Richard Sennett
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life
(1970)
[27]CHAPTER TWO
═══🙡═══The Myth of a Purified Community
THE "PROTESTANT ETHIC" WAS A PHRASE MADE FAMOUS in Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber's book has been attacked over and over during the last fifty years, in part because people thought Weber meant by this Protestant ethic a religious philos- ophy that somehow caused or helped bring into being the spirit of capitalism. Weber meant in fact something simpler and subtler.
Weber saw in the motives for religious belief among certain seventeenth-century Protestant leaders a desire to find in the worldly, everyday acts of men the signs of reli- gious virtue, even as these Protestants believed men in their daily lives were totally ignorant of the divine or the state of their own souls. This contradiction was no abstrac- tion, Weber discovered, for the people living at that time. On the one hand, unlike their Catholic brethren, these
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men had wiped away the rites by which the divine spoke to them and forgave their sins. The Puritan God was in- scrutable. On the other hand, and again unlike the Cath- olics, they wanted to see in their daily lives some unshak- able proofs of their own virtue, so that they would be assured about what awaited them after death. This con- tradition made worldly acts terribly important as signs of virtue, and therefore the subject of constant scrutiny and analysis; however, they were also empty, since man could have no knowledge of how God wanted them to act.
Max Weber's great insight was seeing in this religious situation the expression of a kind of anxiety that would lead men to self-denial and self-repression, out of fear of transgressing some sacred code whose rules could not be understood. And Weber perceived that later in history the kinds of men who became capitalists evinced the same kind of anxiety, expressed in remarkably similar form to the Protestants, and especially to those Protestants who were Puritans. Weber deduced that the capitalists, who were a new phenomenon in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, might therefore have suffered from the same contradictory problem as earlier faced the Puritans. They were engaged in a meaningless world whose pursuits- i.e., making money--had no value of their own, and yet these pursuits had a great value, in that they were a demonstration of the virtue of those who engaged in them. The Puritan dilemma was repeated as men scru- tinized each others' acts for traces of a goodness whose nature the worldly acts could not reveal.
It is this asceticism, this "worldly watching" of the acts of others and oneself for signs of an unknowable virtue,
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that was the communal expression of the drive for purity among both Puritans and entrepreneurs.
This self-repressive ethic in both cases created com- munity life. In Puritan times people watched each other for signs of doctrinal virtue and vice, in the later era peo- ple watched each other and themselves for signs of those qualities of thrift and self-denial that would lead to wealth, wealth that was in turn a sign of virtue no one could quite name.
The reason for the similarity between this particular religious movement and the economic movement that followed was what Weber sought. Both were built out of anxiety, and both led to self-denial and communal re- pression of unvirtuous activity. Weber's direction was quite clear: he tried to show how a certain kind of drive for purity of self could survive, as a social value, in an age that had put aside religion.
But at this point Weber left the phenomenon. The image of a puritanical ethic, a worldly asceticism as he called it, was drawn no further in his account than the communal life of the eighteenth century. Yet the in- gredients that created this ethic--fear, a contradictory system of values, a self-repression designed to be a sign of some personal response to a situation innately out of control--these problems are too deep-seated in men's natures simply to have died out.
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A New Puritan Ethic
The last chapter showed how in adolescence there arise contradictions in growth leading to a peculiar kind of fear. This fear in turn leads to a pattern of self-denial and an avoidance of risk in identity patterns. The impact of this process is the possibility for ordinary adolescents and the probability for some adolescents and adults that they would establish permanent tools for purifying their ex- perience of the fearful or unknown. It would be natural to ask what relation this psychological process in ado- lescence has to the cultural "ethic of self-denial that Weber found in the Puritans and early capitalists of the past. The answer, I believe, is that this adolescent process has created, in modern times, a community ethic of purity dramatically different from the communities produced by worldly asceticism in the past.
I hesitate to say that different historical uses have been made of the same adolescent crisis, for the psychology of individuals is itself historical, not immutably given. In- stead, I think the psychological ideas about self-denial developed since Weber's time provide the tools for under- standing a new kind of "puritan ethic" in community life. To understand what this new puritan ethic is, this new desire for purity in communal affairs, something needs to be said about the idea of community itself.
