What is Community?

Gareth Stevens

“Without community, politics is dead. But communities have been scattered like dust in the wind. At work, at home, both practically and imaginatively, we are atomised.” George Monbiot

What do we even mean by the word Community these days? What does it mean to be a Hastinger – and do you have to be born in the town to qualify to be one? Is a gallery owner on Norman Road, St Leonards in the same community as the beggar that sits outside Londis but one hundred metres away? Is a multi-property landlord new to town in the same community as a young barista struggling to meet rent in a House in Multiple Occupation (HMO)? If the answer to these questions is yes, then how does that community manifest itself? How can we bridge these inequitable differences?

Of course the atomisation of which Monbiot speaks is, as is often said, down to Thatcher’s policies. Encouraging low-income families to own their own council houses, the systematic dismantling of mining communities, international outsourcing of manufacturing and low-skill labour, have all combined to break down strong co-located communities.

There was a time when co-located communities had a heart. In such places generations worked in extraction and manufacturing industries and there was a sense that everyone shared the same experience – or predicament. On top of that the unions amplified a feeling of unity and communality. Despite hardship, these towns sustained a deep sense of belonging and pride.

Along with Thatcher, Globalisation and Neo-liberal economic policies are culpable for the demise of said unions and industries and have sent, mainly northern towns, into a dizzying decline into poverty, unemployment and all the devastating social problems that the working class, in turn, would come to be blamed for. Of course it is easy to look back at these close knit communities and see them as idyllic. Clearly they weren’t – but that does not take away from the fact that what used to bind us has gone and the collective centre no longer holds.

Whilst all this is hard to refute, earlier on new technologies, not least the mass use of the family car, fuelled separation of families and contributed to the high turnover of individual membership of geographically defined groups. When I was seven my father who was a toolmaker at Vauxhall Motors, Luton was relocated up to their plant in Merseyside, and so it was that our extended family became distant and only seen once or twice a year after a four hour drive. Town centres have been strangled by ring roads and, together with mass fridge and freezer ownership, the family car has replaced daily trips to local food stores where we got to know shop assistants and other customers, with the once a week shop in soulless out-of-town retail parks.

A God Shaped Hole

Whilst I have no allegiance to organised religions, there was also a time when communities were bound through collective worship. We quite literally sang from the same hymn sheet. However apocryphal the gospels may seem to us now – and in a time in which we are more acutely aware of the damage that Christianity and other mono-theastic dogmas have caused – their saving grace was that they provided us with some kind of moral and social glue that encouraged kinship in our local communities. And so whilst God may be dead – the question remains, how do we fill a God-shaped hole?

Well one answer is that we have become preoccupied with ourselves. In his marvellous book Selfie: How the West Became Self-obsessed, Will Storr plots the causal chains that have led to widespread narcissism in the developed world. He argues that early agrarian methods were triggers to processes whereby the west honed the idea of the sovereignty of the individual. He builds arguments as to why in South East Asia there still persists a value system that includes an intense deference for collectivity.

I lived in Hong Kong for eleven years and pre-pandemic it was common to see people on buses, on the underground (the MTR) or, indeed, in the street wearing masks. If you catch a cold in Hong Kong it is deemed no big sacrifice to mask up in order to protect your community from infection. In the West mask wearing became such a contentious issue. This hits at the nub of the issue I am reflecting on here. It seems unattainable for any society or community to get the balance right between the liberty of the individual and their right to self expression, and the collective needs of the wider group. Whilst diversity of ideas and expression is, of course, to be valued, how do we balance this with collective cohesion and bringing the heart back to our co-located communities?

Community is now used to demarcate groups of people according to their sexuality, gender, race etc. Even DFLs and OFBs have their own ‘community’ facebook pages. We no longer seem to identify who we are by where we live and our community standing, we do it by what are arguably our least interesting proclivities; i.e. What kinds of people we prefer to sleep with, our self identified gender, the origin of our grandparents, skin colour …. or whether we like wild water swimming. I am in no way trying to downplay the importance of this, I am just asking where does it leave us? A heterogeneous and muli-cultural community is healthy by any measure … but we need to stop thinking about ourselves from time to time and work to find unity in that diversity.

Education and Citizenship

I think that the demise of the connectedness we once felt living in the circumstance of strong co-located (not online) communities, alongside the disabling effects of meritocratization, has deeply affected young peoples’ attitudes to their life chance opportunities and to their notion of citizenship. It is best not to forget that living in strong communities with a deep sense of collective identity, breeds strength and self-esteem in youngsters … indeed in everyone.

Currently, I would argue, students struggle with self identity and are perplexed about how they will develop any agency for change when they live in disconnected and fragmented social groups, and are at the mercy of unseen and alienating political and economic forces. As well as this, face-to-face sociality is currently in competition with virtual social connectedness. Increasingly youngsters curate and forge their identity online – not in the midst of a more secure participatory culture in their own locale.

So this begs the question, to what extent should schools be instrumental in developing politics “from below” rather than sitting by and assuming that politics is wholly “handed down from above”. I believe that the citizenship programme needs to be expanded, made more action based and should equip students with a lived understanding of their democratic power. Moreover it would grow social connectedness within communities.

Tellingly the 2013 subject report for citizenship prepared by OfSTED says that a weakness in provision was characterised by the fact that “the curriculum did not prompt or support a significant number of pupils to take responsible action apart from through fund-raising events.”

What of the process of the teaching of democracy that the UK citizenship programme demands? Surely students need to experience the democratic process rather than just learn about it? What could that look like?

The writer and activist Saul Alinsky said “The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all people. One hundred and thirty-five years ago Tocqueville gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene.”

We need to encourage ourselves to develop strong social capital in our own neighbourhoods and to realise that politics should start local and influence upwards and not just the other way around.

In the words of Marlon James’ character Nina Burgess in his incredible book about the assasination attempt on the life of Bob Marley in the 1970s, “If you don’t live politics, politics will live you”.