The Death of Community and the Rise of Individualism
A person thrust into a new environment first scans their surroundings for danger. As such, they have a heightened attention to detail, a cautiousness of the phenomena occuring around them, and an awareness of the effects on their person. However, if raised from birth in a particular world, the nature of their environment and its effects would remain unseen, for it has always been there, like water for a fish. Similarly, we are often unaware of the essence and impact of the environment we have lived in all our lives. We seldom reflect on the state of our societies, assuming the current arrangement of affairs to be natural. While generally aware that we live in the “modern” age, as opposed to the “medieval” or “ancient,” with better technology and different social norms, we nonetheless remain oblivious to larger, totalizing, and omnipresent aspects of our world.
One such phenomenon that we often fail to reflect on is the disintegration of our social fabric, namely, social atomization, or the basic unit of society being broken down into smaller parts. In medieval and early modern times, community was the basic unit of society, in part due to the lack of communication and transportation technologies that would allow a person to live securely and independently of their community. Today, the joint effects of technology, the principles of modern citizenship, and relatively open borders give people the ability to decide where to live, with which nation to align, and what lands to call home. As individuals become accustomed to frequently moving and breaking ties with their community of birth, communal identification becomes transient. People lack deep links to any singular culture; globalization makes the individual a sponge that soaks up the norms and beliefs of whichever locale they find themselves in. The result is the absence of a clear and permanent identity, without which the individual cannot truly/fully belong to any one community. Without community, they have no culture to provide shared customs and understandings that create common links and trust between a people. Overall, ties of community dissipate and the individual becomes the basic unit of society.
