OUTLINES OF TOMORROW
Now that we barely begin to understand what it will mean to reconstitute the world — not the one we know from the past, but the one that can be shaped in the future — certain ideas begin to be interesting.
One is the dividing of this huge continental nation into areas, maybe four or six, which they have already done for themselves, reacting to their ecosystems and the politics created by the earth itself. Our state systems are too confined by their pasts and our nation as a whole appears to be too big to govern in a sensible unified way.
Another source of division is the shift from boundaries as outside edges of state to the dynamic of the city as a center from which systems extend. Like ecosystems, they are already here, in tension between two systems of population.
Another source of order is that of “classes” that happen socially, economically, culturally and which have in the past been considered a “ladder” that could be traveled up or down, but now appears to be interrupted so it’s hard to come up but easy to fall down.
Two sources of order — meaning systems that connect and determine much of what happens — are known but not really — that is, they exist semi-secretly most of the time. One is what are called “mafias” but are sometimes political parties of white-collar crime with intent of blackmail and theft, and other times the business of war and its materials. The second is sexwork, which has always existed but not as elaborately as it is now with sex being the dominant trope of the merchandizing world and with the existence of so many versions. There is a global network from elite to predatory.
Other systems that both unite and divide us are the kind of and access to food, and the transportation of goods and ourselves across continents and seas. Intertwined are the electrical grid and the satellite-support for electronic communication, which depend upon wealth and access to resources. Hacking these systems is a new kind of war.
I’m intrigued by Patrick Wyman’s notion of the “gentry.”
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/american-gentry
“Pretty much anywhere you have a hierarchical form of social organization and property ownership, a gentry class of some kind emerges: the local civic elites of the Roman Empire, the landlords of later Han China, the numerous lower nobility of late medieval France, the thegns of Anglo-Saxon England, the Prussian Junkers, or the planter class of the antebellum South.”
“. . .Gentry are, by definition, local elites. The extent to which they wield power in their localities, and how they do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime.”
I take this category to be roughly the equivalent of we have called the “middle class” or the bourgeois. In Valier old-timers can name the families who have defined a few decades according to their businesses from tradesmen to tavern owners to car dealers to small stores. The most important small town “gentry” families shift according to the development of this irrigation town, but there are no castles — just grain elevators which may be outmoded.
Wyman’s grasp of history is full of ideas. A most startling element is what he calls “the right to violence” on the part of Medieval people who could afford men-at-arms and hired soldiers. This is certainly a entitlement being re-asserted now by cities and morally united protesting groups. I want to know much more about it.
“The greater the level of social inequality, the more prominent the gentry class — the group that owns the resources — tends to become in economic and political life.” This is sharply relevant to our situation.
Wyman’s anchor point is the city of Yakima in Washington state. My cousin is married to a lawyer there, a stable and humane man and their life is good, I guess, but I’m estranged from them because my lifestyle and convictions are so different. I’m just not relevant, though I suppose it would be possible to build a relationship through dealing with tribal and environmental issues.
At an early point they were in Browning as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. They know how stuff works here as well as there. They are between the old ag culture and the new urban ways. I’m reluctant to name this lawyer without his permission, but some people would know who I’m talking about. They knew an entirely different set of Blackfeet than I do. I knew the parents of the best students from teaching and the town drunks from Bob Scriver dealing with them as city magistrate. They knew councilmen and “chiefs”.
The 7th graders of 1961 are the managers and BIA officials now. They do their own resource management, hire their own lawyers, and created their own bank. They manage a respectable herd of buffalo. Sometimes “they” are the grandchildren of those 7th graders, which gives me a strong sense of the passage of time. Twenty years of national corruption and diversion is nothing against fifty years of growth and change. They are part of the tribal response to the pandemic by pushing vaccination and wearing masks, even across the border into Canada.
We will come out of all this. The gentry like my Yakima cousin who is now in his seventies may not see the end of it, but they will be interlocutors for the forces that conflict with each other, and their son will see the end of it. I’d be curious to know what the “gentry” will be like and whether the “mafias” had by then lost their “right to violence” because of income equity.
