Chapter 2

Speech Creates Society

Community vs. Society

Space vs. Solitude

Natural Community Behavior

Small Groupings

Anthropology and Small Community

Homesteading and Isolation

Destruction of Community

Unnatural Isolation

Community Must Be Taught

Organizing for Spirit

Instincts and Community

Impulse of Community

A Person is a Community Animal

Questions

The Community Course
Part 1 - The Significance of the Community
Part  1   2   3   4      Chapter 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9


2. Man Is a Community Animal

 


Points to cover

  • Man is a social creature, physically and mentally, and does best in varied groups limited to a certain size.

  • If Man does not have community, he will attempt to build it.

  • In modern day America, the “community” often is based on economics or chance, not what is best.

  • In general, the older a culture the more integrated and satisfying its version of community.

  • A true community must be limited in size to allow for unification of the members.

 

Speech Creates Society
Biologically humans are at least social creatures. A person's throat and mouth are formed to facilitate delicately modulated speech, and that speech is a trait of social and not of solitary animals. A man or woman by himself or herself is not a normal organism, but only in relations with others.

Community vs. Society
In mental constitution people are community creatures. They are more than social animals. Cattle and horses, when living wild on the plains, may thrive in vast undifferentiated herds of thousands of individuals. They are social animals, but apparently not to any marked degree community animals. People live best in integrated groups of limited size. They crave community life, not simply social life.

Space vs. Solitude
People can become adjusted to almost any kind of life and may be so habituated to it that any change to a different mode of life is extremely unpleasant. New York slum dwellers on being transferred to rural communities often find the new life unendurable, and drift back to the city. On the other hand, the most isolated people in the Southern mountains come to prefer their relative isolation to any community life. When a person has "drunk the lonesome water” he or she prefers that way of life. Even such a person generally has community relationships. He and his neighbor may hunt and fish together, they take care of each other's sick, maintain churches in common. Just as different stars and planets differ enormously in density, yet maintain identity, so real communities may vary much in the spacing of their members. Some spacing is essential in all cases. There is evidence that there are norms of living from which extremes of solitude are variants. In that normal environment people best maintain their population and their basic culture, and the most normal traits of personality. A person who is not a part of some small community tends to be psycho­pathic or a variant from a wholesome type.

Natural Community Behavior
I have read that a captive beaver, kept in a human home, began to pile up the firewood and furniture in an effort to express its instinct for building dams. Put a person among large masses of people and he or she will begin to gather a few of them together to build a small community. Such efforts take the forms of college fraternities, clubs, secret orders, church congregations, luncheon clubs, study clubs, and numberless other associations of limited numbers. We have here evidence of one of the most fundamental and universal of human traits--a craving of human nature which cannot safely be ignored. As a rule such specialized organizations, while they help to satisfy the craving for community life, take account of only a small part of the total interests of their members.

Small Groupings
In modern America, the village, the neighborhood, the hamlet, or the city, often is an economic aggregation or only an incidental grouping, without the acquaintance, the personal relationships, and the common interests and activities which are the essential characteristics of a community. Such aggregations do not satisfy the emotional cravings for fellowship, for unity of interests, and for com­munity of planning and action. Human nature and human life are not at their best in such aggregations. How to make them into communities is a vital problem.

Anthropology and Small Community
The idea that a human is a small-community animal is supported by the science of anthropology. For the most part early man was a small village dweller, and the villages in which he lived were not just accumulations of dwellings, but had well developed social organization. In fact, the community may be older than mankind, for some of man's nearer relatives among the apes and monkeys also are said to live in organized communities. Existing very primitive communities, as in India and among the Eskimos, bear witness to this human trait. More than half of mankind still live in villages, and of those who live in cities, probably most of their grandparents were born in small communities.

Homesteading and Isolation
Where people live on isolated farms it is generally because some arbitrary circumstance cut across the tendencies of human nature. In the United States the somewhat crudely drafted homestead laws, written with little thought of human nature, by giving each homesteader a tract of land half a mile square, put families far apart.

Destruction of Community
In Mexico the Aztec conquests, and after them the Spaniards, drove some of the more independent Indians from their villages into the hills for safety, where for centuries they have continued to live on isolated farms. In England the ancient villages with their common lands were broken up by the Norman conquerors, and by later enclosures of common lands, so that by forcible means the character of English community life was largely destroyed. Some competent students hold that this destruction of the old English village and the enclosure of common lands was the cause of the decadence of the English yeoman. When the Turks were driven from eastern Europe, the lands in some cases by arbitrary action were divided into separate farms. Brittany in France, which is characterized by separate farms, was settled by a mass movement of population about ten centuries ago, with apparently arbitrary division of lands. In the rough mountains of Switzerland and Scandinavia many small valleys were settled which were too small to support villages, and some land was too rough for crops to be carried to central points. In Russia the agrarian reform of 1906 so disturbed community ways that it made revolution. (Source Book in Rural Sociology, Vol. 1, p. 298). Sometimes the only way for a young person to get a foothold was to go beyond the confines of village ownership and make a new clearing. The novel Growth of the Soil is a picture of the clearing of such an isolated farm. In China a great belt of country was once destroyed by conquest and its village life eliminated. Recently Manchuria has been settled largely by isolated immigrants, many of whom have not yet matured a village organization.

