What is Community?

 

I have an aversion to buzzwords. Too often I hear people treat words not as a means to an end, but as ends unto themselves. And buzzwords make for tedious conversations. A person who uses ‘decolonize’ and ‘end-stage capitalism’ in the same breath is not a very interesting person to talk to. The whole thing feels rehearsed, like I am being lectured to in a graduate seminar. The goal of a good conversation is genuine connection, not a lecture.

But of all the buzzwords that have leaked into popular culture, the one I hear most often and which causes me the most grief is ‘community.’ It is so commonly misapplied that most people do not recognize it as a buzzword anymore. Its definitional slippage happened slowly and quietly without our noticing. 

What do we mean when we talk about the LGBTQ Community, the Black Community, the AAPI Community? What are we referring to in the world? Recently I was reading about progeria, an extremely rare genetic disorder. The author made numerous references to the ‘Progeria Community.’ This makes little sense to my mind. What is gained by this shorthand? Today our culture has largely forgotten that ‘community’ once meant something concrete. 

The above are examples of what sociologists call communities of interest, or ‘imagined communities’ to adopt Benedict Anderson’s phrase. As the name implies, communities of interest are groups built around a shared interest, idea, or sense of identity. This is a useful way to think about it from an academic perspective. But academic theories have a bad habit of muddying the waters of popular understanding. 

As a matter of practice, when we confuse imagined communities for real, physical communities the obligations of civic life become harder to see. A community in the original sense of the word implies proximity and shared physical space. Community requires cooperation and sacrifice, the willingness to share resources among people who have nothing in common but for the fact that they live beside each other. It requires a commitment to seeing the best in our neighbors, and to building spaces that inspire the best in us all, and to ensuring that everyone in the community succeeds. 

A neighborhood is a community. A town, a village, a city is a community. The places where we live, work, and play are communities. These are distinct from imagined communities, which rest on personal tastes and identity characteristics over which we have little or no control. Real communities are dynamic and immediate. Imagined communities are nebulous, ungrounded.

It is true that real communities can become sorted along racial, ethnic, or ideological lines. The historical reasons for this are important and deserving of our attention. But the surface similarities shared by people in a community are not exclusively what define them. When we assume that everyone who looks alike or shares similar dispositions or attitudes will inevitably think alike, we oversimplify the complex social dynamics that make communities possible.

I’m not suggesting that imagined communities are unimportant. We naturally want to be around people who agree with us, who share our interests and tastes. We feel safe among like minds. But we do not get to decide who lives in our neighborhoods. We can’t banish those who disagree with us from our shared spaces, nor should we want to. We can’t back away from our civic obligations because differences and disagreements make us uncomfortable.

It might seem like I’m splitting hairs. But I believe we lose something important when we blur the line between real and imagined communities. When we divorce the term from our lived spaces and the people we share these spaces with, we risk losing our ability to live among others, to respect and tolerate and embrace their differences from us. It becomes easier to see our nextdoor neighbors as an outgroup of sorts. We hold them to impossible standards, and when they inevitably fail to meet these standards, we retreat further into our identitarian enclaves. We merely and grudgingly tolerate them.

Robert Putnam observed America’s fraying social fabric in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Putnam began with the simple observation that starting in the 1960s, fewer and fewer Americans were participating in social clubs, sports leagues, and community groups. Combined with a growing distrust in government and public institutions, Putnam argued that Americans were disengaging en masse from civic life. “Without at first noticing,” writes Putnam, “we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the [twentieth] century.” 

In the two decades since Bowling Alone was published, Americans have become more divided, more lonely, and more disengaged than ever. Voting is perhaps the only civic institution that has seen increased participation in the last decade, and this is largely due to negative polarization—we’re driven to the voting booth not by a sense of civic duty but by hatred of the other side. What’s more, there is little evidence that local and off-year elections have seen comparable increases in turnout. Negative polarization only motivates us so far. 

