A Community of None
by Johnny Eleven, himself
A word we hear a lot from politicians and social commentators these days is community. The general idea seems to be that community is a good thing, and consequently that anything that promotes it is a good thing. We even have people whose jobs are to promote community development.
The people with the jobs promoting community development usually have a clear idea of what they understand by the word community. No one else seems to, though. A community is obviously (to us old buggers who studied Latin in high school, at least) a group with something in common. Originally it was simply a group of people living in the same place. What they had in common was a site. Then the Germans got involved.
In the late nineteenth century Ferdinand Toennies distinguished two types of community. In the first type (Gesellschaft) what people had in common was self-interest. In the second (Gemeinschaft) people have a common will (if you’re like me your skin has started to crawl). Toennies believed that there were no pure examples of either type, and that all communities were a mixture of the two.
The only problem with that set of ideas is that it’s patent nonsense. Beyond a certain very small population size the members of a community cannot possibly have a common self-interest or a common will. There is also the problem of defining just what the will of a community is. How would we recognize it?
Although it has furnished an attractive line of patter to demagogues of all stripes through the ensuing decades, this analysis of community does not help us understand community. However, the idea of a community that is more than the sum of its parts continues to poison the minds of many. Earnest, well-meaning, benevolent people continue to tell us how important it is that we all share certain values.
From another point of view, though, the idea of everyone having identical values is dangerous. It stifles debate and even discussion. One strength of Western society has been that it has never had shared values. It has had competing centres of power – church, state, business, aristocracy, workers, and so on – with competing values, and the outcome of the competition between these values has been greater freedom to speculate about and test ideas about what is the most effective way to run things.
If you still want a society with shared values, how about North Korea? There’s a society with shared values. You share them or else.
The idea of community, though, is still widely promoted by the authorities here, and the reason seems obvious. If you can persuade people that they share common values or interests, in any conflict with a minority you can persuade the majority that the minority is a threat to the community.
The authorities don’t even have to make the argument any more. Last Saturday (April 26, 2008) Toronto transit workers went on strike. As soon as people found out they started calling for a bill forcing the strikers to go back to work. The argument was that the community was being inconvenienced (inconvenience was the word most commonly used to describe the effects of the strike).
So, seeing the “community” merely inconvenienced, people called for its protection, even though that required attacking a right – the right to strike – guaranteed by law. It never occurred to anyone that by calling for the suppression of minority rights when they were in the majority, they might find their own rights being suppressed when they were in the minority.
It also seems never to have occurred to anyone that the bill which ended the strike on Sunday (less than 48 hours after the strike began!) also severely complicated the ability of the elected representatives of the people of Toronto to negotiate with transit workers. The law calls for the appointment of a mediator-arbitrator to approve any settlement, which must be for a minimum of three years. The mediator-arbitrator must be acceptable to both sides, but I suspect a single person is more susceptible to pressure from the provincial government than is an entire city council and an entire union local.
Intending to protect itself, then, the community shot itself in the foot. It shot itself, furthermore, with a gun it cocked and aimed itself. People are so well schooled in the importance of community that no one even has to persuade them to shoot themselves in the foot.
Dealing with troublesome minorities is made simpler by defining them as mythical sub-communities rather than as people. We hear all the time about the “black community,” for example, as if one existed. One might as easily claim there is an “Irish-Canadian community,” conveniently overlooking important characteristics, such as religion, that differ within the group. Once we start thinking about black people as a community instead of as individual people, we start thinking that they all have the same needs, values, and interests, and that a simple program can address any problems created by these needs, values, and interests.
A classic example of this type of thinking is Canadian government policy for First Nations. This policy is founded on a stereotype of Indians as people with a common aboriginal culture all living on reserves. The majority of status Indians who live off reserve are forgotten, as are non-status Indians. The huge variation in aboriginal cultures is ignored. That allows the federal government to continue its policy of dealing with the First Nations by keeping the band councils happy.
As long as the band councils are happy, the bands leave the federal government alone. Every so often, of course, the problems of the people neglected by this policy become so obvious that even Canadians are embarrassed by them. The government then conducts negotiations with – representatives of the band councils! An agreement is signed among much high-flown talk, and everything returns to abnormal.
Another article here has shown how a similar conception of society led the Rae government in Ontario to conceive of employment equity as a labour market in which all groups obtain the same benefits on the average. In fact, it is possible to be a member of a group that on the average is privileged in the labour market and still be treated inequitably. It is possible, given current definitions of community, to be a member of a community without receiving the same treatment as other people.
We are all members of communities of some sort or other, but we live as individuals. Identifying our interests with those of a mythical “community” enables us chiefly to fail in promoting our interests.
A Community of None © John FitzGerald, 2008
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