The Localist Manifesto
section 11
tribe and nation
Since our lives are currently ordered down to the last detail by big corporations, banks, and governments, proposals to shrink them down to size can stir up fears of disorder. Regrettably, we have all read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, presumably because the teacher assigning it believed it conveyed profound truths about what happens when human beings suddenly find themselves beyond reach of established forms of authority and social control. Thanks to these teachers and, behind them, the many apologists for autocracy (e.g., Thomas Hobbes and his progeny) who have hammered away for centuries at the same message, the presumption that Golding’s fantasy shows us primal human nature in action is now lodged securely in many minds. Heads furnished in this way commence to nod when arguments for smaller, more localized economies and governments are greeted, as they usually are, with charges of “tribalism.” Without the strong arm of a central authority, won’t we all be dropping heavy rocks on one another and dancing around with heads mounted on sticks?
Humans organized into tribes have committed their share of violence. Raids and kidnappings carried out by grassland tribes that developed the military potential of horse domestication – the herding cultures of the Eurasian steppes or, closer to home, the Comanches of the Mexican/American Southwest – could be merciless. The cycles of violence that we group under the heading of feuds are typically represented as outbreaks of something “tribal,” particularly if the participants are poor mountain folk. In contemporary political discourse, that label is used to discredit any rebelliousness rooted in pre-modern, vernacular, or subcultural modes of solidarity. Rebels such as these, on this reading, are prone to incivility and mayhem because their outlook is retrograde and provincial – the lingering resentments of cultural laggards too malevolent or dimwitted to recognize the superiority of the social order overseen by big corporations, banks, and governments.
The great majority of tribal cultures were settled and, at least until another tribe encroached on their hunting grounds, largely peaceful. The great majority of hillbillies have never shot anyone over a land deed, a pig, or a straying lover. The charge of tribalism is not leveled to further our understanding of violence but to route our fears away from the biggest perpetrators of it. The Comanches, in their heyday, slaughtered thousands of Spaniards, Mexicans, Apaches, and American settlers. The casualty count for the entire span of the Hatfield-McCoy feud was somewhere around thirty – roughly a corpse a year. Compare these numbers with the death and destruction wreaked by the nation-state since it first made its appearance in history. The American nation was built over the bones of millions of Native people, Comanches among them. The deaths attributable to the nation-state in the twentieth century alone – two world wars, multiple regional conflicts, several genocides and policy-induced famines, the lethal violence required to control colonies and imperial outposts – also run well into the millions. By any empirical standard, the suffering caused by nations dwarfs anything that any tribe, however warlike, could ever hope to inflict. Nations were designed and assembled to dominate large territories, a process that in every case required the murderous suppression of native inhabitants and continuous warfare against rivals. That is how they have always operated and continue to operate. Yet we still tremble at the specter of tribalism and celebrate, with much flag-waving and chest-thumping, the spirit of nationalism.
Our fears spin the webs that the 1% use to bind our loyalties to their purposes. A regime that serves financiers and CEOs has nothing to fear from citizens who have been conditioned to recoil in horror at the prospect of anything that threatens the profitability of banks and corporations. A people so conditioned will not be capable of thinking or acting in their own best interests. We will get the cutthroat future we have earned by working and voting for people who do not care in the least what happens to any of us.
That future has already announced its arrival. Fearmongers set the tone for national politics and in corporate media. The figures who are the most resourceful in conjuring up one boogeyman or another are now the most influential leaders and opinion-makers. One party whips up fears against immigrants, communists, and lizards; the other peddles “the rule of law” as our only line of defense against rednecks, fascists, and ogres. The manufacturing of fanciful threats and bogus remedies has become the primary business of politics because the real threat – the everyday, lawful operation of the jobs/growth behemoth – has been thoroughly normalized. We have welcomed that beast into our hearts and minds and now beseech it for miracles. Small wonder we cannot bring ourselves to acknowledge its responsibility for what endangers our families, our communities, and our earthly home. We are powerless to meet the dangers before us because we see the world from the blinkered perspective of those who prosper by putting us in danger. Robin 99 challenges us to rip off the blinders, see the culprits for who and what they are, and act accordingly – as localists executing a careful demolition of mega-corporations and wall-to-wall governments and a deliberate construction of the small-scale economic and political institutions that we will build in their stead. In that role, we will be governed not by our fears but by a determination to maintain and enjoy what we claim to value. As hearth occupiers and land re-settlers, we will finally have the power to make that determination effective.
