Common Good Podcast

Pete Davis: Nostalgia & Prophecy

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 The big message of the doc, we say it right from the beginning is this is a film about why you should join a club and why the fate of America depends on it. And as we made the doc, I just believed more and more and more and more in that theory. At the beginning, it was kind of just this interesting finding from Bob Putnam that community groups help lead toe functioning democracy and functioning institutions and thriving economies and better health outcomes and things like that. And I thought that was like a nice technical social science discovery, and you can kind of find some of the causal mechanisms. Like, when you know people, ideas spread more. When you know people, there's more trust and there's more watchdogging of institutions and people check up on you and that's how you get healthier and things like that. But as I've gone deeper and deeper, I actually have discovered more and more and more ways that this actually might be the Archimedean lever that could help rejuvenate society, Like just the basic act of associating with other people in a formal organization. One aspect of that is you know, it's not just that formal organizations are a place where there's community. I've gotten more and more during the making of this film, the belief that formal associational life is also where you exercise agency. It's a free space. Some have referred to it as like the commons  where  life is more underprogrammed than daily life usually is. Like we're over programmed in life. Too many spaces in our daily life are over programmed by consumer forces or bureaucratic forces  or professional forces. And a club is actually a place where you can sit around with other people and you can say, what do we want the world to be? Maybe it's just in our corner of what do we want pickleball in the society to be. But that little spark of collective agency is a spark that can catch fire and remind you that this world is a world that you can co create. And the second thing is that clubs I've discovered from interviewing these six clubs we do in the film that are really thriving. I've also discovered there's kind of a spiritual element to clubs, which is that  something verging on the religious is happening when you decide to commit and cultivate a club over the long haul.  You go to an Odd Fellows meeting and we aren't able to see the secret parts of the ceremony but even in the public parts of the ceremony, the rituals, the routines, the vestments, things like that. It creates an air in the room of the spiritual. It reminds you that life is bigger than ourselves, that there's something else going on here. That there's something beyond even our own deaths that matters. That's why we called the film Join or Die, you know. And, when we were starting the film, we were a little more materialist and we've kind of discovered the spiritual realm of associational life.

So the one thing I was really interested to talk about related to the documentary is this nostalgia that a lot of this work has for the 1950s. I think  Parker says, this is the first moment  in history where we're trying to do a multi ethnic, multi racial  democracy. This is a really a novel experiment. It's quite different 1950s were like. And a lot of times when people are talking about, we got to bring back clubs, we've got to rebuild social capital they're looking at a time when there was a bunch of inequality. So give us some ways to think about that. So that that time can be both placed within its larger context, but also still be  an example for us to to strive for. 

Yeah, the figure that we spotlight in the film is Bob Putnam. And, one thing that Bob, who is the one who wrote Bowling Alone and kind of turned me on to these ideas  One of the things I really appreciate about Bob is Bob from the start, has always said the goal is not to go back to the 1950s. Just because we're spotlighting the period in the mid 20th century when there was high social capital and high associational life in America, that does not mean that the goal is to reverse the clock to that period, because there were a lot of other qualities  and social phenomena at the time that were very bad and we're very glad we're liberated from. And so he's always said the goal is to find that spirit of community and plant it in new soil, meeting the new opportunities, the new problems, and the new people  and groups of people that are here today, not you know, Reverse the clock. So it won't look like with all love to all those clubs in the hopes that they can each be rejuvenated who were big in the 1950s, you know, the good clubs not the, the darker clubs of the 1950s. The rejuvenation of American community in the 21st century will not just look like those literal clubs that were at their peak then getting members back. It's going to be a flourishing of new cities. Civic creativity and new clubs and beyond clubs, new community institutions and new community programs within all the different types of institutions in America. I also like that Bob likes to point out that I think is a really interesting mind shift is that we often pitch the high social capital era of the mid century as in opposition to the rights movements of the sixties and seventies. So we say there's hunky dory Kiwanis clubs in the fifties and then we had the feminist movement, the civil rights movement and the gay rights movement and the environmental movement. And those were a break from the high social capital days. But one interesting shift. If you look at stories of each of those movements, one could think of each of those movements as the culmination, not a break from a high social capital era. All of those movements emerged out of civic institutions, social clubs and social formations and high social trust among the movement, building up through churches and unions and different civic groups and high social trust cities that allowed people to come together and have meeting rooms and have funding and have agency and civic skills that allowed them to become leaders in the civil rights movement, the feminist movement and gay rights movement. So it's not social capital versus rights movements. It often is the opposite. Finally, I'll just get realist here. There are real challenges of bridging across divides to build community. And we can't just have community groups that are all with people that are similar to us. If we want to hold together as a country and hold together as a democracy we have to figure out ways of having community groups that bridge across divides  that bridge across class divides, race divides, political divides, and often I always like to say is those groups might not look like the form of We are starting a group to bridge across divides, quote unquote, but rather groups that are about something totally different, but are mindful and capacious enough to not just appeal to one type of person, but actually bring people together. So, for example, you know, a unionization campaign we have in the movie, Jane McAlevey, the great labor, organizer who sadly just passed away this past week. She always was very articulate  about how like a unionization campaign might bridge people across political divides and racial divides. And so we need more things like that  uh, that bring people together. 

