Community
Dorota Masłowska
When Poland joined the European Union, we young writers started getting lots of commissions from foreign magazines for essays about community. What did the concept of community mean to us?, they asked. Was it close to our hearts? What promise did it hold for us? Well, at the time its main promise was probably a fee of two hundred Euros for a pretty mediocre text dashed off at speed. But without a doubt,it was a sacred moment for our country. We’d only just gained freedom after centuries of annexation and historical defeat, the impact and stranglehold of which go far beyond the scope of this text, and aren’t of concern to anyone except us.
In 2004, with a blush on our as yetashencheeks, we joined the European community, with a vision of prosperity, justice, equality and solidarity ahead of us. As it now turns out, fifteen years on, the emphasis has been on prosperity, with a very relaxedattitude to everything else.
History has been hard on us; for many decades, what hasbrought us together as a society has been disaster, traumatic events and wars. When we finally made our debut on the dance floor of peace and relative well-being, we turned out to be like an exhausted married couple who’ve spent years shoulder to shoulder, battlingfor their home, but after that they’ve got nothing left to say to one another in the moments when they’re not jumping down each other’s throats. These days the question about community, so recently the routine topic for an essay paid for by an EU grant, is creeping up to the door in my country, a place consumed by internal social conflict, where under the banner of Christianity, gays, foreigners and other minorities are being persecuted, and which refuses to take in refugees. It’s a country where community issuffering from a tumour – possibly one with a bad prognosis. As I write these words, with report after report running along the Windows news ribbon about boats full of refugees being wrecked on the shores of Italy, it crosses my mind that this tumour is affecting all of Europe, all of humanity.
There have never been so many of us before, and we’ve never been so well connected bysuch a wide network of unimaginably complicated, ever more specialized devices. Never before have we penetrated the Earth so fully, moving from place to place with such ease, flying to any corner of it, sometimes at almost no cost. Paradoxically, it’s right now, when we’re so close together, crowding and stepping on each other, that we’re as remote and unreal for one another as the pop-upsthat come streamingfrom all directions on every kind of website. The global village has smashed into a million molecules, sub-villages, sub-tribes and sub-clans. My feeling about this is pessimistic, if not apocalyptic.
It’s a commonplace that the need for belonging, the need to be a part of something is organic and inherent, and that despite all its devilish inventions modernity can never drive it out of us. But perhaps it keeps pushing each new model of smartphone and each new communication platform under our noses because our natural urge to commune with other people, our dream of being part of something generates markets worth billions of dollars?
Social media must take joint responsibility for theutter diffusion and erosion, or rather liquidation and virtualization of interpersonal connections; after all, they’re geared towards our need for intimacy, communication and communal emotions. It’s the same with streaming platforms that entwine humanity in a net of the same standardized, universal truestories and the emotions they bring;so what if they’re produced by algorithms?
Both of them are at the service of our burning lack of community- they’re its phantom gestures, a prosthesis for people lyingin their beds at home alone the worldover. And as they continue to make use of these wonderful, practical, hygienic surrogates, there’s little chanceof them going into the streets outside to grab each other by the hands.
Meanwhile there are ever more reasons why that’s what they should be doing, and like the rising temperature, they’re getting more and more burning.