When I left university and moved west, my parents found a great birthday gift, a t-shirt that said “Born in Maine, Living in Exile”. It remains my favorite t-shirt, although by now it’s barely holding together after twenty plus years of wearings and washings. I only bring it out on rare occasions – for example, I wore it to Safeco Field for a Mariners-Blue Jays game. Since most people at the game were Canadian, I thought I might get a good reaction, and sure enough, some Newfies now living in Vancouver who were following the Jays spotted the t-shirt and we struck up a great conversation about growing up on the Atlantic and living on the Pacific.
I’ve been reading a number of books lately in which the concept of exile has come up more than once, and after writing on community affairs, I realize I sort of glossed over the idea that it is now the norm for us to choose to belong to multiple communities, versus prior times in which we were bound to a singular community and society due to the constraints of time, distance, and technology. Thinking about exile has made me realize that deserves treatment on its own. Exile really only has meaning in a world where we are, in fact, bound to a community; when we have the possibility of choice, however, exile is either a meaningless concept, or it is the natural state of being. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter, though, and I want to explore why that is and what I’m observing around me in my friends and colleagues and acquaintances.
First, though, there’s the notion – which I just dropped without elaboration – that we do, in fact, now get to choose communities, and in fact we usually choose multiple communities. What I mean by “communities” here is a self-selecting and self-regulating group of people who share values, develop and maintain a common “language” (more likely a lingo or patois or jargon), and police themselves internally to ensure harmony and consistency. It’s a virtual version of what happens in physical polities but unlike citizenship, which is usually bestowed by birth or by a complex process of endowment in law, membership in a community is more akin to being in a common law relationship: it happens via mutual consent of the member and the community, usually over time and without a formal event marking the consent but like the Supreme Court’s description of obscenity, both the member and the community know when they are joined, and it’s different in kind from prior times when they were not joined.
Belonging to multiple communities, though, is not just a serial thing of belonging to one community for a certain period of time and then “switching” when we grow disillusioned or bored or discover some new community which is more compelling, although that is an element of it. If I look at the people I know, and even more at the people who I don’t know well but have the opportunity to observe, most of them belong simultaneously to multiple communities. This is fundamentally different than the historical concept of citizenship, where being a citizen of one country disqualified you generally from citizenship in another country. And while I can hear people who are historically minded objecting that “citizenship” as a legal construct in this way is fairly new, I’ll counter with the idea that even before the legal construct was formed, the cultural construct was perhaps even more rigid: if you moved countries, unless you did so explicitly for trade or diplomacy, you were viewed as “lost” by your mother society and you were never fully embraced by your destination. Indeed, this was for most of history the fate of the Jewish people, who having lost their homeland were permanent exiles.
And exile is the operative word here: by virtue of being “from away” (which is, ironically, how old Mainers describe people who weren’t born in Maine), exile was a permanent state. Your children, or your grandchildren, may eventually be accepted as native – provided they adopted all the rich tapestry of cultural norms of the new society. But you would never be.
There has emerged in recent years the concept of multiple citizenship, and “permanent alien status” is fairly commonplace, although difficult in almost any country to obtain. This, to me, is just a hallmark of a world in which society as a construct has broken down, however. When society doesn’t exist, it becomes much less imperative to define an absolute, binary condition of membership; “citizenship” or “status” is really just a cue for the state to understand your access to certain legal rights or opportunities, or your obligations for service or tax. And since communities are by their nature fluid and self-defining – not being attached to specific physical places with geographical borders – even more so than today’s modern political states, each community ends up establishing more or less strict rules for “multiple membership”.
I want to observe briefly again a point I made in the other posting on communities: the existence of this kind of “community” is a new historical event. Because of the constraints on association across distances and between different societies that existed before the transportation and telecommunications revolutions of the past two centuries, these self-defined “communities” were historically just subsets of a geographically and linguistically defined “society” in almost all cases. In Venn diagram terms, community circles were in almost every case entirely within the bigger circle of a politco-linguistic society circle. Even where larger community circles existed – say, for the Catholic Church, or starting in the Renaissance for new communities of artists or scientists or the like – those universalist circles had within them national sub-communities of circles entirely defined by subsets of the political societies.
