This article and the comments that follow are typically (for After Babel) illuminating. But it seems to me that one BIG change in community structure has been omitted from the discussion. I'm likely to stimulate resentment by mentioning it, and I don't pretend to have a solution, but they also serve who only point at problems.
As I grew up in the immediate post-WWII era, my dad was often away at work and my mom was nearly always at home. When she went shopping, she took the kids with her. She took us to church on Sunday, where she and I and our father wound up singing in the choir. She made sure we got to school safely and had what we needed to succeed there. She always had a nutritious breakfast, lunch, and supper ready for us and schooled us in proper table manners as we all ate together at least twice a day.
In the evening, we played games and discussed current events in the living room. We all studied music and performed together. When we had a TV, we watched it together and discussed the content together. We went on vacations together, ditto concerts and plays, and sometimes out to eat. We celebrated religious and secular holidays together and discussed their meanings.
If one of us was ill or in trouble, Mom was right there to help. We were NEVER home alone! We did play alone at times, and with neighbors, and spent weeks at summer camps every year.
I won't say it was an ideal childhood: neither parent was a paragon. Together with all the other parents and teachers and counselors and coaches, they taught us what we needed to become successful after leaving home.
I bet you can see where this is going and I shudder to think of the "elderly white male misogynist" label that may be coming my way. But I don't think we can afford to ignore one of the biggest changes in family structure of my lifetime: the stay-at-home mom has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Working moms do not have the time and energy to spend raising a family that their forebears did. Single moms have it even worse. So we rely on strangers to supervise and educate and entertain our children. I'm not saying anything against stay-at-home dads, either.
My main point is that raising kids is a fantastically difficult and time-consuming business that requires a LOT of love, more than most people can muster for somebody else's children. Further, as any successful careerist will tell you, "full-time work" often means 60 or more hours a week of intense application with infrequent and incomplete breaks. The idea of combining a successful career with parenthood seems like a lot to ask, and it's no wonder that women of child-bearing age are not an employer's first choice because they want you to give 110% to their priorities and raising a family is supposed to be secondary. None of this is to suggest that a mom can't be successful in any career up to and including POTUS, but I would suggest that if that's your ambition you look for a stay-at-home dad as partner.
I don't think you're nuts, but you're only seeing part of the picture with the romanticized Leave it to Beaver American family. You're missing the empire part, where much of that era was funded by taking resources from other people abroad (including their labor) without adequate compensation (except maybe for those countries' dictators). You're also missing the part where many housewives were suicidal or on valium because they DIDN'T have much community, it was mostly nuclear families. You're missing all the unhappy husbands who resorted to extra-marital affairs. And you're missing the stultifying lack of creativity that was exhibited in such movies as Pleasantville (Erik Hoel has also chimed in on this with his Gossip Trap), that partially caused the 60s rebellion.
Nuclear families without village or tribe are not something that works for most people. On the other hand, tribes or villages or nations with no families (or dysfunctional families) also don't work for most people.
Actually, I think Haidt is arguing AGAINST what developed into a focus on nuclear families. Throughout world history and across peoples, clan and tribe were communities that people belonged to. Religion, culture, language dialect, and history tied clan/tribe together into a homogenous way of life. Kids learned from their parents, grandparents, aunts-uncles-cousins, schooling (formal and informal), etc. a way of life via immersion and osmosis.
Coming to America, these communities/experiences transplanted here via immigration waves. The Italian Catholic, Jewish, etc. communities/neighborhoods. Think the multi-generational Waltons.
Westward movement--esp during WWII to California--resulted in leaving those connections behind. This is when the nuclear family began to take over as a cultural norm. Mid-century modern housing reflected this as they became backyard (vs. porch) focused and the kitchens were switched from being largely hidden to having views of the den so mom could watch the kids while she cooked.
While the Waltons were multi-generational each episode, Leave it to Beaver had an aunt or uncle appear in just 4 of 268 episodes. Grandparents (the dreaded mother-in-law episode) rarely appear in the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, etc shows.
The nuclear family, then, is the result of the breakdown of what Haidt describes as community--not the the epitome of it.
The midwestern/east coast parents (like mine in 1960) settling on the West Coast still transmitted a semblance of their experiences to my generation (1964 between Boomers and GenX), but we didn't get the full immersion. What we transmitted to our kids is even weaker--especially in the influence of what Haidt and others describe over the last 30 years.
Pete, agreed. "Religion, culture, language dialect, and history tied clan/tribe together into a homogenous way of life." And also economy, they would make essential stuff and provide essential services for each other. Global trade was for luxury goods, except maybe salt. But from my understanding, tribes still had families as a lower level unit of organization, sometimes called clans, and maybe family could have been even lower level than clan. What do you think?
Sure, families were a sub-unit within larger tribes/clans. In that context, aunts and uncles were second parents, and cousins almost indistinguishable from brothers and sisters. Everyone lived next to each other. Expectations, supervision, and parenting were essentially shared. Everyone spent time at everyone else's home. Today, there is a much bigger gap between the 'nuclear family' and aunts-uncles-cousins.
In Southern California, Northgate Market is a very successful, large Hispanic grocery chain. The original owners--parents from Guadalajara--brought the children to the states. The eight children are all owners of the Market with their parents. One son is the CEO. Another is a meat cutter. Different roles in the organization, but equals in ownership. Talk with the grandkids, and they will tell you they have 16 parents (aunts and uncles). The Market is intentionally, deeply committed to the good of the Histpanic community. Very impressive.
We just need thousands (millions) of such companies that are all synergistic with each other and committed to the good of their local community MORE than the rest of the world. And where much more trade happens locally than globally.
One of the biggest problems today is that the American economy operates at about 15% of its potential. American business is structured around transactional relationships: employee wants more money for less work vs. company wants more work for less money. It is structured as a win-lose entity, the lowest trust, lowest performance relationship possible. Good companies only get 30%-35% engagement-commitment from employees. 20% are disengaged--actively burning the place down from the inside.
Switch to a structure based on Covenant Relationships in which the good of the individual (employee) and team (organization) are the same. The more they commit to each other in terms of becoming Good (as individuals and as an organization), the higher their engagement, productivity, and performance. Imagine a sports team accepting 35% commitment. They would lose every game. Any company that bumped their engagement from 35% to just 50% would wipe the floor with the competition and dominate the market.
The best part is that performance--profits if you want--would increase dramatically. And, in covenant. high trust relationships, that would be shared with all the employees.
Now, do that not just within a company, but between companies in an economy, and the wealth generation and spread would be unbelievable. The best part is that strong relationships are also the key to Happiness in life.
Success, Happiness, and a very wealthy, just society are all possible, but we are trapped by not understanding life and the importance of good, high trust relationships.
I'm a working mom and wonder about this, too. But I don't think going back is the solution. Telling an increasingly educated populace to drop everything to raise their children in a nuclear format is not going to work when choices are available. When women have the choice to enter a career, those who stay at home cannot rely on a neighborhood network being there. The network relied on women not having choice.
I'd prefer a solution where everyone can work fewer hours per week and/or more flexibility for working hours. And again, working mom here, so I will clarify that not only do I value being a mother, but I enjoy working in and of itself as a fulfilling part of my life. But with all these technological advances, why are we stuck at the 40 hour factory work week? Why do we let those at the top hoard so much wealth? Why aren't there more part time opportunities that pay well?
