If you’re an American living in a modern urban or high-suburban atomized environment, then the closest thing you’ll ever experience to an actual tightly-knit chthonic community is probably…high school. That’s what things look like, when you have a bunch of randomly-selected people bound to each other for years on end. You have a world completely dominated by small-scale social politics.
Do you want that? Are you sure?
Hint: if you feel sad and alone and low-status, think about what it would be like for a lot of people who knew you personally to be invested in keeping you that way. Say what you want about the atomized hordes on the other side of the computer screen, it’s not that hard to blow them off. Finding sympathetic souls is a genuine trial, I wish to God that it were easier, but…things could be so much worse.
(In fairness, some of high school’s weirdness comes from the fact that there are no real stakes to anything, apart from academic success, for anyone. Obviously, in a more “normal” tight-knit chthonic society, lots of things have real stakes. In some ways that’s a real improvement. In other ways it’s pure horror fuel.)
So I think a better parallel to what people are imagining is university? Modestly selected people bound together for some purpose with high exit costs and substantial autonomy, but still significant default community.
But if your counterexample to people saying they want tighter knit communities is to say, you have no idea what you want, remember that part of your life where you sure you had to deal with a bunch of random bullshit, but you hung out with a bunch of close life long friends, among other more casual but friendly acquaintances, every day without having to put any effort into coordination, imagine something like that.
Well, give me some exit rights, meaningful work instead of busy work, and then yeah I’d like to see my best friends casually every day without trying.
University communities are great. The best communities I’ve ever seen came out of university settings, one way or another. (There were also a whole lot of terrible ones, but, well, Sturgeon’s Law.)
And seeing your best friends a lot is incredibly great. Far too few people make that a priority, at least in my approximate demographic / culture / whatever, and it causes a lot of misery.
But selection matters, and the availability of exit matters too. And the people bemoaning atomization aren’t saying “choose your friends wisely and bond to them closely” – they’re pushing for a return to the days of villages and powerful families, the days when you were born into an obligate network of relationships.
Which can seem tempting, I imagine, when finding good connections seems really hard (which it often is!) and the myths are telling you that you could just have those things handed to you.
So I’m saying – if you liked high school, if the tradeoffs there actually seemed worth it to you while you were experiencing them, then maybe the standard anti-atomization position actually makes sense. Otherwise you’d be wise to keep looking.
Some thoughts, not really in any order:
1) It’s not that I don’t want to see my best friends often. It’s that we’ve been scattered across the world by the whirlwind of economic modernity. And this has its upsides, I’m not denying that, I have much more material wealth than I would have without it. And yeah, I make new friends wherever I go, but it takes years to form relationships like that.
2) There’s a sliding scale of atomization vs community - the people I see advocating togetherness are mostly pushing for things closer to the university model. Nobody wants no exit rights, they just want actual commitment.
3) Myths aren’t telling me you can just have good connections handed to you, they were. I’ve known some of my friends for literally longer than I can remember, and I know what they would do for me because they have. And yes, selection matters. I grew up in a place with disproportionately the sort of people I could get along with. The pro community claim is that this is not pure chance (my parents certainly didn’t believe it was).
4) I think there’s a reasonable argument that many of the bad parts of high school are from the one size fits all, atomizing, governance from on high model that modern schools take. When I think of the bad parts I think of the faceless bureaucracy pointlessly asserting control, the effects of which were blunted only because of the personal relationships with authority figures who knew me.
5) As much as I think we’ve got too little community these days, I’m in the end an individualist, you won’t find me arguing for the rights of elders or patriarchs. But I think it’s important that I learned that it was right to resist authority not from the greater atomized culture but from my family. It’s not a particularly voluntary institution, and I think exit rights should be available, but I’d be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
…to be clear, these are good thoughts, I’m glad this conversation is happening.
1) This is at least in part a matter of prioritization. “How much opportunity are you willing to sacrifice in the name of living close to your [chosen] friends?” is an actual question, one that is being hashed out at great length by my real-life social circle, and the fact that this is often treated as not-even-a-thing-to-be-considered has a lot to do with the way that atomization has shaken out thus far.
2) Yeah, no, I assure you, it’s not hard to find people explaining how social exit rights are destroying civilization.
3) It can indeed happen, if you’re lucky. I’m even willing to buy “cthonic communities are better selectors-for-compatibility than literal pure randomness.” But the village model reliably fails for a lot of people and doesn’t have safety valves. And a lot of people don’t want it to have safety valves, because, e.g., “my kids up and leave town and I never see them” is a thought that makes them very upset.
4) Those things are bad, saliently so, but you can also find them in lots of faceless authoritarian institutions to which adults are subject. High school is so often peculiarly horrible, at least in part, because all the inmates are trapped in a Dunbar-sized community that is inevitably dominated by local politics and status hierarchies. Opting out of the social nightmare is, usually, as impossible as opting out of the actual schooling part – you won’t be left alone no matter how much you want it. I sure wasn’t, and Lord knows I tried.
5) I don’t think there’s real disagreement here, at least not explicitly…but, yes, families can sure teach people a lot of great things. Often they do this even when they are generally intolerable. (Same goes for schools, jobs, and even prisons.)