IDEAS // 'ASK BEFORE YOU FISH'
Place and People Matter
Hope for America in Seth D. Kaplan’s Fragile Neighborhoods
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Volume 5 // Issue 2 // Fall 2023 // RUST
I recently attended a camping and community retreat deep in Amish country in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t uncommon to see a horse-drawn buggy roll by, one of which was driven by two smiling, waving boys of about eight or nine whose team consisted of two tiny white ponies. At dusk in advance of the fall equinox, a young couple stopped by looking for a dog that had run off during a seed-collecting walk—he quickly found us, and they all joined our campfire, which was collectively involved in a multi-part musical improvisation. The weekend was full of people sharing what they knew about music, body movement, sound, breath, and connection.
That morning, the host of the house—a long-time counter-cultural advocate whose family has lived there for three generations—had handed me a troubling newspaper clipping off of his refrigerator. “This is what I’m worried about,” he told me, and I quickly took in the main idea: Americans are concerned that the country is going to devolve into civil war. While the numbers vary by study, at least 40% of Americans are anxious about the prospects that the democratic entropy we’ve been experiencing will devolve into yet more division and violence.
There is reason for concern about the loss of democratic and social norms, and the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is still seen by many as a sure sign that more violence is on the horizon; the FBI is also closely watching domestic hate groups. Despite these worrisome developments, Seth D. Kaplan, author of Fragile Neighborhoods, would like Americans to have a bit more perspective. He’s traveled the globe both studying and trying to stabilize “fragile states”—places such as Yemen or Colombia, which are characterized by a combination of weak governance, limited institutional capacity, and a lack of resilience to internal and external shocks. These conditions often lead to a breakdown in social services, economic instability, and heightened vulnerability to violence and conflict, which often spill over borders and lead to unimaginable human suffering.
I suggested to my host that, compared to what Kaplan has witnessed in other countries around the globe, he believes America’s systems of governance and our institutions are strong, and he notes that our economy is still powerful. Immigrants the world over still see us as their first choice to settle when they want a better life. Here’s one way to look at it: If you can turn your tap water on and get clean water or catch a train that runs on time, you probably shouldn’t be worrying about imminent civil war.
Clearly, though, something isn’t right, and we all sense it, Kaplan included. He may be bullish on our judicial system’s relative independence, but he’s not blind to our ills. He writes in his introduction that “no country on earth has had such material wealth alongside such unprecedented social decay.”
Kaplan cites “family disintegration, homelessness, school shootings, racial animosity, skyrocketing rates of loneliness and depression, and deaths of despair—alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.” In cities around the country, there is as much as a staggering 30-year difference in life expectancy for people living fewer than 10 miles apart. In Appalachia, which bears the brunt of the 100,000 drug overdoses our country experienced last year, there are communities where 25 percent of the children don’t have a reliable place to sleep. “Nothing mars our country’s promise of ‘opportunity for all’ than these distressed places,” he writes.
In the past 20 years, our overall suicide rate has risen by 35 percent, and that includes lonely elders and students at some of the most elite educational institutions in the country. Kaplan devotes a chapter, titled “The Rich Are Not Alright,” to such phenomena. According to his research, the University of Pennsylvania has suffered a dozen suicides since 2013, and in 2019, the school’s mental health services director jumped nineteen stories to his death in Philadelphia—notably, several states away from where his wife and children lived. Twenty years ago, the leading cause of death for Pennsylvanians aged 18-44 was cancer. It’s now overdoses of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
Rich, poor, black, white, native, immigrant, urban, rural—it’s clear that too many of us are suffering. Kaplan’s book Fragile Neighborhoods is an attempt to understand why Americans are muddling through such a spate of troubling societal entropy, and what we can do to stop it.
On the why, Kaplan starts with what can, and has, gone right around the globe when governments are either weak or engaging in stifling authoritarianism: Strong social ties translate into resilient people and communities. He’s deeply affected by the fact that he’s been taken in by strangers in times of need in multiple countries whose governments have broken down, but whose people haven’t been splintered: When you can’t rely on the government, you must rely on one another.
Kaplan points also to the success of America’s civil rights movement as yet another example: “We forget how the remarkable social cohesion within the Black community allowed the movement to withstand the attacks from racist neighbors and local authorities as well as the important social ties local activists developed with groups and organizations elsewhere in the country,” he writes. The support of religious institutions was crucial to that cohesion, which we also forget.
Even earlier, he argues that America’s success wasn’t founded on “rugged individualists,” but exactly the opposite—communities of “pious ‘joiners,’”1 who often existed in multi-ethnic, multilingual, self-reliant groups that developed their own social and civic norms without state support. A good example of these neighborhood-level social norms is the relationship between the homestead owner whose land I camped on and the surrounding Amish community. The sign on his pond doesn’t demand “No fishing!” but instead quietly requests, “Please ask before fishing.” Apparently, the Amish boys who bring their reels and rods sometimes offer some fish to him as a thank you for sharing the pond. His Amish neighbors also use a freezer in his barn, which we learned when they unexpectedly stopped by during a tai chi session at the retreat, barely concealing smiles at the handful of us caught mid-Cloud Hands. It’s easy to imagine that in an emergency, the community would come together in mutual aid without waiting for some duly-elected state official to tell them that the roads should be cleared and the elders checked on.
Kaplan argues that the Amish may be poor, as are tight-knit enclaves in America of Somalis, Jamaicans, or Hasidic Jews, but they are all examples of communities that do not suffer from far more deadly “social” poverty, which is characterized by “weak social institutions, unhelpful social norms, and a lack of robust social connections.” It’s the kind of conditions that contribute to scourges such as illicit drug use and violence in rural and urban areas alike.
In Fragile Neighborhoods, Kaplan seeks out those places in the country where there has been a return to local and regional self-reliance rooted in a pluralistic embodiment of family, faith, and community, and in schools that teach civic pride and cultivate belonging—new shoots and leaves in which we might find signs of hope—and lessons we might employ in the places we ourselves live. Place matters, says Kaplan, and neighborhoods, he argues, are “the single most significant unit by which we organize our society.”
We can blame the government if we like for our ills, but our fragility is rooted in our lack of connection to one another, and that’s not the state’s purview. If we want a stronger country, we should try harder to learn our neighbors’ names—their unique challenges and joys—and to be curious about their backgrounds and cultures. We should ask before we fish, and share the catch. //
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