I recently had a great conversation with Sarah Breger, of Moment Magazine. She was part of an army of reporters asking a wide array of thinkers to answer the “Big Question” of “What is Community Today?” The result was an incredibly thought-provoking read with lots of surprising—and challenging—insights.
Below are a few of the thoughts that came to mind for me.
Check out the full piece for a fascinating diversity of answers to this all-important question.
[The following paragraphs are my words, edited by Sarah Breger. They appear here, in Moment Magazine]
What is Community Today?
WE ARE LIVING IN A HYPER-INDIVIDUALISTIC MOMENT WITH A VERY “I”-FOCUSED MENTALITY about community: “How do I go out into the world and meet my need for connection.” But that has not always been the case. While working on The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, my coauthor, Robert Putnam, and I discovered that over the course of the 20th century, we started off in a very culturally narcissistic moment, and then slowly over time, we began to replace that with cultural solidarity. Then in the 1960s, we switched back toward becoming more individualistic, more focused on “I” alone. Accompanying that move toward individualism, over the last half century or more, has been a real consumer mentality. We think of ourselves as consumers and we are treated as consumers. So it makes sense to view ourselves as consumers of community and view community as a way to fulfill my own needs. I don’t think that’s a healthy definition of community or one that can get us to a place where we want our society to be. But that’s our starting point today.
To change this we need to begin to see ourselves as creators, not consumers, of community. It may seem counterintuitive but our need for connection is met more efficiently when we’re in a serving mode, rather than in a consuming mode. People who have really dived into living communally say that they found the connection they were seeking when they started giving of themselves. The very first step toward motivating people to do more of this or to seek it out is for our cultural leaders to put forward visions, maybe utopian visions, of what it can look and feel like to work together. People who move into cohousing or who participate in intentional community or all these interesting movements that are experimenting on the radical edges of what community can be are inspired by a vision of what’s possible when people come together rather than a sense of “I should do this because it’s good for me.”
One of the things that we’ve learned in the pandemic is that digital ties are not going to save us. Ever since the founding of Facebook, there’s been an idea that , even though our face-to-face social fabric was unraveling, somehow these digital ties were going to rise up and fill the gap. I think what we’ve learned through the pandemic is that it’s not sufficient for meeting our needs as connected beings.What it means is we can now channel our creativity into the hybrid digital and face-to-face models that are really going to meet our needs, that are going to be truly innovative, and not repudiate the technology behind digital connections, but integrate it into face-to-face communities and help them become mutually reinforcing. Technology is part of our lives now. We have to deal with it. But what we now know is we’re going to have to invest in both sides of that coin and not just hope that the digital is going to save us.
It’s not surprising that we see tribalism accompanying this epidemic of loneliness and disconnection, but it’s not a solution and it actually deepens the crisis. Tribalism is partly about competition and scarcity, the idea that there’s only a certain amount to go around—whether that’s money or resources or land or whatever. What we need to move toward is a more expansive view of the abundance that is created when we work together. The sort of accepted wisdom about capitalism is that you can have economic growth or equality, but you can’t have both. However, we know that during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, the American economy was growing and we were getting progressively more equal. When we work together, we can do both at the same time. And when we’re locked in competitive narratives, it actually undercuts what we’re able to grow and create together. The progressives who started to reweave America’s social fabric and community 120 years ago made a deliberate choice to believe that we were all in this together in the face of a cultural moment when most people didn’t believe that. If we want to see community revived in America today, we’ve got to get more people enrolled in this project and in this mindset that it’s more powerful to believe that we’re all in this together than it is to believe that it’s every one for oneself.