One thing that really jumped out at me  the movie was that it seemed like you implied  that The campaign for hyper  individualism was orchestrated in response to the civil rights movement, was some thinking that the way we counter these rights movements is through more of a focus on individualism. Could you talk about that a little bit? Did I misconstrue that? 

I have my own opinions about this, my sister who made the movie with me has her own opinions about this, but in the movie we wanted to kind of not go put our finger too hard on one side of the debate because there is a real debate about why community declined. Even within Bob himself, the leading expert on community declining in America, he has a debate inside of himself of why community declined. Sometimes he said it was television. Other times it was generational change. Other times it was this moral shift that he talks about in his recent book, The Upswing. What I think you're referencing in the movie is we had Jane McAlevey, the labor organizer, talk about concerted efforts to promote individualism and in kind of like  a fear of these rights movements as collective action, there's too much collective action going on. We need to promote individualist. There's also a Cold War element to that, which is could community be associated with conformity and big structures and communism and there's kind of a Cold War individualist strand to the Cold War  spirit at home. What also the civil rights movement connection, Eddie Glaude. And I think he's kind of riffing off of Heather McGhee's great recent book, The Sum of Us.  There's kind of this understanding that there was an escape from public life after the civil rights movement, where a bunch of communities decided  if our public life is going to be integrated, our public pools or public schools or public spaces are going to be integrated, we'd rather not have public life at all. Then be integrated in public life. And so he talks about how they abandon those spaces. And you see the shooting up of segregation academies, private pools,  tax revolts you know, and that's all part of this theory that community might have possibly declined because of that. So there's a lot of different theories out there on that. And we wanted to include them in the film. 

Your response reminds me of something I know you and I both care a lot about is like. We see potentially today a swell or an upswell in potentially a new communitarian wave. And at the same time, we see a lot of the solutions coming outta that communitarian wave to be more individualistic in nature. Where it almost feels like, Hey, you've said this in your interview with me, you want community,  try this app that helps you make friends and so I'm curious, how you think about one, this kind of current moment and the communitarianism that's tinged with our now 60 plus years of learned individualism and flowing from that, what does it look like to kind of relearn a more uh,    

