The Community of the Future

Which is better for the optimal community - the city or the country?  Arthur Morgan believed that in many ways the small rural community was the superior, though he did write about creating communities as subsets of larger urban populations.

Can we prove that this opinion is true?  Morgan published a book entitled The Community of the Future in 1957.   Interestingly enough,  Peter Drucker, America’s leading management consultant, business writer and teacher, published a book with the same title in 1998.  These intelligent men have very different understandings of rural versus urban living in America, bringing different insights into the challenges facing us today.  While the men wrote over forty years apart, Morgan’s prescription for encouraging community is still a potent one. 

Morgan was an engineer, a teacher (President of Antioch College) and an executive (head of the TVA). Because of his engineering background, his writings show knowledge of technology and a clear understanding of its evolving direction. Thus, there is less distance between the two writers than the date of their publications might suggest.

Peter Drucker has been the best known proponent of modern management practices for the last 40 years. He has written dozens of books on management and business and has been a consultant to major corporations as well as governments.

Both books refer to another book, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (Community and Society) published in 1887 and written by Ferdinand Toennis, a German sociologist. It is noteworthy that Drucker’s reference to Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in his book occurs on page 5, while Morgan’s reference in his book occurs on page 4. Obviously this work figured greatly in the writings of both men. 

Gemeinschaft, as explained by Morgan, is the name for informal, spontaneous social groups, as opposed to Gesellschaft, the formal organizations. The term “community” evolves from the German word for the informal aspect, and Morgan distinguished the spirit of community (Gemeinschaft) from the formal place of community (Gesellschaft)  Place of community means the physical aspects and organizational practices of a community, such as zoning, police protection, licenses, taxes, schools, roads, business codes, etc. Drucker simply uses the word “community” and from its usage and context in his book one can determine that he is speaking of the spirit of community rather than a physical place.

Drucker opens his book with the following comments:

“Civilizing the city will increasingly become the top priority in all countries and particularly in the developed counties such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan. The chaotic jungle into which every major city in the world has now degenerated needs, above all, new communities. And that, neither government nor business can provide. It is the task of the non-governmental, non-business, non-profit organization.”

Drucker continues under the heading “The Global Transformation”.

“When I was born a few years before the outbreak of World War I, fewer than 5% - one out of every twenty human beings then living - lived and worked in a city. The city was still the exception. Very few human beings eighty years ago were still nomads. Most had become agriculturalists. But the city was still a small oasis in a rural universe. And even in the most highly urbanized countries such as England or Belgium the rural population was still a near majority.

Fifty years ago, at the end of World War II, a quarter of the American population was still rural, and in Japan, people living on the land still numbered three-fifths of the total. Today in both countries - and in every developed country - the rural population has shrunk to less than 5 percent and is still shrinking. Equally, in the developing world, it is the cities that are growing. Even in China and India, the two big countries that are still predominantly rural, the cities are growing while the rural population is shrinking or, at best, maintaining itself. In all developing countries-and especially in China and in India-people living on the land cannot wait to move into the city, even though there are no jobs for them there and no housing.

The only precedent for this demographic transformation is what happened some ten thousand years ago when our remote ancestors first settled on the land and became pastoralists and farmers. But that demographic transformation took several thousand years. Ours has happened in less than a century. There is no precedent in history for it, with no proven policies available as yet to manage a primarily urban society, very few institutions, and, alas, very few success stories.

The key to the survival and health of this new urban human society is the development of communities in the city. In a rural society communities are a given for the individual. Community is a fact, whether family or religion, social class, or caste. There is very little mobility in rural society, and what there is, is mostly downward.

Rural society has been romanticized for millennia, especially in the West. The first great Greek poem, Hesiods’s Erga kai memera (“Works and Days”) (sixth century B. C.) romanticized the life of the farmer. And so did the most beautiful poem left to us by Rome, Virgil’s Georgica (first century B. C.). Right through this century, the rural communities have been portrayed as idyllic.

The reality has always been different. For the community in the rural society is both compulsory and coercive.

One recent example. My family and I lived in rural Vermont over fifty years ago, in the late 1940s. At that time, the most highly popularized character in the nation was the local community’s telephone operator in the ads of the Bell Telephone Company. She, the ads told us every day, held the community together, served it, and was always available for help. The reality was somewhat different. In rural Vermont, we still had manual telephone exchanges. When we lifted the telephone we did not get a dial tone; we hoped that we would get one of those wonderful, community-serving operators. But when finally, around 1947 or 1948, the dial telephone came to rural Vermont, there was dancing in the streets and universal celebration. Yes the telephone operator was always there. But when, for instance, one of our children had a high fever, the operator would say, “You can’t reach Dr. Wilson now; he is with his girlfriend.” On another occasion, she would say, “You don’t need Dr. Wilson; your baby isn’t that sick. Wait until tomorrow morning to see whether she still has a high temperature.” Community was not only coercive; it was intrusive.”