Now, however, that has broken down. To be ludicrous: the community circle of Star Wars fanatics knows no real national societal breakdown. Since English has become the lingua universalis of the internet outside China, the Star Wars “community” crosses all borders with ease. I’m not a part of it – Star Wars fanatics would know immediately that I am not of them – but having lived and traveled in most parts of the developed and more than a few parts of the developing world, I’ve encountered members of the community everywhere, and they are all recognizably of the same community. More, er, productively, I’d put bankers in that same vein – I am a member of that community, albeit sometimes reluctantly both from my participation and my acceptance by fellow bankers – in that we cross borders without any loss of a sense of community. Ditto for scientists – although that’s probably unfair, as “scientists” is probably too broad a term but, say “solid state physicists” and “allopathic medical scientists” as communities would have the same coherence without regard to national origin or “societal” membership.
Side by side with these communities, the legacy of history lives on as its own kind of community. By this I mean what we’d traditionally define as “society”, a geographically or ethnically defined community, typically with an alignment to a nation-state or at least the memory of one. Membership is defined by factors beyond an individuals control – some notion of “blood” or historical links through family, most typically – and that factor is what is leading postmodern adults to in many cases reject membership in those communities. People in this new historical moment are almost pathological in their need to assert their sole right to determine their association with a community, to the point where they will reject – sometimes with force – communities which try to assert their prewired definition of membership. But many people do choose to associate with these more traditional “communities” – either by explicit choice, or by an intellectual view of the “correctness” of the traditional ties which create such communities, or simply out of habit.
We live in a transition zone, however, and the two different notions of community – ones which self-select and self-regulate, versus those where selection is out of the control of the individual and regulation is by fiat – do not sit easily side by side. The newer types of communities, moreover, are still “first generation” attempts at defining a new way of existing as social constructs. Prior civic organizations – which many have pointed to as examples of how dynamic communities could exist within an older “society” defined by race or ethnicity – are not valid examples of how to self-organize, because the older organizations could dependably rely upon the foundation of society’s homogeneity to provide a baseline of order. Until the emergence of truly open, self-selecting communities in the last fifty years or so – since the emergence of global travel and telecommunications – society was all-consuming, even in its release valves of bowling leagues, Rotarians, country clubs and Parent-Teacher Associations.
It is telling, in fact, that those older societally based civic organizations and clubs have struggled to survive. Who joins the Rotary anymore? And, as has been famously pointed out, Americans now bowl alone. That’s not entirely true, but organizations and activities that were based on common cultural roots, as opposed to genuine individual interest, have faded rapidly from the scene. So hipsters aren’t bowling alone, but they also aren’t bowling with the middle-aged and older white working class Christian and Catholic men of European descent. People are now bowling with people who share their own interests, and are able to avoid those who do not – they are effectively forcing the older clubs into the same role of self-selection, simply by choosing not to select into their clubs in the first place and leaving the older members caught out.
Communities today don’t serve the same role as clubs or civic organizations did in the past. Rather than affirm your role within a society that forms a closed circle of interaction – as a middle-class business man in the Rotary, for example, or as a wealthy woman who joins an art appreciation club – communities today serve to define your potentials for interaction in a world that is radically open. And since most of us are multidimensional, we choose to be a part of multiple communities. Most new communities are cognizant of this, moreover, and have been forced to adapt expectations of loyalty and of alignment which recognize the imperfection of any one community to exert a dominant pull on any of its members. We in turn tune our expectations of communities, looking for elements of ourselves in a number of different groups – both formal (in clubs or in our choice and continuing devotion to a profession) and informal (in the loose knittings of friends and relatives that define what we might call our core affinity community).
