personal-blog/content/post/what-is-a-community.md

title	date	tags	topics	image	draft
What Is a Community?	2020-04-04T16:54:39Z	social media fandoms locals	philosophy psychology sociology technology	/img/community.jpg	false

I have been thinking about this a lot, since joining Locals. There are two approaches to this, in the common vernacular. First, the naive answer, which is that a community is roughly synonymous with a professional affiliation or a social association. Like being a member of a legal bar, or being a "Cubs Fan", or an alumnus of some university. Second, there are the sociological definitions, which distill "community" into a set of shared abstract properties, like "interests" or demographic characteristics, such as the "community of python developers", or the "LGBT community".

There is something fundamentally wrong with these notions of "community". They all boil down to set collections of identified individuals. Membership in a community need require nothing more than the possession of the necessary properties that get you classified into the requisite sets. This is why sociologists will tell you that you "belong" to many "communities". Because the property of being a sports-ball fan puts you in one automatically, and the property of being a particular color or nationality automatically puts you in another, and the property of having a particular skill puts you automatically in yet another, and so forth.

As much as I enjoy the Aristotelian process of taxonomic categorisation, it is precisely this activity that betrays the modern notion of "community" as bereft of any real meaning. Denatured from both particular circumstances, and a normative character, "community" is just a substitute term for an abstraction imposed upon a collection. I reject this view of community. A community is not a taxonomic class definition. It is a group of human beings with a very specific set of traits in common among them. Namely, intimate personal relationships, that entail particular moral duties. Duties like loyalty, compassion, and courage. Duties that constrain what is possible for the individual, but also focus the individual's efforts, and give his activities a natural meaning.

This view of community implies yet another step. In short: what is going on here online -- and on most of the internet -- is not in any serious sense, a community. There are indeed lots of people with shared interests sharing the products of their efforts with each other online. But they are not sharing themselves. This distinction is important. What I post here on Locals every day is not me. It is a product of who I am, but not who I am. What's more, the set of people with whom I share myself is constrained not only by my choosing, but by a physical limitation. Genuine intimate relationships are only really possible,in person. Everything else (particularly online) is a sort of simulacrum, and most of that, is devoid of any moral imperative. Here online, you need only engage with the effects of who I am. You need not worry about my attitudes, my involvement in the affairs of men, or even my health. All of that can be distilled into a casual report, easily dismissible for convenience sake.

What this means, in practice, is that a "community" is really only possible where physical proximity is possible, and only in small numbers. Because this is the only means available to us for proper human relationships. We are primates, not astral beings. Some, like Roger Scruton and Alasdair Macintyre, even argue that an emotional connection to local places is also necessary. But the central point here, is that community entails emotional attachment, and emotional attachment functions as at least one of the necessary but insufficient bases for moral duty. Neither of these things is actually possible without physical proximity -- which is not possible, online.

So, where does that leave us, online? I'm not quite sure. But the efforts thus far to produce something like "community" online have largely ranged from laughable, to downright dangerous. And, before anyone attempts to condemn me for bucolic fantasy projections, let me clarify. I'm not suggesting we all throw away our laptops and phones, and return to the land. What I'm saying, is that we need to find a way to reconcile the local with the distant, and simply calling the distant a "community", is not enough.I have been thinking about this a lot, since joining Locals. There are two approaches to this, in the common vernacular. First, the naive answer, which is that a community is roughly synonymous with a professional affiliation or a social association. Like being a member of a legal bar, or being a "Cubs Fan", or an alumnus of some university. Second, there are the sociological definitions, which distill "community" into a set of shared abstract properties, like "interests" or demographic characteristics, such as the "community of python developers", or the "LGBT community".

There is something fundamentally wrong with these notions of "community". They all boil down to set collections of identified individuals. Membership in a community need require nothing more than the possession of the necessary properties that get you classified into the requisite sets. This is why sociologists will tell you that you "belong" to many "communities". Because the property of being a sports-ball fan puts you in one automatically, and the property of being a particular color or nationality automatically puts you in another, and the property of having a particular skill puts you automatically in yet another, and so forth.

As much as I enjoy the Aristotelian process of taxonomic categorisation, it is precisely this activity that betrays the modern notion of "community" as bereft of any real meaning. Denatured from both particular circumstances, and a normative character, "community" is just a substitute term for an abstraction imposed upon a collection. I reject this view of community. A community is not a taxonomic class definition. It is a group of human beings with a very specific set of traits in common among them. Namely, intimate personal relationships, that entail particular moral duties. Duties like loyalty, compassion, and courage. Duties that constrain what is possible for the individual, but also focus the individual's efforts, and give his activities a natural meaning.

This view of community implies yet another step. In short: what is going on here online -- and on most of the internet -- is not in any serious sense, a community. There are indeed lots of people with shared interests sharing the products of their efforts with each other online. But they are not sharing themselves. This distinction is important. What I post here on Locals every day is not me. It is a product of who I am, but not who I am. What's more, the set of people with whom I share myself is constrained not only by my choosing, but by a physical limitation. Genuine intimate relationships are only really possible,in person. Everything else (particularly online) is a sort of simulacrum, and most of that, is devoid of any moral imperative. Here online, you need only engage with the effects of who I am. You need not worry about my attitudes, my involvement in the affairs of men, or even my health. All of that can be distilled into a casual report, easily dismissible for convenience sake.

What this means, in practice, is that a "community" is really only possible where physical proximity is possible, and only in small numbers. Because this is the only means available to us for proper human relationships. We are primates, not astral beings. Some, like Roger Scruton and Alasdair Macintyre, even argue that an emotional connection to local places is also necessary. But the central point here, is that community entails emotional attachment, and emotional attachment functions as at least one of the necessary but insufficient bases for moral duty. Neither of these things is actually possible without physical proximity -- which is not possible, online.

So, where does that leave us, online? I'm not quite sure. But the efforts thus far to produce something like "community" online have largely ranged from laughable, to downright dangerous. And, before anyone attempts to condemn me for bucolic fantasy projections, let me clarify. I'm not suggesting we all throw away our laptops and phones, and return to the land. What I'm saying, is that we need to find a way to reconcile the local with the distant, and simply calling the distant a "community", is not enough.