"If you think about recent podcasts you listened to and articles you shared, how many of them stressed the importance of community? Grappling with the loneliness epidemic, the damaging role of social media on face-to-face socialising, and young people's struggles to interact with peers in the post-pandemic era, psychotherapists look for an explanation in the lack of 'community'. Sociologists talk about community as a solution for childcare shortages and the best way to support nuclear families."
"Anthropologists remind us about the power of collective rituals, and bring up examples of culturally diverse models of communal life. Climate experts emphasise that the fight against the climate crisis entails the economy of sharing and a myriad of communal efforts. In short, whether it is about fixing the economy, healing individual traumas or saving a generation, 'community' appears to be the panacea."
"Being a parent, a university professor, a citizen, an inhabitant of a rapidly warming planet, it's hard not to recognise the damage that the undermining of communal ties has brought about at both individual and societal levels in the past decades, in which the spread and the normalisation of the neoliberal order has remade political, economic and social life. Yet, the diversity of problems that tend to be associated with the (presumed) lack or weakness of community should give us pause"
Multiple disciplines present community as a remedy for diverse problems including loneliness, social-media-driven declines in face-to-face interaction, childcare shortages, weakened rituals, and collective action on climate. Cooperation, support and solidarity are central values associated with community. The spread and normalization of neoliberalism contributed to weakening communal ties and produced individual and societal harms. The broad attribution of many social and political failures to a lack of community raises questions about what kinds of community are desirable, what precisely 'community' means, why people moved away from communal life originally, and what forces continue to push individuals away.
Read at Aeon
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