The Loss of Community and the Role of the State in a Mass, Market Driven Society

What is community and why is it so important to understand what a community is and the role it is supposed to play in society?

Photo Credit: Reinhard Schmid/www.4cornersimages.com

36. The Loss of Community and the Role of the State in a Mass, Market Driven Society

Community. This is one of those words which gets thrown around all the time. There is a kind of mystique to it. A sense of longing. We all seem to want it. We all claim that we are a part of some community or another, even if it’s just an online community. But one gets the sense that we talk about it so much because so few of us experience real community any more. It seems like the kind of thing that, if you have it, you don’t need to talk about it. So what is community? What are its characteristics? How do we know it when we see it? And why is it so important to understand what a community is and the role it is supposed to play in society? If we don’t, we cannot properly understand the role that our political institutions—that is, “the state”—must play in today’s mass society.

If you have not read Alan Ehernhalt’s “The Lost City: the Forgotten Virtues of Community in America,” I highly recommend you do. His book looks at community at time when it was passing away. He interviewed the older members of dissolving communities, asking them about their experiences, trying to understand what was changing. At the time he conducted them, the handwriting was already on the wall. Communities were largely disappearing in America. Today, you have to look hard to find functioning communities.

Having done his research, Ehernhalt came to the conclusion that most of us want the feeling of community without its reality. We abandoned them precisely to get away from the things that make them what they are:

“We don’t want the 1950’s back…what we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100% Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent. But there is no way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have of re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a pipe dream.”

Ehrenhalt makes the case that what destroyed community is the idea of personal autonomy, this notion that I should be free to make whatever choices I want to make. I should have the freedom to do what I want, to live my truth. No one should be able to tell me how to live. Live and let live. My choices don’t affect you. I am not harming anyone, so why should you care what I choose to do? It is this understanding of the world which makes community impossible. This idea that everyone should be free to make their own choices has a devastating impact upon the health and viability of communities.

So what gave people the idea that we should be free to make our own choices, that we are morally autonomous beings with the freedom, the right, to make all of our choices ourselves? For three, maybe four generations we have been living with this idea of the autonomous individual, long enough that it seems natural and that to violate this autonomy somehow seems to be a violation of the very idea of freedom itself. It has quickly become so ingrained in our thinking that it is almost impossible for us to conceive of the idea of liberty in any other way than through the lens of the autonomous individual. So how did we shift from liberty as “freedom from political oppression” to an idea of liberty conceived as “personal moral autonomy?” The answer is largely one of economics and technology working together in what we know as “the market.”

There was a time when most of the economic activity that happened, did so locally or regionally. Small proprietors. Family businesses. Small shops. As mechanization enabled an increase in the scale of production, businesses grew to take advantage of this. More and more businesses expanded their size and reach. They grew their market. The took advantage of economies of scale. This brought a greater choice in goods. It brought new options in employment. New specialties were created to deal with this new industrial environment. It had to be managed and staffed. This created opportunities. You were no longer bound by the small scope and scale of your community. You could choose to go off and make your fortune.

These new opportunities also caused disruptions. Small, local shops found themselves competing with larger, more efficient, often cheaper regional operations that could take advantage of their scale to the detriment of the small operator. Gradually, the connection between ownership and the community was severed as well. As businesses grew, they would seek capital from beyond the confines of the local domain through the stock market. This new reality brought about the severing of the bond between business owner and the community. No longer was the businessman’s primary focus and responsibility to the place and people, the community, in which his business was located, but to anonymous shareholders. Ehernhalt says this of the decision of Lennox to move their headquarters from out of Ames, Iowa:

“Once the pressure of the global market had persuaded the Lennox Corporation that it had the moral freedom of choice to make air conditioners wherever in the world it wanted to, the bonds that had tied it to a small town in Iowa for nearly a century were breakable.”

It could be argued that the global market was inevitable. Some will try to make the case that the market is the best guarantor of freedom and that this freedom is the most important value for a society to preserve. Others will argue that the market is the best way to put dollars in people’s pockets, to bring prosperity to the most number of people.

