It seems, further, that in many cases the sense of belonging
is engendered by a shared characteristic of some sort: all who believe that P,
or accept that Q, or who are R, bond over P, Q, or R, and form a community on
that basis:
“All of us, here, are P/Q/R”.
As valuable as such congregating may be in creating a sense
of inclusion, it also entails exclusion,
for:
“You must be F to belong here”
is logically equivalent to:
“If you are not-F, you do not
belong here”.
The risk as that those who are F will clash with those who
are not-F, over resources, or legislation, or simply broader social norms. On risk is the urge to segregate: let the Fs
live here, the non-Fs there. This is the
dark side of the craving for inclusion.
For example, suppose a child grows to reject the religious upbringing of
her parents but still wants to feel a sense of belonging to her family and
community. It would be a shame for her
to have experience rejection on that basis, so we want families, for example,
to have a broader sense of belonging/inclusion that a shared religious belief
or practice. Accordingly, I think it
worthwhile ask what greater inclusion would look like.
Which leads me to wonder what the maximally inclusive community would be. Is there a conception of inclusion that is
sufficiently broad that it could include everybody? I will eave aside for the moment whether such
a broad definition of community would satisfy the psychological need for a
sense of belonging. My question is
whether it is logically possible to define a community that would not be
exclusive, something along the lines of:
“All are
welcome here”.
Right of the bat, this seems like a paradoxical
formulation. Suppose we had a community
defined by this principle: would it welcome those who actively wish to destroy
the community? Could they really be welcome there?
It is hard to see how a community could, in general, be robust enough to
survive if it had to invite in those who wished to destroy it, as they could
not be integrated into the community as a whole.
What is nice, however, about “all are welcome here” is that
it is a, relatively, content-free
criterion of inclusion. Any community
built on a specific belief, practice, or physical trait, is inherently
alienating because many will not share that belief, practice, or trait. So a content-free, or formal criterion of community would likely be the most
inclusive. We can start with the idea of
a community that is welcome to anyone who doesn’t wish to destroy the community
itself:
(Ax)(Ac)[~D(x, c) à W(x, c)]
Where:
D(x, y) = x works to destroy y
W(x, c) = x is welcome in community c
This seems necessary but not sufficient. After all, the most exclusive community
imaginable could still satisfy this requirement: e.g. a very religiously
intolerant group would still count as maximally inclusive so long as it was unwelcome
to those who are religiously tolerant.
Okay, so let us focus on the concept of welcoming, which is
a naturally inclusive idea. Consider a
community that is open to anybody who is him/herself maximally welcoming, or,
put differently, a community that welcomes any who welcomes any:
(Ax)(Ay)(Ac)[W(x, y) à W(x, c)]
Of course, such a community must only include those who are
maximally welcoming, so let's make this a biconditional:
(Ax)(Ay)(Ac)[W(x, y) <-> W(x, c)]
So long as “x welcomes y” entails that x does not try to
murder, humiliate, cheat, or otherwise harm y”, then it seems that such a
community could be defined without welcoming in murderers, thieves, and those
who otherwise wish to destroy communities.
Thus, perhaps it is logically coherent to imagine a
community that is maximally welcoming without immediately inviting
self-destruction. Such a formal principle
is useful because it provides a criterion for determining when a community is
as open as it can be.
