Apologies for a delay in blogging.  I have been taking some continuing education courses and have also been trying to finish a book I'm working on.  So there hasn't been a lot of free time to keep up blogging.

I am enjoying the slow process of learning and sharing Robert Nisbet's classic work: "The Quest for Community."   Community health is one of the most important and under-discussed aspects of health in the US.  That's why I have taken on the project of summarizing and commenting one of the best books on community ever written.  

This is not a political book, per se, but it does discuss social ideas regarding community and the state.  

You can scroll through my blog for the other chapters to catch up, as I'm going chapter by chapter.  If you like what I'm doing here on the blog, pass it along or invite me to speak.  I do conferences and seminars on a variety of health topics - fitness, nutrition, and wellness.  

​Read on and enjoy.  At the end of this series I'm going to put together a guide to improving community health. 

Chapter 9: The Problem of Liberalism
 
“The real tragedy of existence is not the conflict between right and wrong, but between right and right.” – Friedrich Hegel
 
There are many things to celebrate about modern life, like our individual freedoms, our rights, and our social independence and democratic equality under the law.  But there have also been downsides.  To people who value loyalty, a sense of place, honor, duty, community, patriotism, religion, and tradition, not all of the changes we live with in modern life have been positive.  As we’ve covered in previous sections, to many people, especially in the USA, life has become atomized and nihilistic, devoid of belonging and meaning. Our biggest problem is disintegration. 
 
The causes for this are complex, but can be traced throughout history.  As the faceless bureaucratic state has grown, community and belonging have suffered and declined.  As a result, depression, mental illness, and social disintegration are characteristic of our age.  The tragic thing about the situation we find ourselves in, is that we sincerely do value the type of individual freedoms we have now, freedom from compulsion and the innumerable rights, but most of us mourn (f not consciously) the loss of belonging, culture, and meaning of past times.   
 
“The basic values of modern liberalism have been two—the individual and the moral sovereignty of the people. As values they are as noble today as they were when they were first brought into existence as the elements of modern liberal democracy.   -  Robert Nisbet
 
What we have is the “Problem of Liberalism” and this is the name of Chapter 9.   We’ve been “liberated” but now what?  That’s the problem.  We aren’t any happier, and we may even be less happy. The problem is that we’ve become “liberated”
 
Now what?  That is the problem.  
 
“He is now free-in all his solitary misery.” – Robert Nisbet
 
Even in the field of history, the past in our “progressive” liberal society is considered “evil” and so the possibility of historical community diminishes further with each passing year.  As the “immoral “past is edited, and removed, the famous Orwell book “1984” increasingly becomes a daily reality. Without the past, without culture or history or tradition, there is only left as Nisbet calls it, a “supremacy of technique” and “instruments of power.”  
 
In other words, the managers and the managed are all that is left. 
 
“Is it not again to use the words of Rousseau, “forcing men to be free”? – Robert Nisbet
 
The Soviet Union
 
A more obvious example of what our society has become in 2021 can be seen explicitly, since it’s not our own, by looking at the history and experience of the Soviet Union.   They used the same slogans we use – Equality! Justice! as the propaganda machines of the politburo in Russia churned out slogans and stories in past decades, so do the USA’s newspapers, TV Shows, social media sites, radio stations, churn out similar cant.  Equality! Equity! Liberty! Freedom! Justice!  But what does it mean, concretely?  Concretely it means that the atomized individual, the pawn, is increasingly vulnerable to totalitarian forms of control, without even knowing it, or worse, by digging his or her own grave. She or he is isolated, and cannot resist.  
 
Low-Wage Fast Food Work: A Case Study in Liberation
 
I think about the “problem of liberalism” when I visit Dunkin Donuts. The problem can be vividly illustrated in any trip to a fast food restaurant.  There every day, every week, every year, stands some poor miserable woman, or more likely a whole host of single women, making junk food for minimum wage, while her children’s care are paid for by the state.  Or her kids wonder the neighborhood or peruse the internet alone.  “Liberated” and “free” she works for years.  
 
I’m not disparaging fast food workers.  I used to be one so I know firsthand.  They work hard and nobly, but they are emblematic of what Nisbet is writing about in this chapter.  I’m going out on a limb here, but I imagine many of them would trade their minimum wage job at Taco Bell for a decent and stable family life.  But very few of these liberated people have it.  
 
