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Introduction: Sustaining Community
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18325 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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10 / 1990 |
4,886 Words |
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Leroy S. Rouner
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Our current quest for community has numerous dimensions. Metaphysically it signals the end of our modern fascination with autonomous individuality as the primary reality and hence the cornerstone of culture. In science the empirical method of exploration sought out the behavior of individual entities, whether stars or atoms. In politics, the rise of the individual eventually produced the commitment to democracy. In economics, free enterprise meant entrepreneurial individualism. And in religion, the individual Protestant rose against Catholic hegemony, thus establishing religious individualism as a major influence in Western culture.
Personally, however, the search for roots and the need for common ground are an admission that individuals who live isolated and autonomous live are struggling, sometimes desperately, to find meaning in the onrush of modern life. My favorite survivor of this onrush is my 96-year-old mother-in-law. She was already a young woman when the first automobile drove past her house in New York City. She has lived through two world wars and the deaths of numerous dearly beloved family members and friends, and has seen astronauts walk on the moon. With a little luck - she is in excellent health - she may live to see the establishment of human colony on Mars.
How does anyone keep his cultural bearings, never mind his sanity and hope, in the midst of what sociologists dryly call this “rapid social change”? My mother-in-law never tires of saying how much family and friends mean to her. So, on the personal level, community is survival.
But politics, lying somewhere between the metaphysical and the personal, is perhaps our most vivid recent experience of the quest for genuine community. The collapse of communist governments in Europe in the autumn of 1989 was not a triumph of individuals in the name of individual freedoms. It was a community protest against false community. Oppressive authoritarianism was rejected as serving the interests of those few individuals who controlled the government. The politics of the new Europe hopes for governments that will really serve “the people.”
How we build and sustain community for “the people” depends on how we understand the nature of the community we need and want. Here recent history is cautioning. The communist governments of Central Europe claimed to speak in the name of “the people” when, in fact, they served only their own interests. “Communism” was supposedly the yearning for community raised to high political art. It turned out to be ideology manipulated for individual gain. Nothing is more modern and individualistic than “the cult of personality” that dominated communist regimes.
On the other hand, the collapse of militarily enforced communist ideology now exposes and ironically encourages the old ethnic and regional community antagonisms which that rule had kept at bay. In the soviet Union, the transition to a more democratic government is threatened less by hard-line conservatives, intent on maintaining the old authoritarianism, than by ancient and visceral animosities among large traditional populations whose “national” loyalty has always been to their particular regional, linguistic, ethnic, and/or religious “nation.” So how does the new concern for community distinguish creative communities from those that are destructive to individual values and rights? What do we really want when we speak of our need for
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