Oregon Humanities

The Goal of Community

David Leo Kennedy, Ashland

History can be viewed as a constant shifting of balance between the individual and the collective. There are as many variations on this theme as there are, or have been, cultures. The poorest and most technologically primitive people, hunter-gatherers, are the most egalitarian and among the more collectively organized. They have to be to survive. From the beginning, we humans have always had to come together in some form of extended family—band, tribe, village, city, and upward—to make a living for ourselves.

The advent of agriculture, denser population, specialization, and hierarchies encouraged individualism. To people used to being subsumed in a band or tribe, the change must have been exhilarating.

But it wasn’t until that notable Enlightenment document, our Constitution, was drafted that the rights of the individual were codified so extensively in the first ten amendments. For the past two hundred and thirty years we have increasingly apotheosized individual freedom to the extent that it distorts those other four core principles of democracy. What began as a noble effort to grant hitherto rare human liberties has devolved into a hyperindividualistic, winner-take-all American ethos.

Ideologues have turned our love of liberty into a license to abandon the less fortunate. “Personal responsibility” means if you’re lucky, go for it, if not, tough luck, pal. Equality, economic opportunity, civic engagement, and justice are all unequally distributed in this country because individual freedom has been so perverted. That historic balance between the individual and the collective has shifted to the point that well-off and well-positioned individuals benefit hugely at the expense of the community, the commons.

It has done repairable harm to our republic. Somehow we have lost touch with that which most enriches our lives: each other. Many things fill our lives: art, music, travel, sex, but our deepest satisfaction comes from friends, family, and loved ones—our harmonious relationships within the community. Recently published research has pointed to the isolation Americans feel. This is a direct result of the deification of the individual, the rebel, the tough guy who plays by his own rules. Besides keeping us from enjoying what truly makes us happy, and truncating those other democratic principles, it serves the powerful very well by making sure the less powerful are separated and struggling against each other.

It is no longer possible for those who value true community and the life-enhancing richness it can bring to simply try to carve out nice little lives for ourselves. Our nation is hurtling rapidly toward an oligarchy of privilege for the paltry few and misery for the many. Even those few won’t be all that happy, isolated in their gated “communities,” given the prevailing ethos of our times.

We must speak out about the need to be fair, inclusive, and egalitarian, to recognize how much we depend on each other. Individual freedom is a positive ideal; arrogant triumphalism is not.

From Fall/Winter 2006 On Principle