I have some good men friends, greatly valued. I have coffee with them most mornings in the local cafe. I often think of the group of black men of much the same older age in south Chicago whom Mitchell Duneier wrote about, in 1992, with much affection and sympathy, in his Slim’s Table; they seem to have met and talked just as we do, every day.[1] I was encouraged to find that, like us, they talked not only about local and personal matters, but about the state of the world, and what was needed, clearly, to fix it.
Our group is similarly engaged and forthright. Among locals it seems to have acquired the name of the ‘Brains Trust’ – wholly undeserved, it hardly needs to be said, but perhaps a wry recognition that we are at least giving the more serious side of our collective life some time and attention. For us, the unspoken backdrop to these conversations about the future of this fractured present is, simply, our children and grandchildren.
The cafe is owned by a young couple, whom I’ll call Dave and Debbie. He is in the kitchen, she takes orders and works, ebulliently, with the customers. We exchange a few sentences with them on ordering, when the coffee turns up, on leaving. We don’t know much about their life except that it is busy and pressured, in the holiday season serving hundreds of meals a day and innumerable coffees, then home to do the books and the ordering for the next day. Occasionally, as we’re passing around photos of grandkids on our phones, Debbie will come by and take a look, and share our pleasure. Dave tends to stay in the background, intent on the stoves, but says hello from the open kitchen as we come in and out.
The recent coronavirus pandemic put a stop to this morning routine for some months, which was irritating, and oddly disorienting. We hadn’t realised how much we, in our older group, had come to depend on this time together to set us up for the day. It has its conventions, from the first ‘How are you travelling?’, with its recitation of the absurd, as we would see it, afflictions of old men, kept brief, but tracked out of mutual care; to the ending, ‘What have you got on today?’, with its silent reminder that some directed activity is healthy, the response ‘nothing much’ likely to be noticed and remembered, a quiet kind of alert.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, when the shutdowns arrived, Dave and Debbie had to shut the cafe to walk-in customers, but were able to keep open an outside window for takeaway coffees. They also, we discovered, kept the kitchen going and were quietly ferrying free meals to older men and women who weren’t able to get out easily, or able to afford regular cafe meals. The service wasn’t advertised on their Facebook, or mentioned on the council’s website; they simply got it up and running, all by word of mouth, without expectation of a financial return or of public recognition.
During those weeks, one morning, a friend and I bought takeaway coffees from the cafe window and headed out to the car park. There we had set up some canvas chairs, at the recommended distance from each other, in the open air, where we calculated, probably with unreasonable optimism, that we were safe from infecting each other. The arrangement caused some amusement in the town; people drove by with their phones to take pictures of us; perhaps the photos ended up on Facebook or Instagram, we never found out.
As we walked to the chairs we saw that Dave was pacing up and down the car-park. He was clearly upset, walking it out. When he saw us he hesitated, then made his way over to us. We stopped, and he talked, through tears. The long and the short of it was that the cafe was going under: they couldn’t sustain the weight of the free meals any longer. They didn’t want to let people down – ‘they are our people’, Dave kept saying – but the cafe was going broke. Some days before, the state premier had been in the district, and Dave had gone with a local delegation to urge financial relief for the town; they had been turned down. He didn’t know where to turn or what to do next.
We sat down with him in the canvas chairs, to listen, and to see what we might be able to offer. The conversation ranged more widely, too, into what responsibilities he and Debbie, as we too, might have for our community people, and what its limits might be. He gradually settled, and although there weren’t any immediately obvious solutions, at least some ideas came up, and some directions to think on further. After perhaps half and hour he got up, thanked us – although for what wasn’t clear, he had done most of the talking and thinking – and he went back into the cafe, where Debbie was still serving coffees out of the window. In the event the shutdowns lifted just in time to keep the cafe going – at least for a while, before it happened again.