"Community" is a deceptive social term. People speak of a "community" ' of interest--for instance, men who do the same kind of labor or depend on each other to make
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money. There are also "communities" of affection, like churches or ethnic groups whose members feel emotional ties to one another. Yet, even in everyday language, the idea of a community is not interchangeable with the idea of a social group; a community is a particular kind of social group in which men believe they share something together. The feeling of community is fraternal, it in- volves something more than the recognition that men need each other materially. The bond of community is one of sensing common identity, a pleasure in recognizing "us" and "who we are."
The emotions involved in this feeling of solidarity are complex, and writers on society understand little about them. At the opening of this century, the German social thinker Ferdinand Tönnies tried to sketch out the differ- ences between a community life, in which people felt emotional ties with each other as full human beings, and group life, in which men felt their ties in terms of emo- tionally neutral, specialized tasks they performed to- gether. The generation Tönnies taught tended to view this split between community and group as opposite poles of social experience. In the great flowering of sociology at the University of Chicago in the decades following the First World War, writers such as Robert Park, Louis Wirth, and Robert Redfield began to cast the differences between the two as the differences between village and city. While in village life men felt they belonged together and shared with each other in the full range of human activity, in the city, said these writers, men came to feel a part of each other's lives by virtue of functional tasks performed in common; the tasks were themselves so spe-
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cialized that men's feeling of relatedness was split into innumerable fragments. In the city, complex emotional interactions between men would only get in the way of doing the specialized tasks.
The trouble with this idea of two poles-_village-com- munity versus city-group-is that it has proved itself too neat, too logical, and too simple to account for the vari- eties of community solidarity. For what modern re- searchers have uncovered, particularly in affluent city and suburban areas, is that men frame for themselves a be- lief in emotional cohesion and shared values with each other that has little to do with their actual social experi ences together. The specific contents of this belief is the new puritan ethic.
In the years following the Second World War, social researchers such as David Riesman and Maurice Stein became convinced that the feeling of common identity in community life, the projection of threads uniting a group of people, could occur in advance of any communal ex- perience between the people involved. This striking idea Riesman carried a step farther when he suggested that the need to project a common character of community life often comes to be at war with the actual way men act with each other. He saw people projecting an image of "who we are," as a collective personality, on a wholly different plane from, and in advance of, the character of what they shared.
One striking portrayal of such a community was made a decade ago by Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman, who went to live in and study a small town in New York State. They found the people of this community had lives split
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between pursuits in town and pursuits in a nearby large city; they found that community participation and deci sion making in the town was shared by only a small num- ber of people; they found such social forces as class, ethnic background, and age to play decisive roles in cut- ting off contacts between people in the community. And yet, the people of this small town voiced a strong, almost desperate, belief in themselves as a unified group with warm and sustained contacts between all the members of the town community. The actual contacts were mainly centered on discussing the status and the varying fortunes of town members; but these people believed themselves engaged with each other in a much wider, more important way, and they reacted with hostility when challenged by the researchers on the degree of their cohesion. This feel- ing of solidarity the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki calls a community cemented by an act of will rather than by acts of experience.
This same projection of community solidarity, opposed to community experience, struck me forcibly in looking into the chain of events leading to the ouster of a pros- perous black family from a wealthy suburb outside a mid- western city. In this suburb the rate of divorce was about four times the national average, the rate of juvenile crime began to approach the worst sections of the city to which it was attached, the incidence of hospitalization from emo- tional collapse was frequent. Yet the people of the com- munity united in a great show of force to drive the black family from its home three days after it had moved in because the residents said, among other things, that "we are a community of solid families" and "we don't want the
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kind of people in who can't keep their families together. This is a happy, relaxed place, one resident said, "and the character of the community has to be kept together." The importance of this incident isn't simply that the resi- dents of the suburb lied, but why they lied in this partic. ular way.
Some writers have argued that "insecurity" as such is at the root of this need for an image of community, of "'us." Talcott Parsons, for instance, has made a brilliant study along these lines in discussing the need of the Nazi Germans to define something characteristically "Aryan." During periods of social change and displacement, these writers say, the desire grows strong to define a common "'us" so that men may forge a bulwark for themselves against disorder.
But putting the matter in this way brings up something we have already discussed in terms of individual growth: the purifying of identity may be forged in a life as a means of evading experiences that can be threatening, dislocating, or painful. Is there a connection between this community by an act of will, this identity of a coherent "us," and the tools generated in adolescents by which in- dividuals acquire a purified "me," resistant to new expe- rience?
