I don’t know if this happens to you, but sometimes a single word will plunk itself down amid the furniture in my brain, and just like any new thing, it’ll grab my attention and I’ll notice it each time I walk by. For the last little while, it’s been the word “community”. Did it start with Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart? Maybe… See, she talks about belonging:
Our neural, hormonal, and genetic makeup support interdependence over independence. He [John Cacioppo] explains, "To grow into an adulthood for a social species, including humans, is not to become autonomous and solitary, it's to become the one on whom others can depend. Whether we know it or not, our brain and biology have been shaped to favour their outcome." Of course we're a social species. That's why connection matters. It's why shame is so painful and debilitating. It's why we're wired for belonging. (p. 179)
Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History just finished a season with a series of episodes on the Minnesota Starvation Experiment and the final episode (The Mennonite National Anthem) makes a poignant point about a person’s sense of community and how it can be disrupted by the denial of a basic need:
[About Lester Glick:] "He is just one of the kindest most gracious people but as he writes about his experience, he writes about getting really angry, angry with the officials in charge because they've taken away his allotment of bread, you know, he's no longer getting the two slices he thought he was going to get because he's not losing weight fast enough." Back when Lester Glick was working at the state mental hospital in Michigan, he wrote with pride about the connections he made with patients who could not speak. He loved to work with patients and help them. But now in his hunger, he was becoming isolated, anti-social. He started to dislike the company of his fellow guinea pigs. "And so there is this separation that starts to take place, this breakdown in relations that is not at all in keeping with the real Lester Glick, but was the new malnourished Lester Glick who was separated from all the people around him." He understands that what it means to be hungry is not a momentary physiological deficit; it is a profound and overwhelming deprivation on every level. "Yeah. It's a deep isolation and an isolation that goes against the building up of community that he's been a part of since childhood, that church community, the family community that shaped who he was in the most basic ways."
Having read that, does it seem like an obvious conclusion? Maybe. But the thing with a word that stands out, is that you start to notice it in different contexts. Oh look, you say (to yourself), there it is over there! It looks different in that place!
This is from the podcast Invisibilia, on an episode called Power Tools, where the guest, Peter Belmi, discusses a class he attended where the professor taught Machiavellian-type tactics for gaining power in the work place and how it conflicted with his upbringing:
"In a working-class environment, where there's lots of threats, lots of uncertainty, everybody has to coordinate because doing so helps us survive as a group. And so people learn in those contexts that what it means to be a good person is to be sensitive to the needs of other people, to see yourself as connected to others." This tracks with social science that shows that by contrast, people from wealthier backgrounds are taught to value focusing on themselves. "We don't need others as much in order to survive, and so what it means to be a good person is to pursue your own identity, to figure out how you're unique compared to others.”
How nice, you might think, how charming… But wait! Here is the idea of community again, but this time, in the concrete functioning of society! It’s Roman Mars, (episode 508 here) explaining to former President Bill Clinton why not being able to pop the hood and fix your own car isn’t such a bad thing…
There's also a beauty in other people doing it better and you just kind of trusting in that. That is how we build a society. So the world […] has to be an ecosystem of things we know and control and there's individual agency and liberty and things like this and then you have to like, fall into the warm embrace of a designed world that people have thought of and their expertise is present and maybe you don't understand it and hopefully we're engaged enough in the civic society that you trust those things. And I think that that's super inspiring, like I love the things we create together, collectively.
And then, there’s this last quote, which isn’t exactly about community, really, but it’s this touching idea about the small human action it takes to foster this usually-grandiose ideal. It’s an action so small it can be overlooked and dismissed… it doesn’t win prizes, it’s not the kind of generosity journalists look to profile. And yet, its small size betrays the effort it took, and takes, and will take, to build and maintain this kind of goodness. It comes at the end of a piece by the Guardian, read on their podcast The Audio Long Read, titled “‘Farmed’: why were so many Black children fostered by white families in the UK?”.
I have to accept my parents for who they are (...) my mom has been gone for awhile now, but I still speak to my dad. He's 90, has other wives and other children, so I need to take away my prejudices about that, forgive and just deal with him as he is. He's an old man, so I'm going to do what I can for him and I'm not going to have any malice about it because that means I haven't truly let go.
Isn’t that amazing? I can’t help but feel in awe of that person’s example. Mason Currey in his latest newsletter included a quote from Virgina Woolf which seems to capture the sentiment I feel reading this.
I’m thinking here of a favorite Virginia Woolf line, in which she praised the Irish novelist George Moore for “eking out a delicate gift laboriously.”