ENDS AND MEANS
Each one of them can say, in the words of the Jolly Miller
of the song, 'I care for nobody, no, not I, and nobody
cares for me/ Metropolitan life is atomistic. The city, as
a city, does nothing to correlate its human particles into a
pattern of responsible, communal living. What the country
loses on the swings, the city loses all over again on the
roundabouts.
In the light of this statement of the principal reasons for
the recent decline of the community and of die community
sense in individuals, we can suggest certain remedies. For
example, schools and colleges can be transformed into
organic communities and used to offset, during a short
period of the individual's career, the decay in family and
village life. (A very interesting experiment in this direc-
tion is being made at Black Mountain College in North
Carolina.) To some extent, no doubt, the old 'natural* life
of villages and small towns, the life that the economic,
technological and religious circumstances of the past con-
spired to impose upon them, can be replaced by a con-
sciously designed synthetic product—a life of associations
organized for local government, for sport, for cultural
activities and the like. Such associations already exist, and
there should be no great difficulty in opening them to
larger numbers and, at the same time, in making their
activities so interesting that people will wish to join them
instead of taking the line of least resistance, as they do now,
and living unconnected, atomistic lives, passively obeying
during their working hours and passively allowing them-
selves to be entertained by machinery during their hours of
leisure. The existence of associations of this kind would
serve to make country life less dull and so do something to
arrest the flight towards the city. At the same time, the
decentralization of industry and its association with agri-
culture should make it possible for the countryman to earn
as much as the city dweller. In s£ite of the ease with which
80