The problem is that we are all pawns in a game we aren’t aware of.  The technocratic elite profit, and live out utopian liberal fantasies, while masses of people like the women working at fast food joints pay the price. They are the emblems of modern society- broken homes, obesity, diabetes, fatherless children, debt, dependency, drugs, and a whole host of other problems.  
 
Decision Making- An Individual Responsibility?
 
Thomas Jefferson’s ideal for the USA was a country of strong local communities, solid in social institutions and memberships, not a country of “disunited, despairing masses”.  But for Jefferson’s ideal to happen, people needed to live in strong communities.  Communities are built by people with similar beliefs and values living and working and making wise decisions together to accomplish a shared vision.  
 
All people are decisions makers, even the least educated and least well-off. Everyone has free will to make decisions, but most decisions we make we aren’t aware of.  They’re a result of our programming.  Culture and community are the most important factors in decision making and the key factors underlying decision making are:
 

• Social context – Social world and embedded culture
• Pre-judgement - Unconscious cultural biases
• Judgement – Conscious decisions

 
Nisbet lays out a key thesis in this chapter:  
 
The centralizing effect of the state has sterilized and mechanized the social context, pre-judgement, and judgements of masses of people, leaving it increasingly difficult for people to function.  

The formal, overt judgments of liberalism have rested, historically, not merely upon processes of conscious reason and verification, but upon certain prejudgments that have seldom been drawn up for critical analysis until the most recent times. 
 
And these prejudgments have, in turn, been closely linked with a set of social relationships within which their symbolic fires have been constantly kept lighted through all the normal processes of work, function, and belief. It is the disruption of the relationship among judgment, prejudgment, and social context that confronts us at the present time—a disruption caused in very large part, as I believe, by the cultural mechanization and sterilization that have accompanied modern centralization of power. 
 
When we consider either the “individual” or the “people,” we are dealing, plainly, with ideal types. They are moral abstractions. This in no way lessens their potential efficacy, but it does call attention to the fact that their actual efficacy as symbols depends on the means by which they are translated concretely into the goals and actions of day to day living.
 
Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community . Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.
 
Now liberated from social contexts, cultures, communities, from given pre-judgements, we are all left to make judgements on our own, in regards to the decisions we make.  For the first time in history, we liberated people are being asked to make wise, healthy, and functional decisions with no cultural or communal support.  We are being left to the managers, who market to instincts.  This ends up hurting the poor the most.  I heard someone call this “limbic capitalism”.  The limbic system is our system of primal urges.   Since the moral community no longer exists, only the urges are left.  Most people have a hard time controlling their urges.  


There is no context in which modern people are guided to make wise decisions- stay in school, control yourself, be disciplined, delay gratification, save money, live below your means, love your neighbor, and other traditional guideposts.  To lay it out bluntly, the problem of liberalism is that it often displaces people from the social context in which they can succeed and have a good life.  This is not a political statement, it’s certainly not a left or right statement, only a true and objective statement.  
 
---

This is a tough topic, but one worth learning about.

I write about 3 things:

Fitness- What we do, how we train, etc.
Nutrition- What and how we eat.
Wellness- Lifestyle, culture, and everything else.  

And remember...there's never been a better day than TODAY to make it happen!
 
Read Next: Speed and Power Training Simplified​
 
Want to sign up for email newsletter? Sign up on my home page:
www.scottgodwin.net
 
If you like the blog, please share it with friends or on social media.

“The concept of the face, I argue, belongs with those of freedom and responsibility as part of the interpersonal understanding of the world. That is to say, in seeing an array of features as a face, I do not understand it biologically, as the invisible film that encases another brain and lets in, through eyes and ears, the information that the brain is processing. I understand it as the real presence, in our shared world, of you.”  - Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World

​-----

I was talking with a friend from another country recently.  According to him, things in his home country are heading in much the same direction as they are here.  There's a renewed focus on community, faith, camaraderie, and a growing rejection of the idea of a borderless and anonymous consumer paradise labeled utopia.  

In the last decades, possibly even the last few centuries, things in Europe and America have been focused on what we might call "self-actualization" to use the sociologist Abraham Maslow's phrase.  This means there has been a strong drive towards individualism. I've written about that many times here, and in many ways.  There have been good and bad things about that process.   On the whole I tend to think modernity has turned in on itself right now and need to be either fixed or opted out of in many ways.  The evidence of depression, drug addiction, anxiety, suicide, etc. speaks for itself. 

