Community as Panacea
"The person who is in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go." – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"The triumph of the industrial economy is the fall of community. But the fall of community reveals how precious and necessary it is. For when community falls, so must fall all of the things that only community life can engender and protect: the care of the old, the care and education of children, family life, neighborly work, the handing down of memory, the care of the earth, and respect for nature and the lives of wild creatures." – Wendell Berry
Hikikomori as indicator species
HIKIKOMORI MEANS “WITHDRAWL”, or those “those who have withdrawn”, in Japanese. Japan is suffering from an epidemic of those who have withdrawn.
Hikikomori is typically defined as “a person sequestered in his room for six months or longer with no social life beyond his home.” Hikikomori are generally, but not always, teenage boys or young men. They do not work. They do not socialize. They are almost completely removed from any semblance of community. Some stay confined to their rooms for decades, leaving only to use the restroom and to make occasional (and almost always nocturnal) forays outside.
The very nature of hikikomori makes their exact number difficult to ascertain. Estimates range from one hundred thousand to over one million. The latter figure represents nearly one percent of the Japan’s population. There are several factors often cited to explain why the population of hikikomori has exploded in recent years: school bullying, protective parenting, ultra-competitive school entrance examinations, and the “escape” of online culture among them. What is agreed upon is that the costs – social, economic, psychological, and spiritual – of the hikikomori are staggering.
I start this writing with an account of the hikikomori because community health, like that of human beings, is often easier to behold and understand when it is collapsing or in decline. A well-functioning community does not draw attention to itself; it just seems “right.” Health is difficult to see, but disease is painfully and insistently obvious.
The truth is, I could have used any number of acute social problems in this introduction. I could have written about the seven million Americans currently in prison or on parole, or the thirty to forty percent of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip who are unemployed, or the roughly one billion in the world people who are malnourished. I chose the example of hikikomori, however, because many people are unaware of the situation and find it shocking. It is a novel phenomenon for us, one that we have not become desensitized to yet. Sometimes we get so familiar with the unthinkable that we hardly even notice it anymore.
Ecology gives us the term “indicator species.” The presence of such a species in an ecosystem points to the existence of some characteristic that may be more difficult to observe or measure. For instance, the presence of lichens indicates an absence of sulfur dioxide gas, and the decline in numbers of the Gray Jay is one of many indicators of global warming. Hikikomori, like the homeless, the drug addicted, the incarcerated, and the malnourished, are indicator species of impoverished community.
“Community” is something that nearly everyone agrees is good and desirable. Beyond that general consensus, however, things get murky and even a bit mysterious. What is community, exactly? What are its characteristics? How do we “get” it? And why does it seem to be in decline in so many parts of the world? The very slipperiness of the concept of community has, in my view, contributed to our neglect of it. In our increasingly technological, rational, empirical world, anything that cannot be quantified or measured or articulated in legalese is often considered suspect, possibly imaginary, and vaguely squishy. Consequently, much of the art and practice of what actually sustains us and gives us joy has been neglected, left to wither on the vine.
This is an excursion into that murky territory of community. My intent is to explore why community is so important, how we can cultivate it, and what forces are antagonistic to its development. In doing so, I hope to shed some light on why community is so crucial and why it deserves our full attention, not just as a means of nourishing human happiness and fulfillment, but as an essential prerequisite for the healing of our world.
Characteristics of Community
HAVING SPENT THE better part of the last two years with my hands in the soil, I tend to equate the elusive, life-supporting nature of community to the equally elusive, life-supporting nature of humus in the soil. Humus is the dark, cake-like mixture of broken down organic material present in soil. It contains a rich array of nutrients and minerals that plants uptake through their root systems, and the structure of humus helps bind soil particles together and creates good soil structure. The healthy, balanced micro-biotic community that humus supports helps guard plants against disease and serves as a buffer against disruptions in the chemical makeup of the soil. For this and other reasons, humus is sometimes referred to as the “life force” of the soil. Yet, humus is so complex that soil scientists still do not fully understand it.
