Beekeepers Too
John Phipps
Ever since reading Robert Putnam’s seminal work on American communities, Bowling Alone, I have looked at my tiny neighborhood differently. Meanwhile, the rapid adoption of laminated lumber in the construction industry offers an analogy that may be helpful. By gluing thin layers of wood together, longer, stronger and more stable lumber is displacing sawn boards, especially for long beams and joists.
Like-minded neighbors with similar socioeconomic status form layers that when bonded together with the glue of institutions like church, school, and geography adhered to common values, creating communities stronger than the sum of the layers. Without sound communities, commitment to national values is even less likely.
Depopulation, income divergence, associative mating, alternative online pseudo-communities, and intense partisanship are dissolving those bonds. These causes can be reinforcing. Lower populations and birthrates mean fewer parental interactions at basketball games, for example. Church identification with political positions repel possible members who share religious but not political beliefs. Loyalty to your layer is the highest virtue.
This has happened before, especially in the late 19th century as people gravitated to others most like themselves. Other layers were seen with disapproval or outright animosity, such as the anti-Catholic/Irish hatred of those times. Racism was so entrenched as to be assumed a normal part of life.
Community importance and commitment were revived last century primarily by war, especially WWII, as the very real prospect of losing everything shifted our attention from internal differences to foxhole tolerance. In fact, one of the great levelers of that time was universal conscription. Population was growing (notably the Baby Boom) so all layers could be gaining members without diminishing other groups.
As Putnam noted, we have become a nation living alone together. Critical mass needed for viable laminated communities passed a tipping point, as cultural bonds disappeared in rural America.
This magazine speaks to one layer in particular – relatively prosperous farms who often are the highest income group in tiny communities. There are even sublayers between small or agrarian farms, livestock producers, and specialty crop growers (Beekeepers). The need for distant outside members to form a peer group is not only for different perspectives, but to make social interaction possible and comfortable.
This stratification of our culture has several consequences but one of the first to be noticeable is longitudinal or intra-layer bond intensifying. As we avoid other layers, our links to those like us intensify to compensate for our smaller personal circle of friends. In our shrunken groups we encounter fewer contrasting ideas and reinforcement of our prior beliefs.
As the U.S. reproduces to a population of all minorities as soon as 2045, that perceived threat weakens interlayer links, especially for the white population in which recent census numbers show an unprecedented decline. The pandemic exacerbates the loss of cohesion in rural America, adding more outward signals – mask wearing, vaccination – to further corrode the bonds between layers.
I wish I had helpful examples and guidance how to offset this fracturing, but history has no example of free people rebuilding interlamination bonds without an immediate threat to all. Oddly, we have such a threat. Global warming is difficult to deny, but its catastrophic consequences are cumulative and slow by human life standards. Without a shattering event like Pearl Harbor, this looming danger will not solidify our communities or nation, even as it poses a far greater risk than war.
Reprinted with Permission from Top Producer Magazine.