The connection exists, I believe, and is unlike what Weber observed in the communities of the Puritan world. For here the images of communal solidarity are forged in order that men can avoid dealing with each other, while in the Puritan sects or among the early entrepreneurs the images of purity were constructed so that men might come closer to one another and justify new kinds of social
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actions. The asceticism Weber saw in germ in the Puritan world, with its constant mutual interrogation and exami- nation, and the worldly asceticism of the next century, where men scrutinized each other's activity to find the signs of grace in those virtues leading to wealth--these attempts to purify the self led men into a community of experience, to use Znaniecki's phrase. But the mecha- nisms of repression Vidich and Bensman found were myths that kept men from having to interact and under- stand each other as they really were. The Puritan's com- munity life or that of the struggling entrepreneurs did not exclude conflict; in fact, conflict was often encouraged for attaining virtuous ends. The small town in upstate New York and the suburb where "bad" black families were ex- cluded feared conflict because conflict involved confron- tation between men, friends as well as enemies, and that was an uncontrollable and therefore threatening social event. By an act of will, a lie if you like, the myth of com- munity solidarity gave these modern people the chance to be cowards and hide from one another.
There is also a great economic difference in the fan- tasies of community identity Riesman, Vidich, and Stein found. These fantasies have taken place in relatively af- fluent communities. Affluence, as shall be seen, gives a community new tools to define itself in this particular way. It is also affluence that makes this problem in com- munity life one to be faced by post-revolutionary societies that manage to survive as well as by the societies of the West. For especially in affluent communities the partic- ular feeling of nonexperienced solidarity is a logical use of the powers developed in adolescence to avoid pain.
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How the Myth of Community Purity Is FormedThe feeling of a common identity, in the forms Riesman and Znaniecki describe, is a counterfeit of experience. People talk about their understanding of each other and of the common ties that bind them, but the images are not true to their actual relations. But the lie they have formed as their common image is a usable falsehood- a myth--for the group. Its use is that it makes a coherent image of the community as a whole: people draw a pic- ture of who they are that binds them all together as one being, with a definite set of desires, dislikes, and goals. The image of the community is purified of all that might convey a feeling of difference, let alone conflict, in who "we" are. In this way the myth of community solidarity is a purification ritual.
Involved here is a collapsing of the experiential frame, a condensing of all the messy experiences in social life, in order to create a vision of unified community identity. It is exactly this detour around social contact and expe- rience in the making of a coherent common identity that reveals the marks of adolescence on the community process.
Adolescence has been described as a stage of life in which the individual finally attains his full range of human powers, but is empty of adult-like experience to guide him in using those powers. This imbalance in the time scales of growth is particularly acute in the realm of ethical and social choices. Young people have the power to
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be free, to choose their future careers, to explore them- selves outside the boundaries of family and school, to have full and diverse erotic relations; but they sense no history of freedom under these terms in their own lives. This is the hidden malaise, as I understand it, behind what writers like Erikson call a crisis of identity. Some adolescents do have the strength to hold themselves back, and let a diversity of painful, confused, and contradictory new experiences enter their lives, before they take the active steps that will confirm them in an identity. But most young people are denied the strength to endure ambiguity of this kind, and exercise their new powers to form conscious meanings and value relations to them- selves about experiences they are yet to have. In this way, the experiential frame is controlled in advance; its im- pact on the reality a youth perceives is muffled because unexpected or painful new experiences are rejected as unreal. They don't fit into the schemes of coherent order the young person is now able to articulate consciously to himself.
It is the same projection-_a picture of "us" as a co- herent being in advance of actual social relations--that links the feeling of communal solidarity to the patterns of avoidance learned in adolescence. Certain tools of avoid- ance used by a human being to deal with crises in his own growth patterns are subsequently transferred to the way he understands himself as a social being. This transfer of a skill learned in adolescence is how the myth of a purified community comes into being.
The illusion retained by adolescents caught by the desire for purified identity is that they chose a coherent
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and secure routine with knowledge and experience of all the alternatives to security. There is no reason why peo- ple, having learned such a technique of avoidance in their individual lives, could not learn as adults to share it to- gether. Communally painful experiences, unknown social situations full of possible surprise and challenge can be avoided by the common consent of a community to believe they already know the meaning of these experiences and have drawn the lessons from them together. For example, in the suburb that expelled its wealthy black family, the myth the white residents created--that they were volun- tarily a tight-knit group of stable families--served to make them immune in advance to the pain of dealing concretely and directly with the black family. Because the whites felt as one in their illusion about their family stability, they could drive out people they presumed to be different.
