“Buy Local” is a mantra familiar to most contemporary consumers. There may be various motivations for the practice: to support a neighborhood economy; to minimize environmental impact; or to enjoy the benefits of fresh food or home-crafted rather than mass-produced items. Related to these reasons is what ought to be the central consideration: the importance of personal relationship. The superiority of personal relationships over impersonal systems extends far beyond commercial transactions. In fact, we should be pushing for “local” in government, education, philanthropy, entertainment, and just about everything else.
Localized government was the ideal of the American system from the beginning. In the colonial period, Puritan farmers in New England, middle-class merchants in Pennsylvania, and wealthy planters in Virginia participated actively in local governments, where most matters that affected daily life were settled. The federal system erected after independence sought to preserve the dispersion of power among national and state governments, ensuring that governing decisions would not be predominantly centralized in a monolithic national authority. These arrangements both allowed and encouraged the involvement of individuals in the making and enforcing of law, giving them control over their own destiny and the responsibility that goes with control. New England town government was not without its faults (e.g., the Salem witch trials), but it worked, by and large, in part because it what based on personal interaction among the interested parties.
Similarly, organized education started as a radically local endeavor. An area’s citizens funded and oversaw the schoolhouses their children attended and the teachers who instructed them. This has been preserved to some extent, with many decisions left to local school boards and primary jurisdiction for educational matters left to states. But local control has been eroded here, too, as school districts have gotten larger, state mandates increasingly tie the hands of school boards, and federal involvement has preempted state control in many areas. Decisions that affect the individual parent, student, or teacher are often made by officials located far away— if the decisionmaker can even be identified within a vast educational bureaucracy. Deprived of the possibility of personal engagement in decision making, school stakeholders are left with a feeling of powerlessness and infantilization.
The problem has even infected the impressive and enviable American charitable sector. As philanthropy has been professionalized and nationalized, personal relationships have declined in importance. National organizations raise large sums of money using empirically proven methods, but donors lose the sense of reciprocity that comes with giving to community organizations headed by people they know.
All of these are general points that must be qualified. Some functions must by their nature be national in scope. Some commercial, governmental, and charitable activities do gain efficiency and effectiveness by increasing in scale. “Small” isn’t necessarily synonymous with “personal,” nor “large” with “impersonal.” In some instances, impersonal transactions are preferable to personal ones.
But the generalizations remain true. Robust personal involvement—where people come to know each other well and genuinely care about each other—comes more easily in relationships that are geographically near rather than distant. Smaller institutions that cultivate personal relationships tend to be more responsive and less sclerotic than big ones, which must of necessity rely more on systems of rules and procedures than individual judgment and adaptation.
National policies and personalities will always have an attraction because they seem “more important,” but the fact is that most of us have little control over them. What we can influence is our local culture, economy, and politics. As we refocus on our own communities and deal with our own neighbors, we may find that charity and decency find their way back into our civil discourse.
