Remnant Review (January 28, 2012)
A site member raised the question of the world of the 1950s, a world which we have lost. He referred back to an article that I wrote several years ago that dealt with one of the causes of the loss of community, namely, the existence of government-subsidized mortgage loans for housing. These loans, which exist mainly because of government-subsidized depositors' insurance, have enabled people to move more often than would have been possible prior to the 1930s. These loans became widely used by the middle class after World War II.
The question which I was raising when I wrote that article remains an important question. The question is this: How is it possible to retain a sense of community when families move every five years? When there is low commitment to remaining in a neighborhood, we find a loss of community. This is an ancient social phenomenon. It has been recognized by scholars for at least 300 years. It is unlikely to reverse in the future.
It is instructive to think about some of the reasons why people all over the world have been willing to abandon local communities in favor of the impersonal lifestyle of the modern urban world.
Let us begin with a familiar story: the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It was a garden. The garden was a temporary training ground for mankind. It was not to remain mankind's place of residence. Families were supposed to move out of the Garden at some point and begin to build cities. We see this in the story of the tower of Babel. It tells of the scattering of all those families. They in turn built cities.
The New Testament ends with two chapters that describe the city of God (Rev. 21, 22). There, in the midst of the New Jerusalem, is the tree of life. So, the New Testament's version of the final place of residence for members of the kingdom of God points to a combination of urban living and a rural setting. The ideal world is neither exclusively urban nor exclusively rural.
There is an account of a German economist who lived in Switzerland during World War II. His name was Wilhelm Röpke. He was a very good economist. Ludwig von Mises had shaped his thinking. Unlike virtually all other free-market economists, he was deeply concerned with the interaction between society and economy. This raises the problem of putting together a high-efficiency urban society and low-tech gardening. Röpke had his own garden.
At some point, he was visited by a free market economist. The story has come down through the years that this economist was Mises. I believe this story, but I am not sure Mises was the other economist. The other economist pointed out that gardening is not an efficient way to produce food. This observation is correct. Röpke replied that gardening is a very effective way of producing happiness. This also is true. Anyway, it is true for people who enjoy gardening. This is why gardening is a very popular hobby in most countries.
In that exchange between the two economists, we see an important division that is taking place, both intellectually and socially: urbanization vs. rural living. It is the story of the country mouse and the city mouse. This process governed the creation of ancient Rome. Then, in the medieval period, it reversed. Rome went from a million people to 8,000 in about eight centuries.
The benefits of living in an urban society are very great. Urban life brings lots of people into close proximity with each other. This enables them to specialize in production. This specialization of production increases the output of most participants in the society. The division of labor extends geographically. This enables people to concentrate their efforts and skills on those productive activities in which they have a competitive advantage. Output per unit of resource input increases.
This is another way of saying that waste decreases. Most economists believe that the extension of the division of labor is a benefit both to individuals and societies. This was the argument of Adam Smith in the third chapter of his famous book, The Wealth of Nations. He pointed to the great productivity of a team of individuals who work together to produce pins. Without the division of labor, the output of pins would be very low. The craftsmen who produced pins would not be able to price them at a low price; so, the use of these pins would not spread to the general community.
Smith recognized very early that the kind of life associated with pin production is limited. He understood fully that the boring activities associated with pin production would not be the way that most people would want to spend their days. Nevertheless, people did spend their days doing this, because they were paid to do so by employers. The employers in turn were benefited by purchases of these pins by large numbers of people. Price competition expanded the market for pins.
This process has been repeated around the world in all walks of life for the past two centuries. Our world rests on this process.
The lifestyle associated with pin production and the lifestyle associated with the use of pins seem to be in conflict. The husband goes to work to produce pins. His day is boring, repetitive, and highly limiting. Meanwhile, his wife finds it easier to sew than ever before. Her lifestyle improves. What is true of this husband and wife is also true of members of society as a whole.