What is Drucker doing here?  He is making the small community sound quite unpalatable, with no compensation for the loss of leisure, privacy, or health.   Is this really true?  Were small town phone operators always so rude and invasive?  Such interference with an ill loved one would be upsetting at the least.

I also lived in a time of manual telephones but in a different small town in rural Missouri. In our town such behavior would have been intolerable. If it had occurred, there would have been a race between my mother and our doctor, Dr. Kerr, to the operator’s home, probably both with mayhem in mind. I think that laws existed even then for practicing medicine without a license and the operator, as presented by Drucker, might have been liable for damages or a jail term.

In my own town, the operator was helpful. She was an integral part of the community and people liked and respected her. If she had lapsed into such behavior as exemplified by Drucker, the community would have corrected her and forgiven her. If she continued, the community would have replaced her. And to contrast, there was no dancing in the streets when the dialing network came to our town. We knew “community” had diminished a bit.

Drucker’s book continues with:

“This explains why, for millennia, the dream of rural people was to escape into the city. “Stadluft Macht Frei” (“City air sets you free”), says an old German proverb dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century. The serf who managed to escape from the land and was admitted into a city became a free man. He became a citizen. And so we, too, have an idyllic picture of the city - and it is as unrealistic as was the idyllic picture of rural life.”

Drucker acknowledges that the city was attractive, but that this idyllic view was unrealistic. The same situation still exists. People leave the small town for the city - and it is not what they expect when they get there.

“What made the city attractive also made it anarchic- its anonymity and the absence of compulsive and coercive communities. The city was indeed the center of culture. It was where artists could work and flourish. It was where scholars could work and flourish. Precisely because it had no community, it offered upward mobility. But beneath the thin layer of professionals, artists, scholars, the wealthy and the highly skilled artisans in their craft guilds, there was moral and social anomie (instability), prostitution and banditry, and lawlessness.

Also, not till up to a hundred years or so ago did any city manage to replicate itself. It needed constant replenishment from the countryside in order to maintain its population, let alone to grow. The city meant disease and epidemic. Not until the nineteenth century, with a modern water supply, modern sewer systems, vaccinations, and quarantines, did life expectancy in the city begin to come anywhere near life expectancy in the country. This was true of the Rome of the Caesars, of Byzantine Constantinople, of the Florence of the Medici, and of the Paris of Louis XIV (as portrayed so brilliantly in Dumas’ Three Musketeers, the nineteenth century's greatest best seller). It was true, also, of Dicken’s London. In the city, there was a brilliant “high culture”. But it was a wafer-thin layer over a stinking swamp. And in no city in the world, before 1880 or so, did a respectable woman dare go out alone at any time during the day. Nor was it safe to walk home at night. Even a Member of Parliament ran a tremendous risk of being attacked and killed by murderous gangs on his way home at night (a central event in several of Anthony Trollope’s best-selling novels of the 1870s).

This city was attractive precisely because it offered freedom from the compulsory and coercive community. But it was destructive because it did not offer any community of its own.”

Studying this, one notes that the city offers freedom from various social limitations of the small community. And it replaces the social limitations with severe physical ones - such as death, fear and a reduced life span - especially for the poor. Its not clear if the choice to go to the city was made knowing the tradeoffs.

“And human beings need community. If no communities are available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities - the gangs of Victorian England, or the gangs that today threaten the very social fabric of the large, American city (and, increasingly, of every large city in the world.)

The first to point out that humans need community was Ferdinand Toennies, in an 1887 book, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschagt (Community and Society), one of the great classics of sociology. But the community that Toennies, a little over a century ago, still hoped to preserve, the “organic” community of traditional rural society, is gone, and gone for good. The task today, therefore, is to create urban communities.”

Drucker acknowledges that the cities of the past were dangerous, violent and unhealthy -with a short life expectancy. There as an implication that the situation has changed in terms of health, but this implication is challenged by the “gangs that today threaten the very social fabric of the large, American city (and, increasingly, of every large city in the world”. It’s reasonable to make the argument that the cities continue to worsen and possibly, if one prepared a study of social indicators, it could be shown that life in the cities in general continues to decline for the majority of its residents. It is certainly not safe in most cities to leave your home at night.

Furthermore, Drucker states, “And human beings need community. If no communities are available for constructive ends, there will be destructive, murderous communities.”  We agree with this assessment. What we can conclude from his writing, even if we do not agree, is that rural towns have “community” (a set of qualities) and these same communities are “coercive and intrusive”. Cities do not have “community”, again a set of qualities, and are “destructive and murderous”. Clearly the phrase “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” applies in this situation. Would you rather be coerced or destroyed? Intruded upon or murdered?

