The Joys of a Working Society
Great and Small
I live in South Florida and a hurricane recently passed by to the North of us. Aside from gusts of wind and school closures, and branches and trees down in streets and yards, there was little disruption. The stores stayed open (although some closed early) and the shelves were stocked. No one shoved or stole or yelled.
The night of the hurricane the streets were empty, patrolled by sheriff’s deputies and fire trucks and maintenance vehicles. The government sent out text notifications and bulletins (flash flood warnings, tornadoes) before and during the storm.
My office opened at the usual time, although the workday was light and some people had called off. I went out to get a coffee mid-morning, enjoying the preternaturally clear (for Florida) and cool air. Something struck me and it took a moment to realize what it was: the office park I was standing in (~1,500 parking spaces and a campus of a dozen buildings) had been covered in piles of foliage and palm fronds and forlorn, downed branches. In the two hours I worked a crew had gone through and gathered it all up, to be trucked away.
These are the blessings of living in a working society: one in which people aren’t often rude, and there’s a kind of a sense of common good, where children and the old are treated with forbearance and the weak are mostly pitied rather than despised. Emergency rooms can replace low stocks and never close their doors. Police come within a reasonable period of first being called. Grocery stores are full and competently-staffed. Roads are clear and orderly. Phones work and the power stays on.
There are a great number of inputs at play here: high-trust culture, meritocracy, a functional criminal justice system, widespread opportunity, a great deal of wealth, and many more.
If we remove ANY of these factors society becomes more disorderly, more chaotic, more haphazard, more dangerous, more confusing, poorer. In a very real sense our systems of social harmony and production are our most excellent creation-our own Roman roads or Pyramids of Giza, with benefits for every citizen.
This situation is far from universal. It is a source of daily rejoicing for all those who know a different reality-immigrants, combat veterans, aid workers, freed felons-and it is almost completely dismissed (or actively scorned) by folks who just don’t know how lucky they are.
Social order is always fragile. One disaster or revolution or negligent generation and it is gone, perhaps forever.
Social order is good. It’s not white supremacy or colonialist or imperialist. It’s not even specifically capitalist (socialist countries have also worked toward progressively more expansive and productive regimes of order), although capitalism incentivizes the meritocracy and personal initiative and technological production which nurture it.
Without it people are less happy, less free, less safe, and less decent. This is is the state which we would expect from reviewing the data and it is the clear historical pattern. Those who scoff at our order and try to link it to racism and repression have no way to replicate it, much less improve upon it. If they had, they would have deployed them! Tellingly, very few of them had a hand in constructing our society. They almost never seem to be builders or sellers or leaders… or even technicians or maintainers.
Social order relies on institutions and consensus. It is worth considering the ways that our civilization creates and maintains order. They should be near the top of the list of goods to promote and defend, since everything else (health, education, freedom, technology) depends upon them.
Within months of the most destructive storms in Florida all damage has been repaired and all buildings rebuilt and all stores replenished and all survivors have embarked upon their new life courses.
Haiti suffered a devastating earthquake in 2015. The scars are still visible everywhere around its capital.
Post-earthquake looting, Port-au-Prince, Haiti (2015)
My last reflection:
I do not tend toward conspiracy theories but I find it curious that the policies which are beloved on the Left today are not simply policies which work against social order. They are literally frontal assaults upon the most deeply-anchored foundations of that order:
Bail reform and defunding police will generally be (and certainly have been) corrosive to the working of the criminal justice system. This claim would not have been controversial even on the Left 20 years ago.
DEI undercuts meritocracy and can inflame group resentment and identitarian divisiveness. If you want to know the surest way to provoke disorder in a well-developed society… find some communal fault lines or in-group/out-group biases and deepen them.
Encouraging group identity is always risky (even when those groups are historically ‘marginalized’) and it is not something that our governing institutions should do, even when certain elites might think it justified or fashionable. Lower-class people instinctively know this, as they will be the ones to suffer most from the recession of order.
Hiring the best people for available jobs has an obvious value which cannot be exceeded by projects of increasing group representation. If you want to increase group representation in a job or role you should improve the qualifications of those group members and encourage them to apply.
Riots and looting plague South Africa. The police are known to be slow and unhelpful but private security can only provide so much protection. The country has seen an accelerating slide into disorder, lubricated by corruption and political opacity and MONTHS of brown- and black-outs which have rolled through the nation’s power grid.
Climate regulations can destroy wealth and often offer no benefit in return. They are usually based on a dubious or nonexistent cost-benefits analysis. That description should never apply to any public policy, ever.
Immigration diverts resources from native-born residents and citizens and can introduce new group grievances and cultural challenges. If you believe that ‘assimilating’ new arrivals is in any way a challenge then you are implicitly acknowledging this. Discussing the risks and costs of mass immigration can NEVER be (by itself) racism, or xenophobia. It is a conversation which must occur in a functioning democracy.
Controls on speech and expression retard society’s ability to react and develop according to the popular will. They substitute elite consensus for new information and developing ideas. They will almost never help in the design of beneficial public policies and will always increase the repressive powers and appetites of the state.
These are direct assaults upon the basis of our social order. It constantly amazes me that more people don’t see that-or perhaps they do and they don’t want our social order. I promise that they will not be pleased by its replacement.
