We are becoming fluent in a certain kind of loss: environmental loss, from hotter and more frequent fires to flooding of places that had never experienced it, pushing people and wildlife toward the edge. We have learned, painfully, to notice this loss because the evidence on our news feeds is impossible to ignore. We also see the loss of informal social structures, unmediated friendships and daily rituals as communities are capsized by physical chaos.
I wonder whether we are losing something just as real in communities that never burn or flood at all, a loss that leaves far less evidence behind: the slow shift, in so many of our institutions, from a virtue-based footing to a transactional one.
The anthropologist Victor Turner called what can emerge between people: communitas: a sense of connection that arises when people experience something together or ‘collective joy’, a term he borrowed from his wife, Edith, a poet.
A child arrives in kindergarten at around five years, and for many, it is their first sustained experience of a community beyond their family. They are learning not only what they know, but how people treat one another, what can be expected of others, what is expected of them, and what it means to belong.
As they grow, they encounter friendship, competition, disagreement, cooperation and responsibility. They learn that we do not always like or agree with the people with whom we share a community. And yet we can still walk alongside them. Aristotle called this reasoned exchange between two people seeking understanding, not a contest to be won, but a shared pursuit. The philosopher Margaret Gilbert described it as sharing something more than each person’s private goal; they share a ‘we’, a plural aim that belongs to neither of them alone. A virtue base, from which a community forms that can hold that kind of ‘walking together’ even amid real disagreement, because it starts from the assumption that the person across from you is, in their own way, trying to do good.
A transactional community makes this harder.
When relationships are increasingly understood in terms of what is owed, delivered, measured or exchanged, that vital sense of connection is lost. There is no longer a shared ‘we’, holding the two sides together.
This matters particularly for schools. When schools become transactional communities, they lose something of that shared sense of ‘we-ness’, and often without noticing it. When education becomes something delivered in exchange for a good ATAR, a place on the team, a role or a leadership position, we risk losing something foundational that schools provide: an experience of what it means to belong to a community and to contribute to something beyond oneself.
Schools are one of the last vestiges of the communities we all grow up in. Alasdair MacIntyre argued that virtues can only be sustained inside communities that share a sense of the good life being pursued together; strip that shared pursuit away, and disagreement stops being something two people work through side by side.
So perhaps the question isn’t only what we are losing to fire and flood, urgent as that is. It’s also when a five-year-old walks into her first community and takes her bearings from what she finds there, what compass are we giving her?
Gilbert, M. (1990). Walking Together: A Paradigmatic Social Phenomenon. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 15(1), 1–14.
MacIntyre, A. (1985). After Virtue ( 2nd ed.). London: Duckworth.
Turner E (2012) Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy. Virginia: Palgrave Macmillan