3 From Thick to Thin: The Seven Dimensions of Communality
Few words are as frequently uttered as imprecisely as the word “community.” It is used to label everything from daily life in a rural small town to participation in an online forum as well as groups of people that merely happen to share some ethnic, racial, or sexual identifier (e.g., the gay community). These cases are clearly not communal in the same way. Small town residents economically depend on one another for their livelihoods. Their small talk and gossip is as much for cementing social norms and doing politics as for maintaining social bonds. Online forum users or weekly “meetup” participants, on the other hand, tend to be seeking some very specific good, not just social connection. Language learners meet up in bars and cafés in order to acquire speaking practice as much as belonging. The modicum of connection felt by scanning one’s Facebook newsfeed may partly allay a sense of loneliness but hardly amounts to anything like what community has historically entailed. Members of the “black community,” in contrast, are bound together not by social ties or material interdependence but by a shared culturally assigned identity—including the experiences of racial discrimination and oppression that typically come with it. The tendency to refer to each of these very different phenomena with the same term—without qualification—obstructs clear thinking about sociality.
The core of community is the provision of social belonging, which social psychological research has demonstrated to be a fundamental human need.1 Its polar opposite, loneliness or social isolation, causes intense psychological and physiological harm. Like other aspects of well-being, however, exactly how and in what way belonging should be provided is an intensely divisive issue. The need for togetherness can be met more or less well through a number of different mechanisms, each coming with its own implications for social life. The sheer diversity of often mutually incompatible communal forms and the complexity of belonging as a social phenomenon make universalizing definitions problematic. Even worse, there is a tendency to reduce community to a single variable and deny this diversity. How could the concept of community be put to work in a way that better acknowledges the complexity and diversity of social life?
This chapter attempts to untangle social belonging from this theoretical morass by conceptualizing it as a multidimensional social phenomenon. Some instances of community can be described as thicker than others in terms of their strength in each of the possible dimensions of communality as well as with respect to the number of dimensions actually present. An online forum, for example, provides relatively thin networks of social ties, which at their best involve moderately thick relational exchanges of social and material support. Their economic and political dimensions are typically thin, however, if not nonexistent. Users are rarely tied together by material interdependencies or involved in the governance of the site. In any case, this framework is both broad enough to encompass most forms of community, including networked individualism, and systematic enough to distinguish between them. As a result, it moves the debate past dichotomous notions such as “authentic community” toward a consideration of different weightings of the various dimensions of communality. My goal here is to provide a framework that allows for the improved differentiation of the myriad forms and constructed understandings of belonging that exist today.
Community as Webs of Social Ties
In most accounts, community is made up of webs of social bonds. However, these ties can have a variety of different topologies. Those who study more traditional forms of community life describe it as built on dense, multiplex, and systematic social ties.2 Bonds are dense to the degree that every possible connection between two community members actually exists. Do members know most of their compatriots either directly or through their other relationships? Multiplexity describes the extent to which members’ social connections are integrated into multiple spheres of everyday life. Bonds are multiplex when they are not functionally segregated. In a cohesive neighborhood or rural village, residents tend to see their neighbors and friends in multiple contexts: at work, church or temple, the local pub, and/or civic association; when shopping or during their volunteer time; and when engaged in political action. Ties are systematic when they are ordered and incorporated into larger social bodies. For instance, so-called traditional, or tribal, societies tend to be highly systematic. One belongs to a family within a clan or band that fits into a larger tribe and so on.
The opposite end of the spectrum, acommunality, has been typically defined within sociology as characterized by diffuse webs of social ties that are more transitory, contractually defined, and fragmented than in traditional communities. Sociologists from Ferdinand Tönnies to Georg Simmel associated the decline of communal social webs with the greater anonymity, mobility, and individualism within the then-emerging industrial metropolises of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The social ties of the typical urban dweller were viewed as less intimate, more superficial, and more likely to be segregated to only one sphere of everyday life. The acommunal urbanite was seen as flitting around a network of weak associations, acquaintances, and contractually governed economic and bureaucratic relationships rather than being enveloped within a strong web of supportive, meaning-giving ties. Some sociologists, Simmel among others, wrote positively of the metropolis for giving birth to new forms of individual freedom at the same time that they lamented the development of blasé and apathetic attitudes among urban dwellers.3
Despite the anti-urban slant of early sociologists, webs of dense, multiplex, and systematic social ties have been found in large cities, though often in ethnic enclaves. Urban sociologist Herbert Gans, for instance, described the vibrant community life and dense webs of ties that enabled Italian Americans in Boston’s West End to navigate life in an urban ghetto. Similar levels of communality have been found among first-generation Irish immigrants to London.4 In other ways, however, ethnic enclave communities are less than ideally dense, interwoven, and systematic. Gans described West End residents as feeling alienated from their work lives in factories outside the neighborhood, speculating that they might have compensated for their lack of fulfillment by focusing on their relationships with kin and neighbors. In any case, Gans contended that the social aloofness that scholars commonly ascribed to city dwellers really only fit a particular population: the bohemian or well-to-do cosmopolite.5 Dense, multiplex, and systematic social ties can form nearly as well in urban spaces as in rural towns and hunter-gatherer bands. Indeed, the aim of new urbanist design movements, as discussed in the next chapter, is to mold urban form to be more compatible with such social arrangements.
Others, in contrast, have maintained that the association of community with dense webs of social bonds confounds it with feelings of local solidarity. Network sociologist Barry Wellman has argued that because most people’s primary social ties are located no longer in dense, tightly bound, and localized groups but in diffuse social networks, it makes little sense to equate the former with community.6 In his perspective, community is a matter of individuals being connected via intimate and weak ties to social support and important resources, not the existence of a feeling of connectedness to a place or to local webs of mutual obligation. As such, the topology of social ties is rendered mostly irrelevant to the question of whether community exists. Rather, it is considered to occur wherever there are social networks, whether these networks take place within a neighborhood, an online forum, or across a nation. From the perspective of scholars who associate the term with webs of dense and multiplex ties, however, Wellman describes not community but friendship networks.
Rather than either follow or dismiss Wellman, it is better to think of diffuse network ties as lying toward the end of a spectrum of possibilities, while on the opposite end are forms of social connection rooted in dense, multiplex, and systematic bonds. The former is a thinner arrangement of communal ties than the latter, which is more characteristic of thick community. Both can provide belonging in a real sense but in very different ways. Most communities, of course, probably lie somewhere in the middle, being composed of some mixture of fragmented networks and dense social webs. Regardless, whether communal bonds are diffuse or dense affects the character of relational practices, understandings of the self and community, as well as economic and political interactions between members. In the next sections, I explore these other dimensions in greater detail.
Community as Relational Exchanges and Social Support
Community is more than the mere existence of social bonds. The practices between those bonds also matter. Communal norms and practices are typically distinguished from the realm of contractual economic exchange. Psychologists define relationships as communal by the extent to which participants care for one another’s needs without expecting immediate reciprocal benefit.7 Exchange relationships, in contrast, are rooted in the specific and more immediate exchange of similarly valued goods, as is the case within markets. In communal relationships, considerable effort is spent to ensure that reciprocity is construed as nonspecific and nonimmediate. Gift givers usually remove price tags in order not to convey a sense of specific debt or obligation. Similarly, taking someone out to dinner is reciprocated only at a later time and usually not at the same restaurant, if reciprocated via a meal at all. Of course, it is not only material aid that is provided but also caring in times of need, attentive listening, and companionship.
