For Leaving the Community Behind
Richard Chappell says, “communitarianism creeps me out.” That makes two of us. More from his excellent post:
I’m so incredibly grateful to be where I am now, to have the opportunity to dedicate my life to the discipline of philosophy; I can’t even begin to imagine being nearly so happy doing anything else. The academic philosophical community is the first to which I’ve felt that I truly belong. But if I had been born a Maori, if my skin were a darker shade, then suddenly I would have been obliged to remain with my ethnic community instead? *shudder*
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So, count me in favour of meritocracy and the upward-mobility (though not the crass materialism) of “middleclassness”. Count me in favour of “elitism”, understood as the claim that some ways of life are better than others, tempered by the cosmopolitan insistence that the best forms of life not be closed to anyone merely due to the circumstances of their birth. (Sadly, this demand is yet to be met. Much more still needs to be done to enable humanity. But entrenching class divisions in the name of “solidarity” is not the place to start. We should want as many people as possible to join the creative classes — to vacate the working class and its culture, not hold people there and reinforce it.) Count me in favour of liberalism.
Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. It’s just generally better for people if they do not feel pushed to consider their parents’ culture a cage within which life must be lived.
March 23rd, 2008 02:20
The vast majority of people are never going to be members of the “creative class”. As long as I have the option to be free of the community, I see no reason to deprive it of others different from me.
As a Stirnerite egoist and by temperament rather unsociable I’m averse to communitarianism. However, I do see some merit in it as a competitor with and bulwark against the large, distant, bureaucratic central authority.
March 23rd, 2008 09:30
This is one of those things that are tough to break from though. I agree that a society where we are free to move between classes is ideal.
It is also just bloody hard.
See the problem in South Africa of identifying bright young kids from disadvantaged communities… Do you pluck them from their communities and send them to private schools, and then when they come home for holidays, they can not identify with parents who may be domestic workers and miners?
I am not saying that I don’t think they should be given the opportunities, but sometimes we have a deep affection for people who are in different `classes’ and it is a tough balancing act, and sometimes a choice rather than a balancing act.
Sometimes you are forced to turn your back on your community. Even if you don’t, you may be perceived to have done just that.
March 23rd, 2008 12:51
I’m no communitarian, but I really don’t get the first quoted paragraph. What holy straw man version of communitarianism suggests Maori can’t be philosophers?
March 24th, 2008 19:43
This is all very nice for philosophy class, but I think you have to take a step back and consider the context of the TUCC’s “Black Value System” document.
Whites and blacks have had a difficult time getting along. Whites have often treated blacks with condescension. Blacks sometimes look for acceptance and find it in the condescending-but-sometimes-innocent attitude of whites (e.g. “you’re so articulate! so well-spoken!”).
Blacks who do not get that kind of feedback dislike the appearance of weakness and prostration, the obviousness of the black person’s desire to be accepted by whites.
They feel that when talented blacks “jump ship” and live in a white culture, it deprives those “left behind” with positive role models.
You know what? In a society where people look at you funny (or don’t look at you at all) because of the color of your skin, I’d say it’s pretty F’ing hard to avoid thinking of yourself foremost as a “black” human being, not simply “a human being like anyone else.”
So, if events out of my control continually tell me “you are part of group X and that is different from me,” I think it is an eminently understandable response to say “OK, the X’s are going to have to stick together and help each other out, because the Y’s won’t give us an inch because we’re different from them.”
What really needs to happen is that everyone needs to chill the F out (whites and blacks all) and stop thinking of the other as different.
So in some ways through meandering logic I’ve come around to reaffirm anti-communitarianism. But my gripe is that this is most definitely not a “black problem.” If we are going to bemoan the “Black Value System,” let us also bemoan the white person crossing the street and avoiding all eye contact with the black person walking towards them on the sidewalk.
March 25th, 2008 19:03
People naturally have tribal needs, just like they naturally have sexual needs. There are ethical and unethical ways of trying to fulfill those needs, but just preaching that human nature ought to be different than it is seems pointless.
March 29th, 2008 21:05
[...] Who Fears Solidarity? Posted on March 29th, 2008 by Daniel Larison Richard emphasizes that one need not be some kind of egoist or a pinched individualist unable to value a common enterprise to think this. ~Will Wilkinson [...]