It is a truism among students of small groups that people feel most uneasy and most challenged by perceiving the "otherness" of the people around them. Finding the dif- ferences between oneself and the world outside oneself seems to be much more difficult to bear than finding the points of similarity. The fear of "otherness, ' of that which one does not know, is exactly of a piece with what men fear about themselves and their own powers when those powers ripen in adolescence. From adolescence people take a power for mythmaking into their adult community lives to blunt the conscious perception of "otherness."
A community is not simply a social group or an un- related collection of individuals living in the same place. It is a group in which people belong to each other, share
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something in common. What is distinctive about this mythic sharing in communities is that people feel they belong to each other, and share together, because they are the same. The narrowness of this feeling can best be seen by contrasting it to the sharing and sense of belonging in a strong love. As Denis de Rougemont has so wisely remarked, the sharing that occurs in deep relations of intimacy grows out of loving the distinctiveness, the uniqueness of the other person, not in the merging of selves into one homogenized being. But in the purification of a coherent community image, fear rather than love of men's "otherness" prevails. Out of this fear is bred the counterfeit of experience. The "we" feeling, which ex- presses a desire to be similar, is a way for men to avoid the necessity of looking deeper into each other; instead, men imagine that they know all about each other, and their knowledge becomes a vision of how they must be the same.
In this way the "we" feeling can grow up among people whose lives strike the outsider as so disparate in actuality, who seem in fact to share very little with each other and matter very little in each other's lives. It is this counter- feit sense of community that Stein, Riesman, Vidich, and Znaniecki have described. The counterfeit is not bred, I believe, out of peculiarities in local or even American con- ditions. Rather it is bred out of the way human beings learn at a certain point in their own growth how to lie to themselves, in order to avoid new experiences that might force them to endure the pain of perceiving the unex- pected, the new, the "otherness" around them. Through this peculiar learning process "belonging" to one another
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becomes a shared sense of what we think we ought to be like, as one social being, in order not to be hurt.
But resolving the fear of "otherness" through this myth of solidarity affects the ways the community, as an entity in itself, will operate over the course of time.
The Social Structure of the Myth
The myth of solidarity in community life speaks to a more complex human problem than social conformity. Usually discussions of conformity to mass values and mores have treated the human beings involved as being, at their very worst, passive creatures manipulated by an impersonal system. Thus is there supposed conformity without pleasure, mindless obedience to the norms. This is much too flattering a picture of the human impulses at work.
When the desire for communal sameness is understood as the exercise of powers developed in everyday life rather than as the fruit of some abstract creature called "the system" or "mass culture; it is inescapable that the people involved in this desire for coherence actively seek their own slavery and self-repression. They would be insulted if the issue were stated so boldly, of course; yet it is their acts, their impulses that create the communal forms. The social images do not materialize out of thin air; they are made by men, because men have learned in their indi- vidual lives, at one stage of development, the very tools
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of avoiding pain later to be shared together in a repressive, coherent, community myth.
When the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville came to America a century and a half ago, he was struck by the grip this repressive myth had on American community life. The Americans he observed needed to be assured by each other that they were the same- -that is, equal in condition. Tocqueville believed they felt this need be- cause they felt insecure about their own dignity as men; the act of drawing together, in confirming to each other their sameness and their coherence in a common image, warded off the apprehension of threatened dignity. The issues so far explored could be expressed in Tocqueville's terms, as a way men counterfeit a feeling of dignity through an image of equality. There is born in adoles- cence, and subsequently reified in community life, a means of reassuring oneself that the process of learning about life has occurred even as the substance of learning is avoided. The result is a feeling of dignity in the image of sameness, of equality of condition, as Tocqueville put it, that men forge for themselves.
There are three marked social consequences of this myth of dignity through communal solidarity.
The first is the loss of actual participation in commu- nity life, the loss of situations of confrontation and ex- ploration between individual groups of men. Tocqueville believed this occurred because the individuals of the com- munity convinced themselves that since the community was in hands much like their own, no matter who ruled, the community was in good hands. If each man was dig- nified, and if all shared the same character, then all were
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dignified and could be trusted. Thus men could return to their real concerns, Tocqueville said, which were the petty, routine, isolated pleasures of everyday life. Solidar- ity in name and isolation in fact were, Tocqueville said, cause and effect.
But I believe the psychological ideas of this essay put the matter in a different way.
