By Celia Coates

My sister Judy, who has a fine sense of humor, sent me a gift subscription to HARPER’S BAZAAR, a very glossy women’s fashion magazine. High fashion is near the bottom of my list of interests, although this banner statement on one of the articles did catch my eye,
“Spring’s BOLDEST LOOKS play with TEXTURE and VOLUME and offer fresh TWISTS on traditional tropes like FLORALS, FEATHERS, FRINGE and LACE,
it was nothing I was interested in exploring further.
So, I was astonished when I glanced at and then fully read the editor’s letter in the April issue. Samira Nair named this a “Possibility” issue and went on to write this fine and very thoughtful comment,
“The world can sometimes seem filled with things that are intractable or predetermined: limitations on what we can do or who we can be; obstacles to the way of growth or progress; systems, pressures, and realities that can restrict our field of vision. But finding ways to see beyond all that is part of what makes us both human and extraordinary. It’s something we unlock through creativity, ingenuity, art, and science, but also love, family, friendship, community, activism, and a multitude of other expressions of promise and potential.”

 The word community really caught my attention. Posts in WINN have included observations by knowledgeable psychologists and sociologists about human nature and the groups we form, but for me the most important view is the one from people who are spiritually wise and teach that we are all one. We are each a part of a larger whole and we exist together in a divine order, a multi-dimensional reality.

I remember a book, BOWLING ALONE, published in 2000 that was developed from author Robert Putnam’s 1995 essay about the increasing collapse of community in America. He wrote that beginning in the 1980s individualism had overtaken our sense of connectedness. One noticeable feature was that mass marketing had taken the place of grassroots citizen networks. The pandemic years taught us something about what we lose when we cannot meet in groups. In 2024 though, it seems we have become even more distant from many of our fellow citizens, we’ve divided into taking sides and forming cliques.

 I have enjoyed reading Eric Barker’s PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationship is (Mostly) Wrong. * And I learned some things. I didn’t know that the Neanderthal brain was larger than ours and that the human ability to cooperate kept us from being the ones going extinct,
“Neanderthals could work together only in tribes of ten or fifteen, but our collaborative superpower allowed us to scale to bands of over a hundred.”
In the wild we do not survive alone. We band together for mutual support, aid, and safety.
(And to have an audience for our jokes?)

Barker often pulls in scientific reports to shore up his statements. I read with interest that testing rats living alone in their cages skews the results of the research,
“We all know the story of the lab rat feverishly pressing the lever to get more drugs. Bruce Alexander, professor of psychology at Simon Frazer University, wondered if addiction was the only cause.”
Alexander wondered what would happen if the animals weren’t alone,
“What happens when you put rats in a cage with friends and toys and create a rat-topia? They don’t want the drug. When alone, rats used 25 mg of morphine. In rat-topia, the animals used under 5 mg.” *

 We in the wealthy West, are richer and more privileged than ever, and more depressed. And we “push the lever” more and more often, although the lever is on our cell phones to which we have become addicted. And although it may seem that we are “connected” through social media, the science shows that it is real relationship, actual contact with people, that is most important.

Many years ago, before charities had an on-line presence and there were still collectors who went door-to-door, my older daughter had a summer job asking for donations to benefit a good, national organization. She was intrigued to find that in the poorer neighborhoods more people gave money, perhaps not large amounts, but they gave something more often than in the upscale areas. They seemed to better understand the need for mutual support and neighborly generosity.

Dealing with disasters and calamities brings us back together – out of necessity. When I was growing up, I heard people in England reminisce about the camaraderie of sheltering during World War II in the tunnels of the London Underground. It seemed odd that people would have any good memories of that time, but it has now been shown (science again) that when we are in trouble and have to give up that everyone-for-themselves way of living, we return to our natural, primitive state of cooperation for our survival. We return to needing, and having, a community.  We aren’t alone in that rat-cage. And we don’t really care if the rodent next to us is rich, famous, or powerful.

Sociologist Charles Fritz has written,
“The widespread sharing of danger, loss, and deprivation produces an intimate, primarily group solidarity among the survivors…This merging of individual and societal needs provides a feeling of belonging and a sense of unity rarely achieved under normal circumstances.” *
We join together – but there is a danger here. In some circumstances we don’t form community, we form cults. One of our most basic needs is to know where we belong and what we belong to.
“Who are my people? Who is like me and who can I count on?”
When we go forward to become part of a community that is based on a wide sense that we are all valuable human beings rather than one based on a belief that enviable wealth, status, and celebrity create a leader to hang on to, we can form healthy communities.

Brett Ford of the University of California at Berkeley views the modern approach to basing our happiness on what benefits the individual as a failure. Eric Barker wrote about his ideas,
“Your efforts will all be me-me-me, and we saw that doesn’t jive with millions of years of human nature. You’ll be going at it all wrong because you are aiming at the wrong target. More status, more money, more control, fewer obligations won’t do it. … You can get happier. But to rise, you must first think of how to lift others.”

There was more to Samira Nair’s editorial,
“Believing that there is something more, something better, something brighter on the other side of a hill or a moment is always an article of faith but also a matter of perspective. That sense of possibility can be an invitation to dream and imagine, but it’s also the impetus for tangible work that makes what’s possible seem probable or even a reality. This issue looks at how we see and find possibility, even when the barriers to it seem overwhelming. It also explores how we create possibility for ourselves and others.”

The image that leads this post (you can find it on the webpage www.winnpost.org) is another photograph by artist David Lewis. It’s of a beautiful door – for me, it’s an opening to the possibility that we can get beyond our current obstacles to find and live the promise of our human communities.

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* Statements taken from PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships is (mostly) Wrong, by Eric Barker, Harper One, 2022.

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