Community and the American Village on Paradise Drive

Abstract

The author argues that at the root of American culture is an apparent, though illusory, paradox of a people who are at one and the same time thoroughly individualistic and voraciously communal. This paradox is not only part of the American cultural fabric, it is built directly and purposefully into the U.S. constitutional system itself. By using their individual choice to choose various forms of community, Americans were able to sustain and reproduce the social capital necessary to remain the functional community of communities the constitutional scheme depended upon and prevent the slide into egoism and narcissism that would result in their own personal alienation. In this way, what was once thought to require virtue, discipline and obedience could seemingly beproduced by self-interested individualism, the pursuit of happiness and the willingness to respect the rules (read rights of others) of the larger political game.The author explores this idea on two recent “texts” that capture in very general ways a dominant trend in the relationship between community and culture in the contemporary United States. The first text is the recent film by the current master of suspense in American movies M. Night Shymalan The Village (2004). The second is the recent work of non-fiction by the conservative political journalist and regular news commentator David Brooks titled On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004).