Community affairs

I have friends from across the political spectrum – an increasingly rare and difficult thing to pull off these days – and while they have vastly different reasons for doing so, they all complain about “society” and its rejection of their values or political views or whatever.  My right-of-center friends complain about how media – both news media and movies and television – reflect a version of society that is uncomfortable for them, filled with gay marriage and casual sex and with no room for faith.  My left-of-center friends complain about the persistence of traditional notions of marriage, gender roles, and the pervasiveness of casual violence in society.  They all talk about how “society” seems to denigrate what they hold dear, and many of them talk about how they have felt isolated or rejected by society for the choices they have made.

One population seems to mourn the passing of society.  There is a desire among these people to return to an era where “society” shared a singular set of values, which in the rear view mirror seem somehow more pure and holy.  The other population feels judged negatively by society and wants the world to see them “as they are”, without aspersion.  I think both, however, miss the point, both in the context of what “society” may or may not be, and in the context of time.

Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t believe we live in “society” at all.  We live in a shifting mass of overlapping communities, communities which share the use of a common set of words (though not necessarily a common language) and inhabit similar physical spaces, but which are nevertheless distinct from one another.  Most of us, moreover, are members of multiple communities, and have the capacity to choose our communities, joining and leaving communities over the course of our lives.  And this is a new historical reality.

If we think about how both “society” and our “communities” have evolved, we need to recognize that we are living in a new kind of world today.  Society and community historically would have been largely overlapping, with the barriers between a given society or community and another being of three kinds: density based, geographical, and linguistic.  Take the last one first: most societies have been defined by a distinct language which, if not unintelligible to outsiders, at least required translation, and translation separates us even as it enables us to understand one another in that it reminds us that we do not share the same words for the same concepts.  In fact, translation brings home the fact that we have words for concepts that others don’t understand and others have concepts that we cannot express in our language.  That awareness reinforces the separation of societies in real way, and there should be little wonder today that in the US, there is still a nativist fear of non-English expression – or that in France the language is so actively defended.  The French are not just preserving a language, but in their own words, they are protecting their society.

Geographical barriers were historically obvious, but for early 21st century humanity, it has already been forgotten how radical the changes introduced by the transportation and telecommunications revolution of the past two centuries have been.  We have lost any cultural memory of a time when what happened one hundred miles away was, by definition, foreign.  In the US, we have forgotten that “states” were at one point autonomous; we look at the difference in size between Delaware and New Mexico and think “well, states just were set up with similar populations but at different times”.  No: states were set up as governable units with common cultures.  Or else they were set up by colonial administrators with no sense of the cultural distance that separated, say, Mohawk country and the former New Amsterdam city – and their failure to understand that echoes down today in the disconnect between upstate and downstate New York, or lowcountry and plateau Carolinas.

By the time the western territories were established, rail and telegraph connections allowed for common culture and governance to operate over distances that would have been incomprehensible to the Founding Fathers.  Put simply, New Mexico was culturally distinct from Arizona, and both were culturally distinct from Colorado.  All three now operate as relatively coherent states, despite being the size of a hundred New Hampshires or Delawares.  As rail technology improved, as telegraphs were replaced by telephones then radio then television then internet, as planes replaced trains and crossed oceans with ease, geography has effectively ceased to operate as an effective barrier to societies.  And thus even California and Texas make perfect sense as states in a world of railroads and telecommunications, despite being ridiculously larger than the first thirteen colonies.

The last constraint – density – isn’t as easy to understand as it’s more of an intensity dimension, something like the difficulty people have in understanding “spin” as a quantum “dimension”.  But again, the last two centuries have involved an implosion of density – the human population of the earth has gone from around a half a billion to nearly eight billion today, and yet the rural areas of most of the world have relatively depopulated, leaving most of us in terrifically dense cities of an again unimaginable size to those who came before us.  While the cities of the 1500s and earlier were very dense, they formed relatively small pieces of the human puzzle compared to those living in villages and farm settlements.  Those villages, moreover, looked to themselves for effectively all of their social needs.  They were static communities within societies that were themselves just as static.  But logistics and technology means we can concentrate today in cities that would have imploded in famine just two centuries ago.

So we look at the world today and see a more or less interconnected world, with geography serving as a kind of seasoning.  We live in suburbs or in post-modern urban neighborhoods while we work in concentrated office buildings and factories and call centers, taking our holidays in still different places often thousands of miles away.  We are pressed against our fellow humans at all times but have the constant ability to disconnect from them via the internet or by simply driving or taking a train or flying away.

