It is this final division or segment of the communal organization with which community-center associations are mainly concerned. Politics, religion, and community welfare, like golf, bridge, and other forms of recreation, are leisure-time activities, and it is the leisure time of the community that we are seeking to organize.
Aristotle, who described man as a political animal, lived a long time ago, and his description was more true of man then than it is today. Aristotle lived in a world in which art, religion, and politics were the main concerns of life, and public life was the natural vocation of every citizen.
Under modern conditions of life, where the division of labor has gone so far that—to cite a notorious instance—it takes 150 separate operations to make a suit of clothes, the situation is totally different. Most of us now, during the major portion of our waking hours, are so busy on some minute detail of the common task that we frequently lose sight altogether of the community in which we live.
On the other hand, our leisure is now mainly a restless search for excitement. It is the romantic impulse, the desire to escape the dull routine of life at home and in the local community, that drives us abroad in search of adventure. This romantic quest, which finds its most outrageous expression in the dance halls and jazz parlors, is characteristic of almost every other expression of modern life. Political revolution and social reform are themselves often merely expressions of this same romantic impulse. Millennialism in religion, the missionary enterprises, particularly those that are limited to “regions beyond,” are manifestations of this same wish to escape reality.
We are everywhere hunting the bluebird of romance, and we are hunting it with automobiles and flying machines. The new devices of locomotion have permitted millions of people to realize, in actual life, flights of which they had only dreamed previously. But this physical mobility is but the reflection of a corresponding mental instability.
This restlessness and thirst for adventure is, for the most part, barren and illusory, because it is uncreative. We are seeking to escape from a dull world instead of turning back upon it to transform it.
Art, religion, and politics are still the means through which we participate in the common life, but they have ceased to be our chief concern. As leisure-time activities they must now compete for attention with livelier forms of recreation. It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes in American life occur.
III. THE MEASUREMENT OF COMMUNAL EFFICIENCY
This, then, is our community. How are we to measure its efficiency? Here, I am bound to confess, we have still much to learn.
The simplest and most elementary way of estimating the competency and efficiency of a community, as something different from the competency and efficiency of the individual men and women who compose it, is by a comparative study of that community’s social statistics. Poverty, disease, and delinquency have frequently been called social diseases. They may be said to measure the extent to which the community has been able to provide an environment in which the individuals which compose it are able to live, or, to state it from the opposite point of view, they measure the extent to which the individuals who compose the community have been able to adapt themselves to the environment which the community provided.