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SHOW 104 TRANSCRIPT
New Communities for the New Millennium?

THE word "community" may sound pleasantly archaic, a remnant of an idyllic past. Community was where we put down roots, celebrating common heritage and shared beliefs. But today our roots are like radio waves, planted anywhere and beaming everywhere. And so the concept of community is changing. What is a community? It's more where your mind connects than where your body resides. We have ethnic communities with special customs, spiritual communities with special visions, scientific communities with special languages, and on-line communities where no one has ever heard a voice, much less seen a face. But ironically, in an age of instant information community is more relevant than ever--and its expanded boundaries, greater diversity, and subtle powers may surprise you. New communities are more than your friendly neighborhood or favorite chat room. They have spread across the planet, erasing time, distance, and national borders. We asked five prominent thinkers to describe the communities of tomorrow. Each has enhanced the meaning of community, and they bring a rich variety of perspectives.

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PARTICIPANTS

Bruce Chapman, a former director of the United States Census Bureau, is the founder and president of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based public policy center that promotes representative government, free markets, and individual liberties. Bruce talks about how shared obligations generate connectedness and why old neighborhoods are reviving. 

Barbara Marx Hubbard, the author of Conscious Evolution: Awakening the Power of Our Social Potential, is an inventive futurist, citizen diplomat, and social architect. She envisions a global community in which people work together to construct an improved world.

Saru Jayaraman, a law student at Yale, is the national founder of WYSE (Women and Youth Supporting Each other), a group that empowers young inner-city girls. While an undergraduate at UCLA, Saru was recognized as one of the top three students in the nation. 

Dr. John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is an outspoken social critic. John is the author of The Word on the Street: Fact and Fable About American English, and he discusses the power of language to define and differentiate communities.

Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, is the director of the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. Neil offers a broader than usual definition of the scientific community.

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ROBERT: Bruce, you've had a full career in public policy, from writer and publisher to member of Ronald Reagan's White House staff and diplomat. Now, as president of the Discovery Institute, you're involved with diverse communities. As you look to the future, how do you see this diversity playing out?

BRUCE: With the technological revolution that one of our fellows, George Gilder, has written so much about, we're going to see new forms of community developing. There will be many niche communities, but along with this fragmentation you're also going to see a return to the old kinds of communities and a sense of neighborhood--the place where your body resides, to use the term you used. And we're going to find people paying more attention to how to revive those kinds of communities.

ROBERT: You look at communities from regional to religious, cultural to civic. 

BRUCE: Exactly. We're talking about relationships among people and the sense of obligation and connectedness that results. 

ROBERT: Neil, as an astrophysicist, you deal with galactic communities, but tell us about the scientific community here on Earth.

NEIL: I like to think of the scientific community as not simply those who practice science but those who can appreciate science at its more fundamental levels. I'll give you a perfect example. It's sometimes said that the state lottery system is a tax on those who never did well in mathematics. A scientifically literate community consists of people who know what scientific issues are important and can think coherently and collectively about them. And in that sense, we create a scientific community that pervades society.

ROBERT: So the scientific community should be pandemic, embracing everyone?

NEIL: Of course, because it's not my science or your science. Science describes the nature of the world around us, and no one has a monopoly on it. Yes, there are a few people who know it better than others, but the same laws of physics apply to me as apply to you, and there's no reason why I should hold all the reins. Science is for everyone.

ROBERT: John, I'm trying to figure out how many different communities you belong to. You're a professor at a major university, you're a linguist, a musician, a historian, an American, an African American, a social commentator, a critic--forgive me if I've left anything out. Focus on how language can unify and differentiate communities.

JOHN: Language is ever changing; it just has to be. And one of the indexes of a community--or a group of people intimately connected--is that it will have its own version of whatever the reigning language is. You can expect of a group of people who feel unified among themselves that they will have ways of speaking which are different from everyone else's. That's true not only in America but everywhere in the world. And so one index of a community's feeling of not being a part of the greater community is the extent to which their speech differs from that which is considered mainstream.

ROBERT: Does that create social fragmentation?

JOHN: Often it does, yes. You can think of linguistic differences--although in themselves fine, harmless, and often wonderful--as indexes of fragmentation. If people are speaking in a very different way, it most likely means that there's a social problem--or at best they're separate but peaceably coexisting. 

ROBERT: Saru, you call yourself a nonviolent revolutionary. After you graduate with advanced degrees--in public policy from Harvard and in law from Yale--you plan to go into social activism. Tell us about WYSE, the organization you created, and how it helps redefine a sense of community.

