Community and Freedom 2 – April 2, 2019
The Vast Sweep of History
So many people today say they long for a greater sense of community. What is it they want? What are they lacking? In the broadest sense, what is community and why do we want it?
Most humans, as far back as we can trace human beings, have lived in groups, in communities. This is our basic way of being; it seems to be our basic nature. Being in groups is so much a part of us that it is fairly impossible to imagine humans in any other way. Further, going back to time out of mind, most of our communities were determined by where we lived—people who lived around us made up our community.
For many, there was a strong kinship factor in determining who constituted one’s community, but the top factors were, to borrow a marketing phrase, “location, location, location.” From the time one came into the world, your community was made up of the people who lived near you.
Another important factor was that, for thousands of years, there were not many humans on the planet, and we were spread out over the globe, and, since changing the place one lived was difficult, communities were coherent over time and mostly made up of those who had the same ethnicity. People did move, but mostly as groups, carrying their community with them. When wars and natural disasters came along, those who were forced to move as individuals usually had a hard time, especially if they couldn’t find another group to join—which was not an easy matter.
There were, of course, many migrations through the centuries, with groups of people carrying along their communities and cultures with them. But focusing on North America around 500 years ago, its settlement was different in many ways, especially in scope, variety, and the way the ideas of individuality and personal freedom created a new form of identity.
The vastness of North America and its many natural advantages made it seem to early immigrants like a land of boundless opportunity, a “new Eden,” so the great migration began. But unique in the American experiment, as Colin Woodard makes vivid in his book American Nations, eleven different cultural groups began settling North America during the same period of time, each bringing with them their cultures and their own ways of being in community. Each of these eleven groups were different, had different cultures and values, and each was able to establish a base of power. Each developed somewhere in North America a place where they implanted their original ideas and beliefs and where these views, to a great extent, have maintained dominance to this day.
Beyond these eleven transplanted cultures that developed a continuing power center, large numbers of slaves from varying cultural backgrounds were brought here as well. These enslaved people were not able to develop independent centers of power in which they could maintain their cultural traditions intact, but they did bring with them many of their beliefs and traditions, and they integrated many of these into the cultures in which they were forced to live.
Finally, the numerous waves of immigrants encountered large native populations that had their own sophisticated communities and cultures. But a gigantic disaster befell these earlier settlers—the immigrants from Europe brought with them diseases to which the natives had no immunity. Without doubt, America would be vastly different today if not for the epidemics that ensued, which killed as many as 90% of the people already living in the Americas. Some died from fighting, as the Europeans systematically took the lands of these earlier peoples, but most died from the epidemics that destroyed their ability to defend their homelands. In a scant few years, impressive cultures that had developed over long stretches of time were devastated by disease, their ability to resist invasion collapsed, and they were overrun and destroyed.
Scholars now estimate a range of 60 to 112 million people living in all of the Americas before 1492, compared to around 80 million in all of Europe. Absent this dramatic death toll from disease among these earlier people, the European immigrants would have had to adapt to the powerful kingdoms that were already here. But because of the great dying, the new arrivals were able to establish their own cultures and ways of being in America.
Racing on through history, each of these eleven immigrant cultures developed a power base in North America, and each established communal patterns along the lines of their ancestral traditions. These eleven ways of being in community were different from each other, and if you add to this the differing ideas and structures of community among the native peoples, as well as that of the large numbers of slaves brought here against their will, the result is thirteen distinctly different communal ways of being, all vying for a place of prominence and power in the same land. No wonder we have struggled to find our way in trying to live together. (Both the native and the enslaved peoples had many different communal structures within their various tribal groups, but I will not try to explore that here.)