Sociologists make a similar distinction when differentiating generalized and specific reciprocity. Robert Putnam has associated the former with “social capital”: the existence of high levels of trust, interaction, and cooperation that recursively support community life.8 Generalized reciprocity is characterized by the act of giving or caring for others without expectation that they immediately return the favor. Rather, it is done because giving aid is the norm and one believes that the favor will eventually be returned in the future—though not necessarily by the same person. Acts of generalized reciprocity can be as insignificant as holding the door for someone or as large as joining with neighbors to raise a barn. Moreover, as former Missoula mayor Daniel Kemmis depicted in his account of rural Montana barn raisings, strong mutual aid norms even elicit the help and cooperation of neighbors who may not even like each other.9 In some cultures, practices of mutual aid are separated from gift giving: recipients are discouraged from even expressing gratitude because it could imply that providing aid was a voluntary choice and that a debt was incurred. Inuit walrus hunters, for example, would share their catch with the insistence that “since we are human we help each other … What I get today you may get tomorrow.”10
In the psychological literature, such actions are understood through the label prosocial behavior: actions directed toward the benefit of others and not motivated by egoistic gain. Although prosocial behaviors such as stopping to help a stranded motorist may be prevalent even in very thin communities, social psychologists have explicitly connected it with thick community.11 That is, a propensity for prosocial actions is related to the degree to which people are integrated into a network of communal bonds and the stability of those bonds. Furthermore, prosocial action forms a positive feedback loop with a felt sense of belonging and attachment to a psychological or geographic community. For example, volunteering at a nearby hospital or local HIV/AIDS service organization establishes and maintains social bonds and fosters a sense of belonging, which, in turn, inspires more volunteering. In line with Putnam’s theory of social capital, prosocial activity both drives and is driven by dense social connections and the feelings of social trust stemming from a sense of community.
Many everyday practices of social and material support, of course, lie between specific exchange and mutual aid. Material exchanges within communities often differ significantly from the ideal models of economic theory. Community members are interested not simply in making a living from their productive activity but in sustaining relationships too. For instance, early promoters of home photovoltaics and small-scale wind or hydropower plants eschewed traditional business models.12 They included their customers as cooperative participants in the process of building and design rather than as passive consumers, and their employees more or less set their own hours. These business owners focused less on maximizing profit and more on ensuring the spread of renewable energy technologies in their communities. Similarly, local businesses often cut into their margins when working with nearby institutions. One Troy, New York, church, for instance, maintains an ongoing economic relationship with a local firm that goes beyond mere contractual obligations; the company managing church property performs maintenance work at a substantially discounted hourly rate, reflecting a sense of social obligation and a prioritization of the stability of the arrangement. Economic exchanges are communal to the extent that broader social and publicly minded goals shape the conduct of business, not just short-term profit maximization.
Likewise, the more specifically reciprocal gift exchanges dominating rural village life in non-Western nations do not create wealth so much as they create long-lasting relationships of credit and debt that bind individuals and families together. Anthropologist David Graeber has described how women in a Nigerian village would walk considerable distances to give a handful of okra. All gifts had to be reciprocated so that one did not appear to be a parasite or an exploiter. Moreover, the women intentionally did not match the perceived value of the previous gift in order to spur future giving. Although economically irrational, such activity makes sense when understood socially, because “in doing so, they were continually creating their society.”13 Frequent exchanges and alternating obligations sustain the interdependencies upon which thickly communal social arrangements are built.
Not only are economic exchanges often governed by communal logics, but otherwise communal relationships can be framed in terms of marketlike exchanges. Sociologist Robert Bellah and his coauthors characterized this relational practice and disposition as “therapeutic contractualism,” a way of modeling and negotiating social bonds as if they were contractual exchanges.14 Relationships, under these terms, are only important in terms of the utilitarian or expressive benefits accruing to individuals—an egocentric way of understanding the social world that Bellah et al. associate with psychotherapy. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, for instance, displayed a therapeutic understanding of marriage when framing it primarily as a means to access those “certain things you can only learn about yourself [when] living intimately with another person.”15 Under a contractual model, moreover, relationships are always tentative arrangements, maintained insofar as both parties keep their side of the bargain. If a friendship or marriage ever seems more costly than the social support or good it provides to the self, participants are to dissolve it; maintaining relationships for any other reason is framed as illogical.
Although social network theorists do not make the connection, therapeutic contractualism appears to be the dispositional logic undergirding and reinforced by the practices of networked individualism. As such scholars already recognize, “personal networks rarely operate as [communal] solidarities.”16 Networked reciprocity is generally “tit-for-tit” rather than “tit-for-tat.” That is, it involves the exchange of material or social support with specific people who generally return the same kind of good. This is not surprising: generalized reciprocity would make little sense in fragmented and transitory social networks. There is no larger sense of “we,” no long-lasting forms of interdependence that would motivate spontaneous mutual aid.
Although therapeutic contractualism is probably communal enough for some people much of the time, it has its limits. A recent description by writer Gina Tron of the lack of support provided by her social network after her rape illustrates the thinness of contractual logics.17 Fearing emotional outbursts or not wanting to hear a retelling of the incident, members of Tron’s personal network purposefully avoided her. There is no guarantee, of course, that less therapeutically contractual ties would always be more supportive in such cases. Nevertheless, the contractual view appears to dispose people to fail to provide care whenever specific reciprocity is unlikely or impossible.
Talk
The most important communal exchange occurs through talking. As biolinguist John Locke has argued, speech is too often mistaken as merely a vehicle for information. Even seemingly unimportant small talk and idle gossip help cement social bonds, facilitate the informal negotiation of shared norms, build trust, and lessen feelings of loneliness. Face-to-face talking is “social grooming,” a practice similar to the physical grooming utilized by humanity’s ape cousins to foster group cohesion and lessen anxiety.18 Furthermore, as Janet Flammang has argued, the kind of talk undergirding local civil society begins at the dinner table. The enjoyment of conversation around shared meals helps instill the baseline affective bonds and linguistic skills citizens need in order to sustain relationships through inevitable moments of conflict.19
The maintenance of places for talking, unsurprisingly, has been a major component of social life. Indeed, sociologist Ray Oldenburg well described the particular amenability of local cafés, pubs, and the German Biergärten to relaxed forms of talk and their importance for social bonding.20 Likewise, communal wells have traditionally provided local people the opportunity to gossip and build relationships as they gathered water and did laundry.21 Community is destabilized by the loss of such places, even in less traditional societies: some have suggested that the decline in civility and fraternity between conservative and liberal congressional legislators in the United States is due partly to the fact that they more seldom dine with one another after work hours.22
Given oral communication’s role in developing and stabilizing social bonds, the thickness of any community can be characterized by the frequency and intimacy of face-to-face talking. Indeed, even members of otherwise relatively thin communities, like academic research specialty areas or anime fans, will often insist on meeting in the flesh. Doing so helps cement social bonds in an affectively rich way. Even the foremost champion of virtual communities, Howard Rheingold, pointed to the frequency and intimacy of offline social gatherings to justify the authenticity of the togetherness he pursued on an online forum.23
Communication via non-face-to-face mediums, of course, likely provides some of the same benefits as embodied interaction, albeit less reliably across circumstances and populations. Recall how cyberasocials do not feel a sense of social presence via digitally mediated technologies.24 Moreover, anyone who has been in a long-distance relationship has probably felt some dissatisfaction with the intimacy available through phones calls and Skype chats. The communicative and affective value of hugs, hand holding, and mere proximity cannot be overstated. Of course, the distance provided by more mediated communication media can occasionally have its advantages, including better enabling a “cool off” period after a fight. At the same time, these media can provide access to social belonging to those excluded by the physical communities that surround them. Nevertheless, the advantages of such media do not offset the relative thinness of the social connection they provide.
