Community: Community of a People
A group whose organic bonds are animated by the sentiment of belonging, homogeneity, heritage, and wanting to live together and share the same destiny.
The notion of community opposes that of ‘society’, whose essence is mechanical, heterogeneous, and based on a social contract. Community is the most natural way to group humans, since it’s based on ethnic and spiritual kinship — which establishes a harmonious equilibrium between its members and serves as the most propitious expression of their culture. Community pre-exists its specific forms of organisation and institution, for its essence is historical, innate, and non-contractual, unlike society.
Community, though, never exists in a pure state; it always includes certain social relations. One speaks thus of a ‘communitarian model’, whether of the nation as a community-of-people, of family, clan, association, army (community of combat), etc.
The communal model radically opposes the social model of egalitarianism and individualism. In the communal model, human relations are hierarchical, interdependent, and multi-functional. The community is not limited to the present; it has a history and a destiny. Its being transcends individual existences, imbuing it with meaning. The social model, in contrast, is purely contractual, mechanistic, and abstract, with the individual isolated, easily excluded, and the whole ensemble prone to rapidly descending into a jungle. The nihilism of contemporary market society is unthinkable in the communal model. From this perspective, the community-of-a-people is organically subdivided into encompassing sub-communities: nations, regions, towns, clans, families, etc. True democracy, in the classic Greek sense, is only possible within such a communal context. This follows the implications and co-responsibilities of communally-related individuals; of their common ethnic bonds; and the common projects and memories linking them. The social model, on the other hand, is prone to ethnic chaos and its individual members are indifferent to one another, solidarities are purely artificial, self-discipline is impossible, democracy a simulacrum, and order a constraint.
A community-of-the-people — given that solidarity, social justice, freedom, security, defence, and the transmission of values are possible within it — operates with at least a minimum of ethnic unity and a sense of innate belonging.
In defining the Ummah as a community of believers opposed to the Western individualist model of anonymous society, Islam finds in its communitarian nature a very powerful and effective idea. Despite the good sense of its social and philosophical precepts, Islam nevertheless remains the enemy, for its totalitarian and obscurantist ideology is totally incompatible with the European mentality of the liber civis: the free man. This is not a matter of disputing Islam’s critique of the West, but of denying it the right to offer us its solutions. Each must find it in himself, in his own way. It’s possible that the idea of community among ethnic Europeans will be reborn only in misfortune.
(see people)
