Before reading this, I might have told you that community was one of those words that is firmly on the good side of the ledger. Community seems to be our only hope. And yet, what this book does remarkably well is to show the problems associated with community. To belong in a community you have to give up part of yourself – your freedom. Now, freedom is a word that I’ve tended to put very much on the evil side of the ledger – not least due to the kinds of people who use it most. That is, the freedom from crowd, rather than the freedom to people. The dialectic between freedom and community isn’t really something I have ever spent much time thinking about before – but will have to now.
I’ve sent a copy of this book to a friend of mine. She is looking at doing research into how teachers feel about non-English speaking students in Australia and how they might be more compassionate towards them. That is, to better understand their fears, hopes and dreams and to use these as a way to help them learn. One of the things we have been speaking about is the idea that many non-English speaking students feel herded into mathematics. This is because it is felt that their lack of fluency in English will make other subjects harder for them. The problem is that the further you go in mathematics and science, the more you are going to need skills in being able to understand complex text – and it isn’t at all clear that a mathematics teacher, who probably hated English themselves at school, and built an identity on this hatred, is going to be of much help to you in conquering the skills needed to decode these complex texts.
One of the things Bauman discusses here is the idea that being asked (or even demanded) to assimilate comes with the unspoken certainty that you will never fully be allowed to assimilate, regardless of how much you try. Also that you will always be associated with the stereotypes that are connected to the community that you belong to. It doesn’t matter if you think Black is beautiful or Black is something you would rather not be associated with at all – you will always been understood as Black, you will never pass, regardless of how many degrees you hold, where you buy your house, what school you send your children to. The stigma will hold onto you regardless of the efforts you make.
Bauman also gives an extended interpretation in this book of the drawing by Paul Klee that Walter Benjamin owned, The Angel of History. The Angel of History has its back turned to the future – and so it is being blown into a world it cannot see. What it sees instead is the destruction piled high of the past. It is forced to watch on with little or no hope of a utopia that will replace all of this destruction. It is almost as if the Angel is trying to catch a glimpse through its peripheral vision of that is to come, but this sight is forever denied it. As Bauman makes clear, Benjamin was a Marxist and so believed that the future world was capable of overturning the horrors of the past – which isn’t an opinion Bauman shares. If anything, this has gotten worse in recent years – in these liquid modern times, where all certainties turn to their opposites or worse, appear to change randomly and inexplicably as we, like the Angel, are powerless to sustain order amongst so much destruction.
There is hope in this book though – although, it is a hope based on the flimsiest of bases. That we will find ways to allow the dance between freedom and community to play out in ways that do not isolate us so much from our ‘other’, from the fear that locks us in our communities of the same. Only by reaching out our hand in friendship, rather than fear, have we any hope at all. But Brexit and the election of Trump show just how unlikely this hand of friendship being offered has become. We are entering terrifying times, times when we build walls and place guns on top of them to keep the stranger out. Our only hope is that this fear can be replace with friendship.