Box 3.1 Thick Sociality on the Island of Ikaria
Stamatis Moraitis lived a relaxed but socially active life in Ikaria. Nearing his one hundredth birthday, his days were occupied with working in the garden and maintaining a vineyard that produced four hundred gallons of wine per year, while evenings consisted of visits to the local tavern to play dominoes with friends. He and his neighbors would frequently walk to each other’s homes to chat over glasses of wine or cups of tea, and Sundays were usually defined by church-related gatherings. Even if Stamatis had wanted to live an isolated existence, his fellow Ikarians probably would not have let him. Nearly everyone, regardless of age, is cajoled out of their homes to share in feasting and dancing at festival time.
Despite the island’s 40 percent unemployment rate and despite having fewer of the material luxuries often associated with “modern” life, people living in Ikaria live longer, healthier, and more relaxed lives than those residing in the world’s metropolises and suburban areas. Indeed, afflictions like dementia and depression are far less common among Ikaria’s elderly. Social life on Ikaria is characterized by the dense webs of ties and the frequent face-to-face interaction associated with thick community. Although the relative lack of privacy on Ikaria would likely feel overwhelming to those who have been raised to see the physical isolation of suburbia as normal, if not eminently desirable, it helps ensure that residents like Stamatis are always connected to and hearing about fellow community members.25
The Symbolic and Psychological Sense of Community
Aside from manifesting in practices and social bonds, community exists in the minds of its members. As political historian Benedict Anderson put it, “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.”26 That communities are imagined does not mean they are false or inauthentic but rather that a significant part of their felt realness comes from the symbolic or psychological construction of a “we.” It matters a great deal, however, which processes and practices are used to evoke or instill a sense of community.
On the thin side of the spectrum lie symbolic forms of belonging almost wholly detached from direct social relationships. Nations are one example. The average American has no hope of knowing—or even knowing about—more than an infinitesimal fraction of his or her 300 hundred million or so compatriots. For them, the United States exists as a collectively held imaginary: they think, talk and act as if it were real. Indeed, this imaginary is real enough for some citizens to be willing to kill or die for it. This felt realness, of course, does not come from nowhere. Anderson connected the rise of nationalism, in part, with the standardization of print languages and the emergence of national media. “America,” similarly, is reinforced as an imagined community through stories, symbols and rituals, from the pledge of allegiance to national monuments, moments of patriotic celebration, and sporting events.27
Nations are not the only cases of discursively created symbolic community. As social theorist Craig Calhoun has pointed out, “communification” via print and mass media occurs for a range of “categorical identities” (e.g., gender, ethnicity, race, lifestyle, sports team affliation).28 The “black community,” for instance, is not created only through the shared experience of racism but through everyday media, such as Ebony magazine, and the political discourse of civil rights leaders and participants as well. Media-driven symbolic communities have their advantages and can be thicker than one might otherwise imagine. A case in point is how gay rights advocates have used sites like Gay.com to help organize offline political action. On the other hand, owners of such media portals are usually in the business of promoting not civic engagement but rather the delivery of a desired demographic to advertisers. Forum members typically lack a substantive say over which stories and discussions are permitted on the site; they are more often consumers than communal participants.29
Symbolic community creation also occurs for physical places through moments of “civic communion.”30 These are moments when members rhetorically celebrate their common existence, speaking of the social and material connections between them as well as shared valuations of local ways of life, collective goals, and political structures. Occasions and places for civic communion can include annual festivals and local heritage museums. Such moments, of course, are not always rosy. For instance, political conflict in Manhattan, Kansas, over a Ten Commandments monument placed in front of city hall broke local residents into oppositional “rhetorical communities,” which dissolved only when the two sides hammered out a compromise. In any case, place-based symbolic community is built on webs of social ties and interdependencies less present in the case of nations or categorical identities. Moments of rhetorical communion are less and less feasible, however, as networked citizens become habituated to describing their political action and values in terms of individual utilitarian or expressive benefit.31
The temptation to reduce belonging to its symbolic dimensions should be avoided. Consider anthropologist Anthony Cohen’s argument that community “inheres in [people’s] attachment or commitment to a common body of symbols” more so than structural interconnections. He has insisted that the Saami, an indigenous group in Norway, persists as a community as long as it is sustained as a collective mental construct, despite the blurring or elimination of structural boundaries by the increasing encroachment of white European technological civilization.32 Although this view is correct in an important and real sense, it risks diminishing or denying the value of the other dimensions of communality. At any rate, maintaining a shared commitment to a common body of symbols absent strong facilitating institutions would require heroic efforts.
The reduction of belonging to its symbolic dimension is visible in practice wherever a contrived image of community is used to psychologically manipulate citizens as consumers. Indeed, people are increasingly engaged in the consumption of symbols of togetherness: for example, shopping malls, the Olympics, public grieving for dead celebrities.33 In such cases, citizens are merely bound together through the collective act of buying and viewing rather than by relational or material interdependence. These rituals often feature a simulation of sincerity designed to evoke a sense of belonging, a technique media scholar James Beniger called “pseudo-community.”34 Television shows like American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent frequently employ tactics like having hosts act as if they were conversing directly with viewers and framing the audience as a community bound together by the act of voting for their favorite performer. The purpose of these methods is ultimately not the viewer’s well-being, of course, but to boost ratings and advertising revenues.
Similar to the sense of belonging, the image of community-as-place is often contrived and exploited for commercial gain.35 A case in point is Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace. Although publicly owned, it is little like the marketplaces that have traditionally centered community life. It is a dressed-up mall, serving tourists interested in consuming the manufactured image of a community market. Similarly, builders of gated communities sell the resemblance of a quiet, safe, semirural community to affluent whites rather than an actually functioning one. Indeed, one trenchant critique of suburbia, strip malls, and fast food chains is that they cannot operate as authentic places.36 According to anthropologist Marc Augé many contemporary urban environments are better characterized as “non-places,” functioning mainly as way points for anonymous spectator-travelers rather than coconstructing shared identities, relations, histories, and “unformulated rules of living know-how.”37 That such environments facilitate consumption and the movement of individuals far better than gathering and social belonging, however, does not stop their symbolic construction as places from having power.
