The Quest for Community

Robert A. Nisbet (1913-1996), a sociologist who taught at Columbia and Berkeley, wrote about the importance of maintaining a pluralist society.  He believed that centralization of power in modern societies with the attendant bureaucratization, was sapping the power of community groups such as churches, labor unions, professional associations, social clubs like the the Elks, and community groups in general.  

He quoted Hitler’s in Mein Kampf:  “The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the picture of a greater community, something that has a strengthening effect upon most people.”

In the Middle Ages, people wanted freedom from community groups, especially the church, but also the guild, kinship patterns, occupational slots, the shtetl, the tribe.  The State, providing rights and duties, would free  people from their constricting bonds.

Unfortunately, the State, according to Nisbet, will in its totalitarian form attempt to eliminate the pluralism that he believes is necessary to ensure democracy and avoid tyranny.  

I just finished his most famous book, The Quest for Community, published in 1953.  Nisbet is considered to be a conservative, but what he argues for is a pluralist society.  I don’t know what he would think of modern social media, which comes to us unfiltered by discussion or judgement.  I have a feeling he might think of Trump rallies as an attempt by rootless and unattached people to find meaning and purpose.  

It does seem to me that many American citizens are unconnected to anything outside themselves.  They don’t read newspapers, don’t filter information from the Internet, don’t analyze, are not rational.  I’m extrapolating from a 70-year-old book, but to me Nisbet makes sense.