***populism***
Innate to the process of forming a coherent image of community is the desire to avoid actual participation. Feeling common bonds without common experience occurs in the first place because men are afraid of participation, afraid of the dangers and the challenges of it, afraid of its pain. Therefore, with- drawing from participation is not simply a possibility under these conditions, as Tocqueville believed; it is the driving power that produces the urge of men to feel socially alike, to share a myth of common identity.Thus, in the wealthy suburb whose residents were sud- denly faced with the possibility of having to deal with a real situation--the introduction of a prosperous black family in their midst--the racial prejudice was a product of something in the lives of the suburbanites themselves, something that had little to do with their feelings about blacks. The racial prejudice was a cover for their fear of having to be social beings, to deal with each other in order to cope. In order to defend against this social participation, and all its pain, they had to proclaim a lie about who they were, about their own coherent and uni- fied community image. This resulted in a lie about the corresponding "otherness" of blacks.
The incident suggests a second consequence of the feeling of coherence in a community: the repression of
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deviants. Again, Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through their col- lective sameness. The "poets of society, " the men who challenged the norms, would have to be silenced so that sameness could be maintained. But when the "we" feeling is understood as a myth bred in the life cycle, the re- pression a community practices is more than just a means to an end; in fact, it is exactly the same process of re- pression that the majority, the "we, exercise against themselves. We do not expel this black family from our neighborhood in order to make the neighborhood a nicer place, although that is what we tell ourselves. In the end the blacks could be blue or brown or green; what we are afraid of is that something other" will come to matter to us, and then we might be hurt by our own exploration of "otherness."
So the expressions of common identity and the re- pression of deviants are both aspects of men's fear of power within themselves. To permit the freedom of devi- ation would be to care about the unknown, the other, in social contacts. The myths of community are self-destruc- tive in that they take a strength developed on the eve of adulthood and use it to repress other human strengths, like curiosity and the desire to explore.
The term "repression" is today becoming a generalized catchword in intellectual circles the way "communist" Was once among anti-intellectuals. As Kai Erikson has pointed out, total repression of deviants would rob society of a means of defining itself; there must be room for "them" for "us" to exist as well. But the myth of a common
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"us" is an act of repression, not simply because it excludes outsiders or deviants from a particular community, but because of what it requires of those who are the elect, the included ones. The elect must give up complex or conflict- ing loyalties, and they want to do this, want to become slaves to each other, in order to avoid the strengths in themselves that would make them explorers beyond com- fortable limits.
The third consequence of this desire for an image of coherent, shared community life lies in its relation to violence.
The myth of community solidarity disposes men, ] believe, to escalate discord with other communities or with outsiders too powerful to be excluded to the level of violent confrontation. Essentially, communities whose people feel related to each other by virtue of their same ness are polarized. When issues within or without the community arise that cannot be settled by routine proc- esses of bureaucratic administration, it seems that the whole fabric of the myth is in jeopardy because of an in- tractable issue or event that cannot be assimilated. This occurs because the basis of community order is commu- nity sameness; problems that can't fit the mold challenge the feeling of being together because of being alike. In situations like these, everyone's dignity is threatened. and people can't ignore it. They feel that the very survival of the community is at stake, and in a sense they are right. Individuals in the community have achieved a co- herent sense of themselves precisely by avoiding painful experiences, disordered confrontations and experiments, in their own identity formation. Having, therefore, so
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little tolerance for disorder in their own lives, and having shut themselves off so that they have little experience of disorder as well, the eruption of social tension becomes a situation in which the ultimate methods of aggression, violent force and reprisal, seem to become not only justi- fied, but life-preserving. It is a terrible paradox that the escalation of discord into violence comes to be, in these communities, the means by which "law and order" should be maintained.
In this way some communities, through such tools as the police, respond totally out of proportion to the provo- cations they receive. I am not thinking here so much of the obvious examples-_-Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, the Mexican student uprising of 1968, the recent purges in Chinese cities as of subtle processes, like the reactions in most American suburbs after the chain of riots from 1964 to 1968. These riots, unlike most insurrectionary outbreaks, did not burst the boundaries of the black ghettos; they never involved mass shootings or mobs storming government centers; rather they focused on the seizure of small articles of property, food, or liquor. As one North Vietnamese revolutionary is said to have remarked, they were not so much a revolt as an apocalyptic, despairing act of self-destruction by peo- ple who felt they could bear no more. However, the re- action in the white suburbs was that "we" were threatened. that blacks were spilling out of the ghettos, that actual civil war and personal attack were imminent. Gun sales in the suburbs rose sharply, grandmothers began to learn how to shoot to kill, liberals suddenly began to understand the "logic" of the separatist movement, the police were
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unleashed in the cities in a wave of violent reprisals and mindless destructiveness. The overwhelming feeling of "us" being mortally threatened, so incommensurate, so out of touch with the actual tragedy of self-destruction, is the puzzle of these civil disorders. This kind of reaction this inability to deal with disorder without raising it to the scale of mortal combat, is inevitable when men shape their common lives so that their only sense of relatedness is the sense in which they feel themselves to be the same. It is because men are uneasy and intolerant with ambigu- ity and discord in their own lives that they do not know how to deal with painful disorder in a social setting, and instead escalate disorder to the level of life or death struggle.