We can't force enough mothers back to the home full-time to recreate the 1950s. I believe it's not just because of affordability, but because that was not a sustainable set up in the first place.
I really don’t understand how you can think that women have to be forced to take that position.
As a man I find that not having to engage in the competitive labor market in order to have some worth at the societal level is a very enviable proposition, as long as your partner can bring enough to provide for a decent life.
I think women have been successfully brainwashed into believing that there is inherent value in working when in fact, people work because this is what they have to do in order to sustain their life.
Men may work more or find more lucrative work because society basically assign their whole value based on this.
The vast majority of work confer very little self-worth, nor are particularly good for making one feel valued.
My opinion is that women idealize work because in reality very little of them do actual work so it is very easy to pretend. If they were judged the same as men it would be quite different.
Just ask any women that is unlucky enough to have one of the boring real work women ends up with, like cashier, and you will quickly find out she hates her work and would rather prefer to take care of the home and kids. Alas she cannot because being of lower social class, her husband generally is too and she absolutely cannot stop working to have a decent life.
Those women usually despise the feminist rhetoric overvaluing work just because it was supposedly a male privilege when in fact the women had the more desirable position.
Funny thing is that no matter how you put it there is basically no women who accept to be with a man that don’t work, clearly highlighting the lie for what it is…
The whole women work thing stinks of bourgeois status signaling it’s insane that it is still taken at face value.
So women shouldn't be forced to work, but should be forced to limit their expectations and only plan on keeping home?
Neither are a winning prospect. I'd rather there be both more flexibility in work expectations (becauae yes, a lot of jobs are just make work to support the creation of some things no one really needs) and higher expectations for men to participate in the hands on home and family care.
There is no going back to the past unless the population is forced. How can people move forward then? As it always has, life must adapt.
These are the questions to ask, for sure. Don't stop! "But with all these technological advances, why are we stuck at the 40 hour factory work week? Why do we let those at the top hoard so much wealth?"
100% - if one parent can stay home - does not have to be the woman - it protects amd strengthens the first and foremost community bond the family. Just because there are many failed examples of nuclear families as Luval Clejan articulated, doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Why can't we raise a family anymore on one income? I believe Western corporatism - beyond big tech social media - is one of the biggest killers of community - at all levels - to include the family. I live part time in Italy and am so grateful that they have a stagnant and lower GDP than the USA - their "wealth" per capita is not financial but emotional and relational. I know by first name every artisan small business owner and most of their staff - think butcher, baker, small family super market in the small community where we live. These personal and non-corporate connections create community. We in the West must start acknowledging how harmful to our health the conveniences that corporate America gives us is (24/7 pharmacy, big box retailers, fast food, etc.). With rare exceptions like Chik-fil-a, what incentive does a corporate chain really have to serve its clients and employees and not create a corporate competitive race to the lowest levels of service and care? I am slowly convincing my wife to make 4 stops at 4 small artisan small businesses in our local community than to go to one large chain supermarket which is more convenient. It is more inconvenient to buy produce and food that does not last as long. Maybe inconvenience is healthy? If convenient food is so dead that it is not healthy enough to grow mold or go bad, how do we expect it to be healthy for us? Our malnutrition and obesity epidemic is no surprise. We also know no one by name at the large corporate supermarket. In effect when we go to big box retailers - we are pretty much like cattle at a feeding trough - getting fattened for the emotional, mental, and relational slaughter.
Neal Stephenson called the mainstream economy a "feed economy", in one of his books (might have been The Diamond Age). In contrast to a "seed economy". I don't think we have to seek out inconvenience. We just have to make it one of the factors to be optimized, along with family, community and nature connection, not the only factor.
There is another thing going on though besides choosing convenience above family and community: it's also about staying competitive in one's work and having tools that lead to more productivity and saving time. So it's not so easy to do something else besides getting all the tools that everyone around you is getting. I am surprised things are different in Italy.
I just don't think you explored the topic deeply enough. You stopped at "families with stay-at-home parents seem to have done a better job raising kids". I would ask "5 Whys" Starting with two at the top level: Why do two parent families with a stay at home parent do better? and Why are such families on the apparent decline?
One answer I am reaching for is the current economic trend toward what was traditionally a normal upbringing requiring the financial input of two breadwinners. Enough couples hold down two full time jobs and raise "successful" children to provide anecdotal "evidence" but many couples just aren't left with enough time, money, or connection to do a good job. Many of the "successes" were also helped along by other family members or supportive communities. (It takes a village to raise a child). The kids, and families, that don't luck out are "victim blamed" for their failures.
In the mean time our GDP increases, making us wealthy as a nation, but the wealth is increasingly concentrated in the companies, families, and individuals who have enough or more than enough. Who pays? The families that don't have enough.
When we talk about inflation the core conversation is almost always about how much more things cost and very seldom about where is the money going? The part that goes to pay wage-based workers is often touted as the cause of inflation while the businesses' profits and the increasing wealth of billionaires is ignored.
Community is an important piece of the conversation.
I will add that one key piece of technology that has contributed to isolation and a lack of community (ironically) is the car. The majority of US children are driven to school by their parents instead of walking or biking with friends and neighbors. (One reason is that we've built sprawling communities where schools are far from homes; another is that cars make it too dangerous for walking or biking; there are others.) I wrote about how overdependence on cars makes us more isolated here: https://annelutzfernandez.substack.com/p/down-this-lonely-road
The other day I saw a couple with their child riding in the seat of their shopping cart playing not with a phone but with a pencil and paper. It was worth a comment and praise from a total stranger for how they are raising that kid!
Agreed, walkability is a big deal. Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit delves deep into he development of the suburb, which put people primarily into cars for the first time.
Yes, the car, but also the office, the water and electricity, the food, the heat, the comfort, the entertainment all coming from far away (or machines made far away) and not from people and nature close by.
My recent TEDx talk, “Is the cure for loneliness hiding in your closet?” has gotten over 435,000 views since it was published on YouTube on July 13. Seems a LOT of people want to hear about simple ways they can have more sense of community, belonging, and social connection.
When I gave the talk live in January, people of all ages came up to me in the lobby afterwards, but what touched me most were the late teens-early 20s kids who said they were so excited and inspired to take my message on board.
We all know things are more atomized than ever. We all need ideas and inspiration. Not everyone can join a church, a club, a class, host a gathering, or even call a friend… some need to start the way I’ve described… by talking to strangers! https://youtu.be/mcYPiQGyZbM?si=-4nADbtEGiyo9lU0
Loved your TEDx talk, Mollie! Such a lovely idea. I have been thinking about this loneliness issue for a long time and wanting to do something. You are inspiring, and so is this newsletter issue!
At the level of personal behaviour, these exhortations to change things must surely be right and well said. I share the sense that the fraying of community bonds is perhaps the greatest threat to the continued thriving of Western society. But I have my doubts about the ability of politics to do much about this. I am not a great believer in political solutions....more a believer in unintended political consequences. My instinct is that - in the age of the internet - such changes are not really controllable either at national or global scale.
