Finally, an important modern function of communities is to give the individual in large countries some political influence over the way they are governed, and thus a sense of control over their lives, as well as a sense of public responsibility. Well-structured countries decentralize a lot of decisions to local community government. To the extent that individuals can organize collective political action within the community more easily, it affords them a vehicle to affect issues on a national stage. The community then magnifies the power of the individual. We will return to the political role of the community later in the book.
DYSFUNCTIONAL COMMUNITIES
We have seen what functional communities do. Consider now a classic picture of a dysfunctional community and what it does not do. Dysfunctional communities in developed countries can be virtual war zones, with widespread drug addiction, crime, failing schools, and broken families. Who would expect significant public engagement if even leaving home is dangerous? This is why the Pilsen community we discussed in the Preface set about tackling crime as the first step in community revival. However, dysfunctional communities are present even in fairly safe areas around the world.
In the mid-1950s, social anthropologist Edward Banfield spent nearly a year studying a poor village in Southern Italy, to which he gave a fictitious name, Montegrano. The extent of underdevelopment of the village can be gauged by the fact that many of the inhabitants were illiterate and did not have toilets with running water. The village remained underdeveloped even in an Italy that was then undergoing a miraculous economic transformation, in part, as Banfield argues, because of “the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good.”12 Anyone who has been to dysfunctional communities around the world will recognize some of Montegrano in those communities.
The main occupation in Montegrano was agriculture, but with limited untilled land and small land holdings, it was unlikely that peasant families would prosper by staying in agriculture. Even so, the main path of upward mobility for children, education, was largely blocked. Only five grades of school were taught in the village, the schools were poorly equipped, teachers poorly paid, and attendance, both by students and teachers, was irregular. Moreover, “After finishing the fifth grade some students can barely read or write or do simple sums . . . According to a Montegrano school official, one-third of the [school] graduates are illiterate several years after graduation.”13 Many children did not attend schools regularly, and some farm people sent their children to school willingly only so long as they were too young to work in the fields.
An engineer from Northern Italy, who was shocked at the lack of professionalism among teachers in Montegrano, perhaps best captured what was wrong: He noted that during the summer vacation, a teacher from more prosperous Northern Italy might hold informal classes, take children for walks into the country and explain a bit about nature, or even go on picnics. In contrast, teachers in Montegrano spent their summers “loafing in the piazza,” and did not speak to their students when they saw them. The teachers simply did not care if their students learned anything.14
Apathy was evident elsewhere too. There were no organized voluntary charities in the village. An order of nuns from outside the village maintained an orphanage for little girls in a crumbling monastery, but even though girls from local families were at the orphanage, “none of the many half-employed stone masons has ever given a day’s work to its repair.”15 There was not enough food for the children, “but no peasant or land proprietor ha[d] ever given a young pig to the orphanage.”16
The nearest hospital was five hours away by car, and few villagers could afford the trip. There was no organized effort to bring a hospital nearby, despite villagers complaining for years about the lack of access to medical facilities. Stopgap measures to improve access to education and health care, such as rescheduling public bus timings to transport village children to schools elsewhere, or funding an ambulance to carry emergency cases from the area to the hospital, were simply not considered.
A functional community would have put pressure on the local government to improve public services, failing which volunteers would have gathered to undertake the task. While Montegrano had an elected mayor and council, decisions “even to buy an ashtray” were taken by the prefect, a member of the civil service sitting in Potenza, the nearest large town.17 Similarly, the director of schools reported directly to Potenza, public works were not under the purview of local government, and the police were under the Ministry of Justice in Rome. Too few important decisions were taken locally, a problem we will discuss later in the book, but even so, villagers did not even try to influence them.
The problem in Montegrano, as Banfield argues, was the extreme distrust between villagers, their worry about losing relative social position if they helped someone else improve their lot, and their corrosive envy of those who did succeed. Given this attitude, anyone who undertook a public-spirited action felt they incurred the full costs of acting, would probably receive only a small part of the public benefits, and would feel diminished by the public benefits that went to others. As one teacher explained, not only was there little public spirit, but many people positively wanted to prevent others from getting ahead.18 Such public apathy explains why voluntary efforts to supply public services—for example, masons repairing the monastery—simply did not emerge.
There are a variety of reasons why these attitudes exist in communities. When economic opportunity is very limited, economic activity might be seen as zero-sum—your gain comes at the expense of mine. The problem is exacerbated when families are at risk of slipping in social status, from the barely self-sufficient but still respectable to the “deplorable,” who are dependent on others for subsistence. With few savings and little wealth, many peasants were just one hailstorm or one pig’s unfortunate death away from a winter of deprivation or worse. While families were willing to help one another tide over temporary misfortune, more general public spirit required a degree of comfort with their economic situation that they simply did not have. Given the difficulty of staying afloat economically, villagers’ focus was on providing for their immediate family rather than maintaining a broader public spirit.
This inward focus may actually do public harm. A common example of what Banfield calls “amoral familism” is visible in many developing countries, where people keep their houses spotlessly clean, but unceremoniously dump the garbage collected inside on the street outside. The ultimately self-defeating effects of having unclean and unhygienic public spaces surrounding clean homes can only be explained by extreme public apathy, a fundamental characteristic of dysfunctional communities.
The state, despite being recognizably apathetic, distant, and nonfunctional itself, nevertheless dampened initiative in Montegrano. The faint hope that the government will dig a latrine, pave a road, or discipline school teachers can prevent the local population from organizing to do so. In frontier towns in the United States, the community raised a barn or built a road itself, knowing there was no one else who would do it. In dysfunctional communities where the government is closer, the misplaced expectation that the ghost of the inefficient government will eventually appear and do the job crowds out what little private initiative there is.
WHEN DO COMMUNITIES NOT WORK WELL?
Communities can be fragile even without becoming dysfunctional. They tend to work best when they are small and have little competition. Community relationships are built when