Bauman, Zygmunt. Community.

“But we never wish each other bad luck, and we may be sure that all the others around wish us good” (Bauman 2).

“In short, ‘community’ stands for the kind of world which is not, regrettably, available to us—but which we would dearly wish to inhabit and which we hope to repossess” (Bauman 3).

“‘Community’ is nowadays another name for paradise lost” (Bauman 3).

“Imagination, unlike the harsh realities of life, is an expanse of unbridled freedom. Imagination we can ‘let loose’, and we do, with impunity—since we have not much chance of putting what we have imagined to the test of life” (Bauman 3).

“It is not just the ‘harsh reality’, the admittedly ‘noncommunal’ or even the explicitly community-hostile reality, that differs from that imagined community with a ‘warm feel’. That difference, if anything, only spurs our imagination to run faster and makes the imagined community even more alluring. On this difference, the imagined (postulated, dreamed of) community feeds and thrives” (Bauman 3-4).

“On this difference, the imagined (postulated, dreamed of) community feeds and thrives” (Bauman 4).

“The ‘really existing community’ were we to find ourselves in its grasp, would demand stern obedience in exchange for the service it renders or promises to render. Do you want security? Give up your freedom, or at least a good chunk of it. Do you want confidence? Do not trust anybody outside your community. Do you want mutual understanding? Don’t speak to foreigners nor use foreign language. Do you want this cosy home feeling? Fix alarms on your door and TV cameras on your drive. Do you want safety? Do not let the strangers in and yourself abstain from acting strangely and thinking odd thoughts. Do you want warmth? Do not come near the window, and never open one. The snag is that if you follow this advice and keep the windows sealed, the air inside would soon get stuffy and in the end oppressive” (Bauman 4).

“There is a price to be paid for the privilege of ‘being in a community’—and it is inoffensive or even invisible only as long as the community stays in the dream . . . Missing community means missing security; gaining community, if it happens, would soon mean missing freedom” (Bauman 4).

“We cannot be human without both security and freedom; but we cannot have both at the same time and both in quantities which we find fully satisfactory” (Bauman 5).

“Tantalus was guilty of acquiring/sharing knowledge which neither he nor other mortals like him should have” (Bauman 7).

“as long as you just enjoy your happiness while staying ignorant of the nature of the things that made you happy and not try to tinker with them, let alone t o take them ‘into your hands’. And that if you do dare to take matters into your own hands you will never resurrect the bliss which you could enjoy only in the state of innocence. Your goal will forever escape your grasp” (Bauman 8).

“One can be truly happy only as long as one does not know how truly happy on is” (Bauman 9).

“This is exactly what makes that circle ‘warm’: it has no room for cold calculation and rota-learning of whatever society around, frostily and humourlessly, presents as ‘standing to reason’. And this is exactly why frost-bitten people dream of that magic circle and would wish to cut that other, cold world to its size and measure. Inside the ‘warm circle’ they won’t have to prove anything, and whatever they do they may expect sympathy and help” (Bauman 11).

“Since, ‘community’ means shared understanding of the ‘natural’ and ‘tacit’ kind, it won’t survive the moment in which understanding turns self-conscious, and so loud and vociferous; when, to use Heidegger’s terminology again, understanding passes from the state of being ‘zuhanden’ to being ‘vorhanden’ and becomes an object for contemplation and scrutiny. Community can only be numb—or dead” (Bauman 11).

“‘Distinctiveness’ means: the division into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is exhaustive as much as it is disjunctive, there are not ‘betwixt and between’ cases left, it is crystal-clear who is ‘one of us’ and who is not, there is no muddle and no cause of confusion—no cognitive ambiguity, and so no behavioural ambivalence” (Bauman 12).

“‘Smallness’ means: communication among the insiders is all-embracing and dense, and so casts the signals sporadically arriving ‘from the outside’ into disadvantage by reason of their comparative rarity, superficiality and perfunctory character” (Bauman 12).

“‘self-sufficiency’ means: isolation from ‘them’ is close to complete, the occasion to break it are few and far between. All three features join forces in effectively proftecting the members of the community from challenges to their habitual ways. As long as each and every one of the triune traits stay intact, it is indeed highly unlikely that the motivation to reflection, criticism and experimentation would ever arise” (Bauman 12-13).

“The sameness evaporates once the communication between its insiders and the world outside becomes more intense and carries more weight than the mutual exchanges of the insiders” (Bauman 13).

“From now on, all homogeneity must be ‘hand-picked’ from a tangled mass of variety through selection, separation and exclusion; all unity needs to be made; concord ‘artificially produced’” (Bauman 14).

“all vying for attention and each promising a better (more correct, more effective or more pleasurable) assortment of life tasks and solutions for life problems” (Bauman 14).

“no agreement will appear as ‘natural’ and as ‘self-evident’ as in the communities of Tonnies or Redfield, whatever its spokesperson and promoters do to portray it as such” (Bauman 14).

“Community of common understanding, even if reached, will therefore stay fragile and vulnerable, forever in need of vigilance, fortification and defence” (Bauman 14).

“‘Men and women look for groups to which they can belong, certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain” (Bauman 15).

“‘Identity’, today’s talk of the town and the most commonly played game in town, owes the attention it attracts and the passions it begets to being a surrogate of community: of the allegedly ‘natural home’ or that circle that stays warm however cold the winds outside” (Bauman 15).

“Identity sprouts on the graveyard of communities, but flourishes thanks to the promise of a resurrection of the dead” (Bauman 16).

“Contemporary seekers of community are doomed to share Tantalus’ lot; there purpose is bound to elude them, and it is their own earnest and zealous effort to grasp it that prompts it to recede” (Bauman 17).

“It will call for twenty-four hours a day vigilance and a daily resharpening of swords; for struggle, day in day out, to keep the aliens off the gates and to spy out and hunt down the turncoats in their own midst” (Bauman 17).