SARU: WYSE works with young women, age twelve to fourteen, in disadvantaged communities across the country and provides them with the resources, information, and support to help them make responsible decisions, create community change, and then go on and become leaders in their communities. WYSE gives young women the tools to think critically, deconstruct the images that are coming at them, and counter pressures from a variety of sources--peers, parents, school, society.

ROBERT: How do you teach young people to think critically? It's an unusual task.

SARU: It's all about teaching them to ask the right questions and getting them to express themselves, and also about giving them new lenses through which to view the world--lenses such as feminism, social power dynamics, classism, those kinds of things. But what I've seen increasingly with these young women--and with young people in general--is that because they don't feel part of a larger American community they've sometimes gone on to create their own alternative communities. 

ROBERT: For this show, you'll promise to remain nonviolent? 

SARU: I promise.

ROBERT: Barbara, tell us of your transformation from a mother of five into a pioneer of global consciousness. 

BARBARA: My own movement in this direction came when the United States dropped the bomb on Japan. I had always thought we were making progress by knowing more, but now I suddenly saw that we could kill ourselves by knowing more. So I asked, What's good in all this power of science, technology, industry? Where are the positive images of the future in our new power? There weren't any. We had images of destruction and Armageddon--very mystical images, like the New Jerusalem. But where was the human race going? When I was twenty-one, my father took me to visit President Eisenhower, and I asked him, "Mr. President, what is the purpose of all our power that's good?" And I'll never forget his answer. He shook his head and said, "I have no idea." I decided to make a lifelong search for an image of the future based on real power that would be good. And this has led me to the view that something of huge importance is happening through evolution, through unconscious natural selection. 

ROBERT: And now we're involved in the evolutionary process ourselves?

BARBARA: Yes, we're consciously involved. When humanity understood e=mc2 from Einstein, we made a bomb. Now that humanity is beginning to understand our own genetic code, we can make monsters or we can cure diseases and extend our life span. So we have to become conscious and ethical about how we use our power. My work is to show people that if we use our power well, we can have an unlimited future. 

ROBERT: How does conscious evolution--your hallmark--enrich the sense of community?

BARBARA: Very deeply. First, it gives all human beings, wherever they are, a sense that there's meaning to the struggle--that human existence isn't just a mistake, that the human race has great potential. Second, it means that every human being has a personal potential. So if you're frustrated and upset in your world, that's the universe evolving through you. I've conducted twenty-five conferences--called SYCON, for Synergistic Convergence--where a cross section of the human species was represented: young kids, welfare mothers, ambassadors, former criminals, Nobel Prize-winning scientists. We asked all of them, What do you want to create? What are your needs? What are your resources? And they had to listen to one another on such topics as education, the environment. We took down walls, searched for common goals, matched resources with needs. We used diversity to lead toward synergy.

BRUCE: I'm troubled by the use of the term "evolution" in describing the development of communities, because I think evolution itself is coming into a period of great redefinition and even challenge. People like Michael Behe and William Dembski in the so-called intelligent-design movement are challenging the whole concept of Darwinian evolution. As a result, we may think very differently about what it means to be part of a community. This is not a problem of science but of the applications of science. If our world is totally materialist, if we are only the products of evolution, then we think one way about what it means to be human--we come up with justifications for the consequences of our action. For example, we start to explain problems in law enforcement based on genetic disposition. 

ROBERT: Are you criticizing such applications of science?

BRUCE: Yes. It robs us of part of our humanity, because it robs us of responsibility. But if the term "intelligent design" has meaning, we'll come up with attitudes different from those we had in the twentieth century.

ROBERT: Do you respect the capabilities of science?

BRUCE: I think we need a debate about it, a civil discussion. We ought to reflect on the applications of evolution to our politics and our social order.

NEIL: The social order wasn't perfect before Darwinian evolution. 

BRUCE: Of course not. 

NEIL: Why blame our social problems on evolution? Surely nations laid siege to other nations before Darwin was ever born. 

BRUCE: It has nothing to do with that. It has to do with how we see the world in which we live today and whether or not it's a materialist world. Now, we're talking about new communities. Is evolution going to be guided, and is technology going to take over the process, as Ray Kurzweil says? Then we'd have a very different world than we would if the computer, as George Gilder says, is "the triumph of mind over matter." 

ROBERT: Your litmus test seems to the ultimate nature of human beings, whether random accident of evolution or purposeful result of intelligent design.

