On warm evenings, three girls who live in the two-flat across the street play with other neighborhood kids. They practice cartwheels, play "Mother, may I?" and chase each other up and down the sidewalk. Often at least one of their parents is sitting on the front porch, and neighbors stop by to chat. This scene fills me with a longing for the kind of community it seems to represent: the neighborhood or small town where people know their neighbors and meet them on the street or at the local store, where people help those who are in trouble, where children walk to school and parents know the teachers.
Nowadays, many of us long for such neighborly relationships. Yet such communities are disappearing. In our neighborhood, for example, within the last five years, most of the houses or garages have been robbed, and my husband was mugged on the street. Sometimes we hear gunshots at night. If we had a real community, we think, these things wouldn’t happen.
In some ways, the American community has always been a myth. Americans have always been on the move, and individualism is one of the strongest strains in our culture. No doubt we idealize the communities of the past. But social scientists agree with the common sense observation that rapid and intense changes in the last 30-40 years — superhighways and suburbanization, tv and mass marketing, two-bread-winner households, the demise of small family farms — have undermined the basis of community, especially on the local level.
But what exactly is this community that we long for, and if local communities are disappearing, can they be replaced by other types of community?
The word community comes originally from the Latin Communis meaning common, and it carries a history of economic as well as political connections. Nowadays, the word is used in so many ways as to have almost lost its meaning. A glance at the telephone book shows that it can be connected with almost anything, as in Community Hair Design, Community Savings Bank, Community Smoke Shop. We talk loosely of the business community without giving a thought to what we are saying.
Surely all this is not what we are talking about when we say we want to find or build community. We have in mind a stronger definition. When people search for community, what they desire is a sense of belonging, a sense of closeness with and a shared responsibility among, a group of people. They want the opposite of the alienation and meaninglessness that pervade our society.
A reasonably strong definition of community involves three components: common values, discussion and decision-making about tasks, and a common history. It seems to me that among these components, common values is the key, not in the sense of a formal written creed, rather in understood assumptions about human nature and human potential. Traditional communities value their families, work, and the community itself. They tend to think about the past and the future as well as the present, so they care for children, the elderly, and the marginal members.
In the process of making decisions and acting on them, community members test and refine the values. Over time, the sharing of values and common work create a security, clarity, guidance for the group’s members. Underlying all of this are shared meals, jokes, stories, play, the development of friendships. And implicit in the definition is the notion of familiarity. In a community, one may not know everyone by name, but the people seem familiar; they "belong."
We all know the advantages and disadvantages of communities. Under conditions of fear and ignorance, communities foster narrowmindedness, bigotry, resistance to change. We see these attitudes in extremist groups, but also almost everywhere where feelings of "us" and "them" arise. Yet a healthy community should be able to keep these attitudes in check. The advantages of community are many: for the individual, the community provides a sense of belonging; for the larger society the community provides practice in citizenship. American political philosophers from Thomas Jefferson on down have always considered the community to be the necessary basis for democracy.
But if communities based on living places are disappearing or at least weakened, what about other types of communities? What other kinds of groups match the definition? The workplace, with its shared pressures and achievements, has always been an important source of community, but workplace communities are also weakened by the fact that few people stay in the same job for very long.
Other sources of community are churches and civic voluntary associations like the League of Women Voters, the Scouts, and environmental organizations. The advantage of these groups is that while their practice is usually local, membership is national or international. A person may move from place to place and still be a member. Membership in national or international groups also helps people avoid the narrowness of purely local experience.
These civic and religious groups fit the above definition of community; they value service and they teach and practice democratic forms. But what about single interest groups — model airplane clubs, sports clubs, chess clubs? These groups may have common discussion and decision making about tasks, and common histories, but common values beyond that attached to the particular interest are only incidental. These groups may enrich a community that is based on locality, but they in themselves do not provide the security and clarity of a group that is based on broader shared values.
Moreover, as social scientists are telling us, even these groups tend to be weakened. In the U.S. memberships in all types of groups have fallen off drastically during the last 20 years.
But while some social scientists decry the disappearance of traditional community, other experts say that we are entering a new age of human interaction. Today we constantly hear about the potential of cyberspace to form communities with people all over the world.
In some ways, this experience is not new. I know someone who for 30 years has been corresponding by mail with a group of nine friends now living all over the world. The group began as anti-Vietnam War activists who were living together. When jobs and family sent them in all directions, they continued to write to each other, to consult with and support each other. Even now, although they aren’t living together, they are a community.
In cyberspace, groups like this can maintain instant contact. Groups can attract new members, communicate among themselves, and save paper and postage in the process. This kind of contact may be especially important for groups that are marginal to mainstream society. For example, pagan groups have found members through the Internet. In parts of the country where paganism is more or less underground, the contact goes beyond conversation to the creation of on-line rituals.
Cyberspace also enables individuals to find others who have common interests and values to start new groups. During the Iranian Gulf War, the Internet provided opportunity for opponents of the war throughout the world to find each other, to share information, and to organize resistance.
However, cyberspace also carries severe problems for people who are trying to form communities. One problem is obviously that of income and education. At present, the masses of American people have no access to cyberspace, and it’s hard to believe predictions that by the year 2000 all Americans will be hooked up to visual telephones which combine the functions of the telephone with the tv and the computer.
Another problem of cyberspace is its anonymity. Because users don’t meet face to face, many try out anti-social behaviors that would be unacceptable anywhere else. In addition, how is one to form a community with people without seeing each other’s work? When people work together in the flesh, workstyles, accountability, attitudes come into focus. As long as humans have bodies, nothing can replace a physical human presence.
Yet there is no denying the potential for cyberspace to enhance community through instant and world-wide communication, and the notion of global community now seems like less of a contradiction in terms.
The world always changes faster than human understanding of that change. A clear vision of the future is impossible. But on the subject of communities, one thing is certain. We will never return to the one-level community of village life. People now have the opportunity to relate to communities at several levels. One person may belong to a neighborhood block club, have a circle of friends at work, participate in an environmental organization on a city-wide level, and communicate through the Internet with other members of the organization to plan an international conference. These groupings are all, potentially, communities.
But there are dangers. First, spreading ourselves thin prevents the forming of deep long-term relationships that are necessary for true community. Second, because we feel free to select our communities, many of us neglect the community where we live, the result being the deterioration of our larger society. And, of course, the greatest danger of this freedom is that we choose to opt out of communities altogether.
In talking with community activists, and from my own experience, I have learned that the most important thing for those of us who are seeking community to know is that it takes work. No matter whether our primary community is a church, a civic organization, or a neighborhood club, we can’t just join something and find a ready-made warm and fuzzy group. Belonging to any community involves long hours of getting acquainted, discussing, clarifying, agreeing, disagreeing, and finding consensus, taking action, and then meeting again, and so on — and all on a voluntary basis. Yet, the rewards do come! It’s worth the struggle.