“Real community” is the solution . . . so what is it?
First of all: Let’s talk about what the problem is.
Regarding the idea that there’s a difference between “first world” problems and “third world” problems . . . there’s some truth to that, though ultimately all humans have the same deep needs and thus, ultimately (as Gandhi said) the solutions are the same. Under current circumstances third world countries are particularly marginalized, exploited, and oppressed. They face distinctive immediate problems re: nutrition, healthcare, educational and employment opportunities, autocratic government, etc.
[Young people ask: Where’s the “second world”?? The answer is that it’s gone. It was the Communist bloc of countries during the middle of the 20th century. It had its own distinctive issues. See:
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/339-spring-1992/the-triumph-of-capital/ ]
For most Americans — in our own, “first world,” relatively well-off, relatively privileged, culture and society — the main, viscerally felt problems are not material. Few of us lack food. There is a general surfeit of stuff. Our complaint is not “exploitation” in the Marxian sense (i.e., “the capitalists don’t pay us the full value of our labor”). Lack of health insurance coverage is a significant social problem, but ninety percent of us do have some extent of coverage. Ditto for employment.
For most of us, the main problems are associated with the more subtle, yet pervasive, conditions of atomized, consumer-oriented, hyper-individualistic lifeways. In other words, we lack community and a sane grounding in communitarian values.
However . . . in regard to the solution, there is faux community and there is real community.
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Any anthropological or historical examination of the human condition makes it clear that we’re meant to live in collectives. Given that, the question becomes one of scale. The nation-state is too big and the nuclear family is too small.
On the one hand, the conflation of the modern nation-state with the idea of community is absurd. To the extent that that’s not appreciated it becomes a source of confusion: “I feel like an American, I want to identify with my people, but I don’t really have a sense of agency within the commonwealth.” People are inclined toward thinking in terms of community, in terms of “We,” but collectivity at that scale is ridiculous. And not healthy. Nationalism is a very different phenomenon from communitarianism.
On the other hand, our current circumstances are such that our material and emotional sustenance derives too much from the nuclear family. In this case the sense of “We” is too limited. Interactions and dependencies are too intense, putting stress on the Significant Other relationship and the parent-child relationships. In a tribe or a village or small town (or, now, in a cohousing community) the younger generation that provides a sense of transcendence is primarily our own kids, and the cousins, but also to some degree the cohort of the whole community. If we are familiar with the children of the neighbors, if there’s stability and the kids all grow up together and we interact with them, if we have some real shared childcare responsibilities among us . . . preciousness is not so terribly concentrated in our own. That’s a benefit of real community.
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The intermediate scale of the tribe, village, small town, or ecovillage neighborhood is the context for lifeways embedded in real community. That scale is conducive to direct, personal resource sharing and responsibility sharing. At that scale people can eat meals together on a regular basis — an important bonding experience.
In regard to governance: The New Left of the sixties called for a deeper form of democracy, beyond casting a ballot every couple of years. A participatory kind of democracy — where We make decisions together for our collective — is possible when the collective numbers in the thousands rather than the millions.
A simple example: In a real community the issue of reliable times for peace and quiet can be raised, discussed, and decided upon. Noise from children playing or machinery operating can be relegated to set time periods. Ecovillages do that. At that scale it can be agreed upon on the basis of collective decision-making. Want to try to get your municipal or county or state or national government to enact “quiet times during the day” legislation? Good luck.
A real community could foster self-governance and “holding up the sky” interdependence. Members could stop allocating most of their work-time to outside institutions. The maintenance of households and the sustenance of the community-as-a-whole requires plenty of work. At the proper scale, We can have control over our division of labor; We can collectively and straightforwardly assess needs and then allocate tasks in order to get the necessary work accomplished. No one has to be relegated to one task done all the time as a job. No one has to be timed, confined, or remunerated with a paycheck.
