The role of chess communities in individualized society

@OMGtoJEpetr said in #23:
> The main part of my work is comparing [1] online players and [2] players from chess clubs
and investigating [whether] chess clubs have a place in modern society when most of today's generation prefers the online world.
> As part of a cross-cultural comparison, I then examine whether post-communist countries, such as mine, have a different perception of the concept of community.

I slightly altered what you wrote in the quote. I might participate in your survey, and it could be that some of my questions will be answered if I do so.

Here are a few questions:

About the question << S kým většinou hrajete? >> I notice the survey is set up so that it is not possible to give more than one radio-button response. I suppose the idea here is that the word "usually" is calling for a single response indicating the most "usual" playing format. But, as you know, we have just come through a 33-month global pandemic (which is not over yet), during which period very little has been "usual" about the ways people interact and communicate. It seems obvious that online chess became more usual over the past 33 months, out of necessity (quarantines, social distancing, lockdowns, avoidance of face-to-face in-person contact, etc.). But the recent experience of Covid-19 doesn't necessarily reflect broader patterns, does it?

About the question << Jakých benefitů si v rámci hraní v komunitě nejvíce ceníte? >> I'm not sure what sense of "community" is being asked about. The choice (in one of the possible responses) of a "sense of anonymity" seems antithetical to the notion of community. How would anonymity be a feature of a genuine community? So, I'm not sure whether the word "community" is being used here in some sense I don't understand. Maybe the answer about valuing "anonymity" is necessarily tied to online chess under a pseudonymous (or anonymous) username. But if so, such a depersonalized interaction would hardly count as a type of "community" from my perspective (at least not as I use the word "community").

I'm guessing that the ultimate cross-cultural comparison the study seeks to illuminate, is between (1) "post-communist countries" and (2) countries that do not fall under that heading. And by "post-communist," I suppose you are referring to countries that were formerly members of the Warsaw Pact, or that were Soviet Socialist Republics, or that were at least to some extent considered communist, even if they weren't necessarily fully in the Soviet sphere (e.g., countries from the former Yugoslavia). I started thinking about this a bit. One of the interesting things many people do not realize is that much of the European colonization of the New World was actually intensely "communistic" (in a pre-Marxian sense), so the notion that the U.S.A., for example, has historically always championed the supremacy of the individual is not necessarily accurate. In a sense, many of the various places where people live across the United States could be considered "post-communist," especially if our historical frame of reference goes back earlier than, say, 35 years ago. Among the early European settlers in the New World were utopians, communitarians, and others belonging to social organizations that were definitely not oriented to the classical economic model of individualistic capitalism (many of these early settlements were deeply religious and were founded on the principle of "having all things in common" following the model of early Christian communities). Some of these New World "communities" still exist today to some extent (despite the commercialization that has pervaded much of the world); some of them remain more closely knit than others. I suppose I should also mention that many of the indigenous peoples in the New World have long practiced forms of communitarianism (and some tribal groups still do so today). How important is it to your research project that there be a clear conceptual and real distinction between "post-communist" countries and other countries?

I had some other questions, too. But I think these must be enough.

Best wishes to you on your research!

About two months ago I visited Iowa, which is a state in the U.S. west of the Mississippi River where quite a few groups of Czech immigrants settled in the 19th Century, many of them Hussites from Bohemia or Moravia. (In Iowa City there is a historical neighborhood founded in the eighteen-hundreds called "Goosetown," which might actually be a linguistic corruption of Huss-town.) Anyway, the people who came at that time from Bohemia were not from a "post-communist country"--if anything, they were from a post-Holy Roman Empire crown country--but they were definitely communitarian. I mention this mostly because I gather that you are a student at university in Pilsen.

Because I was not sure I was understanding the way you were using words like "community" and "society," I remembered the Gemeinschaft–Gesellschaft dichotomy that began to be developed about 140 years ago in sociology. Are you using the words "community" and "society" in something like that sense?

Again, best wishes to you for interesting research!

I've been trying to understand the claim that society in advanced modern states is largely characterized by "individualization."

I'm wondering: do you perhaps mean "individualism" (in the sense of "liberalism" in moral and political philosophy, maybe of the type J.S. Mill championed)?