The loss of craftsmanship is painful for craftsmen. Craftsmen must learn to compete in a marketplace which generally is not willing to pay them enough money to compensate them for their time. This hampers them as producers. This is difficult for skilled workers, because men tend to define themselves and the meaning of their lives in terms of what they do for a living.
On the other hand, everybody benefits from the enormous increase of production that specialization and the division of labor have made possible. So, their lifestyles as producers are inhibited, but their lifestyle as consumers is expanded. In short, we don't get something for nothing. We have to pay for that which we receive. Many people pay this price: a reduction in the significance of their jobs. Yet their jobs enable them to go into the marketplace and buy far more goods and services than they could have afforded to buy before. Is the price worth it? Most people think so.
To get people to abandon their old ways of earning a living, customers bid for the output of workers' labor. There is a great competitive auction going on at all times. Actually, there are two great competitive auctions going on. The first auction is seller versus seller. The second auction is buyer versus buyer. Sellers lower their prices or increase the number of features in order to persuade customers to buy from them. Customers increase the amount of money that they are willing to pay, or they increase the number of units they are willing to buy, in order to persuade sellers to sell the goods or services to them.
The outcome of these two gigantic auctions is the modern economy. There is constant improvement in the quality and quantity of goods. This is because there is a constant increase of capital formation. This increase of capital formation is what makes possible the increase in the division of labor, meaning an increase in the specialization of production. So, while workers may complain about the loss of relevance of the specialized work that they do, they take the money they earn for their specialized work and go into the marketplace to bid for the output of workers just like themselves. They keep the division of labor system expanding.
Teamwork becomes less and less meaningful as the size of the factories increases. This is why Japanese management breaks up the factory into small work groups. There is no sense of increasing teamwork as the number of cubicles in an office building increases. There is not much community in a room full of cubicles. Maybe there is community at lunch time among a few people, but then they go back to work in their cubicles.
In their cubicles, they talk to clients on the telephone. Someday, they may talk to clients on their computers by using Skype or some other telecommunications software that enables people to talk to each other face-to-face when they are 1000 miles apart. There is an increase of community made possible by Skype, yet we usually do not think of it as being of the same quality and caliber as being in a room with an individual. The amount of information is only marginally greater in the room, but somehow we tend to think that we have a greater personal relationship with somebody just because he is in a confined geographical space. It is not clear to me why we think this, but apparently we do.
In making these observations, I observe from the perspective of a loner. I have never been a group person. I have always done better on my own, sitting in a room by myself, than participating in a joint discussion. Occasionally, I do find that one-on-one discussions, in some Socratic way, do enable me to make some kind of an intellectual breakthrough. This has happened on several occasions. But I see no reason why these breakthroughs could not just as easily have taken place on a telephone as they did in a confined geographical space. So, I am not one who has placed a great deal of importance in my life on community. But I also understand that I am not representative. A lot of people do feel a need to participate with each other in small group settings.
We know that modern large churches, which are a sometimes called megachurches, rely heavily on small groups within the congregation. These groups may be as small as a dozen people. These people get together on a regular basis. They may share common interests. They may share common interests based on age or marital status. But there is no doubt that the megachurch goes hand-in-hand with small groups.
The problem of the megachurch is that people come and go so constantly. There are always visitors coming in to test the social waters. There are also people who move out to join another church, possibly because they have moved away from the community because of a better job offer.
It becomes difficult to establish personal bonds to build communities, because of the enormous mobility of modern life. I do not know of any society in history that has had mobility comparable to the United States. This has been going on for almost as long as people have gotten off the boats in North America. Americans, especially Americans outside the South, have been on the move since approximately 1640. They have always looked for better land, better business opportunities, and a better lifestyle 20 miles or 200 miles down the road, or down a beaten path, or even through the woods.
Jefferson believed in 1803 that it would take several centuries for Americans to fill up the land. It took less than a century. One of the most amazing forecasts in the history of forecasting was made by the president of Yale University sometime around 1800. His name was Timothy Dwight. He believed that by the year 2000 there would be 300 million Americans. He was correct. But he was almost alone in his forecast.
