DEAR WORLD ❖ What defines a community?
Community notes #2
I’d been trying to define what a community is for a while, but the more I asked and tried to understand what kinds of groups people really truly belong to, the more I realised the futility of this task.
One reason for this is that one aspect of community is that of self-expression: the same way you can’t define authenticity in a formulaic way, you also can’t define community. There are some indicators, but it is also wildly and rightly subjective. This, ironically, is a good lens on how some might define community: a social extension of your authentic self.
I’ve asked a bunch of people what communities they belong to, and answers have ranged like this:
Other immigrants or ex-pats like me
My family and their friends
My skateboarding community
My religious group
My vegan group
The start-up community
My online aquascaping homies
I don’t really know, my friends I guess? The ‘me’ community?
And those are all very different from each other! So next, I asked, what patterns can be drawn here? Here are mostly unedited notes; I’d love to hear your thoughts in the replies!
Commonalities across ideas about community
Optional to join and leave
Healthy communities are both optional to join and leave: they have a base respect for the autonomy of the individual. Visa wrote that they should be ‘difficult to join, easy to leave’, and I think if you are hoping to create a community that is a force for change/impact, I think that’s a great model!
Embrace contribution
They welcome and include diverse contribution, which can ripple through the community and give a real, concrete, high-touch sense of your impact and importance in the world. This elevates your relationships above the default of atomised and abstracted transactions into the realm of social ties and shared responsibility.
Incidental encounters
These are about meeting many people, possibly even quite frequently, at a safe surface level. This is where details in the ordinary really matter: shared space, food, simple conversation (another commonality: shared rituals). It creates a sense of light-heartedness, serendipity and curiosity. Showing up to the same place and knowing that there will be some mix of friendly and new faces is exciting, but not overwhelming!
What’s different between a community and just a bunch of your family and friends hanging out is that element of randomness. Like a healthy ecology that experiences rain and freshwater to flush out stagnation, a healthy community has some manageable amount of flux that maintains interest, productive conflict, and offers up opportunities for people to show up in different ways.
Multiple people have mentioned to me missing a sense of community where you could just drop by your neighbour’s house and ask for sugar (literally this same example multiple times). There is uniquely comforting about knowing you can lean on others not only for big things, but for tiny, totally mundane things as well.
Different ways to map communities
Experiential likeness <> ideological likeness
When seeking community, everyone is looking for some kind of likeness, but people’s nose for likeness can be led either by experience or ideology (or neither, like skateboarding!).
Naturally, experiential likeness also introduces the likelihood of breeding ideological likeness. I think of ideology as the natural output of articulating individual perspectives into a collective experience of the world and filtering it many times through various critical lenses. Views of the world in, worldview out.
There’s a lot to be said here about whether that ideological likeness is negative or positive, e.g. a men’s group breeds misogyny or toxic behaviour which leads to erratic acts of violence against the outgroup, vs. rallying together to campaign and convince the outgroup of the unique needs and plight of men in a coherent way.
On the other hand, ideological likeness provides a shared lens for experience! For example, you could bring together people from many different paths who relate to their own experience in a shared way, e.g. religion, or creating art.
Examples of experiential likeness: Immigrant communities, broadly ‘identity’-based communities (this is distinct in that the grouping is generally more based on how their are perceive by an outgroup - i.e. a more abstract and externally-imposed notion of identity - such as how Asian Australians who band together despite the diversity of their actual cultural makeup.)
Examples of ideological likeness: Volunteer groups, creative arts groups, religious groups
Network of support <> impact
A community oriented around a network of support generally exists to provide a strong home base, and in extreme cases, even weather crises together. They seek each other out to feel secure that they are known on the most basic level to others, and that their struggles are not unique only to themselves.
One big challenge that groups on the extreme end of this face is how to maintain the health of the group given that many of its members arrive in a vulnerable state of some kind, particularly if the best outcome for a member of the group is to successfully leave it (e.g. sexual assault survivors who want to go beyond their trauma, queers who are isolated from non-queers, singles who want to find a partner).
