[`Complete’ in this essay refers only to the willingness of a human being to acknowledge his communal human being as well as his individual human being and is no claim that we human beings can ever be complete in this mortal realm.]
In a recently posted essay, Looking Backward, Moving Forward, Moving in Circles, I questioned liberalism: is it ever good? Conservatism and progressivism can take on corrupt or misguided forms, but liberalism denies the reality of human communities, of communal human being, by declaring the sovereignty of individual human beings. I would suggest that there is no such sovereignty on the part of either individual human beings or communal human beings. Rather is there a complex entity which can be conceptualized as a surface with each small region being an independent entity.
I use `surface’ as an simple concept which can point to the truer, more complex concept of `manifold’. A manifold can be as many dimensions as you wish. The surface of a globe, a 3-dimensional ball, is a 2-dimensional manifold which is pretty much a Euclidean plane in small regions (street maps are a good rendering of the reality) while any attempt to flatten out the entirety of Earth’s surface or even large regions will lead to Euclidean planes which distort various parts of that surface.
I claim this is also the case with human communities and the small regions which are individual human beings—communities are analogically manifolds with individuals being the small regions which are individuals. More radically, and mostly beyond the scope of this essay, I claim that the mathematics which can help describe the basic stuff of this concrete universe and the shaping of that stuff into complex entities is part of the being of that stuff and those entities.
But there is no way to claim the egg or the chicken, the individual or the community, comes first. In fact, it would seem to be the wrong way of speaking when it comes to human being, individual and communal, which is the result of very complex evolutionary and developmental processes. Individual and communal human being developed together and neither can really exist without the other; it’s possible that we can find or at least hypothesize a species where we can observe individuals starting to form communities—some have claimed this is true of jellyfishes which are colonies of specialized individuals rather than true organisms.
If an individual human being doesn’t have rich and satisfying communal relationships, he will be open to other offers, in a manner of speaking. The offer might come from an unordered group of human beings, street gangs of the non-criminal sort or at least not being involved with the worst sorts of crimes. It might come from a religious group, perhaps one that draws that relatively isolated human being away from what is left of his family or ethnic ties—for good or bad or both.
Human beings can be said, analogically, to clump together. Since human beings, individual and communal are dynamic entities, it is perhaps best to imagine a flow like that of healthy blood through the arteries and veins. Under good circumstances, the components of the blood will flow relatively freely in synchronization with each other, in chemical and mechanical and electrical relationships which establish that synchronization. But there is more involved, that more being well beyond the scope of this essay and being the study of theorists in the mathematics and sciences of complex systems. A school of fish can move as if directed by a single mind able to change the direction of each and every one of those fish as if by instantaneous communication and response. Rapid it is but not instantaneous; in fact, that tightly synchronized school is really a global entity which comes into existence as a result of only `messages’ and responses between each fish and the ones near it.
But the reality of human communities is richer and far more complex than the reality of schools of fish. We’ll move on to more realistic but more ambiguous ways of dealing with human being.
It is better to think of human beings as needing social ties, strongly desiring them. We will form social ties even if we leave behind those to which we were born. If our lives at home, in our extended families, in our neighborhoods, in our ethnic communities, in our communities of worship, are weak or nonexistent, then we’ll form attachments as we can. We Americans, probably the citizens of most countries in the West, are mobile and have regularly left behind all those ties, supportive and inconvenient as they are. Even when we live in the same town or small region for all of our lives, we are still mobile in place, if you allow such a strange but empirically justified idea.
When I was young, fourth or fifth grade, I was making my way through a collection of young-person’s biographies (George Washington, Ben Franklin, some Amerindian leaders, and so on) when I happened to fall into a conversation with classmates during some sort of indoor recess; I learned I’d have to start watching The Monkees television show to be a part of their conversations. My fellow-youth in my hometown were far more interested in those rock-and-rollers than in George or Ben or Crazy Horse. It was only later that I learned I was cheated by a rapidly progressing process of separation from my ancestors from the British Isles. It was decades later that I learned my father’s family had so effectively left behind even valid rumors of their roots as to have thought of our (probably) Saxon name, Fueston, as being some sort of Anglicized French name; a few years more and I learned that our Y-chromosome (paternal-line chromosome) is Irish Gaelic by way of Scotland, not French and not Saxon. It’s hardly surprising that there is nothing left of extended family relationships with either my mother’s or father’s family. I’ve noticed that, like many American parents, mine were willing to break ties with their families while expecting their own children would retain good family ties.
