1988

Disenchanting the Concept of Community

Bennett M. Berger
n the literature of sociology the concept of community has, since the nineteenth century, been contrasted with the idea of society. Community is tradition; society is change. Community is feeling; society is rationality. Community is female; society is male. Community is warm and wet and intimate; society is cold and dry and formal. Community is love; society is, well, business. The contrast between community and society is part of the conservative political tradition of sociological ideas. It was promoted mostly, although not exclusively, by European conservatives and their counterparts in North America who saw primarily the dark side of the industrial revolution: the rupture of traditional ties to village, family, church, and guild, and the appearance of those twin psychological bftes noitw, alienation and anomie. They tended either to ignore or to trivialize the brighter side of this process, which men and women of the democratic Left know as freedora or liberation or pluralism or choice and which l characterize here simply as cultural modernism. Unlike the holism of the idea of community (with its yearning for fraternitd and its predominant kinship imagery), cultural modernism emphasizes limited, partial, segmented, even shallow, commitments to a variety of diverse collectivities--no one of which commands an individual's total loyalty. In cultural terms, what modernism does is to reduce, although not eliminate, the total constraint or control that communities have over individual mem-

bers in favor of the diffusion of constraints among several collectivities in which persons have differing degrees of partial involvement. Viewed favorably, we call this freedom: the prospect of having alternatives. Viewed negatively, we call it alienation because persons may have no central identity; and we call it anomie because persons may not know what to believe in when, as is often the case in modern life, they get contradictory or incompatible signals from their various communities of membership. What cultural modernism does not do, and perhaps cannot do, is liberate or alienate persons from the taken-for-granted culture of their everyday community life, which is part of their personal history of socialization-what Pierre Bourdieu calls "habitus." It does not do this because most people most of the time are only dimly or partly conscious of the connections between their felt, taken-for-granted beliefs and their location in social spaces or social structure. Psychoanalysis claims to liberate people from neuroses derived from ignorance of family constraints by making them conscious of repressed fears and traumas. Sociological analysis of habitus can in theory liberate, or alienate, persons from the received wisdom and the received structures of feeling that are parts of their personal history of socialization beyond the family, but also including it. It does this by making them conscious of the relations between their cherished ideas or feelings and the roots of these in taken-for-granted communities.

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Like psychoanalytic patients, who may be expected to engage in a lot of resistance to making the unconscious conscious, we should not expect many people to be grateful for sociological efforts to render habitus visible. It is an illusion that detachment from the habits of socialized culture, neurotic or not, is something devoutly to be wished. Few people are likely to be eager to risk yielding the certainty of their convictions and the "naturalness" of their feelings to the relativisms of sociological analysis. Confusion and ambivalence are frequently the results. That is why Yeats's famous lines "the best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity" come as an abrupt shock to readers trained to think of nihilism as evil and authentic conviction as good. What Freud knew about the unconscious, Simmel and other sociologists influenced by him know about socialization: to render its processes visible is full of mortal risks. Nearly fifty years ago, Erich Fromm pointed to the fact that freedom can be a burden from which some seek to escape. Along with it may go alienations, anxieties, anomies, feelings of displacement that freedom and social mobility engender. Stendhal's Julien Sorel, in The Red and the Black, is an early and tragic archetype of the insight that marginality can kill you. This is bad news for the Marxist and Enlightenment traditions which hoped that liberation would create the unmixed blessings of opportunity. Nevertheless, Marx made an important contribution to the tradition of liberation from received ideas with his sociological analysis of them. He conceived this as a proiect of demystification; but because his intention was to debunk and to reveal the class origins and class consequences of ideas, he limited his analysis to "'bourgeois" and other ideas he regarded as obsolete. Yet it is clear from his early writings that Marx retained more than a little sympathy for holism or totalism in his image of a human community that is not stratified by class, and therefore not exploitive, and which therefore has no need to mystify its ideas about a common culture. That retained image of natural fraternity in Marx's early writings goes far to explain why his work was so attractive to the New Left in the 1961)s. Because Marx's prime intention was to demystify and debunk and thereby to weaken or undermine the domination of bourgeois ideas, he could not extend to all ideas, including those of the Left, the principle implicit in his sociological analysis: that all ideas, including the idea of community, must be understood in terms of their group origins and their consequences li)r reproduction or change in social order. This problem has had an odd consequence. Since Marx, most intellectuals of

the Left--indeed most intellectuals of whatever political stripe--have been eager to analyze sociologically ideas they regarded as false, misleading, pernicious, exploitive, or which they otherwise disliked, because such analysis was the equivalent of demystification. On the whole they have discreetly refrained from sociological analysis of their own ideas, or any ideas they were lbnd of, because the style and substance of such analysis, rooted in the tradition of demystification, was intended to weaken their credibility. Karl Mannheim tried to extend the style of Marxist analysis to all ideas (all political ideas, that is--he exempted science), but he too felt obliged to look tk)r a stratum and a point of view that could unify or make whole the diversity of conflicting perspectives generated by class and other placements in social structure. In retrospect, he seems naive in having assigned such a role to the intellectuals who, we have learned, may be as partisan as any group. Antonio Gramsci made a major contribution to this Marxist tradition by showing that widely diffused common culture bridging class divisions was not simply a case of "false consciousness" brutally imposed by a ruling class intent on perpetuating its domination. For him, "'hegemony" or hegemonic domination referred to the consent and compliance induced by habitual socialization, by an authentically felt common culture of implicit, self-evident pieties. But even Gramsci seemed to limit his idea of hegemony to bourgeois hegemony, exploitive and therefore needing to be revealed. It would have been difficult for him to accept the insight that all societies require some hegemonic culture: implicit, taken-for-granted, and--for the historical moment--relatively unchallenged. Without it, routine social interaction and ordinary civil discourse would be just about inconceivable. To say that all societies require some widely shared hegemonic culture is not to say that such hegemonies do not change over time. They change in part through struggles carried on by groups differently placed in social structures, who attempt to legitimate their struggles less with cultural inducements (that is, widely takenfor-granted pieties) than with ideologies (that is, ideas still predominantly controversial). In Western countries, over the short space of a hundred years, we have seen equality of opportunity, the universal franchise, marriage for love, and expressionist aesthetics translormed from issues of deep ideological controversy to values that command near-universal consent. I see a continuing historical process in which shared culture is broken up into divisive ideologies and in which, over time, some ideologies win sufficient consensus to approach becom-