And finally, the economic environment of abundance in a community strengthens each of these consequences of the urge toward community coherence.
The Role of Abundance in the Myth
One recurrent image in the language of society is the great, teeming chaos of cities. Its fascination and its terror come from the diversity within the city's borders; the garment district of New York, for example, spills into a district of offices which spills into a district of social-work agencies which spills into a district of elegant townhouses which spills finally into the great shopping areas around Fourteenth Street. Anyone walking through this diversity
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in lower midtown feels an enormous vibrancy in the over- lap of so many different kinds of life. This diversity was created in the history of New York because none of these areas of activity had enough power to control its own limits as a community. None of them was rich and cen- tralized enough to wall itself off, and so each suffered the intrusion of others by necessity.
As Jane Jacobs has observed, this penetration of diverse modes of labor and life into each other has been a char- acteristic feature of the neighborhoods of great American cities, but a characteristic that is in the process of dying off. The reason it is dying lies, I believe, in the role abun- dance plays in forming communities of self-conscious solidarity.
Material abundance in a community provides the power for enforcing a myth of coherent community life. It does so in two ways. The first, and obvious one, is that a com- munity with adequate monetary resources can materially control its boundaries and internal composition. The old neighborhoods in cities were complex precisely because no one group had the economic resources to shield itself; the brownstone dwellers did not have the money to live one family to a house, and so shield the housing unit from influences outside the circle of one family; residential life in turn could not be shielded from commerce, much as people might have wanted to get away from the noisy bars and shops on the first floors of city buildings. People simply hadn't the resources to move out. An economy of scarcity in cities has, at least historically, defied myths of coherence in community affairs; people haven't had the cash to realize their own desires.
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Now, with the advent of large sectors of the urban pop- ulation achieving modest wealth for themselves, those desires for coherence, for structured exclusion and in- ternal sameness, can be played out. Whole urban regions can be divided geographically by class, by race, by eth- nicity; "unsightly" activities like stores and entertainment can be hidden from home life, so that community identity through a brutal simplifying of human activities is achieved.
But abundance plays a subtler and perhaps more dan- gerous role in shaping the desire for a common identity. For in communities that are poor, or in times of scarcity, sharing between individuals and families is a necessary element of survival. The sharing of scarce appliances, like a vacuum cleaner, or even of such basic necessities as food, has often been remarked on by visitors to the black ghettos of American cities; historically, however, the same communal sharing, which brings people together and necessitates direct social contacts between them, has been a feature of many diverse city neighborhoods; services, skills, and possessions that could be shared provided a focus for concrete communal activities.
It is the hallmark of abundance that the need for such sharing disappears. Each family has its own vacuum cleaner, its own set of pots and pans, its own transport, supply of water, heat, etc. Thus the necessity for social interaction, the necessity to share, is no longer a driving force in communities of abundance; men can withdraw into their self-contained, self-sustaining homes. This means that the feeling of community, of being related and bound together in some way, is cut off from a region that
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in the past furnished communal experiences. When much less must be shared, there is a much smaller fund of ex- periences on which individuals can draw to assay the character of each other. In framing a sense of communal bonds, men are inclined much more easily to envisage how they are the same rather than what they actually do in their relations with each other.
Abundance, in other words, increases the power to create isolation in communal contacts at the same time that it opens up an avenue by which men can easily con- ceive of their social relatedness in terms of their similarity rather than their need for each other.
These are the dimensions of the myth of communal solidarity. It appears as something possible, even prob- able, in men's lives, as a result of experiences in adoles- cence. But the myth is more than just a logical social possibility of psychic growth. It is a real force in modern social life, and it has a special relationship to the develop ment of cities during this century. The gradual dominance of this myth is the hidden story behind the community patterns that have been evolving in cities during the last seventy years.