It Takes a Village

English 1101: Paper Two
June 5th, 2009

We are likely all familiar with the saying “it takes a village to raise a child,” but there is another byproduct of a village that is much less helpful to the health of a region, province, or country. Salem, MA was a village back in the 1690’s when their leaders ordered that the so-called witches be put to death, and so was Jonestown, Guyana in November 1978 when hundreds of unwilling citizens were forced to drink the purple KoolAid. Prior to September 2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan used the isolation of their villages and the absence of technology to their advantage because their primary tool in their oppressive regime was message control. The above three examples serve to illustrate instances where outside cultures threatened the very continuance of the power and privilege that the village cultures had willingly (albeit blindly) bestowed upon a select few, and in each instance, larger and more civilized outside cultures were required in order to free the oppressed villagers and depose the self-serving leadership. Writing about cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote “[a] creed that disdains the partialities of kinfolk and community may have a past, but it has no future” (16). While cultural heritage is important, even if only from a village, not every village culture should be allowed a continuance, and two deciding factors will always be to ask whether first, the culture in question has within it a framework that allows it to coexist with intersecting cultures, and second, is it oppressive to the lives of the people under its control.

A student of history can find examples of tribal villages on virtually every patch of land in the world. In North America, the Native Americans survived solely by governing themselves with a village style of leadership. The intersections of the diverse tribal cultures occasionally resulted in wars, but for the most part each tribe knew where they could travel, hunt, and settle without initiating such a conflict. In this case, the cultures were mostly symbiotic to the surrounding tribal cultures, and tribal members were well-served by their membership in the community. This scenario played itself out on every continent for centuries, but as time marched on clear winners emerged as an imbalance set in, with tyrannical leaders of the more powerful tribes and nations pursuing ever more power and dominion. The defeated tribal leaders had been doing nothing wrong and had only the best interests of their people at heart, but the invading forces seldom had any intention of ever allowing another culture to coexist alongside of theirs. There was no sense of a global humanity and every scenario was one of us vs. them.

Today, the struggle for survival wages on for what remains of these First Nations tribal villages. In the movie Whale Rider, writer/director Niki Caro deftly lays bare the generational conflict of an aging chief who is trying to hold onto a very different vision for his Maori village than his two sons and his grandchildren hold (Whale Rider 2002). The old chief is waiting for a prophet to come who will bring the tribe together behind him, and because his two sons failed to live up to this vision he was desperate for a grandson that could be molded into this role. Instead, he ended up with only a granddaughter. The story is resolved as Pai, the pre-teen female grandchild, wins a regional speech contest that outlines how it would not require a prophet to lead the village, but simply a desire for all of the villagers to join together behind a single purpose…not a single leader. It would be nice if every village had such a vision for themselves, but some of us are not so lucky to have been born into a winning village.

Today, in America, First Nations villages are adapting to the modern world and finding innovative ways for their cultures to coexist, but the oppressive Christian cultures that invaded them over the past centuries are not. While most Christian-centered communities have stopped burning their witches it does not mean that Christian extremists have stopped controlling the lives of people living in small towns across America. Speaking metaphorically, many de-facto “village dictators” have retained a frightening amount of control over their “towns”, declaring their own version of a jihad and nurturing an environment where misguided adherents will shoot an abortion doctor in the lobby of his own Christian church (CNN.com 2 Jun 2009). Of course, in this jihad their weapon of choice is the same Abrahamic text used by other religious terrorists and likewise, the leaders are anointed as infallible. In the Mormon villages of Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Northern Mexico and Southern Alberta, Canada, the stake president is this appointed leader. While there is a mayor who ensures that the infrastructure and administrative duties are attended to, the “message control” is fully relinquished to the will of the church, through the stake president, and it is he who can destroy lives with a word.

