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Did Somebody Say "Community?"

[ by Leslie Savan ]

"In the polling community," Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said during the '96 elections. "We have a saying: The trend is your friend." And the friendliest trend rolling through speech patterns today is the discovery of "communities" where previously there were only interests or professions. Places like Fabrizio's imaginary Pollstertown now dot the map of America, as any group of more than two individuals consecrates itself as a community.

"It's time to get UFO investigations out of the UFO community," a true believer asserted on a Fox TV show about (Twentieth Century Fox's) Independence Day. According to the Dallas Morning News, "the stock-car racing community wrapped its arms around car owner Rick Hendrick" at NASCAR's annual awards banquet (he was recently indicted on federal charges). An Emmy Award winner thanked "all of you in the television community out there." One member of that community, Peter Jennings, described Christopher Reeve at the Democratic National Convention as an icon of "the paralyzed community."

Real communities in the traditional sense may be struggling to survive, but community, the word, is booming, cheerfully riding any modifier that waddles its way, as in these recent sightings: "the eco-design community," "the S&M community," "the creative community," "the transplant community," "the hockey community," "the legal community," "the criminal community," and, from the nonplace where this kind of thinking seems to be the default drive, "the online community," "the networked community," and "the virtual community."

Clearly, the Internet has popularized the idea of nonphysical communities, pushing cup-of-sugar-borrowing, town-meeting-decision-making neighborhoods to the definition. And our president's it-takes-a-village touchy-feeliness has raised expectations of group coziness so much that it takes a community to have a conversation. But there's a more fundamental emotional shift in the meaning of the word as well, away from describing an inclusive, indiscriminate mix of people (the sort of community served by the United Way) to something more about personal choice. As a Sausalito interior designer told the design monthly Metropolis (which devoted its November issue to answering "What is community?"): "The communities that have some importance to me are communities of intellect or spirit. They are the design community, the artistic community, the psychologically aware community, the health-conscious community, the nonviolent community, the ecologically sound community."

If this busy guy ever gets to New York, he's got to check out a new Chelsea restaurant--it's called Community.

Almost everybody who isn't a member of the misanthropic community seems to be overselled on the sweets of togetherness. But most of the world's users tend to fall into three, uh, categories: First, minorities, like gays, blacks, and Jews, who may or may not have a cohesive group identity but who, by virtue of their contrast to the majority, have the most natural claim to being at least a community in name. Second, people who share an interest or occupation ("the advertising community," "the cultural community") who aren't a community by the usual standards but apparently feel girded by the label. And finally, anyone who wants to invoke some form of social consensus, no matter how imaginary. (As Elaine does in a Seinfeld episode: Worried what people will think if they discover she dumped a man after he had a stroke, she frets, "I'll be ostracized by the community!" Jerry: "Community? There's a community? All this time, I've been living in a community. I had no idea.")

Identity politics has surely contributed to community's rise, and the word, with its emphasis on collective rather than individual virtue, does serve as a righteous liberal retort to the right's family values. But community isn't limited to a specific p.c. left. "When Firing Line began," William F. Buckley, Jr., said on radio last week, "conservatives were a very isolated community." And of course, community is unfettered capitalism's favorite humanizing device: the business community, the investment community, and the financial community, and the financial community are among the worst abusers.

Like so many values, community is on everyone's lips just as it seems to be disappearing. The enormous social upheavals of the past few generations--globalization, suburbanization, television technologies that collapse times and space--have all forced the notion of community to shift from one grounded in a physical closeness that fostered mutual concerns and responsibilities to . . . what?

"My definition of community has two components," says Amitai Etzoni, the "guru" of communitarianism, the movement that focuses on balancing rights and responsibilities among individuals and groups, which President Clinton made famous during his 1992 campaign. (Etzioni acknowledges community's overuse: "We've not only noticed it, but we're the culprits.") "The first element," he says, "is a bonding, not one on one, but a group of people to each other. The second is a shared set of values and culture--it's much more than interests."

He doesn't find all self-named communities spurious: "Bankers may not be a strong community, but they are more than an interest group--they often know each other personally, they hang around the same country club. But people who have only a narrowly defined group interest--people who sell office equipment and lobby Congress, for example, when they share no bond, just shared greed--they're not community."

Robert Putnam, the Harvard government professor who wrote "Bowling Alone," an essay on the decline of civic participation in America, says he's "ambivalent to the word community. The word has become so vague and banal and meaningless, I try to use another term--social capital, which means social networks of connectedness, of reciprocity and trust. But if I say `social capital' before a group of Rotarians, their eyes glaze over." The old community cornerstones, "the PTA, bowling leagues, Sunday schools," Putnam says, "no longer fit the way we live . . . but as a people, we don't seem to want to give up this word for something we long for--as sense of warm, cuddly connectedness to people with whom we share things in common."

And as boomers face their mortality, "we're going to hear a lot more about community," he adds. "In a certain sense, there's a market out there for people who have ideas on how to connect." The success of the Saturn car company, for instance, is due largely to its decision to market community, complete with "reunions" for Saturn owners--who, of course, have never previously met.

But why can't the damn word at least be slowed down, maybe by substituting other nouns that used to work well enough and that, depending on the context, can actually be more descriptive: network, industry, circle, field, movement, association, public, constituency? In fact, why not go for broke and state the entity--investors, artists, scientists--without any appendage? Obviously, community softens and bestows respect on racial and ethnic words that, standing alone, could too easily be turned into slurs. On the other hand, community makes it awfully easy to feign a respect that isn't there (an exercise common on TV and radio talk shows).

The reason everyone wants to be a part of a community, rather than an association or a movement, goes beyond respect: The bright and rounded word lends an instant halo effect. Anything it touches seems valiant; whatever the endeavor, it is noble.

Whether community is vanishing or merely evolving, fear of its loss is what keeps us chanting the word. The word provides comfort--it's a prayer or wishful thinking, as if we could yak it into being.

Community's quasireligious overtones may reflect an authentic yearning, but too often we're reaching less for spiritual kin than self-amplification: we want to see our individual selves turned into a multitude--a thousand other people who cherish The X-Files, do eco-design, or make a killing in online investments. We're not alone; our identity is validated.

But since community is generally a good thing, why niggle over how the word is used? Sometimes magical thinking really works. Writer Robert Atkins recently edited an issue on community for the online journal TalkBack! He began by zinging those who "prattle about virtual community as if sex-chat rooms . . . constitute community." But looking back on the project, he now says he "can see the value of adhering to some ideas even if we don't quite believe in them, like Santa. Maybe the fact we say `community' all the time is an important wake-up call that it's an endangered phenomenon."

Maybe. But if past habits are any clue, we're far more likely to continue to choose a verbal hologram over the real thing. Who wants to do anything if you can merely say it? You don't have to join local organizations, do volunteer work, or even vote because you're already part of the creative community, the Channel 13 community, or--who knows?--the polling community.

You've done your duty by pronouncing the word.