Community and instiutions

This weekend David Dark preached at Downtown Presbyterian Church.  It is a pleasure for everyone to have him there, but we do this very rarely.  That needs to change.

At one point in the sermon, David distinguished between community and institutions, and made a nice comparison--a community sacrifices for people, an institution sacrifices people.  It seemed like a good solid distinction, consistent with values many of us cherish. I can picture governments as war-making and incarcerating institutions demanding people to sacrifice as cannon fodder in war and objects of punishment.  This distinction feels like it comes from good intellectual stock, reminding me of Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, the distinction between community and society.  Society as captured by Gesellschaft implies rules and obligations, and bureaucracies and large organizations.  The word Gesellschaft can also refer to a company, and so it is definitely freighted with the implication of economic rationality and predominance. David is pitching into this tension, making the case for the human humane path. 

But this seemingly unassailable position brought me back to some of the more challenging and in ways mystifying ideas I encountered this year which to some extent turn the tables in the moral balance between community and institution. There is an argument that any community contains at its core an act of violence.  Here's Nidesh Lawtoo discussing this in his book (New) Fascism (2019):

"For Bataille, then, community finds in sacred experiences that generate ecstatic horror the affective source of a contradictory double movement that both unites and divides the social body: death, sacrifice, tragedy are but the most prominent sacred experiences that constitute the palpitating heart or “central core” (noyau central) of community."  Lawtoo 2019, p. 80. 

When I first read this, I thought about DPC as a community.  At first glance, this kind of violence and sacrifice seem far away.  David invited the congregation to think of themselves as a community of inquiry.  The fact is this church was built by slaves for a local ruling class with wealth built on slavery, and on ground taken over from indigenous people.  One of the things DPC sometimes does is trace its origins to its founding as a separate congregation in 1956.  This has the convenient effect of eliding the early history, of slavery and of the original encounter between Europeans and indigenous people.  (Of course DPC itself has in its shortened history managed to be on the wrong side of history during the lunch counter sit ins.)  But if you let the historical frame flow between re-organizations, you can see the original acts of violence.  What is less clear is how under this schema of community they are re-enacted to renew the community.

Leaving aside DPC, I don't know I see this same noyau central in every community.  Jean-Luc Nancy made a distinction between Operative and Inoperative Communities, with operative ones being those that depend on contagion and these Bataillian dynamics.  I'm part way through some of his writing on this. 

Then on the other side of the equation, political science defines "institutions" as basically rule sets.  From Azari and Smith : "Peter Hall and Rosemary Taylor, for example, characterize institutions as 'formal or informal procedures, routines, norms and conventions embedded in the organizational structure of the polity.' Douglass North, adopting the view of rational-choice rather than historical institutionalism, defines institutions as 'humanly devised constraints that shape human intersction,' a scoiety's 'rules of the game.'" From this perspective, institutions are more accommodating of the individual than a community.  They provide a clean set of rules within which an individual can claim agency and legitimacy, and don't demand much else. 

For me, the more important tension is between the individual and any manifestation of collective human experience.  I still believe in the absolute value and beauty of that collective experience. But I see a set of intrinsic, potentially unavoidable problems within it.  One of my jobs for this summer is going deeper into some of this work, and try to see what I can do with some of this stuff that is out there in Bataille and Foucault, and Jean-Luc Nancy.