Community Life and the Urban Individual
Community Life and the Urban Individual
The old community
- Closely knit, based on face-to-face relations, affection, and friendship.
- People held narrow views and prejudices but agreed on life’s meaning and on rights and responsibilities.
- Conduct and ideas of right and wrong were induced by local custom and tradition.
The urban individual
- Cities arose from industry and the factory system, concentrating workers.
- Life is shaped less by the community and more by occupation and specialized activity.
- Specialization divides people’s moral ideas, knowledge, skills, and tastes.
- Each individual carries only a specialized fragment-picture of society.
The move from village to city is not just a change of address. It changes where a person’s values come from. In the old community, a shared local culture told a person what was right; in the city, a person’s own specialized work does much of that telling. This shift sits underneath many of the curriculum problems a modern society faces.
The old community
Early community life was a closely knit unit, built on face-to-face relations, affection, and friendship. People knew each other and lived their whole lives in view of one another.
The people of these small communities were, by modern standards, often ignorant, narrow in their points of view, and held to prejudices. But they shared something a modern city often lacks: they were in agreement about the meaning of life and about the rights and responsibilities of the individual. That agreement did real work. A person shaped their conduct and even the course of their life by the demands of local opinion and sentiment, and their ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect were induced by the customs and traditions of the community.
Today all of this has changed. The old-fashioned communities are declining, with no real chance of restoration. The shared local culture that once formed each person has thinned out.
Induced by the customs and traditions of the community
Conduct was shaped by local opinion and sentiment. The community held a shared agreement about life’s meaning and about rights and responsibilities, and that agreement formed each member.
The individual in the urbanized society
Modern cities arose from the new industrial and business activities created by scientific invention. Power-driven machinery brought the factory system into operation, and that system led to the division of labour and the concentration of multitudes of workers in industrial areas. Urban areas became both the workshop of the country and the home of its people.
The result of this urbanism is a different kind of individual. A person’s life is shaped less and less by the community and more and more by their occupation and other specialized activities. The community no longer does the forming; the job does.
This produces a strange double effect. Mechanical interdependence, through a minute division of labour, has brought people closer together geographically and mechanically; they live and work in dense proximity. Yet specialization has divided them in their mental outlooks: their moral ideas, their knowledge, their skills, and their tastes all differ. People are physically close but mentally scattered.
What an individual believes is right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect now traces back to their own experience, activity, and specialized labour, rather than to a shared community culture. As a result, every individual carries around in their head a specialized picture of society, representing only a little fragment of the total social pattern. No one holds the whole picture any more.
It brings them physically close but divides them mentally
Interdependence and dense living bring people together geographically, yet specialization splits their moral ideas, knowledge, skills, and tastes, so each carries only a fragment of the social picture.
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