Another way of seeing what's happening now is that it's like a correction in the stock market.  Individualism or "self-actualization" was oversold and now there's a correction going on.  People are returning to earth, so to speak and dumping there "stock" in a life of abstract and amorphous "self-actualization." 
​
There is movement away from self-actualization, lived as individualism, and a movement towards the life of the soul.  

Self-actualization sees no necessary limits, duties, or fidelities, and is focused on what each individual wants, and has often played out primarily as a never-ending quest of materialism, based on high amounts of debt and stress.  In contrast, the life of the soul is the life of rootedness, community, and eternal spiritual values.  The life of the soul is based on love- love of friends, family, community, truth, God, a way of life, a home.  

On a deeper level, the life of the soul says we're subjects, real people with free will,  not just objects of material gunk with no free will.  

And as we've already discovered in many other posts, individualism is impossible without community. 

It's a very exciting time, despite all the craziness in the news.  New forms of camaraderie and community are developing, green shoots of faith are popping up, and small but significant numbers of people are opting out of the frantic drive for a purely material life.  This is a good thing for anyone who cares about the life of the soul.  

There is less of a divide between left and right, conservative and liberal, (though they want us at each other's throats) as there is a real divide between the life of the soul and the life of avoiding it or sleep-walking.  This makes for all kinds of new possibilities and opportunities for those with their eyes open.  

Speaking of the life of the soul, now is a great time to get outside with a friend and go hiking.  This world God made is amazing. 
​
I took this picture a few weeks ago after a day hiking the Appalachian Trail in North Georgia.  We got lucky because it doesn't snow often in Georgia.  But when it does it's good for the soul. 

One of the few people to follow for serious analysis of the Covid-19, which we know originated in the Wuhan province of, China, is Matt Ridley, a researcher and author in the UK. I've been reading his blog for several years and he's one of the smartest writers out there. He has a book coming out about this in the fall. This article is a bit long, but the main point is that the virus "could" have escaped from a lab in China. There's a good chance it did.

Click here to read the article:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/did-covid-escape-from-a-lab/

Community health is one of the most important and under-discussed aspects of health in the US.  That's why I have taken on the project of summarizing and commenting on Robert Nisbet's classic work: The Quest for Community, one of the best books on community ever written.  

You can scroll through my blog for the other chapters to catch up, as I'm going chapter by chapter.  If you like what I'm doing here on the blog, pass it along or invite me to speak.  I do conferences and seminars on a variety of health topics - fitness, nutrition, and wellness.  

​Read on and enjoy.  At the end of this series I'm going to put together a guide to improving community health.  

---------

Recent protests, riots, violence, censorship, and brazen cases of propaganda and disinformation have made this essay as pertinent as anything I've ever written.   In truth, riots and protests have been going on the last few years, though the media hasn't been covering it. If they have, they have been misleading the public as to what's really happening.  

To put it very simply: The reason extremism seems to be on the rise is because of the collapse of community in the United States.  

Real community is family, extended family, extended kin, churches, associations, local neighborhoods, and fraternal organizations.  These have all collapsed in America.  Things have been going this way for many years now, but it seems to be getting worse.  But the truth is that all of this could get much, much worse.

It's important to know what's really happening.  Chapter 8, entitled "The Total Community" of Robert Nisbet's "The Quest for Community" addresses exactly what the problem is.  The "Total Community" is mass society of atomized individuals, characterized by a soft or hard totalitarianism that seeps its way into human consciousness and wars against both culture and real community.  The "Total Community" is not a phenomena of culture war, but rather a "war against culture." A great example of this is the currently lauded 1619 project, which pushes the false narrative that the USA was evil from the beginning, and is backed by the media power centers in the US, New York, Hollywood, and academia.  

Local community is virtually non-existent in the USA, and so being proud to be part of a larger national community was something many people could participate in.  In other words, it was good to be American and be patriotic.  The 1619 project, which could be seen as a prototype arm of the "Total Community" seeks to destroy what little goodwill is left in this form of national community and to make people be ashamed of their own nation.  Amazingly, Nisbet describes this type of thing perfectly in the "Total Community."  