Dave and Debbie’s response to the shutdown seemed to me to be something special, worth reflecting on. They saw the plight of the older and disabled with whom they shared the town, a group often not seen at all, and moved to help them, quietly, not looking for any return; in fact, at their own cost. That spoke to impulses of empathy and care that had nothing to do with the commercial. They saw those they supported as ‘our people’; their relationship with them was in place, part of their lives; to help them was not unlike helping extended family, natural and accepted.
So that when the financial weight of it become too much, Dave’s response was not first commercial but relational, framed by care. It was the people — ‘our people’, as he saw it — who mattered most, and it was the inability to meet the responsibility for them, which he and Debbie had taken on themselves, that was Dave’s distress. What, I wondered, lay at the root of this, which ran so deep – how had it arisen at all? One couldn’t see it as anything but remarkable.
And a question along the same lines attached to the two of us, his listeners. Neither of us could be said to be Dave’s personal friends. We knew him from the daily contact of morning coffee, over some years. We had regularly exchanged greetings, and had from time to time talked casually about the weather, or the tourist influx, or some local council entanglement. We didn’t know much about his life, hadn’t spent time with him talking and sharing on any deeper or closer level.
And yet, in distress, he had felt able to turn to us, in tears; a state of vulnerability that is usually seen as shameful by Australian men, particularly young men, who come to adulthood with a bolted-down, disabling model of masculinity. Somehow we had all three moved unobtrusively, without conscious recognition, into an unmarked space of extended community, family of a kind, in which you could speak about these things, share feelings about them, and give and gain sympathy and support. Familiar as this process is — and perhaps just because it is so familiar — that also struck me as singular, consequential.
~~~~
Let me share another local story which bears on a similar theme. It was told to me by a friend, whom I’ll call Marnie. I’ve come to know her in that casual morning place — she enjoys wandering over to our male table and ribbing us quietly, her eyes laughing. She is a bit younger than us, and has been offering alternative health therapies for some years.
She told me of an older man she used to see outside the cafe, sitting against the window. He was dressed shabbily, a worn hat pulled down almost over his eyes. People passing, Marnie said, gave him a wide berth; no one spoke to him, nor he to anyone else. After a little time, as she passed, she began to say hello to him. To begin with he didn’t respond; he looked down, turned his face away. Eventually he looked back, responded with one or two words to her morning greeting. Over time, although he still came to the same place, in the same clothes, sitting, the exchanges were a little longer, though not much — he held his privacy close.
Then one day, Marnie said, there was an open community event to which she went along. She was astonished to see there the man from the cafe — dressed up, looking well-to-do, talking with people around him. She didn’t manage to speak to him herself, but there he was.
Yet next day, there he was again, back at the cafe, dressed in the same shabby clothes, careful with his words, a quiet conversation which continued to develop on the same slow track with her as though the funeral had never happened.
Marnie didn’t speak of it to him; she respected his choices, although, she said, she had no idea what was driving them. She didn’t speak to him with his name; although others had told her what it was, it was something he hadn’t shared with her. It was enough that he seemed to be in some kind of trouble, and needed understanding company. She took him as she found him, as he seemed to want to be, with her.
~~~~
Most of us recognise stories like these, in some way. And that casual observation is consequential. It seems that such small, even trivial, events, are an important part of what makes up our shared lives. The value of thinking more about them suggests itself.
For one thing, the accumulation of small interactions over time seems to be important to the way in which these informal relationships, and the actions they enable, are built. It seems that the space around them is deeper than it may appear on the surface: the few words; the silent exchange of eyes, faces, bodies; moments of shared agreement; the growth of understanding, increasingly seen as that; sometimes understanding of difference. They have to do with feelings and vulnerabilities that for most people need to be protected, that are not opened or risked lightly.
These small meetings, inconsequential in themselves, allow for a gradual opening to the other, controlling the risks of what may become — sometimes, not always — an emerging relationship. Over time, the boundaries are tested and loosened. A safe space is made, from both sides; a space that is reliable, that can be counted on, that is increasingly a place of comfort. Within that space, eventually, more open sharing becomes possible. Placed alongside the lightness and transience of the contacts, the weight of it may seem incongruous; but it can happen like that. Stories like these testify to it.
