The Abundant Community

Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods

John McKnight, Peter Block

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Jahr: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781605096278
• Thema: Social Sciences
• Thema: Sociology

"We need our neighbors and community to stay healthy, produce jobs, raise our children, and care for those on the margin. Institutions and professional services have reached their limit of their ability to help us. The consumer society tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside the community. We have become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbors. John McKnight and Peter Block show that we have the capacity to find real and sustainable satisfaction right in our neighborhood and community. This book reports on voluntary, self-organizing structures that focus on gifts and value hospitality, the welcoming of strangers. It shows how to reweave our social fabric, especially in our neighborhoods. In this way we collectively have enough to create a future that works for all. "

PART I
The Shift from Citizen to Consumer

A CITIZEN IS ONE who is a participant in a democracy, regardless of their legal status. It is one who chooses to create the life, the neighborhood, the world from their own gifts and the gifts of others. Many who have the full legal rights assigned by their country continue to wait for others to provide them with satisfaction and contribute little to democracy or the well-being of their community. At the same time, there are major contributors to community and democracy who do not enjoy the legal status of “citizenship.” We would still consider these people to be citizens because they function as full participants in what is necessary for a democracy to work.

A consumer is one who has surrendered to others the power to provide what is essential for a full and satisfied life. This act of surrender goes by many names: client, patient, student, audience, fan, shopper. All customers, not citizens. Consumerism is not about shopping, but about the transformation of citizens into consumers.

Our intention in part 1 is to look at what happens to the family, the neighborhood, and the community when we make the shift from citizen to consumer. When we go to the marketplace and the professional to seek satisfaction, something happens to our capacity to prosper and find peace of mind. Our premise is that these cannot be purchased.

Our larger purpose, fulfilled in later chapters, is to describe a few powerful and simple actions to do something about this. To reclaim the role of citizen. To move from individualist/spectator into community. To go from addiction to choice. This is the shift that will simultaneously restore vital functions to the family and the neighborhood and reconstruct the competence of community—all of which come under assault in a consumer culture.

1 The Limits of Consumption

THE ESSENTIAL PROMISE of a consumer society is that satisfaction can be purchased. This promise runs so deep in us that we have come to take our identity from our capacity to purchase. To borrow from Descartes, “I shop, therefore I am.” This dependency on shopping is not just about things; it includes the belief that most of what is fulfilling or needed in life can be bought—from happiness to healing, from love to laughter, from rearing a child to caring for someone at the end of life.

In our effort to find satisfaction through consumption, we are converted from citizen to consumer, and the implications of this are more profound than we realize. This is clearest when we explore two particular consequences of a consumer society: its effect on the function of the family and its impact on the competence of the community.

One social cost of consumption is that the family has lost its function. It is no longer the primary unit that raises a child, sustains our health, cares for the vulnerable, and ensures economic security. The family, while romanticized and held as a cultural ideal, has been a casualty of the growth of consumption and therefore lost much of its purpose. Its usefulness has been compromised.

The second social cost is that, in too many cases, we are disconnected from our neighbors and isolated from our communities. Consequently, the community and neighborhood are no longer competent. When we use the term community competence, we mean the capacity of the place where we live to be useful to us, to support us in creating those things that can be produced only in the surroundings of a connected community.

When they are competent, communities operate as a supportive and mediating space central to the capacity of a family to fulfill its functions. A competent community provides a safety net for the care of a child, attention and relatedness for the vulnerable, the means for economic survival for the household, and many of the social tools that sustain health. If the function of the family is to raise a child and provide what we can summarize in the phrase peace of mind, then it is the community that provides the primary determinants of success of these functions.

In a consumer society, these functions are removed from family and community and provided by the marketplace; they are designed to be purchased. We now depend on systems to provide our basic functions. For example:

We expect the school, coaches, agencies, and sitters to raise our children. We deliver our children in the morning and pick them up later in the day. Same-day service, just like the laundry.

We expect doctors to keep us healthy. We believe in better living though chemistry. We think that youth, a flat stomach, a strong heart, even sexual desire are all purchasable.

We want social workers and institutions to take care of the vulnerable. Retirement homes are a growth industry marketing aging as the “golden years” best spent in a resort-like environment with other old people.

What this means is that the space that the family and community were designed to fill has been sold and is now empty.

There is widespread recognition that the lost community has to be refound. You see the signs everywhere. Urban design focuses on community connections. Community builders and organizers exist in every city and town. Our intent is to move the conversation about community forward and remind ourselves what citizens can do to bring satisfaction into modern life.

The Consumer Way: Lives of Scarcity and Consumption

Some costs of the consumer life have been discussed for some time. We are familiar with the spiritual downside of materialism, the social competition of conspicuous consumption, the effects of waste on the environment, the ethical questions of planned obsolescence. What is not typically included in the conversation about consumerism is its effects on the isolation and loneliness that is clearly common in our suburbs and our cities.

We asked a group of suburban women about their lives and their connection with their community.

Each said she moved to where she now lives for the sake of the children. They wanted a safe place and what they thought would be good schools. Said one:

It is who I am now. I gave up my prior career to move here and live this life.

What is “this life”? Listen to what these women had to say about the choice they made:

I live in a “poverty of wealth.” I do not know my neighbors. Everyone has lawn care, professionals put up holiday lights, and relationships are formed by the ability to buy things. I learn about my neighbors from the cleaning lady and handyman.

