Chapter 8

Neglect of Small Communities

Loss of Community Identity

Frustrations of Building Communities

Dogmatism

Feuds

Loss of Energy Reserves

The Basic Need

Recreating Interest in Community Life

Questions

 

The Community Course
Part 1 - The Significance of the Community
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8. The Problem


Points to cover

  • The small community holds the source material for urban expansion, and that human material would be better served, as would the nation, if they remained outside the cities.

  • Our country as a social organism is ill. Transmission of our mutual cultural heritage is fading away in an ocean of uniform Wal-Marts and McDonald’s.

  • World events are so vast they engender frustration in those who witness them via our mass media.  (“Wallowing in the troubles of five billion strangers before breakfast.”)

  • Well-proportioned life, complementing basic human nature, is not attainable for a majority of Americans.

  • As the lack of community is felt more strongly, identification is made with other types of social groups, leading to a kind of cultural Balkanism, the larger community fragmenting into special interest groups.


Neglect of Small Communities

As a continuing source of population, and as the social organization which, next to the family, has been the chief agency for perpetuating and transmitting human culture, the small community has been of vast import in human affairs. In the long run the culture of human society could maintain itself on no higher level than the culture of the small community.

Yet the small community has been neglected, robbed, exploited and despised, while society has paid a very high price for that neglect. Very often even the neglected thread of community culture has been eliminated by conquest and destruction. This neglect of a basic cultural unit may be one of the primary reasons for the failure of human society to advance with greater surety.

Loss of Community Identity.
Serious as has been this neglect, a process is under way today perhaps more fundamental and more serious than anything which has preceded it. The seriousness of that process may be illustrated from the biologic world. The higher plants and animals are made up of cells and of tissues and organs, which co-operate to the common good of the organism. Yet each cell has its own indi­vidual life and carries on its own individual functions in a little world of its own. To protect that individuality each cell is surrounded by a cell membrane which separates it from all others, and tissues and organs are similarly protected. If the cell walls or tissue walls of the human body should be dissolved, the body would quickly die.

Similarly, a social organism, such as a state or a people, is composed of cells, tissues, and organs; such as individuals, families, communities, and functional societies. Each of these in its way has its own cell or tissue wall, its own indi­vidual life. Only by maintaining its separateness and identity can its indigenous culture be kept alive and transmitted with dependableness from generation to genera­tion.

Today, as seldom if ever before, society is dissolving its cell and tissue walls. And as a result it is losing power to preserve and to transmit its basic culture. Old social outlooks and convictions and habits that gave men a sense of validity are fading away, because the social units through which those values were preserved and transmitted are disappearing, leaving little but immediate self-expression to give meaning and a sense of validity to life, and leaving the way open for the development of crude expressions of group loyalty.

Frustrations of Building Communities
Where community life is dissolved and the only remaining sense of social identity is with vast societies, such as great nations, serious-minded young people who wish to be socially effective often measure their small powers against national or world movements, and develop a feeling of frustration and futility. Where they are members of small communities they have opportunities to deal with problems within their grasp. They can be realists and can be effective within the community, and so can have a feeling of validity which is denied them when their primary rela­tions are to vast social aggregations. It is doubtful whether there can be social health until this process of preservation and transmission of basic culture is renewed. In the great world disturbances of today, stable seed beds of fundamental culture are especially necessary.

To what extent is the integrated community possible and desirable in our present day society of rapidly shifting populations and multitudinous contacts, influences, and associations? (Few populations shift faster or have more contacts than those of colleges, yet integration of college life is possible, partly because the concept of integration exists there.) 

Our problem is to recover the essence of the integrated community, and for it to achieve a set of mores, a code and a temper of inquiry, of critical-mindedness, of intellectual freedom and of intellectual interests that will, so far as possible, leave it without inhibiting barriers.

Today the conditions of life have changed so that the small community can be culturally abreast of any other. Is not this a significant fact in social evolution?