As political scientist John Freie has outlined, these are far from the only cases of symbolic community being used to exploit the human need to feel connected.38 Elaborate “town hall” meetings are staged by political candidates to persuade the voting public that they are “one of them,” not an elite funded by other elites to maintain some facet of the status quo. Evangelical churches and their associated televised services offer a sense of community as a therapeutic escape from the hardships of everyday life, yet often remain aloof and detached from local civil society. The symbolic community provided in both cases is thin if not insincere, disconnected from underlying webs of relationships and relational practices of material support and is partly a mechanism for generating wealth for elite politicians and celebrity preachers.
Whether contrived or not, community manifests not merely symbolically but also in the minds of members. Psychologists have characterized the sense of community as the feeling that one exists within a “mutually supportive network of relationships” that is dependable and thereby prevents “sustained feelings of loneliness”39 Among the contributing factors are the feeling of membership in and influence within the community, the sense that one’s needs are fulfilled, and the existence of a strong emotional connection with fellow members. A psychological sense of community often develops as members interact with one another frequently in meaningful and satisfying ways. Participants feel not only a sense of agency in the mutual fulfillment of needs but also that others are personally invested in the life of the community. Scholars stress the importance of members being able to conceptualize the community’s borders and membership, view their identity as rooted in communal ties, believe in the efficacy of the community, and concern themselves with its future.40
A psychological sense of community, like its symbolic dimension, should be evaluated as thick not simply according to the extent that members feel it but also in terms of its rootedness in other dimensions of communality. For instance, even though some studies show a positive correlation between urban sprawl and social trust, a proxy for the sense of community,41 the privatized structure of suburban life suggests the need for caution when interpreting such findings, for the commuting times, social homogeneity, and fragmentation of work, play, and domestic life characteristic of suburbia are all connected with declines in civic engagement.42 Hence, a symbolic or psychological sense of suburban community may have more to do with the marketing of such areas as idyllic semirural settlements coupled with residents’ shared ethnicity and social class than with actual patterns of interaction, cooperation, and interdependence among neighbors. Trust comes easy when contact is rare and superficial, albeit pleasant, and the neighborhood is designed to convey a sense of bucolic togetherness.
Likewise, online communities should be evaluated in light of the presence of factors like material support and embodied interactions. Kind words from and acts of rhetorical communion by online connections certainly have meaning, but they frequently lack depth. Members of thicker “virtual” communities might provide financial support to another who has been diagnosed with a deadly illness, babysit their children, and meet for chili cook-offs.43 Even in such admirable cases, however, the political and economic facets of community life, discussed below, remain fairly thin. In sum, the symbolic or psychological sense of community is probably a necessary but far from sufficient condition for thick community.
Communal Economics
Often underemphasized in discussions of community is the role of economic activity and self-provisioning. Communal practices and norms of exchange are premised on the importance of maintaining relationships and mutual aid, which are not to be overshadowed by the pursuit of individual gain. Trade networks among and within traditional societies often involved the exchange of goods that both sides could easily make themselves, serving more to sustain alliances than to create wealth.44 As anthropologist Richard Wilk has pointed out, people in Western industrial societies continue to sustain relationships through economic activity. Yet, they do so more through shared consumption than via material interdependence: a shared vacation cruise or shopping with friends becomes the focus of relationship-sustaining economic activity in a society where economic goods and services are primarily exchanged between semianonymous individuals.45
Narrowly rationalistic economic ways of thinking, on the other hand, can be acommunal if not outright anticommunitarian. As Harvard economist Stephen Marglin has argued, “[mainstream] economics offers us no way of thinking about the human relationships that are the heart and soul of community other than as instrumental to the individual pursuit of happiness.”46 Indeed, it is hard to imagine how practices of mutual aid or generalized reciprocity would be practiced by the self-interested maximizers of individual utility that much of microeconomics takes as a model of humanity. Although more often challenged today, mainstream economics has long understood practices like communal barn raisings as irrational. The provision of mutual aid crowds out potential entrepreneurs who can realize new efficiencies and profits by cutting off the relational fat. Yet, as Marglin noted, premarket practices are only inefficient or irrational if one thinks their sole purpose is economic production.
Economistic thinking has been found to have detrimental effects on cooperation and a sense of moral obligation to others. Majoring in economics or being prompted to think about money leads to more self-interested, less prosocial behavior; another famous study found that fining parents who were late in picking up their children ended up increasing lateness because parents came to see themselves as paying for a service rather than owing a moral or ethical obligation to childcare providers.47 Market thinking can crowd out other social or communal norms.
In contrast to the practices of self-provision, mutual aid, and reciprocal gift giving within communal societies, most economic activity in affluent, Western nations is defined by individualism and impersonality. Although a department store clerk may be pleasant and helpful, he or she is usually a stranger whose interests only temporarily and imperfectly align with the customer’s. Indeed, apathy or even antagonism often underlie “ideal” market activity. Consider the controversy over a smartphone application used to scan barcodes in physical stores in order to compare prices with Amazon. The online retailer’s success in undercutting local businesses is aided by the extent to which citizens have internalized the economistic thinking that makes such behavior appear to be socially acceptable. A case in point is how one online commentator supported the app by saying, “If you think for one moment that any of the stores you choose to shop at care about your budget or the costs your family incurs each month, you’re wrong. They are in business to make money. I’m in the business of keeping my money, and charity starts at home—my family comes first. Not theirs.”48 Such logic makes sense when customers and business owners are understood as no more than independent social atoms competing over scarce dollars.
Similar anticommunitarian logic characterizes corporate activity more generally. Corporations are legally required in some countries to be beholden only to shareholders, not to the places where firms are located. Consider how an Apple executive recently responded to criticism of the company’s outsourcing of manufacturing jobs by replying, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”49 The implication is clear: Apple has no commitment to any community, not even the imagined community of the nation-state. With such a commitment it would be hard to justify the uprooting of factories when another municipality, state, or country can offer a more attractive combination of tax breaks or the relaxation of workers’ rights and safety regulations.
Because thick economic community manifests in the commitments between owners and workers in the places where they are located, it is threatened by the economic changes that demand fragmented, mobile populations. One UNESCO study traced the decline of place-based communities in part to owners and managers ceasing to settle among and socialize with lower-level workers,50 a situation exacerbated by increasing job insecurity and enforced mobility. As urban scholar Thad Williamson and his coauthors have contended, such “economic dislocation entails the wholesale destruction of civic networks.”51 Unstable social webs provide a weaker sense of belonging, and economic precarity and worry likely discourage active volunteering and community membership. Indeed, residential stability has been found to promote a sense of belonging and prosocial behavior. In contrast, residential mobility, having to frequently dissolve social ties and adjust to new circumstances, leads people to identify less with their social roles and more with their personal characteristics.52 The more residential mobility is economically promoted or enforced, the more citizens become individualists.
