I think this is off:
More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.
Community was lost as a result of cultural priorities manifested in individual choices and economic and political pressures. The use of money may foster a psychological blindness to our need for others, that is true, as well as a false sense of self-sufficiency. Getting rid of money in our economic exchanges may force us to evaluate how we can be useful to one another, that is true. As a community-building exercise, its usefulness is rather limited. Of course, progressive liberals presume that everyone else is the right-thinking sort, and that there are no big obstacles to community. We just need to be forced to interact with one another, and everything will turn out fine.
Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."
Fortunately, the monetization of life has reached its peak in our time, and is beginning a long and permanent receding (of which economic "recession" is an aspect). Both out of desire and necessity, we are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration and our independence an illusion. We are not actually independent or "financially secure" – we are just as dependent as before, only on strangers and impersonal institutions, and, as we are likely to soon discover, these institutions are quite fragile.
The diffusion of the good -- first of all in our desires and choices and through them, the passing on of our actions and material things. This is a more holistic vision of communal life with which the wise and Catholics can agree and have built upon in their teachings. After all, the diffusion of the good is proper to love.
Recognizing our dependence and reliance upon on another for satisfying certain material needs is important, but it is not as important having a common vision of [communal] life which is necessary for solidarity (along with identity, a common culture, and so on). A community is a group of people who want to live with one another, not just because they depend on each other but also because they desire to live with them. Commercial relationships or friendships are important, but they are not the same as civic friendship (the mistaken opinion of liberals reading Aristotle).
Finally, the circle can do a third round in which people express gratitude for the things they received since the last meeting. This round is extremely important because in community, the witnessing of others' generosity inspires generosity in those who witness it. It confirms that this group is giving to each other, that gifts are recognized, and that my own gifts will be recognized, appreciated, and reciprocated as well.
The community-building exercises do sound hokey and rather forced. Should we not be expressing gratitude to one another in our exchanges? Moreover, there is a danger inherent to turning generosity and gratitude into a spectacle - it can become an occasion for competition and vice. Finally, we need to realize that each person is a gift to the community (as well as the role he exercises), with the ultimate source of good being God. Another sentimental version of secular humanism (or some alternate spirituality) will be inadequate to deal with the reality of sin and human imperfection (especially with the devil and his ilk seeking to trip people up).
Related:
Alasdair MacIntyre's Political Liberalism
Thaddeus J. Kozinski
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