Connectedness and the arc of human advancement

The brief peak our civilization enjoyed gave us the illusion that we could facilely bounce back and forth between belonging and autonomy

I’m going to start this post with a recommendation of a recent post at another Substack. Make “We Will All Become Boring” by Louise Perry essential reading today. It’s an in-depth examination of the phenomenon of an increasingly lonely society that lots of people are writing about these days. Perry’s inquiry involves

• a look at why women of the “tight-knit traditional British working class urban community” that existed from the early nineteenth century, when the Industrial Revolution got underway, through the end of World War II, washed the front steps of their homes. (It was because “the appearance of your house frontage told your neighbours something important about your conscientiousness” and reputation was the highest form of social capital.)

• examining the disparity in upward mobility between black and white doctors in mid-twentieth century Rhodesia even though they were paid the same (because the black doctors had to take their paychecks home to extended families)

• a discussion of the Uncle Colm character on the 1990s British TV series Derry Girls (“The girls roll their eyes at Uncle Colm and can’t understand why they have to spend time with him. The adults also find him tedious, but nevertheless continue to invite him along to family events, because their culture is still traditional enough to regard this intra-familial hospitality as an obligation. The girls don’t think about this (why would they?), but the truth is that if Uncle Colm wasn’t invited to family Sunday dinners he wouldn’t be invited to anything at all. No one would choose to spend their time with him.”)

• an unsparing look at the hollow core of life at Florida’s The Villages (“ . . . what liberal individualism insists is the “true purpose of human life”: that is, their leisure time, free from unwanted social obligations. For these lucky few, there are still just enough migrant workers to provide cheap care, and the state pension is still arriving reliably in their bank accounts every month, courtesy of working age tax payers. In a material sense, they don’t need the traditional family. Of course this will not be true for future generations, given that the pyramid scheme that is the welfare state is starting to collapse.”)

The paragraph that landed like a gut punch with me was this one:

You cannot promote a culture of optionality, and then also expect people to choose you when you become a dull and onerous option. You cannot buy solitude when it suits you, and then try and buy back company when it does not, because company of the sincere and intimate kind cannot be bought.

Now, I’d like us to revisit a post here at Precipice from July entitled “Place.” I was motivated to write that one because a lot of the exhortations to have a local focus one hears - “take care of the people you actually know, foster the civic bonds that so impressed Alexis deToqueville, come together with fellow community members to arrive democratically at decisions on how to enhance one’s area’s quality of life.” - don’t tell the whole story.

I cover a lot of ground in that one, from Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Freedom of Speech painting to Diana West’s pointing out, in her 2007 book Death of the Grown-Up, that prominent cultural critics such as H.L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis were already portraying small-town civic involvement as hokey and stultifying by the 1920s, to the 1927 study of life in Muncie, Indiana entitled Middletown to my own experience growing up in another small Indiana city, and the changes that took place as I did so.

This matter of expanded options needs some discussion.

Recall George Bailey’s frustration with life in Bedford Falls in the movie It’s A Wonderful Life, his talk of going to see Baghdad and Venezuela and his dreams of large-scale accomplishments. That was set in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, but it was still the manner in which young people, primarily men, spread their wings and expanded their domains. They. wanted their contributions to be grand.

Then came the fascination, as exemplified by Kerouac’s desire to see if a Whitmanesque lighting-out on America’s open road was still possible in the age of the GI Bill and Life of Riley, Father Knows Best and The Honeymooners, a life in which adventure leaves little room for commitment. Then came the hippies and the inward turn, the search for meaning focused on one’s own disembodied consciousness. Then came . . . well, you know; what we’ve seen in the ensuing decades.

Boomers’ influence is now generally thought to be waning, but remember that they raised the X-ers, who in turn raised the millennials, who in turn raised the Z-ers. An ethos concerning individual autonomy has been handed down.

But the ability to facilely bounce back and forth between belonging and autonomy only worked for a brief moment. In that window from 1945 to 1970, America and the West generally was resilient enough to absorb the blows its foundational pillars took. A plurality of snot-nosed young Boomers could venerate Che Guevara, assert that the US attempt to prevent the expansion of Marxism-Leninism in east Asia was an immoral undertaking, equate the homemaker role with slavery, and denounce the advancement wrought by industrialization as a planet-killer only because the society that spawned them enjoyed the best of both worlds: a still-high level of social cohesion and the comfort, convenience and wide array of options of modernity.

Then those Boomers came of age and assumed positions of responsibility and influence, but they lacked the skill, knowledge and sense of devotion required to sustain the institutions that made their moment in the sun possible.

At this point, I’d like to steer you to an article I wrote for the July-August 2023 issue of the bimonthly magazine about life in our city. It’s about the year-long celebration a local church (with a Campbellite / Restorationist denominational situating) had for its 200th anniversary. That celebration included scanning and digitizing old documents like nineteenth-century Sunday school attendance records, the wearing of commemorative tee shirts, and a September Sunday featuring a special service, a catered meal in a tent set up on the lawn, and live music. I noted the rarity in 2023 America of a congregation in which multiple generations of families not only belonging but sitting together for Sunday services is the norm. Congregants can wander through the cemetery on the property and point out ancestors’ graves. Even among those in our society who still go to church, that kind of thick connectedness is generally not found.

I didn’t disclose the fact that I am a member of that congregation in the article, but I’ll do so here. It’s where I landed after a prolonged period of church-shopping.

But I’m the odd man out there. My spiritual-but-not-religious wife doesn’t attend with me. My parents and my only sibling are deceased. I only got serious about a faith walk in the last ten or fifteen years.

But my position has allowed me to, so to speak, look at the beam as well as along it, a duality that C.S. Lewis discussed in his essay “Meditations in a Toolshed".” I’m able to consider how it is that this community has maintained that thickness of relationships even as our society atomizes.

It comes down to allowance for the transcendent.

A community can’t maintain what my church has maintained unless those comprising it are looking to something outside themselves, as individuals and as a group. And the something has to be not only compellingly sublime, it has to demonstrate to those so looking that it is true and real. My fellow congregants are thoroughly convinced that that something has demonstrated that.

I think you know where I’m going with this. This entire post may be just a long-winded way of saying that families, churches, towns, institutions and societies fragment when they lose sight of God.

In a way, we Boomers were uniquely lucky. We grew up during the apex, when the West still looked to the heavenly realm, but also had television, rock and roll, fast food, and burgeoning career fields from which to choose. You could say that we were able to kind of coast. Make a lot of bad decisions and still find a place in a strong society.

That’s over now. Subsequent generations have had to, and will have to, as Louise Perry says, “take the long view of human interdependency.” And the only way to do so with out grumbling and resenting it and seeing it as stultifying is to learn again to grasp the reason why we’re here at all. And that’s to love, as our Creator loves us.