How Does Your Community Help You Live Out Your Values?
Social scientist Jean Twenge, in her new book Generations, argues that generational divides are marked by technological change far more than living through historic events together. How old you were when you started using a smart phone shapes your generation much more than whether or not you remember 9/11.
Technology Increases Individualism
Twenge explores the demographic differences between generations — the Silents, the Boomers, Gen-X, the Millennials, and Gen Z — to show how technology accounts for the rise of individualism.
Increasingly, machines do for us what we once could only get done by cooperating with — or coercing — other people.
My neighbor, well in his eighties, lives in a house by himself. He also spends a lot of time golfing.
In 2023, this is possible for him because he has a machine that allows him to mow his lawn, and another machine that allows him to wash his own clothes, and another machine that allows him to travel to a grocery store, and another machine that allows him to preserve his food, and other machines that allow him to heat it and cook it.
In 1723, if he wished to live alone, he would have had to be able to tend and climb up on a horse. He would have had to be able to swing a scythe. He would have had to wring out his wet clothing before hanging it to dry. (I lived without a washing machine for a few months, using a wash board and a bar of soap; wringing out heavy, wet clothing takes real physical strength.) He would have to be physically able to chop wood. Tend a fire most of the day. Till soil. If he wanted to eat meat, he might have had to tend chickens, fish, hunt. And after the basic drudgeries of survival, he would probably have little time or energy left for golf.
As our tech allows us to turn up the dial on individualism, it simultaneously increases the ability for more people, like my neighbor in his 80s, to live independently rather than having to rely on others’ physical labors for his food, clean clothing, and heat.
Conversely, the Amish have the communal life they do, because they do not use the tech that would reduce their need for one another’s physical labor.
Communities and Coercion
We are also less bound to communities to meet our psychological needs.
I remember a conversation with an elderly woman who told me about growing up in the 1920s in a strict religious community — not the Amish, but another faith community known for its opposition to war. She married a man from a different tradition, and I assumed that was why she was no longer with her childhood church.
I told her I admired her first tradition for its commitment to living out its values. I asked her what her childhood church was like, and if she missed it. She said that she thought sometimes people outside the tradition romanticized what it was like to be in a community like that.
Her childhood church was opposed to physical violence, including the violence of war; and took pride in this. However, she said the community relied on psychological violence like public shaming, exclusion, and excommunication to enforce its beliefs, which had real social and economic consequences in the wider community.
“It was cruel,” she said. “It tore families apart, it destroyed people’s livelihoods, you couldn’t do business or remain friendly with someone who had been excommunicated, even a family member, or you might be excommunicated. There was so little grace.”
She continued with many of the spiritual practices and beliefs she had learned from her childhood tradition, but chose a more inclusive church as a young adult, before she got married. She met her husband in her new church. Her choice to find a new faith community was hers.
Because I am in the church, I often hear laments about the breakdown of community.
Because I am online, I often hear laments about how closed-minded church communities are.
Twenge discusses how as technology increases, participation in any kind of volunteer community drops, including participating in organized religion. But even if organized religion disappeared tomorrow, we would still have to contend with the dark side of human communities.
Sometimes online communities replicate the psychological violence, the shaming, the shunning, the public condemnation, and the excommunications that my friend described in her childhood church in the 1920s.
It requires real, conscious, applied reflection and effort to live out values like grace, inclusivity, tolerance, and openness. And sometimes you might have to change communities to find that.
Knowing Your Values Helps You Find Life-Giving Communities
Being in community is a basic human need.
Because of technology, we are no longer forced to belong to communities to get our basic physical needs met. Because of technology, even people who live in small, remote places can find like-minded people online.
Thanks to technology, my cat did not have to work, and I could participate in communities online. 2009.
We can choose the communities to which we belong.
The degree to which we can do this now is unprecedented in human history.
I participate in multiple communities, in person and online. But the woman who grew up in a clannish faith community in the 1920s and chose to find another community that better aligned with her values, is a role model for me.
She knew her own values. She sought out a group that aligned better with her values around grace. (I can’t think of a secular word to describe the concept of grace; it draws on qualities like humility, love, forgiveness, compassion, tolerance, peace, humor.) She also lived out that value. I got to know her because I was drawn to the way she lived a life centered around the value of grace.
I believe orienting yourself with something like a rule of life or a personal framework (my non-religious description of this practice), where you identify your values and the routines that allow you to live those values out, helps you find your community without losing your integrity.
The first rules of life were developed by religious people, already in religious communities, who still felt like they were being pulled away from their values.
It is a good thing to make some time to figure out — and write down — what you really stand for.
Technology has freed so many people from being dependent on others’ physical labor to survive.
But we as human beings, social beings, still need communities. And technology does not change the fact that all communities live out values. All communities express certain ways of being, ways of treating people inside and outside the community.
Our communities either help us live out our deepest values, or hinder us in doing so.
What communities are you choosing?
And how well do your communities help you to live out your values?
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Reference
Twenge, J.M. (2023) Generations: the real differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents - and what they mean for America’s future. New York: Atria Books.