning

Logic of the social:
Logic of Connection (love)

The family, religion

Each sphere has its institutions. The market has the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, with its hand-signals and commotion. The state has its bureaucracies in serried rows. Joke: Dept of Agric. The family has its traditions of the two-week camping trip to the north woods, or Sinterklas. The social has its institutionalized rules of easy conversing among strangers.

Each sphere has, in other words, as the rhetoricians put it, "special topics," that is, certain ways of talking, certain scripts that would sound strange if applied to another sphere. If a family follows strictly the rules of easy conversing among strangers, and never gets down to cases, we worry, seeing it as a tragedy or a joke. If a bureaucracy uses the language of the market, we are startled—NNN as telephone operator in the days of AT&T's monopoly saying to an angry customer, "If you don't like our service, go to our competitor." If a club member in the realm of the social demand a special quid pro quo for taking his painful turn on the governing board, we are annoyed.

But the places in common—literally, the commonplaces, the loci communes, the koinoi topoi—are linguistic. The lone institution that all four spheres share is language. All we have in common is language, not our separate tongues after Babel but the faculty of speech. Language is an institution. In fact, all other institutions are analogies to language, when they are not violent. Sharing language means sharing metaphors and stories. The effective constraint on human behavior is not grammatical. Prove this. It is "pragmatic," in the technical sense used in linguistics.

So, the metaphor of GOVERNMENT IS A FAMILY brings notions of caring into politics. The "family" of the United States of America, admittedly, contains 300 millions souls instead of two or six or a dozen. But nonetheless (the metaphor asserts) we should treat other Americans as family: being family means you have to take him in. You can celebrate or criticize the metaphor, but the point here is that family-talk spills over into government-talk. In a rhetoric common in 1593 in England, THE KING IS A FATHER dominated political discourse. Thus the Anglican divine Richard Hooker wrote, "To fathers within their private families Nature hath given a supreme power." But then he sharply criticizes the metaphor, on ground similar to the criticism of a 300-million person family.

Over a whole grand multitude [such as 300 million souls] having no such dependency upon any one [in as much as it does not have a single natural father]. . . impossible is it that any should have complete lawful power, but by consent of men, or immediate appointment of God; because not having the natural superiority of fathers, their power must needs be either usurped . . . or, if lawful, then either . . . consented unto by them. . . or else given extraordinarily from God.

Hooker 1593, p. 191, italics supplied.

The phrase "by consent of men, or immediate appointment of God" states the gist of the political struggle to come in 17^th-century England, and later elsewhere. Are kings by God anointed, or do they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed?

So likewise the story of expertise in government . . . . spills into the market. Obsession with Bernanke and Omaha guy. "Someone must be an expert," which the economist denies. Jerry Nordquist story.

The spillage of special topics into the common places has consequences. If you really do think and speak of the Pope as "the Holy Father," you are less likely to protest at innovations sponsored by him such as clerical celibacy [DATE] or papal infallibility [DATE]. Father knows best. To be sure, your position as a nun may lead you to use the father metaphor. The position, not the language, may be the common cause of the figure of speech and of attitudes towards action. A federal judge is required by her position to speak to the court in a certain way, regardless of her interior convictions about the law. But metaphors constrain thought, too, independent of your pleasure in the matter. If every other nun around you uses the Holy Father talk, you will come to see him that way. If you think and speak of the Pope instead as merely a highly successful clerical politician, then all your disdain or admiration for politicians spills into your actions in ecclesiastical polity. Like some nuns of my acquaintance, you will for example work against church policy in the position of women, the political rights of the poor, the . . . .example of story spilling badly from one to another.
In 18^th century Scotland, John Dwyer and Joan Tronto have argued, the perception of increasing social distance worried the philosophers. That the “breakdown of community” fit with ancient traditions of the pastoral made it easier to believe. The increasing anonymity of a commercial society was supposed to erode solidarity. People have been saying this ever since it is the heart of both the Durkheimian and the Weberian analysis of European life c. 1900. Long-distance trade grew in the 18^th century and then exploded in the 19^th of this there is no doubt. But did the long-distance trade make people less connected? Did social distance actually increase with the spread of commerce?

Recent analogies suggests where the notion of increasing social distance might go wrong. When e-mail on the worldwide web first got into its stride we all talked about the increasing social distance it would bring. The press was filled with confident predictions that e-mail would break solidarity. One can still find such Chicken-Little talk about the end of community by electronic death, though less and less as the evidence accumulates. People would sit in their lonely rooms, we said, “talking” to imagined characters, neglecting the forum of civic republicanism. The social world would dissolve into a science-fiction nightmare. No one would show up for coffee.

What actually happened, of course, is that e-mail widened rather than narrowed social contacts, and deepened rather than drained the content of friendship. People had more to talk about. The bulletin board on the sport of cricket has over 500 messages a day, with enthusiasts from Boston to Bangalore chatting, denouncing, informing, quarreling, joking, viewing with alarm in other words, being human (and mainly in this case male). Letters to the editor, with month-long delays in the magazines, are a poor substitute when a man wants urgently to complain about body-line bowling in the latest test series though the round-robin letter such as the Beecher family (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s, that is) used to circulate sound like a mid-19^th-century version of e-mail.

Likewise television. The baby boomers, especially the elder-boomers born in the 1940s who grew up before Leave It to Beaver, view the TV-saturated socializing of their generation X children with horror: “Come on kids, go down to the local soda fountain and really get to know each other.” The elder-boomers see their children’s fixation on TV as similar to the giant screens in every house described by Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 (1953), enticing the population into soap operas crowding out real lives.

But that’s not what happens. The TV culture is used by the kids for the same social purposes as shopping in the local marketplace or gossiping at the well or hanging out at the soda fountain was used by earlier generations. Generations X-ers and their younger siblings the Slackers live and love with the TV blaring, make jokes at the expense of the advertisers, use the medium. People do. The medium is the message, to be sure, but people are not therefore passive in its grip. (Notice that it’s always other people who are passively in the grip of rhetors. We intellectuals know.) Seventy years of communist propaganda in Russia damaged Russians, but not in the way the commissars had hoped. In Poland forty years of the same message left hardly a scratch on the Polish mind.

The scandalized old folks resemble the monks writing about Irish women in the middle ages, as XXX describes it. Real social life, said the monks indignantly, is something that happens in courts and battlefields among men. This womanly gossip while washing at the river or selling at the fair undermines male authority, and is the Devil’s forum. Keep the women at home, isolated from other women, lest they conspire against us. So too say the parents of e-mailers.

It’s easy to believe, surely, that getting out of the family and village into a world of ocean-crossing ships, then telegraphs, then telephone, then airplanes, then e-mail was in fact liberating. It has been long established that in England at any rate the vision of villagers as confined to one place is wrong, as early as we can know [McFarlane]. English people were in 1300 always already “individualists,” mobile from place to place [Raftis]. The issue is, was individualism alienating? Did it produce anomie? That is, did people lose connection a society of love in accepting autonomy a society of courage?