Americans have always been on the move. This has always led to problems of community. So, let us consider what was probably the greatest migration in American history. This was the migration of African-Americans out of the deep South to cities like Chicago and Detroit, beginning in the early 20th century and accelerating after World War II.
The early migration was based on access to the Mississippi River. They moved up the river from New Orleans into the cities above the Mason Dixon line that were close to the Mississippi.
When railroads began to offer north-south travel, African-Americans took advantage of the low rates. They departed from the deep South by the millions. Who could blame them? The cities of the North did not offer the same degree of community that the rural towns of the South did, and that was to the advantage of African-Americans. They were discriminated against in the small towns of the South, whereas they were merely ignored or resented in the cities of the North. This was true in 1800, too, but it became a new way of life for African-Americans when they got on the trains or the buses and headed north after 1900.
There was a clever line made by black comedian Dick Gregory in the early 1960s. He said this. "In the South, whites don't care how close I get, as long as I don't get too high. In the North, whites don't care how high I get, as long as I don't get too close." I thought that was clever when I first heard it, but then I read in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America something almost identical. He wrote that book in the early 1830s.
There is a chapter in Democracy in America that describes life on two sides of the Ohio River. Tocqueville described life on the Kentucky side as far more slow-paced, far less efficient, and far less wealthy. It conformed to the stereotype of slow-paced life in the South. On the other side of the river, in Cincinnati, the atmosphere was urban, mobile, and marked by economic growth. His point was obvious. The difference was not geographical; the difference was based on social organization. There were two rival systems of self organization competing on the two sides of the Ohio River. Three decades after he wrote this, the Civil War decided which of those social orders would persevere below the Mason Dixon line. The South lost the argument in a war that involved 10,400 battles. Over the next century, the South worked out a new social system. Life in Birmingham today is pretty much like life in a comparably sized city north of the Mason Dixon line, except for the tornadoes. But that was not true in 1963.
When African-Americans departed from the deep South, they gained a better life for themselves inside the ghettos of the North. But, as the welfare state expanded its reach into the lives of African-Americans, the family structure of blacks disintegrated sometime in the 1950s. The northern ghettos lost their earlier community. Federally funded urban renewal projects accelerated this in the 1960s. (An early book on this was Martin Anderson's The Federal Bulldozer, published by M.I.T. Press in 1963) It then paid the South's blacks to stay in the deep South. The civil rights movement was in part a recognition by Southern blacks that they had to take a stand in the South, because life in the urban ghettos of the North had begun to erode the sense of community that had existed in those ghettos in 1930. There was a recognition by blacks in the South that the way to get a better life for themselves was to have the legal system of the North brought South by the federal courts rather than to get on a bus to North. They were right.
I think the best example of the change of attitude can be seen in the decision of African-American actor Morgan Freeman to move back to the small town in Mississippi where he had been brought up as a young boy. He prefers the lifestyle of that community to living in a large city. He owns a bar that is noted for its blues music.
I saw him interviewed in a cable television series. The interviewer was British actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Fry toured the United States by car in this series. He visited every state in the union. He got a pretty good sense of what America is like simply by talking to people along the way. As part of the series, he visited Mississippi, moving up the Mississippi River. In his interview with Freeman, he asked why Freeman had come back to the deep South. He thought that it had something to do with Freeman's sense of obligation to pay back to the community. Freeman said that this had not been the case. He said he just felt better in the town. He had experienced pleasant years there as a small boy. He liked the lifestyle of that town.
We are told that we can't go home again. This is true. We can't. When I went back to my high school reunion in Manhattan Beach, California, I could recognize almost nothing of the town I had grown up in. This is one of the most expensive cities in the United States today. It is said to be the #1 city where rich Americans want to live. The old middle-class landmarks are gone, with the exception of the town's pier. The high school that I attended is now just below the top 1% of all high schools in the United States academically. It surely wasn't in my day. All that money moving in has changed the nature of the student body, and therefore has changed the nature of the demands placed on school by parents. In the case of most of my peers, if they moved out without retaining ownership of the home they grew up in, they could not possibly afford to move back.