We do not see humus directly. Rather, we observe its presence in healthy plants and ecosystems. Similarly, we do not see community directly – we observe its presence in healthy people. As opposed to trying to articulate what community is, I will endeavor to point out characteristics that seem to be common to healthy communities, whether human or ecological.
Community supports diversity… to an extent
Diversity is nature’s survival strategy. You will never find a monoculture ecosystem in the natural world. Nature seems intent on filling each geographical niche with as many species as the resources of that location will support. Even when a new or invasive species enters an ecosystem and crowds out competitors, it does not take long (geologically speaking) before that species overextends itself and a new balance is reestablished.
The natural world is equipped with many mechanisms to foster diversity. Sexual reproduction, genetic mutations, and even viruses serve to diversify gene pools and provide any given species with variations to adapt to changing external circumstances. Of course, diversity is encouraged within limits. Many mutants and outliers in the natural world do not pass on their genetic information. Any community needs a good deal of homogeneity to maintain its coherence. A tension of opposites must be maintained between diversity and conformity.
Human communities also thrive when they strike this balance. Too often, diversity is stifled and sacrificed in the name of stability, order, power, or simply convenience. The Nazi dream of Aryan purity; ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Darfur, or the Balkans; and the disturbing amount of support for eugenics in the early twentieth century are but the most blatant recent examples of the suppression of diversity in communities. More typically, diversity is denied through overt and covert oppression, marginalization, or neglect.
An example of neglecting our diversity in the United States involves the treatment of the elderly. Over the past half-century, the elderly have become increasingly marginalized and devalued members of the population. Whereas it was once common for the elderly to be integral members of intergenerational family structures, participating in child-rearing and community leadership, more and more elderly spend their final years in retirement homes and nursing homes. When the elderly are marginalized, the entire community suffers on account that the experience and wisdom of a significant portion of the populace is simply shut away and left to fade into obscurity.
In strictly pragmatic terms, stifling diversity is a squandering of resources, of “human capital.” In this country, the talents of African Americans, Native Americans, women, homosexuals, and other groups have long been underappreciated, underutilized, and unsupported. Progress has been made, but much human potential is still wasted because of our failure to truly embrace diversity and the gifts it offers.
To deny diversity, more importantly, has crippling spiritual repercussions. At the core of the great spiritual traditions, contrary to the divisive way in which they are all too often interpreted and practiced, are teachings of unity and interconnection. To deny diversity is to deny this unity. Martin Luther King and Gandhi both recognized that, in a stratified society, both the oppressor and the oppressed suffer a sense of alienation from one another and from the very essence of unity.
Human beings are born with a wide array of personality orientations, talents, and foci of attention. This cannot be by accident. Communities do well to recognize and support these diverse manifestations of humanity. The elders of certain Native American tribes would carefully observe the predilections and talents of their young. When a child reached ten years of age or so, he or she would be paired with a similarly inclined older member of the community who would serve as their mentor. In this way, each person was encouraged to grow and develop in a way that was most natural and beneficial to the community at large. This is honoring diversity at the most subtle and profound level.
Rigid conformity, whether it manifests as fast food restaurants, narrow educational pedagogies, or McCarthy-style witch hunts, is corrosive to community. When people can honor and harness the gifts of diversity, community flourishes.
Community self-corrects
Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a meditation on receptivity to feedback. Societies fail, Diamond argues, when they cannot adapt appropriately to new environments or new circumstances. The first Norse colonies in Greenland, for example, died out because they tried to maintain their Scandinavian lifestyle in very different environs. Similar fates befell the Aztecs the inhabitants of Easter Islands, both civilizations having failed to live within their ecological parameters. Change itself does not necessarily bring suffering; refusing or being incapable of adapting to change does.