Richard Sennett has written thoughtfully about this. A maverick sociologist (as I would describe him, a gesture of appreciation), he has written books about social arenas that others of his profession have largely ignored, such as the nature of work, of craft, and of workshops. He talks and listens, in the traditional style of the sociologist, and draws widely on the history of social thought, exploring matters that interest him in the past and world of people living and working together. One of his books is titled just that, Together.[2]
The subtitle of the book makes clear his particular interest in the topic, which is mainly on how work together gets done, hence the focus on togetherness as cooperation; part of our area of concern, while not perhaps in the centre of it.
However, in the course of his wide–ranging conversation, he makes an interesting general observation, which may be of value to us in thinking about community. He distinguishes between formal and informal ways of being together. For example, one can think of more formal organisational structures of community, such as elected local councils, or volunteer organisations dedicated to particular ends, and, of course, work organisations. Alongside that are the informal connections that go on every day, as people move around doing what they do, living their lives.
My morning coffee is one such activity; as also, for parents, say, dropping and picking up the kids, doing the shopping, caring for younger children, running by the laundromat, visiting the doctor, having a quick cup of tea with a friend, and so on – familiar, in its different forms, to most of us. The workplace, too, Sennett points out, has its informal side; in fact there is a whole body of academic work which investigates how it seems to work, of itself.
This kind of sociable connectedness, Sennett observes, has a particular kind of simplicity and power. His idea of sociable connectedness gives at least recognition to these everyday, apparently trivial, connections; it brings them into the foreground, makes them visible, appreciates their weight.
It may also account for the importance of the local and of place. The regularity of being directly in touch, in the normal routine of the days, seems to matter, and that can only happen, in this picture, if we are living more or less in the same place. Only then are these connections likely to happen, and to be given the space and time to build into relationships.
Most of the great accounts of communities, in the city and in the country, take that as a given. The local is an idea which intersects with the idea of place, often framed as the sense of place. And that in turn overlaps with the idea of the commons, the rights and responsibilities that people have for the shared places they live in. These are big themes, with real weight for what communities are and how they work best. In what follows we’ll take some time to walk with them.
~~~~
It’s worth noting that the idea and the language of community has unobtrusively moved into our discussion, through the idea of the local and of the people who live there. Our entry didn’t foreshadow that: we were concerned simply with the everyday connections between people. But we’ve seen that Dave and Debbie understood themselves, without hesitation, to be inseparable from those who are not primarily their customer base, but the people who shared their lives in this local place. They acted on that conviction, despite what it meant for them.
Marnie’s approach was made out of a recognition that this man, apparently on the margins, was, in some way, connected to her, simply by their joined presence in the same place; and she too acted on that conviction, inviting him, in time, into a quiet kind of mutual acknowledgement, even a kind of friendship.
The above paragraphs are not intended to be particularly intellectual or theoretical, in the way that academic sociologists have. I have quoted Richard Sennett, but he is the most grounded of commentators. That is not to diminish their work, simply to distinguish our work from it. We are simply taking the time to reflect on our ordinary, shared, experience; as others have thought about the ordinary uses of language.[3] Here what you see it what you get, but it is at least important to take the time to see.
~~~~
Trust and respect find a place here, too. These are words that, in my experience, tend to go together: they are two sides of the same quality of social life. It’s difficult to think how one could have either one of them without the other. Trust is something I’ve referred to in exploring how a safe space might be built from the day-to-day contacts. Respect goes one step further. There are many layers to it.
At one level, it is a simple recognition of a human quality, coming out of regular experience of another. One of my morning coffee friends is like that, supporting others around him without a second thought, a central part of who he is, as a person. Respect gathers naturally around that kind of work.
At another level, it’s a principle, a traditional one, dating back some centuries to Immanuel Kant: respect for all persons, the idea that every individual, of whatever background or description, is to be treated as valuable, in themselves, and not used as means to some other end. That’s not just an abstract idea: it has real world consequences in the interactions which form our every day, and in the choices we make.
