Since then, doing a good job means you’re an unenlightened
bigot or a fool. Getting something for nothing is good.

It seems to me that some of this “geek” phenomena is a demonstration of tribal instincts…the warm scent of a herd and that it allows us to abandon local connection without feeling loss. On the other hand, it does not demand an abandonment of local connection as much as it might ease it. Russell obviously does not feel it to be a vehicle to abandon his local connections.

Heavy thoughts, as always; my thanks for them. If there is a relatively brief upshot from my post in connection with your observation above, it might be this: yes, being able to “geek out” over whatever it is which catches your fancy invites you into a community of fellow fanciers–an “imagined community, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, but nonetheless, a community of shared understandings and activities. There will be an effort to draw close to fellow members of that community, spatially and materially, and mass production and modern technology do make said associations possible. Will they replace the localities that should ground us in virtue, or will they “merely” complement the competencies which we ought to be striving to build and maintain? Tim–though I admit this reading of him may be unfair–would probably insist that there will unavoidably be a bit of replacement involved, because the pursuit of any kind of luxury or excess emphasized individual appetite and acquisition over the discipline of a place or group. I disagree: I choose to believe–and I think I can argue persuasively on behalf of the belief–that the delights of modernity need not force us into distinguishing ourselves, and our chosen “herd,” from those localities and communities and proprietorships we are and should be organically connected to.

This question of what kind of economy the localist would create out of the current condition is a good one . Are we to turn our backs on Modernity and live like the Amish or is there some form of informed editing of the current spectacle of want that can be achieved? Can we be simultaneously local and global….modern and traditional or even primitive, as conditions warrant?

Right now, it would seem that the popular culture is resigned to sacrificing the local to the great Efficiency Moloch of globalism. Where is it carved in stone that the local must be a stepchild to progress? We hold to our traditions of family solidarity but feel it “prudent” to sacrifice the next level of our social organization: the local community of village-town and city, in favor of achieving some kind of authentic “global community”…a thing that gives me the creeps. Not because I find the other inhabitants of the planet to be creeps but because I do not want to live a life of indiscriminate sameness represented by cheerful global multiculturalism. It seems to me that some of this “geek” phenomena is a demonstration of tribal instincts…the warm scent of a herd and that it allows us to abandon local connection without feeling loss . On the other hand, it does not demand an abandonment of local connection as much as it might ease it. Russell obviously does not feel it to be a vehicle to abandon his local connections.

Being careless in what is wished for, will the localist want to blow their brains out in boredom when all that they deride is gone? Is the future a state of banishment or a more competent incorporation? Being an amateur moirologist of the doom and gloom sort, I am ill-equipped to flesh this question out and would like to see a fuller exploration of it on the Porch. I’d like to think the chartered wonderbus to waste and poverty is not a foregone conclusion and that we will not be forced to watch something along the lines of a hearty crash and burn before we pull our heads out of our arses and attempt a better competency of life. At present, we seem to be willing supplicants to an Establishment that has confused reality with packaged gloss. When I hear a politician use that term “Family Values”, I get an urge to watch my back because I know that my family is the very last thing they actually care about. Needless to say, my neighborhood and town are not even on their radar. Even my own Senator will know more about Columbian Coffee or Iranian nuclear policy or Chinese Fiscal policy than they will the affairs of my county because the place they represent is utterly beside the point.

We’ve flung up a big suspension bridge from our persons to a larger popular culture that has neither place nor legitimacy beyond the spectral. It is a historic reversal or abnegation of immediacy and it is like attempting to grow a tree of limbs and roots with no trunk.