The capacity of a community to self-correct requires several prerequisites. Communities must maintain excellent lines of communication between its members, its leaders, and its constituent groups. Systems theorists often use the “neural net” of the human brain as an example of a system that gives rise to an astonishingly open and nimble flow of information. Communities must also have mechanisms in place and develop the skills and maturity amongst its members to ensure that feedback is responded to in a timely but well-considered manner. In his book A Bright Shining Lie, Neil Sheehan vividly illustrates how opaque and limiting communication networks within the United States military and incapacity to change course led to the tragic continuance of the Vietnam War. As a global community, our survival may very well depend on whether and how quickly we can self-correct some of our more destructive living habits.
Community is resilient
The rise and fall of countless intentional communities illustrates an important point: developing and maintaining community is never easy. However, this should not serve as a deterrent or as rationale to write off efforts and movements that would elevate the importance and role of community. I believe modern attempts to form lasting, place-based communities often fail because community living is a difficult, subtle, and complex art that modern humans have largely forgotten. Nourishing and forging authentic community can feel a bit like the task put to all the kings horses and all the kings men, trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Fortunately, there are still many living, breathing examples of long-lasting, durable communities. There are still peoples in the Amazon, in the frozen north of Canada and Scandinavia, and upon the mountain slopes of the Andes and the Himalayas who are living in ways that have changed very little for hundreds if not thousands of years. Modern society tends to view such traditional ways of life as backward and stagnant, but I think resilient is the proper term. Without romanticizing traditional ways of life, we desperately need to study just how these communities have maintained such staying power, how they have weathered innumerable storms and retained their coherence. What are their ecological attitudes, practices, and traditions? How do they mitigate and address conflict within the group? How do they help individuals along the path towards true adulthood and elderhood? How are resources considered and allocated? What cultural traditions serve to bind, renew, and, when necessary, heal the fabric of community? Most importantly, how the balance between the group and the individual reconciled?
Certain spiritual and monastic communities have also displayed remarkable health and longevity. Monastic orders should obviously be considered somewhat differently since they are “opt-in” communities, and they do not self-perpetuate. Yet, the clarity of monastic codes and practices are a good starting place when it comes to studying the mechanisms that support resilience within community. While the Amish tend to be viewed by many Americans with a mixture of curiosity and puzzlement, they represent one of very few examples of a large community that has continued to thrive in the modern era on more or less its own terms. The strength of the Amish community’s principles and practices has enabled them to maintain integrity and self-determination within a society very much hostile to their way of life.
To ask the big questions about how societies and communities thrive is crucial in our time. Putting the answers into practice in our own context will not simply be a matter of transposing more traditional ways of life onto our own. Our task is to identify the essential characteristics of successful community and to live those out in ways appropriate to our own unique circumstances.
Benefits of Community
THE BENEFITS OF healthy community are so various, profound, and subtle that the use of the term “panacea” does not seem an overstatement. It is useful to consider exactly why community is so beneficial in order that those benefits are not taken for granted and ignored. If we were more aware of the gifts of community and the hardships and sorrows it helps stave off, then more of our collective energies might be directed at nourishing its preconditions. Below are just three of the myriad ways in which community enriches our lives and eases our suffering.
Community lowers ecological impact
There are several reasons why human beings tend to exert much less impact on the environment when the fabric of community is strong. First, people are much more likely to share food, tools, labor, and other resources when they feel strong bonds of community. This reduces waste and redundancy tremendously. People are more inclined to carpool, to watch one another’s children, and to share food and labor when they share strong connections with those around them.
Second, and related to the first point, there is less impulse to consume when community is strong. Much of our materialistic consumption can be seen as an attempt to fill the void left by an absence of community. Those who are blessed with strong community often find great joy simply through working, cooking, singing, and playing with one another. When people have recourse to this deep sense of well being, there is less desire to purchase an excessive amount of material goods.
Third, community in its healthiest and most sustainable form places great import on the relationship between human beings and their natural environment. Community, in fact, is understood not just as a set of interrelationships between humans, but between all species and natural phenomena. Great respect for and humility towards the natural world is thus taught and reinforced through culture and ritual. We see this orientation towards community in a speech attributed to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe.
"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we have taught our children: that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves."