The determination to do something radically new requires a steady supply of confidence. Stories told by those who see human beings as inherently violent and self-serving work to smother that confidence in its crib. Such stories have always been the work of confirmed authoritarians: Hobbes argued on behalf of absolute monarchy, Golding once confessed that he understood the Nazis because he was “that sort by nature.” Finding and maintaining the confidence we will need to wrench history onto a new path would be much easier if we would stop giving credence to dog-eat-dog, “war of all against all” narratives. There is no truth in them. The horde of anthropologists who for over a century have studied cultures that knew neither king nor emperor have found nothing resembling the “state of nature” that Hobbes invoked to bolster his argument for tyranny. He planted nastiness and brutishness in the primitive past so that governments could claim to be acting in accordance with god’s plan as they carried out nation-sized violence in the civilized present.
The fraudulence of Golding’s fictional tale was exposed by an event occurring in real time a decade after Lord of the Flies was published. In 1965, six teenage boys from Tonga (an island chain in the Pacific) decided they had had enough of their Catholic boarding school and set sail, on a stolen boat, for Fiji – 500 miles away. After their sail and rudder were destroyed in a storm, they drifted for eight days before stumbling upon a small, uninhabited island. It was little more than a rocky outcrop, but they stayed alive on it for 15 months. The Australian sea captain who rescued them was rightfully astonished and noted carefully the things they had created to survive: a well-tended garden, hollowed-out trunks to collect scarce rainwater, a make-shift gym, pens for chickens that had been left behind by previous inhabitants, a fire which they managed to keep going for the duration of their stay. Everyone shared in decision-making and all necessities were distributed equally. Quarrels were resolved with voluntary time-outs – no one was bludgeoned or impaled. One of them constructed a rudimentary guitar from scavenged materials and, to keep spirits up, they ended every day with prayer and song.
These Tongan teenagers are the true tribalists. Marooned on a barren island with only one knife blade and their own wits, they figured out how to make wise use of the land and to share responsibilities and goods in a way that kept the peace and freed good will to work its magic. They survived by tapping into the deep vein of cooperativeness and empathy bequeathed to them by their ancestors. That is just what we need to do with our survival now at risk. All of our ancestors, if you trace them back far enough, were tribal in just this way. We are all social beings, shaped over the course of our evolutionary journey by capacities to share stories and knowhow and to distribute affection and provisions by means of enduring kin and small group relationships. We are still fundamentally tribal in our families and our local doings. Habits of mutual aid and care were bred in small settings and need small settings to remain operative. The everyday operations of the modern nation-state and the modern corporation habituate us to resentful subservience and anxious money-grubbing. As loyal citizens and employees, what we think and do is governed by resentment and anxiety rather than respect and affection. Our personalities are forever split between a nurturing, enterprising self that willingly sacrifices for kin, friends, and neighbors and a buttoned-up, cold-hearted ego happy to make life miserable for whomever it has been persuaded to resent. That ego is the self that needs smothering if we are to become whole again. We must commit heart and mind to the task of dismantling the big institutions that call heartlessness and ignorance into being and reward us when we exhibit them. The task of present-day politics (the role that Robin 99 promises to play) is to orchestrate a transfer of allegiance from country and company to the small places that awaken and reward our caring selves.
Most of us would be happy to quit our jobs at Amazon or Starbucks and start up or work for a small business in our own neighborhood if it promised a decent living. We are not so ready to renounce our allegiance to country. When compared with any other system of government, American democracy has much to commend it. If your preferred measure of worth is how much freedom you will enjoy to determine your own destiny, then Americans have shown good sense in their rejection of statist alternatives, whether of the Right or the Left. At the same time, the pride we feel for having maneuvered pragmatically between those extremes has prevented us from noticing the high price we have paid for setting the bar so low. We have two parties instead of one, but that circumstance has hardly made us masters of our own fate. We can start a business or move up, down, and sidewise in an open labor market, but these “free” choices take place within an economy painstakingly designed to load all the risk, hardship, and worry onto the shoulders of those who occupy the lower and middle rungs of it. How many of us can get up in the morning and say, with a straight face, that we have ready access to the means of living in accordance with the values we claim to cherish? Who has the time, even when the means are within reach? We have never had to suffer the casual brutality of the dictatorships, but otherwise we are hindered at every turn by barriers and restraints cemented into place without our input or consent. We crow about the powers granted us by a democratic constitution and a free market, yet we possess neither the authority nor the wherewithal to protect our families from the disasters piling up at our feet.
