A very common present day manifestation of this: people (from all colours of politics, but it’s especially funny when it happens on the left) yearning for more “community”. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a point to it! There definitely are things we lost by moving to a more individual lifestyle, and we should maybe consider what is the best way to thread that needle. But you have ideas thrown around like “community policing”, as if that would not just be called lynching, or people really invested in LGBT rights who simultaneously seem to ignore just how judgy and controlling communities tend to be on sexual mores—a tight knit community is one where your business is also everyone else’s, and the community, pretty much in order to exist, has to be entitled to some of your freedom and time. Maybe the specific mores will be different this time around and we won’t just replay the past, but regardless there will be someone whose individuality will have to be sanded off to fit in.
Yes, I recall an anthropologist pointing out that whenever tightly-knit communities were initially exposed to larger civilizations, a certain percentage of people would run for the cities as quickly as they could. Tiny communities aren’t all Stardew Valley, and if you don’t fit in, they can be very rough.
That said, there are a lot of different cultural variations here. Old-school New England, for example, has an unusual variation of small-town dynamics:
People seem a bit distant and standoffish. They might warm up in 5 or 20 years, depending.
But if you’re in genuine trouble, complete strangers will often go out of their way to help you, no questions asked. I remember hearing of an incident where someone was woken up by a phone call saying, “Help, my car is stuck in a ditch and I need to be hauled out.” The suddenly-awoken person agrees, gets the street name, and then finally thinks to ask, “Oh, who is this calling?”
People try to stay the hell out of each other’s business. If you do something really unexpected, they might gossip a bit about you. But have to really screw up badly before other people interfere.
So there are multiple sets of cultural tradeoffs that can be made around small communities.
I think a part of the problem is that moving in one direction is easier than moving in the opposite direction. Which creates an imbalance of the result.
You want less community? Get a job, and you can rent a place in a different city, or on the opposite side of the same city.
You want more community? That’s more tricky. For an existing community, you will be a newcomer; they can potentially ignore you for years. To create a new community, coordinating people is difficult.
So I find it plausible that on average we have fewer communities than we would ideally want, because leaving a community is easier than joining it.
I’ve been wondering the case of Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt. A hotel employee called the cops on them because they were “dressed in tactical clothing and protective gear, while also being armed”. Does this pass the threshold of “too weird” in New England? Or maybe it was New England forbearance that let them get away with it for as long as they did? Or maybe it’s possible to be weird in New England, as long as one has the right kind of vibe.
I am not familiar with the details of that case, unfortunately. And rural New England gun culture is a big and complicated subject. But yeah, if you walk around in public with, say, an AR-15 and a plate carrier vest, plenty of people are going to notice. What they do about it, that’s another question. Generally speaking, you don’t want to interact too directly with the sort of people who walk around wearing body armor in a town with a population of 1,000. They are, not to put too fine a point it, armed. And they have badly deficient risk assessment. The correct response to people with bad epistemics and AR-15s is the same as the correct response to bull moose in rutting season: keep your distance, avoid loud noises, and minimize direct confrontation.
As for less dangerous sorts of weird, well, I’m speaking in anthropological generalities. New England still has all the same kinds of people you’d find anywhere else. You can find amazing people and idiots and jerks and loudmouthed racists. What changes in different cultures is the proportions of these people, and the broad cultural “overlays” of what’s valued, what’s seen as tacky, and what’s taken for granted. If you’re the only black person in a rural New England town, you will absolutely interact with your local racists sooner or later. There is no place on earth where you can escape people being people. Even if you live in a culture where your economy is based on (say) elaborate competitive gifts to other villages, there’s still going to be an old man grumbling about “kids these days” and their sloppy work ethic preparing gifts. Humans are going to human, wherever they are.
But the whole New England thing of rescuing strangers’ cars from ditches without a second thought, but often taking 5-20 years to really warm up to new arrivals? It’s almost hilariously real. But it doesn’t change fundamental human nature, it only remixes it.