What Chief Seattle articulated is a perception of community that comprises the whole of the earth. That modern science reinforces this wisdom, by showing us just how intricately and inextricably linked we all are, should only reinforce our intention to understand and practice community.
Community helps satisfy the deep human need for connection
That human beings need love and connection to flourish is supported by all of the major spiritual traditions, modern psychology, and common sense. Healthy community both facilitates this sense of connection and belonging and can be viewed as a manifestation of that connection.
True community fosters a deep understanding amongst its members that they are separate and unique individuals and yet tied to one another as a larger whole. Each plays a part in the workings of the group and it is understood that the group shares a common fate. When an individual is accepted for who he is, not for his stated beliefs or appearance or accomplishments, he begins to feel a sense of belonging to and affinity for the group of people who have shown him acceptance. Only when this sense of belonging is present do the interrelationships of community display their true strength.
Humans need this sense of connection because it reduces a persistent and universal anxiety that we are separate, alone, and vulnerable. We devise all manners of clubs, organizations, gangs, tribes, and other groups to alleviate this anxiety and to feel part of something larger than ourselves. But all too often our anxiety persists because these groups do not always honor the unique and individual nature of each human being. More often than not, we feel the pressure to conform or to fill a certain role. The result may be an appearance of unity or common purpose that lacks the essence.
When people feel this sense of belonging in community, it also serves to diffuse some of the strains and pressures of intimate relationships. In idealizing romantic love and in whittling down our core community to the nuclear family, partners and spouses are bereft of the broad net of community support that human beings have taken refuge in for millennia. We have, in a sense, put most of our eggs in the basket of marriage. Providing another human being with the love and acceptance to give rise to a sense of belonging is a tall order, one that is best taken on with the loving, active support of community.
What I am describing are of course ideal conditions that humans will forever come short of fully realizing. There will never be a community devoid of anxiety, conflict, and selfishness. However, ideals are instructive in that they point us in a positive direction, and they help us to think seriously about how we can give rise to a sense of belonging and interconnectedness even as we come to terms with our separateness.
Community helps mitigate social problems
Nearly everyone would agree that it is infinitely preferable to encourage children to eat healthy food and get plenty of exercise than to treat obese children for early-onset diabetes. The former approach to child health is proactive, cheap, and effective. The latter is reactive, incredibly expensive, and largely ineffectual. The former approach saves time, energy, and heartache by focusing on the preconditions that lead to health. The latter approach squanders resources and lives by addressing a problem only when it has become nearly insoluble.
A healthy community, like a healthy human being, is much less prone to acute and costly problems. Fostering and tending to community health is, therefore, essentially preventive medicine on a large scale. Just as the parents of a healthy child need little worry about diabetes, the citizens of a healthy community are relatively free from the concerns of high rates of substance abuse, depression, and violence. The assertion that strong community mitigates social problems may seem obvious, but the fact of matter is that as a society we largely neglect tending to community and are left to cope with social problems of monstrous size and complexity.
Antagonisms towards community
THE MODERN AGE, with all of its technological wonders, facility of travel and communication, and organizational complexity, has also proven to be rather inhospitable with regards to community. Without denigrating the value of modern advances, it is also important to pinpoint how and why the fabric of community is unraveling throughout the world in part because of these advances.
Imposition of mechanical and digital values onto human beings
Industrialization has undermined community largely because it has so dramatically shifted our value system. The characteristics we most prize and value in machines— efficiency, speed, productivity, uniformity—have increasingly become the characteristics we prize and value in human beings and human communities. If we get a sense at the strip malls and in the pre-fabricated subdivisions that community has become something limp and lifeless, it is because our society extols the lifeless values.
Human beings are not machines and should never be expected to behave as such. Machines cannot and do not form community. There is nothing wrong with efficiency or productivity per se, but if they become dominant considerations of life, they are toxic to the health of individuals and community alike. If we value speed and uniformity above creativity, rest, reflection, and ritual, then we forsake the ingredients that give rise to complete human beings. We lose the glue that holds people together.
