Modernity

Modern social life is complicated by the explicit intrusion into private life of large scale social forces. Benjamin Barber (1995) has described modernity as “McWorld,” while George Ritzer (1993) describes the “McDonaldization” of society. The metaphors invoke a pervasive theme in sociology since Durkheim's identification of the division of labor and Weber's analysis of the rational/legal order. That theme is the dissociation of the individual from the community, a transition from the religious to the secular, and a ‘market order in which social relations are increasingly seen as fleeting, contractual, and instrumental. For Selznick (1992, p. 4), the distinguishing characteristic of modernity is “the steady weakening of traditional social bonds and the concomitant creation of new unities based on more rational, more impersonal, more fragmented forms of thought and action.”

The context for understanding community life is modernity. We live in a society of weak social ties, which is not to say that our ties are few. Rather, the average person will have more contacts with a greater variety of people than ever before. But these contacts arc short, guided primarily by the expedient exchange of cash for goods and services. Individuals feel anonymous and lost in the shuffle, hustle, and bustle.

Modernity, ironically, has created more independence and more interdependence. With occupational differentiation and specialization, individuals have more freedom to choose careers that suit their sensibilities. With greater affluence, they are free to quit jobs they do not like, leave bad marriages, ignore authoritative parents, or come out of the closet. Of course, this is not to say that such decisions are always positive in their consequences (divorce, for example, throws many women into poverty), but only that modernity makes them possible. This freedom arises from a distinct “sep- aration of spheres” of social life. We do not work where we live, parents are not involved in their children’s schools, extended families live far apart.

At the same time, the complexity of social systems creates greater interdependencies. As the provision of collective goods occurs on ever larger scales, self-sufficiency becomes an empty abstraction. We rarely barter, because our skills are generally too limited to exchange with the great variety of others that we depend upon. The most educated among us, the college professor, can only teach 10 or 20 of the 800 or 1000 courses offered in a term at a major university. We cannot produce our own food and water supplies, we cannot construct for ourselves the apartments or houses we live in, we cannot build our own cars, boats, and planes, build our own schools and hospitals, or defend ourselves from foreign invasion. We are desperately dependent upon one another to collectively provide such goods. As Alan Wolfe (1987, p. 3) puts it, “to be modern is to face the consequences of decisions made by complete strangers while making decisions that will affect the lives of people one will never know.” Anonymity and interdependence converge in modern society.

The puzzle of modernity is to “discover the forms of social action and organization that typically emerge in relatively permanent, compact settlements of large numbers of heterogeneous individuals” (Wirth, 1938, p. 2). In Louis Wirth's well-known formulation, the condition of modernity, exempli- fied by the urban form, is best understood in the context of large populations, high levels of density, and great heterogeneity. Heterogeneity comes in many forms: occupational differentiation, multiculturalism, and perhaps most salient, social inequality. In these ways, the communitarians assume the prospect of community is deeply challenged by the conditions of modernity.