I was flying back to Maine about a month ago and found myself sitting next to a priest (he turned out to be a bishop) and I looked over his shoulder as he was reading an essay about how the Catholic church was responding to this shift.  The theme of the essay was that the Church should be resisting this dissolution of society, that it should use its moral authority and spiritual power to enable society to remain cohesive.  It complained that the current pope was acquiescing to the fragmentation of modern times by allowing the language of how the Church engages with the world to shift from one of laws and institutions to one of interacting and co-opting the systems and processes of the world.  As I read it, though, what struck me about the essay was how it missed the fundamental physical change in the world.  It blamed the fragmentation on the loss of faith in institutions, beginning back in the Enlightenment and in the unintended consequences of the French and socialist revolutions of the nineteenth century, followed by the revolution of individual identity in this century.  At no point did it mention trains, or telecommunications, or population growth driven by both logistics and the ingenuity of modern farming and industry.

It occurred to me that the end of society, and the emergence of fluid and wholly self-defined communities, was inevitable once the physical barriers that kept people in place broke down in the face of these fundamentally technological changes.  Human beings are too imaginative, too creative to stay trapped if they aren’t restrained.  For thousands of years – hundreds of thousands of years – the restraints were real.  People couldn’t move from society to society, because language, the physical difficulty of movement, and the light sprinkling of people across the globe made such movement too hard.  It’s not hard anymore, and it seems natural to understand that a creative species would then release itself with an explosive force.  Societies as we think of them were simply a result of, if you will, transaction costs; eliminate the transaction costs, and societies will be replaced by communities of our own capricious self-choosing.

I hate thinking of this as a loss, but for the generations which still haven’t internalized this change – and reading that essay in the bishop’s magazine, I realized that most of us alive today haven’t internalized anything of the sort – it feels like a vacuum has emerged that we will be unable to fill.  We – I say “we” but I’ll challenge where I fit in all of this in a moment – were brought up to think we were a part of something “natural”, the town or country in which we were raised, linked by language and a common history.  The enabling of our inherent ability to imagine new connections and new ideas brought about by the change in our world infrastructure makes that old conception of “society” actually unnatural, however; society is just a remnant of an older historical reality that no longer exists.  But the lag with which we change ourselves is leaving a few generations adrift.

It also got me thinking about the people in my life who I’ve met in the last few years who are ready and excited about this shift past the constraints that defined our existence on earth.  And oddly, I find them to be just as blind as the essayist in the Catholic magazine First Things – just differently blind.  There is a kind of enlightenment, a kind of awakening that has taken place for these new friends of mine – fundamentally they are right.  The world is new, and it is a world freed from constraints which were externally imposed on us as humans, not inherent to us as humans.  Being freed from those constraints enables us to realize more of the astonishing, infinite potential of our minds and our beings, and it is a good thing to embrace it.  But they all too often view those who can’t embrace this new world as being somehow lesser beings.

My friends aren’t this blatantly callous; they wouldn’t be my friends if they were.  They love their families, are supportive and kind and see their loved ones’ attachment to the old things of society as part of what makes them unique and beautiful.  But they reject the spirit of the old nevertheless, and the rejection is complete even if they still feel sympathy and love for the individuals who remain attached to what was in the past.  What they do, in effect, is to exclude those who haven’t embraced this new freedom from their community – without seeing that rejecting them from their community is, for these left behind generations, exactly akin to rejecting them as people, because in the past we became defined by our society and that was viewed as a positive good.  Those who have embraced the new world seem unable to understand that that “good” was, truly, a lived good.

This raises a further danger in a world without physical barriers – one which is playing out today.  People think of the past as being war-ridden and violent, and it was – but it was also carved up into distinct areas that could easily isolate themselves if they wished.  The Old and New Worlds were so separate that even disease remained isolated, while places like the Balkans or southeast Asia had valleys and plateaus where peoples could remain separate for centuries, where a Bhutan could evolve peacefully just a hundred miles from one of the most contested river valleys on earth.  When the old “society/communities” intersected, they usually fought violently in what we should rightly think of as a clash of civilizations.  What is playing out today – in airport terrorism, trucks plowing into protesters and shoppers in Charlottesville and Paris and London, in random mass shootings in schools and malls – is a clash of communities, which are internally linked across time and space, but which still externally run into other virtually linked communities in physical, lived reality every day.

