Local and Sustainable Communities

How do we care about the communities we live in? Ours is an era of globalization, economic monopoly, political and economic oligarchy, massive shifts of human populations and refugees, social isolation, anti-government social movements, and nationalistic reactions to globalization and neoliberalism.

Is it possible that the coronavirus has found a perfect host: The United States of America. A virus needs a host. It cannot survive for long without the host. It feeds on a host. It occupies the host. What kind of host is the United States? One thing we've learned: the virus has produced an awareness of just how deeply flawed our systems of caring are. Another thing we've learned: our sense of the common or collective good seems impossible to imagine. And we're also left with many more questions: do local identities compete with and even undermine the possibility of achieving a common good? (see the work of Nancy Fraser on identitarianism). Has our neoliberal era and globalization produced a kind of toxic individualism, separatism, identitarianism, right-wing libertarianism, which have combined and enabled the virus to find and thrive in this most perfect host? And by pursuing non-state solutions to our deepest social problems (NGOs, the so-called civil society solutions, non-profits) have we not also bought into a troubling binary, state vs. non-state actors and actions? And perhaps this misrecognition, this binary, also feeds the virus.

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How do we take care of the local without sacrificing our connections to the common good? How do we form caring communities without creating borders and walls? These are all questions complicated by the potential and easy slide into conservative politics (e.g., the communitarian sociologists, Etzioni, Bellah). How do we form and maintain identities that allow for the local and the community and healthy relationships with the globe at the same time?  Do we need a cooperative movement in mental health, one that is situated in communities (see our blog post on a cooperative movement)? In this mode of caring, we must confront our habits of consumption so that we can imagine the common good and cooperation at the local level where difference is felt and experienced and things come to matter and have significance while at the same time valuing meaningful connections with nature and the globe.

On the Blog - Modes of Caring - Community and Household