The Humanity of Community

The structure of our communities is important. They influence and shape our language. Our thoughts. Our actions. Our history. Our belief in ourselves. And how we treat other communities."

When we look back at the individual communities we find ourselves in today - whether by accident of birth, by economic choice or by force of circumstance - their origin histories will reveal a timeline of chance, a series of accidental incidents and powerful personalities all colluding to create them.

Those timelines will invariably have an insular viewpoint and thus be inaccurate. History is a myriad of voices speaking from the past, all telling their own version of the truth, but with uniqueness, subtlety and nuance drowned out by those shouting the loudest. It's they who have their view recorded as accepted fact on the timeline. The victors of our past not only (re)wrote the timelines we learn about in school, but they also shaped the communities we live in and are struggling with today.

Look back at the victors of your communities. Italy echoes its ancient Roman past. Spain echoes its colonial past. As does England. Greece still acts as though Alexander truly was great. China believes it invented everything and can do no wrong. Even after its communist incarnation turned its back on its imperial past. So I am often surprised when people are surprised by the way these communities behave. It's all there in their societial norms shaped by their myth-creating past.

Had our communities been shaped to focus on the world, on living in peace with it, respectful of its sources, we would be in a different place in 2020, but the majority of our victors weren't too fussed with the future of the planet. Similarly with organised religion, after it suffocated global pagan beliefs and became the victorious voice to shape our communities further, it decided to talk of patriarchal dominion and subjugation, instead of being honest that the human race should view itself on the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder when it comes to benefiting the planet.

Fot instance, it's believed a single 400-year-old ancient oak produces hundreds of thousands of litres of oxygen a year, and may support more than two thousand species of bird, insect, fungus, and lichen. Surely, on that basis alone, we need to give every tree automatic preservation rights and allow them to be cut down only as an exception rather than the rule. And as John Lewis-Stempel's loving tribute to the tree, The Glorious Life of the Oak shows, the oak is inextricably bound up with the history of the British isles, and serves as a reminder that every tree has a special place in some community. Here it is the oak, in Cyprus the olive tree. Look at your own communities: which tree is bound to your identity? There'll be one there. Yet, instead of looking after the trees - these "wooden ties between heaven and earth" as Lewis-Stempel says - we cut them down. We murder them, en masse. For what? In retaliation? I can't remember the last time a tree murdered a human being, unless a storm dropped it down on one.

I often find myself ashamed of my species. With the emergence of a new and highly infectious virus this year, our reaction to it hasn't surprised me, either. There was no global unified response; every country took its own unilateral action as it saw fit, and only when the virus spread through its borders unchecked. Yet, when I see the public panic buying, stockpiling, walking around fearfully wearing face masks, planning to flee with their children if the outbreak can't be contained, I can't help but think, do we now know what it feels like for people trying to flee war and famine? And what if people took climate change as seriously as they now take the COVID-19 outbreak (even if a little too late and haphazardly)? Everyone seems to think they may get the coronavirus (and everyone's life is so precious to them) yet simultaneously everyone thinks climate change will impact others and not them. And that is our problem right there.

Because if today we are on the verge of a pandemic, it's not nature's way of culling the human population explosion (even though it may justifiably feel like it). It's our everyday way of going about business on the planet - taught through our communities - that seems to be driving this. And if our land use, deforestation, road building, mining, poaching and agricultural intensification are the reasons we push ourselves into wildlife habitat and get infected, then that means we're going to get bigger pandemics, and they're going to happen more often. The current one happened to originate in China because of their cultural way of dealing with and feeding on wildlife. The next one might come from Latin America because of the urbanisation and harvesting of forests to satiate the stomachs of people in the West.

This dystopian fact has been a long time in fiction: Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, the 2011 film which tracks the outbreak of a virus from China that goes on to cause a pandemic and societal collapse is an eerily prescient depiction of the nascent stages of the highly contagious illness that has entered our lives at almost Hollywood speed. The film reflects more than just some truth about our world, however. It shows that nothing spreads like fear.

But we are the children of victors, right? What have we to fear? So what, if we greedily use up the planet's resources, or treat life on this world as throwaway and hierarchical? We believe that nature says survival of the fittest, but it doesn't stipulate the definition. It's the community that defines whether fittest means strongest, the most cruel, the most devious. Evolution through natural selection doesn't always suggest that the strongest (in our human understanding) will beat the odds. In nature, when the environment has deemed it fit, it has been the most silent, the most passive, the most gentle (read: adaptable) species to have survived when the violence of others caused their own annihilation. But in our communities we've attached ourselves to the belief that violence is a winning formula for our survival (our literature is littered with it, too) and so it will continue to influence our actions and interactions.

The underbelly of every community today is based on violence, because borders are drawn and made through it, and a country's existence is defined by its borders. And if a country's psyche is the psyche of its majority community, you only need to look back into its past to see how every victor has changed the story of the majority to suit their own agenda. Violence was suitable, so today, we still believe in the myth of its suitability for survival - even though it will very probably (and literally) be the death of us.

The results of this has been all too painfully clear in 2020. In its first days, the US President brought his country to the brink of war with Iran, then the following month the entire continent of Australia was engulfed in the flames of massive bushfires boosted by climate change, and now a virus pandemic sweeps across the planet to affect rich and poor alike, bringing the global markets to their knees. These last three months, however, can be said to be the culmination of over half a century of violence, towards each other and the world we live in, with complete disregard for future generations. It's a timeline we've set ourselves up for, and it's very difficult to change direction after so many centuries of preparation. We've finally hit pay dirt.