Coincidentally, I was just talking about community yesterday with my 19-old college sophomore granddaughter. She is a remarkably well-adjusted, happy, optimistic young woman who was making her way around my iPad when she was five and got her first phone when she was seven. She (like most kids, it’s worth pointing out) has avoided the mental health struggles that are the preoccupation of this newsletter. I wanted to get a better understanding of how that came to be, so we’ve spent two afternoons a week this summer on a loosely designed research project in which she’s been both research assistant and research subject. I’ve done a great deal of listening and it’s been illuminating. She’s explained the rules that she and her friends have developed for handling their phones and social media and has done some brief videos in which she presents these to an imaginary thirteen year old. The rule we talked about yesterday was, “Find a community you can trust”. Given the general breakdown of trust in institutions, I was particularly interested in how she handles this. What I learned, somewhat to my surprise, is that her online community – the people she is in constant contact with via snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram – is entirely built around people that she has formed trusted relationships with offline. The kids she was in gymnastics with when she was three, her classmates throughout her school years and now in college. What the phone has done is enable her to maintain those bonds as people have changed schools, moved away, etc., so some of them are now relationships that are mostly online, although with most they’re still the people she gets together with on a regular basis. She has a very active in-person social life. Her online community is an enhancement of those in-person relationships, not a replacement or substitute for them. Her default assumption (another of her rules) is that “most everything you see online is edited, altered, or fake” so she is skeptical of all of it. She places her trust in the relationships she’s established in person and that’s enabled her to develop armor against the potential negative effects of what she sees in social media. Since she assumes that most of it isn’t real, it’s easier for her to turn away from the toxicity and negativity. She claims her behavior is typical for most of the people she knows around her age. It’s been a fascinating project and I hope to explore what I’ve learned in a series of essays over the next several months. Certainly it’s led me to believe that our kids would be better served by good guidance from a young age in how to incorporate phones into their lives in a healthy way than by making the phone the scapegoat. But that guidance is better coming from people like my granddaughter who’ve grown up developing the new norms than from older people for whom the online world will forever be alien territory.
And for the other 75% who didn't go to college and aren't as savvy or informed...
Who's helping them "good guidance" about how to navigate these dangerous shoals? Nobody. And such "guidance" is unlikely to reach very far in a country where everyone gets to set their own standards of what's OK. Great for some. It's the rest I worry about.
Thank you for your work to advance the conversation on, truly, all of society. The thing I'd add to the upstream nature of the issue discussed is the inequality of fair pay for work. Once people are fairly paid for their labor, the vast majority of Americans will be more able to devote time to their families, and neighborhoods and communities.
Liberals' concern with fairness/equality above other values that conservatives value more or equally (like community) is a relic of tribal times, where it functioned as a proximate mechanism for keeping the tribe intact, fit to its environment, and sometimes competitive with other tribes. It doesn't make sense anymore (i.e. offer a fitness advantage at the individual level, maybe a minor one at the state level) in an environment where the villages, tribes and families are gone.
Fairness/equality is also too hard to enforce at a state level (too many people), and has negative consequences on other things we value, like excellence and striving. You've got it backwards: community doesn't come from equality and fairness, it's something that encourages those things and makes them possible and beneficial without the negative side effects above.
I understand your comment about the difficulty of maintaining fairness/equality. I'm focusing more on the issue of most of the workers in a society being paid adequately for their work. When they are paid thusly it will obviously reduce the excess income the rich derive from the work of others. The income of the topmost far exceeds the effort they expend. Once workers have united voices in bargaining for the true value of their work, fairness will be determined by negotiation. A long process to be sure, but one in which those whose work produces value can arrive at fairness employers over the bargaining table.
Dave, we were doing that until companies decided to take their work to places where unions and environmental regulations were weak. And now there are robots and AI to replace most people. So I don't think unions will make a comeback anytime soon. We need to think outside of the box of capitalism, communism, socialism or anarchism. When people need each other for producing life's basics (including cultural goods and services) more fairness thrives (especially if they've been exposed to humanist/liberal values). And also the need for community is satisfied. Without this interdependence you get all the ills of the 50s.
Yes, I agree that the fairness/equality and care/harm allow for cooperation on larger scales than just the other ones. Capitalism is mostly thus a liberal enterprise. However, the downsides are that we 1. don't get our psychological needs for communion with people and nature met (despite marketers telling us otherwise this terms like "global village"), 2. we have feedbacks that are too slow and noisy between our actions and the consequences to nature (thus Climate Change) and 3. it is too hard to manage freeloading and other "Molochian dynamics" where we get a race to the bottom with the likes of AI, bioweapons, political polarization, great wealth inequality, and the attention economy, because there are too many moving parts, and not enough levels of abstraction (to use a computer science term) like family, village and tribe. Please ask questions if you don't understand what I'm saying about the cost benefit analysis.
There is no reason to not be motivated by both the liberal AND the conservative values (this is not precise, since conservatives also care about the liberal ones, but not exclusively).
What about people who don't have kids, or whose kids are grown up? What about people who are not religious? Is it hopeless for them to have community? Before the industrial revolution, such people had community. The upstream cause of loss of community is capitalism. It makes people not need each other locally, because they can get cheaper goods and services from anonymous people and institutions far away. It also make them not need the nature around them, and hence the feedbacks between actions and consequences become weak, hence Climate Change.
I am not optimistic that "activities" are sufficient to restore community. Community was maintained by actual physical and emotional interdependencies, before capitalism. Not only did communities satisfy people's evolved need for communion with other people and nature, but they prevented psychopaths and other free riders from getting too powerful (not perfectly, especially before humanistic ideologies and religions). Mass production, decreasing marginal costs due to investment in capital, and global trade (all of which constitute capitalism) have made us wealthy, but destroyed community (and are destroying families and integrated psychological individuals). Are Jonathan Haidt et al not aware of this, or are they afraid to bite the hand that feeds them?
I think your vision of pre-capitalism and Post capitalism is a little bit romanticized, but I agree with you that the upstream of loss of community is due largely to an unchecked finance capitalism that since the 1990s has removed capital from circulation in actual human communities, and through digital networks has displaced investments into etherspace.
Not romanticized, because I acknowledge the up sides of capitalism (wealth and convenience) too, and I acknowledge that without humanistic values, even small villages can be be oppressive places. But there is no doubt that before capitalism, most villages had strong community, and also most tribes (though with tribes, the decline started with the agricultural revolution, before capitalism). The real question is can we pin the decline of community completely on capitalism, or are there other important independent factors like the decline of religion (maybe not independent of capitalism), the rise of Enlightenment individualist values, etc? Also, what is my vision of post-capitalism? Please enlighten me?
No problem. I do have some ideas that need to be tried and improved about how to improve capitalism or at least provide alternatives, based on Emergence and Multi-Level selection theories. I don't want to wait for capitalism to die to try them out, first because it might take a really long time for that to happen, and second because many resources will go away once that happens.
This atomization happens with every industrial revolution. The 4th (digital) is no exception. 150 years ago steam engines took people out of the "community" and into the city. The atomization is not new but the scale gets larger each time. Blaming capitalism is a red herring. It's a function of science and technology and the Revolutions that produces. Regardless of the economic system, James Watt wasn't likely to keep his engine at home in the garage.
Perhaps not offering a red herring so much as a different perspective. Agree with you that history is cyclical and that we tread worn paths built into steam- and now platform/app-powered profiteering
What I was trying to imply with the red herring comment was that these things would exist *regardless of economic system* because they are things people want, developed from scientific knowledge (or sometimes just luck). Check all the Indust. Revs. The technology is always ahead of our ability to learn how to deal with it. Does "profiteering" make it all happen faster and be less responsive to social influence? Absolutely. But it, and its disruption, would happen anyway unless you want to be a hermit in Mongolia. And even they have cell phones... See Mark Carney's book "Value(s)" for a great explanation of how this has worked historically.