A community oriented around instead impact might be more rallied around an ideological cause, and actively work on charitable or political change in their environment. They have an ethos of doing-good and promoting hope based on some kind of narrative about what is needed on the world, e.g. through politics or religion, but might be less known on a personal level to each other.
I think some really fantastic communities can stretch themselves towards both ends, e.g. survivors who take their shared experiences into activism.
Examples of networks of support: Survivors, rehab groups, to probably a lesser extent immigrant groups.
Examples of impact communities: Churches with high charity activity, grassroots political groups
Silly <> serious
This is pretty self-explanatory. I consider ‘serious’ communities as any type of community with a purpose that feels deeply important or personal, and ’silly’ ones where some type of play or exploration is the main objective (like a hobby).
But also: there are many very effective communities which take both of these hand in hand! For example: The grassroots activist group ‘The knitting nanas’, or idk, there’s probably some Dungeons and Dragons against Domestic Violence group out there.
How to nurture meaningful communities?
The greatest ideal for a community in my eyes one that is a true social agent in itself. It has a strong capacity and competency to collectivise care through public means, to effectively:
smooth out the acute suffering of vulnerable people, instead of leaving them to be blown around by the whims of the market or confused legislation
inform priorities democratically, in opposition/antithesis to institutional power
create space for impact that is deeply felt and sustained, not solely measured in reductive or utilitarian terms
bring joy and presence back into the core of life in response to cultural overemphasis on productivity and future-focused (yet short-sighted) attainment
In healthy, resilient, grass-roots built community we find that many ailments of hyper-capitalistic life fall away or become less imminently assaulting: isolation, distraction, endless consumption, inequality, extremism.
But of course this is a Platonic high-flying ideal, and there are so many questions about how to do them right! Partly because I think Western society has such a poor grasp of what it means to have a community.
Like, when I ask most people: do you feel like you can borrow things from your community without it being weird? Would you tell them if you were having trouble in your personal life? Would you need your partner to meet or be part of them? The answer is usually no, not really or to a limited extent.
One reason I’d venture is that we float around freely chopping up tiny parts of ourselves to be part of so many micro- or non-communities, that it’s difficult to find a place where we feel deeply known.
As a generalisation, how we think about community is co-opted by our Western individualistic paradigm as yet another means of self expression and object of consumption, rather than a meaningful political or cultural agent in and of itself.
To come back to the definition I laid out earlier: we may see our community as an extension of self-expression, but this presumes a necessarily self-oriented view of the world. A more ambitious notion of community sees it as politically powerful and the fundamental fabric of society itself, beyond just a pleasant pastime or an as-needed support network.
There are some cultures where this however is a no-brainer (India, Hispanic, Jewish diaspora come to mind)! And while they aren’t perfect, I find it really disappointing that we don’t have access to this. We live in a time where for most of us, our most prominent sense of community is our workplaces, which is a very, very vulnerable position.
And while I think it’s straightforward to build some community, I think it’s quite nuanced to bring a community close enough to a resilient, healthy ideal. By rejecting private means of problem solving in favour of the public collectivisation of care, you are instead faced with much more wriggly, ambiguous problems of a social and philosophical nature. It involves grappling with confronting questions in practice, such as:
How to prevent codependency / enmeshment?
How to create empathy without creating fertile ground for manipulation?
How to prevent narcissism from rising to dominance?
How to create cohesion without imposing indoctrination?
How to prevent abuse where a community is creating space for a vulnerable population?
How to not make the vibes fucking weird?
These are difficult, philosophical questions - even unanswerable! But I think there is a lot of benefit to even simply having them in your mind, particularly as a community becomes more interdependent and larger.
Every new person to a social network increases its relational complexity literally exponentially, and it therefore becomes inevitable that these problems will happen, and they will seed beyond your perception of behind closed doors in the privacy of 1 or 2 problematic relationships at a time.
I think the rewards of attempting to articulate an answer to these questions are worthwhile, because to me, Western society and younger generations are only craving healthy interconnection more and more.
wonderfully written 💫💛 such a great read thank you for your wisdom in articulating