I've been having a hard time talking about this until I just found like the perfect metaphor for this yesterday. So I'm so glad you're asking this question. I was listening to a very weird podcast about magic. And it was this person who kind of studies esoteric traditions and weird kind of magic histories. And he went on this long rant. I'll shout him out. His name is Connor Habib, and he has this kind of magic podcast. And there's another great magic podcast called Weird Studies  which are these two kind of twin magic podcasts. And they were both talking about how in the deep magic, this is going to sound weird, but it'll get back to your point.   He was ranting about how some people practicing magic are still practicing a very materialist version of magic. And this is going to make sense. I swear this isn't going to fully remain weird the whole time. He was saying if someone goes to  a fortune teller and they say I want to know what my specific future will be or I want to be able to get money or I want to be able to get this thing that I want in the material world. And the fortune teller gives them some specific thing they want in the material world. That's like one form of magic. Another form of magic that's like this is, I have the ability to move objects in the material world to get things done in the material world. And he went on this big rant against this because he said That's not the deepest sense of magic. What that is, is that you just trying to have an extra tool in the material world. You want money in the material world, then this extra supernatural thing can help you get money even better. You want to  be super strong in the material world because of material values. And this extra chant that you say to yourself makes you super strong in the material world. He says, deep magic is you actually go into the spirit realm and you have different values and you have different wants and you have different desires and you draw on something that it's like the old Monty Python line. And now for something completely different,  you know, the way they used to end scenes. And I think this is very similar,  let's get back to earth now away from these weird podcasts. This thing is very similar in community, which is  all of our  hyper individualist values, I want ambition, I want money, I want health, I want to be the healthiest person, I want to live forever, I don't want to die, I want all the success, or on a political level, I want our town's GDP to go up,  I want our town's public health data to go up, all good stuff, like I like materialist goals as well, but the way we're talking about community often is Oh, if you join a club, or if you have a little bit more social capital in your life, your town will be a little bit more economically productive, your health will go up. Like I say this in the movie, so I'm not criticizing people.  We make this argument in the movie. Or,  you will be able to fulfill that tiny hole in your life that's making you feel unhappy, or you will be able to be healthier, you're going to be able to have more fun on Saturdays. That's one level of community. Individualist community. The real level is now for something completely different. You start thinking about your whole life differently. You start thinking about that your purpose is something bigger than just yourself. You start thinking about that. The purpose of the common wheel of a town is completely different. It's not just to make a lot of money and have a lot of success as a town. It's to come together closer and closer and find kind of a sense of what it means to be human. It makes you deeper in your humanity. It gives you this new mythology of like, what success is. I just Saw a recent article that said, we need to trade personal ambition for moral ambition. It starts rewiring your whole sense of meaning. That is what deep community is. And I'm not ripping on what it sounds like I'm ripping on one and succeeding the other. I just think there's different levels. And I think if we stick at the plateau of one, we're not going to get the full benefits of what we want out of community. And we're not going to see what people in really high community eras really felt that was different.

In your interview with Sam, you talked about how we need to imagine tools to rebuild community from a communitarian  perspective and sorry to be incredibly practical, but do you have examples  of what that has looked like or could look like? What are some of the tools that  aren't based in the individualistic dogma. 

I'll say two things. One is I just think deep and simple, So have you guys ever heard that phrase Lindy? Oh, there's this idea called the Lindy method. Nicholas Nassim Taleb recently popularized it, which is things that have existed for a long time in the past, it probably will probably exist a long time into the future. And the kind of being Lindy spirit is to think about  deep and simple things that have been around for a long time. So basic associational life. Basic senses of a city having connections with each other and thinking about what's best for the city and creating things in the city of public life, creating commons where people interact together to steward a common resource,  these things that have been around for a thousand years are these things that kind of are not quick fixes, things that have you connect in the real world  and fully get to know each other in a deep way over the long haul. Those are like really practical tools. In terms of mindset shifts, I think there's a lot of things that kind of do well when your mind starts shifting to a more communitarian spirit. So here's a great example of a great mindset shift  there's this group out of Virginia Tech called the maintainers that I'm really into. And the maintainers Have this whole idea that we over celebrate innovation in our society and we don't celebrate the people that maintain things and they talk about it on a really practical way like the people that maintain electric wires or come and fix broken devices or hem clothes but they also mean it in a cultural way, which is the people that maintain relationships, the people that maintain  people who are sick and dropping out of society or people who are wayward and dropping out of society and help maintain their presence in society by caring for them. They say we should have more celebrations of maintainers instead of just and only celebrating innovators. And my friend Elias Krim has been turning me on to them recently. And that's a mindset shift, you know, a city could not just celebrate all the people that have invented things in their city or did a big new fancy thing in their city, which is important to you got to move the ball forward, but also the people that maintain things a communitarian I would slowly start appreciating that as well and build statues to  the human maintainers of the town, the people that kept people coming to some institution or kept people involved or cared for people when they were falling off.

