by Steven Poole
In the domestic sphere, ‘community’ really begins to earn its Unspeak stripes when the sense of shared interests is projected on to people whom the majority considers ‘other’. The gay community, the black community, the Jewish community, the Muslim community: thus are all gay, black, Jewish, or Muslim people regularly forced to coalesce into homogeneous groups by the language of US and British politicians and news media. At first this form of language looks unexceptionable: it merely adds the warm and fuzzy connotations of ‘community’ in what might be thought a welcoming or respectful fashion. But if it is respectful, it connotes respect for what is irremediably alien. To say that Jewish people, taken all together, form a ‘Jewish community’ is to say that they are separate, that they associate among themselves but keep themselves aloof from others, and it implies further that, by virtue of being Jewish, they all think alike.
As Ian Mayes, readers’ editor (ombudsman) of the Guardian, notes, this use of ‘community’ tends to imply ‘that there isn’t a diversity of opinion’.41 ‘The principle is the same one,’ Mayes adds, as when ‘we try to dissuade people from talking about “the disabled” or “a diabetic”, which tries to define the whole by the part.’ Similarly, ‘gay community’ or ‘black community’ defines the people so labelled entirely in terms of their gayness or blackness. To the extent that we can be said to be members of ‘communities’, we are members of many at once: for example, the community of one’s workmates, or sports team, or TV show discussion forum. But people described as ‘the gay community’ or ‘the Muslim community’ are allowed to belong to only one, which defines their whole identity.
This use of ‘community’ is mirrored in another feel-good term that may in fact hide a darker meaning: ‘tolerance’. If people congratulate themselves on ‘tolerating’ others, it may be because they already find them uncongenial in some way. One tolerates a friend’s annoying habit, or a mild toothache. To tolerate is not to embrace. George W. Bush displayed the weasel use of ‘tolerance’ when asked, during the third Presidential debate in 2004, whether he thought that homosexuality was a choice. ‘I don’t know, Bob. I just don’t know,’ Bush said, playing for time. Then he found the appropriate homily: ‘I do know that we have a choice to make in America, and that’s to treat people with tolerance and respect and dignity.’42 This might be read as meaning: gay people deserve tolerance, sure – but that doesn’t mean we have to like them. We tolerate what we despise, as the hippo tolerates the flea. We will ‘tolerate’ their ‘community’, as long as it doesn’t impinge upon ours. Of course, one is not morally obliged to feel warm and fuzzy towards those whose rights one is nevertheless prepared vigorously to defend. But to congratulate oneself for one’s ‘tolerance’ is sometimes actively to display distaste.
Consider, by contrast, how relatively rarely one hears of ‘the heterosexual community’ or ‘the white community’, or even ‘the Christian community’. In the US and Britain, to be white, heterosexual, and Christian is the default position, and so carries the privilege of not having to be defined by a limiting ‘identity’. Only those who do not fit the white, heterosexual, Christian template are described as forming ‘communities’, and in this way the word already bespeaks a kind of contempt for people who are somehow ‘other’ and so naturally will huddle together for warmth and mutual reassurance. It is further assumed that, in such an embattled position, ‘their’ interest will be more militantly homogeneous than ‘ours’.
It will often be reported, indeed, that a ‘community’ is demanding, or opposing, some political action, as though black or gay people operate like bees, with a hive mind. What is really happening in such cases is that self-appointed or elected or media-christened ‘community leaders’ are speaking to reporters or politicians, and their views are taken as representative of the entire group. And they may even, like all politicians, fight among themselves for primacy. Stephen Whittle, head of editorial policy at BBC News, says that there are often many different ‘people competing to be, at least in media terms, the “leader of the community”’.43 But the people whom they claim to represent often resist the reification of their ‘community’ in this way. ‘There is no such thing as the Muslim community,’ Asim Siddiqui, chairman of a group of Muslim professionals, told the Observer.44 ‘There are communities.’
