by Walter J. Smith
We should appreciate that the housing and other economic crises, locally and nationally, are gaining attention. We must, however, be careful to avoid letting these crises get trivialized by the oversimplification that often accompanies popularization. We also need not get lost in the details of the overall crisis. We need to find our own most effective role in resolving the various local crises, and in seeing such crises emerge before they more seriously threaten our overall economy. We can successfully transform crises to the extent we can see the promising possibilities they reveal or suggest. Community integrity grows through exploiting the opportunities inherent in crises.
The housing crises emerged most immediately because our overall economy experienced growing conflict everywhere in the shared human and natural world. Our housing crises also emerged from a string of housing successes: recent decades have brought more housing to more people. These successes also brought more businesses to enjoy more profits. Unless we are careful resolving the housing crises, these gains stand to be lost along with much more loss – in housing and throughout the economy and community.
The Housing successes were built upon perceived efficiencies in marketing, policy-formation, construction technique, land-use management, and so on. Many of those efficiencies were sound, but only for a very short term. Long-term impacts continue unfolding. Most are not pretty. But one very significant consideration seems to have fallen aside. This is the classical political question: how shall we all live together?
The classical question of how we all should live together includes overall management of all resources -- human, domesticated and natural. This overall management of all resources was historically the supreme task of politics. Politics was created to provide just this service. Politics was created because some three thousand years ago, traditions everywhere proved incapable of providing that management while political economies everywhere proved destined to grow more complex and to reach into more and more households.
The rise of industrialism, and the more recent technological revolution have brought us into an era of extreme occupational specialization. With the increased narrowing of specialization, the question of how we should all live together initially lost sight of the natural world, (all sought pieces of the industrial commodities pie), then lost sight of the domestic animal dimension (only five percent of us now have functional knowledge of farming), and finally, specialization has pretty much come to mean that any human we can’t personally see and know is somehow negligible. Meanwhile, overall resource management was long ago delegated to specialists through elections and appointments.
In other words, the pursuit of plenty, through industrialization, technologization, and hyper-specialization rendered our modern society almost devoid of any comprehensive consideration of the fundamental elements of that big question, ‘how shall we all live together?’ Traditionally, this was the ultimate question for every community. Community includes all the characteristics of public integrity. Extreme specialization has come at the expense of almost all common sense, unless we abandon the traditional meaning of common sense. Of course, the most common way of making this mistake is to assume “I” have common sense but few others do. If a sense isn’t held in common, it isn’t common sense.
Traditionally common sense is a shared sense of what our community should include regarding food production, housing, the natural world, the care of domestic animals, and the care of other citizens beginning with the care for domestic human life. Cultivating and conserving our common sense always enjoys primary position atop every genuinely conservative public agenda. For without a common sense of what is most worth keeping in our community, what else is there to conserve? Only private things. This is the world the philosopher Hobbes famously described as the ‘war of each against all.’ It is the world Johnny Cash dubbed as “you better get them others before them others get to you.” In human terms, it is the opposite of a civilized world.
To grasp just how much has been lost along the way to all our recent economic successes and current housing and other failures, pose the question: “what are the essential elements of our community?” To the extent we share a broad common sense of what these essential elements of community include, we appropriately say ‘we have a solid community.’ Where there are few or weak shared understandings of what is essential to our community integrity, all social organization increasingly risks collapse. As our shared sense of community declines, our community loses political integrity and overall societal order declines. The economy is usually among the latest of the political failures.
The Ancient Greek philosopher, Plato, presented the classic measure of a community’s political integrity. He revealed this measure by pointing out that it was the very first and most widely admired specialists who undermined every community: poets and philosophers. In today’s language, this would amount to charging our primary teachers with our social evils. Not just the schoolteachers. Every one of us who sits at a computer and teaches himself anything is a primary teacher. Today’s specialization problem emerges from each citizen increasing his or her focus upon individual pursuits, a focus that almost unavoidably succeeds at the cost of our individual contributions to and our understanding of our community’s integrity.
Plato argued in that the practice of specializing gave the specialist the self-impression that he knew all that was important about everything. In other words, specialization leads the individual citizen to, unknowingly, but steadily exit from community life and culture. Specialization does this by encouraging us to believe “they” will take care of collective needs. “They” will take care of all the things we share in common. Nevermind who “they” are. “Don’t be a busybody; take care of your own business.” Ever notice in everyday language just how evil “they” are? It seems that invariably “they” get it all wrong.
Specialization leads us to think increasingly of the pleasures of withdrawing from community deliberations while we simultaneously expand our “purchasing power.” We forget, or worse, never learn that only community-oriented deliberations create and conserve political integrity. We forget, or never learn that without political integrity, our specialization and all the booty it delivers has little or no viable social culture within which it can be sustained.
Plato’s charge isn’t only that specialization leads us away from public life and responsibilities. It is also that, through the benefits specialization confers upon the specialists, the young and poorly educated are seduced by their own worst tendencies. And Plato didn’t mince his words. Wealthy ancient Athenians were usually among the very worst educated and the very most easily seduced. Sound familiar? Community integrity becomes reduced in more and more minds to a confused amalgamation of cartoons, jokes, and completely ignorant and otherwise inappropriate ideas about what community actually confers upon humans, both as individuals and collectively.
Perhaps most importantly, we have as citizens for the most part assumed that our citizenly duties and responsibilities begin and end with voting. Second, we see little if any connection between our voting habits and the cancerous failures of our governments to properly manage our resources, human, domestic, and natural. Finally, when such impacts of failing community life as an unaffordable housing payment hits us, we are so ill prepared to assess the ultimate sources of the problem that we tend to despair, become cynical, crack a beer, and focus on the favorite tinker toy -- TV, computer game, four-wheeler, “a good read,” or whatever “floats our boat.” Any one of us can, if we put our hearts into it, look into the mirror and see the greatest source of our growing political failures.
Will discovering and acknowledging our personal contributions to our public ills magically transform our newly found individual and deeply felt honesty into a healthy community? Of course not. But it is an essential first step. We also need to begin looking for and discussing present possibilities with our friends, neighbors, loved ones, and other associates, possibilities for the little things we can do right now. Right here where we live, play and work. Possibilities for creating and inhabiting every healthy characteristic we would like our community to include. To inhabit a characteristic is to practice doing the thing until we forget it was once our silly illusion to suppose we could live without this habit. The best habit for a citizen to practice is befriending others.
Next: “Friendship and Citizenship.”