Tending the Commons

Seven small habits to build a culture which heals

We live in a small complex of townhomes, nestled in a glade of trees adjacent to a golf course in Greenville, SC. After living in the city center of a developing city in Central Asia, this felt like a little piece of paradise when we moved here in 2014. The quiet of trees, owls, deer, and hawks (and occasional beavers) attracted us after the chaos of Asia. Because these are townhomes, our neighborhood is a series of private dwellings and common areas. There is a shared parking lot, a pond (we’re called “Pebble Lake” — which sounds better than “Pebble Pond” — but our lake is really just an overgrown water-lily pond), and trees. In a community like this, care for the commons is expected of the residents. We pay HOA fees for that purpose. I’ve personally taken on a project of freeing trees covered with English ivy so they don’t end up dead and strangled. It’s a community thing. I try to do my part.

While we don’t really know everyone in our little community, we do know everyone who lives in our adjacent buildings, and there is a consistently growing sense of looking out for each other. Packages are at the door and it’s about to rain: someone will let you know. If there’s trash in the parking lot, someone inevitably picks it up. When I do my next sourdough bread bake, I always bake in twos: one loaf for my breakfast toast, one for my neighbor. I am more responsible for the culture and common good in our neighborhood than anyone else because I can’t control what they do.
I do have agency over my own actions.
This is tending the garden of culture.

“Culture care is the ‘work of love’ of the soil of culture. It may be that we need to protect our land from invaders, but it is certainly true that if we do not cultivate our soil of culture with love, we will not have anything fruitful to make it worthwhile to invade.”
—Makoto Fujimura (from Culture Care)

We have a national culture crisis.

And it has absolutely nothing to do with immigrants.

We’re losing something. Something important. Call it what you will: the belief in human dignity. Justice. Imago Dei. I genuinely fear this element of our society and faith is deteriorating, and we need to be careful, lest we lose everything we consider valuable.

The long arc of manipulation

Perception can be engineered. In 1928 Edward Bernays—“father of public relations”—said the quiet part out loud:

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.”

The propaganda tools of the industrial age matured into a professional apparatus that creates desire and steers behavior at scale. Now we can plow deep furrows in the populace’s imagination—furrows that are hard to undo.

Marketing is a part of my job. Objectively, it’s a part of almost every job. There are literally hundreds of books written to help us understand how to “get people to do things.” And while it doesn’t necessarily have to be an evil thing (public-health campaigns taught us to wash our hands—I’m grateful for this!) Here’s my concern:

At some point, there’s been a break. Persuasion once serving the common good has been militarized, treating people as targets and attention as quarry. Culture has become something to manage at some ethereal level from the technium, rather than cultivated with and for one another. These systems mediate our lives for engagement, rather than good.

“No one in the digital attention economy wants to be standing in the lights of our attention. Yet the system, in order to sustain itself, has been compelled to go all the way.”
—James Williams (former Google strategist), Stand Out of Our Light

The endlessly scrolling, culture-building media we read and watch are —by design— undermining the society most of us would actually like to build. It’s not just about true and false posts anymore. Our most watched and read media are structured to create closed circuits which heighten rage and algorithmically filter for people who agree with our rage. Pope Francis, of all people, understood this:

“The way many platforms work often ends up favouring encounter between persons who think alike, shielding them from debate. These closed circuits facilitate the spread of fake news and false information, fomenting prejudice and hate.”

I don’t believe we have a misinformation problem anymore. It’s much worse. We have a mal-information[1] problem: our common areas—our shared field of attention—have been strip-mined by systems which reward capture over care.

A problem with no obvious solutions

I was lamenting some of this with my daughter while she was visiting this summer. What can we do when such enormous systems are rigged to destroy us? While there is an old-school, punk-rock-anarchist part of me that would like to burn it all to the ground, we can’t do that. And even if we could, the sudden and immediate destruction of anything so massive would hurt a lot of people.

So I give sourdough bread to my neighbors. It’s what I can do. My daughter, in her beautiful wisdom, assured me: that’s what you should do.
All you can.

But I want to do more than bread?

Enter the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching.

A master’s in theology and ancient spirituality doesn’t really boost my market value much—fair. But it does train the eyes to notice structures beneath the headlines: what builds people up, what hollows them out, what serves the common good, and what is strip-mining the attention commons. This week I’ve been sitting with the seven themes of Catholic Social Teaching. They aren’t a partisan platform or a niche theory; they’re a time-tested way of seeing persons, communities, and creation rightly—and then acting accordingly.