Perhaps the most striking example of this village mentality since the Salem Witch Trials is the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre in Southern Utah where 120 innocent pioneers were slaughtered. With the help of Brigham Young in far-off Salt Lake City, the village bishop and presiding stake president successfully sheltered the Mormon Church from being directly implicated, but their involvement was undeniable and it could have only happened through an enormous amount of message control. The patriarchal order of the Mormon Church is similarly powerful and it still oppresses Mormon women with a level of control that harkens back to the late 1800’s when the permission for a man to practice polygamy was a reward for a select few Mormon men who found favor in the eyes of senior church leaders. Add to that the near-literal interpretation of the Bible and you have a recipe for oppression against homosexuals and cosmopolitan freethinkers as well. Thankfully, in exchange for statehood in 1896, the Mormons gave up on the idea of a theocratically governed homeland like the Taliban had in pre-9/11 Afghanistan, but the Mormon modus operandi is identical to that of the Taliban and the consequences for disobedience are almost as severe. An unrepentant Mormon who is excommunicated would find it virtually impossible to remain in one of these villages and live a normal life. Being an “out” gay Mormon is perhaps the most visible example of such treatment, but a whisper campaign of marriage infidelity, teen pregnancy, or even drinking coffee or alcohol has destroyed thousands of lives and careers in these small Mormon towns. In the Fall 1997 edition of the Harvard University Nieman Reports, former Mormon and Arizona Republic’s Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Steve Benson wrote the following:

Look at an average group of Mormon followers, and what does one find? People who dress the same way down to the same underwear, follow the same leader, think the same thoughts, believe the same things, read the same books, obey the same commandments, vote the same way, fear the same enemies, oppose the same ideas, condemn the same people who don't think the same way, pay the same church, avoid the same movies, eat the same food, associate with the same people, marry the same kind, and give the same reasons for believing that God and Mormonism are one-in-the same (Benson 1997).

Any adult Mormon can tell you that a threat of mortal harm is not the only way for a powerful religious leader to exact obedience from a member of the community. Their authority is never questioned. Control within these oppressive villages is inextricably connected to the belief system, and to escape that control one is often faced with a choice of family or church. When one of Steve Benson’s cartoons in the Arizona Republic rightfully targeted then governor of Arizona, Ev Mecham, for making racial slurs, Benson’s own sister-in-law dis-invited Benson’s family from the family Thanksgiving dinner simply because Governor Ed Mecham was “one of us,” meaning he was a Mormon (Benson 1997). Forget the fact that Mecham was the first governor in history to face simultaneous onslaughts through impeachment hearings, a recall election, and a felony indictment, which was ultimately successful. Though thoroughly disgraced, his fellow Mormons were still willing to claim him as their own and come to his defense (Wikipedia). With such an over-arching reach, leaving one’s hometown and moving to a big city is not enough, and families are taught that a loved one who leaves the church has also chosen to leave the family because he will be lost to them for all eternity if he leaves the faith.

As evidenced by Steve Benson’s experience in Phoenix, AZ, the term village can also be used interchangeably for communities or classes of people within a large city, metropolitan area, or even an entire country, and even without control over the physical geography of a village the control upon the members of that group can be just as oppressive. It still boils down to us vs. them and all it takes is a carefully crafted message that one defined group is somehow worth less than the larger, more powerful group. It is this mentality that allows the mistreatment of others to take place, as expanded on in Mark Bowden’s “The Dark Art of Interrogation”. If the message is crafted well to the villagers, then it is easier to pit our largest unified class (American Christians) against the terrorists (Islamic extremists,) which in turn gave Bowden license to tolerate the use of coercion and dismiss it with a “wink” (Bowden 65). Appiah also captured this us vs. them mentality in another article entitled “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” In this essay he shares an account of how Lord Baden-Powell wrote in a history of his life work that “the work of collecting the treasures [of the Asante palace] was entrusted to a company of British soldiers, and that it was done most honestly and well, without a single case of looting” (Appiah 2). Perhaps it all depends upon who it is that gets to write the official version of history. It is virtually certain that the Asante people have a record of history that tells about the looting of their palace by Lord Baden-Powell and the British soldiers.

