Cambio climático, escenarios e incertidumbre

Zygmunt Bauman is a central figure in exploring current ideological constructions of community, and consequently I will discuss him here, though I think he personifies some of the strengths and limitations of philosophy in describing these constructions. For example, he presents the idea of community past in such glowing terms, describing it as a “paradise lost” (Bauman, 2001, p.3) and “‘a naïve immersion in human togetherness’” (p.10) now available only in dreams, and possessed of “communal innocence, pristine sameness, and tranquility” (p.18). He cites Redfield (1971) who identifies true community as conforming to the following:

no motivation towards reflection, criticism or experimentation community true to its ideal model only as it is distinctive from other groupings

small so as to be within view of all of its members

self-sufficient so it provides for all or more of the activities and needs of the people in it.

a cradle-to-grave arrangement.

Given this description, community is not only impossible to achieve in current times, it was impossible to achieve in the past. I’d argue that this form of community never existed except as an idea; this is a paradise of story. In my opinion, to define community in a way that negates people’s lived experience of it is to imply that the life of ideas constitutes reality, and lived experience comes up a distant second. These constructions create a situation in which “good”

community can no longer be achieved, and all other community is considered ‘less than,’ as human fallibility prevents us from reaching this unattainable goal.

Bauman discusses the range of challenges to finding, building and

maintaining community today, addressing at length a conception of contemporary community as restrictive, controlling, and lacking in the unconditional support present in the past (Bauman, 2001, p.10). He identifies a current trend toward superficial communities that are perfunctory and transient, which don’t “weave a web of ethical responsibilities and long term commitments” (p.71). He calls aesthetic communities, such as those developed through shared aesthetic

experiences, “peg communities” (p.71) (hang a common problem on the peg, then move it later).

Bauman (2001) states that the ‘really existing community’ of today reflects common understanding that is attained through a conscious struggle, selected from a mass of variety in the pursuit of “sameness” (p.14), and therefore lacks the sense of membership and support of communities of the past, adding to its

members’

fears and insecurity instead of quashing them or putting them to rest. It will call for twenty-four hours a day vigilance and a daily resharpening of swords; for struggle, day in day out, to keep the aliens off the gates and to spy out and hunt down the turncoats in their own midst (Bauman, 2001, p.17).

I question the construction of community as either a mindless paradise or an unstable fault line. I would argue that there can be a “warm circle”

(Rosenberg, in Bauman, p. 10) without mindless obedience, though there may be non-negotiable components of community membership. It seems possible that such communities, the result of conscious thought and choice, may be more resilient and less threatened by new ideas.

As a coda, Bauman does acknowledge the full communal orientation of ethnic minorities but states that they are not communities of choice. And in discussing the ghettoization of many such communities, Bauman states, “Ghetto life does not sediment community…Sharing stigma and public humiliation does not make the sufferers into brothers; it feeds mutual derision, contempt, and hatred…’to be more like them’ means to be more unworthy than I already am” (p.121). I’d argue that there’s a difference between the external ascription of community by race (by the power collective) and the internal experience of community by cultural tradition. Given the role community plays in the lives of many cultures, this seems an oversimplification and dismissal of their lived experience.

Bauman’s thesis on the history of community during industrialization has resonance for the ways in which schools discourage student community and foster an ethic of competition and individualization that works against achievement by urban students of color. According to Bauman (2001) “The war declared on community was waged in the name of freeing the individual from the inertia of the mass” (p.27) with the goal of removing the power of the community in order to re- insert the individual into the labor force (Bauman, 2001, Apple, 1995). Modern capitalism ‘melted all solids’ (as Marx and Engels put it) and “self-sustained and self-reproducing communities were high on the list of solids lined up for

liquefaction” (Bauman, 2001, p.30).

The ‘masses’ were wrested out of the stiff, old routine (the habit-ruled web of communal interactions) to be squeezed into a stiff new routine (of the task-ruled factory floor), where their suppression could better serve the cause of the suppressors’ emancipation (Bauman, 2001, p.27).

The dissolution of cultural communities was followed by attempts by philanthropic industrialists to create “model villages” to improve worker

satisfaction and productivity and create communities centered around the place of work, in order to buttress the coercive powers of the machine and make factory employment a “whole life” pursuit.

The argument made by schools for emotionally removing students from their home communities is similar. School personnel cite the fact that home languages inhibit success in English-only schools, as states adopt increasingly restrictive laws governing the use of home language in instruction (San Miguel, 2004). Schools identify the range of cultures, races and ethnicities present in the environment and point to cultural practices which work against the goals of the educational system. The “command, surveillance, and punitive regime” (Bauman, 2001, p.27) practiced in post-industrial factories is familiar to urban students

(Gallagher, 2007) and, as dissolution of community prepared workers for factory life, so, too are students of color prepared for their place in the job market.

Interestingly, as years of repression and increasingly stringent behavioral controls have failed to generate sufficient school success in urban students of color to fill our market needs, school reform has turned to attempts to establish inter-school communities (through fostering grade-level community, small group mentors, and club-based communities around life issues, to name a few) to combat student- generated community represented by gang membership, teen pregnancy, and other counter-productive strategies (Ladson-Billings, 2009; Tatum, 2007; Fine and Weis, 2003). Much as industry did, schools have discovered that years of coercion have failed to generate success for students of color, and many urban schools now attempt to bridge the gap between home and school communities by trying to bring families and communities into schools as partners.

Bauman identifies the differential valuing of community as a class issue. He points to modern day “patricians,” in love with their own self-made success, who resist engagement with communal solidarity, seeing it as a threat to “what they have” (p.51). Dench (1986) states that the privileged view community and communality as ‘a philosophy of the weak’ due to the accompanying fraternal obligation. Therefore, those who can afford to opt out of it, which Reich (1991) refers to as the “secession of the successful” (p.282). Dench (1986) adds, “The society open to all talents soon becomes for practical purposes one in which failure to display special ability is treated as sufficient grounds for consignment to a life of submission” (p.59). This is evident in schools when students,

to replicate their parents’ socio-economic lot, which Bauman refers to as “a prospectless misery” (p.59). According to Bauman,

‘The powerful and successful’ cannot easily dispose of the meritocratic world view without seriously affecting the social foundation of the privilege which they cherish and have no intention of surrendering. As long as that worldview is upheld, and made into the canon of public virtue, the communal principle of sharing cannot be accepted (p.59).