Symposium: Localism, Shmocalism

This article is in response to “Reject Jingoism and Groupthink” by Daniel Larison and is part of the symposium on “Conservatism: What’s Wrong With It and How Can We Make It Right?”

Mr. Larison is skeptical of any type of centralization or universalization. Everything ought to be local: locally grown food, local elections, and a local sheriff who has served more terms than The Andy Griffith Show has had reruns on TV Land. Wonderful. I always did like Jersey corn.

But what about technology? What about the fact that liberalism has, more or less since its founding, tended toward centralization? Sure monarchies were toppled in the beginning, but what of the growth in state apparatuses proportional to the growth in modern technology? Cities are bigger than ever, requiring bigger police forces with access to more technology. For instance, here in Britain, almost every corner seems to have a security camera watched by the local authorities. Fine and dandy. But I imagine the money for those cameras comes from the national government.

Oh boy. We have a problem. Localism might be incompatible with the growth of that nasty, addictive behemoth: technology. Technology requires lots of money, lots of money requires lots of taxation, and lots of taxation requires a broad area over which to tax. Need I go on? Kojève speaks of a “universal and homogenous state” as the necessary outcome for the modern world. The scary part is his logic seems spot on. The UN, the EU, the World Bank, and the existence of Chinese food in small German towns all point towards one thing: globalism.

Now before your Marxist undies get in a bundle, my point is not to promote this globalism, nor to attack the localism I hold dear. My contention is that localism is hard in a necessarily technological world. 15^th century France didn’t have McDonalds and that’s not just because they didn’t have ball pits and high fructose ketchup. Our world is our world because of our technological destiny, which requires centralization. It’s not that we’re smarter than past peoples, our obsession is simply different.

And so while localism is a noble cause we must find a way to reconcile it with our increasingly centralized world. Does Plato not tell us that democracy can end in centralized tyranny? Does it not seem that technology and modernity can only exacerbate this trend? Localism must be smart localism; it cannot convey an absolute skepticism of authority, but must acknowledge our historical moment. To stand athwart history yelling stop cannot work as long as our society loves iPhones and Facebook.