Henry Tam explains why the true value of community lies in its ability to welcome and nurture our natural diversity.
Author: Henry Tam
Some politicians have been urging their left-of-centre party to align itself more with ‘traditional community values’. This push is often mislabelled ‘communitarian’ by commentators. Not only have communitarian thinkers (e.g., Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, Robert Bellah, Philip Selznick, Amitai Etzioni, David Miller, Jonathan Boswell, Henry Tam) consistently warned against fixating on any value of the past as though it must be valid for all time, they have set out why we need to understand how values change and adapt as human interactions evolve.
The problem with much contemporary championing of ‘traditional community values’ is that it functions mostly as a code for what some people idealise as ‘the good old days’ when immigrants were rarely seen, feminist voices were seldom raised, everybody loved God and country without question, nothing unconventional about sex or gender was spoken of, and there was barely a hint of frightful things like multiculturalism or internationalism.
At the heart of these so-called ‘traditional’ values is the aversion to diversity – more precisely, it is the aversion to any departure from a white, male, wealth dominated hierarchy that assigns a sense of superiority to each rung of the ladder, linked to the expectation of submissiveness from those placed below. Communitarians object to such an outlook not because it is supposedly ‘traditional’, but because decades, if not centuries, of communities’ experiences have found it to be inimical to human wellbeing, and that improvements to every aspect of life requires respectful openness to diverse participation.
History has shown us that there were values – once dearly held by some (e.g., in relation to slaves, servants, women, children) – which came to be rejected by communities because their oppressive impact was too much to bear. At the same time, other values and ways of living have become traditions for later generations.
There has never been a monolithic set of ‘traditional values’ that rule over any community through all time. Values are more akin to social entities like institutions that shape and get shaped by people’s lives – and are inevitably scrutinised by those affected by them. For any value to become and remain a part of an overall set of values, it has to pass ongoing tests of serving the community in terms of enabling its members to recognise and respond satisfactorily to the problems and opportunities that arise. This includes resolving any conflicts between value commitments that go against each other, leading to a deeper appreciation of what should be prioritised.
Communitarian thinking does not support abstract relativism which assumes that contrasting values are incommensurable. It recognises instead that human communities have learnt from long experience what it takes to compare rival values and social practices. One guiding approach that civilisations across the world have in fact converged on has come to be known as the golden rule: treat others as you would have others treat you.
This has two notable implications for the issue of diversity. Firstly, there is the question of scope. Should we limit reciprocal care and respect to only a small circle – say, just men of certain ranks in our community, to first-born sons, to those who belong to the same religious sect as us? Or do we go along with what has been found through centuries of interactions, that extending the scope of reciprocity – towards women, children, people from other lands, believers in different religions or none, and so on, helps to remove the antipathy fermented by discriminatory treatment, and paves the way for wider cooperation and enhances the chance of success through pooled efforts.
Secondly, there is the question of arrangement. How should we facilitate our reciprocal treatment in practice? We need institutional setups to enable mutual support. Places retreating to ‘just look to yourself, and leave others to their own devices’ have found their conditions worsening. But those prepared to explore and adapt societal arrangements to empower diverse citizens to channel their resources to help each other have achieved the most enviable outcomes on virtually all social, economic, environmental, and political indicators (most notably with the highly inclusive Nordic countries as found in global comparisons).
What communitarians favour is, therefore, the development of our values and practices through the embrace of diverse people, and exploration of diverse ideas, so that counter-productive barriers can be more readily identified and removed, and more satisfactory ways of working and living can be tried out and put in place.
It is only through open, cooperative learning, that members of any community can come to see what would really help or hurt them. No community has ever thrived through fossilising itself. Scientific research has long exemplified the beneficial workings of open cooperation, and there is a wide range of communitarian consensus-building, such as deliberative assessment, common ground exploration, participatory decision-making, structured collaboration, and reconciliatory engagement, that enable communities to advance their shared understanding of what they should do together.
In the process of learning to develop their values and practices in light of experience, communities also have opportunities to learn to improve the conditions that would facilitate further learning. There are times when those opportunities are missed because communities are held back from learning by some self-styled authority; deceived by an elite who make gains from the wider population’s ignorance; or disadvantaged by many being denied the chance to share their ideas. By contrast, having arrangements to protect and promote the inclusive participation of everyone in a community with their diverse range of thoughts and experiences is what gives rise to meaningful and productive solidarity.
There will always be some individuals or groups who will groundlessly insist that some values they are attached to should command everyone’s compliance out of a sense of ‘tradition’. And ‘values’ that confer a ‘higher’ status to some to lord over others without having to possess any relevant aptitude or achievement would always appeal to a minority in any society. But there is no reason to suppose these should be the values for the whole community. Ultimately, it is openness to diverse input, informed by shared experiences and deliberations, that provides a dependable basis for communities to adapt to changes, improve on a myriad of issues that matter to people, and build sustainable relationships. Any politician who cares about the wellbeing of communities will ignore the siren calls to hop on some dubious ‘traditionalist’ electoral bandwagon, and concentrate on ensuring their constituents have the best chance of attaining improvements with everyone being able to help and be helped without exclusion or denigration.
Henry Tam's latest book, Communitarianism: politics, society & public policy, is available to buy from Bloomsbury: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/communitarianism-9781350422421/
For a free preview of the introductory chapter, visit: https://bloomsburycp3.codemantra.com/viewer/67d050e5ee3588000125971e
Read more about our Citizen Democracy Series here.
The publisher is Citizen Network. The Communitarian Case for Diversity © Henry Tam 2025.
Citizen Democracy, community, Need for Roots, politics, social justice, England, Article