Let me give you another example. For less than a year, on two separate occasions in the fifth and sixth grade, I lived at my cousin's home in the small town of Newhall, California. It was on the northern fringe of the San Fernando Valley. There was no freeway system in those days that enabled people to get from the San Fernando Valley up to Newhall. So, the population was limited, and the price of the housing was low. My cousin had a horse in their fenced backyard. Today, the town is wall-to-wall houses. The all-time free lifestyle has disappeared. The population in Southern California has multiplied, and it is spread out because of the freeway system. So, my cousin could not go home again. That home is gone. The house is there. The town is not.
Theologically speaking, this is the way it should be. We are reminded constantly that this world is not our home. We are pilgrims. Pilgrims are not nomads. The nomad returns again and again to some earlier location. He has no home, but he has familiar places in his circular pattern of life. The nomad is not the model for Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Why not? Because it is not linear. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are marked by their concept of linear history. Each has a concept of a beginning, progress, and an end. This makes these three religions different from pagan polytheistic religions, including Eastern religions. The societies that have developed as a result of these three religions are different from the societies that are built on concepts of circular history.
It is a good thing we cannot go home again, because our home is not here. The time we spend here is supposed to be devoted to improving the world in which we find ourselves. This includes the concept of economic growth. This idea was unique to Western civilization -- no earlier than 1600. The fact that we cannot go home again is supposed to remind us that this is not our home. It is to remind us that we have an obligation to change the world in which we live, in order to improve that world, and then leave a better legacy.
This means that the concept of community must be tied to the concept of linear progress. Any concept of community that is based on unchanging tradition in a geographical area is based on an error. Community has to be marked by change, and this change has to be progressive. This is the idea of progress, and it is unique to the religions that are based on the biblical account of creation, history, and final judgment.
The world has become urbanized. This process is continuing. When people want to escape their poverty, they head for a city. The life that they build in the city is rarely followed by a return to the countryside. The children remain urbanized. Their opportunities increase. The families' net financial position improves. In the early phase of the transition, life appears to be miserable. Any Western observer would go into that part of the city that houses recent immigrants from the rural areas would regard that the place is a hellhole. This is because the observer did not spend a lot of time working in the fields in the rural community from which the families have escaped.
There is no doubt that families in modern American cities do not know the names of the families two houses up the street or two houses down. They may not know the names of the families who live next door. This is normal. It is certainly not abnormal. We can view this as a loss of community, but, at the same time, we also see the establishment of what is sometimes called virtual community. There's nothing virtual about it.
People who exchange ideas and photos with each other on Facebook are part of a community. The extraordinary success of Facebook indicates that people have a desire to participate in community. They have far less desire to participate in a neighborhood community.
We have moved from a community of geography to a community of confession. People online share ideas, cultural preferences, and language. They invite other people to join their communities in order to have a wider range of opinions, but opinions not so far out of bounds that they move people out of their existing community. So, there is community growth. There is community progress, but there is also stability. Facebook has shown the way. I cannot think of any other community of confession to match it.
We are about to overcome the divided languages that have kept people apart. The software is being developed now that will enable people to talk with each other even though they do not understand each other's languages. This is beginning to take place already in text form, and I have no doubt that, over the next 20 years, it will apply to verbal communications. It may take place within a decade. This will vastly increase the ability of people to create communities of confession, because people with other linguistic backgrounds across the ocean will share many of the same concerns of those who participate in a particular Facebook group.
So, on the one hand, we are seeing the undermining of geographical community, and at the same time, we are seeing an unprecedented increase in the establishment of verbal communities. These may not be face-to-face communities, but they are Facebook-to-Facebook communities.
As you might expect, I do not participate much on Facebook, or Google plus, or any the other social networks. This is not because I do not appreciate the technology; it is because I am a loner. My time is best spent writing and researching, and rarely is it best spent chatting online.
