In the spirit of full disclosure—and illustrative of the pervasiveness that this title suggests—in “a former life,” I first addressed this topic in a sermon in June of 1973, having gotten the idea from a sermon by Harry Emerson Fosdick in his anthology, Riverside Sermons, published in 1958, although the sermon originally appeared in an earlier collection of his sermons, entitled Living Under Tension, published in 1941. My approach in this blog is not intended to be “sermonic,” but it’s informative that the topic was as relevant in 1941 and 1958 and 1973, as it, sadly, is today, since we have locally, nationally, and globally “waxed and (more often) waned” in our search for community.

This is the way he began the sermon, delivered well before its first publication in 1941:

A single look at the world reveals how deplorably we are split up into fragmentary and conflicting individuals and groups. We often say that this is a crazy world, and in the literal meaning of that word it is true, for crazy comes from the French, ecrase, which means broken and shattered. We human beings ought to be a co-operative community, using the resources of this planet for the common good, and we are not (Riverside Sermons, p. 229).

Does anyone doubt that those words could have been written yesterday? Fosdick moved from there to the repetition of what we call “The Lord’s Prayer”— found in Matthew 6:9-13 and, in slightly different and truncated form, in Luke 11:2-4—in the worship services of most churches and to call attention to its use of “Our,” as in “Our Father . . . our daily bread . . . our debts . . . etc.”, which became his motif for “throwing the light”  of this symbol of community on various areas of human experience.

And with that we will leave behind the “sermonic” flavor of this topic and, with my continued fascination at the timelessness of Fosdick’s observations nearly a century ago, move on to explore the need for an understanding of and a quest for community in our present world.

While we will return to the importance, and often absence, of a sense of community in individual and local awareness, let’s begin with the glaring lack of it at the global level. It is a crowded, comprehensive world, with nations pressed up against each other and yet often at odds with one another. While closeness cries out for togetherness, a host of other forces push us apart—economic differences in both form and supply, the prevalence of racial discrimination and animosities, and—with apologies for becoming political—the push of the current U.S. administration toward isolationism, which is an attempt to return to a national posture which, in my opinion, simply will not work in this world of burgeoned national entities which are interlaced with myriad agreements, initiatives, entities, and common interests.

My hope is that the new president and administration will make good on the promises—and I don’t envy them the task—to heal our differences and bring us together in a spirit of community, while also reestablishing the relationships with other national bodies which have been wounded and broken over the past four years.

On the one hand, I understand—sometimes better than I would like—those personal deficiencies that can be setbacks, stumbling blocks to our sense of community: selfishness resulting in our unwillingness to share what we have with those who are without; envy of the possessions or personal characteristics of others; the practice of subtle forms of racial discrimination which bely our beliefs and assurances that we are not “racists;” our tendencies to withdraw into the “silos” that beckon from our work life, our family life, our friendship circles, even our church life.

And yet, even the natural world offers examples of the crucial importance of harmony and community—hydrogen and oxygen; subatomic particles, atoms, and molecules; planets and solar systems; ants in their colonies, birds in their flocks. Everyone, of course, is familiar with Darwin and his view of natural selection’s competitiveness in the evolutionary cycle, but not many are as familiar with Kropotkin’s view of “mutual aid” which guided the evolution of all life on earth.

Peter (Pyotr) Kropotkin (1842^–1921), who was born into an aristocratic, land-owning Russian family, was a protean, highly accomplished writer who published books on a dazzling array of topics, including ethics, economics, socialism, political science, and philosophy, but it was his fascination with and research in evolution and his strong case for the common thread—what he posited as the scientific law of mutual aid, which guided the evolution of all life on earth—that tied these seemingly disparate topics together and that I want to call to our attention. This law boils down to Kropotkin’s deep-seated conviction that what we today would call altruism and cooperation was the driving evolutionary force behind all social life, be it in microbes, animals or humans.

When Kropotkin began a series of expeditions in Siberia, he was already an avowed evolutionary biologist and a great admirer of Darwin and his theory of natural selection. So in the icy wilderness he was to explore, he expected to find “nature red in tooth and claw,” but instead, everywhere he observed animal life, he found “mutual aid”—individuals that huddled for warmth, fed one another, guarded their groups—all seeming to be components of a larger cooperative community.

In one sense, this is not new to us—we have all seen in the animal, even the insect, world that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in those associations their best weapons in the struggle for life and survival. While Fosdick, in the sermon I have referenced, does not cite nor indicate that he was familiar with Kropotkin’s views, he does offer examples that Kropotkin no doubt also saw and that we all could cite—e.g. bees in their hives, wolves in their packs—and he makes the same observation that Kropotkin did, that the solitary animals that stayed to themselves have died out—in Kropotkin’s words, “The unsociable species . . . are doomed to decay.”

It was not a big jump for Kropotkin, the young scientist, to move from the animal to the human world, because in the small Siberian villages, he witnessed human cooperation and altruism in its purest form.  This enabled him to conclude that not all human societies were based on competition as were those of industrialized Europe, and that many societies exhibited cooperation among individuals and groups as the norm. So following the models of independent cooperative communities he discovered, he developed his theory of “mutual aid,” that “it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human.”

Given his belief that natural selection favored societies in which mutual aid thrived, Kropotkin even coined a new scientific term—progressive evolution—to describe how mutual aid became the sine qua non of all societal life—animal and human. Kropotkin’s virtual “redefinition,” if you will, of Darwinian natural selection probably caught fire less in the scientific world than it did in the field of social theory, but I find it, nevertheless, a persuasive element that enhances rather than simply contradicts the evolutionary saga.

So, after this long digression, what’s the point? It’s obvious, I hope: that even the “progressive evolution” of the world itself points to the crucial importance of harmony, altruism, cooperation, collaboration, helpfulness—“community,” if you please—in the basic development of life on this planet.

To reference Fosdick again—briefly and mostly apart from this evolutionary story—he points out that even our basic selfishness plays to the need for community; that is, the things we covet the most—e.g. our physical health, sound drinking water, the morals of our children, peace in our world—we can’t get alone as individuals or as nations. “We cannot have anything we most want unless we share it.”

It is also important to note that this iconic idea and reality of community is significantly important from the global to the local levels. As the world has gotten increasingly smaller—given the speed at which we can cover distance and the technologies that allow virtual instant communication anywhere on the planet—it has become crucially important that nations as well as states, provinces, cities, neighborhoods, and organizations develop a sense of community—of cooperation, of recognition, of connection, of common purpose, of support.

Now, all of that said, assuming it is sound, and that the case is basically made for the crucial importance of community, I want to turn, in a second post, to explore some of the primary setbacks to the realization of community. Surely the list could go on and on, but I promise I will mention only three and I hope you will follow along.