One of the things that I've been kind of grappling with here, Pete, and I'm curious how you think about this is, and this is actually not a question about nostalgia. I think the nostalgia piece is like anchoring towards the 1950s, which I think in some ways we just anchor towards because, the metrics that Putnam had peaks in the late 50s and 1960s. So we anchor towards that time. I'm actually thinking like deeper history here. Like How much of what we're talking about  is just undoing some of what's been done  in the industrial age,  when I'm rereading Robert Nisbet and quest for community right now and like so much of a quest for community is like, we've lost the mediating institutions and the functions of those mediating institutions that  gave our lives cohesion  and allowed us to feel a greater purpose and belonging.  How much is it just rebuilding those things versus how much of it building things anew? I think this is something I'm like holding that right now, and I'm curious how you think about that. 

One of the interesting things about the mid century civics in America is they were one of the great first responses to the industrial age. Like the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, you would have just done that in your village,  Oh, we teach you how to fix things, build things, scavenge for things, navigate nature. That's just all what you would have done. And then it was lost. And  this wave that we're talking about losing is like two degrees of nostalgia because it was nostalgia for that lost thing and then attempting to rebuild that. And so part of this is a critique of  nostalgia poo pooing, that nostalgia built community because they said we really liked that and we missed that and we don't want to give that up. So unfortunately we're gonna have to  bake it into this kind of form that is a little bit  contrived, which is we're going to give you merit badges for doing a thing people just naturally did a hundred years prior. But it worked. And so that's one example. Another example is parks like Frederick Law Olmsted. You know, where would you meet? You'd meet in the field.  Suddenly the field is getting covered up by everything, and the only places where people could play in open fields were like cemeteries  in big industrial cities.  then people thought, oh, why don't we affirmatively set aside places in cities that are places where you can meet in semi nature that's a little contrived for our nostalgia for meeting in the fields, and that's why we have parks. And  so in many ways,  the quest for community is always that, and so, nostalgia is very old. And responses to nostalgia is part of that. And, a lot of the history of the Catholic Church is kind of lost village society and figuring out institutional forms that can bring back spirits of a village society as society industrializes. So, there's always a history of lost things and how can we find the fire in the bottle  of Things that are lost by contriving new things.  That's not a cynical take at all. That's the spirit of humanity searching and continuing to figure out ways to return to the source of things that they miss and love. I think that's a beautiful thing. 

Yes. Oh, It's my favorite poem. And I think it's all we need to know about how to get out of dark times.  February 2nd, 1968 by Wendell Berry. Two lines long in the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading families, dying the world in danger. I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover.

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter. War spreading, families dying, the world in danger. I walk the rocky hillside sowing clover.

So going from nostalgia to the prophetic. We're influenced an awful lot by Walter Brueggemann. And he talks about the prophetic imagination containing two dimensions. The first of which is critiquing the status quo. And the second is imagining an alternative reality and alternative community. How do you think about the prophetic as it relates to the regeneration of community? 

I'm just a big giant fan, it's a weird thing to say, I'm a big giant fan of the prophetic, it's so lame, lame way to put like one of the biggest concepts in humanity and existence. You know, I love this Roberto Unger, a prophet in his own right, the Brazilian philosopher, he has this phrase, we need to unsever the link between insight into the actual and imagination of the possible and that two step between imagination of the possible and practical insights into where we're at now and therefore figuring out the first step in the direction of the dream is the way things get better. You dream of something bigger, then have insight into where we are now and what would be a step in the direction of something bigger. What is the dreaming of something bigger? That's prophecy.  There's two Strands to prophecy that I like one strand is kind of this Hungarian strand, which is just dreaming of a vision of an alternative. We need  utopian thinking, thinking of ways that things could be better and sketching them out in a pungent and inspirational way. I think it gets way, way, way too bad of a rap. It's the type of thing that inspires people to start doing things. They read about these dreams of a world being different and then a bunch of practical things come out of it. So that's one. The more biblical Heschelian, you know, Abraham Joshua Heschel sense of profit is someone who is calling us back to  the original spirit of what God wants of us. you know, You could have a secular version of it, which is any institution can be called back to its original mission of what it was originally founded for by  naming and shaming how far we've gone afield from where we need to be and then pairing that fire and brimstone with a dreamy vision of how we can be better, that's what all the biblical prophets are. it might've been Heschel. I think he said underneath all the thunder is a light. And so I think the communitarian movement needs that too. We need big visions like the mid century when Jane Jacobs dreamed of a better city or Buckminster Fuller dreamed of different ways of doing things, or small is beautiful was dreamed of or Ralph Nader dreamed of a different way beyond corporate control or Paul Goodman dreamed of no cars in Manhattan. All these different dreams from the mid century. We need that. And then we also need a little bit of communitarian fire and brimstone like We are not living in the way we should be living as humans. This is not a way to be, to not be connected with our neighbors. Someone called Bob Putnam an Old Testament prophet with charts. And I think we need a little bit of that too.  