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ing new or restored chunks of hegemonic culture. This vision has made me a partisan of the sociological analysis of ideas. Despite the very real risks of nihilism or anomie it implies, if it helps people to become aware of the relation between what they believe and where they are or were, it can potentially help them to detach themselves from ideas that no longer serve them well and to scan their cultural environments for some that do. In this continuing struggle it may be time for us, as scholars and intellectuals, to submit the ideas we like to demystification--to pass them through the fire of sociological analysis. I have in mind here and now the idea of community. The quest for community is very likely eternal, and it reflects the fact that orderly social life is inconceivable without some shared culture. Whatever else it means, community always refers to commonly held values and behavioral prescriptions, the honoring of which are ultimately conditions of membership. It is also true that the sustenance of that common culture usually requires frequent face-to-face interaction among its partisans or members, very likely more frequent than interaction with nonmembers. Frequent interaction with outsiders represents the possibility of seduction to new memberships and reduces the costs of expulsion from old memberships. For this reason, the invocation of the concept of community may more often be like an incantation than a precise reference; its rhetorical use taps the magic and mystery of culture and frames it in a gauzy halo, rather like soft-focus photography. It emphasizes the familiarity and comfort that secure membership is supposed to bring--that sense of "we" that we congratulate ourselves that we "need" and which community provides. If the dark side of freedom is alienation and anomie or the insatiable egoism that Durkheim warned of and which Habits of the Heart also invokes, the dark side of community is the eternal internal power struggle over always limited resources and over the authority to interpret the ultimately ambiguous, shared culture in a way that ensures optimal conformity and continuity of members. Hence we use phrases like "the black community," "'the academic community," and "the feminist community" in an incantational manner. The word "community" adds nothing concrete to "blacks," "'academics," and "feminists": actually it hides the internal conflicts within each of these groups behind an implied rhetoric of shared culture. The distinctively modern sense of community is minimalist. Communities are always "wholes" in some sense, but in the postindustrial world our quests for freedom and alternatives mean that we share the minimum

culture necessary for social order; we ideologically disagree about the rest, and bring to bear our highly differentiated, partial and segmented subcommunities in political struggles over what we are obliged and constrained to accept and what we are free to choose, dissent from, and rebel against. The history of liberation from the authority-- sometimes the tyranny-----of communities is a great psychological adventure story. It tells of either alienation and anomie or limited comings together and goings apart on behalf of an image of relatively a u t o n o m o u s individuals choosing their communities of affiliation for the time being, and from which members are free to withdraw or sever their ties when the group no longer serves them.

Community is warm and wet and intimate; society is cold and dry and formal.

This image is deeply offensive to some because it contradicts the primordial image of community as not a matter of choice but of birth, ascription, fate, or irrevocable "'commitment." Alongside this notion, choice pales into triviality. It is for this reason that the vocabulary of kinship dominates the discussion of commun i t y - t h e "family" of nations, "sisterhood is powerful," the "'brotherhoods" of labor, the "brothers" in the black ghetto, and the "intentional families" of the counterculture--for kinship is an exemplar of community membership which for centuries one was not free to cancel. Blood, we say, is thicker than water. The metaphor may still be apt, but its days may be numbered. Over the last one or two hundred years blood has been noticeably thinning, while the waters have become increasingly muddied. In a world increasingly dominated by transnational corporations, the invocation of kinship and community may seem like little more than sentimentality or, worse, a cynical pseudo-gemeinschaft. If the traditional image of community is increasingly sentimental or an effort at reenchanting the world, the image of autonomous individuals choosing their communities of affiliation is a myth. Choice, after all, is always to some extent structured, constrained, habitual. It is always choice flom a more or less limited range of alternatives made accessible by one's placement in social space. Nevertheless, it may be a myth worth believing in if it helps to increase the range of alternatives from which "'free" people make choices.

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The character of the constraints in pluralistic societies is increasingly complex. Marx had to deal with stratification by class. We have learned that gender socialization may create hegemonies relatively independent of class, and age certainly does. In a time of international migration, ethnicity does too. This multiplicity of major interacting variables constitutes the great challenge to a sociology of culture; and this brings me finally to "the radicalism of everyday life." What the idea evokes for me is the fact that, over and above the major variables, in a given situation of social life there are more variables operating than any social scientist can take account of: much less control. Very small interactive differences among them can produce very large unanticipated consequences. That is why everyday life is fldl of unex-

pected turns, and why it is always more complex than the generalizations of social scientists can contain. That is no reason tot abandoning the effl)rts at generalization. It is only to say that our participation in the human community, with all its radical complexities, gives us our capacity to surprise. That is trouble lor social science, but it should be a delight tbr social scientists who value their membership in the human community more than their membership in the social science community.
Bennett M. Berger was born and raised in New York City but "L,rew up" in Cali['ornia, to which he remains grcItefitl. He is pr~[~'ssor ~" sociology at the University of Califi~rnia, San Diego. Hi.s" latest b~,ok, Sociology and Autobiography, is in press. [ Current c(~]~liation: ~hliversitv ~f California]