A very common present day manifestation of this: people (from all colours of politics, but it’s especially funny when it happens on the left) yearning for more “community”. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a point to it! There definitely are things we lost by moving to a more individual lifestyle, and we should maybe consider what is the best way to thread that needle. But you have ideas thrown around like “community policing”, as if that would not just be called lynching, or people really invested in LGBT rights who simultaneously seem to ignore just how judgy and controlling communities tend to be on sexual mores—a tight knit community is one where your business is also everyone else’s, and the community, pretty much in order to exist, has to be entitled to some of your freedom and time. Maybe the specific mores will be different this time around and we won’t just replay the past, but regardless there will be someone whose individuality will have to be sanded off to fit in.
Yes, I recall an anthropologist pointing out that whenever tightly-knit communities were initially exposed to larger civilizations, a certain percentage of people would run for the cities as quickly as they could. Tiny communities aren’t all Stardew Valley, and if you don’t fit in, they can be very rough.
That said, there are a lot of different cultural variations here. Old-school New England, for example, has an unusual variation of small-town dynamics:
People seem a bit distant and standoffish. They might warm up in 5 or 20 years, depending.
But if you’re in genuine trouble, complete strangers will often go out of their way to help you, no questions asked. I remember hearing of an incident where someone was woken up by a phone call saying, “Help, my car is stuck in a ditch and I need to be hauled out.” The suddenly-awoken person agrees, gets the street name, and then finally thinks to ask, “Oh, who is this calling?”
People try to stay the hell out of each other’s business. If you do something really unexpected, they might gossip a bit about you. But have to really screw up badly before other people interfere.
So there are multiple sets of cultural tradeoffs that can be made around small communities.
I think a part of the problem is that moving in one direction is easier than moving in the opposite direction. Which creates an imbalance of the result.
You want less community? Get a job, and you can rent a place in a different city, or on the opposite side of the same city.
You want more community? That’s more tricky. For an existing community, you will be a newcomer; they can potentially ignore you for years. To create a new community, coordinating people is difficult.
So I find it plausible that on average we have fewer communities than we would ideally want, because leaving a community is easier than joining it.
I’ve been wondering the case of Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt. A hotel employee called the cops on them because they were “dressed in tactical clothing and protective gear, while also being armed”. Does this pass the threshold of “too weird” in New England? Or maybe it was New England forbearance that let them get away with it for as long as they did? Or maybe it’s possible to be weird in New England, as long as one has the right kind of vibe.
I am not familiar with the details of that case, unfortunately. And rural New England gun culture is a big and complicated subject. But yeah, if you walk around in public with, say, an AR-15 and a plate carrier vest, plenty of people are going to notice. What they do about it, that’s another question. Generally speaking, you don’t want to interact too directly with the sort of people who walk around wearing body armor in a town with a population of 1,000. They are, not to put too fine a point it, armed. And they have badly deficient risk assessment. The correct response to people with bad epistemics and AR-15s is the same as the correct response to bull moose in rutting season: keep your distance, avoid loud noises, and minimize direct confrontation.
As for less dangerous sorts of weird, well, I’m speaking in anthropological generalities. New England still has all the same kinds of people you’d find anywhere else. You can find amazing people and idiots and jerks and loudmouthed racists. What changes in different cultures is the proportions of these people, and the broad cultural “overlays” of what’s valued, what’s seen as tacky, and what’s taken for granted. If you’re the only black person in a rural New England town, you will absolutely interact with your local racists sooner or later. There is no place on earth where you can escape people being people. Even if you live in a culture where your economy is based on (say) elaborate competitive gifts to other villages, there’s still going to be an old man grumbling about “kids these days” and their sloppy work ethic preparing gifts. Humans are going to human, wherever they are.
But the whole New England thing of rescuing strangers’ cars from ditches without a second thought, but often taking 5-20 years to really warm up to new arrivals? It’s almost hilariously real. But it doesn’t change fundamental human nature, it only remixes it.