Beyond Harper: Rebuilding community
Neo-liberalism vs. the commons
Yet in the decades since the free trade deals were first signed we have gradually stopped talking about community and have perhaps forgotten just how critical it is to human health and indeed what it is to be human. The hyper-competitiveness promoted by neo-liberalism and the politicians it has captured is completely at odds with our social natures. Community - the commons - is at the core of what we have lost and reclaiming it will be at the core of any successful social movement that halts and reverses the current trends.
I was reminded of this when I read Malcolm Gladwell's remarkable book Outliers. The book is a compelling look at human achievements that fall outside normal experience. The first chapter is about Roseto, a US town founded in the late 1800s by the inhabitants of an Italian town of the same name. In the late 1950s the ethnically homogeneous town caught the attention of doctor Stephen Wolf who was told by a colleague that there wasn't a single man under 65 in the town who suffered from heart disease - an almost unbelievable finding given that at the time heart disease was the leading cause of death of men under 65.
Wolf's subsequent investigation of this phenomenon found a classic outlier: a community so remarkably healthy that it fell completely outside the norm for similar communities in the area. It showed not only low rates of heart disease but a 30-35 per cent lower rate of death from other causes; it had no suicides, no alcoholism, no drug addiction, very little crime and no one on welfare. Wolf with the help of a sociologist slowly eliminated possible explanations: diet, genetics, geography.
What explained Roseto, was Roseto itself. They observed "..how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their back yards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town's social structures. ...They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of under two thousand people. They picked up on the particularly egalitarian ethos of the community which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures."
Roseto was healthy because its inhabitants "...had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world." We could do worse than to look at Roseto of the 1950s and '60s when we start to rebuild community in Canada because if we want to halt the march to a competitive, mean-spirited and selfish existence for our children, this is the vision we have to keep in our minds.
http://rabble.ca/columnists/2012/06/beyond-harper-rebuilding-community
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