Territorial states and political boundaries will persist; but they will not be barriers which impoverish experience by cutting man off from his fellows; they will not be hard and fast divisions whereby external separation is converted into…
John Dewey
The Public Record
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.
gutenberg.org
For it will be alive and flexible as well as stable, responsive to the complex and world-wide scene in which it is enmeshed.
But if it be re-established, it will manifest a fullness, variety and freedom of possession and enjoyment of meanings and goods unknown in the contiguous associations of the past.
Unless local communal life can be restored, the public cannot adequately resolve its most urgent problem: to find and identify itself.
Organization as a means to an end would reënforce individuality and enable it to be securely itself by enduing it with resources beyond its unaided reach.
Mobility may in the end supply the means by which the spoils of remote and indirect interaction and interdependence flow back into local life, keeping it flexible, preventing the stagnancy which has attended stability in the past, and…
Uniformity and standardization may provide an underlying basis for differentiation and liberation of individual potentialities.
But we can assert with confidence that there is nothing intrinsic in the forces which have effected uniform standardization, mobility and remote invisible relationships that is fatally obstructive to the return movement of their…
The unanswered question is how far these tendencies will reëstablish the void left by the disintegration of the family, church and neighborhood.
The local is the ultimate universal, and as near an absolute as exists.
But enormous organization is compatible with demolition of the ties that form local communities and with substitution of impersonal bonds for personal unions, with a flux which is hostile to stability.
This, we repeat, can be found only in the vital, steady, and deep relationships which are present only in an immediate community.