The Community Course
Part 1 - The Significance of the Community
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5. The Place Of the Community in Human Culture

Roots of Human Culture
The roots of human culture are not its fine arts, its technology, its political institutions. These are the flower and fruit. The roots of culture are the underlying drives, motives, incentives, manners, habits, and purposes. If these are socially sound and vitally alive in a good social soil, then the flowers and fruit will appear. If these underlying elements are unrefined, weak, and undis­ciplined, then the fine arts, the technology, and the complex organization of society cannot long endure.

Human nature in the raw is lower than animal nature. Sub-human animals rely largely on instinct or its equivalent, which often is developed with vigor and sharp detail. Human life has come to rely so greatly upon culture that specific instincts have largely faded away, leaving rather vague instinctive tendencies or trends, greatly subject to modification by culture—that is, by teaching and by imitation. Human instincts become little more than capacities, tendencies, potentiali­ties for being conditioned, rather than explicit impulsion to definite courses of action.

Human “teachableness”
This vague generalness of human instinct or its equivalent, whatever its biological mechanism may be, and its susceptibleness to formation, development, and change by external influence, might be termed 'teachableness.' Whereas in most sub­human species action tends to be definitely fixed by instincts, tropisms, or other controls, relatively unmodifiable during the life of the individual, human action is so modifiable that it is relatively formless and incoherent except as it is taught, developed, and educated by instruction, example, and imitation. Without teaching and example as a guide to development, human life is far less capable of maturing and developing than is the life of a lower animal.

Young human life is avid for example and instruction which it can accept and imitate. It takes to itself whatever is available in the culture of its environment, and makes that its own. It becomes fundamentally and intimately like the culture in which it grows. It recapitulates the existing culture.

Human individuals take on the characteristics of the existing culture, and take a set of personality during the very early years. Probably the ages up to seven or eight are more compellingly formative than all the rest of life taken together. It is during those years that the individual's tastes, standards, and appreciations are determined.

Human Nature - Chain of Teaching
When we say that human nature does not change, all we generally mean is that this chain of teaching or conditioning seldom is broken from generation to generation.  Each generation acquires while very young the incentives which preceding generations learned in the same way. This basic human culture is of very slow growth. Apparently simple matters such as honesty or courtesy may have required many thous­ands of years to originate and to be refined and established. Once destroyed, thousands of years might be necessary to re-create them. Because the traits of refined culture can be passed by contagion from one individual to another does not mean that they can be quickly originated. The displacement of a lower culture by a higher, as when European culture replaced that of the bushmen in Australia, does not mean that a new culture has been created, but only that an existing culture has been transferred or diffused. Because the dandelion has spread all over North America from Europe in a very short time does not nullify the fact that millions of years were necessary for its evolution. If we eliminate a type, either of human culture or of plant or animal, thousands of years might be necessary for the re-creation of its equivalent.

Transfer of Culture
Perhaps the greatest inheritance of humanity is its basic culture. There is evidence that some of the finest of human cultures have almost disappeared. The preservation and dissemination of the finest cultures is one of the basic human needs.

When we come to observe the exact processes by which this transfer of culture takes place we see that it is through intimate personal contacts. It is the same process as that by which spoken language and inflection is acquired by children. It is a process of contagion and imitation from those closest by. First of all there is the family, and next there is the community surrounding the family. Through those two relationships the permanent set of personality is determined in early life, always influenced, of course, by inborn native quality. Later influences overlie and modify these fundamental sets of character, but seldom change the main traits of personality. Occasionally profound change does take place in later years, but only as a great personal achievement, and in a relatively small number of cases.

Small Community Supplements Family
For the most promising development of great personalities the family is too small a unit to stand alone. Very generally the home is too small a part of the child's total environment to be conclusive. If playmates and neighbors tend to nullify the influence of parents, serious stresses and conflicts may be set up in the growing personalities. A great home needs to be supplemented by a great community, so that the cultural inheritance a child receives at home is in harmony with that which comes to him from the community. As a young person from such a home is married, the peculiar character of that home is to some extent lost unless the mate also has inherited it.

Small Community Determines Society
As a rule great leadership occurs when exceptional intelligence and vigor project onto a larger scene of action the drives and purposes that were acquired in the small environment of the family and the community during early years. It follows that society and government in their larger units will not be moved by any more refined motives, and will have no higher objectives, than do the families and the communities from which their leadership arises. The community is the mother of society. As the community is, so will society be.

Nurturing Human Culture
The home and the community are not only the places of origin, but also the principal preservers of the most intimate and sensitive values of our cultural inheritance, of those elusive traits of good will, of considerateness, of courage and patience and fellowship, which are the last and finest fruits of the long process of social evolution. Those finest and most distinctive traits can originate only where but a few persons are immediately involved, and where fine qualities can be sheltered and nourished during their infancy, where the sympathy and understanding of a few will protect them from destruction until they are mature and tempered so that they can make their way in the larger and less hospitable world. Human cultures, like human beings, have periods of infancy during which they cannot survive without shelter and nurture. The higher the animal or the higher the culture, the more surely is this true. The family and the community must provide the shelter for the infancy of human excellence. If they fail, the excellence cannot survive. It will be destroyed by the hostile world without.

