In search of belonging

Day 2 at the Battle of Ideas - Orwell, community and the trouble with sortition

On the second day of the Battle of Ideas weekend - before I spoke on A sense of place: how to create community in a fractured world - I wandered into a discussion with Christopher Snowdon, author of a new book on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. There was some to and fro about whether he (Orwell, not the Institute for Economic Affairs’ Snowdon) was a socialist. And if so, what kind? Actually, this was the least interesting part of the conversation and threatened to descend into The Life of Brian territory. But happily moved onto a more fruitful discussion of Orwell’s attitude to community and England. An audience member thought he was interested in how we can create ‘the space for organic communities to emerge’.

That comment stayed with me as I joined my session, the first of a strand of debates on Belonging and Community. Kim Samuel, founder of the Belonging Forum, started by laying out - very usefully, I thought - the importance of the ‘feeling of being at home’, a sense of place and having agency over our lives. But then, either consistently or in-congruently (depending on who you have in mind I suppose) she referred to those seeking asylum and how they are made to feel like they ‘don’t exist’. As I argued, there is surely a tension (even a contradiction) here. If we are members of a community, doesn’t it follow that others are necessarily not members? Given recent concerns about immigration, lent a particular edge by the riots, whose home or place are we most concerned about, and what agency do we have over public policy decisions?

William Clouston, leader of the Social Democratic Party, talked about the social atomisation that is both a consequence of globalisation and itself globalised. He described this as a ‘product of modernity’. Covering similar ground to my own introductory comments that were to follow, on the historic shift from traditional community to the looser associations of the capitalist era, and its consequences. Clouston also talked about today’s difficulties with screens, our mental health troubles and how institutions like the church - even for us atheists - could play a role in lifting us from our digital and psychological obsessions. I sort of agreed, and said so.

Abbot Christopher Jamison, Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation, was delighted to hear such enthusiasm for Godly pursuits from such quarters. And these were to be echoed by co-panelist Michael Merrick a little more expectedly perhaps, given he is director of schools for the Diocese of Lancaster. Jamison, perhaps surprisingly, had rather less to say about religion than the rest of the panel. But was nevertheless intellectually engaging. He spoke about freedom. As somebody in the audience said, community can be ‘stifling’. There is a trade-off between wanting to belong and acting autonomously as an individual. The Abbot argued against the negative freedom of wanting to be left alone, preferring the freedom to, in this case, pay attention to others.

Though that does pose the question, on reflection, is wanting to be left alone really negative? And how does that sit with the other theme of the Abbot’s talk - the importance of solitude? As I said in the debate, I’m all for creating spaces for greater solitude - which is precisely why I didn’t share the frustration of those in the audience wanting libraries to be even more like community centres than they already are. Indeed, like my wish to run from libraries that have gone from hush to hub, isn’t it inevitable that the experience of living in a community makes some want to escape? It reminds me of a lyric from Small Town, by Lou Reed and John Cale in Songs for Drella, their biographical tribute to their late mentor Andy Warhol:

When you're growing up in a small town

You know you'll grow down in a small town

There is only one good use for a small town

You hate it and you'll know you have to leave

Merrick, in a thought provoking contribution to the discussion, talked about his own experience of loneliness. This was interesting because he is clearly surrounded by people in his life. He spoke fondly of his wife and seven (yes, seven!) children. And he also spoke about his experience in the education sector. While he is clearly very dedicated, and spoke of how this has taken him far and wide, he also described the social mobility he experienced as quite ‘shallow’. Without disparaging either home or career, he was describing a home-work cycle, with little down-time in between, to which many can relate.

And, of course he is right. The pubs and clubs he remembers from his own father’s generation, the old institutions that supported male companionship, have largely gone. While there are no end of campaigning groups trying to get men together - usually to talk about their mental health - this is to misunderstand, or even to exploit, the collapse of male solidarity along with the industries that once employed them. Men, for all the attempts to feminise them into submission, ‘do not talk’ as Merrick put it. They do. (Though I wonder what they do?) As a member of a working men’s club myself - which amounts to the occasional game of snooker - I can understand what he is getting at. The world to which these institutions belong is of the past.

As Clouston hinted at, there is something about the world as it is today that makes us more alienated than we would otherwise be. And yet, as somebody in the audience said, pathologising the loneliness many of us feels as if it were a mental health problem, is a mistake. Some spoke of the importance of having a sense of purpose. As I argued, sometimes it can feel as if those who want to be volunteers are responding to their own feeling of vacuousness as much as they are to the needs of those around them. They are hoping to find meaning in their lives through helping others. Which is good (especially if you’re a Battle of Ideas volunteer).

As a number of people said, there are too many obstacles put in the way of them taking part in community life. Whether it be the welfare state ‘crowding out’ voluntary activity, or bureaucracy, DEI ideology, and safeguarding regulations, strangling it. How do we enable the emergence of a sense of community, something more organic (to go back to the Orwell discussion)? I later joined a session on Citizens’ Assemblies, which could hardly be more inorganic. I had written on the topic here and reviewed a book on the subject here. Could they ‘save democracy’ the session asked?

While there was agreement in the room that democracy was in a sorry state, we were split on whether these assemblies or sortition (which means drawing lots to select participants) would make any difference. They might even make matters worse, because not only are they inherently anti-democratic, but the whole point of these assemblies is to take decision-making away from the masses. As I explained from the floor, one of the contributors to the book I reviewed described citizens’ assemblies as a ‘snow globe version of democracy’. I took this to mean that they are an idealised version of democracy (at least for the expert class) sealed off from politics and popular opinion by that transparent globe.

We need to shake it up, but without the winter scene returning to its unreal representation as the snow settles. For these assemblies are only representative in a statistical sense. Invited citizens are put in their respective boxes - there to ‘represent’ those who are poor, gay, black, etc. And as such reflect more the preoccupations and biases of those devising them, than the views of citizens. There is no political representation, no debate, despite their considering the big issues of the day. The environment, assisted dying, gender recognition in Scotland, and the constitution in Ireland, were amongst those cited on Sunday. I wonder if we had a better sense of ourselves as a community, might we have a better grasp of what matters to us and appoint our representatives accordingly?

Image: Artem Kavalerov