Exercises in Thought: Community

Sweeney: “Josie”

I wonder if I’ve been a part of a community here at Amherst. There are the things I took an active interest in, and that made me a member of some kind of club. These connections were tenuous, or fleeting. I never became involved in student radio beyond my weekly show. I’ve lived in Marsh Arts House for two years; I didn’t make much art and lived with artists I never really got to know. For four years I’ve written for the Amherst Student without attending a single writers’ meeting. All said and done, my most successful social venture was my stint as a sociopathic murderer for two months during my junior fall. A few lasting friendships came of it. The rest of the cast I see around campus, and our relations are as friendly as Patrick Bateman’s are with anyone that doesn’t irritate him too much.

But it’s not something that I mind. There’s something about it I prefer, really — just seeing people around, whom I knew at one time perhaps more intimately and now maybe less so, believing that they’re all doing something with their lives. I can ask them about the doing, just to confirm it, and they’ll say something that makes it true. As for closer company: I have my friends, and we do stuff sometimes. I’m willing to call this community. I’m more a part of it than most of anything I’ve ever been a part of, and every other day I am not so well wadded with stupidity that I fail to be deeply grateful for it.

Growing up, I did plenty of things with other people. Let me try to name a few: tee ball and then Little League; the Upward Basketball League for ages five and under (sponsored by the church); swim team (the Tigersharks); karate class for a day; jazz and concert band. Naturally, the level of commitment to each activity varied. For some activities, I felt nothing but apathy. For others, I would have told you that there was nothing more I loved to do. But what I felt didn’t matter — when someone came to the head of our group and told us we were going to grow together as a community, invariably I would say to myself, “All right. That’s fine.” In my mind, community was always for other people. It just wasn’t something I was going to be a part of.

I’ve wondered why. Sometimes I wonder like Klara wonders. In “Klara and the Sun,” by Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara is an Artificial Friend (a type of AI companion) for a little girl named Josie, who is ill. Josie lives with her mother in a house on the prairie, far away from most people, but one day she has a birthday party, so people come over. The kids are playing; Klara has been forgotten in another room because Josie is too preoccupied with what the other kids will think of her. For some reason (I can’t remember why) Klara enters the room and joins Josie. The kids size her up. Someone gives Klara a shove and someone else laughs. Josie pales and shivers.

It is one thing to know these kids are being mean, and to know that your only friend is too scared of being alone to care about you all that much. It is another thing to do what Klara does, which is to be confused. A kid gives her a shove, and Klara looks on at all those smiling faces and the one frowning, trembling, without fear or shame and with real curiosity. What is happening? What are they all doing? I promise I will feel all the things that I am supposed to feel, that I can’t help but feel, but only when I know just what it is that’s going on.

I was dismissive toward AI in another piece I wrote, but Klara inclines me toward something like sympathy. Sometimes I listen to my friends and I don’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes the people I love laugh and cry and I don’t know what they mean. I want to live along with them but there is something in the way. I don’t feel like this as often as I did when I was younger, but sometimes I do, and more strongly than I ever did. I feel that this is something important about me, and about other people, and about AI maybe. I think figuring this whole thing out is what it means for me to be in a community.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Carroll: “Thomas”

Joe: What’s up? Getting dinner at 7? That’s pretty rare. For you and for me.

Tim: Yeah, I’m just getting dinner late since I was just having a conversation with Tom.

Joe: About what?

Tim: It’s a bit of a long story, but it might make for a good exercise in thought.

Joe: I want to hear it.

Tim: OK. Basically, I ran into Tom outside the Science Center. He had just gotten back from his spring break, and I had just gotten out of a classroom where I spent several hours rereading the third draft of one of my thesis chapters. Tom was talking about some controversy surrounding theme community housing. And then we just kept standing and talking about community. It went a little like this:

***

Tom: Why do you care how people use “community?” Is it that big of a deal?