I think geography and housing policy also plays an important part in this. The idealized suburban detached life in America leads to low density, which has its consequences. There's fewer kids around to play with, and you're dependent on your parent's car to get to them. I recently visited my cousin who lives in one of the densest places in the world (Singapore), and his child's independent play opportunities vastly dwarf my kid's. Through their children playing together, he's formed very close connections with a lot of his neighbours as well.
In addition to higher density leading to a larger pool of nearby other children to play with, Singapore's HDB (housing development boards) owned buildings are extremely well planned, with playgrounds embedded in the spaces between the tightly packed buildings. Schools/food/most of your requirements are within very easy walking or public transit distance and kids learn to use them independently at an early age.
Great ideas, lots of concrete examples. A few you left out should address how to seek and find community with the economic demands that require dual incomes, frequently working more than one job per adult…. It’s nice to be able to pick and choose, but seriously, this is far more complex. The place you can afford is most frequently in a poor quality neighborhood with crime and transient residents. The place you prefer to live is usually out of the question until your kids are older and you have more money. Another factor is employment, prices have gone up, pay has not. True story, I worked a licensed healthcare job for 18 years with a national healthcare company that is traded on the NYSE. During those 18 years, my taxes went up, my insurance went up, everything was more expensive but I did not get a raise, not even 1%. I had to work 3 jobs. I am not the exception, sirs, I am the rule. In another example, my community went from English speaking to non English speaking within that 18 years. I learned Spanish. But culturally the Latine neighbors held their own events, did not include the locals. It’s not as easy as you make it seem. Another commenter pointed out that having mothers at home during childhood gives more opportunities for socialization. An absent mother only contributes to anxiety AND loneliness, a single mother away from home can only make her children feel insecure as existence depends on her shoulders and she’s far too exhausted to socialize with neighbors. Having siblings gives opportunities to interact with people, families are smaller. Families once established fracture. Much of this fracture can be traced to the temptations and excess encountered by internet where every vice and temptation is but a few keystrokes away. The demise of community, the fracturing of family these are casualties of our internet age and must be addressed before our culture can heal.
I am a 90+ year old white female and have been involved with civil rights and diversity building organizations since the 1960’s. It concerns me that rather than pulling together for a common goal so many are branching off into their own ‘identity’ groups - which by the name or branding they choose says — Not you. Stay out. If you are not like us you are not welcome. What this has done - and is, in my opinion, still doing is further separate those who long to be part of a diverse and welcoming community. I admire what some of the groups stand for but I see no welcome signs.
Thank you for your hard work on this. I currently live in and study the military community and write about how our culture, rich in all of the values you mentioned here, has declined significantly- impacting our national security, recruitment as fewer want to be part of a community you described, and declining retention due to the moral injury caused by the loss of American support and two decades of intense demand. I mention your work in my book Military Culture Shift: The Impact of War, Money, and Generational Perspective on Morale, Retention, and Leadership https://a.co/d/g3se52j
I am working on policy changes and shifting the culture toward more positive multi-generational dynamics so we can build off of what we have left. I would love to share more of what our community has experienced with you.
The military is one of the last bastions of thriving community in western civilization, where people have a visceral interdependence for their survival. Sad to hear that even that can't withstand the anti-community producing aspects of capitalism.
Even the amish are having trouble. I don't know in general, but I got to know a bit about the amish community around me where I was living in Missouri.
We are solving this issue through the thing that connects people more easily than anything else: eating together. The pilot launches in the fall. beth@ozarka.biz
If I may I would like to give a Dutch perspective, the country with the happiest children. I grew up in a pretty good community, mostly built around the school, and without religion. To me the strongest factor for community seems the layout of the neighborhood itself. The school and sports fields are all in the neighborhood, everything walkable or bikable, so I walked alone or with friends to school by my self from 5 years old. I would play in the neighborhood with one of my 3 best friends until dinner time.
Compare that to the layout of many American suburbs where the school and later sports facilities need to be driven to; raising a child becomes a lot more laborious, and children are much more dependent on their parents or other adults. It's more work for the parents, and less autonomy for the children.
So my message is: Place the school in the neighborhood.
"Why do we let those at the top hoard so much wealth?" I believe the capitalist system has worked better than the other options that have been tried. But many politicians have traded their integrity for patronage, which has left us with a skewed tax structure such that a few have billions and can do almost anything they want --- fly to the moon, for example --- while those with ordinary talent have to make uncomfortable choices. But when I compare how most people live in America with how they get by in the various communist countries, or how the world's richest folks lived a century earlier, I'm not seduced by the lure of letting government have all the money. It seems to me we've gone a bit overboard with under-taxing the wealthy, though... and a lot depends on the upcoming election for POTUS. Will we get somebody who REALLY understands working moms, or one who just wants to "grab em by the ******"? Best we can do right now is VOTE and encourage our friends and family to do the same!
A neighborhood or town based around a synagogue (or church, or mosque, or temple, etc) is perhaps the archetype of a place-based community. You can also create artificial, non-place-based communities if you put the effort in - the military is one example that other posters have also mentioned, but a lot of universities, especially campus-based ones are community-forming institutions too, even if most students spend well less than a decade there. You have shared values and goals, you might live in dorms and eat in communal halls, you join student socieities, and all of this (pandemics aside) happens in person. It's perhaps a transient community, but if it's done well it's still a community. Many current and former students would say they went to uni not just (or not so much) for the learning and the grades, but for the "experience" - for which, read "community".
Another example from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the military, as far as I can tell, is the queer community. It has shared norms and values, as much of a common identity as many other communities, commitment, role models, rituals, ingroup trust, social sanctions for misconduct against the community norms, and most of the other points you listed. If you move to a city with a vibrant queer scene, as many queer people do precisely for the in-person community that offers, you get lots of opportunities to interact with members in person - queer book clubs, queer activity groups, queer sports teams, and your own party and dating scene. Helping each other out because we're "on the same team" is very much part of it. In states that allow it, you can even adopt and raise children according to your community's values! It might only work for, being generous, maximally 5-10% of the population as a whole, but if there's hundreds of members in your city's queer community that's still a community. It's a beacon of togetherness in an otherwise lonely Generation Z.
This article and the comments that follow are typically (for After Babel) illuminating. But it seems to me that one BIG change in community structure has been omitted from the discussion. I'm likely to stimulate resentment by mentioning it, and I don't pretend to have a solution, but they also serve who only point at problems.
As I grew up in the immediate post-WWII era, my dad was often away at work and my mom was nearly always at home. When she went shopping, she took the kids with her. She took us to church on Sunday, where she and I and our father wound up singing in the choir. She made sure we got to school safely and had what we needed to succeed there. She always had a nutritious breakfast, lunch, and supper ready for us and schooled us in proper table manners as we all ate together at least twice a day.
In the evening, we played games and discussed current events in the living room. We all studied music and performed together. When we had a TV, we watched it together and discussed the content together. We went on vacations together, ditto concerts and plays, and sometimes out to eat. We celebrated religious and secular holidays together and discussed their meanings.
