Good evening,
Community and Freedom 3 – April 9, 2019
(This is the 3rd in a series. The first two parts can be found here – Community and Freedom, Community and Freedom 2)
How Did We Get Where We Are?
Most humans, for 10’s of thousands of years, have lived in groups. This seems to be our basic nature. We are communal creatures. Further, for most of our history, our human communities were based on where we lived – our communities were made up of those who lived close to us.
The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has researched the nature and natural size of groups, and drawing from his work (and over-simplifying it), my summary of the numbers is:
5 – the number of people we have the time and energy to be really close to;
15 – the number of truly intimate friends we have the capacity to maintain;
50 – our capacity for fairly close friends who are not true intimates;
100 to 200 – we can remember and keep up with about this many causal friends;
500 – we can have about this many acquaintances, with whom we have some contact:
1500 – very roughly, we can remember the names and faces of around this number of people.
Obviously, these numbers are averages, and will vary for each of us, but they give a sense of how our minds and emotions tend to work. Further, the research suggests these numbers have provided a basic framework for how we have organized ourselves and our communities for thousands of years, from tribal groups, to neighborhoods in cities, to military organizations. (For example, these numbers fit nicely with the way many militaries have been organized for centuries; taking the U.S. military as an example, the structure consists of squads, platoons, companies, battalions and brigades, roughly fitting the chart above.) Of course, the individuals who make up a group can change, but if there is sufficient continuity of membership, a group identity can continue over long periods of time, as it does with many families, tribes, neighborhoods, military units, and countries.
Another example of how the tendency toward these typical group sizes influences behavior comes from a long time ago, during the period larger towns were being created. As a town expanded, people began thinking of themselves as part of specific neighborhoods within that town. Consider Tokyo. I remember visiting in the mid 1980’s; it was one of the largest cities in the world, but the guide books said you had to think of it as thousands of neighborhoods. Many of the neighborhoods resisted having street signs (and the houses were not numbered sequentially, but according to when they were built), because the people in the neighborhoods knew where everyone lived, where the local restaurants were, and interacted frequently with each other, so they did not need signs – and putting up signs and orderly street numbers would have made it easier for outsiders to barge in looking for restaurants, shops, and the like. Similarly, in London only a couple of decades ago, that great city seemed to be made up of many, many neighborhoods, each with its own school, a church or two, and a local pub (which was often the heart of that community). This neighborhoodness is still true to a certain extent in both these cities, and many others, but as people move more and more often, this is changing.
As is true everywhere, in the U.S. most everyone has always lived in communities. The new land had more individualism and a greater spirit of independence than most places in the old world, but still, people gathered together in communities: farming communities, ranching towns, small merchant towns built around natural ports, convenient river landings, mining operations, railroad junctions, and crossroads of various sorts.
To make these towns work, for they had little central government authority, people formed civic clubs, sports teams, recreational groups, church congregations, school-centered organizations, and many other local groups to provide structures to carry on communal tasks and to facilitate participation in community life. Because people moved more frequently in the U.S., groups began to form around special interests (knitting, tennis), rather than just where they lived, around a project or goal (improve the school, help the poor), or around a practice (meditation, singing) – and many of these groups evolved into communities. Many shared Dorothy Day’s hard-won realization: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” People also intuitively felt, as David W. Orr put it, “Our true destiny … is a world built from the bottom up by competent citizens living in solid communities, engaged in and by their places.”
One crucial factor in communal life in all times and locales was that children were taught to support and give to the groups to which they belonged; to serve their groups, whether they were family, community, club, tribe, country, or several of these at once. For most human beings through the ages, to give and serve was automatic, almost second nature, a powerful force (although enculturated and to a great extent subconsciously maintained).
Following this enculturation (and sometimes conscious choice), countless millions have sacrificed an incredible amount of time, energy, money – and even their lives – to help individuals and their groups in times of war, natural disaster, famine, plague, or when sickness struck members of the family, neighborhood, or those with whom they felt a connection. Some have even made great sacrifices for strangers, or even animals, through a feeling of kinship with all other beings. All this led John Gardner (chaired Professor at Stanford Business School) to write: “We know that where community exists it confers upon its members identity, a sense of belonging, and a measure of security,” and “Communities are the ground-level generators and preservers of values and ethical systems. The ideals of justice and compassion are nurtured in communities.”
Getting in touch with these deep currents makes it easier to understand the dilemmas we face in the modern world. In the United States today, these bonding forces are fraying, and have been for a long time. Many factors contributed. America was settled as a land of new opportunity, and the frontier always beckoned. If things weren’t going well, you moved on, so people kept moving more and more often. This reinforced the already significant current of individualism, which has always been present in human nature, but was especially strong in early America. And modernity has greatly increased the strength of this current in us.
Next, the early communication revolution, especially the telephone, changed the way we interact with each other. The telephone was a great blessing, but it is very different to talk to someone by phone as opposed to in person. Something was gained, but something was lost as well.
Simultaneously, there was the transportation explosion, and our communities no longer had to be the people we lived close to, but could be made up of those who lived at much greater distances. A great gain, but at the same time, this led to the breakdown of one of the ages-old foundations of community – proximity. Then came radio and TV, and as Robert D. Putnam observed, people were less and less likely to walk around the neighborhood talking to each other, but instead closed their doors and isolated themselves in their private, heat-controlled houses, focusing their attention on the television screen rather than other people.
Another impactful development was that people were changing jobs more and more frequently, partly because of a desire to find greener pastures and partly due to an increasing emphasis on the bottom line within companies. Rather than making the effort to create a culture within the workplace that valued team effort and the importance of long-term employees, some companies edged toward a model of internal competition and a turnover of workers. As a result, jobs became less secure, and many who had felt a sense of belonging at the workplace felt more and more isolated from their coworkers and alienated from their employers. And as people felt less valued and secure at the workplace, the powerful sense of belonging to a community there eroded for them.
Still another factor was that as prosperity increased after World War II, and communities were breaking down, children increasingly became the center of attention for many parents. This was very good in some ways, but also led to an increasing self-centeredness for ever-higher percentages of those raised after WWII. (Not all, by any means, but higher and higher percentages.) Children were less likely to be taught that they should give, serve, and sacrifice for their communities. (What group was one to give to, anyway, since group identities were breaking down.) Thus, many young people were encouraged to be more individualistic, “be all you can be,” “do your own thing,” “follow your bliss,” “be who you are,” and “find your answers for yourself.” The natural drive for individuality, autonomy, self-fulfillment, and personal sovereignty became a greater and greater force in many lives. More and more of us became focused on “finding our bliss” rather than serving our group.
Finally, the 21st century brought forth an explosion in the use of the internet, with social media and on-line gaming occupying increasing amounts of the time and attention for millions. This too has been a great blessing, but the cost to our lives and especially to our connection to others, and to the health of our communities, is still to be determined.
All these changes and several others have led to the modern difficulties we face, and at times the problems seem so great that it is easy to become nostalgic for an idealized past. To recreate the fantasized past, however, is not an option. There are many, many factors and forces at play in the modern world – some that work for good, and some whose results are not so good – but we do not have the power to roll back time. Nor should we want to. Our task is to find the best way forward, incorporating the best of the new while reclaiming some of the valuable things we have lost.
Thought experiment: What other factors come to mind that have set in motion the problems of the modern world? Take a moment and get in touch with any thoughts you might have about the best way to begin solving these problems.
Take care, David