Curious juxtaposition in adjacent columns of today's Guardian. Under the headline "There is no such thing as community" Peter Preston writes: "The implication behind the word is that Britain is a nation somehow composed of defined, homogeneous and organised groups based on race, religion and neighbourhood interests."
Two or three centimetres away (for those of us using hard copy) Madeleine Bunting reports a Muslim telling her: "There are so many frustrated, angry men who ... convince themselves that this is Islamic. I find it frustrating that our community hasn't tackled this."
I'm a parsimonious user of the C word, and there are plenty of problematic misuses to moan about. But Preston's theme - of course society doesn't comprise necessarily homogeneous groups - misses a point. I think Bunting's source uses the term quite acceptably: if we want to represent a vague sense of commonality, this word, community, is a valid word to use. Such a sense is broadly recognised in human societies. We can grumble about the vagueness of the term but it won't make the feeling itself any more concrete.
What's happening this past few days is that people are groping at the potential for collective responses, as our species probably always has in situations of commonly experienced crisis. We need our politicians and our media to continue helping us understand why we draw in some people and exclude others from our shifting meanings of the word.
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