Belonging? Community? Shared values? These, surely, have become the weasel words of contemporary social analysis. Overblown and overplayed, they have been robbed of much of their meaning. They have come to sound more like mantras than social goals. Indeed, the word ‘village’ is de rigueur if you’re writing a real estate advertisement or creating a promotional brochure for a new high-rise development: the vertical village is with us.

It’s even become fashionable to speak of ‘the Australian community’, as if Australians were a close-knit little group, sharing in the life of some village where everyone knows everyone, everyone trusts everyone, and from which we draw a powerful and sustaining sense of identity and emotional security. Yet we cling hopefully, and sometimes desperately, to words like community and village, precisely because we know, deep in our guts, that any successful, civilised society would aspire to that utopian prospect.

Perhaps we also sense that the fondly imagined community is under threat, and we suspect the consequences of that might be serious. In fact, the consequences could hardly be more serious: our moral sense is, after all, a social sense.

Read the full essay at Australian Policy Online http://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/Real_communities_Mackay_Ed24.pdf