As these thirteen communal cultures tried to find their way forward, first in their own power centers and then as they spread out and began to encounter each other, many changes unfolded. First, different from the previous worlds they had inhabited, in this new land the frontier always beckoned, so people moved on much more frequently than had been the case in their old worlds. Second, there was no strong central government or religious authority over the whole country, so local communities had much more power and more leeway to go their own way than had been true of most places in the past. Third, as these groups started to run into each other, they mostly accepted that they were part of the same “country” (except for the native peoples and the enslaved peoples), so the eleven immigrant groups did not usually have hot wars for supremacy against each other (the bloody Civil War being the one major exception). Instead, to a great extent they intermingled, while vying for power within the established political and cultural systems that each locale had established for itself. Fourth, absent a strong central government or a ruling aristocracy, local voluntary groups formed in each community to handle many of the functions necessary for communal life, and these groups offered a means for members of the various cultural traditions to cooperate and mingle with each other. This process was not perfect, of course, but it often worked well enough to create successful communities.
Thus, when Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America (his observations about traveling around the United States in the early 1830’s, and still one of the most insightful books ever written about the country), he highlighted the incredible number of community groups doing important things, and how the people in America spent a great deal of time volunteering to do the things needed by the communities, as well as how people were quick to help each other in various ways. This, of course, is the very heart of successful community as it developed in North America.
And the breakdown of this joining and serving communal spirit is one of the major problems we face today. In 1953, Robert Nisbet wrote The Quest for Community, in which he noted the beginning of this breakdown—the weakening of what he called intermediate groups (civic clubs, sports teams, recreational groups, cohesive church groups, school-centered organizations, etc.). Nisbet argued that this gradual breakdown of intermediate groups beginning after World War II was the greatest single cause of the problems the U. S. was beginning to face—and which have magnified many times over since his day.
Another change agent consisted of the new currents set in motion by World Wars I & II, and we are still trying to integrate the results. One set of problems was pointed out by David Riesman and his co-authors in The Lonely Crowd, A Study of the Changing American Character (considered by some the most influential book of the twentieth century). In it, the authors observed that the United States was gradually becoming a country where people looked to others for self-validation, but at a superficial level. More and more people were measuring their success by the accumulation of consumer goods and material possessions, rather than by inner values or allegiance to traditions and established values. The authors suggest that as more and more Americans looked to others for approval at the superficial level, the result was greater narcissism and increasing deficiencies in communal leadership, individual self-knowledge, and the true fulfillment of the deeper potentials of an individual life. And ironically, this led to the decline of community spirit as well.
Then, in 2000, Robert D. Putnam chronicled in Bowling Alone the continuing breakdown of healthy communal life experienced by an increasing number of Americans. He observed that people were less and less likely to walk around their neighborhoods and talk to each other, but instead were closing their doors (and often their minds and communal hearts) and retreating into their private, heat-controlled spaces, and focusing their attention on the television screen rather than other people.
Moving to the present, many commentators today are noting an explosion in the number of us who are increasingly closed off to others, gluing our attention instead to our personal screens and listening devices, leading to a world of diminishing personal connections and to a great lessening of the communal spirit of service.
All these changes, plus many others, have resulted in over a half million homeless people wandering the streets of the United States, rampant reports of sexual abuse, and epidemics of stress and loneliness. Not that long ago, it was reported that the average person in the United States had at least three people they felt deeply connected to and could talk to about their deepest problems and issues. That number is now an average of less than one. And a recent survey indicated that a majority of Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel “left out.” These are likely some of the reasons that estimates have suggested that in the U.S. in 2017:
42 million adults met the criteria for alcohol use disorder;
45 million had some form of anxiety disorder;
57 million consumed opioids (not all were abusing them, but a significant number were);
40 million had been prescribed antidepressants (and many more felt depressed but were not being treated by a physician);
100 million were obese;
And there were 45,000 recorded suicides (with the actual number being much higher, for a lot of people die from behaviors that can be interpreted in various ways, and families are often reluctant to report deaths as suicides).
The above comments are much too short to do justice to the whole picture. But hopefully it will serve as a framework for thinking about our problems today, how we got to this place, and what we might do now to solve our problems—which will be the topic of the remaining chapters.
Reflection: Take a few moments and think about all the reasons you feel there are so many problems in the United Sates, and in all modern societies today. How did we get to this place?
Take care,
David