A tremendous advantage of Facebook communities is that people can move geographically and still maintain a sense of community with participants online. This has restored community on a scale that would not have been conceivable as recently as a decade ago. It really is a social revolution.
Something in the range of 800 million people are members of Facebook. If Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest nation in the world. Yet it is not a nation, because the communities that make up Facebook nation are not connected in any way other than digitally. Advertisers will pick and choose from among the communities that make up Facebook. They want to target their advertising. It does no good to send the same ad to 800 million people, with the people speaking separate languages and having completely different attitudes towards life. Yet they share one attitude: the desire to participate digitally in the building of community. The impersonalism of the digits makes possible the personalism of the digital communities. We have a reconciliation of the rival processes.
Karl Marx referred to life in the country as the idiocy of rural life. He was an urban man. Yet it is quite possible for people living in the middle of high density apartments to plant a garden in the space between the apartment houses. We sometimes read about these garden plots in places like Harlem. We have mixtures of city and country by means of urban gardening. You can find out about urban gardening on YouTube.
People do have an understanding that there is a necessity of putting together country life and urban life. I suppose the lasting testimony to this faith is the lawn. We like grass growing on our property. Grass is inefficient. It takes money to make it grow, and then we pay money to have it mowed. It takes time and trouble. Yet urban Americans have demanded their lawns for as long as I can remember. They want green visible on their property. They could put in Astroturf, but they don't.
Japanese gardens, English gardens, Swiss gardens, Austrian gardens, Italian gardens, American gardens: all over the West, meaning the industrial world, people like gardening. It is not efficient in terms of the cost of the inputs, because our time is valuable. Nevertheless, Röpke was right: a garden is an efficient way of producing happiness.
People create communities. They find ways of getting together with each other in order to solve problems, or amuse each other, or educate themselves, or find out about what their friends are doing. Who could have foreseen Twitter? Here are billions of messages, 140 characters long, informing people about what people had for breakfast. I do not understand this, but I don't think it is going to change. This is, in the words of my professor Robert Nisbet, the quest for community. This quest will continue for as long as technology spreads. Technology will be harnessed by individuals to create more and more communities. So, while we have seen the decline of geographical community, meaning neighborhoods, we have simultaneously seen the increase of digital communities, which are confessional communities. Confession is more important than geography.
How can you take advantage of these developments? One way is to set up a blog. People create blogs, not to become famous, but share information that they think is important with a relative handful of other people. This is a positive development. Tens of millions of people have done this. Hundreds of millions of people are going to do it. This is a positive development. People are pulling away from Establishment broadcasting in order to become participants in individual broadcasting. They are getting the word out, blog site by blog site. This is changing the world. This is undermining the establishments of this world. This is mainly to the good.
Think about your own situation. Think about the limits that were placed on your ability to communicate your views a decade ago. I started a Website in 1996. There were not many of them around in those days, at least not compared to today. There were no blogs. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook.
Email destroyed stamped, carbon-copied letters within a four-year period, 1996-2000. Future historians will never have access to letters in the way that they have had access to them over the last four centuries. This is a major loss to historians, but it has been a major benefit to the rest of us. We know this, because we did it to ourselves. We kept no copies of the letters we sent, and then our hard disks died. Oh, well. There is a price of progress.
Our ability to share our opinions and to gain information from the opinions of others has increased exponentially in the last 10 years. There has been nothing like this in history. We have not yet found substitute communities with long traditions, but we are in much better shape than we were in the year 2000.
The decline of neighborhoods began no later than my grandparents' era. Television was a big part of this in my generation. Radio had been part of this process. The couch potato began with radio, not with television. But there was not much sense of community with radio and television. They were one-way communications technologies. They were broadcasting. Somebody had a microphone, and later on he had a microphone and a video camera, and he spread his ideas or talents to millions of others. But it was one-way communication.
Situation comedy producers found out very early that a machine-generated laugh track increased the sense of community in homes. Then, in the 1970s, they found out that performing in front of a live audience produced a greater sense of community than a laugh track did. There have been no comedies on television since 1950 that have not had laughter as part of the total experience. This conveys a sense of community, but it is artificial. There is much greater community today than there was in the era of the laugh track. Broadcasting is fading in our lives.
