The answer is: communities are real entities, just as real and just as strange as the abstract forms of being, quantum wavefunctions, from which concrete being is shaped. But no more real nor more strange.
To see the reality of communities (and some other `abstract’ entities), we can return to my basic claim about being, one compatible with the teachings of St John the Evangelist in the Christian Testament and also with quantum physics and its basic understanding of concrete matter. I wrote briefly about the first in one of my first blog posts: Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation: Part 1. (There was no follow-up to “Part 1”.) I wrote just as briefly about the second in another early post: Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality:.
This is how I’ve been writing and speaking:
- Relationships are primary over stuff.
- Relationships form stuff; stuff doesn’t come to exist and then start forming relationships.
I’ve generalized the second claim so that stuff is being—abstract as well as concrete. This is where we find hints of greater understandings than what is possible with the conventional split between being which is concrete and then abstractions which describe relationships between concrete being. This seemed pretty reasonable in the centuries before Darwin and Einstein, before we began to realize that concrete stuff comes into being as the result of a `collapse’ (truly dangerous word) of something strange which we describe in terms of the wavefunction of quantum physics. Then again I say that wavefunction is a real form of being and our description is like the description of oxygen or more complex concrete entities. That wavefunction exists as does oxygen. And, of course, complex entities don’t just come into existence ready to love each other, to worship God, to build cities. Love comes from neural and hormonal activity directed toward, first in the opinion of many evolutionary theorists, offspring and only gradually toward mates; after many millenia of showing signs of burying loved ones as if preparing them for an afterlife and of showing related signs of gradual awareness of divine forces (maybe fertility goddesses at first), human beings developed instincts conducive to animistic paganism; and anatomically modern humans existed for as much as 100,000 years of technology at the same level as archaic human beings such as Neanderthals before starting to farm and to build cities. So far as the last goes, there is some serious evidence that farming and urban living led to an acceleration in human evolution—especially in abstract reasoning skills. Those modern human beings who retained primitive technology developed by apish human lines might not have had minds of the sort we’d recognize as being fully human.
My viewpoint is generous with the name of `being’ rather than stingy. One way of explaining this summary is to say that all that is not God is created by Him; there are not abstractions separate from God and from Creations but rather abstractions accessible to a concrete, flesh-and-blood creature just because those abstractions are also creatures. If they were not part of Creation, how could a creature access them?
Is the thing-like being of this world really so concrete? Equivalently, are the abstractions which develop in the adolescent brain real being? Do our mental conceptions deal with abstract being as real as the concrete being our hands and eyes deal with? Are the mathematics which seems to come to apish creatures of flesh-and-blood as if by magic true being, an abstract form of being? Was Dr Johnson’s common-sense (common-foot?) rebuttal of Bishop Berkeley’s claim about being as valid as it was painful? Would Dr Johnson have said his beloved Anglican Church wasn’t real because he couldn’t literally kick it with his foot? He could have kicked Winchester Cathedral; he could have kicked an Anglican bishop or a devout widow; he couldn’t have kicked the Anglican Church as such. Certainly, he couldn’t have kicked the seemingly more vaporous Body of Christ, which he believed in though he might have differed from me in the particular definition of that Body.
What would Dr Johnson have said about the Body of Christ, or any of its particular communal members—such as the Anglican or Catholic or Orthodox churches? If pushed to speak about something so dangerous—and not just because of the religious conflicts still remembered in terms of blood and mutilated human beings, he might very well have spoken in terms similar to those his Deistic (or atheistic?) friend, Adam Smith, had used in discussing the economies of Scotland and England and perhaps much of Western Europe. The Invisible Hand was perhaps partly a metaphor to Adam Smith, but it’s effects were observable, for real. If it was truly a metaphor, it was one meant to speak of real relationships among human beings, individual and well as communal (beginning with families and partners). Those relationships organized economies as if by magic. We can believe in magic or we can hold the belief which is the modern equivalent of magic: it just happens and so we’ll wave our hands about and move on. Some Medieval thinkers claimed a man couldn’t be made of soul and body where soul is of a different sort of being from body; assuming such plays too loose with the concept of being. I’d say the same about abstractions and thing-like being—ultimately, they have to be derived from the same sort of proto-stuff which is some sort of abstract being, such as the wavefunction of quantum physics.
The economic relationships observed by Adam Smith shaped a true economic community into being.
Unfortunately, the invisible forces of magic have been banished only to be replaced by a dullness of thought, not what Adam Smith would have wished upon us. We think that so long as we deny magic, we are being rational and scientific. The simple, including those who choose simplicity, just wave their hands; the more sophisticated write and speak vaguely of self-organizing forces, imagining that such is sufficient to explain how millions of human beings can act as if one, how the populations of United States or Russia or Vietnam can act `as-if’ those states have a true existence and only as-if. To be sure, there are many, especially knowledgeable historians and novelists, who accept reality and do write and speak of nations and other communities as having true existence. That existence is sometimes a lot more fluid, more ephemeral, than some would admit, but those nations and other communities can show signs of unity and coherence and completeness during their existence, momentary or long-lasting. It is sometimes appropriate to speak of real effects as being caused as if by an entity, but sometimes `as-if’ should be `is’.
In our ordinary discourse we have little power to think or speak of such matters as entities which remain themselves while being fully members of one or more communities. We know only about individuals integrated into Soviet or Borg-like collectives or else communities which are nothing but voluntary and contractual gatherings of individuals. I suspect that family-centered liberals, whether free-market `conservatives’ or big-government liberals or free-market and big-government whatevers, have done nothing—or at least have been able to do nothing—to protect the family just because its very existence is in conflict with their more deeply held beliefs. To them, communities at all levels and scales are nominal entities just existing to serve freestanding individuals. These very modern thinkers and doers wish mostly to keep these individual human beings free from membership in any community claiming to have real existence—including religious communities such as the People of Israel or the Body of Christ.
Naming something doesn’t always indicate true existence of that something, but any something which is named builds up evidence for real existence the longer that name, or similar names, is used and the more essential it becomes to general human understandings of their world, including our own human being. I claim that some named but invisible entities, such as `mind’ or `soul’ and `community’ and many mathematical entities, have existence as real as that of matter which itself comes mysteriously from some sort of particularization of what is named as `quantum wavefunctions’, mathematical functions which are—in my opinions—real being, though a bit abstract to say the least.