If one of us was ill or in trouble, Mom was right there to help. We were NEVER home alone! We did play alone at times, and with neighbors, and spent weeks at summer camps every year.
I won't say it was an ideal childhood: neither parent was a paragon. Together with all the other parents and teachers and counselors and coaches, they taught us what we needed to become successful after leaving home.
I bet you can see where this is going and I shudder to think of the "elderly white male misogynist" label that may be coming my way. But I don't think we can afford to ignore one of the biggest changes in family structure of my lifetime: the stay-at-home mom has gone the way of the dinosaurs. Working moms do not have the time and energy to spend raising a family that their forebears did. Single moms have it even worse. So we rely on strangers to supervise and educate and entertain our children. I'm not saying anything against stay-at-home dads, either.
My main point is that raising kids is a fantastically difficult and time-consuming business that requires a LOT of love, more than most people can muster for somebody else's children. Further, as any successful careerist will tell you, "full-time work" often means 60 or more hours a week of intense application with infrequent and incomplete breaks. The idea of combining a successful career with parenthood seems like a lot to ask, and it's no wonder that women of child-bearing age are not an employer's first choice because they want you to give 110% to their priorities and raising a family is supposed to be secondary. None of this is to suggest that a mom can't be successful in any career up to and including POTUS, but I would suggest that if that's your ambition you look for a stay-at-home dad as partner.
So, am I nuts?
I don't think you're nuts, but you're only seeing part of the picture with the romanticized Leave it to Beaver American family. You're missing the empire part, where much of that era was funded by taking resources from other people abroad (including their labor) without adequate compensation (except maybe for those countries' dictators). You're also missing the part where many housewives were suicidal or on valium because they DIDN'T have much community, it was mostly nuclear families. You're missing all the unhappy husbands who resorted to extra-marital affairs. And you're missing the stultifying lack of creativity that was exhibited in such movies as Pleasantville (Erik Hoel has also chimed in on this with his Gossip Trap), that partially caused the 60s rebellion.
Nuclear families without village or tribe are not something that works for most people. On the other hand, tribes or villages or nations with no families (or dysfunctional families) also don't work for most people.
Actually, I think Haidt is arguing AGAINST what developed into a focus on nuclear families. Throughout world history and across peoples, clan and tribe were communities that people belonged to. Religion, culture, language dialect, and history tied clan/tribe together into a homogenous way of life. Kids learned from their parents, grandparents, aunts-uncles-cousins, schooling (formal and informal), etc. a way of life via immersion and osmosis.
Coming to America, these communities/experiences transplanted here via immigration waves. The Italian Catholic, Jewish, etc. communities/neighborhoods. Think the multi-generational Waltons.
Westward movement--esp during WWII to California--resulted in leaving those connections behind. This is when the nuclear family began to take over as a cultural norm. Mid-century modern housing reflected this as they became backyard (vs. porch) focused and the kitchens were switched from being largely hidden to having views of the den so mom could watch the kids while she cooked.
While the Waltons were multi-generational each episode, Leave it to Beaver had an aunt or uncle appear in just 4 of 268 episodes. Grandparents (the dreaded mother-in-law episode) rarely appear in the Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, etc shows.
The nuclear family, then, is the result of the breakdown of what Haidt describes as community--not the the epitome of it.
The midwestern/east coast parents (like mine in 1960) settling on the West Coast still transmitted a semblance of their experiences to my generation (1964 between Boomers and GenX), but we didn't get the full immersion. What we transmitted to our kids is even weaker--especially in the influence of what Haidt and others describe over the last 30 years.
Pete, agreed. "Religion, culture, language dialect, and history tied clan/tribe together into a homogenous way of life." And also economy, they would make essential stuff and provide essential services for each other. Global trade was for luxury goods, except maybe salt. But from my understanding, tribes still had families as a lower level unit of organization, sometimes called clans, and maybe family could have been even lower level than clan. What do you think?
Sure, families were a sub-unit within larger tribes/clans. In that context, aunts and uncles were second parents, and cousins almost indistinguishable from brothers and sisters. Everyone lived next to each other. Expectations, supervision, and parenting were essentially shared. Everyone spent time at everyone else's home. Today, there is a much bigger gap between the 'nuclear family' and aunts-uncles-cousins.
In Southern California, Northgate Market is a very successful, large Hispanic grocery chain. The original owners--parents from Guadalajara--brought the children to the states. The eight children are all owners of the Market with their parents. One son is the CEO. Another is a meat cutter. Different roles in the organization, but equals in ownership. Talk with the grandkids, and they will tell you they have 16 parents (aunts and uncles). The Market is intentionally, deeply committed to the good of the Histpanic community. Very impressive.
We just need thousands (millions) of such companies that are all synergistic with each other and committed to the good of their local community MORE than the rest of the world. And where much more trade happens locally than globally.
One of the biggest problems today is that the American economy operates at about 15% of its potential. American business is structured around transactional relationships: employee wants more money for less work vs. company wants more work for less money. It is structured as a win-lose entity, the lowest trust, lowest performance relationship possible. Good companies only get 30%-35% engagement-commitment from employees. 20% are disengaged--actively burning the place down from the inside.
Switch to a structure based on Covenant Relationships in which the good of the individual (employee) and team (organization) are the same. The more they commit to each other in terms of becoming Good (as individuals and as an organization), the higher their engagement, productivity, and performance. Imagine a sports team accepting 35% commitment. They would lose every game. Any company that bumped their engagement from 35% to just 50% would wipe the floor with the competition and dominate the market.
The best part is that performance--profits if you want--would increase dramatically. And, in covenant. high trust relationships, that would be shared with all the employees.
Now, do that not just within a company, but between companies in an economy, and the wealth generation and spread would be unbelievable. The best part is that strong relationships are also the key to Happiness in life.
Success, Happiness, and a very wealthy, just society are all possible, but we are trapped by not understanding life and the importance of good, high trust relationships.
I'm a working mom and wonder about this, too. But I don't think going back is the solution. Telling an increasingly educated populace to drop everything to raise their children in a nuclear format is not going to work when choices are available. When women have the choice to enter a career, those who stay at home cannot rely on a neighborhood network being there. The network relied on women not having choice.
I'd prefer a solution where everyone can work fewer hours per week and/or more flexibility for working hours. And again, working mom here, so I will clarify that not only do I value being a mother, but I enjoy working in and of itself as a fulfilling part of my life. But with all these technological advances, why are we stuck at the 40 hour factory work week? Why do we let those at the top hoard so much wealth? Why aren't there more part time opportunities that pay well?
We can't force enough mothers back to the home full-time to recreate the 1950s. I believe it's not just because of affordability, but because that was not a sustainable set up in the first place.
I really don’t understand how you can think that women have to be forced to take that position.
As a man I find that not having to engage in the competitive labor market in order to have some worth at the societal level is a very enviable proposition, as long as your partner can bring enough to provide for a decent life.
I think women have been successfully brainwashed into believing that there is inherent value in working when in fact, people work because this is what they have to do in order to sustain their life.
Men may work more or find more lucrative work because society basically assign their whole value based on this.
The vast majority of work confer very little self-worth, nor are particularly good for making one feel valued.
My opinion is that women idealize work because in reality very little of them do actual work so it is very easy to pretend. If they were judged the same as men it would be quite different.
