The community and the individual
What does it take to build community, and do we really want it?
It (used to) take(s) a village
I remember the first time that I visited my family in India as a child. After a long plane journey and a rickety train journey, we were finally arriving at the nearest train station to my family’s village. Excited, I looked out of the window to find a crowd of people waiting outside, eagerly staring at us. This wasn’t very unusual - I was no stranger to crowds, having been born in London.
What was unusual was that as soon as we stepped off the train, the swarm of people moved towards us - hugging us, saying greetings, taking our luggage. It dawned on me that this was not a crowd of strangers - every person in this crowd knew my family, and were there to greet us. That seemed overwhelming - what seemed like the entire village had excitedly come to meet the Londoners.
When we finally got to the village itself, there were more people - and everyone wanted to meet us. We had a solid schedule of dinners and lunches at each family home for the entirety of our stay - and visiting each home, including ones in villages much further afield, was mandatory. Even when dining wasn’t officially scheduled, I don’t remember ever dining alone.
As a child, the most thrilling part was being able to play outside nearly from dawn until dusk with my cousins. As soon as it was light, we went outside and roamed the tiny village, buying shaved ice with flavoured syrups to cool off in the boiling heat, and burying rubber toys deep into the sand in the hope that they would one day be there when we could dig them up as adults. There was a timelessness to the days that was broken up only by the rhythm of meal times. We would be so engrossed in play that we would not notice it was time to eat - until whoever’s home we happened to be closest to came outside and yelled at us to come in and eat. Whether the adult was a distant cousin or an aunt, inevitably they would always do the same thing: come to us, squinting in the sun, address us by our father’s name (“hey you! Child of [father]!”) and usher us in to their home to make sure we ate. Then they would send us back outside into the timelessness of play, until night fell. As the night skies darkened, any adult passing us would start to yell at us to go home - and they knew exactly which home each of us belonged to, grouping us again by our fathers - and would make sure we got there. This, truly, was the village raising the children.
Community and care
What allows for such a communal upbringing and an extensive support network? I have thought about this question a lot over the years, long after I had returned from the family trip to India and continued to grow up in the UK. We had community here too, though already, those village ties were starting to break down. But we still had a strong and close support network, relative to increasingly atomised nuclear family in the UK.
This has its perks as an adult too. Childcare, financial provision, care of elderly family members, and the daily rituals of life all fell on the shoulders of many, rather than on a single couple unit. This allows an incredible level of support, even for families who are much poorer in material terms than the average. For example, a young adult within a well-knit and close community may be able to take out enough small community loans in sufficient numbers across extensive family networks to be able to afford to buy a home - faring better, in this respect, than the child of a nuclear family whose parents are individually wealthier, whose salary is even higher, but who can only draw either from the Bank of Mum and Dad, or the actual bank - with a hefty interest rate. Childcare, too, is spread out across grandparents, aunties, sisters and cousins. On the opposite end of life, multigenerational households meant my own grandmother spend all of her ageing years living with her sons and her grandchildren. Eventually, when she did pass, she did so surrounded by 4 generations - all of who were able to split care shifts into a rota. Extended family from across the rest of the UK travelled to see her in her final days. She did not spend one moment of those last years alone.
By contrast, mainstream modern societies seem to be gripped by ever increasing atomisation and loneliness. Parents expect little support with newborn babies, and grandparents can expect to spend their final years in a care home - alone and lonely in the worst case, although some care homes fare far better in terms of both standards and the creation and facilitation of friendships and shared rituals. “Where did the village go?” we ask ourselves, nostalgic for its presence.
It’s the economy, stupid
Part of the answer to this question is inevitably tied to the demands of the modern economy, and I don't discount that. I’ve seen it occur down the generations in many previously closer knit communities and in my own extended family: ever increasing house prices and a concentration of job in specific cities, as well as the university education structure drive children away from the places where they grew up - away from their parents, most often, never to return again. “Move to where the jobs are!” and “move to where the houses are affordable!” people were told - and they did, leaving behind their family, neighbours and community in the process. When politicians and public figures who extol the virtues of “traditional” and “family” values respond to concerns about jobs and house prices, they fall straight into this refrain, completely ignoring the material and social costs of continuously driving people away from their local communities and their support networks. We have inherited the burdens of this shortsightedness in other domains- for, when community support networks vanish, people outsource this function either to paid care, or state funded care. How will we foot the bill for childcare, when working parents have no village around them to help? How will we pay for the care of the many ageing citizens whose children and grandchildren have long fled their small town for a City career, never to return again? Or who had to move out of their childhood area due to ever increasing house prices, and now need to travel hours to provide support?
When I speak to friends of mine who are older or their parents, who grew up in small towns and villages across England (and even those who grew up in some parts of London), they all share stories that were remarkably like the one I just did above - of families living on the same street or in the same area, of raising money communally for a local funeral of a family who couldn’t afford one for their daughter, of knowing your local baker and visiting your Nan every Sunday. These ties disappeared partly because a critical mass of people had to move out of the area and scatter across the country, either due to rising prices, new populations moving into the area, the closure of previous forms of manual labour, the transition to the knowledge economy in which jobs are concentrated in big cities and teenagers expect to move away for university.