“But in the end, there is no escaping the reality that the market is a force of disruption of existing relationships. To argue that markets are a true friend of community is an inversion of common sense.”

It disrupts the relationship of businesses to the community. It disrupts how people relate to the community.

“To idealize markets and call oneself a conservative is to distort reality.”

What Ehrenhalt means here is that if you wish to conserve the social fabric of a society, built up and sustained at the level of the local community, then you have to recognize that the mass market is a force which works to undermine that same community structure. The market proliferates choice, for businesses and for individuals. People and businesses have options they never used to have before the mass market. Everyone involved welcomed these choices. They come to embrace choice itself as a moral value. The right to choose, to make one’s own choices, began to transcend the attachment to community. In the end, what destroyed communities was a devotion to “the market” and to “personal choice” as ends to be pursued for their own sake. Once they were elevated above other, older commitments, the handwriting was on the wall for the local community.

Characteristics of Community

Choice

“To worship choice and community together is to misunderstand what community is all about.”

Personal autonomy. No one telling you how to live your life. No one in your business trying to tell you right from wrong. “Why should it matter what I do as long as I am not hurting anyone?” This is the attitude of someone conditioned by the market, as well as the intellectual, spiritual and technical milieu which makes the mass market possible. We like our choices. There was a reason that the growing proliferation number of options, in employment, in where you could live, the friends you could keep, the entertainments you could enjoy, the products you could purchase, was so appealing to people. A whole world of freedom was opening up. Within a few generations, two or three at most, the idea of “liberty” shifted from a freedom from state oppression such that the citizens of a society could gather together and determine their own affairs; to something wherein each person person should be granted the maximum amount of freedom to make as many personal choices as is possible, without limits or restrictions. Anything which restricted personal choice became oppressive and authoritarian.

And so, within a startlingly short period of time communities began to be seen as confining and smothering. Throughout the mass media, the community was projected as a straightjacket, narrow-minded, backwards. The community was the thing which held you back and prevented you from realizing your dreams. Getting out of your small town, moving away from the neighborhood you grew up in, these became tropes of personal development, growth and liberation. Becoming an adult meant freeing yourself from the confines of the community you grew up in, to get out into the world to make your own choices. Becoming an adult was equated with making your own choices. Those who stayed home, who didn’t leave, were choosing a lesser, more child-like existence.

But you can’t have both. You cannot have a real community and personal autonomy at the same time. Ehrenhalt says it this way:

“Community means not subjecting every action in life to the burden of choice, but rather, accepting the familiar and reaping the psychological benefits of having one less calculation in the course of the day.”

A real community has a kind of, shall we say, metaphysical reality. It is there all around you. It provides order. It determines who your friends will be. Your role in life and your career are likely chosen for you. Where you worship. Whom you worship. All decided for you. Whom you will marry. Where you will eat lunch on Sunday afternoons. Your social calendar. All chosen for you. You merely have to fit in and assume the role which the community has provided for you.

You can’t have community and be free to create yourself and your own life through the exercise of choice. By choosing the autonomous individual, you have chosen the burden of having to “find yourself.” You must engage in the process of self-creation. Nothing is given. Everything about you must be created by you. But once you have broken free and have the possibility of near limitless choice, how do you in fact shape your own identity? Is it even possible? Is it any wonder so many of our youth seem so lost? Who can face the reality of near limitless choice without restraint and not be overwhelmed? You would think that total freedom of choice is a good thing, but it is not. It is a burden. Most of us reach a point where we experience decision fatigue. Tired and exhausted we must pick ourselves up day after day and continue to make decisions, to exercise our so-called “freedom.”

Privacy

In a real community everyone knows everyone else’s business. You have limited privacy. Any time you do anything, it is quickly known by everyone. Do anything interesting or which violates community norms and you will find yourself the subject of endless gossip. This can at times be cruel. Do something stupid and it can define you for the rest of your life. A good man might never become an elder in church because of that three year period of his life in his early twenties. The reasons why people want to cloak their doings in privacy are not hard to understand. Why someone so branded would want to escape the gossip is also quite reasonable.

