Selling My Ideal Community

I recently designed an “ideal community” for a class I am taking. The other individual I was working with and I decided that the fundamental ingredient to create an ideal community was to maximize interaction. I believe that the more connected people feel to each other the happier the entire community will become. With this in mind we designed a community that aimed to maximize community interaction through the areas of agriculture, wellness, outreach, and arts. However, it is one thing to design an ideal community and it is another thing to actually convince people to live there.

Because the fundamental idea behind this community is to maximize interaction, people who want to keep their distance and be loners most likely would not enjoy living in this community. But it was never the intention that this community would be a perfect fit for everyone. For this reason we stressed the idea that people would have the right to leave whenever they wanted. In order for an ideal community to work well people have to actually want to live there. If people are not living in a community by their own choice it will be nearly impossible to create an environment where everyone can be happy.

So while we’ve already established that this community is never going to be appealing and ideal to everyone, I believe many people would be interested in joining this community. In order to convince people to live in it, I would need to sell them on the basic idea that maximizing community interaction creates a better community. I do not believe that this would be all that hard to do because people already know this from their own lives. Many people find happiness and satisfaction in being part of social groups and organizations. Whether it’s attending church once a week, being part of a community club, or playing video games with friends on Xbox Live, people know that they can find happiness when they interact with other people and feel like they a part of something. All my community is trying to do is take what people already know and do in their own lives and put it on a larger level that encourages this same sense of community and belonging on nearly every aspect of regular everyday life. 

Veblen Definition for Purposeful Effort

Veblen once said “Purposeful effort comes to mean, primarily, effort directed to or resulting in a more creditable showing of accumulated wealth.” When this saying becomes the everyday definition for modern individuals, it easily leads to a misguided understanding that happiness is to be found in the pursuit of material wealth.

The first thing that jumps out at me is that this quote in many ways accurately describes life as we know it in the United States today. The American Dream has always been that anyone from any background who lives in America has an opportunity to be anything he or she wishes to be. For many people, the American Dream is, as Veblen says, accumulated wealth. If pursuing the American Dream is equivalent with the pursuit of happiness and if the American Dream for many people is the accumulation of wealth, then it is no stretch to say that many Americans seek to find happiness and meaning through the growing and gathering of material possessions.

The problem is that when a person’s happiness is placed in their own ability to show off the wealth they have accumulated as a result of their hard effort, “enough” is never enough. If the quality of my happiness is to be judged by the wealth I accumulate then true happiness is a state that can never be fully realized because there will always be some new avenue (whether it be in the form of a sleek sports car, cutting edge technology, or precious jewels) to demonstrate to others that I am a successful person. The constant desire for “more,” which results if you live by Veblen’s definition of purposeful effort, leads to bitterness, envy, resentment, and ultimately a sense of emptiness. 

Thoughts on Urbanization in the 21st Century

Over the past few hundred years one of the safest bets when making predictions for the future has been that human populations will continue to shift from rural areas to new metropolitan centers. Since the Industrial Revolution of the West during the 19^th Century, the number of people needed in agriculture has decreased while more jobs have emerged in cities. But the opportunities that drew people to London and New York 200 years ago are not necessarily the reasons drawing people to live in cities today. With technological advancements in the areas of transportation and communications, people can theoretically work from anywhere to anywhere. Even still, as of 2007 more than half of the world’s population lives in cities and the process of urbanization shows no signs of slowing down.

The spectrum of opinions about what urbanization means for the future of the world is wide ranging from those who see it as positive change to those who would have people believe that it is the beginning of the apocalypse. I want to briefly examine the opinions of two individuals on this subject before giving my own opinion.

One of the gloomiest predictions about urbanization I came across was that of James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler believes that the rapid pace of urbanization will eventually slow and even decrease. He argues that once the world runs out of oil people are going to have to return to farming for themselves in order to survive. Kunstler believes that this will then lead to the disappearance of smaller cities while larger cities shrink to a smaller core, turning the outer limits and suburbs into slums.

