The Community Course
Part 4 - Concluding Observations
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25. The Larger Community

Maintaining Perspective
Interest in the small community as the primary social group should not imply that other groups are not important. Because this primary social group has been largely ignored and neglected, with resulting vital danger to the stability and quality of society, explicit emphasis on the small community has been greatly needed. But the aim of that emphasis should be to correct a deficiency, not to eliminate interest in larger social groups. The continuity of the primary community in health, vigor, and well-proportioned development is essential to social health, yet the primary community is too small a social unit to make possible the fulfillment of human destiny. Only as both individuals and primary communities are associated in a great interwoven complex of relations, institutions, and organization can the vast possibilities of human existence be realized.

There should be free and full acceptance of larger relationships wherever they can advance the range and quality of life. The need of the primary community is to discover the place it can fill and the functions it can exercise better than any other group, and to become excellently qualified in those, encouraging and supporting other units wherever they are more effective.

Power of Small Group Influence
No matter how high a level society may reach, there will continue to be vast differences in natural ability, experience and skill. Sometimes, but not always, exceptional ability should have the widest possible range of action. There are cases where even great ability can be most effective with small groups. Exceptional parents may have the greatest total influence by deeply impressing great character upon the children of their own family, rather than by having slight influence over a very large number of children. A great teacher may do his best work by very intimately transmitting his spirit to a few students. The founder of Christianity was able to transmit his teachings, not chiefly because he spoke to the multitude, but because he lived intimately with twelve disciplines, and gave them an intense and intimate acquaintance with his spirit. In many cases a person may do their best work by concentrating his or her efforts in a small community, thereby bringing about a penetrating and fairly complete perpetuation of his or her own quality, whereas if his or her influence had been country-wide it might have been superficial and might quickly fade away.

Exceptional People and Community Influence
Very generally, however, the larger units of society can make best use of exceptional excellence. Copernicus was wise in spreading his ideas before the whole world in a book. In his village his great concept might have died. Mendel’s epoch-making discoveries in the principles of heredity were published only in a local journal, and not one of his local readers combined the insight to get the significance of his great work and the vigor to transmit it. So his discoveries lay unknown for decades. Long after his death copies of the local journal fell into the hands of two scientists far away. Because of that fortunate discovery, Mendel stands probably next to Darwin at the head of nineteenth-century biologists. Have there been other great men or women whose work entirely perished because their neighbors could not understand and perpetuate it? 

For the transmission of deep-seated character and of a way of life, long-time, intimate, first-hand association with a few people, with the gradual spreading of that way of life from group to group, far and near, often is most effective. Widespread dissemination is often best for the transmission of intellectual concepts, especially such as can be grasped by only a few men and women. 

Contributions of Larger Communities
Yet even such a statement is insufficient, for, through the process of organization, limited changes in ways of living can be enforced for very large numbers. National bank examiners, who presumably are exceptionally able, experienced, and well-trained men and women, may visit large numbers of individual banks, and enforce standards of practice which relatively few individual bankers could achieve by themselves. State departments of education, directed presumably by the ablest educators in the state, prescribe or pass upon the design of school buildings, the qualifications of teachers, the quality of textbooks, and the general range of the curriculum. That centralized supervision, while it may put an enterprising school system in a straitjacket, probably has improved the general level of instruction.

A striking case of the superiority of large social units over small is in the building of public roads. Three quarters of a century ago road making in the northern states was largely in the hands of local authorities. Township officials largely determined road making policy, and often farmers "worked out their taxes” on the roads. Under this system America was said to have the worst roads of any civilized country. Local officials lacked standards, skill, equipment, and discipline. Their road administration was in contempt throughout the country.

Then gradually the building of roads and bridges was taken over by counties, and there was marked improvement in road making, though inefficiency and graft were notorious, and there was little long-range planning. With the coming of the automobile, road making was largely assumed by the states, definite standards and plans were developed, and while graft and favoritism were not unknown, road making became a fairly well-developed art, with efficient administration. 

Then the federal government began to contribute to the cost of state roads on condition that it determine the standards of road making, and again the develop­ment of highways reached a new level of quality and efficiency. A single group of specialists, working in the Office of Public Roads in Washington, could carry on research, could make designs, and could enforce standards of planning, of contracting, and of construction for the entire country. In general, in the case of highways, the more centralized the administration, the better have been the results. 