Whereas the industrial age gave rise to the nine-to-five man and the automaton of the assembly line, the digital age is shaping a new kind of human being. The digital man is everywhere and nowhere. He is a multi-tasker and a networker, and he is always available. He need not be rooted anywhere save cyberspace. The digital age, while it may engender a certain physical freedom, has saddled human beings with the same expectations we have of our computers. We are always “on.” There is no pronounced end to the workday or the workweek. We are hyper-connected, but our connections are forged with the thin strands of binary code. There is no Sabbath, no time to reflect, and no time to simply walk amongst the trees in awe and wonder and gratitude.
The things that perpetuate healthy community often cannot be measured or quantified like processing speed or gross domestic product. A harvest festival or a traditional dance performance is not “productive” in the modern sense, and attempts to make such events financially lucrative affairs often serve to denigrate their integrity and therefore their capacity to build or sustain authentic community. In our schools, art and music programs are often gone or on the verge of extinction, while expensive new technologies become fixtures in even the poorest districts. Working to build community means reexamining our value system and shifting it towards some semblance of balance.
Monoculture
Transportation and communication technologies, along with a globalized corporate economy, are fostering a global monoculture. International airports epitomize this phenomenon, as do the Starbucks and McDonalds and Wal-marts that spring up like mushrooms from Jakarta to Moscow. Movie theaters in Tokyo show the same movies as movie theaters in Topeka. This monoculture is a direct threat to community because it muscles out the indigenous businesses, indigenous values, indigenous languages, and indigenous cultures that bind people together and connect them to a specific place. Global culture is so bland, diffuse, and commercialized that it simply cannot bind people together in a meaningful way.
It is true that globalization enables an increased pollination between different peoples that has given rise to new forms of art, music, and culture. However, the loss of culture and of community is far outpacing the rate of the creation of culture and community. Furthermore, the cultures that are being lost are often mature, integral, and three-dimensional as opposed to the often narrow and fleeting nature of modern subcultures. The deliberate destruction of culture and art that took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution seems to us a shocking and tragic occurrence. What is occurring today as global culture subsumes traditional cultures far exceeds what happened in China in the 1960s and 70s in terms of the sheer loss of human legacy.
Consumerism and modern corporatism
Consumerism equates human happiness with the purchasing and consumption of material goods. I view consumerism as an antagonism to community because it deemphasizes a constellation of other factors that contribute to human happiness: healthy relationships with friends, family, and nature; meaningful and enjoyable work; creative endeavor; and the opportunity to develop oneself personally. The message of consumerism, broadcast endlessly through advertising of all types, is that we are somehow incomplete, insufficient, or missing out unless we buy product X. This is not a preferred method of encouraging self-worth and contentment. More subtly, consumerism can give rise to a consumer orientation towards life. We begin to see not just products, but also trips, studies, experiences, and relationships as objects to be consumed, enjoyed, and then left behind while we search for the next thing. Most of us would express some distaste for the idea of extreme consumerism, but we must acknowledge that it is not only omnipresent but also our economic orthodoxy.
Modern corporatism, by which I mean an economic order dominated by large multinational corporations, often destabilizes communities and siphons wealth from the many into the hands of a few. Multi-nationals, beholden not to the public but to shareholders and the profit motive, can shift production from one contracted factory to another as prices, tax-incentives, and regulations change, leaving laborers in a precarious and unstable position and inhibiting them from becoming rooted and invested in their community. Corporate retailers like Wal-mart out-compete local businesses and drain the wealth of communities into the company’s coffers.
It is disturbing to note that consumer culture and modern corporatism actually thrive as community dissolves. The more isolated and alienated we become, the smaller and more fractured our living groups, the more people consume. In an apartment building with one hundred studio apartments, chances are there will be one hundred televisions and one hundred computers. If we cannot draw upon community for support and happiness, we are more susceptible to sophisticated advertising that promises immediate fulfillment. Corporations often find themselves rebuffed in areas with strong community. In production zones, workers with strong community are more likely to organize and demand fair practices and compensation. Corporate retailers can meet vehement resistance when they seek to put a new store in a neighborhood that has strong community and support of local businesses. That is why the ideal place for multinationals to produce is in Special Economic Zones in developing countries that are full of impoverished and desperate workers who have recently migrated in droves from the countryside. Moreover, that is why the ideal place for corporate retailers to set up shop is the suburb, which has not had time to develop a sense of place, a sense of identity, and a sense of community.
