An American Pragmatist

My friend, Aaron Arinder, recently posted a series of really great questions and postulates concerning community, so I’m reposting this post from a couple of years ago. I think that using Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft are helpful categories of analysis here.

Two Views of Community:

We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of ourselves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning. All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning

We are part of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.

If we are not to have a self that hangs in the void, slowly twisting in the wind, these are issues we cannot ignore.

- Robert Bellah, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. P. 84

We often stress the the need for community in our religion. I want to spend a little time discussing what this community might look like.

A Brief Excursus on Individualism

One can speak of contemporary Western society as heir to two traditions, the liberal individualist and the communitarian, each of which brings along with it a distinctive set of values. More than anywhere else in the Western world, the American Psyche has been forged in the fires of liberal individualism but tempered with a keen awareness of the importance of community.

We see American Individualism run amok in the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. When it is scaled back from egoism, the individualist tradition elevates the human person above everything and sees the contract as the basis of all social interactions. This tradition promotes such values as personal freedom, self-improvement, privacy, achievement, independence, detachment, and self-interest. Living these values may put people into contact with one another, the central focus is not upon these others, or upon the group as a whole, but upon the rights and needs of the individual separate from their relationship with those others.

There is much more we can say about individualism and more specifically, American Individualism, but our purposes lie elsewhere.

Community

In good communities the members ask not, "What is the minimum my contract requires?" but “What will make this group good?”

The notion of community strongly contrasts with the notion of individualism because its emphasis is upon the social nature of humanity. The self, communitarians say, is formed by its relationships, roles, attachments within traditions and institutions. Accordingly, communitarians elevate the group instead of the human individual as the center of society. Its core values are intimacy, benevolence, fellowship, belonging, dependence, social involvement, and the public good.[1]

So, how do we see, how do we describe this community? It is most helpful to talk about two types of community, Gemeinshaft and Gesellschaft as they are constructed by Ferdinand Toennies in Community and Society. At first the use of two very similar German words might throw you off, but just think of them as containers for ways of speaking about community.

Gemeinschaft refers to social groups that involve:

relationships encompassing human beings as full personalities rather than single aspects of human beings. These are relationships characterized by high degrees of cohesion, communality, and duration in time. What is essential is the quality of strong cohesiveness of persons to one another and the quality of rooted, persisting collective identity.[2]

Gesellschaft refers to social groups that

engages the individual in only one of the aspects or parts of his or her total being, or at most, only a few aspects. From the individual’s point of view his relationship with other in Gesellschaft is more tenuous, loose, and less deeply rooted in his allegiances or commitments. Gesellschaft is commonly founded around a few specific interests or purposes, whether religious, economic, recreational, or political.[3]

You can think of Gemeinshaft as a tight-knit family whereas Gesellschaft is more akin to working in a factory.

The Community vs. the Individual

One of the classic arguments running through American political and ethical thought is the supposed war of the interests of the individual against those of the community. Working from a post-Enlightenment liberalism, we (as a historical people) have worked hard to protect the interests of the individual (or sub-communities) from the demands of the community. We see this thread running all throughout our laws. We see the dangers of not guarding against this in the pain the Jim-Crow laws inflicted upon the Ante-Bellum Black community. The situation (at least legally) was finally remedied through the Civil Rights movement.

When addressing the tension between individualism and communitarianism, it is helpful to note that in Gesellschaft communities, the individual exists and is important only insofar as the individual is useful to the group. However, in Gemeinschaft communities, on the other hand, a group focus does not necessarily mean that the individual is subsumed underneath the group and that a uniformity of through and practice is necessary. Robert Bellah describes the argumentative nature of good Gemeinschaft communities:

A good community is one in which there is argument, even conflict, about the meaning of shared values and goals, and certainly about how they will be actualized in everyday life.[4]

We may draw a parallel with ancient Rome. Being Roman is not necessarily the wholesale adoption of Roman Reinkultur, or pure culture, which may or may not have actually existed, as much as it was entering into a debate about what Roman Reinkultur consisted.

This is why “Roman identity remained so attractive to those within the empire, yet failed to enchant those beyond it.”[5] Additionally, Romanization did not consist of an adoption of one ideal type, as if there was only one idea and way of being Roman. Rather, there were so many kinds of Romans to become that becoming Roman meant “acquiring a position in the complex of structured differences in which Roman power resided” instead of “becoming more [like] the other inhabitants of the empire.”[6] It is likewise with good community.

Likewise, when we join good communities, our selves don’t melt-away, Borg-style; instead, we become something like the X-men, where we bring our whole selves to the game and we only succeed through contested teamwork.

Conclusion: Intentional Community is needed and Messy, but that’s OK

In sum, while some communities are tyrants lording over their members and must therefore be protected against, not all communities are thus constructed.

In good communities the members ask not, “What is the minimum my contract requires?” but “What will make this group a good group?” The Masses ask not “How can we gain more power?” but “What is good for all of us?”

What are some good communities you’ve been a part of?  What aspects have made them such?

[1] Fergusson, Community, Liberalism, and Christian Ethics,p. 139.

[2] Nisbet and Perrin, Social Bond, 98-99

[3] Ibid.

[4] Bellah, Habits of the Heart. P. 333.

[5] Woolf, Becoming Roman, 98-105.

[6] Ibid., 245 and 242.