One of the fault lines that this current crisis has revealed is the distinction between society and community. A society can be composed of impersonal relations, and in our highly technological world it is more than ever founded on abstract articles of law and order and the various structural systems through which we depend upon and profit off one another. I would not be the first to point out the ways in which our lives are built according to the logic of capitalism, and in deep ways our very selves are structured by what capitalism permits and dictates. I mention this here to point out that the stakes when thinking about how our communities are ordered are immense. It is not just about how we relate to others but about who we are and what we see as possible for ourselves.
The fault line showed up for me when I started to see how many goods and services whose almost immediate availability I take for granted were suddenly in danger of going away. Then it became apparent to me what my world would look like if things really do break up; I would have to rely on my own inner resources, whatever material goods I have within my reach, my family, and my neighbours. Wait, what? My neighbours? Do most of us even know who lives next door? We live in a world where we have so much mobility and so much choice that there tends to be little reason to get to know the people living right beside us. We choose as our companions people with interests and habits similar to ours, people we get something from in terms of entertainment or camaraderie that feels familiar. We tend to choose people who are like us. Our neighbours on the other hand just happen to live next door, and in some cases may be very unlike us.
There are a few reasons to rethink our relationship to our neighbours beyond the fact that we might very well need them one day soon, or may have already come to rely on them in unprecedented ways. The first is that a society that is built upon relations of expediency and similarity is not a community. What is a community? According to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a community is built upon relationships of responsibility, it is built on the foundation of ethics. In Levinas’ account, the neighbour is simply the figure that represents the ethical relationship, the person who I am faced with because he or she is right there in front of me. It is a person whose existence and proximity calls on me to be responsible for another being. The beings who I never see, the people in distant countries upon whose labour my lifestyle depends, for example, are hard to feel responsible for because I don’t see them. I might feel responsible for my family members, to be sure, but that’s more like self-interest; my family members are so much a part of me and my interests that it doesn’t even feel like giving anything up when I put their needs before my own. Often, in fact, we wrongly justify unethical behaviour in the name of family – if I believe I have to protect my family at the expense of all others, then we are right back at the war of each against all. Many of the Nazis at Nuremberg were reported to have felt justified in what they did because they felt responsibility to their own families, who would have suffered had they refused orders.
A community is made out of relations where we are responsible to these others who face us and who are not necessarily our friends and may not be similar to us. Levinas describes the pact made between Moses and the people of Israel as it is reported in the Talmud, as taking place in person with all of the tribes facing one another, so that each person can see and pledge themselves to each other person. The people do not pledge themselves to some disembodied set of laws but pledge themselves to one another, thus forming a community and not just a society. What binds them is the face of the Other looking back, asking to be treated with dignity. We already understand this in witnessing the expanded possibility of human hostility in the impersonal domain of the internet; we just don’t see faces of those we hurt. The spirit of this face to face relationship is what we should strive for in our behaviour towards all others, but we need the figure of the neighbour in order to see what it means to be responsible in the first place. It means to offer a response.
But why would we answer this call to be ethical? Why are neighbours checking in on one another right now, bringing groceries to the more vulnerable among us, offering their time and services for free to those in need, sharing goods and resources that we might be better off keeping to ourselves in these uncertain times? Levinas was a religious philosopher and believed that we worship the infinite in our duty to the Other. With or without God, we do this because it fulfills something that is deeply liberating to us, something that can’t be captured in the transactional and self-interested nature of most of our relationships. The responsibility for the other is something we often enact at the expense of our own immediate and individual well-being, and yet we are loathe to refuse it. As ethical beings we could not enjoy what we keep to ourselves knowing that the other suffers and that we have turned away. It is so easy in our disconnected lives to avoid being called upon like this, to avoid the kinds of relationships that would obligate us, and so we don’t tend to get to know this part of ourselves. In this crisis, we are discovering our ethical natures.
I am not naïve. I know that, more than just avoiding the call, some of us turn away, and there are those out there who are profiting off the suffering of others more than ever. The human drive for security is powerful, and those who live by greed and exploitation seem to me more insecure than the rest, more fearful and unsure of their own inner resources, less confident that there are others who have their backs, and thus never satisfied with the external securities they amass. If it is true what most of the ancient philosophers believed, that a crucial element of human happiness is virtue, then these exploiters are the unhappiest of us all. They may never have experienced the illuminating joy of being there for or depending upon another human, the way that in that coming-together with the Other we overflow the bounds of our individual selves and for a moment participate in the infinite. The need for security is what drives us apart and convinces us to look out for ourselves or our families at the expense of others, but within the fault lines of individualism lies the revelation of how much more of ourselves the ethical relationship offers us.
Here we are, many of us, surrounded by our neighbours in a time when we might think we have very little we can depend upon. In these community networks we are capable of Herculean strength, I would contend. The creativity and pooling of resources and trading of skills and local organization and emotional support that I have witnessed has been amazing. My view is that this could significantly further a movement that we have been seeing already for decades, a movement that would help us begin to undo the global relations of exploitation within which capitalism imprisons us. You might think this is hopelessly utopian and unrealistic, and a few weeks ago I might have agreed. But the way our lives are structured by capitalism is designed to give the impression that humans aren’t capable of living outside it. In times when the cracks appear in our habitual ways of doing things we learn what else is possible, and my greatest hope is that we let the communities we’ve awakened here lead us far beyond this crisis, to a better version of each of us.