Gemeinschaft

The other day, I came across a Deutsche Welle documentary on the founding of  Germany as an independent vassal state of the United States.  It should go without saying that, in 1945, Germany suffered not only a defeat on the battlefield but was devastated and destroyed in near entirety.  If one could draw and quarter a country that was what was done to Germany whose inhabitants were left to scrounge around in the rubble and out of which a viable civil society of citizens had to be created anew. 

The documentary focused on four illustrative cases of individuals trying to restart their lives. The first was a young man of 22 who decided on going to Heidelberg in hopes of earning a degree.  The narrative explained that he, along with others, had no money for food at the university's board, so the people of Heidelberg got together to scrounge up money so that students would be able to eat and being able to eat, study.  It is necessary to stress to Americans that the paradigm at issue was not “helping those who, through no fault of their own, are in need.”  The entire country had “fallen on bad times” and was “in need.”   The logic at issue was gemeinschaft.   A rebuilt Germany would need teachers, lawyers, physicians, engineers and indeed (since this was Heidelberg) even philosophers.  One could not have a society without professionals any more than one could have a society without bakers, mechanics, carpenters and singers.   The good people of Heidelberg were helping themselves through helping others; and they understood this intuitively without deliberation or discussion

The second illustration concerned another young man also 21 who, upon release from a POW camp in the Soviet Union, returned to his homeland a dedicated communist and determined to rebuild his country.  He settled in Leipzig, joined the Party, and went to work in a factory dedicated to rebuilding locomotives.   Because of his political affiliation, he was made foreman of the factory floor.   His fellow workers called him “the Russian” but, although they were at best skeptical of his ideology, there was no doubt between them that they were all, above all else, Germans... and, of course, the locomotives needed to be rebuilt.  They understood that brotherhood “in heart and hand” is the pledge of fortune.  (Third stanza Deutschland Lied.)

It is typically said that the word community is an inadequate translation of gemeinschaft.  That is not quite correct.  The difficulty is that the English speaking world has lost the original sense of the word. Community derives from com (together) + munis (a burden, duty, obligation, gift, service, favor).  It refers to the mutual sharing and exchanging of usages - or, in Marxist terms, of use values. Similarly, gemeinschaft derives from gemein (together) + schaft (-ship).  Now the suffix “ship” has a broad range of applications; e.g. freundschaft (fellowship), priesterschaft (priesthood), Leserschaft (readership), and so on.  It can be seen that the suffix schaft or ship really denotes a practice -- what Thomas Aquinas would call a habitus.  Thus, gemeinschaft refers to the habit of being together and belonging.  

According to the German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies (1887),  a gemeinschaft is comprised of personal social ties and in-person interactions defined by traditional social rules, commonly held sentiments  and a shared sense of mutual moral obligations.  In his view, a community was necessarily small in size and homogeneous in nature.  But that was not correct.  The German historical experience both before and after the war indicates that a subjective sentiment and practice of mutual recognition and obligation both between members of society and toward society as a whole can exist on a larger than village scale.   It ultimately boils down to self-conception: does one think of society as a community or simply as a place where one can enjoy one's individual pursuit of happiness. 

Now, fulminating Kumbaya Liberal outrage aside, it is a practical fact that ethnic, linguistic, religious and cultural homogeneity promote a sense of community.   It is very strange indeed that a functionality that has been recognized from time immemorial should suddenly become an impermissible thought.  Most people feel comfortable with things that are recognizable and similar to their own manner of being. This does not mean that differences cannot be appreciated; it simply means that “oneness” is exactly that.

But it is equally a mistake to think, as the Nazis certainly did, that any one commonality is a sine qua non of community.  It is always a question of mix and degree.  In this regard, it is not only a question of how much of each commonality is present in the mix, but how much difference exists with respect to a single common element.  For example, the differences between Protestants and Catholics, or by the same token, between Orthodox and Reform Jews, is less than the commonalities they share.   To obsess on any one common feature within a community is just plain stupid.  It ignores the deep seated human want to be in communitatis regardless of differences.   To paraphrase Anne Frank, people really don't want to hate one another.

It was, at least in the mid 20th century, the hope that an American gemeinschaft was possible despite fairly pronounced dis-commonalities in the population (sub nom “diversity”).   There was a great push to minimize ethnic and religious differences while emphasizing linguistic and cultural commonality.  As the sociologist Erich Fromm pointed out, the cultural element was glib and largely commercial -- a superficial artifact.  But, since real culture is a slow-growth phenomenon (the various national cultures of Europe fermented over a thousand years), the hope was to jump-start the process. 

However, the success of the New Deal and of the immediate post-war prosperity was bought at the expense of the Blacks.   For the sake of gaining Dixiecrat support, Franklin Roosevelt, made a conscious decision to exclude Negroes from virtually all New Deal programs.   The decision to put an end to segregation and to push for racial integration put a very serious strain on the sense of national community.  Too many people  were not ready or willing to go “that far.” 

Although the task was greater than perhaps was realized, I do think racial integration could have been achieved without sacrificing community, but only provided one really understood what community entailed.   Americans did not.  Instead of focusing on mutuality of obligation, they focused on and obsessed over rights of individual indulgence and acquisition -- the very thing that is incompatible with community because it reduces society to merely the occasion and material for personal enrichment.  And no one should make the mistake of thinking that capitalism is not a zero sum game.  Every one man's gain or appreciation in asset value is another's loss.  All the rest is simply legerdemain.

The deviationist mis-focus was perhaps a tragic mistake.  Rights for the Negro became the paradigm for a sequel of other cognized group rights:  for women, for Hispanics, for the handicapped, for gays and lesibians and so on, serially individuating society instead of focusing on rights for all as a birthright, which is to say, mutual obligations of all for all.   For well known historical and socio-economic reasons a special affirmative action was required with respect to the Blacks in the United States.  But it was utterly misbegotten to turn that exception into a rule of policy.  Under the seeming appearance of “improving” the conditions of “more and more” special cases or victimized groups, it actually undermined the true sense and practice  of gemeinschaft.   Instead of asking what we could do for our country, more or more people were guided into asking what rights of getting they had as women, as gays, as Hispanics, as... whatever.     As de Tocqueville pointed out near two centuries ago, American individualism was always problematic.  In the 70's and 80's it became fatal.

The case was even worse.  At the same time that the establishment elites forced integration on the country, they drove a wedge between the supposedly “universal” middle class and the working class. The policy of exempting middle class college kids from military service while drafting blue collar kids to go fight in Vietnam drove a wedge of disparagement and resentment into the  country's future generation.   The difficulty with dodgeship is that it inevitably became a habit.   The “haves” of the Boomer generation became accustomed to living for themselves, acquiring for themselves and enriching themselves without any sense of paying for others.   Instead, they convinced themselves that they were doing some kind of social good, by removing prejudices from their hearts and personally accepting the wonderfulness, of Blacks, the equal worth of Women, and the (we won't think too hard on it) affectional rights of gays.  Hey, I'm hip! 

In sum, the only way America's ethno-cultural diversities could have been overcome in order to achieve the reality of community was by ending economic disparities and replacing a culture of pursuing individual happiness with a culture of mutual obligation for one's own sake.   The country's failure to do so has resulted in the colossal cluster fuck of its present circumstance.  Americans do not realize it because, unlike bombed out rubble, the devastation is moral; that is, it has destroyed  the understanding, sentiment and commitment to gemeinschaft.    America needs to seriously acknowledge the rubble of itself and strive for an auferstanden.

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