As the Financial Crisis Commission grills financial Gullivers about their roles in the Great Recession and digs into its causes, it might be useful to cast a longer look backward at what has happened to an America we once knew.

In the past 50 years, economic and social changes in the United States have resulted in a deepening depersonalization of our society. We are less connected to one another. Less caring.

The telephone often connects you with a digitized voice; the social adhesive of three TV networks has been scattered into a billion pieces by the Internet, which in turn is sucking the life out of larger newspapers.

Most newspapers and banks are more beholden to distant corporate headquarters than to the needs of their community. Even the social adhesive of the soda fountain was collateral damage from the civil rights movement.

Arrival of the big-box pharmacies and the Wal-Mart phenomenon has eliminated the town square as a place of human interaction, as an incubator of friendships and cement of community.

At the end of World War II most newspapers were family-owned — as The Star still is — but there are fewer than 250 left, part of the vast depersonalization of society. Crippling federal inheritance taxes and large families squawking for larger and larger pieces of the pie made many family publishers simply throw up their hands and sell out to corporate newspaper companies or investment firms.

The human dynamic of a family publisher and a community is unusually close and caring. It is what gives a family newspaper its unique personality. It is more caring than a chain newspaper. It scolds, supports, consoles and chides. It hurts and is hurt, and it loves — like any slightly dysfunctional family.

The uncaring abdication of a community leadership role is what is so troubling about the corporate gigantism of newspapers and banks. In cities the size of Anniston or smaller, if its newspapers and banks are insignificant blips at the end of long corporate strings, they infect the community with a sickening ennui.

Who cares if local businesses close for lack of a patient, friendly financial adviser? Who cares if local civic enterprises founder and starve for lack of leadership and funding sources? Some do care, but they have profit goals to report to Charlotte or New York, and that obligation comes first.

Anything that saps the energy of caring, committed local leadership is the enemy of community vitality. But what does community vitality mean to the Wall Street titans of the new Gilded Age?

The original period of great concentrated wealth, the time of the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies and J.P. Morgan, was a time of “conspicuous consumption of conspicuous leisure,” as Thorsten Veblen put it in “Theory of the Leisure Class.”

But the economic giants of the late 19th century pumped up the industrial muscle of the adolescent nation such that the output of the United States was greater than that of Britain, France and Germany together.

What creation of today’s no-name titans of Wall Street can match the railroads, mines and steel mills of the early Gilded Age? The new-breed titans created bundled derivatives and a heart-stopping recession.

One neat invention got a man named Johnathan Egal a promotion at Goldman Sachs: mortgage-related securities that they sold to clients such as teachers’ pension funds and bet against them, suspecting they would fail.

In the original Gilded Age, that is like making tons of money selling adulterated meat that sickened thousands of families who bought from the local butcher. The titans of the new Gilded Age don’t add muscle to the economy as the robber barons did. They don’t make anything; they just make money.

And way down at the bottom of the food chain, small businesses tremble, hat in hand before local buildings on which are written the names of the uncaring, distant lords of finance such as Wells Fargo.

When Anniston had its big three local banks, First National, Commercial National and Anniston National, their presidents were generals of the civic army and their boards of directors were the field-grade officers of those brigades. If the general spoke, something happened.

They are all gone, swallowed by mergers into giant conglomerates. By the great 2009 recession, the city was left with only a broken piece of Wachovia, a brokerage firm, and two banks, Regions and Wells Fargo.

Their presidents have no authority, and nobody knows or particularly cares who is on their local boards. New banks have risen to serve the abandoned local markets, but they are not yet strong enough to lead boldly. In time they may be.

Meanwhile, small cities across America are filled with a sense of nostalgia for lost drugstores, family merchants, personal banking, newspapers who knew you, all replaced by distant corporations who look down and shrug: Who cares?

Brandt Ayers is publisher of The Anniston Star.