Unpacking: Understanding community
In our first workshop on the nature of society, we identified that the apparent bigness of society often acts as a barrier, constraining our ability and energy to see and do social change. In this, our second workshop, we hoped to make society more visible and tangible by starting out from a concept that seems more familiar – community.
How we see community
We began the workshop by asking how participants see or understand community.
One of the participants shared that they think about community in terms of both people and the environment. For them, our own wellbeing is shaped by and reflected in the health and vitality of non-human animals and nature. A question was asked about whether these parts of our world are routinely listened to when we talk about and make plans for our “communities”.
Next, one of the participants shared that there is a popular idea about their community – that it is inclusive and progressive in values – that doesn’t always feel true to them. This echoes Benedict Anderson’s thesis of the “imagined community”. It’s a reminder that in thinking about communities and society we should pay close attention to the stories being told about them, why, and by whom. These stories can obscure realities but also act as visions and aspirations. Martin Luther King used this idea to powerful effect in his “I have a dream” speech when he called on the American people to uphold their own ideal that “all men are created equal.”
Another participant said that community felt “abstract” and that it is something that can be seen differently from different angles. Indeed, how two people in the same community experience that community could be very different depending on their socio-economic status, ethnicity, age, gender, and so on. And it could be different again for people who live in a community compared to those who have moved away, pass through it, or work there. The possibility this offers us is to recognise that communities are never fixed and to embrace the possibility of many stories being told about a community rather than adhering to a single, fixed narrative.
Finally, it was noted that as well as being a noun, community can be an adjective (or even a verb – to do community). There was a sense in our group that community implies care, support, togetherness, and relationships. It is interesting to consider the power of the word ‘community’ to orient us to certain expectations and norms of behaviours. What, in contrast, do words like economy or society imply to us that might shape our thoughts and behaviours?
The difference between society and community
The next part of our conversation considered the apparent difference between community and society. We set up this discussion by suggesting that society is large, formal, rule-based, and heterogeneous whereas communities tend to be homogenous (people build communities out of their identities), informal, smaller in scale, and relational. We might also see communities as the building blocks of society.
While the group accepted that this is the way most people think about society and community, they wanted to question if it was inevitable. The idea was put that rather than reifying society as fixed or neutral, we should understand it as a tool (for example, by setting up institutions, systems, processes) that can help us be in flourishing communities. The problem comes when society establishes its own system with its own logic that has to be served, irrespective of the needs or interests of communities.
Ability to choose
A great deal of the work we want to do is to help people understand that society and systems are being made daily through our choices, actions, and behaviours. But in this conversation, we also questioned how much choice people really have. Restrictions can exist even when social narratives dictate that we are exercising free choice: for example, in choosing who to vote for at an election, it’s important to remember that we have not been invited to choose the political system we live under or, more specifically, the process through which parties choose their policies and candidates.
In response we considered the need for a more liberating idea of choice. The ultimate choice is the one which says: I refuse to accept social narratives unquestioningly. Once we make this decision, we are liberated to see how much choice we really have, what it is we’re really being asked to decide when choices are presented to us, and how engaging in the performance of false choice might be serving and giving energy to a harmful system.
But, as the group then discussed, choosing differently is hard. One participant raised a simple problem: we like to make easy choices and sticking with the status quo is the easy choice. The question was put: how can people be helped to make new, potentially harder choices? Two ideas emerged in the discussion – though undoubtedly there will be more avenues to explore. Firstly, that we can help people by giving them insights and tools that might affect their decision-making. It is true that our brains want to make habitual choices because this is less demanding on our time and energy. But this doesn’t mean we’re making the right choices. Helping people to understand this might be an important step in liberating their power to choose. Secondly, the group agreed that we need to create spaces – care, support, networks of reciprocation – which mean that making a new choice is never done in isolation or without help.
How we create change
In the final part of our conversation participants brought us back to the central question of how to change society.
We started with a simple but significant truth: making change is about curiosity. Curiosity about people is the window into systems – seeing how they are made through our beliefs, choices, and actions. And curiosity is the way we help people to unpack them. Social change cannot be done to people. That’s not a model that we believe is either ethical or sustainable. People have to be invited to this work and spaces of care without judgement where we can ask questions are where the magic will happen.