Just ask any women that is unlucky enough to have one of the boring real work women ends up with, like cashier, and you will quickly find out she hates her work and would rather prefer to take care of the home and kids. Alas she cannot because being of lower social class, her husband generally is too and she absolutely cannot stop working to have a decent life.
Those women usually despise the feminist rhetoric overvaluing work just because it was supposedly a male privilege when in fact the women had the more desirable position.
Funny thing is that no matter how you put it there is basically no women who accept to be with a man that don’t work, clearly highlighting the lie for what it is…
The whole women work thing stinks of bourgeois status signaling it’s insane that it is still taken at face value.
So women shouldn't be forced to work, but should be forced to limit their expectations and only plan on keeping home?
Neither are a winning prospect. I'd rather there be both more flexibility in work expectations (becauae yes, a lot of jobs are just make work to support the creation of some things no one really needs) and higher expectations for men to participate in the hands on home and family care.
There is no going back to the past unless the population is forced. How can people move forward then? As it always has, life must adapt.
These are the questions to ask, for sure. Don't stop! "But with all these technological advances, why are we stuck at the 40 hour factory work week? Why do we let those at the top hoard so much wealth?"
100% - if one parent can stay home - does not have to be the woman - it protects amd strengthens the first and foremost community bond the family. Just because there are many failed examples of nuclear families as Luval Clejan articulated, doesn't mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater. Why can't we raise a family anymore on one income? I believe Western corporatism - beyond big tech social media - is one of the biggest killers of community - at all levels - to include the family. I live part time in Italy and am so grateful that they have a stagnant and lower GDP than the USA - their "wealth" per capita is not financial but emotional and relational. I know by first name every artisan small business owner and most of their staff - think butcher, baker, small family super market in the small community where we live. These personal and non-corporate connections create community. We in the West must start acknowledging how harmful to our health the conveniences that corporate America gives us is (24/7 pharmacy, big box retailers, fast food, etc.). With rare exceptions like Chik-fil-a, what incentive does a corporate chain really have to serve its clients and employees and not create a corporate competitive race to the lowest levels of service and care? I am slowly convincing my wife to make 4 stops at 4 small artisan small businesses in our local community than to go to one large chain supermarket which is more convenient. It is more inconvenient to buy produce and food that does not last as long. Maybe inconvenience is healthy? If convenient food is so dead that it is not healthy enough to grow mold or go bad, how do we expect it to be healthy for us? Our malnutrition and obesity epidemic is no surprise. We also know no one by name at the large corporate supermarket. In effect when we go to big box retailers - we are pretty much like cattle at a feeding trough - getting fattened for the emotional, mental, and relational slaughter.
Neal Stephenson called the mainstream economy a "feed economy", in one of his books (might have been The Diamond Age). In contrast to a "seed economy". I don't think we have to seek out inconvenience. We just have to make it one of the factors to be optimized, along with family, community and nature connection, not the only factor.
There is another thing going on though besides choosing convenience above family and community: it's also about staying competitive in one's work and having tools that lead to more productivity and saving time. So it's not so easy to do something else besides getting all the tools that everyone around you is getting. I am surprised things are different in Italy.
I just don't think you explored the topic deeply enough. You stopped at "families with stay-at-home parents seem to have done a better job raising kids". I would ask "5 Whys" Starting with two at the top level: Why do two parent families with a stay at home parent do better? and Why are such families on the apparent decline?
One answer I am reaching for is the current economic trend toward what was traditionally a normal upbringing requiring the financial input of two breadwinners. Enough couples hold down two full time jobs and raise "successful" children to provide anecdotal "evidence" but many couples just aren't left with enough time, money, or connection to do a good job. Many of the "successes" were also helped along by other family members or supportive communities. (It takes a village to raise a child). The kids, and families, that don't luck out are "victim blamed" for their failures.
In the mean time our GDP increases, making us wealthy as a nation, but the wealth is increasingly concentrated in the companies, families, and individuals who have enough or more than enough. Who pays? The families that don't have enough.
When we talk about inflation the core conversation is almost always about how much more things cost and very seldom about where is the money going? The part that goes to pay wage-based workers is often touted as the cause of inflation while the businesses' profits and the increasing wealth of billionaires is ignored.
Community is an important piece of the conversation.
I will add that one key piece of technology that has contributed to isolation and a lack of community (ironically) is the car. The majority of US children are driven to school by their parents instead of walking or biking with friends and neighbors. (One reason is that we've built sprawling communities where schools are far from homes; another is that cars make it too dangerous for walking or biking; there are others.) I wrote about how overdependence on cars makes us more isolated here: https://annelutzfernandez.substack.com/p/down-this-lonely-road
I've also written about how as a teacher I started working to keep students off screens more in my classroom: https://annelutzfernandez.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-paper
The other day I saw a couple with their child riding in the seat of their shopping cart playing not with a phone but with a pencil and paper. It was worth a comment and praise from a total stranger for how they are raising that kid!
Agreed, walkability is a big deal. Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit delves deep into he development of the suburb, which put people primarily into cars for the first time.
Lyrics:
People say we got it made
Don't they know we're so afraid?
Isolation
We're afraid to be alone
Everybody got to have a home
Isolation
Just a boy and a little girl
Trying to change the whole wide world
Isolation
The world is just a little town
Everybody trying to put us down
Isolation
I don't expect you to understand
After you've caused so much pain
But then again, you're not to blame
You're just a human, a victim of the insane
We're afraid of everyone
Afraid of the sun
Isolation
The sun will never disappear
But the world may not have many years
I-Isolation
Songwriter: John Lennon
Yes, the car, but also the office, the water and electricity, the food, the heat, the comfort, the entertainment all coming from far away (or machines made far away) and not from people and nature close by.
My recent TEDx talk, “Is the cure for loneliness hiding in your closet?” has gotten over 435,000 views since it was published on YouTube on July 13. Seems a LOT of people want to hear about simple ways they can have more sense of community, belonging, and social connection.
When I gave the talk live in January, people of all ages came up to me in the lobby afterwards, but what touched me most were the late teens-early 20s kids who said they were so excited and inspired to take my message on board.
We all know things are more atomized than ever. We all need ideas and inspiration. Not everyone can join a church, a club, a class, host a gathering, or even call a friend… some need to start the way I’ve described… by talking to strangers! https://youtu.be/mcYPiQGyZbM?si=-4nADbtEGiyo9lU0
Loved your TEDx talk, Mollie! Such a lovely idea. I have been thinking about this loneliness issue for a long time and wanting to do something. You are inspiring, and so is this newsletter issue!
So happy to hear this! Yes, loneliness / need for community is an issue that I am endlessly fascinated and activated by.
At the level of personal behaviour, these exhortations to change things must surely be right and well said. I share the sense that the fraying of community bonds is perhaps the greatest threat to the continued thriving of Western society. But I have my doubts about the ability of politics to do much about this. I am not a great believer in political solutions....more a believer in unintended political consequences. My instinct is that - in the age of the internet - such changes are not really controllable either at national or global scale.
