PROXIMATE COMMUNITY
We are shaped by the people who surround us. Our joys are more pleasurable when they are cherished by our friends, our successes more enjoyable when they are applauded by those whose opinions we care about, our protests are less lonely and our indignation less unsure when shared by our supporters, our hatreds more corrosive when goaded by fellow zealots, our sorrows less burdensome when borne with our family. Moreover, we gauge our actions based on how they affect people near us, on the indentations our actions make on their lives. Without such effects, we would be ephemeral passersby, with little evidence of ever having existed. Each one of us draws from multiple overlapping communities that help define who we are, that give us identity over and above the core we think is uniquely us.
There are varieties of communities, some more tightly bound than others. A community could be a group of people who are linked together by blood (as a family or clan) or who share current or past physical proximity (as people in, or having emigrated from, a village). A community could be those who have a common view on how to live a good life (as in a religious sect), share a common profession (as in the movie industry), or frequent the same website or chat groups (as in my college alumni group, where everyone seems to have a different opinion on everything that they absolutely must express). Each one of us has multiple identities, based on the groups we belong to.1 Moreover, many of us have virtual identities in addition to real ones.
As communication has improved, and transportations costs have come down, more distant communities have gained importance. For some of us, these communities may be much more important than our neighborhood. Indeed, a central concern in this book is about the passions that are unleashed when an imagined community like the nation fulfills the need for belonging that the neighborhood can no longer meet.
Nevertheless, we will focus on the proximate community for much of the book for a variety of reasons. Through most of history when distances really mattered, it was the only kind of community that had a serious influence on most people’s lives. Even today, it is where much economic activity is centered. For most of us, the neighborhood is still what we encounter every day, and what anchors us to the real world. It is where we participate as sociable humans, not as clan members, coreligionists, professionals, or disembodied opinions on the web. It is where we have the best chance of persuading others that our humanity unites us more than our ethnicity, profession, or national origin differentiates us. It certainly is where we debate and persuade as we elect officeholders and participate in the governance of the local public services that affect us. It is where we congregate to start broader political movements. As we will see later in the book, a healthy, engaged, proximate community may therefore be how we manage the tension between the inherited tribalism in all of us and the requirements of a large, diverse nation. Looking to the future, as more production and service jobs are automated, the human need for relationships and the social needs of the neighborhood may well provide many of the jobs of tomorrow.
In closely knit communities, a variety of transactions take place without the use of money or enforceable contracts. One side may get all the benefits in some transactions. Sometimes, the expectation is that the other side will repay the favor, but this may never actually happen. In a normal family, members typically help one another without drawing up papers and making payments. In many societies, friends don’t really care who pays the bill at dinner, indeed the ability to not keep count is the mark of true friendship.
Contrast transactions within a community with a typical market transaction. I just bought a bicycle tire tube. I searched for one of adequate quality at a reasonable price through an online platform, paid by credit card, and the tube was delivered within the time promised. Even though this transaction took little time, there is an elaborate explicit understanding or contract behind it. If the tube is not delivered or it proves defective, I have contractual remedies. The transaction is arm’s length and one-off. Neither the seller nor I know each other. Each one of us is satisfied we are better off from the transaction even if we never transact again. We do not look for further fulfilment through a continuing relationship.
The more explicit and one-off the transaction, the more unrelated and anonymous the parties to the transaction, and the larger the set of participants who can transact with one another, the more the transaction approaches the ideal of a market transaction. The more implicit the terms of the transaction, the more related the parties who transact, the smaller the group that can potentially transact, the less equal the exchange, the broader the range of transactions and the more repetitive transactions are over time between the same parties, the more the transactions approach a relationship. The thicker the web of relationships tying a group of individuals together, the more it is a community. In a sense, the community and the market are two ends of a continuum.
In his magisterial work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (“Community and Society”), nineteenth-century German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies argued that in a community tied together by strong relationships, individual interests are suppressed in favor of the collective interest whenever these interests diverge. By contrast, in a market transaction, “nobody wants to grant and produce anything for another individual, nor will he be inclined to give ungrudgingly to another individual, if it not be in exchange for a gift or labor equivalent that he considers at least equal to what he has given.”2 In this sense, only individual interests matter, and they have to be met transaction by transaction.
In this chapter, we will examine what makes communities useful.3 Those hearkening to the past, as in many a fantasy novel, often invoke an idyllic view of the community. Typically, this is a village—an arcadia where simple honest people look out for one another, offering goods and services without demanding prompt or equal compensation. The village community can be warm and supportive. Yet, it can also be small, closed, and intrusive. We will see how a community facilitates economic and social transactions, but we’ll also recognize there are limits to community effectiveness, and indeed situations where a community may be harmful to its members’ interests. That will be why a community works best as part of the balance.
THE POSITIVE ROLES OF THE COMMUNITY
Evolutionary psychologists argue that we help others who are related to us or look like us because it is genetically hardwired into us—altruism toward kin is a genetic trait that helped its own survival in the Stone Age, when much of our evolution happened, and so was passed on.4 Similarly, we may be genetically evolved to help others, provided they reciprocate the favor. We are also programmed to have a strong distaste for freeloaders who do not. Since evolution is slow, we are fully adapted to the challenges of the Stone Age, and we continue to retain such propensities, even if no longer critical for survival. In other words, we are predisposed to be social.
We have built on this predisposition. People have always banded together because a group is better at defense (or attack) than an individual. In modern society, healthy communities continue to police themselves and their surroundings to ensure safety for their members. They do more, though—much more.
Survival: Training and Socializing the Young
A community trains its young to be productive so that they can take over from current adult members as they age. Equally important, the values of the young members have to be shaped to protect the well-being of the community. Most communities train their young through apprenticeships, where they are taught skills. Also, through stories, customs, rituals, relationships, and joint celebrations or mourning, the young learn to internalize the norms and values of the community. When faced with a choice between self-interest and community interest, or between community members and others, these youth will then be more inclined to put their own community first.
Apprenticeship often ends with a rite of passage that signals the coming of age of a youth into adulthood. In a number of tribes such as the Aborigines in Australia or the Papuans of New Guinea, the rites were so physically brutal that those up for initiation occasionally died.5 Not only did the ordeal prevent those who did not have the requisite tolerance for pain, or desire for greater power and responsibility
