Mourning Mutual Aid

The cost of outsourcing human welfare to political capitals has been far too high. Today we scarcely recognize communitarian acts of kindness and tough love.

When Alexis de Tocqueville came to America in 1831, he saw something profound. Maybe you've read the following passage. But as you reread it, ask yourself whether or to what degree this is an America you recognize: 

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

I suspect that even if you see something of America in the above, it's weakened because it is no longer at the center of American life.

Reading Tocqueville, one can imagine a time when the organs of civil association extended to spheres of life, such as childhood and old age, which are wholly institutionalized and segregated today. The state warehouses children so that parents can work and pay taxes. The elderly are sequestered and told, more or less, that their participation in society is optional after 65. At that point, they become liabilities to be managed by the Congressional Budget Office. 

No doubt, a weakened civil society includes the lost array of mutual aid societies, lodges, and fraternal orders of which a third of Americans were once members. Historian David Beito painstakingly investigates these:

The record of five societies that thrived at or near the turn of the century illustrates the many variants of this system. Each had a distinct membership base. Two of the societies, the Independent Order of Saint Luke and the United Order of True Reformers, were all-black. Both had been founded by ex-slaves after the Civil War and specialized initially in sickness and burial insurance. The other societies had entirely white memberships. The Loyal Order of Moose was an exclusively male society that emphasized sickness and burial benefits. It became best known during the 20th century for its orphanage, Mooseheart, near Aurora, Illinois. The Security Benefit Association (originally the Knights and Ladies of Security) followed in a similar tradition but broke from the mainstream by allowing men and women to join on equal terms.

Even as we shake our modern heads at segregation along racial lines, we can appreciate the power of civil association in those days. 

In this article on mutual aid, I wrote:

Today, if you were to ask the average man on the street to name a mutual aid society, you would be lucky if he could name a single one. But at one time, these organizations were everywhere. They had funny names like the Oddfellows and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. They are the forgotten social safety net, and at one time, they included health insurance and unemployment support. Because they were a mix of the communitarian and the charitable, surplus dues could go to growth and giving. Because most were organized as local lodges, they featured undocumented acts of kindness and tough love we would scarcely recognize today. 

Why would we scarcely recognize those acts of kindness and tough love today? Because they are unpracticed and, therefore, rare.

Professor Beito describes all-female societies such as the Knights and Ladies of Security and the Ladies of the Maccabees, which created tremendous works such as orphanages and surgical centers despite women's continued political marginalization. Women who belonged to these societies thought of themselves as members of fraternal societies. Strikingly, that ethos is now virtually absent in American society.

"Fraternity," writes one of the Ladies of the Maccabees, "in these modern days has been wrested from its original significance and has come to mean a sisterhood, as well as a brotherhood, in the human family."

This vast empire of human good was built not by federal largesse but by the moral conviction of people weaving their lives together to guard against hardship and protect the vulnerable. Redistribution and centralized welfare tore apart the linkages of mutual aid. Most Americans are now totally dependent on the plans of people thousands of miles away. Thanks to growth in the private sector, Americans grew rich enough to afford their welfare state for a while. But in time, the system became corrosive and indebted.

The rise of the welfare state has all but destroyed our sense of human brotherhood. 

Communities that once held together have been lost, too. The breakdown of community in America started long ago. Our robust civil society sector was made moribund by the New Deal and by 1965 had been scorched entirely by the introduction of the Great Society programs. Why? Mutual aid is participatory, which requires skin in the game and a real commitment to the people in one's community. By contrast, the government program is impersonal. All it requires is a completed checklist of eligibility requirements and the appropriate number of stamps. But it's *free.* No more Wednesday evenings at the fellowship hall. No more difficult conversations with members. No more membership dues.

Freemasons researcher Justin Arman showed me an example of how the Freemasons built a community around compassion in Texas. Here’s a passage from one Grand Master Lightfoot: 

It is not only our duty, but should be a privilege to aid in binding up the wounds of our stricken brethren, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, to give protection to the widows and orphans, and by these noble examples of brotherly love, relief and truth, kindle brighter the fires of Fraternity and Universal Brotherhood, and prevent their extinction among mankind.

When it comes to the Freemasons, most of what we hear are conspiracy theories. No doubt, some of them are true. But we rarely hear about the Masons' commitment to helping the world's peoples, both nearby and far away. 

The closer you are to the action, the better equipped you are to determine whether your gift is needed and the results of your giving are good. It’s easier to be mindful if you know the people and the terrain. Social entrepreneur Ron Schultz calls it “adjacent opportunities”:

In practicing this level of engagement, we discover that something rather unexpected happens. When we operate from a mindful image of the world we encounter, we see things we might previously have missed. We still bring our causal chain of experience with us, but as we break through the patterned behavior and habitual responses that have influenced it in the past, and add a new and more present way of looking at the world we encounter, the possibility space surrounding us enlarges and we see more within it with greater clarity....

Mindfulness—especially when it comes to those affective bonds we form with our family, friends, and neighbors—changes the dynamic. It changes us. And it is through our experience of taking care of one another that we come fully to understand what it means to be human.

Americans are compassionate, giving people. But we have changed our patterns of contribution. Large sections of our very identities have been blotted out due to the gradual transference of attention away from adjacent opportunities to party politics. How we fit into our communities, what we contribute, and any sense of common purpose has been reduced to virtue posturing and political peacocking. Our agency in context has weakened. 

The welfare state is charity enough for most people in the developed world. Paying one's taxes is *compassion.* Agitating for more welfare programs is *care.* Apart from tossing $20 into someone's GoFundMe campaign, we are hardly Barn Raisers anymore. The Great Plans of the welfare state are not only sending us headlong into insolvency but continue to rob people of opportunities to practice compassion. The people can't be trusted to care for each other, we're told, they're too selfish. Yet, somehow, among those self-same people, there are angels to be discovered, trusted, and installed at the highest echelons of power.

Matters have gotten so bad that millionaires and billionaires make news with open letters: 

"Tax us. Tax us. Tax us." they write in an open letter to which they are signatories. "It is the right choice. It is the only choice."

No single signatory I know of has written an extra check to the U.S. Treasury. Signing an open letter calling for an unlikely political change is a way to seem compassionate without having to be compassionate.

Such moral posturing is another sign of American decline. 

We can all do more, even those who are not millionaires. And we should. If we were all just one-tenth the human being that Oseola McCarty was, our society would be stronger and more resilient. We wouldn't need billionaires to posture. Instead, they could bankroll a hundred thousand experiments in effective giving—not because they were forced to do so by IRS agents, but because it might improve someone's life.

Alas, the welfare-warfare state is now a bipartisan megachurch.

If you turn the conversation to the impending financial collapse, you might as well be messing with the national religion. We need a new secular religion that does not view free enterprise and mutual aid as contradictions.

After the collapse, we will have no choice.

We will have to rediscover compassion, fraternity, and virtue in ourselves.

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