You think that. The fifties and sixties were a special time for the emergence of the prophetic. What were the ingredients of that moment in history that you think led to this?

Yeah, I'm working on a project with my friend who I mentioned, Elias Krim on featuring some of these people and  these names I'm throwing out Jay Jacobs, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Ella Baker of the civil rights movement, Ivan Illich, the great priest dreamer, you know, uh, Dorothy Day and Peter Moore and all these different people thinking Paul Goodman, all these people thinking at the time some of them still around Wendell Berry. What was interesting is that  seemed to be this emergence of big thoughts and big dreams about where we were going as a society and as humanity it wasn't phrased in the common phrasing of our time in terms of like technical charts and graphs. And little tiny ideas about adjustments we can make based on our charts and graphs. It was big questions about  what are the ways our cities are organized and what should a city be? What is our relationship with nature and how should it be? What is our relationship with the future? And what should it be? Marshall McLuhan asking, what does it mean to interact with media? These big, giant structural questions infused with kind of a mix of spiritual thoughts and political thoughts and cultural thoughts. And what I think they all emerged out of was, we had a huge amount of things happen to society between 1860 and 1940. There's that famous idea, people in one generation could have been born before we had  plane flight and you're dying when we have space flight, you know, you're going through two world wars, Elias says, and this project we're putting out on this lost profits coming soon. He talks about how Tony Jutt talked about how it was an era of death.  People were asking, is there humanity after Auschwitz? People were asking after world war one, they were writing poems, what does it mean to be human after world war one? And then they were waking up in the fifties and suddenly it's like mass consumption, mass media, mass society, big cold war. And you're like back in the suburbs and going to the shopping mall and watching howdy duty on TV. And you're like, what the heck is going on here? some of that took the form of tune in, turn on, drop out and you know, hate Ashbury and acid and Woodstock others of it took a form as like some of the great books on deep spiritual thought and where we should go.  And I think it's worth exploring many of these people because many of their insights still apply today because we haven't really addressed many of the things that they talked about.

It's really fascinating hear you say that because I think  the guys that started with John and Peter and Walter are I don't know if they will appreciate being grouped in with that age of people,  but they really are and so to think about  what was the context, the environment that they were benefiting from, what was the water that they were drinking that led them to these conclusions that so inspire us to come to collective is a big thing.

You look at these people and I'm just such a big lumper instead of a splitter, I just kind of try to notice things that are similar that seem different. The same uneasiness that led someone to go to like Woodstock to drop acid or whatever and say like, I don't really care. The same uneasiness that maybe made people quit the Kiwanis Club. The same uneasiness that said, let's shake up the racial hierarchy in the South is the same uneasiness that led Thomas Merton to go to a monastery in Kentucky,  all of these are different answers, many of them more noble than others, many of them more significant than others, but I think they're all coming from the same sense of  What we thought was certain suddenly became an uncertainty and what we thought was learned needed to be unlearned and the questions became open again and I think we're due in for that again today. 

This is interesting, you actually just teed this up,  what do you feel like we're responding to right now?

