NY Times Op-Ed: In This Together

Roger Cohen published a very thoughtful and timely op-ed in the NY Times on Monday entitled "In This Together."  His piece touched on several themes that I have written about on this site, including the moral considerations that are inseparable from the debate over health care reform. 

He also broaches the subject of disconnectedness within our culture.  This is a topic that I have personally been mulling lately through the writing of Wendell Berry.  Cohen says:

But the more I thought about it — and thought of the repeated Earth-to-Mars experience of trying to get through to my kids when they’re on their laptops, and thought of how often people thumb-typing on their Blackberries bump blindly into me on New York sidewalks, and thought about how technology now trumps community in the United States (even when that community is 39,000 feet up) — the more I felt those Northwest pilots were symbolic enough.

"Technology trumps community."  That is a telling statement, and a convicting one for a person who spends as much if not more time busily pecking away on a keyboard than I do actually interacting with other people.  I believe that is why the words of Wendell Berry have spoken to me lately.  In his writings, Berry emphasizes the importance and necessity of community.  Through community, individuals can find (and offer) healing, wisdom, learning, support, and commonality that fosters a fulfilling way of living.  From Berry's essay "Health is Membership," published in The Art of the Common-Place: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry:

I am not ‘against technology’ so much as I am for community. When the choice is between the health of a community and technological innovation, I choose the health of the community. I would unhesitatingly destroy a machine before I would allow the machine to destroy my community.
 

I believe that the community – in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures – is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms. 

Without going too far afield, Cohen's message, at least the message that I draw, is that the disconnectedness that has seeped into almost every aspect of our culture is obliterating the community of this nation.  Rather than seeing common ground and common good, we are instantly drawn to the philosophical divergences and the distinctions evident among one another.  So Cohen reminds us today that we are indeed "in this together."  The solutions we seek to the array of problems facing this nation  will not and cannot be universally pleasing.  But they still can be universally beneficial if given the chance.