And that’s the point: themes without practices don’t form anyone. In an attention economy shaping us with every swipe, we need counter-habits—small, repeatable ways of tending the culture soil. Think of what follows as a social gardener’s guide. Each theme gives us:
(1) a lens to see by
(2) a distortion it heals in our current media ecosystem
(3) a concrete practice for this week.

Like free sourdough bread: little actions, done together, become culture.

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Seven attention practices for cultivating the common good

1) Life & Dignity of the Human Person

Every person bears the imago Dei and has inviolable worth—no one is a means; everyone is an end.
What this heals: Dehumanizing frames, dunk-culture, turning people into metrics or memes.
Practice: Name the image-bearer. Before any online sharing or critiquing of a person or group, write one humanizing sentence (try: Name + vocation + one real gift). If you can’t do it, don’t post.

2) Call to Family, Community, & Participation

We’re made for life together; the family is society’s first cell, and everyone has a right and duty to help shape the common good (guided by subsidiarity: handle issues at the most local, competent level).
What this heals: Isolation, spectatorship, performative politics that never touch place.
Practice: Host an attention table. One hour, devices away. Start in your home. Eat, read, pray, or play a game together. Notice what you notice.

3) Rights & Responsibilities

Rights flow from dignity and are inseparable from duties to others, community, and truth.
What this heals: “I get to say anything I want” individualism; sharing without verifying; outrage-as-entertainment.
Practice: Pair speech with duty. When posting, verify at least one primary source, add context, or state one way you’ll help (time, money, or presence).

4) Option for the Poor & Vulnerable

Begin moral discernment at the margins of society; prioritize those who are most at risk.
What this heals: Algorithmic invisibility, attention inequality, pity without proximity.
Practice: Pass the mic. Feature a voice directly impacted (local or global). Add two sentences of context to educate—not just emote—and one way readers can act.

5) Dignity of Work & Rights of Workers

Work is participation in God’s creative action; workers deserve just and fair conditions, rest, and respect.
What this heals: Hustle-culture extraction, content-farm burnout, using creators without valuing craft.
Practice: Protect deep craft. Block a 90-minute session (no notifications) and make something. Then pay or tip a creator you routinely consume for free, or send one specific note of appreciation for their craft.

6) Solidarity

We are one human family; commit to the good of all, especially across differences.
What this heals: Tribalism, contempt, echo chambers, the constant stream of “parallel monologues.”
Practice: Use the two-source empathy rule. Before posting on a hot topic, read one piece from someone you disagree with and one from someone directly affected.

7) Care for God’s Creation

Creation is gift; an integral ecology links care for people and the planet. Nature has a right to exist, and our survival depends on it.
What this heals: Disembodied digital life; externalizing costs onto places and future neighbors.
Practice: Tie pixels to place. Pair any online cause with a place-based act: plant, clean, repair, or visit. Post beauty from your place (not outrage). Take a walk outside.

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Pope Francis wrote about “integral ecology.”[2] He said:

“We are faced not with two separate crises… but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental.”

And to this I agree. Societal problems are complex and integral. The irony is that solutions are simple—but also integrated and multi-layered—like pulling ivy from the trees and baking sourdough bread. A clean, healthy commons area: that’s my goal. Culture isn’t a war to win; it’s a garden to tend. And if enough of us tend our plots, the commons grows green again.

Which of the above will you put into practice this week? I’d love to hear how it went. Better yet, post in the comments. Share in the commons with other Good Dirt readers.

You are doing better than you think.

P.S. I wrote a 7-day Attention Examen companion for this essay. If you want it, become a paid subscriber this week (20% off annual until Aug 31 with this link: bernieanderson.substack.com/summer25). I’ll send it right over. If you already pay to subscribe — thank you for supporting my writing. I’ll have this headed your way mid-week.

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[1] My definition of mal-information: Habits and systems of information which deform attention and desire—making us more reactive, less present, and easier to steer.

[2] Footnote — Laudato Si’ §§138–141 (Chapter 4, “Integral ecology”). §138 defines ecology as studying relations between organisms and their environments and stresses that “everything is interconnected,” warning that fragmented knowledge becomes ignorance without a broader vision. §139 reframes “environment” as the relationship between nature and society; because we are part of nature, solutions must be integrated—poverty and exclusion addressed while protecting nature (“one complex crisis… social and environmental”). §140 urges robust, interdisciplinary research and academic freedom; it highlights ecosystems’ intrinsic value (not only utility) and our dependence on their regenerative capacities. §141 calls for an “economic ecology” that links environmental analysis with human, family, work, and urban contexts—insisting that the whole is greater than the part.

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