The suburbanization of America is partly to blame for our failing civic culture. The post-WWII North American development pattern, with its obsessive-compulsive focus on separating uses and maximizing transportation efficiency, has left little room for communities built at a human scale. Planners and engineers driven by high-minded theories of progress and ‘urban renewal’ built monotonous far-flung suburbs that hollowed out our urban cores, and then ran freeways through our neighborhoods to facilitate ease of movement for commuters. According to the latest census data, a majority of Americans now live in isolated, auto-oriented suburbs fenced in by parking lots and six-lane highways. These places can hardly be called communities.

Deindustrialization is equally to blame. Free trade, overseas competition, economic mismanagement, and misguided fiscal policy decimated communities across the U.S. Between 2000 and 2010 alone, America lost 36% of its manufacturing jobs, a precipitous fall coming at the tail end of a decades-long decline. In the span of a single generation, America heedlessly pivoted from a manufacturing economy to a service and information economy, eviscerating the economic security of millions. And, as The Consilience Project has documented, the effects of deindustrialization go beyond the economic: “[I]n addition to poverty and mass unemployment, deindustrialization has been shown to bring with it the collapse of social capital, and the collapse of social capital has in turn been demonstrated to lead to family breakdown, loss of public trust, the collapse of local institutions, and rising rates of violence, drug abuse, depression, and suicide.”

I argue that the American story of the last forty years is a narrative of urban decay and social decline. In this light it is easy to see why the term 'community' has slid so far from its original meaning. It is a symptom of America’s civic collapse. Increasingly alienated from local life, Americans have begun to look elsewhere for the varieties of spiritual and personal fulfillment that communities used to offer. We have turned to imagined communities to fill the void.

This is understandable. We are inherently social creatures. Communities provide a sense of purpose, belonging, and safety; in short, they give our lives meaning. But imagined communities are not adequate substitutes for the real thing. They do not provide the same benefits to our emotional well-being. Often they have the opposite effect, stifling our growth and narrowing our perspective of the world. 

Imagined communities can become echo chambers. Free from the pressures of having to navigate the competing interests, tastes, and dispositions that come with real community participation, imagined communities reinforce their own bad ideas through a pernicious form of groupthink. When everyone is largely of the same mind, there is no one to provide the necessary pushback to even the most well-meaning ideas, no checks and balances against the excesses of the crowd. At their best, real communities are self-regulating and tend toward moderation. This is not true of imagined communities.  

This is partly why our politics have become so ugly. On the right, look no further than the cultish madness of the MAGA movement to see an imagined community gone off the rails. On the left, you can see it in the endless splintering of identity categories and the insistence that every conceivable form of personal identity be recognized and accommodated. Absent the necessity of compromise, the political extremes have succumbed to their own bad ideas.

This also manifests on a more personal level. There is enormous pressure these days to identify as something, and to conform to the expectations of whatever imagined community we end up identifying with. This is especially true online. And the ubiquity of imagined communities in our lives has forced us to adopt cynical heuristics for understanding each other. We have learned to see people not as individuals but as representatives of a larger whole, with all the baggage that comes with it. We foreclose avenues of connection and understanding before a single word is spoken

How many times have you made assumptions about others based on very little information—say, who they voted for in 2020 or what accounts they follow online? Chances are, others have made similar assumptions about you. How many opportunities for genuine human closeness have been smothered by our preconceived notions? How often have we made others small in our minds, and how often have we been made small in turn? Is this how we want to live?

Americans increasingly experience the world through a narrow, uncharitable lens. Our community ties dissolved, we have largely retreated inwards. We have scattered our sympathies to the wind and sought out our chosen spaces. Community is no longer the world around us but whatever feels good to us. We have forgotten about the people along our street, the neighbors toward whom we no longer feel any obligation, camaraderie, or shared purpose.

I don’t idealize the past. Real communities have never been perfect, and our social ills—tribalism, bigotry, distrust—have existed for as long as we’ve been a species on this Earth. But I believe there are better and worse ways to structure society. A society of fragmented individuals living dispassionately on the ruins of real communities is no recipe for well-being.

It’s fashionable these days to ‘reclaim’ words, the belief being that words are powerful enough to shape culture itself. I don’t believe that words alone will save us, but it’s as good a place to start as any. So, in the spirit of the times, let’s reclaim ‘community.’