One of my hunches is that out of that boiling cauldron of ways we can go, one of the ideas won out. And I don't think it won out because it was the best idea. I think it won out for many reasons. You know, It was a little bit enchanting, but it also had a lot of money behind it and powers that be were excited about it. And it kind of helped smooth over some contradictions that needed longer time to be worked out. And that idea that won out was  the roaring 80s.  let's make a lot of money. Let's globalize all the networks. Let's get everyone connected. Humanity is going to become a global village. It's going to be  staccato signals of constant information as Paul Simon sings about We had this computer and  globalization and money and people were writing in these totally techno utopian terms in the 80s and 90s about everything was going to be so all the way up to the early 2000s, Every TED talk in the early 2000s was like I've invented a thing that's gonna connect everyone and people are gonna do this amazing thing together and who knows what's gonna happen and I think that was one silver bullet that we thought was going to resolve all the contradictions. We thought the cosmopolitan spirit that led to many good things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was going to solve all the problems. All the post war good humanitarian stuff was going to solve this. We thought development was going to solve things. We thought tech was going to solve things. We thought Twitter was going to solve the revolutions. We thought everyone was going to intermarry and there wouldn't be any racial divides anymore. There's the cover of Newsweek where we'd all just be one type and there wouldn't be any ethnic divides. We thought  countries that both have McDonald's are going to fight each other. And then what I think is happening now is that mega theory of what's going to resolve our problems is falling apart as an answer, and you have the emergence of all the holes in that paradigm. Oh, there's still ethnic strife.  It's not looking like we're becoming a global village. The internet is not automatically solving everything. The money is not spreading to everyone and making everyone happy. All that explosion of action is leading to sustainability issues. And so we're kind of back to the drawing board. 

I would agree with the kind of definition or the observation that we're in a period now of great jockeying for what the  meta narrative of the next X number of years is going to be,  it's not clear that one is winning out. And  may take decades for one to clearly win out. I'm curious though, like what is the Pete Davis, you know, if Pete Davis is among the current cohort of folks cultivating prophetic imagination, what is the Pete Davis prophecy that you want to see went out in our shared lives?

One of the reasons I'm really excited about looking back on the Lost Prophets of the 70s is that I think they had a lot of good ideas. you know, You read Martin Luther King's triplets of evil speech about materialism and militarism and racism that still resonates today. You read Jane Jacobs talking about how to create a dynamic city that still resonates today. You read Ralph Nader talk about we're going to have corporate control and instead of having corporate globalization, we have to have civic globalization that still resonates today. Wendell Berry talking about love of place, that's still resonant.  You know, I see almost all of these emerge again, like there's Jacobsian urbanists now, and there's Naderite anti monopoly people, and there's Baryon people thinking about our food systems.  In the last 10 years, there's been an interest in like food justice again, and food sustainability. And so if I had to look at a summary of all three of these groups, if I had to get really deep and simple about this, I would say  there's three deep and simple ideas that I think are really important. One is that we need a deepening of democracy, which is not democracy as voting, it's democracy as people co creating their shared world. A sense of collective agency   Martin Luther King said that society leaves the person outside. What democracy is, is that you are brought inside of society. You are in the room. We blur the line between insiders and outsiders by expanding more power to more people in more ways. That's deepening democracy. Two is we need to deepen solidarity. We need to have more connections with more people in more ways. We need more care for more people in more ways and weave our stories together and blur the lines that divide people so we don't have entrenched divides not through Singing Kumbaya, imagine no more countries, not through just lamenting the divide, but actually affirmatively creating bonds between those  divides through new categories. The one I'm much less versed in and not as good to talk about, but I think we need to figure out is our relationship to nature. So, one's our relationship to the institutional form. The second's our relationship to each other. And I think there's something that's also about relationship to nature that needs to come. And that's what a lot of these lost prophets talk about. And the best ones are much more eloquent than me on weaving this all together. Of how democracy, solidarity, and  some might say sustainability. That's a little bit of a technical word. I'm sure there's more beautiful word out there for our relationship with nature. I think we got to figure those three out. And that's a long haul road of affirmative cultivation. There's no quick fixes that are going to get any of those done. 

I was really struck by a definition that you gave of community, which maybe this is kind of your go to, but you said that, Community is anything that weaves us together in a shared destiny. Where does that come from? Like, unpack that a little bit for me.