For individuals, this experience is forcing us to evolve, and I see that evolution proceeding in two different directions. Faced with the knowledge that they will be negotiating with a range of communities for mutual relevance, and faced again with the need to maintain a sane personal identity which is and can remain consistent to oneself through time and across multiple community memberships, most people I see end up responding by building walls around what they see as their core identity. These people expose parts of that core identity to communities as they feel more comfortable, but when rejection seems imminent or when it actually occurs, they file what they’ve exposed to rejection as being “too private” or, more precisely, not acceptable for public exposure, and shove that behind the wall that hides their “selves” from view. The other evolutionary path is towards a kind of radical openness, in which people cease trying to hide their “true” selves from community exposure and take the risk that communities will reject them in our entirety, even if those communities would have accepted them had they held back those parts of themselves which don’t conform.
Neither one of these paths is particularly easy. Those who build and live behind their walls have a huge expenditure of emotional energy that they need to maintain to ensure that each community sees only that which will be deemed acceptable to them, and they also need to deal with the loneliness that comes from not being able to share those elements of themselves that make them truly individual. Those who are radically open, meanwhile, are in fact rejected, more or less constantly, because there is a readily accessible population of people who are willing to conform to the self-regulating norms of a self-defined community – and communities will naturally, and rationally, elect to include those who conform, and will reject those who want to be accepted on other or their own terms. While being free to live as open, fully announced individuals, they also gain the freedom to live in isolation until such time as they find a community which is so tailored to their “true” self that they will find acceptance simply by being completely themselves.
I’m firmly in the latter category, which makes me completely biased in terms of seeing the virtues and shortcomings of these two ways of responding to the same problem. In fact I don’t really see how the creation of new zones of individual isolation, constructed so as to allow survival in a world of communities which self-select with a kind of ruthlessness, will do anything but accelerate the anomie that has marked the modern age towards a reductio ad absurdum of a world of people who are constantly reaching out for acceptance from behind closed doors – which, in fact, isn’t that far from the intenet-driven social media world we’ve created in the past twenty years. We don’t see any increase in happiness – if anything, we see an increase in despair – but we’re all actively engaged in perpetuating that negative process by endorsing the “community” dynamics which shun those who are different, either in their lived being (race, social class, place of birth) or in their revealed selves.
On the other hand, living in a radically open way forces even more choice on the individual, and furthermore forces us to accept in others things that we don’t hold for ourselves. Speaking from experience, human beings are terrible at performing that act of forgiving and accepting in others that which we’d reject for ourselves, but living openly forces you into an active confrontation with that shortcoming as a person. And I’m not talking about forgiving or accepting someone who is a jerk – it’s forgiving and accepting the kind, loving person who, in addition to being someone I want to golf with and hang out with over a beer, also voted for Trump or for Brexit or is actively terrified of immigrants or brown people. Most of us, in our hearts, will judge people who hold different viewpoints or opinions or values, but living openly forces us to acknowledge that we have ideas and values which others believe to be false, and we have to forgive and accept them if we are to have any hope of being forgiven and accepted ourselves.
The response of building a personal wall around one’s self is the rational choice, mind you. It accepts that humanity is rubbish at forgiveness, and at least enables your core existence to remain safe. Moreover, in this new historical moment, when communities are still experimenting with ways of forming, self-regulating, and peacefully dissolving (usually unsuccessfully, but that’s the nature of experimentation), shouldn’t you be on guard? Won’t some communities that seem like good ideas end up as radical failures, with the potential to cause you emotional or intellectual harm? Without practice at living in this open world of communities unleashed from any physical connection to land or ancestry or language, shouldn’t we be really, really careful with our selfs? Obviously we should.
My naive open approach is, indeed, foolish in the extreme, and I’m experiencing that folly every day. Since I’ve been a little boy, I’ve been this open, big-hearted creature. But time and time again, I find that the groups I’d like to be a part of don’t want me – because I don’t conform enough to what that community expects. On the other hand, the groups that would have me, usually because of some quality that’s beyond my choosing (where I was born and to whom) or that I chose for entirely individual reasons (my profession or my hobbies), generally want me to reject parts of myself which I’m going to wear openly and proudly as part of what makes me “me” – and that eventually leads to rejection as well, either on my part or eventually out of exasperation on the part of the group.
