Loss of Community in American Culture

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Gently Passing, Apr 30, 2007.

Page 2 of 4
  1. Baron Max

    Baron Max Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,053
    If you do so, I'd strongly, STRONGLY, suggest that you have several eyewitnesses around at all time, AT ALL TIMES!!!!! A local judge and his wife would be good if you can swing it! One accusation of improper "fondling", even if later proven untrue, will ruin your life forever, FOREVER.

    Baron Max
     
    Baron Max, May 4, 2007
    #21

  2. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  3. Sock puppet path

    Sock puppet path GRRRRRRRRRRRR Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,112
    ^
    There you have part of the problem, fear manifest.
     
    Sock puppet path, May 4, 2007
    #22

  4. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  5. spuriousmonkey

    spuriousmonkey Banned Banned

    Messages:
    24,066
    The community is still quite strong on Finland, but it is heading towards the direction of pure individualism.

    More houses are needed every year. It's not that the population is growing, it is that more and more people live alone. People want to have fun and a career first. And then maybe a family. But only after everything is perfect. You get the typical sequence of job, career, dating, more dating, living together, finding the perfect place, first get a dog to practice, get a baby.

    Often they don't realize that this doesn't really always work out. Since the family unit is the end state and no the starting state as it always was in the past it is often not reached due to failure during intermediate stages.

    And once you have lived 10 years alone as a bachelor, sometimes dating, sometimes living together you get used to the status you have: you live for yourself. Family units will burden that concept. No more 'fun'.


    The States was a bit crazy. They make you fear society there. I can still remember other people telling us to watch our children. It's not like in Europe. Although maybe it was like in Europe. I don't know.

    Never saw children play on the street except sometimes in the suburbs. Children played in the playground with a parent standing next to them. 'you have to watch them' was the message.

    Here in finland our 4 year old goes out by himself in the afternoon to play in the communal yard, which is open to the public street. He gets a shout from the balcony when he is supposed to come in. He had to wait till he was 4 and a half till he could do this because he couldn't open the heavy doors by himself before that.

    I don't pay so much attention to my children in the supermarket. They can semi explore if they want to. We were warned not to do that in the US. I don't know if there was really a reason for this.

    Fear is an awful thing. And in conjunction with individualism beyond what is natural it leads to lack of cohesion in society.
     
    spuriousmonkey, May 4, 2007
    #23

  6. Google AdSense Guest Advertisement



    to hide all adverts.
  7. one_raven

    one_raven God is a Chinese Whisper Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    13,433
    You live in Portland?
    I am likely going there for part of my honeymoon in July - it my fiancee's favorite city.
    I think she would like to move there if we could see a way.
    I've never been there, but I love the Pacific Northwest (I want to move to the Point Reyes, CA area (or more North) myself) - I wouldn't be too surprised if we ended up there.
    Powell's Books is her favorite store in the world.

    I can hardly wait to finally go there this summer and see if it lives up to all her raving.

    Maybe we can have lunch.
     
    one_raven, May 15, 2007
    #24
  8. UltiTruth

    UltiTruth In pursuit... Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    533
    In Indian culture on the other hand, you are part of a web of relations that you can never break free from!
     
    UltiTruth, Nov 10, 2007
    #25
  9. Pandaemoni

    Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    3,634
    I agree with the "cars" answer. The days when people grew up in a neighborhood, married a girl from the neighborhood, got a job in the neighborhood, interacted with their neighbors daily...that's all over. Most parts of the nation are built to be very, very accommodating of commuters. Communities and cities are built with the embedded notion that many people will move out of the region in the morning, and back in at night or vice versa.

    While there is tremendous economic benefit to promoting the free flow of labor, it doesn't allow for the same build up of local good will that you used to see in the past.

    Add to that that we are working longer hours, so even less time to socialize when we are home.
     
    Pandaemoni, Nov 10, 2007
    #26
  10. cosmictraveler

    cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    33,264
    Times change and during the past 50 years they have not only changed

    they have altered the fabric of what America is. What was once a nation

    controlled by white people is now in flux and different nationalities and

    ethnic groups that were once little known are in the forefront of activities.

    What was once a place where jobs were secure and readily available has

    become a mobile, ever changing crisis that people are worried where they

    can get a good job at in this country. Because of many things that have

    happened to the American way Americans today have to adjust to an ever

    changing landscape of businesses and employers.