I'm very inspired by this Brazilian philosopher, Roberto Unger.  Half of my thoughts are just repackaging his, and he has this really beautiful idea. He doesn't talk about that specifically with community, but I kind of am riffing on an idea he has where he says our roots lie in the future.  when you see something like blood and soil nationalism, we are all one people. We have same ancestors on the same land. That's our roots lying in the past.  What Unger talks about, and actually I don't want to endorse everything the guy says, but the thinker Michael Lind also talks about this with his conception of nationalism. They're specifically talking about a nations. I'll talk about it in communities. They say. Actually, a nation is a group of people that are committed to having shared descendants, not shared ancestors. That's how Lind puts it, how Unger puts it is nations are shared projects. It's our decision to project into the future an idea of what we want the future to be. And when we work together in a space to do that, we're a shared nation. And I think that idea  helps unshackle the idea of community from some of the darker sides of nations built in the past. And they also show us what we're doing when we bind ourselves together. We're saying  we're gonna have some of our futures be bound together. And there's very mundane, cliche things like this. Like, let's think about our grandkids. Let's plant a tree that we will not sit under. That's what we're doing. So I was talking about nations, but this can apply to any community or or even something as small as a club or a marriage. That's what it is. That's we're having a shared future together.  I also think the basic  material  that goes into community is commitment. That's why I wrote this book dedicated, The Case for Commitment. And the basic idea of commitment, the reason why commitment is so hard is, is that it's about binding your future.  The opposite of commitment is the idea of keeping your options open, which is one of the most common creeds of our time among young people. Oh, I'm going to make this decision by keeping my options open. What commitment is, is not keeping your options open. It's saying by signing up for this, I'm a little bit sticky about the first Tuesday of every month at night at 7 p. m. I'm going to go to that meeting or even though I don't know what it's going to take if I'm going to bind together in a union with this group of people and one person has a need, we're going to be all for one and one for all. And that's what solidarity is. And so all of this is about  that sacrifice, which is the sacrifice of optionality over your future, a little bit of it, stickiness, not locked, you know, prison,  just a little bit of a sacrifice of optionality for the sake of doing things together. And I think  that's what commitment is and a bunch of commitments together. Wendell Berry would call it convocated. A bunch of your vocations become convocated into a shared piece of your life where you have a shared calling for what you're doing with the future. That's what community is. 

I've been doing some work around this idea of generating mythology around the common good. Okay. what I have come to suspect is that it's not about generating a new myth. Instead, it's about applying a different interpretive lens to the myths that we already have. 

Yes, yes. 

What advice do you have for me as I'm thinking about the mythology of the, common good?

I'm a huge believer in this.  I'm using the word nation, but this can apply at any level. So big nation, small nation, all of humanity, like the cosmopolitan project of everyone being together and something at any level. When you're forming a nation, you always find a past. You always claim a past. You don't just invent a past. So anytime someone is inventing anything, often the successful ones claim a bunch of things in history as part of themselves. It helps if there is a legitimate connection, but I don't think you even need a true legitimate connection that's fully historically all locked in.  and There's all these dark complexities and problematizing you can do of this, but Thomas Jefferson thought a lot about what Americans were the successor to, so he claimed Rome and Greece as like part of the American past, it didn't have to be, but then like architects started building that way because they said it's Greece, it's Rome, and then it's America. You could do it in a smaller way, like Steve Jobs claimed the whole Earth catalog as part of his past of when he was building Apple, Martin Luther King in the I Have a Dream speech, cites that he's a continuation of what Jefferson was writing in the Declaration of Independence. Everyone always tries to claim a past.  And so I think that's a really important thing, specifically on community and specifically on community in America. The idea that America is a particularly hyper individualist nation  is a PSYOP.   It has strands in its cultural history of Western cowboys and things like that. But it has a total communitarian heritage. This is a nation who was only able to come together as a nation because of a hundred year culture  of community and town meetings, like New England, a bunch of our culture emerged out of Quaker culture that was totally communitarian. All of the problematic, but a lot of the American founders were obsessed with the communitarian  of like the Iroquois and  Native Americans and they were obsessed with the communitarian styles of them. All of our rights movements were  the heritage of like the abolition movement  and the  civil rights movement is all of these communitarian stories and like all of the Norman Rockwell stuff That's like part of American or Frank Capra stuff is all about  towns coming together. That's what like it's a wonderful life is about. And even the West, which is often called an  individualist story, is often a story of small towns and  bands of people coming together. And the constitution itself has a whole communitarian ethic that Gordon Wood likes talking about instead of just like an individualist John Locke rights ethic. So I'm much more with E. J. Dionne on like our divided political heart that we have both strands. And the idea that we only have one and thus we're not a communal place, that Alexis de Tocqueville was wrong when he said that in America you're most likely to find an association I just don't buy it. I think we have both strands. So I think reclaim it. Reclaim the  common good history of this country.