One of the things that has been most beneficial for me from reading Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic is that it has given me better language to describe the situation we find ourselves in.  Case in point: Levin’s discussion of the difference between community and identity.  Both terms are deeply personal, but both terms have also been abstracted to our detriment.  Having asserted the need for a “mid-level subsidiarity” for common life, he tackles the difference.

This is why subsidiarity is not multiculturalism, or balkanization.  And it is also why a subcultural conservatism would have to be embodied in actual, living communities—rather than in identities, which can be hung on individuals.  Identity politics is the logical conclusion of the premises of our era of radical individualism.  A subcultural communitarianism is a counter-balance to that logic.  Once more it is the institutions of community and civil society – standing between the individual and the state—that turn out to be most needful in our time.

Community and identity are not the same them.  But the difference can be hard to grasp, because we have lately come to use the word “communities” to describe what are essentially just joint identities.  A genuine community is not an intangible mass grouping (like “Jewish Americans”), but a concrete, tangible grouping (like “our congregation”) that gives you a role, a place, and a set of relationships and responsibilities to other particular human beings.  Community involves a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them, and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life in common.

We tend to balk at such notions, partly because we want to be captains of our own ships.  Dependence and obligations can be difficult realities to embrace.  And our fleeing to a digital reality often compounds the situation.  “Life in common” that is meaningful will also probably be difficult, it keeps us from hedging our bets.  The national level would work best, then, when this is true of life at the local level.

The notion that you can only understand your place in American life by conceiving of yourself as living in the national community is not a communitarian idea, however, but a form of radical individualism, because in a nation as large as ours, it is not possible to live in actual community with the entire society . . . National cohesion  . . . is not the same as interpersonal community and cannot ultimately substitute for it.

(image from placebrandobserver.com)