Five years ago today my family took a weekend road trip to Madison, Wisconsin for my niece’s wedding. Well, we didn’t get to attend the actual wedding (a small modern affair), but we enjoyed the reception and some time to catch up with my relatives.
The next day, we toured the capitol building with my mom and siblings. The kids and I oohed and aahed over the beautiful architecture and artwork, while my husband Tim trailed along behind. Especially impressed by one display, the girls turned to get their dad’s attention, but he was nowhere in sight.
Eventually we found him outside on the phone. It seemed serious. When the call ended, he gave me one of those looks to which I can only reply, uh oh, what now? It was a neighbor calling to let us know that our hot water heater had sprung a leak and was pouring water into our basement. But not to worry. They turned off the water and started cleaning things up.
“How did they know?” you may wonder.
I live in a somewhat unusual neighborhood, by modern American standards.
For one thing, we know all of our neighbors, different as we are. According to a Pew Research Center survey released that same year, this alone places us among the minority of Americans, 26%, who know most of their neighbors. While 57% know at least some of their neighbors, about a quarter of adults under 30 don’t know any of them. Regardless of who you know, the poll shows, face-to-face interactions are increasingly uncommon.
Nobody’s literally pushing us into having contact with our neighbors, but there is a kind of force at work. A social physics of sorts.
Action at a distance: the idea that an object’s motion can be affected by another object without being in physical contact with it, by way of certain forces like gravity, electricity, magnetism
This brings us to a second distinction. The houses on our side of the street are supplied with water from an uphill spring and cistern. It’s an old-fashioned system, vanishingly rare in these parts. When we were going through the home purchasing process, we were informed of this arrangement (we were thrilled) and of the collaborative maintenance required.
Our neighbors are wonderful. In all honesty, though, it’s hard to say how well we’d know them if it weren’t for the need to cooperatively manage our shared water system.
And thank goodness. The obligation benefits us all.
We’re used to keeping an eye on things. So, when someone notices a drop in the cistern level, they start calling around to find out why. Occasionally a leaky faucet or running toilet is discovered to be the culprit.
That’s what happened the weekend we were gone, except in a more extreme and abrupt way. Knowing we were out of town and having a key to our house (though it’s almost never locked), our neighbors came to check on our plumbing situation. To their surprise, they found a gushing geyser instead of a slow leak. A spot on the tank had been gradually rusting and, with impeccable timing, gave way as soon as we left.
Not only did they shut off the water supply, they recruited help. Together they pulled up the interlocking flooring mats, squeegeed water out the door, and rustled up some industrial fans to help dry things out. When we got home Sunday night, the fans were running and there were almost no signs of water. Overwhelmed by their kindness, I had to wipe a few tears of gratitude from my cheek before they could hit the drying floor.
I shudder to imagine what we would have come home to without their intervention.
As a bonus, I had a great story to tell on Monday. That fall I happened to be teaching a class called “Creating Resilience,” which explores meaningful actions we can take at the community level for living well in turbulent times.
Our weekend water adventure is just one example of the perqs that come from our little community. People on my street are always helping each other out, and on occasion hanging out just for fun.
This goes against national social engagement trends, which have been steadily falling, like water running downhill.
When it comes to building community resilience—or building community at all—we have our work cut out for us. In his book Bowling Alone sociologist Robert Putnam documents declines in civic participation, volunteerism, and community in general. Among the many indicators of informal social engagement are statistics on league bowling (for which the book is named), dinner parties, and card playing—especially bridge.
By 1958, nearly 1/3 of American adults were bridge players. In the 1960s and 70s, college students collectively spent millions of nights playing bridge and card games were a regular part of life for nearly 40% of adults. [1]
Upon hearing figures like these, invariably a few of my students hypothesize aloud that people only spent time together in these ways because they lacked other options (they mention streaming entertainment, social media, and video games and chats as examples of ‘better’ forms of leisure now available).
In short, they’re saying, circumstances forced people into these relationships.
They use the word ‘forced’ with derision, presuming it to be an unequivocally bad thing. I understand where this perspective comes from, but I also know it comes with a big blind spot. What they don’t see are the benefits of this kind of force, and the long-term detrimental effects of its weakening.
Sometimes we need a push to get off of a bad trajectory.
Force: a push or pull on an object with mass (a measure of inertia) that causes it to change its direction and speed; an external agent capable of changing a body’s state of rest or motion
Humans experience inertia in more than just physical ways. Generally speaking, our economizing tendencies, cultural conditioning, and other acquired habits tend to keep us doing what we’re doing, or not doing, as the case may be.
