Communities, seen at the object level, are not primarily communities formed through beliefs. Of course, there do exist communities formed by shared belief as, for example, religious communities, which are self-avowedly so. But largely what binds people into communities are customs and traditions, and these do not necessarily involve articulated beliefs. Even when one finds a set of well-articulated beliefs in a person holding allegiance to a tradition, it is not at all clear that those traditions command commitments to such beliefs in the same way as Christian theology enjoins commitment to certain beliefs as part of being a Christian. In other words, beliefs and attitudes are not the horizon which defines a community. However, with the emergence of the sociological discourse on communities there also emerges the attempt to render the diverse object-level talk prevalent within the communities into a form of meta-level talk, representing these communities as if they are formed by shared beliefs.[11]
A web of related concepts comes into play once such a meta-level talk of belief takes over. If communities are communities formed by beliefs, then, sustaining a community is tantamount to sustaining the particular beliefs held by that community. However, beliefs, by their very nature, are fragile. Scientists who have to believe, at least provisionally, in particular theories as part of their work, (failing which it is impossible to further the research) are our best reporters on this fragility. They have to constantly provide justifications, protect their theories against external attack and internal leakage, and sometimes even abandon their cherished theories and take up others. In fact, the most exciting part of a scientific life lies in such propositional revisions.
A religious community[12] too is assailed by these very same challenges to its belief structure. However, in contradistinction to science, religion protects its beliefs by altering the very nature of the practical domain, the domain of its focus. Religion handles the practical domain as if it is a realm defined exclusively by a binary-evaluative norm of right and wrong.[13] Minimally, such a process involves re-describing objects in an evaluative/theological vocabulary, such that, outside the binary-evaluative appraisal, there are no other sorts of appraisals possible. A practical domain lends itself to description and appraisal in myriad forms, involving parameters of relevance, appropriateness, precision, importance, consequence and desirability among others and is not exhausted by any one parameter, or even a set of them. Foregrounding only the binary-evaluative appraisal as the most exhaustive or the most fundamental parameter to appraise a practical domain is what renders it into a theological domain. Thus, for instance, homosexual acts, which as sexual practice, have evoked very different kinds of associations and appreciation amongst different groups at different times in different cultures, are transformed through a particular religious theological re-description of them into sin, i.e. actions that are enjoined as don’ts, about which one could either be aware or ignorant.[14]
Under such circumstances, where communities are purportedly defined by beliefs, conflicts between communities take the form of a conflict between the truth claims entertained by them. And where those beliefs are not subject to revision, conflicts take a particularly vexing shape. The only way by which such conflicts can be reconciled is by taking recourse to thin concepts such as tolerance, freedom and rights. Since the beliefs by themselves are not subject to scrutiny or revision in terms of day-to-day situations, the object-level talk within a community has to give way to the meta-level talk about the rights and claims of the community as a corporate body: leading to the emergence of ideas such as ‘every community has equal claim to survive in the world’, and ‘it has equal right to worship and equal freedom of conscience to pursue its version of the truth’.
Communities defined on religious lines thus incessantly produce a meta-level discourse about themselves, such that, insofar as they are successful, they effectively invert the primacy of the object-level talk in favour of the meta-level talk. All particular learning situations, distinctions emerging from specific contexts, and judgments, tastes and standards contingent upon particular learning situations are now seen not as the basis for formulating an abstract meta-level description of the community, but are seen as derivable from some particular version of the meta-level talk itself. Therefore, for instance, it is not our dealings as family, as comrades, and the prevailing sympathy and co-operation therein that lead us towards articulating the idea of a community, but the particular idea of a community, say St. Paul’s idea of Ecclesia Christi (the Christian Church), which is supposed to have instilled in the first place our love for family, comradeship and cooperation.
Another theoretical consequence of this picture also has to be noticed. When the meta-level talk assumes primacy, it leads to the supposition that there is but one common world. Learning to go about this world is tantamount to acquiring a true picture of fit with it. Different prevailing versions either have to be reduced to this true picture or have to be discarded as false pictures. In contrast, when the object-level talk retains primacy, a radically different approach to action prevails. Learning to deal with the world occurs in many different circumstances and styles. In fact, the ‘world’, as in the case of the pronouns of a language, is a convenient way of talking when an assemblage of learning processes are to be talked about: there are as many worlds as there are learning situations. Integrating or differentiating these different worlds based on the needs of particular action situations is an essential aspect of our being in the world, i.e., the way we are. Therefore, it is not a matter of fundamental conflict that there are different kinds of goings-about the world. They are, after all, an invitation to learning. A bend in the road is not an adversary of the driver. It is simply one of the many things she has to learn to negotiate. In instances where this learning is suspended it leads to stereotypes, and in situations of teaching and communicating this learning to others, it gets schematized and, among other things, may be formulated in the form of theoretical propositions.
Armed with this distinction, we can now examine the nature of community as envisaged by liberals and nationalists and the problems it leads to.
Model of Community underlying Liberalism and Nationalism
We can characterize nationalism as a meta-level talk because its engagement with the community is as if it is a corporate body. This explains nationalism’s recourse to the notion of sovereignty, its celebration of the history of the community, its insistence on the claims arising from historical injustices suffered by the community and the right to reparation. That we hardly encounter any of these concepts in the object-level learning situations we are shaped by as members of a community is evidence enough to assume that the incidence of those concepts hinge upon looking at the community at a meta-level.
Such meta-level talk is also privileged by the liberal tradition, but in a different manner. The liberals’ focus is on the community in its political dimension. And in their scheme, the political community ought to be liberal. Here onwards, therefore, I will use the term ‘liberal community’ for this understanding of political community. Since the liberal community, especially in the age of nation-states, is perceived as having the task of adjudicating between the contending claims of particular given communities (within the territory of a nation-state), it is obviously a meta-community in relation to those given communities. The latter is where particular virtues (and vices) are fostered; the more general and arguably primary virtues are developed in the former. Thus, according to the liberals, such general virtues function as a final court of appeal for other contending virtues developed within given communities. This position is sometimes stated normatively and sometimes historically: stated normatively, the general virtues espoused by the liberal community have to be seen as logically prior to the specific virtues of given communities, where the latter can be derived from the former, or the former constitute the basic units to which the latter can be reduced. Stated historically, the liberal tenet is that the historical experience of all communities presupposes, or anticipates through its many imperfections, the coming of a liberal community.[15]