BRUCE: The question has to do with how you see human beings, and whether or not there's a scientific basis-- 

JOHN: Now, Michael Behe's point is about God. 

BRUCE: No, it's not, actually.

JOHN: Well, yes it is. The idea of Behe's book [Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution] is that Darwinian evolution is a nice idea but that some things [biochemical complexity] can be explained only as having been created by a higher power. I found it a very interesting book. But are you by any chance saying that one can't have proper ethics and communities without religion or God? I just want to see if that's your point.

BRUCE: I think you can have an ethical order without God--there are examples throughout history, such as the Stoics. But what the intelligent-design movement is really saying is that it looks like there is a design in the universe. And if that's the case, then an ethical order should be based on that idea, with very different consequences for how you regard people. 

JOHN: A design by God?

BRUCE: It doesn't describe what the designer might be, just states the likelihood of a design.

BARBARA: I wanted to say that the sense in which I mean evolution--

BRUCE: I know. It's not the narrow definition of mechanistic Darwinian evolution. 

BARBARA: I got it from Teilhard de Chardin--the idea that there is a process of creation leading to higher complexity and greater consciousness and freedom. Nobody knows precisely how that design got there, but I think there's certainly the presence of design.

BRUCE: That's a very good distinction. I'm glad you made it. 

ROBERT: Let's get into the workings of the scientific community. Neil, how do scientists--astronomers, physicists, biologists--think? How does that community work together?

NEIL: Very differently from the rest of society. We're trained to be problem solvers. We're taught to trim the fat off the questions, get to the dewdrop essence of what matters, and focus our analysis on that. And as you get nearer, maybe there's more and more fat to be trimmed. So you narrow your questions, to bring yourself closer to truth of how the universe works--

ROBERT: --and to see holes in your own hypotheses.

NEIL: Exactly. We don't always know whether the questions we ask are the ones that will lead to the answers, but I can tell you that every question that was the right question led to an answer that was testable and created a deeper sense of world order. We can go way back to Copernicus, who put the sun back into the center of the solar system, producing an answer that completely changed how humans view themselves in the big picture. And so, in fact, Darwin wasn't the first; he was just part of this whole sequence that has, over time, redefined what it is to be human on this earth, in this solar system, in this galaxy, in this universe. 

ROBERT: This is a rather idealized picture. Peel away at the onion. What really happens when scientists get together? What kinds of hierarchies, pecking orders, are there?

NEIL: You want the dirty laundry. Well, the laundry isn't as dirty as the stereotype suggests. Because ultimately it's your knowledge base, and your ability to figure out solutions to problems, that wins arguments. It's not how loud you are, or how persuasive, or whether you won debating contests in your day, because in the end you answer to nature. Nature is the ultimate adjudicator of all that we do. So we are humble in the presence of nature, which can send us back to the drawing board at any moment.

ROBERT: Is science useful in unifying humanity?

NEIL: Yes, because it's one universe. It's our universe. When I tell people about the galaxy, I say, "It's not my galaxy, it's our galaxy." And people want a sense of belonging. I can tell you that comets streaking through the sky have a chemical composition that's identical to what you've got in your body. To me, that's empowering. We are all star dust. So "community" is not just your own little neighborhood--with all deference to what communities were in the 1950s. "Community" is a sense of what your place is in the universe. I know it sounds pie-in-the-sky, but this is what flows through my veins every time I contemplate problems in astronomy. 

SARU: But that feeling in part rests on whether you believe that you have an equal stake in the universe along with everybody else--that everybody is a part of the same universal community. You have to have some sense of belonging. And I just don't think that a large percentage of America feels that way. 

NEIL: Look at the Hubble Space Telescope--beautiful pictures making the cover of Time magazine. It's mostly taxpayers' money paying for that. I see people gathering around, asking questions about what Hubble is seeing--

SARU: Which people, though?

JOHN: The people who don't gather around feel disincluded from society. But it doesn't have to be that way. The people you're talking about, Saru, could take delight in seeing pictures of, say, Mars, despite the inequities--

SARU: I'm sure.

JOHN: The fact that they don't is--

SARU: --education! If education were more equal--

BARBARA: It may be that some of them do. I'll never forget meeting with gang leaders in a community-based SYCON in Los Angeles. I walked in there, and the heads of the gangs asked me, "What's the difference between you and the rest of the social workers?" They were scornful of me. And I said, "Well, my difference is that I think the human species is aiming toward universal life together. I think we're going to explore space, for instance." And a Mexican American came up to me and said, "My people have always known that." And the black leaders loved the idea that there was something beyond just not fighting with each other. And I do believe--it's in the biochemistry of our brains--that we are the universe awakening.