Unnatural Isolation
Thus, in my opinion, where people live in isolated situations it is usually because circumstances which they could not control caused them to deny or to repress the deep-seated community impulses of their natures. Whenever those compulsions to separation are removed, people tend again to congregate in communities. In the rich farming states of the Middle West the more prosperous farmers sell or rent their farms and move to town, leaving the less competent and less independent people on the land. One finds fewest farms abandoned among such people as the Mennonites, the Amish, the Dunkards, and the Mormons, where there is strong community feeling, and where community life is most deeply rooted. A large proportion of American farmers on relatively isolated farms overcame that isolation to some degree and developed real community life among themselves.

Community Must Be Taught
In the settling of new areas there is a constant tendency for people to organize themselves into communities, though human instincts are too vague to be effective without teaching; and unless some members of the new community have learned the arts of community making from older communities, the results may be very crude and relatively ineffective.

Organizing for Spirit
The modern town planner, in trying to secure an impression of integration and unity in the physical planning of a village, tries to find an axis or a focus for his plan. Sometimes without fully realizing the significance of what he does, he tries to secure outward and visible evidence of an inward and spiritual condi­tion which would characterize a true community.

Instincts and Community
It is characteristic of human evolution that specific instincts, such as those of the lower animals, have tended to disappear, and in their place are generalized directional impulses. The generalness and vagueness of these impulses is related to men's being intelligent and teachable. The exact expression which their impulses may have will be determined by tradition, experience, education, and reflection.

A Baltimore oriole has a home-building instinct which is so specific that through the centuries it builds just the same kind of hanging nest. A human, I hold, also has a home-making instinct, but it is so generalized that it may find expression in a sod house on a Dakota prairie, or in a suite in a New York hotel, or in a Buckingham Palace. The lack of specificness in the home-making instinct does not imply its absence, but only that it is fortunately adapted to the teachableness of people, just as the specific instinct of the Baltimore oriole is adjusted to its unteachableness. Whether a person lives in an adobe shelter in Arizona or in a Park Avenue apartment, the song 'Home, Sweet Home' stirs something deep in his nature.

When we ask how far the specifically defined instincts of lower animals might be expected to disappear in the evolution of mankind, the answer would seem to be--far enough to take full advantage of the teachableness and intelligence of people, but not so completely as to leave necessary direction lacking. For instincts to have disappeared more completely would imply that the evolutionary process had over­shot its mark. In my opinion there is evidence of some innate impulses in humans which, while general, are nonetheless clearly existing in many cases.

Impulse of Community
People have a strong impulse to imitation. This begins very early and lasts throughout life. Among possibly innate impulses are the inclination to hunt and to fish; in some people, to cultivate the soil; to take exercise; to mate; to create a home environment; and to create or to partake in community life. In my opinion this impulse to create or to participate in community life is so deep-seated and so strong that where it finds no opportunity for expression, grave injury to personality may follow. In American pioneer farm life the isolation of farmers' wives on separate farms had tragic results, and in numberless cases isolated rural children have strong, though natural and untaught impulses to escape extreme isolation. I believe there is evidence that in this respect--of having innate impulses that result in a craving for community activity. and that lead to creation or participation in com­munity activity, and which if unexpressed may result in grave damage to personality--a human biologically is a community animal.

A Person is a Community Animal
From “The Value of Group Work” by Mark Graubard, in Group Work, published by the American Association for the Study of Group Work:

“To begin with, a human is a culture-making animal. Had Linnaeus lived today he probably would have named the human species homo culturans rather than sapiens. Man is a unique animal and his unique weapon, as well as his most puzzling and remarkable trait, is his social form of life and its concomitant, the formation of cultures. Man always led a communally organized life which he accepted as natural. His or her social behavior took on forms referred to as cultural patterns which varied from group to group, from tribe to tribe. Hardly a human practice or belief, be it the kind of food or mode of eating, means of making, fire or of burying the dead, prescribed conduct regarding sex and marriage, lullabies, rituals, wars, ceremonials, medicines, myths, ornaments, art, tools, social organization, notions of gods, spirits, or ghosts, hardly a minute activity or concept that failed to show standardization within a group, and the most bewildering array of variations even in erstwhile culturally related communities. 

“Yet in spite of all this diversification, the basic tendency to produce these beliefs and practices, the irrepressible drive to form a specific culture, is universal and apparently innate in man. The only conceivable reason for this tendency is the mode of action of our central nervous system, producing mental and emotional responses about which we know very little as yet. Their exist­ence seems to be as ubiquitous in human beings as the capacity to produce speech or to grasp tools. Similarly their social expression is as varied as sounds and language." 

Many lines of evidence point to the conclusion that people by natural craving and inclination are community creatures. Their subhuman relatives are largely community animals. The predominant evidence of anthropology is that primitive people were community dwellers, and where vestiges of primitive life remain in out-of-the-way parts of the earth we find men living in true communities. The greater part of the human race now, as in the past, lives in villages or other small communities. People are biologically and psychologically adjusted to community life. Except where circumstances conflict with natural tendencies people almost never choose to live in isolated farm homes, and there is a constant tendency to abandon isolated homes except where they are tied together by strong community bonds. People living in large cities or in other large groups tend to form small communities within those large groups. Where new lands are settled the natural community impulse finds expression by the development of community life. In general, the older and more mature the culture is, the more completely are the people united in vital, unified social organisms. True communities are limited in size to the numbers of people who can personally know each other and work together for common ends in a spirit of unity.

 


Questions

  1. If man were a zoo animal, what would he need to be happy?

  2. Do you "recharge" by spending time with people, or away from them?  Why?

  3. Why might older cultures have a more “satisfying” cultural experience?

  4. Do you think true community is possible in entire cities, or do you agree with the text that size must be limited for success?  Why or why not?