Yet, especially in television news, producers are not interested in having three Muslims carefully and soberly explaining the nuances of differing opinions among Muslim citizens, as one might easily see three white, heterosexual people arguing the toss about some subject which, by virtue of the fact that they are white, heterosexual people, is assumed to be neutral and of interest to people of all ethnicities and sexual habits. What producers want instead is one person who can by visual or aural synecdoche represent all Muslims, and so that is what they get. BBC World radio news presenter Kirsty Lang explains how it works: ‘In the context of a very short news story, there just ain’t time’ to represent differences of opinion, she observes. She describes the typical situation facing a journalist: ‘Very often, you’re in a hurry looking for a quote, and you take the quote from the first person you ring up from your list of “community leaders in Brixton”.’45 Politicians, too, will fall into this kind of shorthand trap. Discussing Britons’ variety of religious and ethnic affiliations in the wake of the London Underground bombings of 7 July 2005, Tony Blair said:
If you talk to, as I say, the majority of the Muslim community here, or the Hindu community here, or the Sikh community here, or the Jewish community here, or the Chinese community here, any of those communities integrate very intensely but they still keep their own culture alive and their own identity alive, and I don’t think that’s a problem.46
Of course, there was no sense in which Blair could possibly have talked to ‘the majority of the Muslim community’, or that many Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, or Chinese, for that matter. Certainly he would have talked to some ‘community leaders’, though it would be interesting to know if he asked them how they derived their authority to speak for so many other Muslim or Chinese people. In his incontinent use of ‘community’, Blair was perpetuating the fiction that all Muslims or Sikhs or Jews in Britain (‘here’ clearly meant the same as ‘in this country’ earlier in the speech) were united in one mind. Contrarily, in a denunciation of the ‘glib, facile word’, former Guardian editor Peter Preston sought to limit ‘community’, if it must be used at all, to small neighbourhoods:
I can, with endeavour, find Bangladeshi communities in the East End, Saudi communities just off the Edgware Road, Pakistani communities in Bradford and Indian communities in Leicester, plus huddles of Afghans and niches of Iraqis, all of them with mosques and imams but none of them part of a wider ‘community’.47
Even so, Preston was himself perpetuating, only on a smaller geographical scale, the notion of a ‘community’ necessarily being a group who would congregate in ‘huddles’: other, afraid, defensive.
‘They’ have their own communities, but they interpenetrate with ‘our’ community, so it is said, in ways which would make for a confusing scribble if you attempted to draw the appropriate Venn diagram. ‘Most people understand,’ said Tony Blair, ‘that you can have your own religion and your own culture but still feel integrated into the mainstream of a community.’48 This ‘mainstream’ was rather vague: was it the local neighbourhood in question, or was it a fictional national ‘community’, the non-community that was the white Anglo-Saxon community? Perhaps only a tiresome literalist would demand to know what ‘our’ community was. It was easy to recognise it as long as it did not contain too many of ‘them’.
Community spirit
This modern political emphasis on ‘community’ was not initiated by British leaders dreaming of a lost rural England. President Bill Clinton got there earlier, exhorting Americans in his 1993 inaugural address: ‘Let us all take more responsibility, not only for ourselves and our families, but for our communities and our country […] I challenge a new generation o
f young Americans to a season of service […] keeping company with those in need, reconnecting our torn communities.’49 Clinton continued to harp on this theme throughout his time in office, reminding his audience of the devastation that would follow from the loss of what he wished existed: ‘If we have no sense of community, the American dream will continue to wither.’50 On other occasions he let the word stand alone, using it in a tremblingly phatic way that was emptied of all specific meaning: ‘Old-fashioned Americans for a new time. Opportunity. Responsibility. Community.’51 This must have reverberated in people’s minds as a kind of rhetorical slam-dunk. For in 2005 the Democratic Party, jealous of the well-oiled Republican propaganda machine, unveiled the results of much hard thinking about how best to ‘frame’ their ‘message’. The new slogan? ‘Prosperity. Opportunity. Community.’52 Pretty radical. Clinton’s ‘responsibility’, it was presumably thought, might scare people who didn’t want to be responsible; let’s offer them ‘prosperity’ instead, for who does not want to be rich? And good old ‘community’ was still going strong.