NEIL: It was that picture of Earth from space that changed how we thought of Earth. There were no national boundaries, just continents. Humanity shifted to another level, and we started seeing this delicate fragile planet, this spaceship Earth, moving through space.

SARU: That's true. I'm not saying that young people aren't interested in science and technology. If they were taught about these things, and provided with this information, they'd be deeply interested.

ROBERT: That's the challenge.

SARU: But I don't think it would move them any closer to a sense of commonality with those who oppress them, unless those who oppress them--the haves--admit that these young inner-city people are a part of the universe as well. 

ROBERT: John, take us back to language and its relationship to culture.

JOHN: The development of a different form of the dominant language is part of the formation of a different culture. It goes along with it; it's something you'd expect. For example, in this country, even African Americans who have several degrees, who have spent a lot of time with white people, who are a part of the general society, almost always--ninety-nine percent of the time--have what we don't call, but in fact is, a black accent. There is such a thing as sounding black. It's not a matter of slang, it's not a matter of sentence structure, it's just a matter of sound. You can generally tell on the radio--say, on National Public Radio--when someone is black. And except in rare cases--like Neil and me--African Americans do not sound like, for example, you, Robert. That's just a fact. And the reason is that there's always been a feeling among people in the black community, regardless of their socioeconomic level, of a certain separation, and other issues that we all know quite a bit about. So if there's a community feeling, then there's probably a community language. It's true in Bavaria; it's true in New Guinea. It's also true in scientific communities; scientists use a different form of language. So do chefs; so do mechanics. Language is an index of community. 

ROBERT: Neil, scientific communities, African American communities--I turn to you.

NEIL: I want to distinguish between word choice and language differences. Just because some jargon uses categories of words that aren't common, I don't think that's necessarily a different way of communicating. In the scientific community, language is introduced to provide a level of precision that everyday English does not allow, and often this language becomes stilted. In astrophysics, though, we have no such problems: big red stars, for example, are called red giants. The beginning of the universe? The Big Bang. Our language was never separatist, not deliberately. The universe is complicated enough; why complicate it more? We use common ordinary language. Our vocabulary comes from the general public. 

BRUCE: Neil, I couldn't read an astrophysics paper. 

NEIL: No, but you could pick up the term "red giant." Other matters are complicated, but the term itself is clear.

ROBERT: But doesn't the fact that we have a scientific class create a new elite, so that knowledge becomes the great divide of society? It used to be money and class--now it's knowledge.

NEIL: It's unfortunate, but that's the reality, and it will continue. It's a battle between the knows and the know-nots. 

BRUCE: Educators realize that this gap exists, and they're trying to do something about it in their curricula. We see a return to a basic core curriculum in science. They're saying to people like me, who are history or English majors, that we have to take a course in science--not necessarily a specific discipline but the history of science, say, or the philosophy of science. So that later on in life we'll be better customers for Neil's papers. You're not going to create a universal understanding of science, but you are going to expand that understanding greatly. 

SARU: But there has to be an appreciation that there are different forms of knowledge--that even the know-nots have a form of knowledge that we, the elite, do not. Call it street knowledge, or some other term for cultural knowledge, but it needs to be respected and brought into the discourse. If the philosophy of science is being taught, then other forms of knowledge should be included as well. 

BARBARA: I like the difference between IQ and EQ. We can be brilliant [i.e., a high intelligence quotient] but have a low emotional quotient. There are whole ranges of capacities that don't involve analytical, critical intellect. We need to broaden our definition of intelligence.

ROBERT: Saru, tell us about the communities where you work, and the alternative structures you've created.

SARU: One of the communities is ninety-five-percent-Spanish-speaking Latina and Latino. Unfortunately, in California, language has been used to divide and oppress communities instead of bringing them together. And many people who feel marginalized have formed their own alternative communities--some of them identity communities and some gangs, some positive and some negative. Our point is to provide young people and marginalized groups with positive, constructive tools, so that they can create communities that then can work productively with other communities, as opposed to destroying themselves. 

ROBERT: Bruce, how do you build an international community?

BRUCE: When you reach across an international border, as we do with the Cascadia Project [the development of common strategies in support of intermodal transportation, trade, tourism, environment and technology] between the state of Washington and the province of British Columbia, you immediately run into problems, believe me. It's not like crossing a state border. You have to think about and treat people somewhat differently. For example, there's some anti-Americanism in Canada, and so when you relate to Canadians you need to take that into account. On the other hand, if we can't relate to Canadians, how are we ever going to establish peace in the Balkans?

