【橘猫推书】

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

TWENTY-FOUR

The Stages of Community Building II

Personal stories are powerful. When they are told and received, trust is created. But in a narcissistic culture, it's easy to stop there. It's easy to sit around one evening, tell a personal tale about yourself, and then, having had a rich experience, go home under the illusion that you've done something good for the world. A commitment to community involves moving from “I” stories to “We” stories. The move, as always, is downward and then outward. Down into ourselves in vulnerability and then outward in solidarity with others.

The next stage of village making is to tell the communal story—a story that links people together. Some places have thick stories and some have thin ones. I'm often in new suburbs in Nevada or Arizona, where not enough time has passed to have a village story, and you can feel the lack. On the other hand, recently I was in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a town of about 3,500 in the northwestern part of the state. It's 81 percent white with a median income of about $35,000, and it sits in a county where three-quarters of the votes went for Donald Trump in 2016.

Wilkesboro and its neighboring town, North Wilkesboro, were once thriving business centers. Lowe's, the American Furniture Company, Holly Farms, and Northwestern Bank were there, along with large mirror and furniture manufacturers. But those employers have either moved out, gone bankrupt, or been acquired by someone else. In the early 2000s, the town was hit hard by the opioid epidemic. There was no place for young people to gather and no place for them to work.

The town took its hits, but what's striking about the place is that there is still a strong identity. There is a clear community story.

Part of that identity comes from being Appalachian—having a distinct historic lineage, a culture of scrapping and fierce loyalty to one another. People in Wilkesboro can fight and scream with each other, but if you as an outsider say something critical about someone there, they rise as one to kick your ass. An outsider is defined as anyone not conceived in Wilkesboro. Yankees who move in while in the womb or later don't count.

Part of the community identity comes from what the ancestors accomplished long ago. “We've had a lot of great things created in Wilkes,” says Nate, who just opened a coffee shop. “That's what we do in Wilkes, build things out of nothing. There's a passion to do that.”

A community is, in part, a group of people organized around a common story. People in Wilkesboro, like many places, tell a redemption narrative: rise, decline, endurance, revival. Part of the revival is spiritual, part is economic, and part is physical.

“How do you create pride again? Everyone's ashamed,” says LB, a young local activist. “We're the town of abandoned factories. We're the town that survived that! We're a history of makers. We have made it. We know how to do it.”

Then there is the common project. Communities don't come together for the sake of community; they come together to build something together. In Wilkesboro, the common project is place making. We have a tendency to think the social fabric is in tatters because the culture is bad or economic forces are ripping everything to shreds. But sometimes there are just no places for people to get together. Wilkesboro once had a bowling alley in town, but it burned down, and nobody rebuilt it. Today, in response, people from all walks of life are opening coffee shops, health clubs, art galleries, and distilleries, and creating performance spaces, teen nights, and music festivals.

What's fascinating is how cohesive this vision of recovery is, across many people, who, being people, sometimes feud and fuss. A coherent communal story is yet another new form of power.

A town story can be formed in so many ways. When I was living in Chicago, Mike Royko and other local newspaper columnists shaped the city's ethos and definition of itself. They rooted the Chicago story in its ethnic neighborhoods away from the lake (until Royko got rich and moved to the lakefront). In some places, artists form the community story. Diego Rivera's stunning Detroit Industry Murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts define the city across four luscious walls. For a few decades, Detroit seemed to have nothing left but its story, but that was enough to keep it together, and now the city rises once again. One of the most important tasks of a community is to create its story.

A community narrative has four parts, says Trabian Shorters, who leads a fellowship group for African American men out of Miami called BMe. There is framing (which defines the context), narrative (where we came from and where we are going), identity (who we are), and behavior (actions that define us). Community stories are almost always cross-generational. They start with the origin of a place, and then tell how it grew.

Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future. People who look backward to see the heroism and the struggle that came before see themselves as debtors who owe something, who have some obligation to pay it forward. “The idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation and a sure principle of transmission,” Burke wrote. “We receive, we hold, we cherish what we have been given and enjoy these things and improve them for others. Respecting our ancestors, we learn to respect ourselves.”

Honest communities tell complicated stories, about the times they sinned and inflicted pain as well as the times they endured and showed mercy. Honest American stories talk about slavery and racism. Honest New York stories tell about the destruction of the old Penn Station and all the grand beauties that have been torn down for the name of commerce. There's always something in every community out of joint, corrupted and unjust in some way. People in community live at a crossroads where their pride of place and anger at injustice meet.

THE CODE OF THE NEIGHBOR

After the community has come together and told its story, there is still the action to be taken: the act of weaving community out of isolation. Community building is done by daily acts of care, room by room. It is done by those who adopt the code of the neighbor.

