What is the State of Community?
The Individual, the community. and the institution - What Mumford missed, according to Critchley
Continuing the discussion of Mumford.
Peter Critchley, writing about the twentieth-century luminary, Lewis Mumford, underscores the importance of community involvement:
Mumford particularly valued the corporate and communal character of Medieval urban life. ‘To exist, one had to belong to an association, a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild. There was no security except in association, and no freedom that did not recognise the obligations of corporate life’.
What Mumford writes here is not dissimilar to the functional mediation proposed by Hegel, the idea that individuals create the identity only by belonging to a corporate or social bloc or association. The individualism and atomism that reduces bourgeois civil society to a sphere of universal antagonism and egoism is held in check by church and guild organisation. These are the pillars of town life. The Medieval City conformed to Aristotle’s definition of a community as ‘the common interest in justice and the common aim, that of the good life’ (CC 1938:29 17).
In reading the works of historians and philosophers I come across the use of the word corporate as conveying quite a different meaning than it has today. Although a corporation can be of any size and organization, from an organization owned by a single owner to one owned by many shareholders, today the word corporation is associated with large corporations as attested to by merely looking up the meaning on a web search. However, as corporation is being used in Mr. Critchley’s discussion of Mumford it means organized community involvement. The question is how is the community effectively organized?
Today corporations have become so large that they have taken on a totalitarian character and are now engendering strong reactions from alienated factions. There is no way that such large centralized managed institutions can genuinely accommodate the diversity of man but In decentralized societies with many points of power and a network of focal points, there are places where even misfits can fit.
Ossiana Tepfenhart is a voice from a young generation writing about the decline of the club scene and the rise of the young mass shooter who builds up anger against society but has no way to connect with others in a way that would mitigate pent-up emotions. Club culture for all its downsides creates diversified spaces where misfits can find belonging. She wrote:
Many people in the generations younger than Millennials forgot (or never learned) how to make friends and talk to people. I can’t even name how many 20-year-olds I’ve heard talk about being afraid to talk to people. Social Anxiety is no joke and has become a mainstream issue. Social skills among the youth are plummeting Everyone’s Ignoring A Major Warning Sign About American Youth Culture by Ossiana Tepfenhart
Why? I speculate that it is a long-time effect of a centralized society wherein the masses of people are treated as mere instruments of the machine, automatically silenced should they speak outside of management’s agenda, threatening management’s authority. It’s always about authority, that which defines an authoritarian society.
The result is populous that treads carefully in an attempt to get along in the system by not making any waves and alienating the authentic self from the community.
Typically, group engagement commences with each person stating their name and location and the moderator asks if one has something to say. In a recent meeting, I said, “Nothing particular- I am just listening”. I don’t think it would make a difference if I had spoken then instead of within the flow of the conversation. It did not feel natural to talk before listening.
Later in the conversation, after someone expressed the importance of addressing the heavy metal poisoning in the local soil, I spoke in the group for the first time and introduced the issue of the way the distribution of Department of Transporation funding goes first to those communities with the most money in hand, and although the cost is split three way between the State, the municipality, and the developer, the developer is given authority over the design. I also brought up the issue of dark money in non-profit funding taking the place of the traditional protocol in the public process.
The group platform in which I spoke identifies with grassroots organizing, which starts locally. In that group, my identity is as a representative of my local issues.
The moderator interrupted me before I was finished with my thought to say that it is inappropriate to discuss this topic at this time, asserting arbitrary rules of procedure over getting to know the person who is joining the group for the first time, and closing down the discussion without ever opening it. This is my repetitive and consistent experience of the current standard of local group interaction, including grassroots organizations. There is no reason to show up in person. It would be better to listen to a recording.
In turn, community resentment grows against anyone that demonstrates original initiative and creativity. The latter category tends to be small grassroots entrepreneurs, people who healthfully believe in themselves and their perceptions and abilities.
Substack is one way to materialize one’s own beliefs into a social form. There is no algorithm used on Substack. One has to create one’s own following. I already had the Andersen Design following when I started my Substack newsletter but I had no idea that the Andersen Design following would respond as well as it has when I started writing about everything that affects our world. This shows that any organization is greater than its surface identity, it is also a community.
Locally, a small group of people with coordinated interests dominates the Boothbay Peninsula. Our municipalities are run as corporations by those who know how to maneuver themselves into controlling positions over public resources but missing the part about public service.
Wendy Wolf is one such from a corporate non-profit background. She was once the head of the now dormant Joint Economic Development Council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor and is now head of the planning board in Boothbay Harbor.
Wendy Wolf supported the Boothbay roundabout with a scolding sound bite about the roundabout not being a referendum on Paul Coulombe. In Wendy Wolf’s message, the virtue of the roundabout was in what it wasn’t, and what it wasn’t was about Paul Coulombe rather than about the road system that would soon become what isn’t or the road system that now is. In other words, she was gaslighting the public by diverting attention to Paul Coulombe by claiming that the issue was not about Paul Coulombe. At the same time, Wolf was personalizing the debate by unsubstantially implicating the motivations of anyone against the roundabout as a means to divert attention away from the substantial issues of the debate.
