Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

Living Community is an ideal textbook for school age and mature students who wish to examine their ethical responsibility to the world around them. It is a practical resource for social workers, community organisers, and human rights advocates, as well as offering the layperson no nonsense pragmatic options for how to become more involved in one’s community. The book draws from sociological and psychological theorists, studies, and statistics to ground the coursework in these current and reputable scientific approaches to the study of human behaviour.

Along with secular attitudes, the book also gives examples on moral social behaviour from a wide variety of religious texts. Using a method of Socratic questioning, Living Community concerns the reader with developing themselves as active, participating, and responsible members of the community. It encourages the reader to develop their own definitions and meanings regarding the complexity of the relationship between self and community, and thus echoes Plato’s Republic in many ways, as Living Community asks the question: “What is the ideal society and how do we make it so?”

Rather than make explicit an approach of collectivist anarchist self determination Dave Andrews bases chapters (or ‘lessons’) in contemporary examples and biographical stories, parables, studies of social development, articles on community attitudes, numerous statistical analysis, and a wide variety of psychological approaches such as determinism, behaviourism and cognitive therapy. What makes this book especially clever, (and incredibly marketable) is that it is, in form, and to some extent content, similar to the ever popular self-help book. However, Living Community is about living as a conscious member of a society, and also about empowering the entire community not just the self. Thus it differs integrally from the self-help book’s materialist approach of status-orientated personal empowerment that privileges feeling good over doing good. Instead, Living Community is about understanding the relationship between members of the community and how all our actions affect each other’s quality of life.

The selection of research grounds the idealistic focus of the text. While it consciously aims to allow the reader the freedom to choose for themselves their own subjective answers in regard to how to help others, it undeniably promotes altruism. Dave Andrews offers numerous examples of how selfishness and exploitation fracture and weaken communities, while fair dealing and communication ensure their smooth running. Thus although the author adapts an approach of sitting back and feeding the reader numerous examples and questions, the book is framed by a presumption that people will look out for their community if this means it will improve their own life. In the context of our current individualist society, the subtly of this approach is extremely effective as it establishes the reciprocal nature of community involvement, and suggests that innate goodness exists in all humans, because without it our society would not function at all.

This presumption of the innate good in all people works in this context as most people like to believe themselves to be good; thus the self-examination of the course work is less daunting. The questioning of the self in the main section of the book not only evokes Socratic method, but also sends the reader into the realm of psychoanalysis. Fundamental questions of identity, motivation, fears, and loss, are not easy to take at the best of times. However, since the aim of this book is more about how one can become better able to co-operate, assist and influence social harmony, these hard questions act as a form of initiation into ‘humanity’. The self is broken down into a component of humans acting as a group. This acts to remove the sense of powerlessness and isolation of the individual versus society. Instead of an ‘us and them’ strategy, the book promotes a perspective of seeing the world in terms of their only being an ‘us’ and we each have a responsibility to the whole. The use of current social statistics and studies means the book is able to stabilise its idealistic aims with the contemporary lived experiences of people. These references legitimise the book’s philosophy by demonstrating examples of altruism in action.

Living Community offers a style and language perfect for community workers to follow in dealing with funding and bodies of authority. It wonderfully places itself as a bridge between our ideals and ways in which we can practically achieving them. While utopian in theme, the book’s structural approach of questions, exercises, readings, and bullet point notes, means that it reflects modern bureaucratic styles as well as offering useful appendixes of grant resources and even the UN Declaration of Human Rights. This deeply practical book is an ideal reference for anyone who needs guidance, support, and funding, to be more effective, honest and ethical in their dealings with humanity. It essentially offers the choice of numerous established and possible avenues, steps, and opportunities, for exercising our rights to enjoy and contribute to the functioning and development of our social environment.

Living Community asks us to see the world as not outside or ‘around us’ but as a living and ever-changing connection between all humans, where the world, and all people, and everything, is one. This ‘we are all one machine’ approach dissolves the isolation of the self, and is the first step to seeing a world where all humans are the same. Once this idea of the self as a component in a greater whole is grasped, the next step Living Community takes is understanding that the only person we can change is ourself, but by doing so we inevitably change the world.


Living Community: An Introductory Course in Community Work
(2007)

By Dave Andrews
Publisher: Community Praxis Co-operative, Last-First Networks' Tafina Press
ISBN-10: 0-9757658-2-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-9757658-2-1
338p