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Community

Each of us is part of a community, often a part of several, whether cultural, racial, local, interest or whatever. The word ‘community’ is currently fashionable, especially among politicians, for whom it apparently kindles a warm comfortable glow of well-being, rather like the thought of buttered toast. But communities exclude as well as include. You may well have close tight-knit communities such as those in the North of Ireland, who choose to define themselves in terms of religion (Catholic or Protestant) and geographical locality (different districts of Belfast), but who share only a lasting visceral hatred and mutual continuing distrust. The communities in early America, such as that in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century, were undoubtedly close and mutually supportive, but continuing membership came at a very considerable cost to what we in 21st-century Britain would now take for granted as individual freedom.

The rule book of the Salem community was the Bible. Puritan settlers of Massachusetts had, or at least professed to have, a fierce and unbending allegiance to it as the sole source of divine knowledge about how to live. Theirs was a faith demonstrated by their adherence to a strict code of behaviour that embraced all aspects of their lives and which forbade them to dance but sought to compel church attendance and prayer. Everyone in this community was not only expected to know the Ten Commandments but to live by them.

It could be said that the society mirrored in Arthur Miller’s play was a theocracy not a democracy. The rules it followed were absolute and non-negotiable. However, what the play explores is what happens when those rules are applied so rigidly as to permit no space for tolerance, especially tolerance of difference. Bind people too tightly together, the play suggests, and sooner or later their society will snap and begin to fall apart.

 

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Connections: Faith Truth And Blasphemy | Transgression | Fundamentalism
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