And we know it. That’s why, in our cleverer moments and for our own good, we devise ways to force ourselves into doing things we otherwise wouldn’t. Examples of such “life hacks” include:
- Parking at the far side of the lot to sneak more exercise into your day
- Turning off your phone’s notifications or using a signal-blocking app to improve your focus and quality of life
- Establishing strict priority-based criteria to help you make a difficult decision when there are too many choices
Nobody’s literally coercing us into these behaviors. We’re simply using our intelligence to create conditions that require us as individuals to do things we don’t really have to, but want to do—or at least want the benefits of having done.
We would benefit from doing more of this kind of intentional forcing at the collective level.
After all, networks of reciprocity and mutual obligation, as in the ancient form of the gift economy, is one of the ingredients that held long-lived cultures together. These circuits of energy and materials exchange worked between groups as well as within them, creating what scholars like Putnam call, respectively, bridging and bonding capital.
Arguably, we’re in desperate need of both.
While individuals suffer the effects of loneliness and isolation in their own ways, our collective plight periodically comes into public awareness. Of late, it’s become such a salient problem that the U.S. Surgeon General has declared it a national epidemic. This high profile attention is encouraging, but we needn’t wait for actions at the national level to do something about it.
At a time when it’s all too easy to avoid direct interaction with people, it’s up to us to put ourselves in situations that help build the capacities and the kind of capital that set ourselves up for real success in the future.
We can become a bridge to somewhere good.
Bridge of cards photo: From reddit r/mildlyinteresting, lizardsgonewild16, 2017. Effects added by author.
Most of us don’t know how to play bridge anymore. But whether we realize it or not, we’re all acting as bridges to futures we’re in the process of helping shape, mostly unintentionally.
Cumulatively, the values, habits, and overall ways of being we passively accept or actively cultivate and then pass on at individual and collective scales are setting the course for ourselves and subsequent generations.
From Isaac Newton: “Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting, and inflecting them but also upon one another for producing a great Part of the Phaenomena of Nature?” [2]
Analogous to Newton’s observations about what I call ‘first nature,’ we too have certain powers, virtues, and forces by which we can deliberately produce a great part of the ‘second nature’ shaping our lives, the world, and the future.
We need only develop and exercise them. As with other forms of exercise, it’s helpful if you have to.
In our neighborhood, we’ve long known that our old cistern was crumbling and would eventually need to be replaced. For six and a half years we all paid a small monthly amount into a group fund as a way to save up. This fall turned out to be the time for action.
It was a lot of work, done almost entirely by residents of our street. (I can take credit for none of it.) Apart from long days of physical labor, there were quotes from excavators to get, data to gather, technical decisions to make, finances to manage, errands to run, and more.
At times, people got cranky, tensions mounted, yelling ensued. All pretty normal human stuff. I was impressed by how quickly the guys got frustrations out of their systems and were able to resume work and pleasant conversation.
Less easy to deal with were the constant clashes with a neighbor whose uphill property overlaps our cistern infrastructure (there’s a longstanding easement). With a penchant for making waves, he made the process much more difficult than it needed to be. The strategic use of certain people’s social skills, patience, and ability to let insults roll off their back helped everybody.
And it’s all so worth it.
In the end, the project was a success. We managed to protect our communal water source for generations to come.
At any point over the years, things could have gone differently.
One or more key players could have simply said “forget it.” It might have seemed more convenient—in some ways and in the moment—to not have to deal with each other.
In other ways, not so much.
Cost: The price of drilling and installing one household well is roughly equivalent to what we paid to replace our whole neighborhood system.
Lost opportunities: We would have foregone free natural sustainable resources: high quality spring water and gravity.
Satisfaction: There’s a certain gratification that comes with knowing where your water (or any resource) comes from and having a hand in getting it to the people who need it.
Continuity: It feels good to honor the intelligence, skills, and labors of the people who, generations ago, built this system by hand, rather than discarding it in favor of more costly and individualized ‘modern’ ways.
Resilience: When the power goes out or when the nearby village’s water system has problems, our water still flows.
Community: Then there’s the fact that we know and are neighborly with each other. We really do lend and borrow the proverbial cup of sugar, and more. Condiments, eggs, tools, technical know-how and other goods and services regularly change hands. These may be small things, but during an election year when we are being encouraged to revile the “other side,” they feel big and of immeasurable value.
Our neighborhood is no Shangri-La. And, of course, community life isn’t all fun and games.
Conflict, mistakes, forgiveness, compromise, hard work, and hard times have always been part of any stable community. As humans, we’re naturally equipped to deal with that. Though it’s possible to let those abilities atrophy, or to fail to develop them altogether.
We’re seeing the effects of that now.
But it’s not too late. With a little awareness and the right kind of force, we can create conditions, present and future, that are actually good for us even if they seem strange by current standards of “normal.” And if we play our cards right, we can have a good time together in the process.
Notes and References
[1] Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Pages 103-104.
[2] Newton, Isaac. 1730. Opticks, 4th edition, corrected. London: William Innys at the Weft End of St Paul’s. Question 31, page 350.