Economic localism offers a more communitarian alternative to the standard economic paradigm. Localists aim to mitigate the effects of the “flexible economy” and of social fragmentation; they seek to reconstruct economic community as “formed in collective action based on place.”53 The intended effect of measures such as community-supported agriculture, local currencies, democratically governed businesses, locally sourced energy, and collectively held property through community land trusts is to sustain an alternative economy more rooted in relational interdependence and better responsive to local needs. The movement’s goal is to help people meet more daily needs through cooperation, sharing, and more circumscribed competitive practices—farmers’ markets, for example, have economic competition without harm to social relationships. Localism aims to diminish the degree to which the disparities of power, cutthroat competitiveness, and single-minded pursuit of profit characteristic of corporate capitalism define economic exchanges. Hence, economic localism lies in the middle between the more thickly communitarian practices of mutual aid and impersonal networks of economic exchange.
It is important to distinguish localist forms of economic sharing from the much hyped “sharing economy” composed of firms like Zipcar, Airbnb, and others. As Internet scholar Russell Belk has noted, exchanges on these networks do not really constitute sharing but rather are short-term leasing arrangements.54 Such exchanges, as well as users’ sharing of personal data and creations on websites like Facebook and YouTube, seldom contribute to the creation of a sense of solidarity or recognizable community. Rather, they might be more accurately viewed as commodity exchanges between network owners, consumers, and lay contributors. In the case of Web 2.0 participation, access to media or valued social space is traded for personal information. That is not to say such technologies could not better support more communitarian forms of sharing. Certainly they could, if they were owned by the communities using them and were less guided by the narrow pursuit of shareholder value or venture capital funding.
Thinner forms of economic community also exist. Businesses and consumers within a locality are bound into webs of economic interdependence regardless of whether they gather a sense of community from them. Similar interdependencies are strengthened between different geopolitical entities through trade agreements and forms of economic cooperation. For instance, the European Union trade agreement has more tightly coupled the economies of countries like France, Germany, and Greece and thus incentivizes the alignment of national economic policies, for better or worse. Similarly, college presidents and business leaders in the area surrounding Albany, New York, have organized an Economic Development Council with the aim of improving local economic growth. Although lacking the relational focus of economic localism, such efforts nevertheless aim to support the well-being of regions rather than merely individuals.
Political Community and Communal Justice
Thick political community exists to the extent that citizens self-govern via community institutions and to the degree to which disputes are settled in ways that preserve and stabilize relationships. The more impersonal and proceduralistic forms of politics that dominate most contemporary liberal democracies bind citizens into political communities in only the thinnest sense of the word: citizens are merely the constituents of representatives, and they are bound more by a shared constitution, legal framework, and some degree of civility than by strong relationships. Proposed communitarian or civic republican political alternatives, in contrast, place more emphasis on participatory self-governance.55 Indeed, political theorist Robert Nisbet defined community as the product of people working together to solve problems, fulfill common objectives, and build the codes of authority under which they live.56 Communitarians typically advocate for an increase in political community through the principle of subsidiarity: devolving political power to the lowest effective level. Thereby, everyday life is organized more through civil society institutions and responsive local governments than a distant, centralized state.
The thickness of the political community within institutions is related to their degree of impersonality. Thin political arrangements begin with the assumption that participants are self-interested strangers and even encourage them to act as if they are. Think of the competitive antagonism of court-directed divorce proceedings and inheritance battles or how the phrase “it’s just business” is used to justify what would otherwise be relationally insensitive, if not unethical, behavior. Liberal political theory and therefore liberal political institutions, as philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, are rooted in “the identification of individual interests … prior to, and independent of, the construction of any moral or social bonds between [individuals].”57 Communitarian institutions, on the other hand, govern behavior and resolve disputes in ways that preserve or enhance participants’ relational bonds.
Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom has analyzed numerous cases of the latter.58 From regulating a local logging forest in Japan to limiting catches in a Turkish fishery or providing irrigated water in Spain, numerous communities have successfully ensured that members share and sustainably utilize common resources for generations. Such efforts depend on members’ capacity to communicate and negotiate conflict, on reliable mechanisms for developing trust through accountable monitoring, and on a sense of a common future. The Turkish fishermen regularly renegotiated rules and allowances, with monitoring made easy by assigning boats to neighboring time slots so that overfishing was immediately noticed by crews waiting to take a turn. Fellow fishermen understood the uncertainties and complexities of managing the fishery and knew the very real threat to their collective livelihoods if the resource were improperly exploited.59
Such institutions strongly contrast with the more bureaucratic systems common in liberal democracies, where setting quotas, monitoring catches, and policing compliance are handled by distant and impersonal organizations. The relationship between regulator and regulated, in the latter case, is more defined by competition or antagonism than longer-term cooperation. Impersonal bureaucracies, of course, are sometimes justified as less likely to be nepotistic or unfair. To anyone who has had extensive experience with them, however, especially around the globe, the view of bureaucracies as hedges against corruption is likely to seem suspect.
A more communitarian model of politics is likewise present in bioregionalist proposals for reforming affluent Western nations articulated by authors like Wendell Berry and Daniel Kemmis. Environmental philosopher Paul Thompson has described the bioregionalist vision as premised on a belief in the importance of interactions with nature, food work, the wide diffusion of property ownership, and local interdependence for cultivating the habits and virtues that make good citizens.60 To this end, bioregionalists call for a greater decentralization and descaling of industry, agriculture, and governance in order to scaffold a stronger felt connection to the environment and a sense of sociomaterial interdependence. They argue that place-based economies help citizens recognize a common stake in each other’s welfare and support a politics guided in part by an acknowledgment of a shared fate. Contrary to the prevailing view, community is not conceived as rooted in some preexisting, nonconflictual consensus of values. Rather, political consensus (or, more likely, some mixture of compromise and concession) stems from and reinforces other dimensions of communality. This does not mean, of course, that very real material and ideological conflicts would disappear but only that structural arrangements could encourage negotiation via mechanisms that more often preserve than fracture relationships.
This process is visible on a smaller scale in the way some more communitarian societies approach the issue of justice. Consider geographer Jared Diamond’s description of the case of a young boy being accidently struck and killed by a car in Westernizing but still very traditional Papua New Guinea.61 Involvement of the police was minimal, limited to protecting the driver and his passengers from vigilantism. The dispute was resolved through mediation. Because the driver was at the time shuttling workers for a local office, his business manager met and negotiated with the boy’s family. Instead of a drawn-out court case, open conflict was avoided through the provision of food and money for the boy’s funeral as well as a feast where expressions of loss, suffering, and remorse could be aired and a collective commitment to peace could be made. My point with this example is not that accidents resulting in death would never result in manslaughter charges in thick communitarian societies—they probably should in cases of gross negligence. Rather, the practice of justice would be far broader than it currently is in Western nations, using jail time and other forms of retribution more judiciously.
Indeed, contrary to myths of communal harmony, thick communitarian societies are not characterized by the lack or avoidance of conflict but by the way conflicts are handled. Justice is premised not exclusively on rehabilitation, retribution, or deterrence, but on the preservation of relationships. Compare this with the Western system of criminal and civil justice, wherein relational ties are considered immaterial, do not exist, or are effectively severed in the process. Relationally restorative approaches to justice are motivated by the recognition that community members must continue to live peaceably with one another postconflict. Determining absolute winners and losers through an impersonal and antagonistic marshalling of evidence and argument tends to breed further resentment and distrust, undermining community stability. That is not to say that people living in societies that practice thick communitarian forms of justice do not hold grudges, have feuds, or otherwise act nasty to each other, only that their institutions aim to more constructively mediate interpersonal and civil conflicts.
