A friend who lives in a large northern city recently wrote saying she’d hired a local contractor to make some repairs to her house. She’d tried the larger companies, she said, but they either didn’t show up or, when they did, quoted an outrageous amount because they considered the job too small to be bothered with otherwise.
“But this guy I hired,” she wrote, “lives down the street, his daughter goes to the same school as ours, and we see him all the time in the grocery store. Community,” she concluded, “is everything.”
Albert Einstein would have agreed with her. People flourish, he wrote, only when “they lose themselves in community.” Jews in the old German shtetls, “those obscure, humble people, had one great advantage over us – each of them belonged in every fiber of their being to a community in which they were wholly absorbed, in which they felt themselves fully privileged members, and which asked nothing of them that was contrary to their natural habit of thought.”
It’s easy to forget that communities exist. Einstein, among many others, lost his when Nazism took over Germany. He found a version of it when he fled to the United States but, like many outsiders who move to small towns, he never felt truly at home in Princeton. His grandparents were buried elsewhere, and he was not allowed to join the group of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Einstein’s experience seems emblematic of the twentieth century, which has been called the century of uprootedness, of diaspora, of alienation. All of which are synonyms for the loss of community. Perhaps that was why he so passionately supported the establishment of Israel.
The last two centuries have not been kind to communities. Rural villages have drained into urban centres and globalization has made an article of clothing imported from Singapore less expensive than one made by the tailor down the street. There is also the proliferation of technology, especially social media, which seemingly brings us closer together, but actually pushes us farther apart. You can be a colleague or a “friend” of someone you will never meet, whose house you will never enter, and who, with AI, may not even exist. Facebook friends are simulacra that allow us to believe we have a community when what we really have is a shared vacuum. And the pandemic made separation from one’s community a virtue, even a necessity. Before Covid, psychologists warned that self-isolation – withdrawing from community – was an indication of incipient mental disorder: the pandemic made self-isolation mandatory.
As Jane Jacobs observed, cities are neither large communities nor collections of small communities. They are conglomerations of people with disparate needs and goals forced to live in close contact. Cities are like zoos for people. John Berger played with this idea when he suggested that we don’t go to zoos to see animals, we go to be seen by animals. Urbanites simulate communities with varying degrees of success. When I lived in Toronto, I had a wide circle of friends, restaurants and bookstores where I was known and welcomed, and my favourite places to shop. I bought bread at a bakery in one end of town, meat from a butcher at another, groceries in the many little shops along Bloor Street. Like my friend in her northern city, I felt I had pieced together a village within the vastness of the city. But I didn’t know the name of my next-door neighbours. My daughter went to a school that was ten blocks away, and when I took her to the park near our home, she didn’t know the other kids in the playground. We had created a simulation of a village, but the real thing remained elusive.
People become more more polarized when there is no community to soften individual differences. Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, begins as a lament that she is frequently mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the hard-right “Other Naomi” who, as a regular guest on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcasts, railed against vaccine passports, vaccinations, immigration, and other things left-leaning Naomi Klein supported. Klein writes that we live in a Mirror World, in which the far right appropriates the language of the left in order to advance their radical agendas. The right and the left both champion freedom of speech, for example, but the concept means something completely different to both of them.
“Whatever I thought the line was between ‘them’ and ‘us,’” writes Klein, “was no longer holding.” The far right, she says, has become not a community but “a poisonous compound enmeshed with powerful notions of natural living, bodily strength, fitness, purity, and diversity.” In such a Mirror World, dialogue becomes meaningless. And where there is no dialogue, there is none of what, in his novel Apeirogon, Colum McCann calls “a community of feeling.”
But pockets of community remain. Merilyn and I belong to one in San Miguel. We aren’t a bunch of expatriate Americans and Canadians huddling together for safety and comfort, circling the wagons, as it were. That view, of Mexico as hostile territory and expats as naïve, self-delusional targets, is perpetrated by the media and others who have never been here. What we have in San Miguel is a true community, made up equally of newcomers like us and Mexicans whose roots go back to pre-colonial times. Last Friday night, we held a small dinner party at which eight of us sat around a candle-lit table in the warm evening, talking and laughing for hours; nothing was said that was contrary to our natural habits of thought. The next day, Merilyn was involved in a car accident that put her in hospital for four days (she is recovering nicely), and we were immediately surrounded by friends who helped in deeply touching ways. One friend who is herself suffering from advanced cancer called to ask how she could help. Three people offered us houses to stay in, another three offered us theirs cars. Merilyn’s hospital room was filled with food and books and visitors. We were, in the sense that Colum McCann meant, taken care of.
Communities exist. It is possible to create one, although few of the communes I knew in the 1970s really succeeded as communities. As of 2018, more than 8 million people lived in gated communities in the United States, where eight of every ten new housing projects were gated. In the half of each year we spend in Ontario, we live in a condominium “village” that has no real gate, but neither does it have stores, restaurants, barbershops, or any of the other features you’d expect in a village. In San Miguel, the sense of a wholly integrated community of feeling is very much alive. Individuals are not separated from one another, but are woven into the larger fabric of life.
Einstein didn’t say that we flourish when we find ourselves in a community. He said we flourish when we lose ourselves in a community. Perhaps being lost is not only a consequence of uprootedness, but also an antidote to it.
Here here ! Brilliant . But first my best to Merilyn from snowy Atlantic Canada and a speedy recovery . I .loved this so much. Thank you . I needed this today . . I once asked my philosophy professor - as was writing on the board if he believed in God . Saint Thomas Aquinas University. I remember the chalk pausing on the board . He put the chalk down dusted off his hands turned to the class and leaned against the board . “ Well,”he said , ‘“no one has ever asked me that question before and I know you want to know my answer . Here is my answer : I believe in community” . He resumed his writing on the board . I think it was something about presuppositionless beginnings . .
He changed my life In so many ways as do the best writers .
I live in a village and for eight years as my husband’s dementia advanced everyone had our back. I hope this essay reaches many many . Einstein. Einstein . Thank you . Thank you . To the Village!
Agree with much of this. However I think there is a dark side to being lost in a community that also needs to be acknowledged. I guess the conundrum is balancing the need to belong to a community where you can give and receive, with the need to also be an individual and not be completely absorbed - at least I think so. Having too much of either isn't good.