Betty White won an award based on one night as a host of Saturday Night Live. She remains by far the most experienced performer in the history of television. She has been in front of television cameras ever since the late 1940s. She is Mrs. Television. She became famous in that Saturday Night Live performance for her statement about Facebook: "It seems like a waste of time." She understands broadcasting. She understands one-way telecommunications. She is the incarnation of that system. Of course, she made this point: the only old friends she could communicate with these days would be with a Ouija board. She is the last woman standing. She has always been part of the laugh-track community. She does not appreciate the revolution that Facebook has created.
The concern of sociologists regarding the decline of community has never been widely shared by economists. Röpke was an exception, but most economists have been far more concerned about economic growth and the loss of community. On the whole, I think the economists are correct. The development of Facebook is indicative of the possibilities for creating highly profitable, highly efficient, and highly segregated communities. Birds of a feather flock together. This is the rule of community, and it surely manifests itself in the operation of Facebook.
Facebook is profitable in direct proportion to Facebook's ability to enable people to create new communities at will. People can participate in multiple communities. For generations, if you did not like your neighbors, your only option was to move. This is what Americans did, more than any other non-nomadic nation in history. Americans after 1950 moved about every five years. They have pulled up stakes and started to move two miles down the road or 2000 miles down the road.
The development of the national highway system was another way that governments subsidized the undermining of geographical community. This was a constant process throughout the 1920s and 30s, and it accelerated dramatically in the 1950s as a result of the federal highway program. That had been the dream of Dwight Eisenhower in 1919, when he was assigned the task of taking a convoy of trucks across the United States as part of his military career. He did not want to do that again on dirt roads. Americans are on the move. They have always been on the move. They think that tax money spent on highways is money well spent.
As the world moves forward on the digital road, this will compensate for the loss of community that has resulted from the world's having moved forward on the physical road. People have moved down the road into cities. They have congregated in ghettos. They have moved across vast oceans into communities that were not only communities and nationality; they were communities of provinces or even cities.
A handful of provinces in China supplied the rest of the world with what is known as the overseas Chinese. These emigrants have sent money back to those provinces for well over 100 years. These inland provinces have been some of the most prosperous provinces.
There was an important study of the development of the early United States that was based on a study of the regions from which English residents departed for North America. Regions of the colonial United States shared ideas and cultural traits that had their origin in four regions in England.
All of this is to say that the importance of the decline of community has been overrated. There have indeed been declines of some communities, mainly geographical communities, but this has been offset by the development of other forms of community.
Birds of a feather flock together. They find ways of finding each other. It is often said that the most segregated hour in the United States is 11 AM Sunday morning to noon. This observation is true. But it is not a segregation forced on people by governments, either ecclesiastical or civil. It is a segregation based on the principle that birds of a feather flock together. People are comfortable at church when the people in that church are from familiar backgrounds.
I was a member of a church in Memphis that was mostly African-American. There was no hostility by the blacks toward the whites who came to worship on a regular basis. There were probably half a dozen white families in that church for least part of the time I was there. Their donations probably were the major source of income for that congregation. People got along just fine.
Most of the people drove to church, which meant that they were not part of the same neighborhood. This was a weakness of the church, because the church had been set up by the presbytery as a missionary congregation to a specific part of town: the poorest part of town. There were some members who lived locally, but most of them came from outside that immediate community. As it turned out, this was for the best, because urban renewal came in, and scraped away the projects in which the original targeted audience had been living.
We think the community should be based on geography, but the automobile has pretty much destroyed that assumption with respect to the workplace, the worship place, and everything except the public schools. Even the public schools are marked by the yellow school buses, which means that students are being transported out of their neighborhoods.
