Community within Modernity

Modern society has often been credited with an emphasis on the individual rather than the community. This emphasis on the individual has caused worry and speculation that too much individualism will fragment and erode community. So, the modern challenge then becomes to find a way to a synthesis of both community and individualism by having communities without the establishment of unequal power hierarchies. This also poses a question of whether individualism and community are essential to understanding modernity. Communities and individuals, because they exist within relation to one another, are drawn into conflict. Most notably, there are conflicts between communities of peoples fighting for their self-interests. This starts with the Neolithic era producing men with leisure and can produce new ideas through the medium of language. One of the most notable examples of communities being drawn into conflict is noted within The Revolution within the Thirteen Colonies which featured different communities of people coming together to secede from the Crown. After The Revolution, there is a fragmentation of community again as people begin to care more for pluralistic, ethnic, and interest-based ideas and representation. While this is not so much focused on the individual and individualism, communities are formed by individuals with similar interests.

To begin, individualism and individuality will refer to the definition given by Crittenden (1992); the individualism is

“constituted by individuals whose goal is to fulfill private ends… whose principal characteristic is the possession of individual rights that have priority over societal needs.”

The individual, too, may alter the interests of a community or form new communities of people. In contrast, the community is defined as a general will or public interest of groups of people (e.g., sex, gender, class, nationality, and profession). The imagined community is similar in that there is a common interest, but many of the individuals within the community will never meet yet will acknowledge the community’s members whenever given the opportunity (Anderson, 2016, pg 6). These imagined communities may overlap with communities but also include communities revolving around ideas or abstracts such as music genres, bands, literature, artists, art, and the likes. One such community of people are the English.

            Englishmen, as Gordon S. Wood (1993) writes, during the eighteenth century were known to be unruly subjects but the English subject used the king as a “common tie” among other English subjects. The king served as the head of family and his children were all those who pledged allegiance to him, thus forming a community— “monarchial society”— among the English. The Englishmen and others in the Thirteen Colonies would grow tired of being under English rule and rebel to form a new community of Americans. Here, there is conflict between two communities of peoples. Those who wanted to be independent from the king and instill democratic-republican values in a new nation instead of continuing a sort of aristocratic and monarchial society. The common tie among the Americans in their newfound country is difficult to establish. The common tie can be the country for which it stands and the ability to purse life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all her citizens. This comes into conflict with what the king had wanted: complete dependency of the colonists on the crown. Individuals with their intended interests joined their factions and communities to either benefit from a community that wanted for more equality within its ranks or a community that preferred inequality and dependency on the crown. This presented an example of the modern dilemma: conflict between individualism, community, and equality.

            After the American Revolution, what remnants of the aristocracy had been done away with, communities and individuals were then able to pursue their self-interests and independency if they felt like doing so. This was a radical change from the monarchial society, as Gordon S. Wood (1993) writes, the making of every man to be independent could not be “more radical” and The Revolution was itself a revolt against dependency. For, the previous monarchial society depended on patrons and clients who were all subordinate to the king. The unruly English (and others) no long wanted to be subservient, for as Jefferson put it, “dependence begets subservience” (Wood, 1993, pg. 179) The English preferred instead to be independent peoples, meaning people who owned property and could live “of themselves” (Wood, 1993, pg. 179) Servants, then, are those who cannot live independently. Two communities had to have clashed for both the accessibility to independency and equal rights.

            Further, by extending equal rights and equal opportunity among all people within the then-new founded America, a new community a new and vast community was formed: the American people. This community, composed of by individuals, had their own self-interests and new opportunities afforded unto them to take. For instance, government positions were no longer accessible only to English aristocrats. Luxury goods were increasingly being imported for the consumption by all those who could afford them. In other words, what was only accessible to the aristocratic class under monarchial society was now accessible to those with means instead of class or of certain communities. Equality was won in The Revolution. Not total Equality was won in all her forms, but more equality than was available previously. Community and individual interests, however, became much stronger and arguably fractured the broad community of the American people. There was a turning point in American history that caused the “very staple” of American politics and that is “pluralistic, ethnic, interest-group politics” (Wood, 1993, pg. 245). Pluralistic representation became the norm. Communities would vie for political power and people would not trust those who were much different than themselves to represent them in government. This is a fragmentation of society into smaller communities, but the individual still shares common ties and interests with communities. That is, the individual is not yet separate from the community despite an individual’s self-interest, the self-interest aligns with communities of people. Individualism will also fall under a community’s interest. In this sense, for every interest, there is a community. The community of women during The Revolution, for example, comprised of female individuals and their role in supporting their statesmen.

            During The Revolution, public affairs were for men and the domestic affairs were left for women. It is during the boycotts against English goods did women have an increasingly important role of not purchasing English goods and making sure their husbands did not either. Women were given an opportunity to “share in the honor” of the country and be a patriotic force behind The Revolution (Norton, 1996, pg. 167) by producing goods from their jennies, defending sieged towns, providing intelligence networks, and the likes; roles afforded to women had then been raised in status and importance around this time. For, communities of women came together into one community in the interest of defeating the British and inevitably proved their patriotism by action. Equality here was extended unto women to allow them to take part in supporting their countrymen but were not given the same equal rights as man. Nonetheless, some equality and honor were won by women in. Like the broad then-new community of American people, there was a broad community of women formed; however, there were also fragmentations into ethnic and interest-based communities prompted by collections of individuals sharing a general will. A partial cause as to why these fragmentations exist is as Condorcet (1979) writes, agriculture and the birth of the Neolithic era allowed a surplus in food and

                        “If this surplus was absolute, it gave rise to new needs; but if it existed only in one commodity and at the same time there was a scarcity of another, this state of affairs naturally suggested the idea of exchange, and from then onwards, moral relations grew in number and increased in complexity. A life that was less hazardous and more leisured gave opportunities for meditation or, at least, for sustained observation.”

            Observation and the exchange of ideas of ideas allowed for people to divide into more communities. Previous to the Neolithic era, man did not have time for observation to where new ideas and communities revolving ideas could form. If we assume tribes are made up of a small number of individuals, then the amount of communities available is smaller than the amount enabled by a large nation-state like the Thirteen Colonies. The Progress of the Human Mind is one that involves the fragmentation of larger communities as ideas spread and individuals gather to meet their interest-based needs. Modernity is where we find ourselves in the progress made so far; tensions between the individual, community, and equality have found themselves at the forefront of the era’s defining traits as we look at the numerous amounts of communities (imagined or not), factions, and ideologies due to the agricultural revolution. The Revolution in the Thirteen Colonies is one example of communities forming and coming apart.

            To sum, to understand American modernity, the conflict between individualism, community, and equality is necessary. Communities form, split, and conjoin to meet the interest of people and when equality is afforded to communities of people, different roles and interests may be pursued. Once the ability to pursue something new occurs, another community is spawned. The Revolution, in this case, spurred the modern problem and tension between individual, community, and equality. Monarchial society was fought against and democracy took its place because it was in the interest of the American communities. This is where progress has taken us since the Neolithic era.  

References

Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.

Condorcet, J. D. (1979). Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press.

Crittenden, J. (1992). Beyond Individualism: Reconstituting the Liberal Self. New York: Oxford University Press.

Norton, M. B. (1996). Libertys daughters: The revolutionary experience of American women, 1750-1800. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Wood, G. S. (1993). Radicalism of the American Revolution. Vintage.

             Author unknown - Brown, Gerard Baldwin (1910). The arts and crafts of our Teutonic forefathers. London & Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, plate III. Digitized by the Internet Archive, available from https://archive.org/details/artscraftsofourt00brow. (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Jalo using CommonsHelper.)