Ms. Wolf brings the practices of the corporate world into municipal government. That is what happens when government becomes a public-private relationship. True to the corporate order, instead of a community being developed by those familiar with its culture, it is assumed by leaders of hybrid organizations that a remote consultant knows how a community grows better than its inhabitants. Large sums of money are spent to hire consultants who rely on data compilation systems, while the populous that has a living relationship to the community is excluded. Thus I was told “to go get help from my own peer group” when I approached the council with my vision for a museum.
At the time I also sent the proposal to Mr. Coulombe’s foundation, which did not respond. In both instances, I envisioned the Museum located at the Center, by the Common, where crafts fairs have been held since medieval times and placed it in the context of the large institutions on our peninsula that are the perpetual economic development talking points. I said, “imagine this in the mix”, but there was to be no conversation.
Later in a Boothbay Register article titled Boothbay chooses three priorities from Camoin report. it is stated that “Last fall, Camoin issued a report with 63 priorities. Both select boards reviewed the report and recently narrowed priorities to three each.” with a subtitle that states ”Selectmen cite housing, regional collaboration, industrial park as main economic development drivers”
This begs the question, would the selectmen have been able to arrive at three priorities without the $79000.00 Town Plan by New York consultants? Obviously, they were already doing regional collaboration because the JECD, the group that hired the New York consultants, purports to be a collaborative regional group. When Covid arrived the JECD quit, even though regional cooperation was one of the three selected priorities chosen from the $79000.00 plan that the JECD purchased.
The Camoin Report did not recommend a fifty-million dollar school. That has been driven by Paul Coulombe and unknown benefactors who paid for the architects to design the school under Coulombe’s initiative. There has been no regional consideration in the ambition to locate a major school on the peninsula.
The Individual, the community, and the institution
What Mumford missed, according to Critchley
Mumford is concerned with the way of life and what this implies with respect to the human condition. Mumford’s ‘utopianism’ possesses a heuristic character which is concerned to articulate the values of an alternate society. This places the emphasis upon new values, feelings and relationships rather than upon institutions. Whilst this approach has great strengths, giving Mumford’s insights on The City in History and on the future prospects for the city a profound moral dimension, it also suffers from a crucial limitation. Mumford’s emphasis upon the transformation of values and inner conversion as a precondition of revolution led him to neglect the need to change institutions. Whereas Mumford maintained a false antithesis between values and institutions, there is a need to ensure the coincidence of institutional and moral transformation. Failure to ensure this coincidence led Mumford’s project of reform in an apolitical direction that failed to connect the moral ideal with the material and social forces and agencies for its realisation.
The Museum of American Designer Craftsmen is a hypothetical institution that resides in my imagination, a network of museums functioning in the Mumford model of decentralized regionalism. All that is required to get it moving is finding people with which one can collaborate, an elusive ambition.
Social clubs celebrate the uniqueness of people in a recreational environment. Designer-Craftsmanship celebrates the uniqueness of human creativity in a work environment, Andy Warhol tapped into both streams.
Mixing it up and turning it around
Andy Warhol created a club atmosphere at his factory that made the workers into celebrities and mass media celebrities into subjects of production images, sold as prestige objects of art. While much about the Warhol scene was dark, his success needs to be recognized for the evocative twists he incorporated into conventional formulas. Whereas prestige objects of art were traditionally valued for their rarity, Warhol made prestige art objects using a production process and reinvented the workplace as a social scene, or vice versa, the social scene at the core of work, one being free and spontaneous human interaction and the other requiring a disciplined focus and the skills of a craftsman.
The seeds Warhol planted emerged in new forms. During the dot.com era workplace culture almost became a playpen before sobering into the myth of a culture of work as heightened community involvement that could only exist within the hallowed walls of the corporate order.
Meanwhile, the narrative on the street was that creative corporate community involvement is limited to the few as the politics of the corporate hierarchical system is designed to keep most in their place on the grid. Creative opportunity exists only for the power elite.
Elon Musk, king of the large corporate domain, stamping his petulant foot, is mandating that all workers show up at headquarters for a minimum of forty hours a week singing the old-time corporate hymn where “hustlers” meet for “spontaneous idea generation”. What hype! As a coder recently wrote, it is very maddening to spend high dollars to drive to work just to sit in a room doing work that can be done anywhere, and meetings continue to take place on Zoom. Perhaps Mr. Musk believes that all his employees drive Telsas, or maybe he just doesn’t think of the cost of gas, the pocketbook, or the environment.
In There Is No Talent Shortage In The Corporate World, Pete Ross writes about an artificially imposed labeling of workers as “high potential” and “low potential”.
There is, however, a huge pool of people with everything upper management is looking for, who are routinely overlooked because they don’t fit the mould of whoever gets to define what talent is.