Coincidentally, I was just talking about community yesterday with my 19-old college sophomore granddaughter. She is a remarkably well-adjusted, happy, optimistic young woman who was making her way around my iPad when she was five and got her first phone when she was seven. She (like most kids, it’s worth pointing out) has avoided the mental health struggles that are the preoccupation of this newsletter. I wanted to get a better understanding of how that came to be, so we’ve spent two afternoons a week this summer on a loosely designed research project in which she’s been both research assistant and research subject. I’ve done a great deal of listening and it’s been illuminating. She’s explained the rules that she and her friends have developed for handling their phones and social media and has done some brief videos in which she presents these to an imaginary thirteen year old. The rule we talked about yesterday was, “Find a community you can trust”. Given the general breakdown of trust in institutions, I was particularly interested in how she handles this. What I learned, somewhat to my surprise, is that her online community – the people she is in constant contact with via snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram – is entirely built around people that she has formed trusted relationships with offline. The kids she was in gymnastics with when she was three, her classmates throughout her school years and now in college. What the phone has done is enable her to maintain those bonds as people have changed schools, moved away, etc., so some of them are now relationships that are mostly online, although with most they’re still the people she gets together with on a regular basis. She has a very active in-person social life. Her online community is an enhancement of those in-person relationships, not a replacement or substitute for them. Her default assumption (another of her rules) is that “most everything you see online is edited, altered, or fake” so she is skeptical of all of it. She places her trust in the relationships she’s established in person and that’s enabled her to develop armor against the potential negative effects of what she sees in social media. Since she assumes that most of it isn’t real, it’s easier for her to turn away from the toxicity and negativity. She claims her behavior is typical for most of the people she knows around her age. It’s been a fascinating project and I hope to explore what I’ve learned in a series of essays over the next several months. Certainly it’s led me to believe that our kids would be better served by good guidance from a young age in how to incorporate phones into their lives in a healthy way than by making the phone the scapegoat. But that guidance is better coming from people like my granddaughter who’ve grown up developing the new norms than from older people for whom the online world will forever be alien territory.
And for the other 75% who didn't go to college and aren't as savvy or informed...
Who's helping them "good guidance" about how to navigate these dangerous shoals? Nobody. And such "guidance" is unlikely to reach very far in a country where everyone gets to set their own standards of what's OK. Great for some. It's the rest I worry about.
Thank you for your work to advance the conversation on, truly, all of society. The thing I'd add to the upstream nature of the issue discussed is the inequality of fair pay for work. Once people are fairly paid for their labor, the vast majority of Americans will be more able to devote time to their families, and neighborhoods and communities.
Liberals' concern with fairness/equality above other values that conservatives value more or equally (like community) is a relic of tribal times, where it functioned as a proximate mechanism for keeping the tribe intact, fit to its environment, and sometimes competitive with other tribes. It doesn't make sense anymore (i.e. offer a fitness advantage at the individual level, maybe a minor one at the state level) in an environment where the villages, tribes and families are gone.
Fairness/equality is also too hard to enforce at a state level (too many people), and has negative consequences on other things we value, like excellence and striving. You've got it backwards: community doesn't come from equality and fairness, it's something that encourages those things and makes them possible and beneficial without the negative side effects above.
I understand your comment about the difficulty of maintaining fairness/equality. I'm focusing more on the issue of most of the workers in a society being paid adequately for their work. When they are paid thusly it will obviously reduce the excess income the rich derive from the work of others. The income of the topmost far exceeds the effort they expend. Once workers have united voices in bargaining for the true value of their work, fairness will be determined by negotiation. A long process to be sure, but one in which those whose work produces value can arrive at fairness employers over the bargaining table.
Dave, we were doing that until companies decided to take their work to places where unions and environmental regulations were weak. And now there are robots and AI to replace most people. So I don't think unions will make a comeback anytime soon. We need to think outside of the box of capitalism, communism, socialism or anarchism. When people need each other for producing life's basics (including cultural goods and services) more fairness thrives (especially if they've been exposed to humanist/liberal values). And also the need for community is satisfied. Without this interdependence you get all the ills of the 50s.
Yes, I agree that the fairness/equality and care/harm allow for cooperation on larger scales than just the other ones. Capitalism is mostly thus a liberal enterprise. However, the downsides are that we 1. don't get our psychological needs for communion with people and nature met (despite marketers telling us otherwise this terms like "global village"), 2. we have feedbacks that are too slow and noisy between our actions and the consequences to nature (thus Climate Change) and 3. it is too hard to manage freeloading and other "Molochian dynamics" where we get a race to the bottom with the likes of AI, bioweapons, political polarization, great wealth inequality, and the attention economy, because there are too many moving parts, and not enough levels of abstraction (to use a computer science term) like family, village and tribe. Please ask questions if you don't understand what I'm saying about the cost benefit analysis.
There is no reason to not be motivated by both the liberal AND the conservative values (this is not precise, since conservatives also care about the liberal ones, but not exclusively).
What about people who don't have kids, or whose kids are grown up? What about people who are not religious? Is it hopeless for them to have community? Before the industrial revolution, such people had community. The upstream cause of loss of community is capitalism. It makes people not need each other locally, because they can get cheaper goods and services from anonymous people and institutions far away. It also make them not need the nature around them, and hence the feedbacks between actions and consequences become weak, hence Climate Change.
I am not optimistic that "activities" are sufficient to restore community. Community was maintained by actual physical and emotional interdependencies, before capitalism. Not only did communities satisfy people's evolved need for communion with other people and nature, but they prevented psychopaths and other free riders from getting too powerful (not perfectly, especially before humanistic ideologies and religions). Mass production, decreasing marginal costs due to investment in capital, and global trade (all of which constitute capitalism) have made us wealthy, but destroyed community (and are destroying families and integrated psychological individuals). Are Jonathan Haidt et al not aware of this, or are they afraid to bite the hand that feeds them?
I think your vision of pre-capitalism and Post capitalism is a little bit romanticized, but I agree with you that the upstream of loss of community is due largely to an unchecked finance capitalism that since the 1990s has removed capital from circulation in actual human communities, and through digital networks has displaced investments into etherspace.
Not romanticized, because I acknowledge the up sides of capitalism (wealth and convenience) too, and I acknowledge that without humanistic values, even small villages can be be oppressive places. But there is no doubt that before capitalism, most villages had strong community, and also most tribes (though with tribes, the decline started with the agricultural revolution, before capitalism). The real question is can we pin the decline of community completely on capitalism, or are there other important independent factors like the decline of religion (maybe not independent of capitalism), the rise of Enlightenment individualist values, etc? Also, what is my vision of post-capitalism? Please enlighten me?
I voice text and that “post capitalism” bit got in there through a garble. Please forgive me. Thank you for following up.
No problem. I do have some ideas that need to be tried and improved about how to improve capitalism or at least provide alternatives, based on Emergence and Multi-Level selection theories. I don't want to wait for capitalism to die to try them out, first because it might take a really long time for that to happen, and second because many resources will go away once that happens.
This atomization happens with every industrial revolution. The 4th (digital) is no exception. 150 years ago steam engines took people out of the "community" and into the city. The atomization is not new but the scale gets larger each time. Blaming capitalism is a red herring. It's a function of science and technology and the Revolutions that produces. Regardless of the economic system, James Watt wasn't likely to keep his engine at home in the garage.