The built environment
Modern cities and suburbs are built more to accommodate the tools and machines of man than man himself. One need only spend an hour or two on a freeway in Los Angeles, or walking through the parking lot of any strip mall, to recognize this. The built environment can serve either to support community or to undermine it. Over the past century or so, our built environment has tended to do the latter by compartmentalizing the daily activities of life, removing us from the natural world, and reinforcing the centrality of the automobile.
If you live in a suburb or a city, the chances are good that you live, work, shop, study, and socialize in different locations. The people you live with probably do not know the people with whom you work, and the people you buy from do not know the people with whom you socialize. Our relationships, therefore, are largely compartmentalized and limited to very specific contexts. It is difficult to weave the fabric of community if the raw materials never have a chance to come together. Furthermore, the people in our lives do not necessarily share a common connection to place or a strong sense of shared purpose.
As we saw earlier, community in its broadest sense includes not just the people in a given area but also the plants, animals, and geography of that place. Most modern cities and suburbs make it almost impossible to feel truly connected to the surrounding ecology. Not only are green spaces and parks too few, but the non-human species we encounter are typically non-natives that contribute to the sense that we could be anywhere and nowhere. With little to differentiate one suburb from another, people are less inclined to become deeply rooted in and attached to their region. Add to this the growing evidence that humans develop healthier psychologically if they have a meaningful exposure to the natural world and it becomes evident that a built environment that separates us from our ecology diminishes us as individuals and impoverishes our communities.
Perhaps no other human invention has so altered the built environment in so little time as the automobile. The automobile and its impact on urban planning have had a negative effect on community for several reasons. First, the automobile has enabled and exacerbated the compartmentalization of cities and suburbs that I mentioned above. Second, the automobile, by increasing the speed of transportation, has also increased the scale of the built environment. Suburbs and cities are no longer planned in such a way that human beings can comfortably walk from where they live to where they work and where they shop. This has negative health, social, aesthetic, and environmental implications; and it also puts anyone who cannot afford a car (or who simply would rather not own one) at a distinct disadvantage. Third, the automobile is inherently anti-social and isolating. Transportation by automobile precludes the unplanned “on the street” social interactions that in a subtle but very real way contribute to community cohesion. Anyone who has had the good fortune to enjoy an Italian passeggiatta, an evening stroll through town and yet so much more than that, knows how joyous and enlivening it can be simply to walk in the company of ones neighbors.
What supports community
CLEARLY THERE IS no simple formula for developing and sustaining community, and every context calls for a unique approach. Nevertheless, I do think it is possible to identify certain general areas of attention that, with investments of time and energy, will fairly predictably bear fruit.
Going back to our humus analogy, building community is like developing healthy soil. A disproportionate amount of energy and input is required to begin the process, or to rehabilitate a degraded soil. Large amounts of compost are added and labor-intensive cultivation techniques are utilized. As health increases, the level of requisite maintenance tapers off. Many of our communities are ailing, broken, or stillborn. They need our energy, our attention, our creativity, and our dedication before we can enjoy “all the things only community life can engender and protect” of which Wendell Berry writes.
Start with the individual
Nourishing community is first and foremost about nourishing individuals. Each of us is a cell in the body. The community exists to provide for and sustain its members so that we can provide for the community to the best of our ability. The function of community is to call us to our true and best selves, to provide us with the right amount of guidance, training, and encouragement on that pursuit, and to foster within us a deep understanding of our interrelatedness. If community serves these essential functions, its members will make less distinction between personal interests and those of the community.
