What chance does Fairbanks stand of being — or being part of — a republic? Can we be a community?
In high school, I learned that the United States was not a “democracy”, as many people think, but a “democratic republic”. Certainly the CIA World Factbook describes us as a “Constitution-based federal republic”.
The word ‘republic’ comes from the Latin phrase res publica, which means “public matter” or literally “people’s thing”. It implies that a republic is, by definition, a common concern. Not that the republic is a matter of common concern, but that that commonality itself is the substance of the republic. Where there is no common concern — where the people have no collective thing — republic can’t exist.
Now, I know that meanings of words change, and that modern definitions of words need bear little relationship to their historical meanings. But I feel that ‘republic’ has an almost spiritual core, or a philosophical kernel, in this idea of “the people’s thing”. When it comes to refer only to specific outward forms of government, it loses this kernel and becomes merely an empty husk.
The word ‘community’ comes close. It is derived from Latin communis, meaning “common (to several persons or to all)”. It doesn’t just mean some aggregation of people; it means a group of people who live by sharing something. (The word ‘city’ derives from Latin civis, which means “a free inhabitant of a town, and implies no commonality.)
I’ve long felt that community is one of the most important guiding principles — maybe just behind family. So I’m always disheartened to see large-scale enthusiasm for political candidates who seem not to believe in any common goals of society. There’s one running in Fairbanks — though they exist everywhere — who claims to be all about “freedom”. He says he believes in the role of government only to provide infrastructure and arbitration, so that the people can pursue their own individual goals. On his campaign web page devoted to “principles”, he says nothing about community, common goals, shared fate, mutual obligation, or even duty. As far as I can tell, it is all about the individual: governments exist solely to further private ambition. John F. Kennedy urged us to ask not what our country could do for us, but to ask what we could do for our country. My guess is that this candidate believes we and our country should do as little as possible for each other; any more would constrain our freedom.
It should be no surprise that he seems to have a large following in Fairbanks. We have more than the usual share of members of the cult of the individual. There’s much distrust of “government” here, and people vociferously protest most proposed laws that would constrain the liberty of the individual to do as he lists — common interest be damned.
Of course, this raises the question: What is our common interest? What are our common goals? If we have a community, what is the substance of that community? By sharing what things do we live? What is our people’s thing?
This issue is at the heart of the energy rebates legislation. Going beyond “me” and “mine” to “us” and “ours” is one of the stages of childhood development. Wikipedia lists:
Plays cooperatively (can lapse), is generous, takes turns, shares toys.
as a social development stage for a normal four year old.
There are things individuals cannot do by themselves – even if they are rich. These are collective projects – develop roads and other community infrastructure, participate as equals in group activities such as an orchestra, sports team and building the spaces for them.
I suspect that some of the ability to understand and trust communal action is genetic and some is learned from experiences we had as we grow up.
Giving every Alaskan $1200 because the state has a surplus and people need help with energy costs reflects the anti-community world view, that we can’t trust groups, we can only trust ourselves. Most people have had personal experiences with bad group decisions, not nearly as many have experiences with good group decisions.
And others have never gotten to like themselves enough to start liking and trusting others. I think that those of us who believe in the imperative of community are the lucky ones who have experienced how rich community can be.
These days the meaning of “community” is being re-defined, generally to the loss of broader local populations. The sense of belonging to a particular city or town and to a particular area is disappearing and being replaced with the sense of belonging to a particular group. The feeling that “I am from Fairbanks” is changing to one of “I belong to the Fairbanks knitting group,” or group of baseball supporters, or some other subset of the community. This feeling may also be the sense of belonging to some larger group, such as “I am a Liberal,” or “I am a conservative,” or “I am an animal rights supporter.” If a larger group has local offshoots, a person can belong to both, weakening the sense of local community in two ways. In addition, there is often a sense of withdrawal into self and self-interest. The person who spends hours alone on the internet is an example, as is the one who walks around with his ear pods in listening to music no one else can hear. On another level, the withdrawal into self-interest shows up in such things as the people who support a property tax cap, not wanting to make contributions to anything that doesn’t directly benefit them, not wanting to support schools and education, for example, because they do not have a child in school.
It is easy to list various effects such as these. Identifying their causes is far more difficult. And that is a necessary step if a person is going to build or re-build a sense of community. Perhaps the world has become more complicated and terrible and people are withdrawing from broader engagements with it, and the obligations those entail. In that case, the rewards of such engagements must be emphasized. All of the centrifugal forces mentioned above, and others, have always been at work, but these days the amount of power they have is increasing. As a side effect, divisions can make it easier for rulers at any level to rule.
Sorry. I have no solution. But maybe this helps to define the problem.
[...] 27, 2008 by Paul Adasiak This post continues thoughts begun in “The people’s thing?” about three weeks [...]
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