adapted from Barn-raisers or Bootstrappers: Does Crisis Strengthen Community? by Rush Kidder at the Institute for Global Ethics
A friend of mine published an interesting column last week beginning with the question: In hard economic times, do Americans tend to become (a) selfish, competitive, and fragmented, or (b) caring, cooperative, and unified?
Acknowledging the case can be made either way, my friend, Rushworth Kidder, notes that ”higher unemployment could lead to desperation, family tensions, fraud, and street crime” and general “Economic pressures could promote a bootstrap individualism, bent on surviving through hyper-competitiveness even at the cost of others’ failure. ”On the other hand, a tough economy could (foster) compassion, solidarity, and a new appreciation for nonmaterial pleasures. A barn-raising frontier spirit could emerge,” he suggests. “Where progress depends on helping each other and where sharing becomes the means to survival.
I have to agree with his ultimate guess that the answer will be situational or fall somewhere in the middle, but like him, I take hope from the folks at the Washington-based Campaign for Community Values, who are encouraged by their reading of trends: “Rather than wedging people apart, says Seth Borgos, director for Research & Programs for the Campaign’s parent organization, and who works mostly in the most poverty stricken sectors of society, ”the economic crisis has brought people together,”
Over two years the group has been charting “A change in the way that Americans are thinking about the relations between the individual and the community.” They admit they are faint signs, but Borgos is hopeful. In prior years, he says, the “dominant theme” within his conversations about values tended to reflect a “go-it-alone, extreme individualism” that “crowded out interdependence and shared values.”
Recently, he’s finding a greater interest in the values that lean toward the community - not so much in spite of the financial crisis as because of it. “For us,” he says, “the financial crisis is a metaphor about interdependence.” As the financial crisis spread outwards from a low-income lending debacle that had roots in these very neighborhoods, he explains, it became increasingly clear that “the story of the crisis is that we’re all connected - our fates are shared.” . . .
He feels, the current crisis has caused communities to coalesce in new ways, returning to “a core-values base” that fosters unity and combats political polarization. Assuming at least for the sake of discussion, that Borgos and his group’s findings are valid, my columnist friend poses a second question: “Could this change be a bellwether for broader change? And on he goes to the next question, asking in effect, if the trend can survive “America’s long love affair with individualism?”
Citing examples of the love affair with individualism, my friend points to the 1977 best-seller, Looking Out For Number One, and Robert Putnam’s 2000 study, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community that documents a trend toward isolation and individualism. Whether you accept the findings of the Washington group, or the examples of the columnist, one point he makes that’s hard to argue is how our views of the American Cowboy have changed… Pointing out that not so long ago, the craggy handsome Marlboro man was an admired and attractive symbol of the American can do spirit, today images of a cowboy are “less often used to praise a rugged individualist than (they are) to denigrate a renegade executive riding roughshod over employees, shareholders, and communities.”
“If the shift Borgos sees toward community values is as real and significant (as the change in our view of cowboys) we may be at one of the nation’s key turning points. And the turn could come suddenly. It was not so many years ago, after all, that anyone expressing a communitarian impulse risked being branded as a Communist. Now, with two decades separating us from the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and with Communism posing a lesser existential threat to individualism, the bias against community may fade . . . or at least recede.
At some level, there will always be a tension between the individual and the community, the columnist concedes. “Policy choices . . . will always straddle the divide between the needs of the group and the needs of the self. That’s as it should be - (even if the problem solving process) too often pits personalities against one another in ways that damage rather than sustain the community.
The columnist who made his mark in the academic world teaching poetry concludes musing about how fitting it would be “If a financial crisis brought on by the moral failures of the richest of the rich - were to find its solutions in some of the nation’s poorest communities? ”How satisfying to think that, when barn-raisers finally begin overtaking bootstrappers, they will do so in some of the very neighborhoods where subprime lending first began. How comforting that, in the hardest of economic times, what emerges is the soft power of ethics. So the point for our consideration is to recognize that things are changing dramatically all around us, and it’s important to recognize how those changes are affecting us and how we think, but most importantly, how we think of others.
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