Dogmatism
How can there be community of standards, aims, and purposes, with­out regimentation and dogmatism? This is one of the oldest and most universal issues of community life. Can unity without regimentation be achieved by eliminating arbi­trary and capricious standards and by seeking universal and fundamental standards?

One of the standards most difficult to maintain is that of freedom of thought and inquiry. Everywhere vested interests and dogmatism strive to entrench themselves by claims to special sacredness, revelation, or other authority, demanding that people accept the orthodox position without inquiry. The small community, because of its relative isolation, often retains the results of indoctrination and propaganda of an earlier period.

One of the most disrupting influences in the American community has been the competition for loyalty of different religious groups. Each has tried to create dominant loyalty toward itself, somewhat regardless of loyalty to general community interests. Community possibilities never can be fully realized so long as any group or groups claim a monopoly of truth or wisdom. Unity of the whole community can result only to the extent that claims to unique authority are given up.

Feuds
One of the problems of village communities the world over has been that of feuds, sometimes internal and sometimes inter-community. The flux of popula­tion to and within America has largely eliminated traditional feuds. In this respect the loss of tradition is fortunate. Can traditions of unity be maintained without also maintaining traditions of discord? Can the development of community codes and standards contribute to this end?

Loss of Energy Reserves
In normal primitive life people commonly had periods of stimulated living alternating with periods of quiet vegetating. The nervous and emotional reserves consumed during periods of stress were renewed during quiet periods. This was the general condition of primitive village life. Under city conditions, especially under modern city conditions of constant over-stimulation, there is small opportunity for renewing nervous and emotional reserves. There is reason to believe that periods of intense urban life may consume the reserves of human energies to such a degree as to bring about general decadence. Can development of small-community living add to its stimulus and interest and yet give opportunity for renewing these reserves, and might such an achievement be a major factor in lengthening the period of vital life of a people? Can the increased stimulation of small-community life be selective, and can a normal balance be reached between the accumulation and the consumption of emotional reserves?

The Basic Need
It is necessary to recover or to achieve a community way of life that will make possible the full and well-proportioned life of its members, and that is not in fundamental conflict with the makeup of humanity, and then to find for it a tolerable environment.

The problem of the community has commonly been viewed in its superficial aspects. Only slowly is it being seen as dealing with a way of life, rather than with economic or social arrangements, For instance, Cecil North, writing in 1931 in his book The Community and Social Welfare, said:

"The author frankly shared the opinion that organization and correlation were the prime needs in American social work. As the study progressed, however,. . . it became clear that the lack of organization is not the fundamental weakness....Underlying organization is personal and professional technique." (Introduction, p. vi.)

Even here he has not reached the foundation, for underneath personal and professional technique there must be the slowly developed spirit of community, which will give vitality to both organization and technique.

Recreating Interest in Community Life
There are many aggregations of families in America the members of which have cravings for community life that are waiting for leadership to turn them from aggregations into communities. In the course of time capacity for community partici­pation becomes atrophied from disuse, and efforts to create community spirit may be met with initial discouragement. Persistent purpose may be necessary to re-create an appetite for integrated community life. That re-development of atrophied com­munity spirit may be one of the most difficult elements of community undertakings.

That is the work of community leadership. Every addition to human culture, every development of good will, courtesy, fair play and dependableness, originated with pioneers who in their own living demonstrated those traits. Then gradually other people, seeing and admiring those traits imitated or deliberately achieved them. By that process civilization advances. The problem is, how to find or to develop or to encourage such leadership, and in the leaders, how to turn disinterest and unconcern into critical but active interest.

 


Questions

  1. Morgan says, “…the small community has been neglected, beaten, robbed, exploited, and despised…”  Do you agree or disagree?  Why or why not?

  2. Do you think Americans work more or fewer hours per week than they did five years ago?  Do you work more or fewer hours yourself?  What effect does this have on you?  On your family?

  3. What organizations or informal groups in your community do you feel loyalty to?  Sports league?  Cultural group?  Family?  Name three more.

  4. Do you sometimes feel lonely?

  5. Would a stronger sense of community help that feeling?