Tim: Well, I worry about us getting confused about our words, because it often indicates we are confused about our thoughts. And if our thoughts are confused, so will our actions. And that’s a recipe for disaster. Maybe we should mean physical health when we say mental health, or should mean spiritual health when we say mental health. But I’m not sure we really know at all what we mean when we say community. And how are we going to take any action for the sake of community if we don’t know what it is? We use the word in such mysterious ways. We “create community.” Someone can be a “champion of community.” In what sense do we create community? Is it like a table or a chair? How does one destroy it?

Tom: Well, clearly we don’t make it like a table or a chair. It’s an intangible thing. It’s a bit vague, but still, we have a sense of what it is.

Tim: Yeah, but you think we’d have a better idea, considering it’s one of the most common answers to the “What do you love most about Amherst?” question. Saying “the community” is almost as helpful as saying “the academics” or “the location.” But those answers have obvious follow ups to clarify what one means, such as “the open curriculum, the challenging classes, the student-professor relationship, the beauty and isolation of Western Mass, the Five College Consortium,” whatever. Shouldn’t we strive for better? Which community are we talking about? What makes it good?

Tom: It’s an inclusive community, for one thing.

Tim: And isn’t that strange? Because a community is something not quite private, not quite public, but social. So what do you mean by inclusive? Isn’t that at odds with the very essence of being a community? Because sociality depends on some kind of exclusion. The best communities aren’t inclusive, because then they would welcome everyone, and so they would be public and not social

Tom: So, a community is inclusive in that it includes the people it’s meant for.

Tim: Doesn’t that just seem a bit circular? And then: Who are communities meant for? Maybe people of a certain kind, who have a certain interest, identity, or property. Who determines that? The community itself? That’s a whole new circle. How do we square this view of communities with people visiting communities they don’t belong to? Should I not come to a certain community because I don’t have said property of the community members? Or is it if I’m interested and want to join?

Tom: I don’t see an issue. Baking Club is for bakers. ASA is for Asian students and people who are interested in the culture, and stuff.

Tim: For everyone interested in the culture? How often are they welcome to attend? And does “the” Amherst Community, of all Amherst students, actually exist? Do you really think that every student enrolled here is part of a meaningful, coherent community? Would you actually prefer that?

Tom: I mean, yeah. Maybe the entire Amherst community is looser-knit than the ones that make it up. Of course, there are multiple communities of varying sizes. They are all basically just people being together in different ways. There’s the athletics community, the track and field community, the high jump community, the figure skating club community, and the STEM community.

Tim: Alright, but I just have even more questions. You say community is about people being together. In what way? What are the substantive differences between these communities?

Tom: Well, people being together, doing something together based on something shared, like I said.

Tim: Maybe what I’m seeing is that when we say the “community” is great, we really mean to say that the social groups are healthy. So what can that tell us about something like a “digital community,” a digital social group? Isn’t there something impoverished about the kind of “being” and “doing” together of that sort of thing? Especially when people are anonymous?

Tom: Well yeah, I think you’re preaching to the choir, man.

***

Tim: And that’s about the most of it. Maybe we said some stuff afterwards but you get the gist.

Joe: Damn bro, you really hit him with the elenchus.

Tim: I guess I tried. I don’t know. I sort of feel like I walked away as the fool and the pedant. Since then, I’ve been thinking nonstop about this passage from Arendt’s “Life of the Mind.” It goes something like: Words are frozen thoughts that thinking unfreezes when trying to find out a word’s original meaning. But when that does happen, we often find no content remaining. For example, when you ask what the word “house” really means, you only end up with more questions. And that’s how all the Socratic dialogues end, in perplexity. Thinking does this to all sorts of things beyond words, including all values, social mores, ethical codes, rules, and so on. The wind of thinking reveals that we have nothing but perplexities, and the best we can do is share them with one another. So, that’s why I was late to dinner.

Joe: Well. I’m glad you were late so that you could share this with me.

Tim: Me too.