But my ties to my peers in my hometown have always been weak, though I have a couple of nearly 60 year-old friendships. I was precocious when I was young though apparently not enough to make me freakish even in a country where intellectual talent is regarded with suspicion. I was actually interested in those academic subjects which so frustrated and bored nearly all boys and girls. Never once in my childhood in the town where I was raised, only occasionally after my return as an adult, did I hold conversations with fellow residents which dealt with those matters of deeper interest to me. It wasn’t that I disdained the conversations about Sandy Koufax or about our families and friends and dogs, but I was forced to wrap the entirety of my public mind and public interest around those topics as well as various topics of absolutely no interest to me, including The Monkees and Laugh-In, and never once talk to another human being about my interest in physics (of which I knew nothing other than a few historical facts) and mathematics (little different) and history.
Being rather social in my general inclinations, I badly hurt the development of my talents in mathematical sciences by joining the march of the herd. Some sort of toughness or self-respect was missing or immature in my young self.
Though the particulars of my case might be peculiar, so to speak, this is a story repeated in the mass-consumer societies of the United States every day. I’m sure it’s a common sort of story in most human societies, at least if they are in some state of ferment, in some state corresponding to a movement forward. And, in fact, this situation shouldn’t be seen as thoroughly negative or even mostly negative. So long as a society is stable, preferably in a morally well-ordered way, most—though not all—young human beings can form healthy communal relationships though they might seem at first to just be joining the march of the herd. It can be negative, leading young men in disordered societies toward some sort of involvement with crime. It most surely led some German young men in the 1930s to follow groups of friends or even strong-willed individuals into Nazi activities. Lt Col Dave Grossman (in his book On Killing) relates, from the actual battle reports, how some American soldiers tried to stop the killing of unarmed civilians at My Lai but most of those joined in as they were caught up in the emotions, the blood-lust.
On the other hand, we can read in histories that those Germans and other Europeans under Nazi occupation bravely worked in the underground or in rescues of would-be victims of the Nazis so long as a substantial group responded to the leadership of a some strong-willed and moral person, perhaps a priest or minister or rabbi—there were more Jewish partisans and others `hiding’ in Nazi-controlled regions than we might think. We can see local churches or social clubs responding to the needs of the hungry or homeless, perhaps in a far-away region hit by a hurricane or earthquake. There are individuals, even some who are loners, who have acted in heroic ways; sometimes perhaps those human beings are helped a little by their lack of attachment to groups of human beings not responding properly. Mostly, we are at our best when we are members of communities, usually complex networks of communities, which themselves have clear thoughts, strong feelings, and good habits—all three of which are ordered to some system of moral order.
Our moral communities and, hence, our moral individuals selves can be so easily deformed, even during the sorts of turbulent times which are leading to good times of strong moral order.
Day-to-day in our hi-tech American lives, what’s important is those little pressures to pay attention to things of lesser importance, once the silly entertainment (The Monkees) of a sort which is actually good in proper amounts (the problem with TV is that it is so seductive, sit down at 7 and you come to your senses at 11) and, more recently, morally despicable entertainment. Lt Colonel Grossman, mentioned above as author of On Killing, was an Airborne Ranger in the US Army and he thinks only morally irresponsible parents would allow their children to watch Rambo or similar sorts of stuff. And that sort of stuff has gotten worse in its cynicism and its advocation of hate and other emotions which are natural but not to be nurtured. It’s amazing that so many who have made fortunes producing or acting in this sort of moral trash parade about in public as they pretend to some sort of moral superiority. That stuff isn’t just despicable in some sort of abstract judgment. It eats away at our individual and communal moral characters. It can even help to make some of us, or some of our communities, outright evil.
We need to do the many little and bigger things which form and strengthen communities, caring for those close to us or—a lesser moral duty—for those poor people in our communities or in another parts of our countries or even those on other continents. We need to fill our minds and hearts with good stuff and to shape our hands to good habits. We do these good things by becoming members of morally well-ordered communities; by doing these good things, we shape our communities to a better moral order. It takes generations. Complex human communities, entire civilizations or lesser moral communities, can be destroyed in only a few years but it will take generations to rebuild them—if they are rebuilt at all.
By failing to take these steps toward individual and communal moral order, we become morally weak, as I was as a boy under peer-pressure (unconscious on the part of those peers who were very good young people) to watch a lot of television and as were those Americans who engaged in hot-blooded murder of unarmed human beings in My Lai. We attach ourselves to groups which are themselves morally unordered, perhaps even morally disordered, even when most or all of the members of those groups are individually morally well-ordered or at least okay-ordered. You might even say we too readily join the herd-like groups worshiping the Lord of the Flies.
Those of us who are Christians believe that the ultimate community is the Body of Christ and, yet, other communities are also potentially good, many of those communities realize some or much of that potential in this world. I’ve claimed in some of my writings that these communities, economic and political and academic and professional and ethnic and work-centered and so on, will go with us to Heaven where they will be perfected and completed. Heaven will be one community of the friends of Christ and yet that one community will be a symphony of many communities, allowing the fullness and perfection of human life to be realized.