Cohousing-L Mailing List: Book Review on Community (long)

[Frank Mancino (fmancino]

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Here is a text-file reprint of a recent review by Jonathan Yardley in the
Washington Post, which is about community, values, and neighborhoods.  The
book would seem to have some relevance to some of the issues on coho-l,
though it may be dealing with the same terms, like "community", at a higher
or more abstract level.  Still, if cohousing is "building a better society,
one neighborhood at a time," it is sometimes useful to listen to other
voices on where their neighborhoods went, and why.
 

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THE LOST CITY
Discovering the Forgotten
Virtues of Community in the
Chicago of the 1950s

By Alan Ehrenhalt

BasicBooks. 310 pp. $24

IN THIS provocative study of three Chicago neighborhoods during the
1950s, Alan Ehrenhalt brings together two themes that of late have
drawn strong followings among the intelligentsia. One is rather
clumsily called "communitarianism"; it seeks to organize a
political movement aimed at restoring what Ehrenhalt calls "the
benefits of old-fashioned community life at the neighborhood
level." The other is nostalgia for the 1950s, which many people
believe was the last time of American innocence before the plunge
into the cesspool of crime and immorality we are now commonly
believed to occupy.

Ehrenhalt is an admirer of the 1950s who tries hard, for the most
part with success, to avoid the trap of nostalgia, of "a cleansing
and oversimplifying of the past that makes it look beguilingly rosy
and innocent from the vantage point of a few decades of history."
He knows that the 1950s were the era of Joe McCarthy as well as
Marilyn Monroe, of fallout shelters as well as "Rock Around the
Clock," of Sputnik as well as "Father Knows Best." He also
understands that if the decade was fairly tranquil and comfortable
for the newly prosperous white majority, it was a hard time for
those of the wrong color, or religion, or politics.

All this said and done, though, Ehrenhalt believes that in moving
away from the social and cultural conventions that prevailed during
that distant decade, we have lost more than we have gained. This is
not exactly a new point. The literature of "lost America" grows
steadily; it was only a few weeks ago that this space was filled
with a review of David Gelernter's 1939: The Lost World of the
Fair, in which America today is compared unfavorably with New York
City of the 1930s. At a time when the nation is lurching from one
crisis of self-definition to another, it is hardly surprising that
we should look to the past both for an anchor and for an example.

Interestingly, both Ehrenhalt and Gelernter focus on the decline of
authority as one broad, important area in which we have lost
something of value. Gelernter wrote of Franklin Roosevelt and
Fiorello LaGuardia as figures who exercised authority that was both
welcomed and unchallenged by those whom they governed. Ehrenhalt
focuses somewhat more narrowly, but no less pointedly, on local
authority figures such as Catholic priests in an old Chicago ethnic
neighborhood, ministers and ward heelers in an impoverished black
area, Junior Chamber of Commerce members in a new suburb on the
city's green fringe.

In citing these figures Ehrenhalt is not being authoritarian in the
received, i.e. pejorative, sense of the word, but arguing that
people both individually and collectively yearn for some measure of
order in their lives. Though we live in a time when choice is
unlimited, there remains within us a longing for rules, for habits,
for steady social relationships in which the community acts as a
buttress for the common good and to perpetuate common beliefs.
Ehrenhalt writes:

"We don't want the 1950s back. What we want is to edit them. We
want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk
and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the
tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on
100 percent Americanism and the sinfulness of dissent. But there is
no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the
rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have about
re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to
be a pipe dream in the end."

That Ehrenhalt had no difficulty locating authority in all three of
the 1950s Chicago neighborhoods he describes herein is evidence
enough of its pervasiveness at all levels of American society at
that time. The country consisted of individuals who lived within
communities rather than, as it does now, of individuals who exist
within themselves. In order to be communities, these aggregations
had to have rules=97some tacit, some written=97that were reasonably
acceptable to all, and they had to have people to enforce those
rules.

The enforcers weren't always pleasant and their methods weren't
always nice. We may like to remember friendly ministers and
avuncular teachers, but there were plenty of authority figures who
routinely abused the powers entrusted them. At a Catholic school in
Chicago called St. Nicholas of Tolentine, "there were nuns . . .
who treated discipline not only as a means of enforcing order but
as an opportunity for their own self-expression." Joseph Lynch,
associate pastor at the parish, was "a disciplinarian with a short
fuse and a streak of meanness," and those who came under his
influence didn't soon forget him:

  "WE OF the baby-boom generation will be having nightmares about
Father Lynch=97or some secular equivalent=97for a lifetime. These men
did a great deal to shape the attitude toward authority that
blossomed in the 1960s and has defined individualism as a
non-negotiable right ever since then. The Father Lynches of the
world gave authority a reputation it has yet to lose until all the
postwar children who endured them begin to pass from the scene. The
consequence is that an entire generation of Americans has found it
difficult to think sensibly about the legitimate role that
authority must play in any decent and civil society."

Ehrenhalt believes that a properly functioning society is one in
which a balance is struck "a bargain," he calls it between our
desire for "familiar and stable" communities and the necessity, in
order to maintain them, of "a whole network of restrictions on our
ability to do whatever we liked." In this bargain, he correctly
points out, "the costs could not be repudiated without affecting
the benefits"; we now have unlimited freedom of choice, but we
inhabit a culture dominated not by order and civility but by
"egotism, incivility, disloyalty."

It's easier to describe such conditions than to prescribe remedies
for them, but Ehrenhalt closes with an insightful observation.
During the 1920s, he points out, many social critics worried that
"debilitating change and collapsing rules" were dragging the
country to perdition, but the country responded to Depression and
war with stability and order. The 1960s and their legacy similarly
may not last forever, though these days it's often hard to imagine
otherwise.

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