    What was once a place where everyone basically did the same thing and

    stayed in their own communities has become a fast paced, mobile society

    moving everywhere to find better work. That is a part of the change that

    Americans have to deal with in keeping their families together. Whenever

    they move they uproot their entire lives and their families, friends and

    schools. To adjust to a new home is very disruptive to the family because

    what was once familiar now is all unknown and they must adapt somehow to

    their new environs. All this moving doesn't fit well with stability which is the

    most important part of a family that has known only stability for their entire

    lives. In order to have a good family relatives should be close by but today

    relatives are thousands of miles away. Some people can adapt to this but

    many others find it difficult. The important thing is that before Americans

    valued their families and friends where they lived and today they value their

    jobs and status. The family has taken a back seat to business and this isn't

    a good way to be.
     
    cosmictraveler, Nov 10, 2007
    #27
  11. w1z4rd

    w1z4rd Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    1,541
    Gently Passing... whats cool, is you were able to come here... to his community, to discuss your worry about a lack of a community

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    w1z4rd, Nov 10, 2007
    #28
  12. Orleander

    Orleander OH JOY!!!! Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    25,817
    Some of you are hypocrites. I talk about the town I live in where we have a very nice sense of community and then you start making fun of me asking if I live in Mayberry.
    what's up with that??
     
    Orleander, Nov 10, 2007
    #29
  13. Atom

    Atom Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    928
    Its true that there is less sense of Community.

    It wasn't always so great for privacy with people walking in and out and neighbours knowing everything there is to know about you but I guess the positives outweigh the negatives.

    Anyone who commited a crime..even a minor one such as bicycle thief or shoplifting was known throughout the community so the crime rate was much lower.

    I still like the relative privacy though I'm afraid.
     
    Atom, Nov 10, 2007
    #30
  14. Fraggle Rocker

    Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Messages:
    24,690
    One of the things that is happening in this Paradigm Shift to an information-based economy is that we are migrating into virtual communities. We don't invest as much of ourselves in our physical surroundings--including the people--as our ancestors did, because we suddenly have the whole world and the whole human race (at least the rapidly growing portion of it that is connected) to choose from. Yes there's something lost here, but as always there's something gained and we appear to be betting that the gain exceeds the loss.

    I'm 64 and you'd expect me to be the one lamenting the loss of a bricks-and-mortar neighborhood and flesh-and-blood friends. Yet my life has never been so rich. I've never been able to find so many people who share my interests, with whom I can have enjoyable intelligent discussions. I had to stop playing go for more than ten years because I couldn't find anyone to play with. In the past week I've had games with people in Brazil, Japan, Germany and Catalonia. It's been years since I met anyone who had more than a passing interest in linguistics; here I'm the moderator of an entire subforum on linguistics and I'm participating in several interesting discussions and learning new things every day. I have never in my life spent as much time (voluntarily) communicating with people as I do today. I have never had as many people I count as friends. I have never felt as connected to the other members of my species!

    I suspect we all may start relying more on our dogs--whom we can take with us everywhere--for physical companionship. I always have. The creation of our multi-species community with dogs coincided rather suspiciously with the end of the Mesolithic era and our social evolution away from small intimate packs toward larger and more anonymous societies. Perhaps it's dogs who allow us to separate our need for physical company from our need for intellectual company. Do you have a dog? My wife and I have thirteen of them. I wonder whether dog lovers share your sense of alarm over the dissipation of physical communities.

    Nonetheless, see below for my optimistic prediction about the resurgence of physical community once we all start working from home and can live wherever we want.
    As someone else pointed out, those people feel like outsiders among us so they cling to each other. Mexicans have historically assimilated faster than any other immigrant group so look to their American-born children, not the immigrant parents. By the third generation they are more than 75% intermarried and have lost their sense of ethnicity, just like our ancestors from other countries did, albeit more slowly. The "black community," comprised primarily of people who are at least sixth-generation Americans, is an anomaly of failure to assimilate. But I have spoken at length on this topic elsewhere and blame it on the poison of the Civil War, since countries in which slavery ended peacefully by attrition do not have separate "black" and "white" populations. Look to the influx of African immigrants who do not share their history for the solution to the black/white alientation in America.
    Indians wear turbans. Arabs wear burnooses. The world is a community too, and it behooves us to know it a little better than we do, for all the same reasons.
    Yes, and over the centuries it has been true. Remember that we started out as small extended-family clans of hunter-gatherers who had known each other intimately since birth. The Neotlithic Revolution moved us into larger permanent villages, where we still knew everyone but not so intimately. Civilization moved us into cities where we learned to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers. Nations had us bonding with people we never met but shared a sense of identity with. Today's trans-national civilizations have us forming "communities" with people who are mere abstractions. As we develop into a herd-social species, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer is still inside us with that pack-social instinct that hasn't had time to evolve in a mere ten thousand years. Occasionally he goes berserk and flaunts his instinctive distrust of people outside the pack, but for the most part he uses his uniquely massive forebrain to exercise his uniquely human ability to override his primitive instincts with reason and learning. Life continues to improve in so many tangible ways as civilization advances, that our inner caveman is content to sacrifice that cloying sense of togetherness with his family. How many of you would actually want to spend your whole lives with ALL of the people who are two branches or less away from you on your family tree... hmm? I couldn't even stand my parents!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

    Cosmo's post is too long to quote (you really should find a way to change your default to single-spacing, dude!) but one of his key points is that people no longer settle in one place and put down roots. Everyone is forced to change jobs or even careers every few years and move to another city, so they don't have time to develop the relationships that create a community. It takes years to get to know your neighbors well enough to really trust them and care about them, and by then they're gone.