Finally he concludes that “…..the “organic” community of traditional rural society, is gone, and gone for good. The task today, therefore, is to create urban communities”. Of course there is an alternative view. That would be that the urban community, as a modern way of life, which differed from the way of life that existed for millennia (small communities) is an experiment that has failed. Certainly urban life has offered more material goods (at least to some), and possibly more culture and formal education. What it has lost are the characteristics of “community”. Morgan has listed some of these characteristics and they include:

Assuming this is a representative list, how many of these apply to the modern urban area? A representative list for the urban environment would include terms such as “road rage”, alienation, isolation, competitiveness, lack of integrity, greed, selfishness, etc. Trading the first list for the second, and adding the advantages of the city basically included in the word freedom, may not be such a bargain.

The attributes of the rural community assigned by Drucker are those of coercion and intrusion. Having lived in both rural and urban communities, I do not see those as the main rural attributes. More representative are the attributes suggested by Morgan above.

Another viewpoint is offered by Wendell Berry in his essay “Writer and Region” (page 80) found in his book of essays What Are People For? To whit:

“Mr. Stegner’s “away from” indicates, of course, an escape to the Territory-and there are many kinds of Territory to escape to. The Territory that hinterland writers have escaped to has almost always been first of all that of some metropolis or “center of culture” (italics mine.) This is not inevitably dangerous; great cities are probably necessary to the life of the arts, and all of us who have gone to them have benefitted. But once one has reached the city, other Territories open up, and some of these are dangerous. There is first, the Territory of Retribution against one’s origins. In our country, this is not just a Territory, but virtually a literary genre. From the sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, one’s old home begins to look like a “little raw provincial world”. One begins to deplore “small town gossip” and the “suffocating proprieties of small town life” - forgetting that gossip occurs only among people who know one another and that propriety is a dead issue only among strangers. The danger is not just in the falsification, the false generalization, that necessarily attends a distant scorn or anger, but also in the loss of the subject or the vision of community life and in the very questionable exemption that scorners and avengers customarily issue to themselves.”

Wendell Berry speaks for the same kind of small community that Morgan supports and does so from the perspective of the spirit of community.

It is interesting to see how similar some of the ideas of Morgan and Drucker are. Both men know well and describe well the history of repeated migration of country to city. Both also notice and comment on the need of the city to be replenished from the country. And both understand the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.

Drucker’s criticism of the small community in terms of the qualities of coercion and intrusiveness is also reflected in Morgan’s concern regarding the negative aspects of the small community. And Morgan appreciates the benefits and unique offerings of the city, as does Drucker.

From this common base, their solutions differ. Drucker sees the day of the small community as over and the only option being to bring “community” to the cities. Berry points out the spiritual danger that occurs. Morgan would say that “community” in the sense in which he and Drucker are using it, cannot be brought to the city. Rather it is something that only develops in the face-to-face interactions people have in the course of their daily lives. It is not something that can be taught in the conventional sense. One is reminded of cultures that for millennia grieved the passing of members, with differing cultures grieving in their own ways. Now, in the sterility of the cities, professional grief counselors are brought into situations such as school shootings or other examples of tragedy, where, using approved psychological techniques, strangers help strangers to process their grief.

There are two ways to view the industrial era, this new urban way of being that began only a short time ago.  Industrialization accelerated in the last half of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century and then began changing at an exponential rate in the second half. One view of this rate of change is that we have achieved a level of exaltation that represents some ultimate pinnacle of human development. The only task is to bring along the vast majority that has not participated in this achievement. The second way is to view the industrial era as an unfortunate period that took mankind in an inappropriate direction and must now be corrected.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s Germany and Japan believed they had to expand their territories to succeed as nations. 70 years later, after the deaths and suffering of tens of millions of people, they have become powerful successful nations within their old boundaries, their imperial leanings defeated. In our view, and that of Morgan, the expansion of the urban areas is akin to the short lived expansion of these countries. There has been a period of growth in cities, of a major population shift from country to city. But with the depletion of fossil fuels and other resources, there will be a period of resolution and finally a reverse exodus. It is not surprising that surveys show that the majority of people who now live in cities would prefer small community life, if jobs were available.

As urbanization continues, the difficulties and unsatisfactory life of the city shows that the century old experiment is over. Drucker may attempt the impossible task of instilling community values in the cities, made futile by the very conditions that he seeks to alleviate. Morgan would select the path of decentralizing the city to small towns, easier in the sense that it is in the nature of humans to live in small communities, not megalopolises.

At the same time, small towns can and will take advantage of technological advances that have occurred. Certainly all improvements in health care, communications and education will be available in a small town as well as a big city. The loss of freeway systems, SUVs and long dangerous commutes will be limiting in some ways but the advantages in terms of environmental sustainability and reduced costs will more than offset the limitations.

The Industrial Revolution proceeded based on the principle of urbanization and destruction of small self sustaining communities. It need not have adopted this principle. After 100 years, a new balance is needed. The “intermediate technology” proposed by E. F. Schumacher along with other thinkers about community such as Wendell Berry, combined with the social aspects of small community described by Arthur Morgan can bring us a world of health and prosperity without the current dependence on giant technologies, giant corporations, and giant cities.