Community Membership Means Obligation

and that's a big part of being human

I was reading a piece about the LA Fires, and ran into the notion that a settled society — as opposed to a nomadic society — needs “maintenance.” It means planning for the future, “the determination to maintain.”

Maintenance manifests a community and a system of obligation, without which substantial development is unlikely.

Now, it just happened that over the weekend I attended a reunion for employees of the company I worked for 30 years ago, and a Korean-American co-worker expressed himself worried about confessing his devotion to family obligation. He worried that ordinary white Americans wouldn’t understand.

Now, back before Christmas I was putting forth a new “distinction” in the sense of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt’s distinctions in The Concept of the Political: the political between friend and enemy, the moral between good and evil. And I decided on a new distinction:

The communal is the distinction between included and excluded.

Aha! I just thought. Community. Obligation.

But at the same time I am reading — at last — Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded by Samuel Richardson. An “epistolary” novel published in 1740, it’s a about a pretty 15-year-old servant trying to avoid the advances of the young master of the household, whose intentions are not honorable. The reason she started working as a servant at the age of 12 was because her father had fallen on hard times and was working as a manual laborer. So she went into service to help them survive. In the exchange of letters, it is clear that, for the parents, their daughter’s honor was far more important than having enough to eat.

So, membership in a community involves obligation. The community could be a family, a neighborhood, a church, a club. The relations are not like government, which requires obedience, or business, which involves contract, formal or informal.

The reason I am getting deep in the weeds here is that I think that there is a problem in our modern society with the left basically wanting to have a society of government and individuals, and the libertarians wanting to have a society of the market and individuals.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that government is essential. But I suspect that the best use of government is way less than our current situation. I believe that the market and its whole apparatus of buying and selling and prices and credit and debt and equity is a marvel of human ingenuity.

But if you think of your life, your interaction with government is minimal, and your interaction with the market is not that much. Even if you are working at a job for an employer most of the time you are not under the lash of compulsion or getting paid precisely for performance.

In other words, most of human life is spent in community — with family, friends, co-workers, club members. And the way that community works is by obligation.

You go into work and you feel an obligation — after getting a cup of coffee — to get down to work, although nobody actually orders you to start work.

You take out the garbage at home because you feel an obligation to take it out if you notice that the kitchen bin is full.

You organize a family or company reunion because someone has to do it, and it might as well be you.

Now, in our day, many of the moral and family and community obligations have been legalized, so that if someone does not perform an obligation he can be taken to court. But human society would not work if everyone took every dispute about obligations to court.

So what is the communal distinction? Is it included vs. excluded as I wrote earlier? Or is it belonging vs. not belonging? Or is it member or non-member? What is clear is that the member of a community has obligations that a non-member does not have. And part of the power of obligation is the love or affection that develops between members of a community. When you do something for someone you love is that obligation or an act of love? For now, I am going to say that

The communal is the distinction between inner and outer.

But more research is needed.