    This will change as telecommuting reshapes our jobs. We won't be able to keep "going to work" every day as the price of petroleum skyrockets. And in any case most of us spend our entire workday huddled over a computer and talking on the phone, so we rarely need to be in the same physical location as the people we work for or with. You younger people who have grown up with chat rooms, cellphones and MPRPGs will not stand for the idea of spending two or three hours every day fighting traffic, just so you can spent eight or nine more hours in the company of people you haven't chosen as companions. You will live in places you like, among people you like, and take care of your career obligations virtually.

    Life will continue to get better. This problem of lack of community is just your luck to live during a Paradigm Shift. In fifty years it will be resolved.
     
    Fraggle Rocker, Nov 10, 2007
    #31
  15. S.A.M.

    S.A.M. uniquely dreadful Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    72,825
    Ain't that the truth!

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    S.A.M., Nov 10, 2007
    #32
  16. kmguru

    kmguru Staff Member

    Messages:
    11,757
    The Amish let other people do their work like developing medicine, computers and energy...if the whole world would live like Amish, we would not have 6 Billion people and when an asteroid is coming our way, we will get wiped out to start all over again.

    I do not think, nature gave us a brain to discover physics and stay stuck on Earth without sowing our seeds out there. The animals do it, the plants do it...and it is our turn....

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
     
    kmguru, Nov 11, 2007
    #33
  17. Klippymitch

    Klippymitch Thinker Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    699
    That's an easy fix.

    Legalize marijuana and people will become 300% closer.

    But you know our controllers will never allow us to get what we want.
     
    Klippymitch, Nov 11, 2007
    #34
  18. Klippymitch

    Klippymitch Thinker Registered Senior Member

    Messages:
    699
    Right now we have too many people, dwindling resources, and no answers to a lot of the problems created by technology.

    Just saying.
     
    Klippymitch, Nov 11, 2007
    #35
  19. Billy T

    Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    How do you do this? I tried to do same couple of years ago, but only with a grandson, who is quite good at long range thinking /strategies.

    PS I do not play GO*, but think it is the best game in the world as:
    (1) Very different skill levels can play each other without changing significantly the nature of the game.
    (2) Anyone can learn and remember the rules in two minutes they are so simple.
    (3) The subtlety and ultimate complexity exceeds anything current computers can even approach.

    All three above sharply contrast with chess, another good game, but chess is simple enough for computers to ALWAYS beat all but a very few (if not all now).
    -----------------
    *Played with fellow graduate student many years ago. I needed an 8 stone handicap at start to have reasonable chance of winning. He was just good enough to be rated at the lowest level in US - not even an amateur in Japan
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Nov 11, 2007
    Billy T, Nov 11, 2007
    #36
  20. Gustav

    Gustav Banned Banned

    Messages:
    12,575
    the trend is towards communalism
    institutions within a society should all work towards that goal
    it is not a given that the various orgs have the same goal or are even in sync

    i lay the blame, for the most part, on the urban planners
    i absolve myself of any blame

    how things could be-------cyberspace : help forums, open source
    bastions of communality is how i define those
    that is our potential
    too bad our reps fail us at every fucking turn

    plain, simple, incompetence
     
    Gustav, Nov 11, 2007
    #37
  21. Gustav

    Gustav Banned Banned

    Messages:
    12,575
    ahh
    i see frag touch on this
    bummer, but good

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

     
    Gustav, Nov 11, 2007
    #38
  22. kmguru

    kmguru Staff Member

    Messages:
    11,757
    Too many people: Yes, but that itself is not a problem

    Dwindling resources: Again, Earth has a lot of resources to keep us going for another 10,000 years until someone develops a replicator. But using those resources without pollution is a problem. The leaders do not understand the issues and hence do nothing.

    No answers: There are answers, but people with funds do not want it. For example, a large coal-based power plant can be built capturing 99.999% emissions including CO2 with a small 2% penalty. But as politics have it, no body does it. A large number of people in a computer and communications activity based jobs, can work out of home saving a lot of gas and pollution. In California, the people who live in North go south to work and vice versa...Go back to glass based recycle program rather than plastics which leaches in to foods. etc....

    Just saying....

    Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
     
    kmguru, Nov 11, 2007
    #39
  23. Billy T

    Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    23,198
    How? Do you have nay support for this claim? I think, just guessing, that the energy cost alone for pumping it deep into the earth would exceed 2% of the energy produced, it that is what you are thinking of.

    If thinking of chemical capture by "scrubbers" - what will those chemical cost, including the ultimate disposal of them without serious water pollution, carbonic acid etc. I think.
     
    Billy T, Nov 11, 2007
    #40
Page 2 of 4

Share This Page