Mouth Slop

the like technocratic like managerial elite and like whatever

The essence of technocratic managerialism is the faith that declaration is meaningful. Display arranges essence: a man who puts on a dress and announces new pronouns is a woman. Experts talk about it. They say what is. Why should you wear a mask? Dr. Fauci said so. Why should you stay inside your house this year? Dr. Fauci said so. Why should you inject this novel medical product into your body? Dr. Fauci said so. Our central institutional assumption is that discourse shapes things — literal things, objects responding to mouths. “This is what you have been told, so.”

But here’s the problem with that, or the biggest current problem.

Fifteen years ago, more or less, I stumbled into a topic for a dissertation when I got frustrated and took a walk. I was in Worcester, Massachusetts, working in the archives at the American Antiquarian Society and finding just absolutely nothing at all that answered my question. So I wandered, and passed a decommissioned armory with a sign over the door that said MASSACHUSETTS MILITARY ARCHIVES. They let me poke around, and by the end of the day I was running around with my hair on fire and shouting at everybody that my dissertation was about something else, now.

State militia courts-martial in the opening decades of a new republic recorded every word, in transcripts that could run to hundreds of pages — frequently interspersed with a line that said something like, “Clerk again reminded witnesses to speak slowly.” The dozen officers who made up a militia court weren’t military professionals, but were instead the prominent farmers and craftsmen who were elected to militia office by their townsmen. So transcripts of state military trials were verbatim discussions among something like the most respected farmers of a county, or of this county and the next one over. They were not recorded debates between the great statesmen of the era. And they needed a big room where a dozen men could sit at a long table in front of the parties and the spectators, so state courts-martial tended to convene in taverns.

One more important thing: The formalization of military courts was way in the future, and there wasn’t a professional JAG Corps in the militia to run trials. State courts-martial were a lawyer-free forum. The accuser was expected to “prosecute” his case — to show up and prove the wrongdoing he had claimed to know about. And defendants were expected to personally defend themselves, questioning witnesses and presenting arguments to the court. At the end of testimony, the “prosecutor” and the defendant personally went home to write their own closing statements, and we still have these documents, tied into the back of the trial transcripts with a ribbon. Courts would stop in the evening and resume in the morning, and men accused of military offenses would show up with twenty-page closing statements in their own handwriting, with holes in the page where the pen poked through.

So: a panel of farmers, serving as local militia officers, listening to an argument between farmers who served as local militia officers, in a tavern, and we have a detailed record of every word they said.

They were magnificent. They were clear, thoughtful, fair, and logical. They had no patience at all for dithering or innuendo; they expected a man who accused another man of wrongdoing to get to it, in an ordered and serious way. Witnesses who fudged or evaded ran into a buzzsaw. The officers on the courts would interject with their own questions: Look, captain, did he say it or didn’t he? And then they wanted a serious summary of the evidence, with a consistent argument. Their thinking was structured, and they expected the same of others.

We distinguish between talking and doing, and between talkers and doers. But these men were doers in the hardest sense. Their families starved or thrived because of their work with tools and the skill in their hands. Their food came from their dirt, outside their front door. They mostly weren’t formally educated; they didn’t spend their young lives going to school. They worked, from childhood. And yet they could talk, meaningfully and carefully. They could address a controversy with measured discourse, gathering as a community to assess an institutional failure and organize a logical response. Their talking was another way of doing.

The historian Pauline Maier has written that we think too much of Thomas Jefferson, because we don’t see his cultural context. The Declaration of Independence looks to us like a startling act of political creativity, systematically describing a set of grievances and proposing an ordered response based on a clear philosophy of action. But Jefferson showed up after years of disciplined and thoughtful local proclamations on the crisis, Maier says. He was the national version of a hundred skillful town conventions, standing on the foundation of an ordered society that knew what it believed and what it meant to do about it.

Now, as I’ve said before, read the letter from the selectboard of the Town of Great Barrington to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Here’s the ending:

Your premise dismisses the views of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, as well as those of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization. They have stated that herd immunity is “scientifically and ethically problematic,” “very dangerous” and “total nonsense.”

Great Barrington, as a community, has listened to these experts and remains committed to following the recommended COVID-19 safety protocols. Your declaration’s complete dismissal of the experts and their advice has caused many of our residents considerable alarm. In addressing this concern, as well as the unwanted media attention your declaration has received, we, as a board of elected officials, wish to clearly repudiate your philosophy. We would like to assure the public at large that your beliefs are in no way sanctioned by the Town of Great Barrington, nor was the use of our town name.

Emotionalism, argument from authority, strawmanning, strawmanning, more strawmanning, mistaking the top bureaucrat for the top subject matter expert. You have failed to obey the experts on the pandemic, they wrote to…a gathering of many of the world’s top epidemiologists.

The selectboard, the prominent people elected as the political leaders of a community, can’t think. At all.

My own small town in the Los Angeles suburbs declared recently that we’re structurally insolvent and need new taxes to fund city government — a very few years after we passed a long series of new local taxes. In the same meeting, a city councilmember asked his colleagues to approve the expenditure of $1,000 so he could hold a press conference to tell the world about our leadership on climate change. A resident stood to ask how a thousand-dollar press conference could be reconciled with the message on structural insolvency — and the meeting descended into shouting. Some people are very stupid, the councilman explained. If we don’t spend that money, the climate will continue to become more dangerous. Maybe some people can’t understand that.

I’ve been mostly silent for a few days because I’ve been baffled into muteness by the flood of mouth slop that currently passes for discourse. “Trans Day of Visibility.” I, uh…yeah. Now it’s four o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep. I keep toggling between highly structured and intellectually disciplined courts-martial made up of 19th-century farmers who met in taverns and the world I live in.

So go back to the opening: The essence of technocratic managerialism is the faith that declaration is meaningful. Display arranges essence. Our central institutional assumption is that discourse shapes things. And our discourse is empty, mindless, disordered, and always built on a foundation of emotionalism. I have to spend that taxpayer money to expand my media profile or the climate will keep changing.

So take your pick: Maybe our talkers are so deranged and disconnected from doing that their speech acts don’t connect to the real, anymore. But it seems to me that talking is doing, and the way you talk actually does shape the world in the image of your discourse, to a not-insignificant degree, or that our style of doing and our style of talking are mutually reinforcing. This is maybe a bit of a problem, now.

And now I’m going to try to actually sleep.