Gemeinschaft is a German word which indicates a type of social grouping which has been actively extinguished over the past century; indeed I saw into almost-total obliteration during my working life. Yet, Gemeinschaft used to form the basis of all human society.
The features of a Gemeinschaft grouping include a relatively informal, self-selected (and self-regulated) group of men who are united by common interests and/or purposes. Examples would include the Medieval craft guilds and learned professions. But also much smaller groupings of men such as clubs and hobby groups, and social/ discussion groups such as the Oxford Inklings.
I emphasize men, because women very seldom form such groups, or even participate in them - and there are (I think) no examples of mixed sex Gemeinschaft groups that were stable over time.
What has been apparent over several generations is the replacement of Gemeinschaft by at first mixed sex, then woman dominated, formal, externally-controlled/ internally rule-based bureaucracy.
Why? Ultimately because bureaucracy has been a major strategy of purposive evil in the world - because it is intrinsically demonic in nature: anti-God, anti-spiritual, anti-human.
Gemeinschaft has been attacked by feminism on one hand - which regarded all-male groups as inherently oppressive to all-women; and on the other side by an inferred sexualization of Gemeinschaft as latent or covert male-male sexual attraction.
In reality; the major thrust of hostility was that Gemeinschaft contains an intrinsic goodness in terms of the basis of its cohesion - whereas bureaucracy is intrinsically evil.
Yet, on theoretic and empirical grounds, it seems obvious that we cannot return to a world dominated by Gemeinschaft ... It certainly looks as if modern men do not even want Gemeinschaft: they are not pressing for more Gemeinschaft, modern men are not spontaneously doing Gemeinschaft.
So now there is hardly any need for the authorities even to repress or disrupt it; and anyone who yearns for Gemeinschaft will find it difficult or impossible to get going; and will find it almost impossible to sustain.
We must not accept bureaucracy, because it is evil - yet we cannot go back to traditional Gemeinschaft because it is obsolete - so, as usual, we need to develop hitherto unprecedented creative possibilities; and these may need to be be so radical as to require extremely high motivation of a kind only possible when based on strong and personal religious convictions.
And there is our clue. We must build from what actually does motivate and is Good; no matter how small such groups may be, to begin with.
Note added: The cause of the decline of Gemeinschaft is - like the cause of decline in all human institutions and groupings - the loss of Christianity as a framework and assumption for human life. This deletion either obliterates Gemeinschaft aspects altogether - as for the mass of young people whose lives are dominated by mass and social media; and large, variable and loose groupings. Or renders smaller interest-orientated groups weak and labile, being merely contingent mutual venues for pleasurable pastimes. One should not mistake these hedonically-justified residues for the internally-cohesive, mutually-aiding and -influencing, and temporally-resilient Gemeinschaft groups of history: strong enough to serve as the building blocks of functional human society.
