It’s so easy to get over excited about the concept of community that we fail to see the potential negative sides of it.
From New_ Public:
What we know from history is that civil society, or these “great free schools of democracy” that Tocqueville described, can be carriers of either authoritarianism or democracy. When you bring people together in these civic communities, historically we have found that they can either facilitate the “small d” democratic outcomes that we want, or they can actually facilitate authoritarian outcomes.
The most notable example is work by a scholar named Sheri Berman where she documents the ways in which civil society was actually really vibrant and very thick in the years leading up to the Weimar Republic. And in that case, it was a carrier for Nazism, which obviously is not something that we want to see repeated in history.
And then it goes on to talk about Pluralism:
Pluralism is the secret sauce of democracy: Pluralism is built on the reality that no two people are ever going to have the exact same goals and interests and desires in the public sphere. There are inevitable differences between people who are trying to create a shared community. People are going to disagree. But pluralism is about creating a process, and a set of institutions, and a culture, that enables those disagreements to be productively channeled so that we can make agreements about how we want to share resources and how we want to create a life together.
Read the full post from
And think carefully when joining, participating and creating community.