Against "community"

Who lives beyond your care?

Dear friends,

For those in the US, I hope your holiday weekend was nourishing. It snowed again in Denver the morning before Thanksgiving - just a light sprinkling that had already melted by dusk. But as I wrote in my last post, any snow appears like a small miracle these days. I’m grateful.

It’s that time of year when many people are contemplating - whether by choice or compulsion - the meaning and value of family, be it biological or chosen. Of “community.” It’s a word I hear all the time these days: on podcasts and instagram, at dinner tables and the dog park. The election seemed to rev it into overdrive: the next day, my social media feed filled with urgent calls to “build community,” “cultivate networks of care,” and “take action locally!” There was no time to waste; get thee to your neighbor’s, stat! (What you were supposed to do once there was less clear, but whatever.)

I get it. Who is left to turn to in these times except your beloveds, your closest, your kin?

Yet, missing in all these conversations are satisfying answers to the most basic of questions: what exactly do we mean by “community”? How do you build it? Who is left out (because every “in” group necessitates an “out” group)? Is every community a good thing? Is there a hierarchy? What if you don’t like its leaders? Can you leave a community or is that frowned upon, similar to how family estrangement continues to be stigmatized?

Building relationships is not a skill we’re taught in school, and those of us who don’t grow up in well-adjusted families, I think, often struggle with this. Not because we’re dumb but because we’re scared. How do you build community if, early on, you learn to fear the adults in your life? What if, deep down, you come to believe self-preservation requires the absence of community?

Call it social skills, call it charisma, call it luck: none of these are distributed equally, and like so much else in life, it can all boil down to the family one is born into.

Family is a subset of society, but America’s not looking too hot on that front either. In a capitalistic society that lacks a basic social safety net, many of us trudge through our days exhausted, overworked, overwhelmed. The US faces a loneliness epidemic, with more adults feeling lonelier than at any other time in history.

There’s so much else that gets in the way of building intimate relationships: mental illness, physical disability, financial insecurity. All of these sap a person of time, energy and will. Is building community, then, just another pursuit available only to the elite? Doesn’t that negate the whole point, which is to protect the most vulnerable?

Perhaps what bothers me most is the hyper-localized connotation of “community.” I understand we’re most likely to affect change locally when the national picture seems so hopeless. But are our responsibilities really only to our immediate neighbors, friends and biological family? Most neighborhoods in America are still segregated, meaning we largely live among people of the same class and in many cases, of the same race. Is such a closed, heterogenous “community” really worth aspiring to, especially if you’re white or upperclass? And what about all the countries and communities overseas, from Afghanistan to Kenya, whose lives are intimately shaped by American foreign policy and funding? Where do they fit into our notions of “community”?

I don’t totally know how we go from this rather hopeless picture I just painted to “networks of care” strong enough to fight hate crimes, climate change, and a million other problems. But I know to get there, we have to dismantle this facile discourse around community as some kind of genie that will just appear from a lamp to save us. I know we have to extend our gaze beyond the people we see and interact with everyday to consider those we might never meet.

I think often of this wonderful story by Sam Anderson about the last two northern white rhinos in the world. Poaching, civil wars, and climate change have decimated the species, whittling them down from thousands in the 1960s to just two in 2021, when Anderson traveled to Kenya to see Najin and Fatu. Once they die, the species is gone - unless conservationists, scientists, and humans as a whole come together to find a solution.

Anderson writes:

We are built to love, and we can summon that love to do nearly impossible things — and yet that love has an outer range of maybe 30 yards. It’s like a wonderful lamp. It fills the inside of our houses. It washes over our families and our pets. It extends, as we walk, to the town around us.

But it cannot leap, with any of the necessary intensity, across city limits or state lines or oceans. It cannot leap, except abstractly, with great effort, to distant people in need, or to strange, threatened animals. We love, really love, what is near us. What we have touched. What loves us back.

Those limitations are a problem when it comes to a crisis like mass extinction. All 7.7 billion humans cannot possibly come and spend a week with the girls, which means that humanity at large will never give Najin her morning scratchdown and feel her warm, grunting breath. Humanity at large will never truly love them. And so we will never act, collectively, with the urgency that befits true love — the only kind of urgency that might work.

Zacharia Mutai, head rhino caretaker at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, with Najin. Credit: Jack Davison for The New York Times

It’s no exaggeration to say we’re embroiled in multiple overlapping crises now, from politics to climate change to mind-boggling inequality. These crises demand an “urgency that befits true love,” to use Anderson’s words. They demand a love that trendy notions of “community,” which somehow manage to be both ambiguous and narrow at the same time, just doesn’t touch.

It’s easy to be friendly to your neighbor, to maybe order them UberEats when they’re sick, even as you pretend not to see the homeless guy downtown begging for change. To buy bacon at the supermarket even as you know factory farming is among the biggest contributors to climate change and multi-species extinction. To ignore that text from your long-distance friend asking for a catch-up because you have a deadline to meet and a promotion to get and besides, they’re so far away, how much is that friendship really even worth?

This is not an indictment; I do all of these things, too. But I’m trying not to. I’m trying to extend the circle of my caring beyond my “community.”

I know this is a bit of a downer. I hope to write in my next post about some truly inspiring instances of community organizing that I’ve encountered, both in America and abroad. For now, I hope this post inspires some critical thinking towards this fuzzy feel-good idea of “community” that’s saturating left-leaning circles. I’m not a cynic, but I do profoundly believe in healthy skepticism as a necessity for justice.

To end on a brighter note, a few recommendations:

• I’m teaching a half-day class on The “New” Travel Writing in April through Lighthouse Workshop. I think it’ll be a lot of fun, scholarships are available, and you can join virtually from anywhere.

• I recently re-read “Voyager” by Nona Fernandez and it still slaps. It’s about memory, her mother’s illness, a satellite in outer space. Super weird, super beautiful. Can’t reccommend it enough.

• For my dry skin girlies, there is nothing better than this super affordable elephant-sized tub of CeraVe moisturizer. I have been slathering it on all winter.

• We recently finished “Alpha Males” on Netflix, a Spanish-language show following four dudes trying to break from toxic masculinity only to fumble back into it. Smart, funny, highly bingeable. Perfect for long winter nights.

Thank you, as always, for reading and take care until next time,

Raksha