Community skills and sensibilities
The diverse members of a community should nonetheless possess a set of common skills and sensibilities. Chief among these is clear, direct, and empathetic communication. Given how much of our time we spend communicating through various means, it is astounding how little attention is paid to developing our capacity to communicate effectively. When “effective communication” courses are taught, the emphasis is typically on how to get one’s point across. This is only half of the equation, and arguably the less important half. The prayer of St. Francis would have us seek “not so much to be understood, but to understand.” Listening deeply to others so that we might better understand them is the crux of empathetic communication. This does not mean we have to agree with them, but it means that we are willing to open ourselves to the possibility of being affected.
Here is an area where modern communications technologies do not serve us well. It is challenging to be truly present with someone on the telephone. Empathetic communication is next to impossible via email or text message. Communication is a full body act. We speak with our eyes, our gestures, our posture, and our many hundreds of facial muscles. What comes out of our mouths or off of our fingertips is only the most processed and propagandized sort of communication, filtered and shaped by our conscious mind. Our nonverbal communication is much more alive, honest, and revealing. Technology can make communication more convenient, but only by reducing its depth and nuance.
I do not mean to suggest that empathetic communication must always be taught in the conventional sense. There are several pedagogies, such as Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication courses, that do teach the principles and practices of deep listening and constructive communication. These can be very valuable exercises. One can also draw profound lessons in communication from spiritual traditions (my good friend Jedd Medefind wrote a book about principles of communication that he has gleaned from his Christian faith entitled The Revolutionary Communicator). However, most of us learn to communicate principally through observation and imitation. Therefore, we are both students and teachers of our friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers. Perhaps thinking of ourselves as such is the most immediate way to become better, more empathetic communicators.
Employ the built environment
Just as the built environment can thwart or undermine community, it can also be powerfully harnessed to support community. Humans have understood this from time immemorial. It is why a well-designed plaza draws people as if by gravitational force and why a step inside the cathedral at Chartres inspires hushed awe. Many architects and urban planners, after decades of unfortunate adventures in gigantism or in impersonal, harshly utilitarian design, have fortunately begun to return to the idea that the built environment can and should serve as source of pleasure, inspiration, social cohesion, and connection to place. Even though the dominant trend may still be in skyscrapers and strip malls, there are those who have rediscovered the beauty and value of building at a human scale for human beings.
The built environment is the backdrop to a large majority of our lives, and there are several ways in which it can support community. First, a city or town can encourage biking, walking, and public transportation and discourage automobiles (or outlaw them entirely in certain areas). This requires a certain density of development and a certain modesty of scale. Second, community thrives when people live, work, shop, and socialize in generally the same area so that the different strands of their lives can intertwine. This necessitates intelligent mixed-use zoning as well as an abundance of parks and greenspace to draw people from the suburbs into higher density areas. Third, great thought and care must be put into public spaces, and they should remain exactly that – public. Finally, the built environment should harmonize as best as possible with the natural environment. Steps can be made in this direction in terms of how things are made (simply, humbly, and in an energy efficient manner with as many sustainable, renewable, and local materials as possible), why things are made (to contribute both function and beauty to the community), and where they are made (in areas and using techniques that will minimize the amount of ecological disruption). Furthermore, designers do both humans and non-humans a huge service by adopting an aesthetic that complements the surrounding natural beauty. This serves to remind humans that they are part of and not separate from the natural world around them and that the natural/man-made dichotomy is a false one.
THE PSYCHOLOGIST M. SCOTT PECK once wrote about the primacy of community in this way:
"Start communities. Don’t worry for the moment about what to do beyond that. Don’t worry much yet about feeding the poor, housing the homeless, protecting the abused. It is not that such actions are wrong or even unnecessary. It is simply that they are not primary. They are not likely to succeed unless they are grounded, one way or another, in community."
We must, Peck continues, “transform ourselves from mere social creatures to community creatures.” Community eases our loneliness and our sufferings. It helps us slow the hemorrhaging of violence and depression and environmental degradation. It may help bring us back to what is most important and most essential in our lives. Building and maintaining community is not always easy, but it is crucial and foundational.
