I’m meeting more millennials who embrace the mentality expressed in the book “The Abundant Community,” by John McKnight and Peter Block. The authors are notably hostile to consumerism.
They are anti-institutional and anti-systems. “Our institutions can offer only service ”” not care ”” for care is the freely given commitment from the heart of one to another,” they write.
Millennials are oriented around neighborhood hospitality, rather than national identity or the borderless digital world. “A neighborhood is the place where you live and sleep.” How many of your physical neighbors know your name?
Maybe we’re on the cusp of some great cracking. Instead of just paying lip service to community while living for autonomy, I get the sense a lot of people are actually about to make the break and immerse themselves in demanding local community movements. It wouldn’t surprise me if the big change in the coming decades were this: an end to the apotheosis of freedom; more people making the modern equivalent of the Native American leap.
Interesting piece. Clearly there’s an attraction to smaller scale and local, but there’s misalignment with larger forces… our politics is heavily nationalized, most good employment is non-local, food chains, etc. And some of this is good, as scale has benefits and cosmopolitanism worldview generally corresponds to peace, prosperity, tolerance. Some of it is problematic, as conservative philosopher Roger Scruton notes… “We must surely accept the premise… that our local human resources – material, geographical, social, and spiritual – are being depleted by processes that have no need to answer for the damage they cause and no ability to repair it.â€
I worry about the Rousseauian romanticization of tribe, too. It’s a good metaphor, but is it a good aspiration… closeness can mean closedness, and frankly most tribal societies are not places I would like to spend time.