Revealed preferences
But the truth is, it isn’t just the economy. While many of us long for a village in times of need, when times are well and we have a choice, we consistently vote against the village with our feet and with our wallets.
Many of us in the modern West no longer actually need to rely on each other, in order to survive. Thanks to relative material prosperity and labour-saving technological machinery like washing machines and pressure cookers, we don’t need to live together in a multigenerational home or near our parents and grandparents in order to simply have enough to eat and to do all of the work required to keep a home running. We don’t need to grow our own food, we don’t need to grind our own spices, and many of us don’t even really need to leave our homes to have food delivered straight to our door.
It turns out that when we don’t need other people, we tend to want to live without them. And that is because: let’s face it: other people, even people we love, can be incredibly annoying and their needs can be incredibly inconvenient. How many times have you been annoyed to intense frustration by your parents, your siblings and your children -let alone by the random auntie who chews really loudly, or the uncle who you can’t get to shut up once he starts talking? Looking after your own children is hard enough, so after a long day of doing that, do you really want to look after anyone else’s? Especially if you need to travel two hours by train to do it? Especially if you don’t even like these other people much, but vaguely have to tolerate them for family holidays? Many of us don’t even like to visit our families once or twice a year for family occasions, let alone live in close proximity to them every day. Some people are just incompetent, never take responsibility, which means they just ride on the benefits of community life while everyone else chips in. Some people are selfish, others are even abusive. There is gossip, there are family feuds, there are all the ways in which humans are - well, human. Imperfect. Selfish. Including ourselves. Sometimes, we rub against each other, and we can’t wait to return to our atomised lives.
The other reason we don’t stick together in communities is because we have much more freedom than ever before in material terms. This can lead to an incredibly transient society. Your neighbour today may fall in love with someone from a different continent altogether, and move abroad to start a new life. Your friend down the road may accept a job in New York tomorrow. You yourself may be weighing up a wonderful opportunity in a cheaper area with a much better quality of life. Our horizons are wider, our opportunities can be plentiful, depending on the circles we are in. While often, poorer families do tend to need to stick together, those with even a modicum of affluence simply don’t need to. And when we don’t need to, the rhythms that sustain a community fall away remarkably quickly.
Freedom and the individual
We take the importance of the individual for granted in many modern Western societies, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Clan-based and communitarian societies place the locus of value on the group, whereas Western societies place immense value on the individual. Our justice system reflects this: we have a conception of individual rights and individual responsibilities, rather than of collective punishment and familial honour.
This has led to incredible freedom and the imperative to treat every human life with dignity - at least, in theory. But as communal institutions - the church, extended support networks, even shared rituals and shared holidays - have fallen away, this has also led to further atomisation. It is wonderful to have the freedom to take a job which has irregular working hours and to celebrate holidays in your own way. It is wonderful to have the freedom to fall in love with the person of your choosing and to build your own separate rituals with them. It is wonderful to be able to leave the religion and structure of your upbringing and find your people.
But as we do that, we lose the collective rituals and the collective routines that made “community” and “village” possible.
Alternative communities
In this brave new world, online communities and alternative communities have sprung up. Some of us have turned to online friends, feeling deep kinship to those across the world who we have never met. We don’t know our neighbours, yet we can pour our deepest thoughts out to someone in a completely different time zone and continent.
Others have tried to bridge the gap via social clubs, hobby groups and clubs centered around shared goals - to varying degrees of success. Run club, book clubs, etc, have sprung up. And they are thrilling - I’m involved in some myself.
All of that is great. But I have myself been involved in some forms of “community building” - trying to construct a whole new community around some shared characteristic - and I am struck that many of these forms of community simply lack the “stickiness” to really endure. People come, and then they leave, still. New people join. The transience of everything seems to be a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, some “intentional” communities seem to be cohesive, but others fall apart nearly as quickly as they start. What does it take to actually sustain a community?
Proximity, shared rituals, reciprocal obligations, and time
What exactly is a community? What is a village? I’m sure there are elements I’ll miss, but I think its essence is something like reciprocal bonds and social obligations, reiterated in repeated patterns over time, rooted in a specific place.
Why did my relatives in India - who I had never met - come outside and usher me into their homes as if I was just part of their family? Why did they all come to greet us? The answer to this lies in how they always called out to me: as the child of my father. The key here isn’t whether the name should travel down the paternal line or the maternal line - it is that in doing this, these family members were locating me in a long, unbroken chain of ties and reciprocal obligations which had began long before I was born. I was the beneficiary of all the repeated iterations of obligations and rituals which my family before me had performed for many generations. It is this element of unchosen bonds which I think create the “stickiness” of a community. This is why I still feel the weight of some of those obligations today, even when I really, really don’t want to feel it. The truth is I don’t feel like an atomised individual because of obligations and ties which were forming long before I became me.
