Zygmunt Bauman concludes his thoughts in Liquid Modernity with a chapter on community
In this chapter he introduces the concept of 'cloakroom community. He comments that,
"cloakroom communities need a spectacle which appeals to similar interests dormant in otherwise disparate individuals and so brings them all together for a stretch of time when other interests - those which divide them instead of uniting - are temporarily laid aside, put on a slow burner or silenced altogether" (p200).
Bauman then concludes, "one effect of cloakroom/carnival communities is that they effectively ward off the condensation of genuine (that is comprehensive and lasting) communities which they mime and (misleadingly) promise to replicate or generate from scratch" (p 201).
As I read this I scribbled in the margin of the book, "is this a description of church?" For many, particularly those in small family churches, Bauman's cloakroom community is not a description of their faith community, but I fear that for a growing number of people it is.
We commute perhaps as much as an hour to sit beside people who we know next to nothing about primarily to experience an event that is as much about show and entrainment than it is about worship. Bill Hyble's says that every meeting should be made memorable, and while this could be understood in several ways, I suspect that it often translates into, "put on a show that will keep them coming back". IMHO when this happens we have ceased being church and have morphed into a cloakroom/carnival community.
It is illuminating that Bauman qualifies 'genuine' community by comprehensive and lasting. I believe we need such a qualification / description of what we mean by community as the word is used so loosely and ubiquitously that it has become a gloss and refers to a myth rather than reality. Many who talk of community struggle to articulate what this concretely means or looks like!
I like Bauman's comprehensive as it suggests that our knowing each other, our coming together is both spatially and relationally multi-faceted. Those I am in genuine community with I meet in more than one space, not just a church sanctuary. The relational structure also changes - e.g. friend, equal, leader, follower, dependent, provider, servant.
I like the tag lasting as this echo's the idea of a covenanting community. This takes us beyond consuming community as another commodity and challenges us to belong by an act of our will.
This said, after reading Bauman's thoughts on individualism and community, one is left pondering if in liquid modernity (or whatever other name we want to call the society we are in), and sense of genuine community is possible, "they may be put beside each other, but they will not congeal"(p35) is his conclusion.
So to the communitarian dream of re-embedding the disembedded, "nothing may change the fact that there are but motel beds, sleeping bags and analysts' couches available for re-embedding, and from now on the communities - more postulated than imagined - may be only ephemeral artifacts of the ongoing individuality play" (P22). As someone who is drawn deeply to a relational, communitarian understanding of the Trinity and that church should bear this likeness, Bauman's analysis and warning that "individulization is here to stay; all thinking about the means of dealing with its impact in the fashion in which we conduct our lives must start from acknowledging this fact" (p37), presents a significant challenge.
Brodie thanks for this post - I think that it is incisive and provocative and that your analysis is not far off the mark at all.
Posted by: Stuart Blythe | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 09:25 AM
Stuart - Thanks for your comment. Did you ever get my email about coffee?
Posted by: brodie | Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 11:41 AM
Brodie - I got one which I replied to - something has got lost somewhere...Stuart
Posted by: stuart blythe | Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 12:10 PM