The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : Community : “Healthy human beings are the ones who can recognize their need for other human beings.”

The myth of the West is of a frontier pounded into submission by rugged individualism.

Southern Californians, according to more modern mythology, are the nation’s social tumbleweeds, stampeded west by a solipsistic lust for wealth and fame and a loathing of the claustrophobia of small-town America.

Both myths are truthful in part. ATMs, freeways, drive-throughs and drive-bys all attest to many Angelenos’ fidgety aversion to direct human contact.

But individuals here have never been entirely autonomous. Cults are as Californian as the car culture, for instance. And by the 1992 riot, it was all the rage for people to band into aggrieved interest groups. The “African American community” and “Korean American community” soon found themselves elbowed by the “surfer community” and the “tattooed community.” Balkanized became the region’s latest defining cliche.

Then, at 4:31 one morning, Southern California’s alarm clocks went off in unison, so to speak. Now a lot of people want to hang onto the feeling of connectedness that came with instant membership in the community of quake survivors.

There are plenty of reasons to think that’s a good idea.

“All over America, people are in deep doubt about the culture of the individual,” says social theorist Michael Lerner, whose writings have shaped the Clinton Administration’s “politics of meaning” spiel. “The healthy human being is the one who can recognize his or her need for other human beings, our mutual dependency.”

Columnist George Will has observed in America “a yearning for the community feeling that comes from collective undertakings. . . . The question is whether any enterprise other than war can tap that yearning.”

Southern California may have provided an answer on Jan. 17.

It would be silly to tell Sweet Alice Harris of Watts, the folks at All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, or other Californians who--myths be damned--have long cherished their connectedness, that this thing so facilely called “community” is a hip new trend.

But these days institutions from the Catholic Church to author Amitai Etzioni’s “communitarian” movement are rethinking and experimenting with the concept.

Traditional community and the extended family began to erode with the industrial revolution as factories and offices lured people who had once worked side by side on the farm or in the home, says futurist Alvin Toffler. As the power of family and community diminished, their traditional functions, from child care to health care for the elderly, gravitated to the state.

Now Toffler has hope that the emerging interactive media and access to the information highway will reverse the work of two centuries, allowing parents to work at home again and making it possible for so-called bedroom “communities” to become more neighborly.

Even the most cohesive community, though, can send repercussions through the region that surrounds it. When well-meaning people in the Valley organize to oppose a light rail project through their turf, they might also consider the stunningly low lung capacity of children in such communities as Compton, Boyle Heights and Hancock Park and acknowledge that automobile emissions are the likely cause. Urban life is an intricate web of rights and responsibilities between rich and homeless, Vietnamese and Armenian, supplier and demander. . . . Unless the us-and-them boundaries of community break down, riots will remain as inevitable as earthquakes.

In heaps of broken china, though, is hope. True community, argues Lois Arkin, who is helping to create an “eco-village” in the central city, makes people question their priorities at a fundamental level--makes them notice, she says, the distinction between “standard of living” and “quality of life.”

The first term, Arkin says, “has to do with your relationship to your material level of comfort, goodies. . . . Quality of life has to do with your relationship to people and to the environment. . . . When people think about community, they think about how we care for one another.”

And, Arkin adds, the burden on government drops in direct relation to that caring.

Building community isn’t easy though. It’s not all pancake breakfasts and uplifting chat with like-minded neighbors. Community also means, it has been said, tolerating “bores, boors, and people who smell bad.”

So, how far can we go in foisting community upon individuals already juggling demands of work, home and chores and at the same time searching for some sense of oasis in an increasingly crowded place?

The question becomes not how we reconstitute an old-fashioned goldfish bowl of a neighborhood but how we define and make a new community in which the spaces between people are as important as the places where they choose to gather.

Years ago, author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. suggested that America’s sense of existential loneliness might be cured by the creation of artificial extended families. Similar radical steps for building community may now be in order, he suggests.

“Not only Los Angeles but most American cities,” he says, “should be thinking now of what they ought to have been instead of what they allowed themselves to become.”