Conflict and tension are everyday realities of life in a diverse community.
The perspectives of a diverse group of individuals are necessarily heterogeneous and incommensurable. Conflict and disagreement can be positive aspects of community life. They are the raw materials that drive meaningful discourse, creative ideas and innovation.
SOURCES FOR CONFLICT IN COMMUNITY
Greene (1988: 4-9) reminds us that the ecology of community life includes “ambiguities of various kinds, layers of determinateness.” Rather than trying to resolve these ambiguities, or striving for some chimerical technical fix, they must be embraced and incorporated into our thinking. This subtle distinction has provided Greene with a profound understanding of the nature of freedom. Freedom cannot be found in Kunderan “lightness of being,” in “private enclaves” or by striving alone for “success.” Freedom is bound up with the inevitable ambiguities of community life. “Freedom, like autonomy, is in many ways dependent on understanding these ambiguities, developing a kind of critical distance with respect to them.”
Greene, Maxine (1988) The Dialectic of Freedom. New York : Teachers’ College Press.
Bellah et al. (1996: 65) echo Alexis de Toqueville’s foretelling of the isolationism and erosions of genuine freedom that have arisen in the United States in the name of rugged “individualism.” Bellah and his team are careful to differentiate between true community and the “enclaves of shared interest” associated with adopting a “lifestyle”:
The notion that one discovers one's deepest beliefs in, and through, tradition and community is not very congenial to Americans. Most of us imagine an autonomous self existing independently, entirely outside any tradition and community, and then perhaps choosing one.
Bellah, Robert et al. (1996) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ROBERT BELLAH
American Sociologist
MAXINE GREENE
American Philosopher of Education
Andrew Brown (2005) Figure. Oil pastel, ink and charcoal on paper.
