Mysterious Communities

Communities, when I think about it, are mysterious entities—and present only in shattered fragments in modern life. My image of a real community is of people working together, but in such a way that the commonality of the effort is reflected in the horizontal as well as in the vertical dimensions, thus that they are working together in the same space, more or less, and that the labor has the same inner and outer purpose, a purpose that all those who support it spontaneously understand. The manner in which individual efforts are meaningfully linked ought also to be quite visible: the people to whom I sell groceries teach my children, sell me clothes, repair my plumbing, attend my church... The activities we undertake together should have a purpose we actually share.

In modern life the closest thing we actually encounter is the spatial unity we share with others who work in the same enterprise. But the vertical and inner dimension may both already be quite vague. The aims of large corporations are up there in the sky and abstract—profit and growth. And my relation even to this partial community may be rather tentative. I’m easily replaceable; and my income is a necessary cost for the collective (but a benefit for my community). But the community’s is not the hammer hand; my employer may reduce me (cost that I am) and gladly if at all possible. My employer may itself also be (at least thinkably) altogether unnecessary—thus throwing my work identity up into the air as well. This is especially true if it competes—and doubly so if it must compete fiercely with others; the more embattled it is, the less necessary it appears. But then—what about me? That’s the thought I would be thinking if I worked for General Motors, an entity recently resurrected from the dead by the artificial interventions of Big Brother; to be sure, that resurrection was motivated by communitarian considerations, but it was not that of any genuine or local community but that of an abstract and vast beast, itself up in the sky.

My thought next turns to hospitals. When we arrived here in 1989, virtually none advertised. Now they all do. Our own St. John, founded by a handful of nuns because a hospital was needed here, now maintains a mere block from where it sits a vast billboard on the corner of Mack and Moross touting its services to the physically troubled in heart. I’d feel oddly marginalized if I worked for pushy Beaumont expanding by acquisitions yet. What has happened to that most honorable of all institutions, the hospital, that, these days, it must scramble like mad for its so-called “customers”? Has it been invaded by machines? Is it the clamor of the machines for return on investment that I hear shouted from the billboards?

Looking for the right word, the word “organic” comes to mind. Why? Because the alien atmosphere of modern life tells me that our institutions are no longer really anchored in organic social reality. They have detached from the soil. They’ve begun to levitate. Most communities, in fact, are communities in name alone. They’ve devolved. They have become transformed into bedroom communities or vast, layered, sleeping slabs. Their inhabitants shower and then travel all over the vast Detroit metroplex to work, to study, to worship (if they do so at all), to shop, to seek health services—everywhere. Virtually all communities today have become virtual; they’re communities of interest. People no longer share anything at all with those who live close by them—except incidentally. Annual block parties trumpet this fact in small talk. The neighbors are strangers unless, by happenstance, small children are present and the still local elementary school binds their mothers (rarely their fathers) into a common purpose they genuinely share. The vast majority—not least some of those mothers—work for institutions the purposes of which are expressible in numbers; and what they actually do is only incidentally related to the corporate objectives that their labor serves.

Real communities, of course, tend to restrict, constrain the individual. The young dream of escaping for the lights of the great city, the excitements and adventures of freedom in the distance. Little do they know… There is an ideal point of equilibrium somewhere, but the laws of this dimension are such that we rarely and only briefly experience genuine community life (if we are lucky to do so at all); memories of that time, to be sure, remain in the heart as a kind a memory of paradise, even when, in detail, it wasn’t—and we remember that perfectly well too. Very odd, indeed, but that’s the way things are.

Responsibility v. Mechanics

The soul-less behavior of large institutions seems (to me) due to a combination of fear, rigid rules, harsh sanctions, and employees who lack discretion or think that they do. This institutional behavior also owes a great deal to an almost silly modern faith in “training.” Now people will say that sheer size necessitates the use of policies and disciplines. And that the modern legal system gives people the right to sue deep pockets—and hence employees must be constrained so that the institutions can defend themselves in court. There is also present here an implied but never stated belief that society does not produce a large enough supply of genuinely intelligent and responsible people who can be trusted to exercise their own discretion when working for large, rich organizations. Decisions therefore must be channeled to those with the right qualifications.

I see this as the substitution of mechanics for meaning. In agriculture we have soul-less monoculture—overwhelming nature with machines and chemicals to produce a single crop sure to sell in vast quantities. In manufacturing there’s the assembly line—you might call it mono-movement: you will secure these three nuts with an electric drill…for the rest of your miserable life. In institutions we have bureaucracy where even the simplest questions, complaints, or adjustments must be referred “up the line”—for God’s sake do not make decisions on the front line where institution meets its client.

It’s riskier but much more effective, in the long run, to delegate the power to the level where it must be present. This has long been known and preached under the code-word of “empowerment.” But use of that very term reveals the problem. No. People already have the power to make sensible decisions at every level of a complex organization. The power is built in, comes with the employee. We speak of empowerment as if the employee didn’t have it. If the employee doesn’t have it, it is because it has been taken away—by the system. To be sure empowerment is there as a subject in countless “off-sites” and the seminars—but not for actual implementation.

We live surrounded by collectives rather than communities because our leadership, those who control wealth or power, hold on to it and insist on using people as soul-less gadgets rather than employing them as responsible individuals. We don’t walk the talk we talk in our endless training sessions. If we could genuinely humanize the large collectives, all sorts of new demands would arise in society. Our elites would then begin sincerely to insist that we have schools that really work, that all families are “empowered” to raise competent children, etc. Instead we apply the same policy mechanics at every level—and some few lonely voices out in the wilderness, like mine, cry out against and curse the “collectives.”

The way to humanize institutions (or agriculture, or manufacturing, etc.), is always to favor  the rational and human side of a situation—even when it is inefficient. Organic, diversified agriculture is—inefficient; but it is adaptive. Enabling employees is—inefficient; but ultimately it will make the organization responsive and more secure. Inefficiency means more costly. This translates into those who control the wealth letting go of some of it willingly to secure an adaptive, moral, and higher order.