The removal of the physical barriers that led our old societies to evolve has led to two vastly different responses.  On the one hand, people are unleashed to find like-minded people who value the freedom to associate and transform themselves.  On the other, these new communities now meet one another constantly, in the densely packed conurbations of our post-industrial world.  The historical record of communities encountering one another in the open is not good, and the present experience does not evidence any particular evolution towards a new, gentler, more open dialogue.  It’s pointless to react the way the Catholic essayist does and say we need therefore to return to rigid separation of communities as a remedy – but it’s also naive to think that this new release from the physical constraints of a premodern world will magically lead us to a glorious, bright future.

I’m at a transition point in my life, having left behind most of those old society trappings that I had thought were natural definitions of a human life.  I got a divorce, I left behind my traditional big company executive career, and I embraced a life which was utterly, totally defined by recognizing the openness of choice.  And I suppose in that way I am ready to let go of what came before me.  Seeing that change has opened me up to getting to know these people who can see a new world in a way I didn’t before.  I’ve always liked knowing people with different perspectives – but I see now that I was approaching it from a perspective which wasn’t relevant to them, and it’s only by waking up myself, as it were, that I’ve been able to understand what their point is, that we have a freedom today that is new, that is empowering, and that can transform all of us.

But these enlightened, “awakened” people I’ve met since I made that change have a fundamental faith in the possibility of this new world – they believe, in other words, that the world will be transformed – and I don’t share that faith.   It is a faith, I find, that lacks any historical context, and ignores the reactionary force of those who are being cast adrift by the destruction of society by mobility, by the Internet’s ability to make meaningless our linguistic divisions, by the (to many) terrifying requirement to choose for oneself in a densely populated world of other individuals.  Maybe that faith enables them to feel the positive momentum they need to create whatever will come next, but a faith that leaves others behind strikes me as not fundamentally different from the faith of earlier societies that was all too willing to view others – in the next valley, speaking a different language – as being heathen or heretics or eligible for death by being outside of their society.

While I understand the inevitability of this shift and my own need to change, I can’t ignore the pain of those who are being left behind, left clinging to the shredded remains of past societies like the survivors of the Medusa in Gericault’s painting in the Louvre.  There is a kind of joyousness in those who are embracing that change which on the one hand I envy, but on the other, I view as a kind of callousness, a kind of real evil where a group of humans are actively judging another group as being irrelevant to how the world will evolve.  At a foundational level, I know they are right: the world has changed, it is our responsibility to change but importantly this isn’t a change to conform to a simply different way of thinking.  We have been given the opportunity to release ourselves from what were just an evolved set of responses to a world which previously was strictly limited.  But shouldn’t our choices in this new, unconstrained world also include the choice to be gentle?  Shouldn’t we see a responsibility to see everyone as human, especially now that we aren’t limited by physical constraints that prevented us from realizing there were, in fact, humans beyond what society had defined for us?

The changes I see in the world are driven mostly as a natural consequence of an unrelated set of historical forces that removed the barriers that had created the societies that formerly defined us, not as an intentional set of mental and spiritual “acts” that people pursued for their own benefit.  I am amazed at how the world is opening up, and I do think that humans will evolve – or more precisely, that as we internalize this new unconstrained physical world, our consciousness of who we are and what we are capable of will evolve.  But I believe that the consciousness which created the societies of our past was itself also an evolution, from our conception of ourselves in a prior world where humans were so exclusively focused on survival in a harsh dominating natural world to a world where we harnessed our ability to dominate the niches in which we were still constrained by the limitations of physical space.

The first step of this new evolution is the dissolution of society and the tentative exploration of new creatively formed communities.  These communities, ironically, consist both of the remnants of past societies – the survivors clinging to what they were constrained by in the past, but now by choice – and the fragmentary beginnings of truly new communities which are being created fluidly by these new humans who see that they are no longer constrained and are tingling with the possibilities of a new future.  I’m neither clinging to what I grew up in, defined by the traditions of my families stretching back into the distance of time, nor do I look to the future with a spirit of unlimited potential.  I see a human future, one in which we will continue to explore what we are capable of, but one in which we will also face the finite nature of lived existence.

It’s been painful of late, because it means I don’t know where “my” community is.  I’m still looking for the community – the partnerships and friendships and understanding – that comes from being open to understanding everyone.  Where is the community that sees the past as a real part of our narrative, that looks to the future hopefully but with a kind of agnosticism about whether it will be bright or dark?  And where is the gentleness that we need in any new conception of community – the gentleness that will allow that explosive diversity to exist comfortably in a world without the physical barriers behind which we used to be able to hide?

I think I’m writing these essays as a means of seeing who’s out there, and seeing if there is a community of people who also live in that precarious balance – or if I’m just caught out here alone at the historical crossroads.  Right now it feels like the latter.  But thanks for reading and responding.  It helps.