By setting up an ideal and static vision of
past communities with fixed economic roles for the individual,
where satisfaction was derived from a communal identity
reinforced by face-to-face interaction, the author paints a
picture of social breakdown by technology.
These communities sit within a postbellum past,
never historically located, yet pictured as small villages where
everyone walks, talks, exchanges goods in a local economy. The
past of small communities is theoretically validated by
Durkheim’s “collective conscience”, as the interests of the
individual and the group are aligned and merged through shared
representations and a united moral vision. The communal
processes that reinforce the “collective conscience” are those
of the village:
The collective conscience reflects
the relations among individuals. Therefore, social relations are
created through the development of a collective conscience; the
collective conscience is then the instrument of social
relationships.
Durkheim’s theory of community is summarised
and defines the historical collectives that are portrayed as the
victims of technology.
The three technologies that cause the social
breakdown are the automobile, air conditioning and television.
All three have a commonality of effect: that is, they reduce
face-to-face interaction and remodel local spaces: a vicious
cycle that accentuates their impact upon economic and social
relations. Cars make suburbs; air conditioning empties porches
and television destroys the dining room. All of these
technologies are attacked as undermining the moral economy of
the local community. As such, the moral purpose of the author
and paper are at one.
In his Introduction, the author kindly quotes
Amitai Etzioni for portraying modern social structures. Without
providing any formal correspondence between the paper and the
society we actually live in, the author sketches a quick
sociological history. Communities are rolled up into the “larger
society”. Their economy, morals and behaviour are all determined
by the wider society:
These
reservoirs of labor are fed, clothed, sheltered and nurtured
from outside. Food, clothing, shelter and therapies are
generated from without the communities. The communities no
longer generate their rules, no longer do they actively maintain
the norms. When norms are broken, the infractions are reported
to agencies of the greater social order.
The norms of behavior and agreed moral rules
are the processes by which a living community refreshed and
reproduced itself. In turn, these communities were the pulse of
morality, and ensured that individual actions were guided in a
moral direction through membership and identification with the
collective.
The silencing of Etzioni’s ‘moral voices’ is
the cri de coeur that the author wishes to raise. Durkheim’s
theory of community becomes an explanatory tool to explain how
this has been achieved. As modern society lacks communities, it
has lost moral vision. This is described as a “deplorable
situation” and, by attacking progress, the paper is presents a
counter-teleology, a description of a process of the social
impact of technology, that proves moral descent outweighs
technological ascent. By analyzing the path from there to here,
the agenda is clear: understanding community is a precursor to
returning to this idealized state.
All three technologies have the same
destructive effect, yet we can concentrate upon one to draw out
the flaws within this methodology. Air conditioning provides the
clearest connection between the relationship of the individual
to the collective conscious, and reveals the need for these
envisioned communities to submit to traditional notions of the
natural. As we see, the moral community required an umbilical
connection with nature, in this instance, the weather, to
justify and police its morals:
It used to be
that people could not live in their houses when it was hot and
they could not live out of doors when it was cold. When it was
hot, people lived on their porches or in their yards under shade
trees and when it was cold they gathered around the stove and
lived the highly interactive life that they lived on porches and
under the shade of trees when it was hot.
The author proceeds to narrate the interaction
of the community that the inclement weather engenders.
Individuals would talk, swap stories, reinforce the collective
memory and gossip if they did not “recognize the walk of a
passer-by”. The conformist nature of the community is clearly
delineated, and the stranger or the deviant is a subject of, at
least, discussion, and maybe more.
The patterns of the community are defined by Durkheim’s theory and never formally transposed into the
historical continuum. The author does not identify an actual
community destroyed by the malignant effects of these
technologies. Histories are cited as a resource for the
substantiation of the author’s thesis, with the proviso, in one
reference, that the historian “failed to observe….. how air
conditioning changed a whole way of life throughout the world”.
This bizarre claim of globalisation for the ideal community
demonstrates the paucity of empirical evidence for the author’s
assertions. The dependence upon community theory without
historical substantiation leaves the narratives open to multiple
interpretations. The story of social breakdown and communal
destruction can be rewritten with the roles of the automobile,
air conditioning and television, replaced by war, urbanisation
and the expanding role of the state.
By ignoring the local rigours of the
historical discipline and the wider processes of modernity, the
author’s ‘grand theory’ of communal breakdown lacks
correspondence with stories of the world as it was. Moreover,
the moral agenda requires Durkheim’s ‘collective conscious’ to
provide a theoretical foundation, but reliance upon a single
mode of communication, face to face interaction, denies the
complexity of human life, then and now. Villages could have
telegraphs too!
To conclude, the author has not embedded his
analysis of these technologies within a wider social or
historical framework. The article may prove a cultural resource
for those who support the ‘relinquishment theory’, such as Bill McKibbin, the environmentalist. However, the ethical and
philosophical sources deployed in the article do not tap the
detailed traditions of Durkheim’s sociological heirs or the
communitarians. Without a greater acknowledgement of its
contribution to these debates, the article remains a curio for
applying the sociological observations of the French peasantry
to the supposed problems of contemporary morality.
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