Wordwatch: Community

An embroidery artist, Jess de Wahls, was recently “cancelled” by the Royal Academy (R.A.) for having posted blogs in which she questioned some contemporary ideas about gender. She had been attacked, often viciously, on social media, and the R.A. in its wisdom decided to remove her work from its shop. They were obliged to do this, they said, because they “stand with the LGBT community”. 

There are so many new words in this story that it’s hard to know where to begin. New though they are, you are probably familiar with them, as they crop up in the media all the time: “cancelled” and “gender” in the above paragraph have taken on new significance, and “blog” is a brand-new word. However, it’s been with us long enough now to seem well-established. We are learning the meanings of “trans” and “transphobe”, not to mention “cis”, which like “trans” is Latin, but used in an entirely new way. If you want these terms explained, please ask someone else. The word I’d like to focus on is “community”. 

Not a new word at all, but one which, I must point out, has become much more common in our daily discourse than it used to be. This is because it’s a word that can be used to strongly convey political ideas – and political is where we’re all heading, I fear. We are steadily being pushed into thinking of ourselves not as individuals with independent lives and opinions, but as members of political groups or “communities”. 

So the R.A. invoked its obligation to “stand with the LGBT community”, as though any such community existed. It’s a political construct (another popular word in this context) by which individuals of hugely varying types and inclinations are herded into a politically conceived compound that represents them all.

The absurdity of the notion is evident from that list of initials itself, which is often arbitrarily extended to include “Q” and other letters, and even the mathematical plus sign “+”. Which human individual would want to be designated like that? (Better than –, I suppose.) 

Three-quarters of a century ago Antonio Gramsci and his follower Rudi Dutschke, members of the group of philosophers known as the “Frankfurt Marxists”, propounded the idea of a “long march through the institutions” – a revolution quietly but steadily increasing momentum until it has absorbed all the institutions by which the capitalist West defines itself. Whether those philosophers intended what is happening today in Great Britain and America (important components of “the capitalist West”), something of the sort seems to be afoot. 

They introduced “political correctness”, and many more ploys have emerged since, especially in the last five years. The “gender wars”, setting people against each other for trumped-up reasons, have all the marks of a similar initiative. We have recently learnt how the once worthy and harmless National Trust has been politicised, and the Royal Academy too.

The Anglican Church has always been an explicitly political body, being a designated element in the British Constitution since its inception under the Tudors in the sixteenth century. But now it too is being reconfigured. We don’t need parish churches or priests, we are told. Every householder can be her own clergyperson. 

The other day I was walking past a local church and noticed a large new sign outside it. “Welcome!” it said, and closed its message with: “Faith, hope, community and love”. If that isn’t politicisation, I don’t know what is. St Paul must be kicking himself for not having thought of that improvement to his famous slogan.