A transfer of loyalty and power from big institutions to small ones may well aggravate one kind of trouble. People who make sense of the world using strict, prejudicial categories of race, religion, or ideology may find it easier to establish communities where those prejudices set the tone for local affairs. Those who insist on an inalienable right to strap on their antlers and semiautomatics when they go to the store for eggs and beer will not have to worry about what a Congress or Supreme Court might have to say about it. But they will have to worry about getting along with neighboring communities whose inhabitants hold to a more sociable kind of freedom and are actively building a way of life on more peaceable and equitable foundations. Even a cynical observer would have to concede that there are far more people who want to live peaceably and equitably than in a constant state of aggrieved, hate-driven animosity. Localism creates the conditions that would allow this majority to see their values, and ways of life that embody those values, take root and spread. The corporate parties and the corporate media work to amplify the voices of the embittered minority. Haters find encouragement at every turn because the nation-state thrives on prejudicial hatred – the 1% relentlessly fans the flames of racial resentment and patriotic arrogance because that is how self-proclaimed sovereign citizens are molded into pliable subjects and, when necessary, obedient killers and martyrs.
A localist revolution both unleashes powerful centrifugal forces and provides a means of containing them that allows for more freedom and grassroots initiative than any nation-state – democratic or otherwise – has ever seen fit to tolerate. Localities that share a bioregion will need to figure out together how to perform basic survival tasks – managing the use of land and water, safeguarding air quality, maintaining transportation systems, protecting biodiversity. General assemblies in urban neighborhoods will have to hammer out a city-wide consensus on the policies that can keep a metropolis in good working condition. When disagreements prove intractable and hostility creeps into these negotiations, we might again draw on the wisdom of those with centuries of experience facilitating small outgroup cooperation. The community or neighborhood that feels least aggrieved can host a festival and invite all parties to the dispute. After a day or two of celebration showcasing local food, homebrew, music, and generosity, councilors will sit down and revisit the contested issues, this time from a perspective of greater trust and fellow-feeling. The affection that all feel for the bit of territory they share, augmented now by the warm feelings born of face-to-face fat-chewing and pleasure seeking, filters into the negotiations and creates new possibilities. No one gets all of what they hoped for, as in a winner-take-all scenario, but a solution is found that people who have gotten to know each other a bit can agree is fair enough, at least until there is new information to consider. People engaged in a small-scale cooperative process like this, where agreed-upon solutions can be closely monitored and re-evaluated, come to recognize as a matter of habit both the tentative and consensual nature of our knowledge and the necessity of cultivating trust and good will if readily observable facts are to play a role in the solution of tough problems. Once established in the arena of practical problem-solving, these habits can come to shape our beliefs generally. It suddenly becomes easier to notice that all of our convictions, from the most lightly- to the most deeply-held, are tentative and consensual. That insight strikes at the heart of bigotry. In this way, a habit born of dogged cooperation and festive communion drags the ideal of toleration down to earth to become an active force in the conduct of intercommunity affairs and interpersonal relations.