It is quite possible to imagine a school system that is based on a combination of the Internet and a local building in a neighborhood. It is conceivable that a student could spend his entire academic career, from kindergarten through junior college, in what would have been called a little red schoolhouse 150 years ago. When the school buses are no longer used to bring students to the schools, it will be because the Internet has brought the best teachers and the best program to buildings in neighborhoods. Maybe everyone around the world will learn mathematics from Salman Khan, but they will learn it in a low-budget facility around the block.
We have put too much emphasis on the importance of geographical community. This is because of tradition. It is a tradition which stretches back to the history of man. It is a tradition based on language, culture, and above all, high-cost transportation. As transportation has become less expensive, geographical communities have faded in importance. People do not invest a lot of time, money, and emotional energy into building neighborhoods, because they know that these communities are unstable with respect to the participants. The faces will change. The neighbors will change. Communities can persevere, and the existence of home owners' associations testifies to this continuity over time. But this is a somewhat impersonal continuity, because it has to be enforced by a homeowners' association, and hardly anybody knows who the members of the association are.
If we can find common areas of agreement in our neighborhoods that will enable us to get together more often, and build some small degree of community, this is positive. The two obvious issues are a neighborhood watch against crime and a neighborhood association of gardeners. If someone with gardening skills in a neighborhood is willing to teach children about gardening, and help these children to start a backyard garden at home, this would be a very positive development. Parents would appreciate the time that a local neighborhood gardener would spend with their children, trying to help their children start a backyard hobby. This is a good way to create good will in the community, and get your name in front of the neighbors. It would also be a good project with respect to decreasing the people's dependence on the supermarket.
Community-building always costs time and money. Every community is always in competition with other forms of community. We have found over the last 200 years that we prefer other forms of community to neighborhood community. As the cost of establishing these alternative communities has decreased, the amount of time, money, and emotional commitment we have invested in neighborhood communities has declined. This is not because we do not appreciate community; is because there has been a change in the allocation of our time, money, and emotional commitment that has been driven by modern mass production methods. These mass production methods have decreased our cost of developing communities that rival neighborhood communities. We have been able to develop other forms of community at a lower price than was possible prior to 1800. This is not going to change. It is going to accelerate. The only thing that will change would be an economic contraction. If the contraction borders on a financial collapse, we will see the reestablishment of neighborhood community.
The division of labor will increase as capital investment increases and as new technologies are brought to market. This is been the pattern since 1800, and it has been a positive pattern. It has imposed costs, as every positive development always does. One of the costs is a decline in neighborhood community. I think it is a cost that has been worth paying individually. Each of us has paid this cost. We may complain about it, but we pursue activities that increase the likelihood that the process will continue. This is a social phenomenon that has been based on individual choice. The macro for the most part is the result of the micro.
There have been a few exceptions. The national highway system is one of them. Subsidized mortgages have been another. But, on the whole, people have preferred to create alternative communities to geographical communities, because they have had more control over the non-geographical communities. They could pick and choose more easily. The cost of creating new communities fell rapidly. A member the rule of economics: at a lower price, more is demanded. As the price of creating alternative communities has fallen, there has been greater demand for the creation of new communities.
Because these communities are more social than geographical, they have not been equally visible. They have not received the same degree of attention as the neighborhood communities have. We worry about bowling alone, because a Harvard sociologist told us we ought to. The fact is this: a lot of people do not like to bowl. Bowling has been an activity of the lower middle class, meaning blue-collar workers. As the number of blue-collar workers has declined, the number of bowling alleys has declined. Community declined because because people got richer. If given the chance to go back in time, few people would do it. Remember P. J. O'Rourke's line: "When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry." I'll take the novacaine. You can keep the community.
There is no doubt that it will take a systematic development of personal capital for you to build up contacts in your neighborhood. This must be self-conscious, and it will take time. I think it is possible to do this, and I think it is a good idea to do this, but it will not be done free of charge. There are no free lunches, and there are no free communities.
There are reasons behind the decline of neighborhood communities, and the main reason is this: it has been cheaper for people to participate in non-neighborhood communities. There has been a cost of this, but there have been enormous benefits. If there had not been benefits, people would not have abandoned their commitment to local communities.
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