I'm pretty sure your word "individualization" is intended to refer to a tendency in the opposite direction to "collectivism." This is what makes me think you might mean "individualism."

From my own point of view, it seems contemporary Western culture (painting with a broad brush here, but based on observations of having lived many decades) is most essentially characterized by increasing commercialization (and the exponential pace of this increased commercialization is powered by for-profit marketing and mass communication technology). From one point of view, increased commercialization causes--or, at any rate, coincides with--the actual devaluation of the individual human being. (I'm not here even pointing to the exploitation of labor, which surely also tends to devalue human beings.) At the same time, the mindset of commercialization also intentionally opposes and seeks to destroy most forms of collectivism. Private ownership of the means of production is an ideological article of faith and economic underpinning of commercialism. I do not see advanced modern states as being characterized by individualism. Instead, it seems to me that genuine individualism (in the sense of self-determination or autarchy) is close to dying out in the West. We might imagine we are free because no one is stopping us from ordering commercial consumer goods over the internet through Amazon, for delivery to our doorstep. But our ability to determine our own sense of values, our ability to think deeply, our sense of ethics, our connection to--and stewardship of--the natural world, and indeed our very humanity have all taken a huge hit from commercialization.

These thoughts aren't necessarily coherent. The main thread of my thinking here is to question whether the key cultural distinction is between individualism and collectivism.

I would be curious to know in what ways your research hypothesis expects to find differences between post-communist countries and other countries. Specifically, what patterns of chess-playing behavior and attitudes do you anticipate finding in the various groups of countries, and what will connect your hypothesis with the patterns of chess-playing shown in the data?

It's fascinating to see how, from an American perspective, the world is still all about commercialism vs collectivism. In my perception that world hasn't existed for at least half a century. The cold war is gone. The world no longer consists of western commercialists and communists. We are way beyond that.

If that world was ever real to begin with. Much of the cold war was a ghost America created for itself. Something to fear. But also something that gave Americans identity, which they really desperately needed, since the country is mostly a large collection of stolen things. Bobby Fischer wasn't fighting the Russians. He was just an insane, psychotic, delusional and paranoid chess player, and Americans shared in his delusions. Many still do.

It seems to me that the answer to the question "are people becoming more withdrawn and less social as a result of the digital era?" is a very obvious "yes", that has absolutely nothing to do with commercialism and collectivism. That isn't individualism, that's actually, factually, an individualized society. It's not an ideology, it's something that just happened without anyone giving it any thought.

The comment by Molurus contains interesting ideas--especially the suggestion that the Cold War (and the symbolism represented by Bobby Fischer) can be understood as fantasy.

I'm still trying to understand the research project of the original poster.

I'm not sure I agree with Molurus that people (or at any rate, many people) are becoming "more withdrawn and less social as a result of the digital era." In some ways, that might seem obvious, but part of my doubt is that, even if we accept the notion that people are becoming less social in some sense, I'm not sure "the digital era" should be considered the cause. Nor do I find it plausible that this type of trend "has nothing to do with" commercialization. The infrastructure of the digital era, and the content of digital communication, reveals an intense motif of commercialization.

Maybe someone would argue that the digital age has increased social connection (through "social media"). That is not an argument I would champion, but it might be part of the story.

From a certain perspective, I suppose things "just happen."
But the various ways groups of people are organized as societies are not irrelevant to what happens in the world. Historical backgrounds of societal institutions do not simply disappear altogether once an institution is altered or even abolished. For example, in the U.S. the thirteenth amendment outlawed slavery in the nineteenth century and thus put an end to it, but considerable fallout from the historical enslavement of African people has persisted for another century and a half and certain unhappy consequences remain very much in evidence even today. Patterns of colonial imperialism have persisted, long after formerly colonized countries have gained independence. The examples I'm using here involve injustice and exploitation, but there are surely also examples of the persistence of benign institutions even after an upheaval.

Molurus might be correct that a focus on ideology isn't the key to understanding the world. I mentioned the ideology of anti-communism (or anti-socialism) mostly because I was trying to understand the research project in the original post. But I would not want to ignore the extent to which powerful interests in the world actively propagandize for "free markets" and "free enterprise."

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