Institutions are prone to work-padding. In that sense they’re not actually all so efficient. In a real community it would be to everyone’s advantage to try to efficiently minimize the work. Work-reduction would be a logical goal.
In an ecovillage or cohousing community most needs could be met through exchange of services and produce in-kind. People would sustain each other by working together. With a direct perception of what needs to be done and a personal familiarity with the circumstances of community members, the collective can be sensitive to the issue of life-balance. It could strive to make the work-that-really-needs-to-be-done convivial and fulfilling. Tasks could be varied. Much work could be done in teams. Such a paradigm results in quite a different feeling from the alienated labor done for impersonal institutions. The contributions of individuals are visible, acknowledged, and appreciated.
Child rearing and the “education” function could be handled much differently from what we know as the norm in modern mass society. Children could start doing simple chores for the community at age six or seven. It’s beneficial for them to start taking on responsibility at an early age. Most cultures throughout history have perceived that children can be wonderfully productive by the time they’re twelve.
Enlightened future people will chastise us for segregating children from the family and community into the isolated, artificial make-work institutions called schools. By doing so we withhold from them the natural and genuine esteem that comes from being recognized as productive members of society.
The modern problem in regard to “child labor” is attributable to the fact that the institutional paradigm is prone to exploitation. Some exploitation can occur within any milieu, of course, but it’s a generalized problem — for adults and children, alike — within the context of impersonal institutions. When no one in particular is closely watching, as is often the case in mass society, irresponsibility is rampant. Within a real community context, how can children be protected from work exploitation — without a government agency enforcing laws against it? — the answer is simple: neighbors are watching.
Until the advent of compulsory schooling during the 19th century, how did children learn what they needed to know to function and thrive? Paul Goodman: “Until quite recently, most education occurred incidentally. Adults did their work and other social tasks. The children were not excluded.” He asserted that participation by, contribution from, and integration of the young into the social/productive life of the community could most effectively yield the “educational” desiderata that our schools strive for but too often fail to achieve: knowledge, character, and esteem. Learning, he said, flows from interaction with adults and peers within a context of common, socially valued activity.
Within mass institutional-technological society, the vital functions of growing up have become hermetically redefined in school terms. The young rarely see adults involved in their productive activities. The institutional simulations set up as part of “educational curricula” in schools are artificial and solipsistic. Under those conditions, students feel that their objective is to become expert in the academic process. Goodman: “. . . the young discoverers are inclined to discover what will get them past the College Board examinations.”
Community-based education requires that the work life of adults, as a matter of course, includes “apprentice attention time.” Just as children most thrive within families where the parents give them real responsibilities, treat them as valued co-contributors, and help them to become such, so would the young learn best by having community members attend to the educational function organically within the course of everyday activity. People would have to give up their preoccupation with productivity values. “Bottom line” efficiency would be sacrificed to the extent that adult workers make time to, in essence, nurture younger workers — through demonstrating, guiding, monitoring, appraising.
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Paul Goodman: “Let’s get kids out from within those institutional walls. Let’s liberate them from their social segregation and enable them to take their place as community members.” I think that should apply to everyone, young and old alike. For adults it means giving up dependencies upon The System. We should direct our attention to and allocate our personal and social resources to a collective that can provide the real and deep meaning, life-satisfaction, and transcendence that humans crave.
Real community as a social-transformational alternative: We could more readily learn to live within limits and recognize balances. We could reconceptualize what constitutes “the good life.” In place of consumption and acquisition could be the satisfactions of relationships — with a stable group of familiar others, with a particular place-on-earth, with the broader natural community of beings.
What E. F. Schumacher called “right livelihood” flows from the organic sustenance of real community life, where our social and territorial domains-of-life are local, bounded, human-scale, and manageable. Thus, the key to “saving the planet,” and saving ourselves, may ultimately lie more at the micro level than the macro. Family / extended family / community is the age-old social context conducive to personal responsibility, healthy behavior, groundedness, and peace.
