What’s a Community?

There seems to be some confusion in certain circles about what a “community” is, and what it isn’t. And no, I’m not talking about Andrew Cohen’s (among others) ground breaking highly evolved community experiments. I’m talking about the basic criteria required to form any community — highly evolved or not.

A community is not a club or a sorority, though they do share one element in common: The members all share a commonality of intent. But that’s where the commonalities end. Though the members of the international ham radio club, for instance, they are also members of very different communities. All they share when they come together, all they’re interested in, is a love of ham radio.

But whereas their communities make it possible for them to come together as a club, their club does not facilitate the coming together of their disparate communities, each of which might have different laws, different social structures, even different political systems. And while the ham radio club focuses on pursuing it’s little agenda of increasing the skills of its members, furthering interest in and the laws regarding ham radio, back at the community things are far more complex:

In a community people who may not even know each other work for the common good of that community. The baker bakes bread for thousands of people he doesn’t even know; the telephone repair technician fixes trunk lines that keep those same thousands of community members connected; the power company lineman makes sure electrical power is suppled; the dairy farmer provides milk; the truck driver picks it up; the creamery turns it into pasteurized milk and cheese. In a modern community thousands of individuals, most of them unknown to each other, all leading their own, individual lives, providing for their individual families, (for most, unconsciously) still pull in the same communal direction: Making the community work, making it support all its members.

We can live without clubs. We can live without sororities. But everyone is a member of a community. Even the lone mountain man of two hundred years ago had a community: The complex eco-system in which he lived. To survive day to day he had to understand, and live by, its rules just as surely as we do in our modern concrete jungles. In doing so that natural community provided for him and protected him, and he provided for and protected it.

So the next time you feel the word “community” about to come out when referring to your social network, give it an extra thought or two. Are they really a community? Do they, living their individual lives, really contribute to yours? Does the life you live contribute to theirs? Despite everyone’s individual interests, problems, and beliefs, is everyone living by the same rules, and working for the common good of the all?

If so then yes, your friends are also your community. If not, they’re just your friends. Valuable, to be sure. Important, to be sure. But not to be confused with your community.

Quote of the Day:“To live without trust is to abandon, eyes wide open, the last safety net.” — Alesia Matson
Metaphors For Life’s website