Nearly all the horrors that litter the course of history have been the work of true believers. Those who profess absolute certainty that their country is superior to all others, their race or class is destined to rule over all others, their god is the only true god – these are the people who brought violence and oppression on a mass scale into the world and have used them ever since to stay atop whatever domain they claim at a given moment. For them, toleration is a sign of weakness – a failure of nerve that can only be remedied by a further hardening of the heart and numbing of the brain. But without toleration there can be no freedom. You cannot claim the right tell others how to live and what to believe, whom it is permissible and not permissible to love, or what other people can and cannot do with their bodies and, in the same breath, pass yourself off as a defender of liberty. Your mind is either open or closed – can’t be both at the same time. Over the years, leaders of nation-states have erected an imposing edifice of deceptions to convince us that we can have it both ways – that we can both stand for freedom and deny it to those whom those leaders need us to despise if they are to have their run of the world. That edifice is the ideological keystone of modern politics and it is eroding like a sandcastle at high tide. Contemporary politics is now a no-holds-barred brawl between those who want to rebuild it maybe with some “progressive” add-ons this time around and those who think the time is ripe to mix in a little more raw power, naked swindling, and unabashed cruelty. If those are your only two choices, then by all means choose option A. But how bad must things get before we insist upon another option? How weary and demoralized must be become before we down all our tools and refuse once and for all to rebuild anything held together by lies and deceit?
In 2016, the citizens of the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. That vote was one of many signals that the neoliberal global order put in place after World War II was leaking credibility, even in countries stationed at the top of it. Surely this is a welcome development. The outsourcing of manufacturing to those countries where labor is cheap, environmental regulations are nonexistent, and protest is outlawed proved to be a great boon to the monopolistic conglomerates (multinationals, if you prefer the euphemism) that dominate the world market. The opening of China to foreign investment after the death of Mao Zedong, in particular, performed most of the heavy lifting needed to reverse the decline in profitability that caused such consternation among the 1% during the 1970s. Nothing like a one-party state if you are a capitalist looking to make money hand over fist. When weighed on any other scale, however, the unprecedented growth of a world market in nearly everything has been a disaster. The measurable decline in our overall quality of life, especially in the countryside; the ecological degradation that of necessity accompanies such a capital- and energy-intensive system of production and distribution; the hollowing out of institutions that once facilitated meaningful, stable relationships in cohesive communities – this is what we must endure so that globetrotting capitalists can enjoy the lifestyle to which they feel entitled. A global economy is wasteful beyond measure, ravenous for fossil fuel and other gifts of nature, producing shoddiness and cheapness by the 200,000-ton shipload. As a way to supply ourselves with the necessities of life, it is pure insanity.
Rebellion against the new global order was not long in coming, and it has taken many forms. Brexit, the Trumpers, and all the other movements usually grouped under the heading of “right wing populism” show us what that rebellion looks like when it is animated by the spirit of nationalism. All the ugliness on display in the ranks of those grown suspicious of globalization and of the “elites” who promote it – the race-proud bigotry, the hostility to immigrants, the deranged conspiracies – has come from the my country uber alles contingent. The British empire, after all, was a bloody business from start to finish, Mombasa to Dublin. While it was in place, justifications for brutality and tyranny had to be manufactured and marketed along with the textiles. Those who yearn for the days when Brits bent the knee to no one and brooked no outside interference with their sovereign affairs quite naturally recycle the language and logic of those justifications in their anti-globalization propaganda and position papers. Brexit ugliness is a pre-packaged commodity, a baked-in ingredient of British nationalism. Trump ugliness is a dreary rehash of the myths and slanders developed by generations of American nationalists to legitimize slavery and racial segregation, land theft and ethnic-cleansing, and the rough treatment of whomever was the most recent to show up at the border seeking admittance. It has the easy familiarity of a timeworn tradition, which is why it so readily available to politicians willing to say and do anything, however bigoted or mean-spirited, to hoist themselves into the cockpit of a powerful nation-state.
The anti-globablization of the nativist politicians, like every other “populist” gimmick in their playbook, has no substance. Their fortunes, and that of their billionaire sponsors, are tied to continuing investment in countries where super-profits are assured. We will not see any British- or American-owned factories in China closing down and moving back home on their watch. The crusade waged by the my-nation-firsters to blame China and traitorous global elites for the ills of the world converts the everyday patriotism of ordinary citizens into a force that serves to strengthen, not weaken, the grip of global capitalists on governments and markets. It is a very effective ruse whose power to confound rests on the willingness of those citizens to play their assigned role in it. Until we disentangle our sense of who we are and might yet become from the destiny of a nation-state, even a democratic one, there will be no other roles for us to play.