On the other hand, Edward Glaeser, professor of economics at Harvard believes that urbanization is an enormously beneficial process. He argues that cities offer many individuals a chance in life that they wouldn’t get in a rural setting.  Glaesar states, “Cities remain important because they create the intellectual connections that forge human capital and spur innovation.” He argues that metropolitan areas offer a place for people to come together, collaborate, and be more economically productive.

Overall I would have to agree a lot more with Glaeser than with Kunstler. Many people want to argue that cities are major agents of pollution. I disagree and would argue that living in a city is actually the greener way to live. In a city you have people sharing more of the same resources than you do in rural settings. People can use greener ways of transportation such as walking, bicycling, and public transportation because distances between Point A and Point B are much closer.

Kunstler does make a valid point, however, when he says that fossil fuels are not going to be able to support our way of living forever. There is only so much oil out there and nobody in authority really wants to talk about how much time we have left before we run out. Whether that will happen in the next 50 years or 200, no one can be certain but either way an alternate source of energy will need to be found. But while Kunstler suggests that such alternate energy sources will not be able to meet the needs to power urban areas making cities less viable, I disagree. I think that people will be able to come up with solutions for better sources of energy as well as other challenges posed by the future when they are living in close proximity among one another and able to collaborate easily—probably in cities.

Wandering in the Wilderness

Just about everyone has heard a “wandering in the wilderness” story at some point and if you’re like most people you probably know more than one. This is the kind of story which usually starts with a person going through an undesirable period in his or her life and ends with the person discovering themselves or Jesus. Whether it’s reading the latest rags to riches story on Wall Street in the Business section or listening to someone’s miraculous testimony at Wednesday night prayer meeting, we are all drawn to these types of stories because they deal with a fundamental human need—to find purpose and happiness with one’s identity in life.

There are two “wandering in the wilderness” stories I want to look at today. The first is the story of NFL superstar Ricky Williams. Williams was a Heisman Trophy winner in college and was one of the first players drafted in the 1999 NFL draft. He led the NFL in rushing in 2002 and was on pace for what many people believed would be a Hall of Fame career. But in 2004, amidst rumors of testing positive for marijuana, Williams quit football forfeiting millions of dollars and a life many would kill for. Instead Williams chose to travel the world to places ranging from Australia to India, visiting some rather interesting places along the way, in an effort to find himself.

William’s story shares some concepts with some of the themes of Ecclesiastes. Early in Ecclesiastes the Teacher writes “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 2:11). Like the Teacher, Williams was a man who had achieved many great successes that would make most men envious. But like the Teacher, Williams was left with a sense of meaninglessness. He felt as though he’d been running away from searching for real meaning his whole life and couldn’t be content until he found a purpose.

The second story is about a Seventh-day Adventist pastor named Dennis Sellers who left the church for 23 years before returning to Adventism. Sellers was a pastor who got caught up in the idea that Christians had to live sinless lives in order to be saved in the last days. When he eventually heard the message about justification by faith, he took his ideas to the other extreme throwing out Adventist doctrines such as the Sabbath as well as the ministry of Ellen G. White. These ideas eventually led to his departure from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He went on to start his own insurance business, which was successful for awhile, but then through a series of unfortunate events he lost his license to work in that field. It was not until he came across a book by Clifford Goldstein a few years later that he was eventually led to rebaptism.

All his life, Sellers had wanted to be a pastor but when he left Adventism he could no longer do that. Sellers hated selling insurance because it was not what he felt called to do. Likewise the Teacher of Ecclesiastes writes, “A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work. This too, I see, is from the hand of God” (Ecclesiastes 2:24). In other words, the Teacher is saying “do what God made you to do.” Sellers was not happy because he was doing something outside of what God had called him to.

So what can we learn from both these stories? As was the case with Ricky Williams, sometimes in life we feel like we have everything going for us. We’re making good money, we have the latest toys, and we’re living what most would call a successful life. But yet at the end of the day we’re still not satisfied. Williams’ story, as well as the words of Ecclesiastes, reminds us that we can’t look to our success to find purpose in our lives.

The story of Dennis Sellers emphasizes the need for us to do what God called us to in order to be happy. We can only live a life apart from the will of God for so long before it eventually leads to a feeling of meaningless. It is only through living a life well lived in accordance to God’s will that people can find purpose and meaning in their existence.