There's no such thing as community

My contribution to 'A sense of place: how to create community in a fractured world'

Strictly speaking, to misquote Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as community. The holy trinity of undergraduate sociology – Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber – described in their different ways the break with the old world of community and tradition. The way capitalism or rationalism, destroys the old bonds and the old ways of doing things. Ferdinand Tonnies used the terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to describe this shift from community to society. The upshot being that we gained enormously in terms of human freedom and material wellbeing. But we were also left with weaker, shallower relationships with each other, a crisis of meaning - and questions about how we might build new solidarities.

When we talk about community today, I think we are talking about something quite different. Those questions remain. But instead of describing a historical process where one way of organising ourselves as a species gives way to another, we are talking about the loss of a ‘sense of’ community. It’s a phrase we often use but perhaps don’t think about. It implies that communities in their old traditional sense don’t really exist anymore. There is only ‘a sense’ of what they once were. Nevertheless, as social animals, we feel its absence. We might have greater freedoms, more mobility, more choices in life – but we’ve lost something important too. That sense of belonging.

Not my people

What I would hesitate to call my community came to national attention when it opposed the opening of Gail’s. This is a bakery chain for those of you who (like me) had not heard of it until that point. Now, these are definitely not my people. Their problem with Gail’s was not just that it was a corporate rather than an independent business. But also that the owner is pro-Brexit, an environmental sceptic, anti-Woke and pro-Israel.

In other words, he didn’t accord with their values. I suspect the hipsters - white middle class migrants from out of town - with their snobbery and prejudices, annoy the mostly working class residents of this otherwise deprived borough as much as they annoy me. In August’s riot season, the hipsters joined the Islamofascists and the old radical left, in the country’s biggest counter-protest against the supposed white fascists. They never turned up.

A backdrop of indifference

I won’t talk about the Harehills riot, the horrific events in Southport or the riots that followed. I won’t talk about the Two Tier Society either. That much is obvious. What really interests me is the official response. The blatant indifference. The riots exposed how ordinary people’s concerns are marginalised at best but mostly ignored. We don’t really know who we are anymore. But we get the distinct impression that those in charge don’t like us.

They spend a lot of time trying to stop us speaking frankly. And no time at all addressing what we are speaking about. People are continuously being locked up for the stupid things they say online. At the same time, burglaries have been effectively legalised across half the country. And violence on our streets - from knife crime to seemingly random attacks and even terrorist incidents - are treated as an almost routine part of daily life.

So, what now?

What can we do to save our communities from further decline? Beyond these violent convulsions that we have become all too familiar with, we live more anxious, more privatised, more hybridised lives than ever before. In Northeast London, I know my neighbours only a little. The commutes to work by bus and tube - for those not working at home - are very anonymous affairs, with everyone lost behind their headphones and earbuds. The notion of a singular ‘sense of’ community to which we might all belong seems more alien than ever. The idea of British values seems to be a misnomer. We only ever came up with toleration - of which I am in favour. But this is only to say we are tolerant of other people’s values.

And diversity - which is to celebrate the atomisation and fragmentation that got us here in the first place. So, how can we get to a place where we have our own values, and can begin to identify with something bigger than ourselves? There are no easy answers so I won’t give any. I’ll only say that there will be more hard arguments to come with our cultural and political elites and, more importantly, with our fellow citizens. I don’t see how else we’ll get a better sense of ourselves as belonging to a bigger something, except by engaging with those around us. After all the divisive rhetoric and rioting on our streets, the heat of debate and the hammering out of ideas seems to me a better way of forging a new sense of community.

The above is the text on which I based my contribution to A sense of place: how to create community in a fractured world - a debate at Battle of Ideas on 20 October.