Limits of Larger Community
Yet there is a limit even to this process. Local country roads and village streets, which probably carry much of the greater part of the total traffic, still are under the supervision of local governing boards. For the central government to try to administer all these minute details would result in a vast cumbersome bureaucracy and in a killing of local initiative. Only by experience and judgment can the best distribution of administration be made between various degrees of centralization and localization. 

The small community can be the testing laboratory and the nursery for society. There, on a small scale, men and women can actually live by the good will, mutual respect and confidence, helpfulness, tolerance, and neighborliness, which are the ideal of all human society. There, and almost there only, men and women can become indoctrinated in their early years with those qualities that are the foundation of society, and can carry those qualities with them into larger relationships. 

The larger units can unify and coordinate efforts. They can raise the standards of backward local units. And they can keep the peace among the smaller units, as the United States keeps the peace between the states, the states between the counties, and the county and other regional governments between the local communities. Large units teach people to think large. A Swiss once remarked to an American, in discussing relatively simple construction methods in Switzerland, “It is hard for a person to think large in a small country.”  

Not only in public affairs are large units necessary. Modern American Industry could not have originated in a small country, and is possible only because both producers and consumers are organized on a vast scale. The meeting of highly specialized wants is possible only by large scale organization. One can buy books on very specialized subjects, extremely specialized scientific apparatus, anti-venom for rattlesnake bites, rag paper editions of the New York Times for library files, and numberless other products used by very few persons in any community. They are accessible to us because our life is organized on so vast a scale. 

Development of Political Units
American political units have had very arbitrary beginnings. States grew almost by chance out of individual colonies, and their boundaries were fixed by the limits of transportation, the density of population when they were established, or the desire of the dominant political party to get additional votes in the Senate. Counties were determined largely by the distance one could travel to and from the county seat by horseback or by train and wagon. Six-mile-square townships were a rough, arbitrary approximation to the natural community units of Europe. Villages were arbitrarily and unwisely separated from the tributary farm country, partly by practical limitations of fire and police protection and school attendance, and partly by the accidents of growth.

It remains for American society to reconstruct its political units so that they will represent the needs and realities of the present day. State lines are arbitrary and often inefficiently located. The New Deal administration lost a great opportunity in the unprecedented expansion of federal activities by not assembling these with regional and sub-regional headquarters, making in fact regional sub-­capitals for federal functions.  Instead of recognizing and perpetuating the present very wasteful excess number of counties, sub-regional federal centers should have been set up, which would tend to become the determining centers of regional governments. By such a program, states and counties would tend in time to become empty shells, and a new and vital regionalism could have developed.

Extending the Community Boundaries
In such a process the local community would shed its arbitrary limits of political boundaries of village and country. People who use the same major facilities for living - schools, stores, banks, churches, shipping centers, recreation centers, and communication centers for mail and telephone - would be recognized as true communities, and would be organized as such. Often there would be neighborhoods or sub-communities, intermediate between the community and the family, which would be organized for those activities and interests which such a small group could serve better than any other. 

If the federal government continues to fail in its opportunity to assemble its many functions into practicable regions and sub-regions, based on careful study of the realities, then the process may begin at the other end. Individual communities may first define carefully their own natural areas and limits. They may then begin to associate themselves together in natural groups, even though those groups do not conform to traditional county lines. Little by little this re-crystallization of American society about natural centers, into families, neighborhoods, communities, sub-regions, regions, and the nation, should give our life a vital integration far superior to the present arbitrary and outmoded divisions. 

And so, continuing beyond the nation, the principle of functional regionalism, of associating together in whatever groupings best serve the common good, may well apply among the nations when it results in free associations of nations, drawn together by mutual need and interest, not forced together by coercion. Yet, no matter how far this process is carried, it generally will be found that those people who have a sound, wholesome sense of fellowship, of tolerance, of mutual regard and cooperation, will have developed these underlying traits in their early years, by being infected with them in the intimate associations of small communities, or from people who were thus infected. The community is the primary social group, not only in being historically first, but also in being first in importance.