. . . the 1870s, that is. From Robert H. Wiebe's The Search for Order 1877-1920:
America in the late nineteenth century was a society without a core. It lacked those national centers of authority and information which might have given order to such swift changes. American institutions were still oriented toward a community life where family and church, education and press, professions and government, all largely found their meaning by the way they fit one with another inside a town or a detached portion of the a city. As men ranged farther and farther from their communities, they tried desperately to understand the larger world in terms of their small, familiar environment. They tried, in other words, to impose the known upon the unknown, to master an impersonal world through the customs of a personal society. They failed, usually without recognizing why; and that failure to comprehend a society they were helping to make contained the essence of the nation's story. p. 12
Men searched for the explanation of America's economic punishment from that provincial, community-centered base. If there was an American philosophy in the seventies, it was a corrupted version of Scottish common sense doctrines, taking as given every man's ability to know that God had ordained modesty in women, rectitude in men, and thrift, sobriety, and hard work in both. . . . Americans were judging the world as they would their neighborhood. Their truths derived form what they knew: the economics of a family budget, the returns that came to the industrious and the lazy, the obnoxious behavior of the drunken braggart, the advantages of a wife who stayed home and kept a good house. In an island community people had little reason to believe that these daily precepts were not universally valid, and few doubted that the nation's ills were caused by men who had dared to deny them.
Consequently, cries for reform sounded much like the counsel of reaction. Deep inside, everyone knew the path of virtue; and those who had strayed would simply have to return. In depression, small-town America took its stand against "the credit system, the fashion system, and every other system tending to prodigality and bankruptcy." The government in particular would have to relearn the fundamentals of thrift. p.4
So much of what Beck and other reactionaries say resonates so strongly with so many Americans because it makes sense in this old-fashioned, small-town way. That it has no bearing on the way the real world works doesn't matter because it's more important to live in a world that makes sense than to live in a world whose complexity makes finding sense almost impossible.
Wiebe's book traces the inexorable bureaucratization of America in the period after the Civil War and through WWI. The country became more bureaucratic in both the public and private sectors because an increasingly complex reality demanded that it be organized. Big, impersonal bureaucracies are what we got. Organization is what humans do in the face of chaos, and as the old American, small-town reality disintegrated during this period, due mainly to the Schumpeterian creative-destructive forces of unfettered capital, the impulse to impose order by centralizing understandably emerged to fill the vacuum. As the influence of the old decentralized, local, given personal customs and folkways that everybody took for granted weakened, impersonal organizational forces took over.
The opposition to this bureaucratization came in two forms--the first was this attempt simply to reject complexity and its impersonality and take refuge in the bunker of small-town, personal values. The second was the more anarchic or libertarian approach, which was to accept that this growing complexity was unmanageable, that any attempt to manage it was always ten steps behind, and therefore any attempts to manage it were futile and caused more harm than good.
Both these refusals to deal with complexity are failures, the first of understanding, the second of passivity and lack of will. Both are failures of imagination, a kind of sticking one's head in the sand. Large-scale, impersonal organizations are simply an inevitable part of living in a complex, globalizing world. The question is not whether or not we should have them, but whose interests do they serve. I believe they can be made to serve broad human interests, but not without concerted organized effort to tame and to personalize the impersonal forces that otherwise direct these institutions.
P.S. On another Beckian note:
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