Let’s say there is a society in which everyone honors
contracts—formal ones and implied promises. Managers and their employees abide
by their collective bargaining agreement. Car dealers transparently present
their vehicles; customers pay their loans. Real estate agents advertise “open
housing” and then do not discriminate. Tax returns contain accurate figures.
Civil courts are the rarity. Yet, says Pope Pius XI (1857-1939), such a utopia
may disguise alienation. All the rules can be followed, but that society can
lack friendship or alternately what Catholic social thought calls public
charity, neighborly love or solidarity. “Justice alone,”
Pius XI writes, “cannot bring about a union of hearts and minds.”
The collapse of great societies is
about the decay of relationships, writes Robert Hall in This Land of
Strangers (Greenleaf Books, 2012). All of our major issues, he details,
are really about weak relationships—homelessness, struggling families,
addiction treatment, misuse of the internet and even economic downturns. Even
our daily commerce suffers under a paucity of open relationships.
The big concept in business today is
“marketing the brand.” A company may have several flavors or models or
instruments or services. According to the brand theory, customers, employees
and stockholders will stay connected to a successfully marketed brand, no
matter the specific product or service. Yet, what is actually happening? There
is high employee turnover and “an ocean of employee distrust” in many sectors,
Hall writes. Managers too distrust the corporate executives while those
executives lose touch with the original aspirations of the company.
Stockholders are fixated on quarterly returns, not on a company’s future.
Customers are loyal until a competitor runs a commercial that promises the next
flavor, model, service or instrument. And all the while Wells Fargo spends lots
of money on their “Rebuilding Your Trust” campaign.
Society goes along treating
“relationships as if they were optional,” Hall continues, even though plenty of
research documents the benefits of relationships. Those with many friends and
colleagues are “prospering emotionally, socially, academically and
economically.” Those who have few friends and colleagues are also those who
lack confidence and resiliency, who fall behind in school, and whose finances
are sliding backward. What holds for individuals and families also holds for
companies and non-profits. Those with only tentative ties to a small number of
stakeholders have or soon will have a grim financial picture.
Has alienation run its course? Will
relationships be a priority in the days ahead? According to Hall, “the small
group is the unit for transformation.” Neighbors or like-minded people unite
around a local concern. They get to trust one another and, over time, expand
their social capital to include other concerns and other small groups. Lots of
encouraging energy comes about as people connect with other members of society
in new and exciting ways.
There’s the Me Too movement and the
Black Lives Matter movement. There’s fresh energy in the movement for
responsible gun ownership. Fresh relationships are building around local
electoral campaigns. The durability and effectiveness of these movements and of
other civic endeavors, however, depends on what is occurs between people,
one-to-another. Does it begin and end on the internet or is there genuine
face-to-face exchange? Hash tag groups and flash mob events do not in
themselves contribute to a relational society. In fact if cyber-connections are
overdone, there is risk of greater isolation.
Strong cultural forces make genuine
relationships seem superfluous. Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)
calls those forces liquid modernity. It favors episodic and temporary
attachment and fluid identity. The culture suggests that strong attachments are
potential hindrances. The fickleness goes further. Views of reason and good
sense change with conditions, Bauman writes. There is little assurance that
what an individual holds to be true at sunset will be what that individual
prefers tomorrow. Modern culture puts too much emphasis on the individual, who
is quickly overwhelmed with choices in the “realm of self-fulfillment and
calculation of risks,” Bauman continues. In a liquid culture, strangers and weak
ties are the substitutes for “the feared fluidity of the world.”
Movements, churches, unions, civic
entities and more continue to use too many shortcuts. They resort to the
strategy of “better presence on the web” and spend far too much time and energy
on impersonal marketing, on the color of the brochures, the advisability of TV
or radio promotions and the like. They attempt to catch people on the
fly–people who might attend a grand opening or a rally, people who are fond of
clicking like or don’t friend.
Effective solidarity or neighborliness
requires the opposite. Public friendship is grounded in virtues, beginning with
amicability. It treasures finesse, attention, subtlety, forbearance and
perseverance. A person’s practice of civic friendship proceeds with calculated
vulnerability in a humble and sincere manner. Public virtues are nourished in
small groups, but not those given to mixing-up, shifting, exiting and entering,
randomly meeting, starting late, jumping around, endlessly in crisis over
collective identity and disbanding over and over.
Please
send along your experience with small groups to the address below. Droel’s
booklet, Public Friendship, is distributed by National Center for the
Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629; $5)