Now fast forward to today. Privacy is now thought of as a human right. It seems a baseline for us to not involve ourselves in the lives of others. We want others to stay out of our lives in return. We expect the same from world around us. Corporations. Government. No one should be up in our business. We elevate privacy to such levels that you can go into some areas where no one knows any of their neighbors by name. We have elevated privacy to such levels that there is an epidemic of loneliness. The fact remains, though, that you cannot have community and privacy at the same time. You cannot be in tight, multi-generational relationships with people and not have them know pretty much everything about your life.

Authority

Real communities are unapologetically hierarchal. There is always a person, or a small cabal of people, who make and enforce the rules and morality in the community. Someone will be telling you what you can and can’t do. There will be someone whose opinion of your actions really matters. Every community had a Reverend Shaw Moore or a Rachel Lind. Part busybody. Part moral authority. If they say something can’t happen or shouldn’t happen, it often didn’t happen. Opposing them openly would carry with it a social cost. You could easily find yourself on the “outs” without friends. But they maintained order. They were the embodiment of the community. Movies like Footloose work as propaganda pieces because it is easy to resent the power these people have in a community. Setting them up as backwards, as holding people back, of not allowing them reasonable freedoms, is easy to do. They are obvious targets. But without them, there is no community.

Sin

The other element that defines a community is a clear moral imperative, a clear sense of right and wrong. There are boundaries which are not transgressed. Crossing those lines threatens your place in the community. Sinning against community mores would bring shame, rebuke, censure, ostracization, even banishment. To sin against community norms would be to threaten one’s relationship with the community. If your identity is tied with the community, such an act would mean the erasure of your whole being. To be ostracized is to be alone, someone without a place or a home. These rules, many of which would be unspoken, interiorized from a young age, would define your behavior and the way you conducted yourselves across a wide range of situations. To be a part of the community means living within the community’s moral framework.

The Loss of Community

So what happens as communities disappear? At first, not much. Even though communities and their various networks of relationships and local institutions did much of the heavy lifting in terms of maintaining a well running cohesive society, there erosion did not happen overnight, nor did their influence cease once they were pretty much gone. There was a long well of built up capital that was slowly spent over the next two or three generations beginning somewhere in the 1960’s. Today that well has nearly run dry. We see the evidence all around us.

There was a kind of golden age, enjoyed mostly by “Boomers,” those who belong to the post-WW2 baby boom generation. They were able to take advantage of the increases in the freedom of choice and opportunity that the erosion of community gave them, but within a context in which people still more or less conformed to the values of community life. But now the bill is coming due. Increased social chaos seems to blossom all around us. People act without restraint and expect that whatever moral choices they make will be validated. But at the same time, the social disorder presses itself upon us more and more making the streets and subways dirty and unsafe. Drug use abounds. People are lonely. Men and women finding themselves living solitary lives. Some find solace in video games. Others in white wine and their cats.

Eventually there comes a point where some level of social order must be enforced. Anarcho-tyranny may be a strategy for securing and maintaining political power, but there comes a point where some level of order must be maintained. Where will it come from? Communities did all the heaving lifting in providing that order while allowing a fair degree of political liberty and freedom from the interference of the state in the lives of the citizenry. But with local community all but a distant memory in most places, the only entity capable of filling that role is the state. Once the institution of the local community is broken down, its functions and characteristics must be replaced by the state. This then sets the course for the kinds of actions, the kind of roles that the state must fulfill in the lives of the people.

Choice?

What happens is that the state and its various adjuncts begin to fill those same roles. Freedom of choice? We are made to think that we have a wide world of choices open to us. But, increasingly, as the strength of communities diminished, the degree of homogeneity in our society has increased. Why is this? Propaganda. The truth is that we as human beings really don’t want limitless choice. We say that we do. But we actually prefer structure and order. You see this at an early age with children. They thrive when there is a clear set of rules which limit and focus their choices. With too many choices, you develop decision fatigue. If you have ever gone through the process of building a new house, the number of choices you must sign off on is dizzying. Most people just end up deferring to the advice of the builder or the designer because there are simply too many choices to process or integrate.