Communal justice, moreover, rarely frames a dispute as existing solely between two individuals but involves those who are directly and indirectly affected. In Diamond’s account, the compensation for the accident was handled by the driver’s company. In different circumstances, it would have been paid by family members, to whom the driver would then owe a debt or nonmonetary responsibility. Thus, in cases of disputes and wrongs, community ties of mutual obligation are reinforced. In America, in contrast, the driver would have probably been fired and help from family would have been far from guaranteed.
Also essential to communitarian politics and communal justice are particular skills and dispositions helpful to resolving conflict. Among the most important is what political philosopher Benjamin Barber has called political talk, which “involves listening as well as speaking, feeling as well as thinking, and acting as well as reflecting.”62 Talking, for Barber, is not just a vehicle for expressing political interests but for bonding, understanding the positions of others, and establishing new shared meanings and imaginations as well. Clearly, the understandably tense ceremony involving the New Guinean driver and the dead boy’s family would have been less effective absent the effort to listen, comprehend, and reestablish bonds. Likewise, larger political conflicts are likely to fracture a community if opponents see each other not as peers to be understood but only enemies to be vanquished. Such talk-based politics were visible in the Berger Inquiry, in which thirty-five “community hearings” held throughout Canada led to the relocation of a proposed oil and gas pipeline.63 Attentive listening, however, is not well distributed throughout Western practices of politics, with some politicians and citizenries putting it into practice more reliably than others. The politically gridlocked U.S. Congress is one particularly negative example.
Without practice, the skills needed for negotiating conflict will likely atrophy, foreclosing possibilities for communal relationships. The first time most middle-class North Americans share a room with another person is in their twenties or thirties. Lacking prior experience with sharing possessions or collective spaces, it is not at all surprising that many of them view domestic disputes among roommates and partners as intractable, life-draining burdens.64 Elsewhere in the world, in contrast, room sharing is the norm. Despite the inconveniences of such arrangements, people growing up with them are likely to be better practiced at sharing, cooperation, and tolerance for the presence of others. For instance, the anthropologist Jean Briggs has described how an Inuit father met his needs for privacy by simply facing the back of the ice house.65 As I discuss later, it is hard to imagine how people could develop into capable political communitarians without being forced by their domestic environment to learn such skills.
Box 3.2 Self-Management of Conflict and Community in Bethel
Established in 1985 in Hokkaido, Japan, Bethel House is a group home for people with schizophrenia and other psychological disorders. Because it is run according to a belief that the mentally ill become well through the process of reintegrating into a community as social beings and with a healthy skepticism of the paternalism typical in other psychiatric institutions, residents get to be comanagers of the home and its associated businesses. A local psychiatrist, Dr. Kawamura, works with residents to reduce their medication levels down to a practical minimum, a point where they can function socially and not be excessively bothered by voices or hallucinations. Especially when compared with the extreme isolation of most Japanese mental institutions, residents of Bethel find it to be a warm and accepting place. Tsutomu Shimono speaks fondly of being “treated as normal” and being able to live a “regular life” again. The home’s youngest resident describes her housemates as “warm souls” who provide her hugs when she is upset, a practice of caring that she believes ought to be commonplace in her society but, lamentably, is not.
Bethel, however, is not and has never been an idyllic place. In Karen Nakamura’s documentary depiction of the home, daily life is punctuated by both minor crises and conflicts. For example, a house member named Yamane created chaos in the community in the middle of a schizophrenic episode, insisting that he needed to go to a nearby national park in order to board a UFO and save the world. In another notable moment of conflict, a resident criticizes another named Yoshino for her body odor until she breaks into tears.
Nevertheless, Bethel’s residents exemplify aspects of thick community in how they deal with such crises and conflicts. Yamane’s episode was dealt with by a group meeting. Other members eventually persuaded him that he needed to see Dr. Kawamura to get a “UFO license” before departing, helping end the crisis without the involvement of the police. The incident with Yoshino provoked a group discussion about how residents could better talk to and help each other with their problems. Although far from perfect, the way in which residents of Bethel are able to put moral commitments to collective self-determination and communal care into practice, despite the challenges presented by mental illness, is inspirational.66
Community as a Shared Moral Order
Finally, community further involves the creation, maintenance, and evolution of shared moral values concerning the “right” way to live and how to make sense of everyday practices. Those shared values and understandings in turn influence people’s self-understandings. As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued, community members not only “profess communitarian sentiments and pursue communitarian aims, but rather … conceive their identity—the subject and not just the object of their feelings and aspirations—as defined to some extent by the community of which they are a part.”67 For relatively thin cases, such as in urban subcultures and many online communities, identity formation more substantively precedes relational communality: those with similar beliefs, hobbies, values, and aspirations (e.g., middle-class hipsters) colocate so that others may affirm already formed or desired identities. In its strongest or thickest sense, as Sandel has contended, moral community is not chosen so much as discovered; it composes the ideological milieu built up by already existing relations and practices from which individuals are constructed. That is, identity emerges more as a result of already existing relationships and social practices rooted in material, psychological, and political interdependence. This shared moral order is not necessarily totalizing, uncontestable, or unchanging but, nevertheless, strongly influences the moral decision making of members.
Thick moral communities also entail the shared norms, values, understandings, and identities that arise in groups where a “common good beyond the sum of individuals’ private interests is pursued and in which individuals define their own interests and values in reference to collective goods.”68 Members make sense of everyday practices in terms of shared values and understand their own welfare as achieved through community life. The existence of moral community plays a strong role in supporting other dimensions of communality. Indeed, one sociological study of fifty urban communes of a variety of political stripes found that the strength of shared values and understandings of social roles was the most significant factor in determining members’ level of commitment, feelings of belonging, and belief that their compatriots cared about them.69
Much of contemporary liberal thought, however, understands shared moral orders as the opposite of freedom, as a form of coercion enacted by community. As noted by Barber, liberty is typically understood as the absence of external constraint on individual choice.70 Individual freedom is seen as accomplished through the development of sufficiently impersonal markets and bureaucracies as well as the procedural protection of individual rights. Achieving this moral vision, however, tends to be inimical to thick community. Indeed, some have argued that its logical conclusion is the destruction of any intermediate association or moral allegiance between the level of individual citizens and a centralized state.71 That is, liberal freedom is ensured by bureaucratic and “invisible hand” institutions making sure citizens are kept sufficiently apart. For many readers, such a moral vision probably looks commonsensical, if not natural.
The difference between thick moral community and liberal individualism, however, is not really that the former impresses a shared moral order on citizens without their consent and the latter does not. Rather, they are simply different shared moral orders. Even highly individualistic forms of politics depend on the collective enforcement of liberal personhood by rendering unthinkable certain beliefs and activities. Liberal moral orders are visible in controversies over certain practices within ethnic, cultural, or religious communities: circumcision and the refusal of some deaf parents to implant cochlear implants into their children, among others. In these situations it becomes clear that a liberal moral order is not neutral but holds sacred certain avenues of exercising individual choice.72 Liberal parents are not to deprive children of the right to choose for themselves particular aspects of their developing identity—whether sexual, sensorial, or otherwise—for the sake of group belonging. It is through these injunctions and others that liberalism exposes itself as a form of moral community.