Perhaps not offering a red herring so much as a different perspective. Agree with you that history is cyclical and that we tread worn paths built into steam- and now platform/app-powered profiteering
What I was trying to imply with the red herring comment was that these things would exist *regardless of economic system* because they are things people want, developed from scientific knowledge (or sometimes just luck). Check all the Indust. Revs. The technology is always ahead of our ability to learn how to deal with it. Does "profiteering" make it all happen faster and be less responsive to social influence? Absolutely. But it, and its disruption, would happen anyway unless you want to be a hermit in Mongolia. And even they have cell phones... See Mark Carney's book "Value(s)" for a great explanation of how this has worked historically.
Well, there might be some shades of gray between hermit and Musk :-)
I think geography and housing policy also plays an important part in this. The idealized suburban detached life in America leads to low density, which has its consequences. There's fewer kids around to play with, and you're dependent on your parent's car to get to them. I recently visited my cousin who lives in one of the densest places in the world (Singapore), and his child's independent play opportunities vastly dwarf my kid's. Through their children playing together, he's formed very close connections with a lot of his neighbours as well.
In addition to higher density leading to a larger pool of nearby other children to play with, Singapore's HDB (housing development boards) owned buildings are extremely well planned, with playgrounds embedded in the spaces between the tightly packed buildings. Schools/food/most of your requirements are within very easy walking or public transit distance and kids learn to use them independently at an early age.
Great ideas, lots of concrete examples. A few you left out should address how to seek and find community with the economic demands that require dual incomes, frequently working more than one job per adult…. It’s nice to be able to pick and choose, but seriously, this is far more complex. The place you can afford is most frequently in a poor quality neighborhood with crime and transient residents. The place you prefer to live is usually out of the question until your kids are older and you have more money. Another factor is employment, prices have gone up, pay has not. True story, I worked a licensed healthcare job for 18 years with a national healthcare company that is traded on the NYSE. During those 18 years, my taxes went up, my insurance went up, everything was more expensive but I did not get a raise, not even 1%. I had to work 3 jobs. I am not the exception, sirs, I am the rule. In another example, my community went from English speaking to non English speaking within that 18 years. I learned Spanish. But culturally the Latine neighbors held their own events, did not include the locals. It’s not as easy as you make it seem. Another commenter pointed out that having mothers at home during childhood gives more opportunities for socialization. An absent mother only contributes to anxiety AND loneliness, a single mother away from home can only make her children feel insecure as existence depends on her shoulders and she’s far too exhausted to socialize with neighbors. Having siblings gives opportunities to interact with people, families are smaller. Families once established fracture. Much of this fracture can be traced to the temptations and excess encountered by internet where every vice and temptation is but a few keystrokes away. The demise of community, the fracturing of family these are casualties of our internet age and must be addressed before our culture can heal.
I am a 90+ year old white female and have been involved with civil rights and diversity building organizations since the 1960’s. It concerns me that rather than pulling together for a common goal so many are branching off into their own ‘identity’ groups - which by the name or branding they choose says — Not you. Stay out. If you are not like us you are not welcome. What this has done - and is, in my opinion, still doing is further separate those who long to be part of a diverse and welcoming community. I admire what some of the groups stand for but I see no welcome signs.
Thank you for your hard work on this. I currently live in and study the military community and write about how our culture, rich in all of the values you mentioned here, has declined significantly- impacting our national security, recruitment as fewer want to be part of a community you described, and declining retention due to the moral injury caused by the loss of American support and two decades of intense demand. I mention your work in my book Military Culture Shift: The Impact of War, Money, and Generational Perspective on Morale, Retention, and Leadership https://a.co/d/g3se52j
I am working on policy changes and shifting the culture toward more positive multi-generational dynamics so we can build off of what we have left. I would love to share more of what our community has experienced with you.
The military is one of the last bastions of thriving community in western civilization, where people have a visceral interdependence for their survival. Sad to hear that even that can't withstand the anti-community producing aspects of capitalism.
Even the amish are having trouble. I don't know in general, but I got to know a bit about the amish community around me where I was living in Missouri.
We are solving this issue through the thing that connects people more easily than anything else: eating together. The pilot launches in the fall. beth@ozarka.biz
Breaking bread together is such a simple yet effective way to connect. Can you say more about your pilot?
If I may I would like to give a Dutch perspective, the country with the happiest children. I grew up in a pretty good community, mostly built around the school, and without religion. To me the strongest factor for community seems the layout of the neighborhood itself. The school and sports fields are all in the neighborhood, everything walkable or bikable, so I walked alone or with friends to school by my self from 5 years old. I would play in the neighborhood with one of my 3 best friends until dinner time.
Compare that to the layout of many American suburbs where the school and later sports facilities need to be driven to; raising a child becomes a lot more laborious, and children are much more dependent on their parents or other adults. It's more work for the parents, and less autonomy for the children.
So my message is: Place the school in the neighborhood.
"Why do we let those at the top hoard so much wealth?" I believe the capitalist system has worked better than the other options that have been tried. But many politicians have traded their integrity for patronage, which has left us with a skewed tax structure such that a few have billions and can do almost anything they want --- fly to the moon, for example --- while those with ordinary talent have to make uncomfortable choices. But when I compare how most people live in America with how they get by in the various communist countries, or how the world's richest folks lived a century earlier, I'm not seduced by the lure of letting government have all the money. It seems to me we've gone a bit overboard with under-taxing the wealthy, though... and a lot depends on the upcoming election for POTUS. Will we get somebody who REALLY understands working moms, or one who just wants to "grab em by the ******"? Best we can do right now is VOTE and encourage our friends and family to do the same!
Well said, and may this be widely heard.
A neighborhood or town based around a synagogue (or church, or mosque, or temple, etc) is perhaps the archetype of a place-based community. You can also create artificial, non-place-based communities if you put the effort in - the military is one example that other posters have also mentioned, but a lot of universities, especially campus-based ones are community-forming institutions too, even if most students spend well less than a decade there. You have shared values and goals, you might live in dorms and eat in communal halls, you join student socieities, and all of this (pandemics aside) happens in person. It's perhaps a transient community, but if it's done well it's still a community. Many current and former students would say they went to uni not just (or not so much) for the learning and the grades, but for the "experience" - for which, read "community".
Another example from the opposite end of the political spectrum to the military, as far as I can tell, is the queer community. It has shared norms and values, as much of a common identity as many other communities, commitment, role models, rituals, ingroup trust, social sanctions for misconduct against the community norms, and most of the other points you listed. If you move to a city with a vibrant queer scene, as many queer people do precisely for the in-person community that offers, you get lots of opportunities to interact with members in person - queer book clubs, queer activity groups, queer sports teams, and your own party and dating scene. Helping each other out because we're "on the same team" is very much part of it. In states that allow it, you can even adopt and raise children according to your community's values! It might only work for, being generous, maximally 5-10% of the population as a whole, but if there's hundreds of members in your city's queer community that's still a community. It's a beacon of togetherness in an otherwise lonely Generation Z.
Zoom
I put on my cape and believe,
I am teleported to meet.
I am super-human. I can be there.
I can be there. I can be anywhere.
Someplace becomes no place when it can be any place.
My body is stretched to fit into a tiny wire.
The lights blink and I am there.
But yesterday I wasn’t teleported.
I was stretched.
I was diffused.
I was scattered to the wind,
like chaff of the wheat,
I was sifted like grain.
My life became a vapor;
it blew away.
I was stretched too thin.
Today I’ve woken up from a dream.
Today that I see what is true.
I am human. I am finite. I am limited.
My feet are set on a rock.
I am here.