ROBERT: You've also been involved with the revitalization of local communities.

BRUCE: I think we're going to see renewed commitments to local communities. All these interesting new technologies are generating fragmented new communities. But at the same time they're creating a yearning for the old-fashioned community, a living place where you know your neighbors, where there's some sort of institution, such as a church, to bring people together. And this yearning has inspired a new sense of architecture. Fifty years ago, there was no such thing as a historic preservation movement; now it's the way we build cities. We try to save and reuse what we have, and we've learned a lot more about the civic amenities--simple things, like street trees. And neighbors who have very little in common with one another cooperate on such projects. I look for a transformation of the suburbs into someplace more humane--a place that doesn't separate living from work, from shopping, from church. In the twenty-first century, this is going to happen, because people will demand it.

NEIL: But there's a limiting factor here. It's not like the 1950s, where you were a company man, you got your job and worked at it for fifteen years, you lived in the same house for fifteen years--so your neighbors and community had a foundation upon which to build. Now we're in a technologically driven economy, with timescales of three to five years before things are all changed around. We have people moving from one place to another, and this old-fashioned kind of community can no longer be where you drop your anchor. We have to be more imaginative about what we call community. 

BRUCE: You actually can have both. You're going to have these various fragmented communities, but you're also going to have a revival of the smaller, physical communities--towns--because people are moving less today than they were ten or so years ago. Today there are more entrepreneurs, more people who are working for themselves [more people telecommuting], more people who can decide where they want to live, more people who can make volitional decisions on their own. It's not for everybody, but it is a trend.

SARU: The non-elites don't have as much volition as others do.

ROBERT: They will when you get finished with them.

SARU: I hope. 

ROBERT: It's a good goal.

SARU: But Bruce is right in that there's been a movement toward developing local geographic communities, organized on the ground--for example, through church-based relationship building. And once relationships are built, then a fight for change against the power structure can begin. Such local communities have developed in Brooklyn and other places and have allowed the people living there to actually take the lead.

ROBERT: When you're the power structure, I'm going to fight against you.

SARU: You won't be able to.

ROBERT: A final question: a hundred years from now, which kinds of communities have become more important than they are today?

BARBARA: High synergy, win-win communities, in which everyone can contribute his or her gifts--what I call co-creative communities. 

JOHN: Certain Asian communities, particularly Chinese and Japanese, doing well commercially and spreading their influence in Asia--and also through their strong immigrant communities in this country.

BRUCE: Internet fragmentation will create many more niche communities, which will enrich us. We lose the power of some previous communities, such as newspaper readership, and so forth, but these niche communities will, ironically, complement a counterpart movement to strengthen old-style neighborhoods.

SARU: Identity-based communities are another wave of the future--communities of women, communities of people of color, gathering and building strength within themselves so that they can then go on and work together with other communities to build a larger community.

NEIL: I'm not going to say what I think it should be, but what I think it will be. It will be the ultimate revenge of the nerds. Society used to be divided between the haves and the have-nots. And it will soon become divided between those who know and those who know not. 

ROBERT: The nerds and the nerd-nots.

NEIL: Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and he's the patron saint of the nerd community. In the revenge of the nerds, those who have embraced technology will be the lead community and in control. 


ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

THE concept of community is a good descriptor of how we cope with social change. If the traditional community was the geographical place where we live physically, the new community is the psychological space where we live mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Community integrates individual desire with collective need, balancing personal expression with social requirement. Today we have many kinds of communities--technology-empowered virtual groups, science-linked knowledge groups, self-reliant social-action groups, spiritual gatherings, local activism, regional cooperation, global awareness. It's fascinating to watch such diversity emerge. Global telecommunications allow us to live in many communities at the same time. A key, I think, is language. The power of words can unify or divide. Computer programmers from India, China, and Israel speak a similar language, much more so than do, say, politicians in Boston, Belfast, and Birmingham. The range of these new communities is staggering and promises to broaden individual opportunity and enrich humanity as a whole, though we should expect some splintering and conflict; we will have to remain ever vigilant against an accelerating specialization that can trigger social fragmentation. Our best hope for the future, it seems, is an increase in communities of shared interests and meaningful action--a new consciousness of a new connectedness. New communities can bring us closer together and, it is hoped, closer to truth.

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