This moral nonneutrality of liberal individualism is typically overlooked. The decision not to put a cochlear implant in a deaf child, for example, is actually not much different than the choice by one set of Toronto parents not to assign a gender to their child.73 In both cases, a certain moral vision is being enacted on and via the child by their parents. The deaf parents value their child’s belonging to the deaf community over his or her ability to hear. In the latter case, the child is allowed more space to wrestle with gender identity inside a popular culture defined by fairly rigid binaries. Yet did the child have a choice concerning whether to be forced to “discover” their own gender, much less about having to take a part in their parents’ political statement? My point here is not to moralistically judge one case to be superior to the other but merely to point out that the deprivation of individual choice concerning shared values and practices is inescapable. Some moral order is already and always, albeit imperfectly, imposed on citizens by the mere fact of being raised by someone and within a culture.
Indeed, liberal personhood is itself not a choice but an enculturated reality. Consider how many middle-class Western parents aim to avoid tantrums by always presenting children with a choice: for example, “Do you want cereal X for breakfast or cereal Y?” Though this practice may often be effective, it nevertheless helps instill the particularly Western idea that individual choice is central to one’s being. Indeed, psychological studies find that North Americans experience uniquely high levels of anxiety when unable to exercise choice over even relatively inconsequential matters.74 The ubiquity of advertising and consumer culture further entrenches the idea that even the highly restricted individual choices offered via shopping represent the surest path to personal empowerment. As Gabriela Coleman has written, “today to liberate and express the ‘authentic,’ ‘expressive’ self is usually [interpreted as] synonymous with a life-long engagement with consumption.”75
Liberal individualism is further naturalized via the narratives that dominate contemporary culture in technological societies. As philosopher Charles Taylor has argued, the unquestionability of individualism is enforced by “subtraction stories,” which depict contemporary individualism as the ideal realization of humanity achieved by the subtraction of the “unnatural” influences of community and traditional forms of social organization.76 At their most extreme, such stories give the impression that hiding within every member of a rural community, cohesive urban village, or hunter-gatherer society is a cosmopolitan (sub)urbanite aching to be free.
Consider the movie Pleasantville, a satire of televised depictions of 1950s family and community life.77 The town is presented in black and white during the beginning of the film; characters only come into full color when they slough off some aspect of their conformity to Pleasantville’s prevailing norms in order to better explore their individuality through various aesthetic, emotional, and sexual experiences. There is little wrong, from a communitarian standpoint, with the individual exploration of one’s interests, personality, and sexuality. Yet, Pleasantville portrays the town’s communal society as solely a barrier to individual self-expression, locked in a state of existential arrested development, especially later in the film when town fathers become increasingly oppressive in attempting to oppose the advancing coloration of community members. The film is a morality tale with a clear prescription: individualism as the cure for the supposed emotional, aesthetic, and sexual prison of community life. Indeed, one character’s transformation occurs when they eat a colored apple, an allusion to the biblical tree of knowledge. Individualism is, hence, presented as the path to enlightenment, revealing the way to personal fulfillment and exposing the evils of the communal past and present to those willing to taste it. Looking upon the presumptions about the character of the good life and good society undergirding Pleasantville and other liberal “subtraction stories,” it becomes clear that even individualism is a kind of moral community.
A common presumption in movies such as Pleasantville and other individualistic subtraction stories is that thick communitarian moral orders are immediately less free than moral individualism. Is this necessarily true? Rather than speculate over freedom writ large, it is probably easier to ask, “What is freedom under moral order X?” The moral order of most liberal democracies tends to privilege the economic liberties of property owners and capitalists, which results in the majority of population having little choice but to labor in nondemocratic, if not authoritarian, workplaces. While citizens in individualistic societies do not see themselves as obligated to maintain strong relational commitments as do people in more communitarian societies, they are also “freer” to suffer from anomie and loneliness, given that they are seen as responsible for arranging for their own needs for belonging and intimacy. The moral orders in thick communities emphasize different sets of responsibilities and freedoms. That members of immigrant communities feel obligated to support one another materially allows them to flourish despite generally not receiving living wages from the “free” market. Indeed, the very functioning of the community depends on maintaining a moral order in which members see the “right way” to live as entailing such obligations. It is unclear whether communal responsibilities are automatically more onerous than the compulsions and coercions of job insecurity, enforced mobility, and debt characterizing individualized, market society life, though they may appear unpleasant when viewed from a liberal perspective.
To some moral liberals, the compulsions of thick community seem not simply unfree but inevitably authoritarian. Although religious cults loom large as obvious counterexamples, one study of urban communes nevertheless found that a communal sense of belonging, commitment, and support tend to be inversely related to the existence of an authoritarian hierarchy.78 That a communal moral order is necessary to an authoritarian moral order is hardly certain. Of course the way certain moral expectations are enforced in thick communities might feel tyrannical. In traditional small-town communities or bands of hunter-gatherers, for example, ridicule and other forms of shaming are used to ensure that no one appears to rise too far above everyone else.79 Although probably unpleasant to the recipient and clearly restricting freedom of social mobility, the purpose of such behaviors is to level the social hierarchy, not render it more unequal.
A related concern is that the way thickly communitarian moral orders understand identity leads to bigotry. The intolerant traditional community is an archetypal story in popular media and understandings of history, not without some grain of truth. Sociologist Stephen Brint has argued, however, that exclusionary practices are not inevitable features of any community but a product of its “normative environment.”80 Indeed, the notably tolerant and politically progressive Quakers are as much a thick moral community as the Ku Klux Klan. Any discrimination against gay or transgender teens in a rural community would seem to have as much to do with the cultural history that led to the development of an intolerant normative environment than the place’s status as a rural community per se. For example, perceptions of rural intolerance have been found to be no longer a significant factor in Swedish homosexuals’ tendency to move to big cities. Moreover, social anthropologist Hans W. Kristiansen found a surprisingly high level of tolerance and acceptance of same-sex relationships in early twentieth-century rural Norway; the common belief that rural and working-class communities have been universally intolerant of nonheterosexual relationships, whatever its potential usefulness as an origin story for today’s liberatory political movements, is simply not true. Indeed, gender and sexuality scholar Nadine Hubbs has maintained that the story of rural and working-class bigotry is told partly in order to reassure middle- to upper-class, urban whites of their own cultural superiority.81 At any rate, such data undermine the view that the moral orders of traditional communities are necessarily intolerant of difference.