It follows that the family, and the community in which it lives, are imperatively necessary for the creation and preservation of the finest cultural values. Yet, what have we in America done with the community? We have taken for granted intimate human culture, without realizing its need for an abiding place. As individual families have come to this country from Europe, torn loose from their cultural roots, we might by conscious design have assembled and transplanted the best elements of the cultural tradition, creating new communities with a synthesis of culture beyond anything the past has known. As a matter of fact, we tended to keep these newcomers isolated from the best and most intimate elements of American life, and to prevent that transfer by contagion and imitation by which cultural traits are preserved and extended.

Small Community - Source of Culture
For several reasons the small community has been the basic source of the underlying culture of a people.

The family by itself is too small a group to be an adequate cultural unit. Children overflow the immediate family environment, and are much affected by the neighborhood or community environment. Exceptionally good or exceptionally poor family environment goes far to set the character of children, but the larger en­vironment tends strongly to improve the poorest and to debase the best, and to reduce all to an approximation to uniformity.

Just as the human body supplies an almost ideal environment for each of its cells, which no individual cell could provide for itself, so the community may create a favorable milieu for the development of each of the individuals of which it is composed.

The small community is the controlling source of population of a country. The character of the small community becomes the character of the country.

“Like water which flows naturally from a higher to a lower level, population generally flows naturally from rural to urban centers, and from agricul­ture to industry and other urban occupations. Rural communities have been the centers of production of a surplus of human beings, and the urban communities the centers of their consumption. This...trait...practically speaking, has been permanent in the history of mankind." (Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, Vol. I, p. 231.)

Population Movement
There has been in the main a one-way movement of population from the small community to the large urban community or to its suburbs. In that movement the controlling basic culture of the small community carries over and provides the dominant incentives of the larger communities.

Preserving Culture
The small community is the preserver of basic culture. As in Greece, fine sculpture and architecture died because they were arts of the city and of aristocracy; fine pottery and masonry lived because they were part of the life of common people in small communities. Religious liberalism was established and survived in England largely because Wyclif and his followers penetrated the small communities, and their movement became established there. The culture which survives catastrophic changes generally is that of small communities.

Social Planning
Notwithstanding the profoundly important part which the community has taken and is taking in human history, generally it has been neglected in social planning.  As a rule the small community has been robbed of its best population, economically exploited, despised, and left to shift for itself. One writer drew attention to the fact that in the United States census of 1920, with all its wealth of statistical material, the only data concerning towns of less than 2500 were the name of the town and its population. In the United States there has been much study of the isolated farm and of agriculture on the one hand, and of cities on the other, but the small community has been largely overlooked. There has been generally lacking in social planning a recognition of the small community as the reservoir of basic human culture.

Because of the neglect of the small community in social planning, it tends to be stagnant and uninspiring, and to pass on its weaknesses to the city.

Limitations of Small Communities
Partly as a result of the failure of society through the ages to recognize the significance of small communities as the sources of population and as the sources and conservators of culture, the long upward climb of society is constantly impeded and interrupted, and there is a constant slipping back to the cultural level of the neglected small community. Characteristic limitations of the small village, neighborhood, or hamlet have been narrowness of outlook, clannishness, jealousies, tendency to gossip, and lack of recreation facilities or of direction and counsel for young people.

Such limitations tend to exist in small groups whether they are true communities or simply un-unified aggregations of people. In the latter case there may be little restraint and control of social action. Where there is a true community there may be very effective discipline to prevent or to control such results. Stefansson, in his accounts of well-integrated Eskimo communities, states that the social offense most frowned upon is "trouble making," and then says that social con­trols to prevent such faults are very effective indeed.

Learning by Imitation
Just as individuals learn chiefly by imitating others, so communities on the whole, when they endeavor to improve their designs, only rarely undertake original study and planning. For the most part they imitate what seems most suitable. For instance, practical management of villages and cities by coordinated, business­like methods had been necessary for more than a century, but no one seemed creative enough to devise such a design. Then the city manager plan was initiated in a small city, and other communities, now having something to copy, imitated that example, until there are now hundreds of cities and villages with that type of government. The creation of even one finely designed community, and the development there of a vital community spirit, probably would lead to that general type of social organiza­tion being imitated and reproduced many times. If skillful community leadership should grow up in such a community, it probably would be called on from many directions. It is not the size but the quality of a society which, in the long run, determines its influence. Greece and Palestine have had far greater influence on the world than have many vast empires.