Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

For Fukuyama, communities of trust are formed “not on the basis of explicit rules and regulations but out of a set of ethical habits and reciprocal obligations internalized by each of the community’s members.”¹⁷ Key among activities associated with trustful networks in the Finnish study were acting in a theatre group, singing in a choir, dancing in a dance club, or playing in a band.¹⁸

The data assembled by Ornish, Putnam, and other researchers more than suggest a physical, enduring need for social assurance and nurturing personal encounters. While dissenters, especially from within the discipline of political science, have criticized the widespread embrace of the notion of social capital, or at least the methodology by which such capital could be measured, the public health data are perhaps most dramatic and empirically satisfying. When we do not fulfill these ancient hungers, we sicken and die. We have a need for presence in order to be well, a need for predictability and assurance, for depth and trust in relations with others, for profound encounters, for love, but the world offers these things to us less and less. With intellectual understanding of the disjuncture between our need and the world’s new sterility, come the possibilities of choice and of action. For myself, I do not want to live a half-way life, deprived of these things, with television heroes and chat rooms as recompense and surrogate. Electronically mediated “relationships” are not bad in themselves, but they are not enough, not good enough.

Recovering Community

There are multiple ways in which we might take steps to find and rebuild true communities and to seek out and sustain deep and honest intimate exchanges of presence. We can reject the new normality and face the risks involved in pulling together with family and hometown (if such entities exist for us), consciously reinventing what was natural social behavior for our grandparents: evenings at home talking with family or friends, hours outside the home building and sustaining friendships at church, synagogue, mosque, or—on a more casual level—at clubs, lodges, sports, activist or service organizations.