But does not the maintenance of a communitarian moral order demand the homogenization of identity? Certainly many thick communities are fairly homogenous, but it does not necessarily follow that they must be so. Moreover, it is unclear to what extent homogenization is actually feasible, especially in less affluent areas. As sociologist Richard Sennett argued, the racial, socioeconomic, or physical segregation necessary to eliminate diversity requires some material abundance to accomplish.82 In his view, the idea of the “purified community” is more a myth that powerful, affluent groups try to enact rather than a fact of community life—consider what it costs well-off whites to segregate themselves from everyone else. Community, Sennett contended, need not be premised on a moral order that privileges sameness but instead can be rooted in a love of distinctiveness. Consider how male-bodied transgendered people (winktes) were a tolerated and even spiritually revered group among many bands of the Lakota, in spite of otherwise rigid gender roles.83 Another case in point is how the small rural town of Silverton, Oregon, elected the United States’ first transgender mayor: Stu Rasmussen. The depth of residents’ loving acceptance of Rasmussen’s differences was demonstrated by an outpouring of support in the face of protests by the Westboro Baptist Church.84 How difference is understood within a communitarian moral order could be not unlike C. S. Lewis’s description of an ideal church: “[It] is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but [one] in which all members, however different … must share the common life, complementing and helping and receiving one another precisely by their differences.”85
Dichotomous thinking regarding community and conformity overlooks how intolerance and policing of deviance have evolved rather than disappeared throughout recent history. Nationalism is an outgrowth of the growing importance of the nation in the face of declines of local forms of belonging. The egalitarian myth behind many conceptions of national identity frequently hides the real socioeconomic inequalities that pervade most countries. All the rhetoric regarding individuality within liberal, market-oriented moral orders obscures how advertisers enforce consumer conformity every day; being made to feel deviant for being overweight or out of style provides the impetus for consumerism. Finally, consider how the American justice system retains moral legitimacy among many citizens, despite disproportionately targeting African Americans and other minorities. The dominance of a liberal moral order in places like the United States has not meant that conformity is no longer enforced or deviance policed.
Finally, there is no clear reason why enforcing conformity with respect to identity or morally right behavior is prima facie a bad thing. Few would oppose informal community mechanisms for policing deviance when directed at antisocial behavior, uncontrolled expressions of anger and aggression, or other activities that can harm community members. Even proposed alternatives to thick community that take the ostensible anonymity and social and aesthetic inexhaustibility of metropolitan urban life as a model would require eliminating or policing anyone whose practices or ways of life were in any way incommensurable.86 Such a society would only be possible by implementing norms, institutions, and sociotechnical systems to ensure that communities do not become too thick, and hence, tolerance would inevitably be extended to only certain kinds of differences.
It is far from certain that thick communitarian moral orders are necessarily less free, more authoritarian, or intolerant of difference. The egalitarianism of a form of social organization has more to do with its thickness as a political community and the presence of social justice–oriented moral values rather than the existence or nonexistence of a strong moral order. Indeed, proposals for more local and participatory models of politics, like Barber’s “strong democracy,” are as committed to increasing democracy as encouraging people to act and see themselves more as communal citizens than unencumbered selves.87 At the same time, I have shown how even liberal individualism involves freedom-limiting moral injunctions and processes of enculturation. The choice for members of technological societies, therefore, is not between oppressive thick community and unequivocally free individualism, but rather between myriad combinations of communal and individualistic freedoms and moral responsibilities, ensured by institutions running the gamut from authoritarian to democratic and rooted in understandings of “we” ranging from open and difference loving to insular and exclusionary.
The take-home message of this chapter is that any manifestation of community, from online forums to a tribal village, can be evaluated as thick or thin in terms of seven dimensions of togetherness as well as its thickness across multiple dimensions (see figure 3.1). Thicker communities would incorporate dense and interwoven social ties; strong norms of reciprocity and mutual aid; opportunities for talk; the psychological or symbolic sense of community; economic interdependence; functioning systems for self-governance and conflict resolution; and a strong shared moral order.
This multidimensional view provides a more straightforward basis from which to recognize the thinness of forms of community like networked individualism, side-stepping stale arguments about which manifestations of togetherness are “authentic.” Networked individualism is premised on diffuse and fragmented social ties, specific reciprocity, and a sense of belonging to a fuzzy rather than a coherent social entity. Even though networks provide some degree of genuine communality to some people some of the time, they do not score very high in their economic, political, and moral dimensions. Symbolic communities such as the nation or categorical identity groups are very thin when considering the density, multiplexity, and systematicity of social ties, being thicker in terms of shared cultural patterns and experiences that can result in a psychological sense of social connection. That some people find themselves unsatisfied by the provision of belonging in technological societies is likely due to them being insufficiently engaged in a sizable fraction of the relational, symbolic, economic, political, and moral dimensions of social life.
This multidimensional conceptualization, moreover, helps maneuver around the neverending debate over whether community, in the abstract, is inevitably intolerant. Political theorist Iris M. Young, for instance, has rejected community as an ideal on the grounds that the tendency to see it in terms of identity results in differences being labeled as deviant or pathological.88 She is no doubt correct that the equation of community with shared ethnic, racial, national, or sexual identity has often led to unjust forms of exclusion and oppression. However, on-the-ground practices are more diverse than is captured by idealized, abstract visions of community. Indeed, feminist scholar Judith Garber has argued that although “community [as an abstraction] is deeply problematic; in practice, it may actually serve women more often than we think.”89 Indeed, it would be the height of academic condescension to write off the efforts of citizens to establish more communally responsive forms of policing or poor minorities banding together to form a worker cooperative because community in the abstract appears uncomfortably compatible with identity-based chauvinism.
To be fair, critiques of community as an ideal do have merit in sensitizing people to the risks of belonging in the absence of broader political community. As DeFilippis and North have argued, community’s emancipatory potential lies in a politics that embraces rather than denies conflict.90 It is the effort to deny conflict that leads citizens to attempt to unmoor community from any recognition of human diversity or plurality, a denial that, according to political philosopher Hannah Arendt, would undermine political action and the formation of political community.91 It is the allure of togetherness-as-tranquility or belonging-as-shared-identity that drives the exclusion of those who are different. One witnesses such notions in the self-segregation of affluent whites to bucolic gated neighborhoods and various forms of ethnicity-based nationalism.
Although identity-based idealizations of community are unlikely to completely disappear anytime soon, they could be tempered by what David Brain has called the ideal of civility.92 That is, one can value subgroup affinities in the context of broader public ties characterized by trust, tolerance, and mutual respect. In other words, it is a mistake to assume civility and community must be independent or opposed to one another. A shared valuation of the ideal of civility can serve as a basis for moral community as much as ethnicity, nationality, or any other collective identifier. Moreover, democratic ideals and practices, at their best, provide a rationale and means for constructively combining group interests with collective purposes.93 To best avoid the risk of intolerance, advocates for thick communitarian technological societies would be wise to craft proposals and actions so as to avoid weakening the practice of democratic civil society.
In the following chapters I apply the multidimensional concept of community developed here to the analysis of technologies that affect the chances for rebuilding some of what has been lost, protecting what is now working, and imagining new possibilities. How do artifacts, large-scale systems and infrastructures afford or constrain the enactment of thick or thin practices of community life? Does a technology promote social connection through diffuse networks or dense webs? Does it undermine or support the recurring practices of material and social exchange that cement social bonds? Does it enable citizens to escape personal and political conflicts or encourage them to engage and negotiate? Does a technology contribute to the building of an individualistic moral order or a communal one? Through such inquiries, I develop an outline of what communitarian technologies accomplish and what more communal technological societies could look like.
