2. Man Is a Community
Animal
Points to cover
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Man is a social creature,
physically and mentally, and does best in varied groups
limited to a certain size.
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If Man does not have
community, he will attempt to build it.
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In modern day America, the
“community” often is based on economics or chance, not what
is best.
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In general, the older a
culture the more integrated and satisfying its version of
community.
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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
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If man were a zoo animal,
what would he need to be happy?
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Do you "recharge" by
spending time with people, or away from them? Why?
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Why might older cultures
have a more “satisfying” cultural experience?
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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? |
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