A neighbor is not on a solitary journey through life, but is one immersed. He sees himself as someone who has been shaped by a tradition of local behavior and place. He feels indebted to that legacy and is happy to pay off that debt. His work, family, and neighborhood lives are not in different silos. They are interconnected pieces of his service to his place. The code of the neighbor revolves around a few common principles:

We are enough. The neighbor doesn't wait for someone else to address the community's problems. He is not just a spectator. As Peter Block writes, “Most sustainable improvements in community occur when citizens discover their own power to act. Whatever the symptom—drugs, deteriorating houses, poor economy, displacement, violence—it is when citizens stop waiting for professionals or elected leadership to do something, and decide they can reclaim what they have delegated to others, that things really happen. This act of power is present in most stories of lasting community improvement and change.”

Village over self. A good person inconveniences himself for the sake of his community. A bad person inconveniences the community for the sake of himself.

Initiating the connection. The good neighbor is the one who invites others over for dinner. The good neighbor is the one who is talking to one neighbor and introduces the other neighbor on the other side of the street.

Thirty-year eyes. A neighbor has a different time horizon than an individual. Her actions are not oriented toward making this place better tomorrow. Her actions are geared to make this place better thirty years from now. This child she is mentoring will be a town leader in thirty years. This festival she is organizing will be a tradition going strong in half a century. She plants trees that will bear fruit she will never eat, and cast shade she will never enjoy.

Radical hospitality. Robert Frost wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” When someone is in need, the code of the neighbor says hospitality is first, judgment and everything else comes later. The neighbor is like the father of the prodigal son who races out to greet him without asking questions. Grace and forgiveness first, then we can think about what went wrong and heal whatever breach.

The community is the expert. Neighbors know that it's not just the school that educates the child, it's not just the police who keep the town safe, it's not just the hospital that keeps the people healthy. It is the shared way of living. People are safe when the streetscape is active. People are healthy when healthy eating is the norm. Kids are educated where adults talk to and encourage the young. It's the norms and behavior of the neighborhood. It's the people puzzling together to find the best way to live.

Coming in under. Hermann Hesse wrote a short story called “Journey to the East,” in which a group of men take a long journey. They are accompanied by a servant named Leo who does the menial chores and lifts the group's spirits with his singing. He takes care of the little things. The trip is going well until Leo disappears. Everything falls into disarray, and the trip is abandoned.

Many years later, one of the men stumbles into the organization that had sponsored the journey and discovered that Leo is, in fact, the leader of this great organization and not some functionary. This story inspired the concept of servant leadership. The lesson is that a community leader is often the person doing the “menial” tasks, the supportive person. As George Eliot observed in the famous last sentence of Middlemarch: “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

The least are the most. Communities are defined by the treatment of the least among them: the young, the poor, the disabled, or the very sad. Jean Vanier built communities for the mentally disabled. “I come here to tell you how much life these people have given me,” he once told an audience at Harvard. “That they have an incredible gift to bring to our world, they are a source of hope, peace and perhaps salvation for our wounded world….If we keep our eyes fixed on them, if we are faithful to them, we will always find our path.”

The sin is partly my own. Mutual fallibility is one of the glues that hold community together. We understand that we're all weak and selfish some of the time. We often contribute to the problems we ourselves complain about.

“True community is different because of the realization that the evil is inside—not just inside the community but inside me,” Vanier writes. “I cannot think of taking the speck of dust out of my neighbor's eye unless I'm working on the log in my own.” Community is a place of pain because it's a place where the truth about one another comes out. But it's also a place of loving through the pain, of disagreement that can be expressed freely precisely because of the unconditional love.

THE VILLAGE COMPACT

In his book The Home We Build Together, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out that in the Bible the description of the creation of the universe in Genesis is covered in a mere thirty-four verses. But then there is this weird episode in the book of Exodus that takes up an entire third of that book—hundreds and hundreds of verses. It is the instructions for the building of the tabernacle.

Why should the building of this one structure—with specific instructions about the length of the beams and all the different woods and ornaments—require such minute attention? It's because the Israelites are not yet a people. They are an oppressed and disparate group of tribes and individuals. As Sacks puts it, “To turn a group of individuals into a covenantal nation, they must build something together.” A people is made by making, Sacks continues; a nation is built by building.

Sacks tells the story of the British diplomat Victor Mishcon. In the early 1980s he was trying to negotiate a peace deal in the Middle East, so he invited King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres over to his house for dinner. They had the meal and a pleasant conversation, and eventually they got up to leave. Mishcon told them they weren't going anywhere. They had to do the dishes. He put King Hussein by the sink and Peres by the drying rack and had them work side by side, washing and drying. This was the point of the evening to him.

Prince Holmes is director of Youth Rebuilding New Orleans. He brings together different kinds of young people and puts them to work building houses. “The community we build is more important than building the homes,” he says. “We're big on energy. The fact that you can build a wall with someone that you've never met before creates an instant bond. It's not work to me.”

The act of working on common projects redraws the boundaries between groups and redefines where someone is on the hierarchy. Suddenly a guy good with his hands is higher than the guy from the executive suite. In Exodus, the Israelites are never happier than they are when building the tabernacle.