Where had Clinton himself learned the magic power of the c-word? Apparently from the sociologist Amitai Etzioni, professor at George Washington University, whose 1993 book The Spirit of Community was ‘spotted on President Clinton’s desk’, who was described as ‘a favoured guru of the Clinton administration’,53 and who had also reportedly been influencing the thinking of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, not yet in power, on the other side of the Atlantic.54 Etzioni’s thinking, which was known as ‘communitarianism’, envisioned families, schools, churches, and civil organisations taking over much of the state’s work. In practice this meant, among other things, more equivocal support for the poor, as Etzioni explained when discussing Clinton’s policies in 1993:
The welfare reform that Clinton favors – demanding that those on welfare either find work or repay their debt through service to the community – further illustrates the direction he is moving. There is debate as to at what point does demanding responsible behavior from welfare recipients turn into cruel punishment (e.g., cutting payments if a woman on welfare conceives more children), but the message is unmistakable: social responsibility will be encouraged with more than warm words: it will be underwritten with special incentives and, perhaps, even penalties.55
‘Reform’ has long been a useful term. Oddly, it contains two contradictory senses, as Raymond Williams noted: ‘(i) to restore to its original form; (ii) to make into a new form’.56 Neither of those actions necessarily implies making what is re-formed better, and yet ‘reform’ also inevitably carries a sense of amelioration. Williams argues that this is owed to the first sense of restoration, because an earlier condition or state of affairs was consistently assumed to be ‘less corrupted’, and notes that the English Reformation of the sixteenth century ‘had a strong sense of purification and restoration, even when it needed new forms and institutions to achieve this’.
Modern political senses of ‘reform’, on the other hand, have played a clever trick. They transfer the positive implication of reform-as-restoration on to the other meaning of reform as mere change. The result is a sense of ‘reform’ which implies that anything new must automatically be better than what came before. It is not new – radical English democrats in the eighteenth century were called ‘reformists’. But now any change may be called a ‘reform’: the word symbolises the central non-idea of all ‘modernising’ rhetoric. (Said Tony Blair: ‘Jesus was a moderniser.’)57 Blair’s ‘House of Lords reform’ consisted not of returning to an even more archaic Lords but gradually eliminating hereditary peers and stuffing their benches instead with political appointees. Clinton’s ‘welfare reform’, too, represented a change, but not one that was unarguably better for those on welfare.
And the word ‘reform’ is so good at what it does that all political parties claim to be in the reform business: George W. Bush’s attempts in 2004 and 2005 to privatise pensions in the US were argued under the rubric of ‘social security reform’, with the added rhetorical trick that the social-security system was claimed to be in a ‘crisis’, so that to reform it would be not just a change for the better but a kind of heroic intervention. Meanwhile, according to The Economist, ‘labour-market reform’ is the preferred term for restructuring pensions to dissuade people from retiring early. What kind of ‘reform’ might this entail? Well, ‘Germany has recently made a welcome start by cutting jobless benefits.’58 Welcome to some, no doubt, but not evidently to the jobless.
Just call any proposed change a ‘reform’, indeed, and people may assume that it will be an improvement, even if all you are doing is getting rid of people who disagree with you, or trying to save some federal dollars so you can give them back in electorate-pleasing tax cuts.
