Coming Home
It's a Saturday night and my house is filling with people. Some carry
musical instruments. Some have sheets of poetry or fiction by their
sides. Some carry nothing, but are prepared to stand up before a crowd
of people and dance, perform theater, or tell a story.
We call it the Coffeehouse. We've been doing it now for seven years.
The first Saturday of every month, friends and friends of friends come
to our house to entertain and be entertained. Usually about fifty
people show up. It's a great time.
This coffeehouse is the highlight of the month, both for me and many of
the people who attend. It's not just the music, poetry, and other acts
that bring people back, although these are good. It's the chance to
meet, connect, and talk with other people during the breaks. Through
it, my wife and I have met many of our now good friends, and other
people have made similar friendships and bonds. In a city where people
come and go, it provides us a mechanism to make new friends as older
ones leave town.
Why do I mention it? Because our coffeehouse is a replacement for what
does not exist in the outer world. And the fact that it does not exist
says a lot about our society at this stage in its history. I would
prefer that a corner tavern or bar be down the street, where I could
magically meet my friends and make new ones. I would prefer to be held
up in a naturally emerging web of friends and family, growing out of
the physical place where I live and the work that goes on there.
Our situation is ironic, because if anyone should have community
"naturally," it's my wife and I. We live in Norfolk, Virginia, a port
city on the Elizabeth River, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Atlantic
Ocean. Huge carriers make their home here, as do huge cargo ships that
freight millions of tons of coal all over the world.
It's been the home of my family on my father's side for five
generations. My great-grandfather came here before the Civil War. He
was the first publisher of the newspaper where I started my career in
journalism, The Virginian-Pilot. My father grew up one block from where
I write this. My wife is a native of the area as well. My newest niece
lives down the street.
Looking at my background, one might think that I live a life rich in
contacts with the past and the world that molded me, a place where an
intricate and perhaps suffocating web of family and friends who have
centuries of combined experience support, argue with, and love each
other. Which is not the case. I have no close friends from my childhood
or high school years that still live in this town, or even the state.
Most of my siblings have scattered themselves around the country, as is
the wont of professional people these days. Various relatives--second
cousins once removed and so forth--do live near me. I know none of them
well. As one commentator remarked about Europeans in contrast to
Americans, "They still have cousins." Americans do not.
Various forces operating in the country and world today have pulled
apart my "natural" community and scattered it to the winds. My own more
cosmopolitan bent figures into this. I lived in Europe for a few years,
attended college and graduate school in Pittsburgh and New York City. I
am not able, nor do I desire, to sink back into the old-boy culture
that does still exist here to a degree. I have a community around me,
but it is one that I created or sought out, more than one I was born
into. My community is in my coffeehouse, in the arts organizations I
belong to, and in the civic work I do.
Community--the network of formal and informal relationships that binds
people together--is a thin, tepid brew in this country. It has declined
to the point where improving it, saving it, nurturing it have become
slogans of a variety of movements in different, seemingly unrelated
fields. In urban planning, New Urbanism promises to revive community
through building subdivisions more cohesively. In political theory,
Amiti Etzioni hopes to reduce crime and improve social health through
his philosophy of Communitarianism. In journalism, the philosophy of
Public Journalism, sometimes labeled Community Journalism, promises to
rebuild community and a newspaper's circulation base by having the
press foster public dialogue and political participation. Our politics,
our places, our press--all of these things run across power lines that
jolt us with the message that something is missing in too many of our
lives, some sense of cohesion and togetherness.
This desire many people have for richer, more connected lives is a
valid one. I believe that a society grows out of its social, religious,
and political compacts, on which ultimately even market relationships
depend. But like the construction of coherent physical places, the
construction of coherent communities is not something to be attempted
directly. Rather, one has to understand what produces both places and
communities, and what weakens them, and address those forces.
Most of what we call community in the past has been produced as a
byproduct of other things: making a living, shopping for food, keeping
ourselves and our families well, protecting them and our society from
physical harm, educating them. We shopped for groceries, served in the
military, and went to a doctor and along the way got to know the
butcher, the fellow soldier, and the local doctor. All of these actions
have become less communal, and so our society has become less
community-minded. We buy our food at the warehouse-style supermarket,
do not serve in the military unless we volunteer, and go to the
impersonal HMO to get our cholesterol checked. If we want to revive
community, then we should look at the trade-offs involved in making
some of our decisions more communal again.
Place has something to do with all this as well. Walking to a
neighborhood cafe for breakfast is a more communal thing than using the
drive-through at a McDonald's for an Egg McMuffin, although
relationships can occur at either place. Driving on the freeway is less
likely to generate relationships than riding a streetcar. Living in an
older neighborhood fashioned around the foot is more communal than
living in a contemporary one fashioned around the car. But the physical
makeup of our places is just one factor in this trend.
John Perry Barlow, computer sage and former Grateful Dead lyricist,
commented once that community is largely generated by shared adversity.
This gets at the notion, true I believe, that our social ties, while
beneficial, are not necessarily produced by situations we would choose.
Although many of us miss community, we don't miss poverty, disease, and
war, things that produce community with some regularity. The problem
for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion may mean
giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low
taxes, and a footloose economic structure. We have not figured out yet
that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.
I speak without any sentimentality or nostalgia for the past. I
believe, however, that the generally fragmented lives so many of us
lead break up marriages, disturb childhoods, isolate people when they
most need help, and make life not as much fun. We live, to speak
frankly, in one of the loneliest societies on earth. If we are to
change that, then we should look more closely at the various
relationships in our society--political, social, economic, and
others--and attempt to construct them in more communal ways. Deciding
how to structure these relationships comes back to what I increasingly
believe is our most fundamental relationship--politics.
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