As Pete Ross describes the corporate culture, there are many hoping for an opportunity to engage their talents but the door is closed to them by the political order of the corporation. They are the misfits. By definition, misfits, by the very fact that they are outside of the current system, are a ground source of creativity that can be channeled for the better or the worse. As the world becomes more centralized, the authentic self is a universal misfit manifesting as a lone shooter, an organized cult, or a collective spontaneous mutual awakening. How do we structure institutions to capture this subliminal force in a socially constructive way? It begins with listening and recognizing the value of work engagement to human wellbeing.
To belong, the misfit has to reinvent the system. As a critical mass of misfits forms into a spontaneous mutual consciousness fed up with the exile of the authentic self from the community, the towers of centralized power, through a conflation of events, are tumbling down and decentralization is manifesting in its wake.
Misfits are drawn to social clubs out of the sheer visceral quest for community belonging. The club scene is a creative community for individuals looking for a way to harness their creativity into a socially accepted form. Night clubs are decentralized fields of interaction that “places the emphasis upon new values, feelings and relationships rather than upon institutions” creating the opportunity for people to be themselves. There are no rules of engagement. People just make them up as they go. We need to reinvent improvisational spaces for the needs of this era.
Institutions are external and formal organizational structures.
While the attraction of the chaotic freedom of the nightclub allows the individual to experience the freedom of expression it is commonly a transitional phase of life toward a new structure and more ordered form of existence.
Community blossoms onto a higher plane when visceral desire and formal structure meet and greet. Opposites attract!
One of the issues confronting clubs today is that they are no longer economically affordable to the communities they once served. A network of local designer craftsmen museums can be an affordable alternative that incorporates the spontaneous social environment of a club and the more ordered and focused environment of a designer-craftsman, in spaces that integrate the need for freedom of individual expression, and the need for work engagement within a more inclusive economy. That needs to be part of the housing picture, but, past and present community leaders do not support such ideas being included in the conversation. That is why the conversation needs to live on Substack.
Grassroots organization begins with the people. Each individual in a region has a unique perspective and ideas. When people are feeling pent up, first there needs to be a space and a community for free-flowing and imaginative interaction and then avenues, where that energy can be directed constructively. I believe that a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen can be both of those things and that as small studios develop around a supportive cultural center, the home studios also extend the community environment.
The current power elite is coordinated in their shared vision of the Peninsula as an upscale community with grid housing for the targeted workforce providing services needed by the community or working in targeted sector corporate jobs located in the industrial park with targeted industrial workforce training provided by the fifty million dollar school.
There has long been a sustained effort by the Town selectmen to discourage grassroots entrepreneurs who work on their own terms. However, today there are so many changes happening simultaneously across the economic spectrum that the future is not as certain as it was even a few months ago. The silver lining is that it opens up the possibility for alternatives.
My vision is an environmentally sustainable low-density community accommodating the businesses in a home lifestyle. This is what a large segment of the workforce wants.
The Museum of American Designer Craftsmen, as a fiscal sponsor, would provide a system that can make studios in a home attainable, Housing would be customized to suit the purposes of the artisan, consistent with the historical nature of the Peninsula rather than a repetitive, one size fits all grid, consistent with the historical megalopolis.
This museum has been living in my head for a long time, The lifestyle of a designer craftsman is built on meaningful work engagement for people of ordinary means and beyond. It’s an open opportunity to define one’s own growth potential.
Until I read the following passage from Mr, Critchley’s paper, I had never come across another voice saying that small is just as economically viable as large. This passage written in 1934, could be about the Museum that’s been living in my head. In the 1970s, Maine was this kind of an experience. Then Maine had the fastest-growing small enterprise sector in the country.
Mumford’s ideal conception of regionalism entails decentralisation, smaller physical scale and greater geographical dispersal. The various dispersed entities would be connected to each other within a regional network. In Technics and Civilisation , Mumford identifies Henry Ford’s ‘Village Industry’ experiments as an example of the kind of decentralisation on a regional scale that he advocates. Ford’s experiments were criticised as public relations or as union busting exercises (Segal 1988:181/223). Without ever becoming the apologist for Ford’s labour relations or politics, Mumford was more concerned to emphasise the role of new technology in facilitating the transfer of production processes from the central facilities to form a regional network of decentralised plants.
In the Culture of Cities Mumford acknowledges that previous schemes for industrial decentralisation, often branch plants away from major plants, originated in the pursuit of higher profits or in the concern to undermine the unions. Mumford decries the general lack of small scale, of decentralised industries as well as of the garden cities capable of sustaining them. In the most public example of planned regionalism in existence at that time, the Tennessee Valley Authority, Mumford is concerned to argue that industrial decentralisation is as economically efficient and as profitable as the centralisation traditionally favoured. Thus ‘bigger no longer automatically means better’. Rather, ‘the new marks of efficient industry’ are ‘flexibility of the power unit, closer adaptation of means to ends, nicer tuning of operation’ (TC 1934).