Community

CommunityCommunities are vital to personal and social well being because collaboration is required where skills and resources are scarce; their pathologies anonymity and isolation, tribalism and murder defeat us. Community is often invoked respectfully but without a clear referent. The word is said to be used ninety four ways, evidence that its sense is diffuse. Community clarifies the word's principal expressions and the alternative ideological spaces

Communities are vital to personal and social well-being because collaboration is required where skills and resources are scarce; their pathologies--anonymity and isolation, tribalism and murder--defeat us.

Community is often invoked respectfully but without a clear referent. The word is said to be used ninety-four ways, evidence that its sense is diffuse. Community clarifies the word's principal expressions and the alternative ideological spaces-holistic and hierarchical or open and tolerant-in which communities form. Members bind in the interest of utility-jobs or schools-or because home and friendship are the focus of feeling and significance. These binders are social glue: they explain our dedication to communal aims and loyalty to fellow members. Autonomy in their context is socialized; its bases are the information, attitudes, and skills acquired when families and schools prepare us for roles in communities inherited or chosen. Yet community is fraught. Holistic societies are repressive; open societies are vulnerable. The members of successful communities-families, businesses, and schools-often thrive. Those excluded for want of luck or skill are abandoned and anonymous. Their isolation is one of an open society's two pathologies: collaboration is a social necessity when resources, space, and skills are scarce; competition turned visceral and murderous is a vice.