Within our own culture, and through another carefully controlled message, we continue to marginalize certain minority groups by allowing a message to spread that these disadvantaged groups have somehow chosen to remain in the slums in spite of numerous assistance programs available to them. In the impoverished Miami communities of Overtown and Liberty City the barriers to escape are almost insurmountable because nobody wants to leave their family behind. In this example, as with the example of the Mormon villages above, family and culture are interchangeable words. For the slums of our large cities in America, without broad-based support from the population outside of these oppressed enclaves, the cycle of poverty, poor education, lack of opportunity, and poor health will continue. The young people who are trapped in such a “village” are easily swayed by the sense of community promised by gangs, and yet the gangs themselves are often more rigidly defined by geographical boundaries than the slums themselves.

On the opposite end of the sliding scale of wealth you have the security of gated communities where the homogenous features are enforced by both written and unwritten codicils. These “villages of choice” allow those with money to buy their way into a culture that will provide them with the privileges that governments are unable to secure for them. When these communities want to eliminate the working class, they pass bylaws that prohibit commercial vehicles from entering the community after 6:00PM, thereby preventing somebody who owns a landscaping business from actually living there unless they can also afford the additional expense of commercial rent and a storage yard. When real estate agents want to secure the multi-million-dollar listings of an exclusive neighborhood, they are at the mercy of the homeowners to actually get those listings. If the homeowners themselves decide that prospective homeowners cannot be Jewish, African-American, Catholic, or Hispanic, they don’t actually have to write those discriminations into the bylaws. They just need to list their homes with real estate agents who share those same prejudices, and suddenly potential home showings for realtors who represent those less-desirable classes of people don’t get their phone calls returned and appointments are always missed or postponed until the other real estate agents in the area get the message as well. These exclusive neighborhoods will actively campaign against any kind of public transit expansion into their area because buses would allow the riff-raff to travel to the area.

When parents are successful in creating these controlled communities or villages, or in the case of slums, when a major city ignores the oppressed long enough that one of these “villages” are created to warehouse the poor and keep them segregated, then the true victims are the children. As noted previously, the true purpose of these villages is to control the message that penetrates into the community. Parents and other village forces control the movies that are shown in the theater and the TV and radio channels that are allowed to be turned on in the home. The electorate chooses the school board, who in turn hires the teachers and set a large portion of the curriculum. If it is a religious village then church on Sunday is elevated to the status of a mandatory activity and in the case of the Mormon villages, the week is filled with activities for the children and youth that keep their lives centered on the church. In every case the message is identical, and that is that there is a world out there that is dangerous to “us”, and we cannot succumb to the lies of “them”, which is to say, the outsiders. The threat that is constantly reinforced to the children is that the stakes are so high that to lose the battle for control of the message would mean the total loss of the village.

Works Cited

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. W. W. Norton, 2006.

Whale Rider. Written and directed by Niki Caro, Produced by Tim Sanders and Jim Barnett South Pacific Pictures, 2002.

CNN.com, “Doctor Who Performed Abortions Shot to Death.” http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/05/31/kansas.doctor.killed/index.html?iref=newssearch 2 Jun 2009. 5 Jun 2009.

Benson, Steve, “Good-bye to God: Editorial Cartoonist’s Journey from Jesus to Journalism – And Beyond.” Originally published in Nieman Review. Harvard University. Fall 1997 http://www.lds-mormon.com/benson2.shtml%20web%2031%20May%202009.

Wikipedia, “Evan Mecham”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Mecham%20web%2031%20May%202009.

Bowden, Mark, “The Dark of Interrogation.” Emerging – A Reader 2nd ed. Ed. Barclay Barrios. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. (31-65).

Appiah, Kwame Anthony, “Whose Culture Is It, Anyway?” Emerging – A Reader 2nd ed. Ed Barclay Barrios. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. (1-16).