We have sleepwalked ourselves into a frightful mess indeed. But an escape route is available should we but lift our eyes from the muck and madness to see it. We just need to take the next step. We seem ready to turn decisively against the neoliberal elites atop the global economy but only to fall in line behind the nation-first loudmouths who, patriotic bluster aside, work in tandem with those elites to service and expand that economy. That is the act of subservience that renders us incapable of taking care of our own affairs. To reclaim the authority to make the decisions that will determine what kind of future we will see, we must repudiate the authority of globalists and nationalists. Our mistake lies not in pulling away but in pulling up short.
All the things we most treasure as Americans were created by people rooted in specific localities and regions. The music that fills our heads and tugs at our hearts – gospel and rap, rhythm and blues and rock’n’roll, bluegrass and country, Louisiana zydeco and Texas swing, Brill Building pop and show tunes – these are the work of specific groups of people embedded in particular places. The foods that fill our bellies – collards and yams, black beans and rice, red beans and crawdads, clam chowder and lobster, beef and potatoes – have the same place-specific origins. These cultural creations became American after they were appropriated and marketed by corporations with a national reach. Aside from their status as saleable commodities, there is nothing in any of them that it makes sense to label “made in America.” The challenge thrown down by Robin 99 that we root our democracies and our economies in local soil represents a call to come back home to the small real worlds that first brought out the best in us and could do so again. She offers us the opportunity to forge an identity out of what those worlds provide – an affectionate relationship with a particular bit of an ecosystem, a culture that both mirrors the substance and spirit of that particular place and opens channels for every form of creativity and conviviality native to those who have settled there, and the habits of self-governance and cooperative decision-making that take hold when power is vested in localities.
The bonds of national identity make us complicit in deadly military adventures overseas and persistent injustices at home. Like music and food, freeborn individuals become certified Americans by pledging their time and talents to the overlords of boundless consumption. That we should be commodities ever hungry for other commodities, damn the consequences – that is what our nation asks of us.
The identities of difference – race, class, gender, sexual preference, religion – sequester individuals into ever more narrowly defined enclaves and chastise those who, whether in search of inspiration or understanding, dare to violate the borders. Radicalisms of this description put activists at odds with the very processes whereby cultures, oppositional cultures included, are formed. They disrupt the quiet intermingling of ideas and aspirations, largely unplanned and never fully explained, that precede and enable major social transformations. They sow hesitancy and suspicion at a time when we need bold, open-hearted modes of cooperation.
To embrace a local identity is not to erase differences but to reconfigure them in our understanding of what needs to be done and what contrivances will be needed to do it. Our aim is to resettle the land. The first people to arrive on the continent did a fine job of it, but the Europeans who drove them off proceeded to botch it altogether. Our well-being, if not our survival, depends on our learning how to do it properly. We begin by taking pride in the place we have chosen to inhabit and doing what it takes to become native to it. We design an economy to accommodate a holistic conception of well-being – a way of producing and distributing necessities that sustains the land and everything (flora and fauna, human and non-human) that lives upon it. We create a mode of governance capable of seeing to it that community business is conducted judiciously, competently, and with the full participation of all interested parties. Leadership roles will be filled by people who have earned the respect of the community for their knowhow, humility, and proficiency in mobilizing and focusing the energies of single-issue working groups and of the community as a whole. The impulse to slot cultural differences into a prejudicial hierarchy finds no field of exercise in a community organized to make good on these kinds of ecological, economic, and political commitments. Instead, the markers of difference compose an inventory of traits that the inhabitants of a place draw on to create a distinctive local identity. The racial and ethnic make-up of the community finds expression in folkways that all inhabitants – regardless of what they look like or where they come from – claim as their own and practice with honor and affection. Re-settlers pull together not as unequal heirs of a phantom promise (i.e., as citizens of a nation) but as rooted inhabitants of real common ground. At long last, after centuries of warfare and ugly behavior generally, we might feel ourselves to be at home in the world. We might finally live on the land in a way that exhibits the proper gratitude for the gifts it has so generously bestowed. By accepting the responsibility to use these gifts wisely and fairly, we might finally reach maturity as one species among many, all caught up in the same web of interdependence. And not a moment too soon.
Occupy the Hearth 