The very word ‘reform’ thus argues efficiently in favour of itself, whatever it actually is, in paradigmatic Unspeak fashion. As used by communitarians and their political disciples in phrases such as ‘welfare reform’, however, it represented not an offer but a demand. In the ‘communities’ that would blossom after such ‘reform’, there could be no rights without responsibilities, a web of mutuality. Etzioni argued that ‘for the ship of state to progress, everyone must pull the oars’.59 He emphasised the idea of ‘social responsibility’,60 which became a key phrase of New Labour rhetoric.61
Evidently this notion of ‘community’ laid the groundwork for the Blair government’s later legislation against what was considered ‘anti-social’. As Jack Straw explained to Parliament in 1998, Asbos had at first been proposed as ‘community safety orders’, before the snappier name was found.62 To complete the circle of logic, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders were then justified by appeal to – what else? – the sanctity of community. We needed to be protected, insisted Blair in 2004, from ‘anti-social behaviour within our communities’.63 It was the enemy within. It was George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, with the ‘anti-social’ playing the roles of the zombies. The community could survive only as long as it was regularly purged.
Also a threat to the fictionally homogeneous ‘community’ in Britain were ‘asylum seekers’, those seeking to stay in the country on the grounds that they were persecuted in their place of origin. The term ‘asylum seeker’ had gradually replaced ‘refugee’, shifting the emphasis from what a person was fleeing to the demands he was making on the country he arrived in. It was safe to call people ‘refugees’ as long as they remained elsewhere in the world (as, for example, those displaced by the 2004 Asian tsunami); but as soon as they arrived on British shores they became ‘asylum seekers’.
Moreover, they were often described as ‘bogus asylum seekers’: a rabble-rousing piece of nonsense. There could be no such thing as a ‘bogus asylum seeker’: whatever one’s motivations, one was simply an asylum seeker up until the time when one’s request for asylum was either granted or denied; the idea of a ‘bogus asylum seeker’ destroyed any presumption of innocence or sincerity. The term ‘bogus asylum seekers’ was first employed by ministers of the Conservative government in the mid-1980s, during controversy over the admission of Sri Lankan Tamils.64 The phrase was found to play so efficiently to public prejudices that it was enthusiastically adopted by the incoming Labour government in the late 1990s, when it was used regularly by then Home Secretary Jack Straw.65 Newspapers that traded eagerly in fearmongering adopted the phrase as their own: the Daily Mail reported approvingly of Straw’s plan for bogus asylum seekers’ to be ‘thrown out to prevent them from disappearing into the community’.66 The idea that they might ‘disappear’ into the ‘community’ pictured people from foreign lands as an invisible infection, an epidemic virus. Perhaps the Daily Mail was still furious at the fact that the French had disappeared into the community a millennium earlier: it must not be allowed to happen again.
The increasingly hysterical concentration on asylum seekers in British politics was often code for simple racism, appealing to a fear of being overrun. Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett conjured an image
of the children of asylum seekers ‘swamping the local school’.67 According to a 2005 poll, Britons on average believed that 21 per cent of the entire population was comprised of immigrants; the actual figure was 8 per cent.68 ‘The asylum-seeker issue has been great for us,’ chuckled the leader of the neofascist British National Party.69
A more sophisticated treatment of the concept was evident in a Conservative poster visible on billboards in Britain during the 2005 election campaign. In a typeface that mimicked the handwriting of the barely literate, the poster read: ‘It’s not racist to impose limits on immigration.’ Below was the Conservatives’ campaign slogan: ‘ARE YOU THINKING WHAT WE’RE THINKING?’ First, the words implied that the Labour government did not already ‘impose limits on immigration’, which was false. Second, the phrase ‘It’s not racist’ functioned deliberately to introduce the idea of a racist sentiment, just as the words ‘I’m not a racist but …’ invariably precede a statement of bigotry. ‘It’s not racist’ worked in combination with the nose-tapping appeal to something unspoken but sincerely thought: are you thinking what we’re thinking? The poster as a whole could thus be translated: We think there’s nothing wrong with being racist; in fact we are racist, just like you; but we all know that we cannot publicly admit to being racist; so let’s just deny that we are racist while continuing to think the same old racist thoughts. The poster as a whole was a brilliant piece of Unspeak, appealing to and endorsing a silent ‘community’ of resentful xenophobia: the hate that dare not speak its name.