George Costanza: defender of society and civilisation -
'The Chinese Restaurant', Seinfeld, S02/E11, (1991): click here.
In this era of identity politics, nobody wants to talk positively about society and its benefits.
Instead, people prefer to speak of whatever community they imagine themselves belonging to on the basis of gender, race, religion, or a host of other identifying factors that they determine as crucial to who they are [1].
Often this sense of self is rooted in an experience of injustice or feelings of social exclusion and oppression. Communities thus often spend a good deal of time asserting their rights and (somewhat ironically) demanding recognition by the wider (mainstream) society that they either reject or wish to radically reform.
People coming together on the basis of shared experiences and values sounds reasonable and can be empowering. But when communities become self-enclosed groups with special interests and are suspicious or resentful - even hostile - to those on the outside, then things can quickly develop in way that is problematic.
Even Heidegger - whom one might have supposed to be very much for traditional (quasi-mythical) forms of Gemeinschaft and against modern, inauthentic forms of Gesellschaft - warned:
"The much-invoked 'community' still does not guarantee 'truth'; the 'community' can very well go astray and abide in errancy even more and even more obstinately than the individual." [2]
Notes
[1] In a very amusing scene from one of my favourite episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm - 'Trick or Treat' (S02/E03) - Larry David identifies himself as a member of the bald community: click here.
[2] Martin Heidegger, 'Ponderings and Intimations III', 153, in Ponderings II-VI: Black Notebooks 1931-1938, trans. Richard Rojcewicz, (Indiana University Press, 2016), p. 127.
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