More active elements in these stories of community, and in others like them, centre on the idea of care. In the latter part of the twentieth century, a whole generation of feminist writers began writing about what came to be called the ethics of care. Carol Gilligan is often regarded as the first of them, with her book, In a different voice. [4] Others joined her, most notably (I would say) Joan Tronto, Annette Baier, Nel Noddings, and Virginia Held. Sherry Turkle is another writer, about technology and people, whom I would put with them.
Nor were they all women: Michael Slote, for example, wrote a deeply thoughtful book about the ethics of care in terms of empathy. And as we know men can be — one might hope they are — feminists.
Care, empathy, support — these were the kinds of terms that this loosely affiliated group took as their subject (I refuse to call them a school, a limiting academic term which doesn’t go near to capturing what these spirited writers did).
Their central argument is that social life was built first and foremost around the deeper relationships we all know from our lived experience. That may sound obvious and one might wonder who would disagree with that. But these writers pointed out that the traditional approach to social life had, for some hundreds of years, been based on the idea of free individuals. Social life — including community life — was seen to arise from the way in which free individuals, making choices and protecting their rights, transacted their lives with each other; essentially a business model of social life.
By contrast, the ethics of care began with the fact that every individual is born into close human relationships, which are and remain primary in the development of personal identity, well-being, and development. That seems to be more or less universally true, across cultures.
What matters, then, was how these relationships, with each other, between larger groups, and with the environment at large, can best be protected and grown. It’s not that individual rights, and the principles of justice associated with it, were dispensed with, rather that relationship came first. This idea and reality was captured in the phrase ‘the ethics of care’.
I think there is a lot to be said for this idea, and I want to look at it more closely in writing about community. Perhaps that’s enough to be going on with. Trust, respect, care, rights, justice — these are each heady terms, each with a long reach, and if they do all sit together inside the idea of community then there is a lot to talk about.
As I’ve said, I’m not in this book particularly drawing on the discipline of sociology — while not unreasonably dismissing it either — simply reflecting more on our ordinary, common experience. Having said that, we will take good insights from wherever they present themselves, even from sociology texts. So in 1987 M. Scott Peck wrote:
‘If we are going to use the word “community” meaningfully we must restrict it to a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some sufficient commitment to rejoice together, mourn together, and to delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own.’[5]
That is a description of just what we are discussing, in our stories, and said rather beautifully. There are other thoughts of a similar kind that could no doubt be added, but certainly these are some of the relationship words that sit at the centre of the wide fabric of care, as it makes community.
Here is one way to think about it; a thought experiment, if you like. Imagine, to begin with, a pristine, natural place, on a coast, let us say, looking out to the horizon. Like many, even most, of these places, here too it is being opened to development. Land titles are created, land is sold, and houses begin to appear. Most of the buyers and occupants have come for the position of the place and its beautiful sea views. As houses begin to cover the ground, someone sets up a local store, although most of the shopping is still done in the nearest small town. More people come to stay.
So our question — my question to you, as we talk together — is this: at what point do we feel it natural to call the people who now live here, in this place, a community? And why? What is the ordinary life, the ordinary experience, which is here attaching meaning to the word?
The answer, I’m going to suggest, may be: when care appears. I’ll take up that challenge in the next chapter.
[1] Duneier, M, Slim’s table: race, respectability, and masculinity, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992.
[2] R Sennett, Together: the rituals, pleasures & politics of cooperation, Penguin Books, London, 2010.
[3] S Laugier, ‘Ordinary realism in ethics’, in F Vosman, A Baart, and J Hoffman, eds, The Ethics of Care: the state of the art, Peeters Publishers, Leuven, Belgium, 2021, pp 113-136.
[4] C Gilligan, In a different voice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1982/1993.
[5] M S Peck, 1987, The different drum, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987, p 59. Quoted in J Bruhn,The Sociology of Community Connections, Second edn, Springer Science & Business Media B.V., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2011, p 11.
This presentation is made available under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Leave a Reply