This “stickiness” and sense of obligation doesn’t need to come from familial ties - it could also come from a religious obligation, a national obligation, etc - but whatever it is, it needs to feel compelled in some way, via a force beyond whether you want to contribute in the moment or not. This is all the more important in a society in which we don’t need each other in material terms.
Online communities are wonderful for some things, as are looser associations based on identities or shared struggles. I don’t want to discount these forms of belonging and friendship. But the online friend on the other side of the world who knows your soul inside out still cannot drive you to the hospital at 2am when your appendix has ruptured. They cannot drop off food for you, like my friends have done, when you are going through family emergencies. They cannot hold your child and comfort them when you are recovering from surgery. They cannot hold your hand as you die. In these desperate times, proximity matters.
Recently, a close friend of mine had to have last minute surgery while her husband was already due to be away for work. They have a toddler, and she needed help to care for the toddler while she was recovering from the procedure. They live over an hour away by public transport and it was a week night. I was just about able to get to her, but there was nothing convenient about it even though we are in the same city. I had to cancel things I’d just paid for, and rearrange my own work and family commitments. I stayed overnight and by the time I got back home the day after, I was exhausted and sleep deprived, but I had to work well into the night and the weekend to catch up. Her toddler hadn’t seen me in a while, so was a little fussy to start with and took a while to warm up to me again, making caring for her much more difficult than it would have been if I was able to see her every day. None of this is a complaint - it is just the nature of what anything that resembles a modern village is - yes it can be full of love and reward. But when you all have individual jobs and schedules and don’t live near each other, it’s inevitably a logistical challenge and an inconvenient one. My friend had called other friends and family, who for whatever reason could not rearrange their lives to travel all the way over and help out. I’ve always wished we lived closer, so that our daily routines and rituals could align and so it wouldn’t be such a logistical nightmare to arrange emergency care. There is no replacement for sharing proximity and sharing a set of daily or weekly little routines or routines which become reinforced over time.
Along the daily rituals which are made possible by proximity, what about the larger rituals that take us outside of ourselves, that give life magic? Feasts, street parties, larger than life celebrations, dances. These are binding in a way that no amount of online spaces can replicate. Hanging out with your book club on Zoom or attending your church service online is a mere shadow of this type of shared festival (I say that as someone who enjoys online book clubs).
Insiders and outsiders
Communities aren’t just about in-groups. It is inherent in the nature of having a community that there are people who are outside the community. If this distinction didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be able to have communities or identify who is within ours.
My family in India were able to embrace me immediately because I was part of this long, unbroken line of social obligations to each other, reiterated over time. By definition, those who didn’t fall within this line were not part of the community- they were strangers. This does not mean they were necessarily treated badly - there is a strong culture of warm hospitality which aims to treat guests as if they are family. But this is for the period of time that there are guest. If one hundred new total strangers moved into the same village overnight, the village would inevitably change beyond recognition and start to dismantle these long standing ties.
Outsiders are therefore the inevitable flipside of any tight-knit in group. This does not mean you treat an outsider horribly, or that you cannot welcome outsiders in as guests. This also doesn’t mean outsiders cannot, eventually, over time, become part of the shared daily rituals and be incorporated into the reciprocal bonds to come insiders. But any such integration process requires time. Usually, a lot longer than people realise. Ties and bonds are not formed overnight.
Can we still build communities?
What should we do about all of this? For some people, the answer is nothing. There are many people who enjoy the convenience and the freedom and just the comfort and peace of individual living. That is wonderful.
But for those of us who want community, I think the only thing we can do is intentionally set up our lives to allow for it. I don’t know what this will mean for any one family, group or network, in granular detail. But it is likely to mean committing to restrict individual freedom for the sake of proximity - for example, choosing to live or stay in a specific location rather than take a higher paying job abroad. It is also likely to mean accepting the inevitability of inconvenience, of being obligated to do things that aren’t on your terms. Human beings are driven to do things that are easy and convenient in the moment - to eat the doughnut, to sink into the sofa, to doom scroll - and it is hard to choose inconvenience when you have so much choice not to. That is why that sense of compulsion is so important for any community to really “stick.”
Although that is difficult in practice, I wonder if it will become more common as we navigate our way through difficult times. Sandwich generations balancing care of infants with care of elderly relatives are once again finding out what so many societies have discovered: extended or communal living is difficult and inconvenient, but it is sometimes the only option to balance, incorporate and integrate the sheer drudgery and immense exhaustion that comes with trying to do it all alone. This doesn’t have to be a conventional multi-generational household with little privacy. It can be a “granny flat”, a little annex, a shared town house, a street of flats, a local village, a shared house, etc.
Whatever it is, those who seek a village will almost certainly need to create it with intentionality and determination, as everything in modern societies drives us in the opposite direction - including our own desires.