I am not being pessimistic or cynical: The longer a historic view persists, the harder it is to remove; it takes a huge effort to scrub a victor's mindset from history. It's much easier to wipe away defeat from the record, because the defeated don't have a platform (or voice) in which to answer back. Thus, we don't hear from the refugees - tossed from one country to another, into one community and then another - we only hear from the communities themselves. We hear their disgust, their fear, their distrust; we see them change their laws, or put people into camps, and treat the children of those encamped as though the offspring of rodents.

Because that's what we do when a mischief of rats run towards our border, we pull out our weapons to try and hold them back. We put out our most poisonous traps to ensnare them and throw their bodies back to where they came from when they die. Because although they, too, were born on this planet, for some reason they don't have the right to peacefully co-exist, not if that means they have to share the same space as you and me.

We don't want them entering our communities to infest and infect us and our offspring (who are the only children that matter). We even invoke the very idea of them as the generic bogeyman, just to instill fear at home to silence the few dissenting voices, because fear is an opium for the masses. It's addictive. And then we are surprised when a few rats that do make it in to our communities don't feel a sense of belonging and struggle to co-exist within such an insular community.

Hang on a minute, though. Why should we care about people unconnected with our communities and who will have (so we are told) a negative impact on our lives? Well, because one day, ironically instead of preserving your children's future, you will have helped destroy it. When we allow a fringe of fear to surround us, inevitably when there are no rats left on the outskirts, that fear doesn't just dissipate because the reason for it to exist has been exterminated. It gathers momentum. The fringe begins to look inwards. To seek out the rats amongst themselves. Those who look different. Think different. Act different. And like the Pied Piper who first took away the rats, and then the townsfolk children, suddenly the community, ravaged by its own mania, is a community no more.

Fear is not only addictive; it's infectious. It's viral. And those who are attacked think they need to fight back in the language of violence, and so around and around we go in a vicious circle. But we do this because we believe our very existence is threatened, because the fear is real (even if the basis for it is not), and because of the way our communities have been shaped to view the world we live in. It's that same mix of a heavy historical reliance on violence and our modern day fears that has fractured the world, pitted community against community, closed borders instead of opening them up across the world, which made us so ill-prepared for the pandemic we are faced with today. No doubt, it's the reason why with such technological potential to be more connected than ever before, this outbreak has revealed how fractured we are as a global community. Political leaders have sounded more like a cacophony than a choir. But a virus isn't a refugee, it knows nothing of our foolish human preoccupation with borders: it divides and conquers; it conquers the divided.

So, what does all this tell me? The structure of our communities is important. They influence and shape our language. Our thoughts. Our actions. Our history. Our belief in ourselves. And how we treat other communities. Ultimately, it even shows us how we would treat friend and neighbour in times of crisis, and turns into a mirror to reflect the worst - or best - in us all. But did we really need a virus turnabout to finally give those of us in the West a refugee perspective? Did we really need a coronavirus outbreak to expose the utter smallness of our politics? Did our actions need to come back and kick us so swiftly in our lazy backsides, to make us realise we've been proctastinating too long on whether violence is still the best blueprint for survival? And to finally wonder what our role should be on this planet? Because the very real problem is that we won't only be destroying ourselves if we don't get this right, we might just take every living thing with us as well, and that would really piss me off. The human race deserves what's coming to it, but not the rest of the living world, unfortunate enough to share this space with us.

The hope is that if the basis of this is community, i.e., ourselves, then communities can change. And there is one community we can take as an example of the way forward, the scientific one. It's a community of people of all genders, all races, all beliefs, driven by the thirst for knowledge that every other community - be it political, religious, or social - should emulate. We shouldn't look to that community only in times of pandemics, to get us out of the trouble we put ourselves in, we should look to the better part of that community as the template for our survival. Because, unfortunately (for the historical romantics) neither love nor religion (nor violence as an offshoot of the two) can show us the way; only cold, hard science and a cool head will save the day, based on a strong foundation of humaneness to keep it ethically, as well as factually, sound.

It may take generations, but once we start asking about the quality of our survival, and not just about survival at any cost, we will realise that (as the new coronavirus shows) the fittest of us is only as strong as its most vulnerable. This goes beyond species. From such a mindset (which has been around for centuries but often silenced) will come future generations who understand that our survival will depend on our respect for every living thing on this planet - from the smallest creature to the largest tree. At its core it's about doing the right thing. It goes against the grain of our violent history, but it's time we rewrote it.

For harming any living thing means hacking at the links of the chain that tether all our communities to this cliff edge of life. Survival is a precipice, make no mistake. But whether we fall off its edge or successfully manoeuvre our way across its ledge will depend on whether our communities can adapt to what the science increasingly shows, that the only special quality we have to contribute to that survival is the spirit of humaneness.

If we can characterise our communities to be known for their tenderness, compassion, and sympathy for all people and animals, especially for the suffering or distressed, and if we can be known for acting in a manner that causes the least harm to people or animals, providing humane treatment for even the worst examples of us, then it will be the best of us that dictates our future. Now, that's a survival I can sign up for. That's a community I want to be a part of and to call my own.

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