​The Total Community
 
In this long study of community health I think it’s helpful to take a step back.  Let’s look at the big picture.  America seems to be falling apart, fragmenting along partisan lines.  Depression and anxiety are at epidemic levels and what sociologists call “deaths of despair” have seen a sharp rise.  The leadership class is not a failure, it's either a laughingstock or non-existent.  Let’s cut to the chase.  The problem we’re dealing with is social isolation, atomization, and social fragmentation, and the continued breakdown of what’s left of our shared American culture.  
 
What is the cause?  As we’ve learned, it’s inherent in the “progressive” and historical consciousness which has become dominant in our country.  The growth of the state has pushed aside real forms of community.  In place of real community, a soft totalitarianism grows into what Nisbet calls the “Total Community.  This massive “relearning” and displacement come at the cost of social membership, social status, social belonging, in other words it has come at the cost of community health.  The “Total Community”, the direction we are quickly heading towards, is the totalitarian community because of its dominant and destructive effect on all other forms of belonging. 
 
It is mass society, which is large numbers of people separated from each other, except in mass movements for “hope” or “change” or “diversity” or other amorphous quasi-religious political groups or movements.  Most people are not aware that they are part of this mass total society, that they are being manipulated, cajoled, influenced, and marginalized into an isolated social world, but they are.  
 
So our goal in this series of essays has been to deconstruct the problem of this growing “Total Community”,  which is a type of anti-community and figure out how we can improve real community health in opposition.  The most important reason we have to do this is because the “Total Community” is also a totalitarian community, it destroys people.   
 
Alexis de Toqueville was a French political philosopher who visited America in the 1840s. Remarkably, he had this to say about the future in the democratic US.  This is one of the most amazing passages I’ve ever been privileged to read, because it describes our anti-community in 2020.  
 
Alexis De Toqueville on the coming “Total Community” in 1840
 
“I think that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and, since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it. I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world.” 
 
“The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country. Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications.”
 
“That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in a perpetual state of childhood: it is well content that people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?” 
 
“Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them as benefits. After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.”
 
“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd. “I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.1 
 
Robert Nisbet, in “The Quest for Community” comments on this passage;
 
Here, in these paragraphs, lies one of the most astonishing prophecies to be found anywhere in political literature. It is nothing less than a picture, nearly a century in advance of the reality, of the totalitarian community. But it is more than a mere prophecy. It is an analysis of the nature of totalitarianism that has not been improved upon by even the most brilliant of contemporary students of the subject. 
 
What makes Tocqueville's analysis immeasurably superior to all but a few others is that it does not seize upon the transparently horrible, the grotesque, the obviously irrational, as the essence of totalitarianism. It does not limit itself to brutalities which, however abhorrent and real in totalitarian society, are nevertheless practiced by totalitarian rulers only against minorities already disliked and discriminated against by majorities. 
 
It does not fix upon aspects that are but incidental or variable in the structure of totalitarianism. The merit of Tocqueville's analysis is that it points directly to the heart of totalitarianism—the masses; the vast aggregates who are never tortured, flogged, or imprisoned, or humiliated; who instead are cajoled, flattered, stimulated by the rulers; but who are nonetheless relentlessly destroyed as human beings, ground down into mere shells of humanity. And the genius of his analysis lies in the view of totalitarianism as something not historically “abnormal” but as closely related to the very trends hailed as progressive in the nineteenth century.
 
-Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community . Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.
 
What Conditions Create the “Total Community”?
 
When a person is socially isolated, they are vulnerable for a move towards the total community.  This is because they have no sense of status or belonging, and human beings can’t live in isolation.  When I say status I am referring to the social role, not in a hierarchical sense, or material status, but in the sense of a part to play.  For example, a church member has status as a member of the congregation.  Modern mass society isolates people, and the state pushes out competitors for community, which leaves people left to only have the “Total Community” to cling to.  We covered this progressive historical development in previous essays.    According to Nisbet:
 
“What is decisive is the social context, the sensations of disinheritance and exclusion from rightful membership in a social and moral order. These may or may not accompany poverty.”
 
-Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community . Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.
 
Is the “Total Community” Evil?
 
Yes and No. The “Total Community” is evil because it creates its own morality, its own existence and worldview, and has no place in history.  It does what it pleases with no regard for distinctions and for subsidiarity (smaller groups of community).  All of the past, as a matter of fact, is necessarily seen as evil and an impediment to the “Total Community.”  Because a past indicates a historical community, which is a competitor, or can pass judgement, the “total community” opposes the past by default.  The “total community” is also evil because it’s only value is the power of the strong over the weak.  The weak must be “made to be free.” 
 
