The Way Of Mutual Aid

ACCORDING to the myth of the modern welfare state, the nineteenth century was a lethal battleground in which the poor and the unskilled wandered unprotected and forlorn against the power of employers and landlords. It was an age of take the meager wages or starve; pay the exorbitant rents or sleep out in the streets. There was no social safety net, no compassion, no recourse. The common people were naked before their oppressors.

There is a germ of truth in this. When immigrants to the industrial city arrived, either as peasants direct from rural idiocy, or as emigrants from a far away land, they lacked, initially, the social support system enjoyed by those who are born to the city or who have already struggled their way up from indigence.

But the immigrants were not helpless. They did not risk their lives in a hazardous ocean crossing or abandon their scanty livelihood on the farm to moulder in the city in helpless victimhood. They were determined to thrive, and thrive is what most of them did. In every city throughout the nineteenth century they planted and tended a dense underbrush of social institutions of all kinds, from local government, churches, mutual-aid societies, ethnic associations, labor unions, and service organizations. There was a safety net; it developed spontaneously, powered by the actions of millions of people. It just wasn’t the system of the modern welfare state, a safety net consciously spun and woven by a national political elite and maintained by a national government’s laws and functionaries.

At the center of this social safety net, in the United States and the United Kingdom at least, was a system of fraternal organizations, descended indirectly from medieval guilds, that brought ordinary people together on the basis of some affinity, real or imagined, in which they could organize and deliver mutual-aid and social benefits to each other in a social framework of brotherhood and reciprocity. Because they were not trying to impress anyone, they could indulge themselves with fanciful names and titles: Irishmen could come together in the Ancient Order of Hibernians; blacks in the Grand United Order of Galilean Fishermen; Jews in B’nai B’rith. The British working classes came together in friendly societies, most prominently in the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows and the Ancient Order of Foresters. Americans joined Moose, Elks, Masons, and the transplanted Oddfellows.

At the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States, most people have forgotten the colorful Moose, Elks, and Masons; they drive past their moldering lodges in incomprehension. And yet, at the turn of the twentieth century “everybody” in the city belonged to a fraternal organization. No political philosopher called them out of the ether; no political activist demanded a comprehensive and mandatory subsidy for fraternity. They did not blaze across the nation like itinerant preachers. And yet they grew from nothing in the sixteenth century to ubiquity in the early twentieth century. In the United Kingdom, in 1910, it was estimated that 9 million of the 12 million adult males belonged to a friendly society (Green 1993). In the United States in 1924 it was estimated that 48 percent of working class men in the United States belonged to a fraternal organization. (Beito 2000 p.222) And then they were chopped off at the knees, and replaced by the government welfare state.

Today, the friendly society has dropped off the radar of British society, except for an occasional reference in some Labour politician’s speech praising the contribution of “friendly societies and trades unions” to the socialist movement. In the United States, the great ugly buildings of the fraternal organizations echo with the activities of sub-tenants, the old meeting rooms converted for dance classes. The Oddfellows and Foresters in England, the Elks, the Masons, the Eagles, and the Moose in the United States: what was the point of them? Fifty years to one hundred years ago, such a question would have been unnecessary. Everyone belonged, and everyone understood.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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