We have some conversations with those who pass by. I don’t really know them, but there is some reciprocity. It is mostly accidental contact. There are lots of porches, but few people sit on them. You can go a whole winter and barely see a neighbor.

We live in our backyard. Home has more of an internal orientation; we stay within.

It is good in a crisis. People in some ways do look out for each other. They will watch the house, feed the cat.

High income means high turnover. There is not time to invest in relationships. Home is more of a practical matter.

The friends come from the school and the swim club. Motherhood is the way we build a social life. The children bring us together. There is a connectedness for those willing to organize it. I started a book club.

We have sold our souls to orchestrating our children’s lives. We don’t have a life of our own, but we can manage everyone else’s. We live vicariously through our children.

We are isolated and insulated in our cars. No sidewalks—we drive everywhere.

We had a second discussion with the husbands of these women. They were professionals and executives and gave their version of the good life.

We moved here to find a safe haven where children can prosper.

We have connected with other families through kids’ sports; this is how we gained our friends. School is our common link.

My strongest community is with the men I play golf with. We go on trips together.

Asked if they would move to this neighborhood if they did not have kids, most said no.

With the kids grown, we know fewer and fewer people in the neighborhood. Now we get together once a year at Christmas time.

We know three people in the neighborhood, and feel disconnected.

I play jazz, and that has been a great outlet for me. I also fly airplanes. My pilot community is very tight.

Community is being among like-minded people. The suburbs are more homogenized. It does get a little boring sometimes. I want to break out, but how do you do that?

As far as diversity, it is nice to be in a non-physician group for a change of pace. [Physician speaking.] Others in my golf group are an accountant, an engineer, and a salesman in leasing.

This community is not set up for mingling with people. When we cut the grass, we wave or ignore each other, but do not really know neighbors.

In suburbs, we drive in and out of the house. It is a really nice house; all the resources are there. No reason to leave there, no sense of community. Very practical choice. Life is about gathering good resources.

I arrive at night in the car, after dark, eat dinner and have a regular evening routine. I can go for two months and not see anyone in the neighborhood.

My grandfather lived only five years in a small town in Kentucky. He walked to town every day, and at the end, many came to his funeral. Where I live, no one a block away would come to my funeral.

These comments speak of a life that from a distance would seem to be the culmination of the American dream. Those speaking have what most people think they want. The question is how to make sense of the poignancy and disconnectedness of their lives.

What they are telling us about is a culture created and sustained by a system or institutional way of life. A system life is a way of living that is not our own but one that is named by another. To live a system life is to live a managed life, a life organized around the products, services, and beliefs of systems. This is a direct result and demand of the built-in structure and assumptions of a consumer society.

In 1977, the great social observer Wendell Berry wrote about life in the consumer society, which he pinned on our dependence on specialists, people expertly trained to provide us through the marketplace what we once provided for ourselves.

The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, and education are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint—that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery—indeed the impossibility—of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.² . . .

The beneficiary of the regime of specialists ought to be the happiness of mortals—or so we are expected to believe. All of [the average citizen’s] vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on tele vision. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts or perhaps legal experts.

The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating [or contract-ing—our addition] like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people.³

What Berry describes is the life of a consumer, what we are calling the consumer way.

The Citizen Way: Lives of Abundance and Cooperation

We want to contrast the consumer way with the vision offered in another set of interviews. These are people, in this instance Appalachians living in Cincinnati, Ohio, who either by choice or circumstance are not encased in the consumer society. They are not the products of it or the winners in it. Consuming has its attractions, but for these people it is not the point or the provider of the good life. Here are statements from people who have a different view about the culture within which they reside.

We know our neighbors. People know all about us. There are no secrets among us.

We are surrounded with social support; we take care of each other. We extend ourselves to our kin network, even though they are not our kin.

There are people that are good looking like me. I grew up thinking there was something wrong with me. That was reinforced by systems, the military, schools. Then, when I was taken in by this community, I discovered who I was and that I was good looking.

We have wisdom, which we call common sense. We have self-taught skills, family taught. Intelligence is connected to character and morals. You can get a PhD, but it doesn’t count.

We are storytellers. I will tell you my story, and if I am in the right mood, I might listen to yours.

Our faith is not based upon what churches teach. Plus even if you claim to be a Catholic or Episcopalian, you are still Baptist or Pentecostal.

We have discovered a way not to be lonely.

We know how to do without. Make ends meet. Make do. We do this together.

We take care of our own. There are no foster kids, only grandmothers and cousins.

This is a set of beliefs of people who live in a more competent community, who live in a way they have chosen, and who experience a more satisfied life than most. They are less dependent on the material culture and its requirements and call. They do not work in systems or reap the benefits of them. They think they have enough; their mindset is abundance, not scarcity. Their families have a function; they have the power to provide.

The two sets of statements are about culture. Culture is composed of the ways that a people have developed to survive in a particular place. To the mainstream culture, the people symbolizing the citizen way are considered outsiders, perhaps even disadvantaged. For our purposes, we call this a competent community and its members citizens rather than consumers, its families functional or function filled.

A Choice of Culture

This contrast between the consumer way and the citizen way is a discussion not about a market economy or materialism, but about social and civic life. The socia...