Rethinking "Community"

I was both shocked and dismayed last Thursday morning over coffee to read a letter to the editor of our local paper that began, “In the event that Barack Hussein Obama is re-elected to the presidency of the United States of America, all members of the military, all members of all the police services, and members of emergency services providers, will have to evaluate and decide if they are going to obey the dictates of the president and his cadre of ‘czars,’ or they will honor the Constitution of the United States.”

            The shock was that someone would go so far as to urge members of our military to consider what is, at the bottom line, something that looks very much like treason—that U.S. soldiers should disobey their commander in chief—and, even more, that a newspaper would publish it.   Free speech is the price of democracy, and in this case I felt some “sticker shock.”

            More deeply felt, though was dismay over what the letter suggests about the loss of community in the U.S.   We’ve seen this in so many ways over the past few years, but this letter illustrates just how profoundly separated from the mainstream some of our citizens feel. 

            It is easy to chalk some of this up to racism.  Clearly, there is a segment of the U.S. population who cannot identify with an African-American being President and who, as a result, see themselves as no longer needing to be loyal to a government led by a President who is not “us.”  This is downplayed in the media, but it is obvious when you listen to what people say.   There is also an element of xenophobia—fear of the stranger—at work.  For the past decade, many in the U.S. have marginalized all Moslems for what some Moslems did on 9/11/01.  Note that the letter emphasized President Obama’s middle name, which is also the name of the dictator that we deposed in our misguided war against Iraq.  The ongoing nonsense about the President’s birth certificate is an example of how this has been used to create suspicion that he is not one of “us,” but instead an exotic “other.”  The right wing in our country has used this as a tool to further radicalize those who already felt disenfranchised by the economy, loss of social standing as workers, etc.

            But I believe that these two factors are symptoms of a broader and, ultimately, more widespread concern.   William Irwin Thompson wrote about the idea that, as society expands, so does our cultural identity.  Early cultures celebrated the clan or tribe as the point of identity.  As farming took root and towns developed, the family identity became “private,” and citizenship in a town became the “public identity.”  Eventually, one’s identity with one’s hometown became private as nationality became the public identity.  We see this in the evolution of how immigrant families identify themselves over the first few generations.  The first generation brings to their new home the language and customs of the old country.  The second generation begins to make much of that private, as they take on the identity of the new country in which they were born.  By the third generation, the old culture is a heritage celebrated at family events and holidays.

            Today, we are at a point where our public identities are being challenged by globalization.  Traditional definitions of communities as groups of mutually dependent people in a defined geographic area are fading.  The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, even the ephemera of our lives—our toys, our greeting cards, etc.—are not made locally by our neighbors.  Instead, they are produced all over the world by people most of us never see and to whom most of us have no sense of social obligation.   But, we have not yet begun to see ourselves as “citizens of the world” or members of a “global community.”  As a result, many of us—having been raised to expect to be part of a traditional community that takes pride in the “Made in the USA” label—feel vaguely disenfranchised.  Being an American seems not to mean what it used to mean, but we don’t know what else to be.

            Then along come the politicians and the robber barons who finance them, who sense they can gain an advantage by playing off the unease that people are feeling.  The result can be seen in headlines throughout the political season as politicians pander to the unease, turning fear into anger and, they hope, action that will benefit their political or corporate interests.  In this environment, we cease to be a community at a much deeper level.

            I have been reading Citizen, Louise Knight’s biography of Jane Addams, the great social reformer of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.   Looking back on the Pullman strike of the 1890s, she noted that one’s ethics are contextual and that, when major changes happen in society, a new ethic may arise.   In the context of the Industrial Revolution—and the massive immigration and urbanization that accompanied it—that meant moving beyond the old class-based ethic of philanthropy as looking down on others to a new ethic of mutual engagement among social equals.   

            Today, the Information Revolution is causing a disruption that is similar equal in scope, if not greater, to the Industrial Revolution.  Instead of immigration and urbanization, this new revolution is causing globalization and, as Fareed Zakaria noted in his book, The Post-American World, not the decline of America, but the “rise of the rest.”   We can no longer see the rest of the world as strangers:  we are too interdependent on numerous fronts.

            What we need to do, in order to mend our increasingly shattered sense of community, is to embrace what is best about our culture and celebrate it and, at the same time, get to know our neighbors.  The long-term solution lies in our educational system.  When I was in high school in the 1960s, seniors took a course called “Problems of Democracy.”  It was designed to help us understand the complexities of the American vision in practice before we went out and joined the adult world.  We need a fresh take on that to prepare people to live as citizens and be productive workers in our new, global community. 

            Meanwhile, I hope that, by the end of this political season, we will be able to find ways to mend relationships and find common purpose as members of a shared community.  That, it seems to me, is the job of our elected representatives—and those who want to be elected—and our media, which has been awfully silent on the issues that underpin the headlines these days.