Is the “Total Community” Irrational?
 
It may be evil, but the “Total Community” is not irrational, on the contrary it is completely rational:
 
The total State is rational in that it recognizes in human personality certain basic needs for security and recognition and strives through every art and technique to satisfy those needs in calculated political terms. It is rational in that it seeks to eliminate from culture all of those ceremonial, ritualistic, or symbolic features inherited from the past that constitute by their existence obstructions to the achievement of a perfect mobilization of popular will. New ceremonies and symbols will be created by totalitarian rulers, but these will be made to fit as closely into the total design of political power as manipulative intelligence can contrive.
 
-Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community . Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.
 
A simple way of explaining how rationalism works in the “Total Community” can be seen with these two examples with nuclear weapons:

• We have these nuclear weapons, and we can defeat our enemy with them.  Therefore we should use these nuclear weapons.  
• Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons on earth.  We should therefore have as many as possible.

 
This is the rationalist way of thinking, and that can be extrapolated to other areas as well, especially in the sciences. We can do this- X, Y, or Z, therefore we should. It is only rational.  
 
Individualism in the Total Community 
 
One reason individuality is so loathed under the “Total Community” is because individualism develops only in the context of social relationships, which the “Total Community” abhors.  Mass society requires isolated automatons, not individuals in real social communities.  The “Total Community” is the abstract mass society so it has no place for individualism.  If someone belongs to a strong religious group, strong family and extended kin, and has a strong sense of localism, if they are someone with membership and status, then they are not susceptible to mass movements and totalitarianism. They have no need for the “Total Community”.  The individual must be separated from all other forms of belonging, before he can belong to the “Total Community.”
 
The Past and Total Community
 
It seems like every day, a street is being renamed, a statue toppled, a building burned to the ground, a new word not allowed, another name erased from the history books.  This is the new normal in the “Total Community.”  This is because a sense of the past is a bulwark of strength to fight against totalitarianism.  The past is a form of historical community which competes, therefore it must be obliterated.  
 
This is one of the most powerful passages in the book:
 
“A sense of the past is far more basic to the maintenance of freedom than hope for the future. The former is concrete and real; the latter is necessarily amorphous and more easily guided by those who can manipulate human actions and beliefs. Hence the relentless effort by totalitarian governments to destroy memory.”
 
-Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community . Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.
 
The Total Community’s Totality is Death.  
 
The “Total Community”, having obliterated all other forms of real community, stands alone.  It creates its own history, its own symbols, its own language, its own vocabulary.  It doesn’t crush physically the will of the former persons, it rather bends it, softens it, and corrodes it slowly from within.  New meanings are created, even new memories.  New conceptions of good and evil, new science, new art, new history, all placed in a different “context.” 
 
This is because totalitarian power is unsustainable unless the “Total Community” is supreme in every facet.  It must create true believers.  It can’t kill everyone or there won’t be anyone left.  So it uses softer means, especially in 2020.  Even in the religious and spiritual sphere the totality is clothed in the garments of deep belief.  Eventually human consciousness is reshaped and remade.  Human agency is lost.  The powerful control even the thoughts of the weak before they happen.  It has happened before, and it will happen again if we let it.  Real community is different, it brings agency, independence, and freedom.  It is based on limits and belonging, on membership not on mass atomized society.  Real community is the only bulwark against nihilism and death.  
 
“This is the true horror of totalitarianism. The absolute political community, centralized and omnicompetent, founded upon the atomized masses, must ceaselessly destroy all those autonomies and immunities that are in normal society the indispensable sources of the capacity for freedom and organization. Total political centralization can lead only to social and cultural death.”
 
Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community . Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD). Kindle Edition.
 
 ---

This is a tough topic, but one worth learning about, if you want to live a healthy life.

I write about 3 things:

Fitness- What we do, how we train, etc.
Nutrition- What and how we eat.
Wellness- Lifestyle, culture, and everything else.  

And remember...there's never been a better day than TODAY to make it happen!
 
Read Next: Speed and Power Training Simplified​
 
Want to sign up for email newsletter? Sign up on my home page:
www.scottgodwin.net
 
If you like the blog, please share it with friends or on social media.