Community in America has grown harder to find. The spaces and institutions that used to gather neighbors together are in decline, while loneliness, depression, and other social ills are on the rise. As Seth Kaplan and Pete Davis explain, a healthy country is built on healthy relationships, and healthy relationships are built on commitment. Relearning how to commit ourselves to a place and a group of people — especially our neighbors — is one of the best things we can do for ourselves and others. This episode of Article 13 offers practical guidance for how we can make these commitments and first-hand accounts of how joyful it can be when we do. FEATURED VOICES Pete Davis is a writer and civic advocate from Falls Church, Virginia. His Harvard Law School graduation speech, “A Counterculture of Commitment,” has been viewed more than 30 million times — and was recently expanded into a book: Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in An Age of Infinite Browsing. Seth Kaplan is a leading expert on fragile states. He is a Professorial Lecturer in the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Senior Adviser for the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), and consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD as well as developing country governments and NGOs. Karen Washington is a farmer and activist. She is Co-Owner/Farmer at Rise & Root Farm in Chester New York. As an activist and food advocate, in 2010, she co-founded Black Urban Growers (BUGS) an organization supporting growers in both urban and rural settings. In 2012 Ebony magazine voted her one of their 100 most influential African Americans in the country and in 2014 she was the recipient of the James Beard Leadership Award. Karen serves on the boards of the New York Botanical Gardens, Why Hunger, Just Food, and Farm School NYC. LISTEN ON APPLE OR SPOTIFY TRANSCRIPT * Introduction Karen Washington was a physical therapist and a single mom who dreamed of having her own house in the Bronx. She was able to make this dream come true – but it turned into what she called “a nightmare” because of the abandoned lot across from her home. It began filling with garbage, got infested with rats, and became a place where “bad things happened.” But her story turned into a different kind of dream when she saw a neighbor, Jose Lugo. Davis: She told me that my eyes lit up like a Christmas tree and she said, “What are you doing? And he says, “I’m trying to clear the trash to plant a community garden. Do you want to help?” And she said, “Yes, can I help?” This is author Pete Davis, who related Washington’s story in his book Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing. Davis: And what they did is they started organizing the whole neighborhood, they cleared all the trash, they started planting, and suddenly they had a garden with corn and squash and kale and collard beans and cantaloupe. Eventually, they got connected with all the other people doing community gardens all across the city. Washington: Welcome to the Farmer’s Market, the La Familia Farmer’s Market. This is Washington in a ParentEarth feature, describing how the garden became the launching point for a farmer’s market Washington: We sat down, mapped it out, and then got four farmers who were willing to come to our neighborhood and got it started, so now we’re eight years in the making, love our community, community loves us, they wait for July to November to come on Tuesdays. The garden also became Karen Washington’s launching point for new kinds of involvement in her community. Davis: She started asking about the life of different people who are hanging out in the garden. And they said, “Oh, you know, we got this issue at school. We got this issue with hunger.” And then that got her involved in school issues and hunger issues and, How could the garden help with this? Washington: Many families that I’ve talked to, just in passing at the Farmer’s Market, said, ‘You know, my kids were eating candy and cookies, and so when, you know, I started going to the Farmer’s Market and getting my kids involved in community gardening and eating healthy lunches, then I started to see a change and really saw how my children really started to like fresh food versus processed food.’ Karen Washington’s story is beautiful. More than that, it’s a beautiful vision of the kind of life we might wish for ourselves. A life of community. A life of meaningful connection to others, built around common projects and mutual care. Unfortunately, for many Americans, such life in community feels more and more out of reach. Welcome to Article 13, a podcast that brings together cutting edge research and spiritual wisdom to provide blueprints for a better world. I’m your host, Zachary Davis. In this episode, we look at why community is declining in America and why this is partly caused by our own fear. We also take a deeper look at why community matters and how we can help bring our own communities back to life. * The disappearance of community Community was once America’s great strength. When French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville made his study of America in the 1830s, he was particularly struck by how readily Americans formed associations. These were, he said, “of a thousand different types … religious, moral …. very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.” “Nothing, in my view,” he wrote, “deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.” This drive to associate also showed up for generations in how Americans inhabited their own local communities. Kaplan: So if we’re thinking that America had a pretty healthy society two generations ago and we don’t have a healthy society now, what has changed? This is Seth Kaplan, the author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time. Kaplan: Until about two generations ago, people were very place-based, where they prayed, where they shopped, where they met people, everything was pretty close. So if you went, let’s say, in the 1950s or even into the 60s, and you went into a street, kids played on the street, parents hang out on their porch, they knew each other, and again it doesn’t mean that they were friends, but they had relationships, they had expectations that each other would be there to support them. I think this was the norm mostly everywhere until recently. “Over the last two generations,” Kaplan wrote for After Babel, “the U.S. has moved from a ‘townshipped’ society in which neighbors regularly communicated and collaborated with each other … to a ‘networked’ and technologically-driven one in which local neighborhoods, schools, churches, and civic organizations are less important, and … have weakened over time.” Two of those key features Kaplan describes – institutions and place-based community – have disappeared. The physical spaces that used to bring Americans together don’t exist the same way. Davis: We’re seeing a decline in what are called third spaces. A third space is a place where you meet in community – a plaza, a park, a library, a cafe, a bar. If we see a decline in those spaces, you’re also going to see a decline in community. Kaplan: I’m thinking, 10-minute drive from where I live, wonderfully nice houses – there’s nothing that connects those people, there’s just roads. Where are the institutions that bring those people together? You drive to church, you drive to school, you drive shopping, your civic engagement is not local, there’s nothing that brings people together. The country has also lost many of the associations, like unions and civic groups, that used to gather people together. Kaplan: And so, when I say fragile neighborhoods, I first and foremost mean places in which relationships are weak, institutions have thinned out or disappeared, and people just live next to each other and they have very little that brings them together. And with nothing bringing us together, it’s no surprise that we aren’t getting together. Between 2003 and 2022, hours of face-to-face socializing declined for American men by 30 percent; for unmarried Americans by over 35 percent; and for teenagers by over 45 percent. As Derek Thompson writes, “there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.” And in particular, we’re not spending time with the people who share our local space. The Institute for Family Studies reports of recent surveys, “only a quarter of Americans said that they know most of their neighbors … The share of Americans who spend a social evening with a neighbor at least several times per month has declined from 44% in 1974 to 28% in 2022.” Davis: We’ve started seeing community as less of a key part of our life. We think it’s all about what we do with our immediate family, nuclear family, and what we do with our careers, and there’s been a decline in this other huge part of our life, which is our interactions with friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens in community life. And this decline in community has taken a visible toll on American life. Writes Thompson, “solitude, anxiety, and dissatisfaction seem to be rising in lockstep. Surveys show that Americans … have never been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country.” * Why community matters What such data reveals is that community isn’t just one good thing among others. It’s a prerequisite for many, many other vital goods, for both individuals and societies – something Seth Kaplan, as a global analyst, is uniquely positioned to see. Kaplan: My lens for thinking about this question is always the idea that relationships is the sta