Now play this out over the whole of your life. Without the comfortable confines of the community to limit your choices, in a mass society you come to almost welcome the voice of the propagandist telling you how to think about recent events. The news man sorts out for you which stories you should pay attention to and how you should frame them and think about them. This is good, because your neighbors are all being told the same things by the same newsman. You are told in the commercials what products to buy, where to eat and what clothes you should wear. In mass society you are given the perception of freedom but this is an illusion. For most, they lose themselves to the crowd and become mere constructs of the propagandist through news and advertising and entertainment. They have less sense of themselves because their self has been constructed by the propagandist. They have the illusion of choice, but for most, their every thought, their every action has been constructed for them. They are merely a collection of brands. They have no self and make no real choices. All of their choices are dictated to them in preset drop down menus.

Privacy?

In mass society today there is a constant call for the right to privacy. Why is this? Well, we all know that our lives are being monitored all the time. Whether it is over the internet or through our phones or the near ubiquitous CCTV cameras, we are being monitored all the time. We don’t need secret police these days, although this is also an option. But we must be watched. The state must render us legible. Our every action must known and catalogued. The push for ever greater amounts of monitoring will continue unabated as real communities continue to dissolve. The panopticon is the substitute, not just for community, but for God himself. One of the foundations of functional morality in society is this notion that we are being watched, that you cannot do things in secret. If it isn’t the nosey neighbors in your community, it will be the state and its adjuncts watching you, catching your every misdeed.

Authority?

Once the influence of local hierarchies of authority are swept aside, something must eventually come to fill their place. Into that void steps the administrative state and authoritarian control. Where once local communities were run through a set of largely unspoken rules, all of these rules and more must now be spelled out and rationalized in public policy. The regulatory state steps in to run an ever increasing proportion of our lives. Because this state still keeps the veneer of democracy, every community problem must be addressed by the state in some manner or form in order to win elections. Once community is eroded and society has massified, there is only one direction the state can take and that is towards a totalizing involvement of the state in the lives of the citizenry in an increasingly authoritarian manner.

Sin?

Again, freed from the straightjacket of the narrowminded morality of small communities, it seemed for a time that anyone could do anything they wanted. But society cannot live without a moral framework. So now we are seeing the state forming its own morality around the dictates of the sexual revolution and the civil rights movement. This morality is taking on something of the feel of a new state religion with its own set of commandments that must be adhered to; enforced by the tentacles of the administrative state.

Rebuilding Community?

So what can be done? The trajectory of the state is largely set. For reasons discussed elsewhere, the state is unlikely to shrink or have its size and influence reduced. In the modern technical world the state is here to stay. It is not really amenable or suited to a morality of personal responsibility or local autonomy. Short of de-massifying our global society, cutting off global communications, making travel difficult again and re-localizing everything—basically blowing up the modern world—things are pretty much on the trajectory for a globalized technocratic totalitarian surveillance state.

So what do we do? The good news is that communities can be formed intentionally. This is the intent of the Christian project from the very beginning going back to Jesus himself. But these communities must be formed under a belief system that transcends individuals and binds them into a cohesive whole. If we look to the places where real community exists in today’s global world, it is either in places cut off somewhat from modern realities, or it is in groups with a strong belief system that binds the people together. We must get past the idea that the individual is the foundation of society, looking instead to the community as its core building block. But communities are formed around the basic characteristics we have discussed here. There is no getting away from this reality. Either you will be within a community telling you how to live your life or the state will step in to fulfill that role. Paradoxically, the degree to which your life is nestled within the confines of a community, is the degree of political liberty you will feel vis a vis the state, even in today’s context. This is another call to “build something,” parallel institutions and structures that exist alongside the state in our society but are not beholden to its influences or rewards.