Community is our survival. ‘Community’, as the opportunity for nurturing human contact, is essential to human wellbeing.
Even though communal life can feel so ordinary that its implications go largely unnoticed, each person’s formation in the community constitutes the social dimension of our shared humanity. It is therefore ill-advised to overlook the importance of communities and their influence, and many governments and international organisations are duly paying attention to their value. The Faculty for Social Wellbeing is no exception to this.
Each one of us carries, like an inheritance, the rhythms, strengths, and growing edges of our communities. For this reason, some ways of seeing and being in the world feel so entrenched that they only become explicit when met with difference. Addressing the implications of differences among migrant and host communities in Malta is one objective behind a research study being conducted by the Faculty for Social Wellbeing, which was commissioned by the Parliamentary Secretariat for Citizenship and Communities.
The study joins with ongoing attempts to define and implement what the European Commission calls “migrant integration and inclusion” in its latest Action Plan (2021-2027), directly relating to these encounters of difference. Parameters for inclusion in the context of migration usually include access to jobs with fair pay, decent shelter, effective schooling, and reliable healthcare. However, inclusion also implies a two-way openness to community values, a meeting of cultural and experiential differences.
Unfortunately, there are situations where such encounters generate a wholly reactive, rather than reciprocal, response. Expressions of fear, anger, and even violence can originate in any community. Even those which pride themselves on the support they circulate internally can suddenly assume rigidly exclusive boundaries. Without sufficient attention being given to the causal agents provoking these rigid responses, then healthy flexibility, in the way a community encounters others within society, is dangerously compromised.
Without an initial openness to the presence of others, there is unlikely to be any meaningful encounter with different ways of living and new opportunities for knowing the world. At its most insidious, the rejection of difference leads to social oppression and outright exclusion. Just as individuals within a community balance their sense of unity with the expectation that their own differences will be held respectfully, openness between communities demands a similar sense of reciprocity.
Said another way, if relations among our communities are treated as a zero sum game, in which one group can only understand benefit in terms of another group’s loss, then there is no possibility for authentic openness to contact. Just as treating an individual like an object is dehumanising because it robs that person of specificity, which is to say, those differences that make us uniquely ourselves, the same effacement occurs to an excluded community and its members.
Now, it is clear that growing through differences within our communities is not always simple. Often, it means confronting the need for healing. It means acknowledging wounds that originate in challenges and anxieties which are seldom related to the actual encounter. While we rightly highlight the interpersonal origins of many conflicts among our communities, there are larger structural impediments to wellbeing which fuel an anxious and fearful culture of mistrust. Social theorist Charles Eisenstein describes one fundamental impediment, when he says, “when everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness.”
In the practice of community, we are already called to navigate the pull of individualism and the orbit of a world populated by others. However, the more secure we feel in our communities, across social, economic, cultural, and environmental dimensions, the more likely we are to avoid a scarcity-based knee jerk response in an encounter with others. When we remember that reciprocity brings opportunities for emergent change, then the choice for stagnation becomes all the more intolerable.
A commitment to community inclusion affirms a larger commitment, to the diversity that keeps society healthy and harmonious. That may mean speaking our minds even if doing so triggers discomfort, reaching out to the excluded even when it feels awkward, and engaging in visible civic action even where we risk angry rejection. Moreover, by awakening to our communities, we may become far more aware of what is present within them, and taking place all around us - the good, bad, and ugly. In the words of Marshall McLuhan, “there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.”
Contemplating “what is happening” means taking the long-term view. It is in response to the need for wide-ranging vision that national stakeholders, including the Faculty for Social Wellbeing and the Malta Foundation for the Wellbeing of Society, are placing increasing focus on issues of social harmony and wellbeing. By resisting erasure and dealing with differences, we can more effectively question the dominant social and economic structures of society. By nurturing society, we can put some order in the world and give ourselves a valuable opportunity to grow alongside others.
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Peter Farrugia is a visiting lecturer and Research Support Officer at the Faculty for Social Wellbeing