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Interview |
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“ The idea
of community is a valid idea to apply
to our social experience –
sometimes” Kevin Loughran
graduated from Queen’s University, |
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‘The Idea of Community, Social Policy
and Self’ is your first book. What
made you decide to write it? Well, in the areas of work I have been involved in
for some years – community work, social services, social policy, the idea of
community is very common. And it is
becoming more so. I have come to feel that it is badly overused. It is often used without clear
meaning. In fact, it is often used
quite unthinkingly. It is seen as a ‘good’ thing, a good thing to be
associated with. A lot of job titles
have ‘community’ attached to them. A
lot of government policies talk about community. A lot of institutions talk about community
and describe themselves as being community oriented in some way or other. I get the impression that you are not entirely
happy with the way in which the idea of community is used? Yes, in fact I
increasingly find myself being irritated with the uses of the word
‘community’ and the label ‘community’.
Often it seems to me to have become a habit of expression. It seems to me to be attached to job titles
or titles of institutions without any clear logic or without there being any
clear distinction between that job or institution and other jobs and
institutions. Would you like to give an example of this? One example I have noticed recently is
the term ‘community pharmacy’. Why on
earth use the term community for a place which is a private business,
privately owned, just because it happens to be doing its business in a public
street? Would you talk for example
about a community newsagent? Or a community fruit and veg shop? But this is
just a recent example. Very often
people talk about certain jobs and use the word community, like community nurse
or community health visitor. And yet
there isn’t the difference between those jobs and other jobs to justify the
word. I am particular about words. Words should be used because they convey
meaning or information. At best when a
word like community is used unthinkingly, it conveys no information to people
– at worst it may seriously mislead people about the nature of what it is
they are looking at. And also of
course, it can be used by some people and by some institutions to put a gloss
on what they are doing that isn’t deserved. Would you then reject the use of the
idea of community, or simply the ways in which the idea is used? Well, certainly I would be happy if
there was a lot less use of the term.
And a lot less reliance on the idea than there is, but not because the
idea of community is not important. It’s precisely because it is
important that it should be used less, and more carefully. In fact I have come increasingly to think,
despite all the things that irritate me, that community is a fundamental
idea, or rather it touches on fundamental things. It touches on our social experience, on our
relationships with each other in groups There are quite a few books on the subject. Do you feel that your book has something
different to offer? Well, I feel that a lot
of books deal with the idea of community, or rather they touch on it, but
often they don’t really explore it.
They don’t really explore the idea as such; they don’t look at it
philosophically. A lot of books on
community or social policy for example, refer to the famous difficulty of
defining community and yet go on to take it for granted. They don’t ask what seems to me a necessary
and fundamental question – is there actually such a thing as community? Because I think you need to ask that
question before you can go on to discuss appropriate meanings of the
word. My own conclusion is that the
idea of community is a valid idea to apply to our social experience –
sometimes. But often it may not be, so
my central concern was to see where the idea of community may be valid and
useful and where it may not be.
Because often it is not sensible or useful or relevant, and yet
it is a fundamental idea. That’s why
for example in my book I give up on any attempt to define community, but rather
concentrate on applications of the idea that are useful and applications that
are not useful. Or as I have put it,
helpful or not helpful. You use the natural sciences quite a lot to examine
your subject. Has science always been
an interest of yours? I have become increasingly interested in
the natural sciences. I have come to
feel that the separation between the natural sciences on the one hand and the
social sciences and arts and humanities on the other that I grew up with is
wrong and damaging. It’s damaging to
our understanding of things and that separation can breed prejudice in one
field against another. I believe for
example that there is a lot of prejudice against the natural sciences among
people like myself who come from a non-scientific background. It’s a prejudice which I think can
sometimes be born from a sense of inferiority you can feel about a subject
you know little or nothing about. But
as I see it now the natural sciences, the social sciences, the arts and the
humanities so-called can all be, and I emphasise can be, simply
different ways of understanding more of the world around us and our
experience of the world and our experience of each other. Also I have referred a lot in the book to
the natural sciences because the subject of the book, the idea of community,
touches on questions about human nature, about the individual and the
social. How can you do that sensibly
without going into the natural sciences, especially into biology and questions
about evolution? There seems to have been a great deal of research
involved. Did you uncover anything,
which you didn’t expect to? Well, in terms of social policy for
example, the rejection of institutional care which seems to be common isn’t
always justified by actual experience.
The idea of community care rather than institutional care may be an
oversimplification and in any case for some people in some situations,
institutional care may in fact be better.
There was also the fact that very often community care, or care in the
community, or community services, sometimes might conceal isolation and
separation. That’s one of the reasons,
possibly one of the biggest reasons, why I distrust the word community. Because it tends to imply relationships,
when sometimes there may not be relationships to justify the term. I wasn’t surprised by evidence of people
rejecting community or going outside community. My awareness of this was one of the motives
in writing the book. Indeed, it’s an
area to which I would like to return more in future.
If you want to make good use of the idea of community, I feel you
should think about those situations in which people go outside of community,
in other words you should think about the limits of community. In fact, this
is an area especially in which I think my book is different from most others
on community that I have read myself, in that it very much examines the
limits to the significance of the idea of community. A lot
of the things I came across in the natural sciences were new to me; not
necessarily unexpected, but new. And
also looking at the idea of community in modern economic and social
conditions; what seems to be the simple idea a lot of people have about
globalisation and what is seen as the loss of community in the modern world are
just that – simple. It’s not at all as
straightforward or one-way as many people like to think.
Another area of research which did not in itself come as a complete
shock to me, but rather to the degree to which it was true, concerned
personal care for people who need support because of physical or mental
frailties or illness or whatever. I was struck by how often in these cases
the idea of community was not relevant because it simply didn’t correspond to
how people lived. You have read and studied a great deal in the
course of your research. Which writers
have been most important to you? It’s very hard to narrow it down, but in
many ways Karl Popper’s way of looking at things has influenced me a lot. I
have been influenced too by reading Karl Marx, or some of Karl Marx, though I
ended up disagreeing with most of his ideas.
But the process of working out that disagreement was important. Reading Richard Dawkins was important,
partly because I ended up disagreeing with a lot of his thinking. I found many of Mary Midgley’s ways of
putting things interesting. What I
have read of Thomas Hobbes I found very interesting for exactly the same
reason as with Karl Marx; I ended up disagreeing with most of his ideas, but
the process of working out my disagreement was important. Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State and
Utopia falls into the same category – the importance of working out one’s
disagreement with someone. Raymond
Plant’s book Community and Ideology is one of the most interesting and
useful books I have ever read on the subject.
A fundamentally useful book on the subject of community care is Martin
Bulmer’s The Social Basis of Community Care – an indispensable book on
the subject I feel. I found Jocelyn
Cornwell’s book Hard-earned Lives: Accounts of Health and Illness in Will there perhaps be another book from
you? Several books maybe, but that’s being
very optimistic! What does your publisher think? Well, you will have to talk to my agent! Idea of Community home | Contents |
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APJ Publications 2008 This page last updated 21st August 2008 |