For example, I could have easily become “just another banker” – I’m good at the profession and enjoy it – but the community of bankers expects me to value personal wealth accumulation, which I don’t, and to defensively overvalue our contribution to society, which I won’t, and to cultivate an air of superiority that I’m probably all too good at and therefore try actively to avoid. And groups that I’d like to be a part of – say, the community of creatives, whether artists or designers or film makers or whatever – see me as a foreigner in a strange land. What group of artists hangs out with divorced bankers who write essays about the social landscape? It hasn’t happened yet.
Oddly, though, facing the challenge of being radically open makes me well suited to being an executive at a large corporation, because as an executive you are cut off from the average employee – they reject you from their community, because it involves on some level being willing to see executives as non-humans – but executives are also cut off from one another because they all assume they are in competition for limited opportunities for advancement and bonuses. You can be radically open in that setting and not worry about being rejected, because you’ve already been rejected. But radical openness also gives you a perspective on others, and as an ongoing practice, gives you the skills of forgiveness and acceptance that are essential for leading organizations through change or even normal times.
As I say, though, it makes me terrible at the rest of life – dating, having hobbies, finding a sense of place – and having taken two years off from corporate life while I’ve focused on my family and personal life, the lack of any stage for reinforcing the goodness of being open is taking its toll. I’ve been really encouraged by readers who have written to tell me that I do make connections, but finding a self-generating community is something different. Being in a community means being in that constant give-and-take dialogue with a group which doesn’t exactly happen with a blog.
Which brings me back to the idea of exile. I’m looking to move back to Maine at the end of the month, leaving behind Seattle (except every other weekend to see my son) where I failed to find any sense of community. I’m sure I didn’t try hard enough, but a part of me thinks that it either succeeds or fails without extraordinary effort (isn’t building a wall, after all, an insane kind of “extraordinary effort”, and I’m not going to do that?), and I didn’t just sit and do nothing here. I’m going back to Maine because at least there I have a physical connection to the land, having grown up there, and I have family, which is something – one of those “communities” that is, truly, defined by where you start, and in my case, it’s a community which tries to exercise patience, forgiveness and acceptance every day. I’ll return, in a way, from the exile commemorated by my t-shirt from 25 years ago, roughly when I left.
But in another way, I’m going to remain in exile – a kind of mutually imposed exile from the new landscape of communities in this new cultural moment. I said at the beginning that exile only has meaning in a world where you are bound to a community or society, but we are all bound to the external aspect of being human – we are bound to the need to be with others in some capacity. In other words, we all need a community. For most of history that community has been a society – defined from birth and tied to land and language. Now we’re entering a history where community is fully open to interpretation and definition, and where membership is freed from anything except the dialogue of understanding between individual and group. As I sit writing this, though, I’m conscious of not yet having been able to cultivate that understanding, of not being a part of any community.
I look at those who build a wall around their self-identity as being in their own kind of exile, though. They get human contact – a sense of association and meaning from being with others – but they also pay the price of knowing that that association is with a kind of automaton, a programmed instance of themselves that isn’t, really, a complete person. Their exile is intensely personal as well – they can’t share it with anyone else. It’s a failure of my imagination, but I can’t imagine being in that kind of a prison, especially one that I create for myself simply for the privelege of joining groups of others, whether those groups are grounded in place and forced upon you, or are fluid and new and self-chosen.
And so I know why, on my side, I’m enforcing my own, more public exile. I don’t want to hide any part of myself from the communities around me that I might want to join or that might want me as a member – but I know that means most, if not all, will find me lacking, or will find something in me that makes me ill-suited for what communities self-define for themselves today. I’m not sure I view that as okay; it makes for a pretty sad day-to-day existence for me. Which I guess means I need to find a job. Fair enough – I’m on it.
But in the meantime, if you find a community that would put up with me, let me know. I’m open to it.