There Is No Such Thing as the Climbing Community

Please Stop Using This Weasel Word

Once upon a time, when people wanted to make an appeal for inclusivity and collective action, they used the word “solidarity”. But “solidarity” was associated with the socialist left, and thus became a highly divisive word as a result - and hence has since fallen out of fashion in recent decades. Before “solidarity”, it was “fraternity” (as in the French Revolutionary slogan “liberté, égalité, fraternité). But “fraternity” literally means “brotherhood”, and so it sounds distinctively sexist to modern ears. Hence, the word that now gets used is “community”. It’s broad, inclusive, politically neutral, warm, and fuzzy. Everybody is in favour of community, right? As a result, it feels like a safe word to chuck around. And chucked, it most certainly gets.

Who in their right mind would make this the basis of shared bonds?

The problem, however, is that “community” has an actual meaning. And misusing words that have proper meanings can generate undesirable effects. I’ll get to this in more detail in a moment. But what I basically have in mind when it comes to mis-using “community” is the endless slew of online “Something Must Be Done About This Outrage!” articles, most of which lay on the “community” schtick throughout.

Climbing is no exception. Indeed, thanks to the high visibility of American athletes and their social media exposure, combined with profit-driven brands who want to sell you a lifestyle image and not just an overpriced shoe, community-speak may even be worse in climbing than other sports. (Americans, for what it’s worth, adore abusing the word “community”, because it allows them to ignore their deep-seated racial and social divisions, whilst pretending everybody is fundamentally united when in fact they are at each other’s throats.)

But to take two examples from recent-ish climbing history, consider UKClimbing’s “response to the response” over the Joe Kinder/Sasha DiGuilian clusterfuck, as well as Chris Kalman’s hornet-nest-awakening piece in Outdoor Journal on the same topic.

(For those lucky enough not to remember, let me remind you: Kinder posed a picture of a fat person on Instagram under a joke (troll?) account and said it looked like DiGuillian. DiGuillian then ‘called out’ Kinder, who was promptly cancelled, hard. His career nearly ended over what he always insisted was a bad joke that got misinterpreted. If you listen to the interview with him on The Climbing Nugget podcast it’s pretty clear he remains traumatised by the entire affair.)

Anyway, back to the rant. Each of the above articles refers to the climbing “community” multiple times, and in turn what “we” should think or do.

So what, exactly, is my beef? Well partly, I’m just a pedant. “Community” has a proper meaning, and I would thus prefer if people therefore used it properly. Specifically, “community” means either:

1.     “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common” or

2.     “The condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common”

Neither of these definitions can meaningfully be applied to rock climbing. For a start, unless by “same place” you mean “planet Earth”, then all climbers simply do not live in the same place. And sure, we may all share the “characteristic” of enjoying rock climbing, and have that as an “interest in common”, but that’s far too broad to be meaningful. After all: we all have an interest (as humans) in eating food. Are we then all part of a “food eating community”? Of course not. It just sounds silly when you put it like that. But the same is true for climbing.

Think about it: simply being into the same sport as thousands of other people, whom I’ve never met, never will meet, and may not even like very much if I did meet, is not enough to qualify me as being part of a community, any more than I am part of a “community” of people who eat food. It’s true that climbers tend to be a friendly bunch, and unsurprisingly (given that they are all attracted to the same slightly mad activity as a means of deriving enjoyment) they may find each other’s company more tolerable than e.g. hanging out with competitive body builders. Birds of a feather do flock together. But, so what? You aren’t part of a “community” with thousands of other people you’ve never met just because you might get along and might think some similar thoughts about various issues. (Although in fact, as the UKC forums reveal, climbers are just as divided as any other cross-section of society when you get down do the nuts and bolts – yes, pun intended).

OK, so that’s the pedantic point: it’s just factually wrong to claim there is a single “climbing community”. But does it matter if we speak as though there is? Why am I getting my knickers in such a twist?

Well, because when it’s wheeled out in relation to controversial issues, “community” is usually a weasel word that serves to obscure important and vital disagreements, by pretending (whether the author means to do this or not) that there already exists a shared harmony on the fundamentals. This can often be hard to see for the people who are themselves using the word. After all, if you think it’s just obvious that the lesson from the Kinder-DeGuilian debacle is that body shaming/sexism/bullying/whatever is bad/snowflakey/whatever, then you will think you’re just stating an obvious truth when claiming that “the community” needs to learn X as a result.

But to those who disagree – and on any issue of any interest or importance, some people will always disagree – it doesn’t look that way. It looks instead like a faulty viewpoint is being steamrollered through, on the basis of some alleged consensus that they haven’t signed up for. Cue irritation and anger, and people lashing out in response. The paradox of abuse of the word “community” is that it tries to forcibly create agreement over divisive issues by asserting that such agreement in fact already exists, in a hope that asserting that this agreement exists will make it exist. But as we all know by this point that agreement never gets established by this route. Abuse of the word “community” is one of the factors (though hardly the only one) ensuring that online political argument, in particular, just goes around and around in circles, like a dog trying to bite its own shit-covered tail.

Climbers, just like any other group of humans, disagree about many things. It’s inevitable. But rather than trying to bury that by pretending that “we” are all deep down committed to the same basic goals (whatever the hell they might be, at least beyond the vague platitude of “enjoying climbing”), it would be better to just have the disagreements out in the open. This means that, inevitably, issues arising from climbing – crag etiquette, bolting of routes, social media outrage, competition vs outdoor climbing, the Olympics, whatever – will cause arguments. And in the end, some people’s preferred visions will win, and others will lose, depending on how decisions go, and how the sport as a whole evolves. That, again, is just part of collective human life. But it would at least show more respect to the losers to treat them as people who disagreed, but lost, rather than as sadly – or suspiciously – misguided members of “the community”, who have somehow failed to grasp a truth that others know.

Perhaps it would also turn out that stopping talk of “community” – and in turn just accepting that not everybody is going to agree on everything – might take some of the sting out of the disagreements themselves. (Although probably not out of the UKC forums, where the usual internet rules about anonymity, lack of direct accountability, and resultant twattery, all apply.)

And if you still want to talk meaningfully about climbing in a collective sense, then I suggest “climbing scene” is the correct alternative. Similar to grass roots music scenes, such as punk, or rockabilly, climbing involves both individual and group efforts; brings a strong DIY ethos; generates suspicion from the old guard about what the young ’uns are up to; displays a love-hate relationship with the big money firms who move in for profit; features both admiration and envy of those who achieve mainstream success; and houses devotees of various sub-styles who will go to their deaths insisting that their taste is objectively better than everybody else’s. “Scene” is the proper word to describe what this is, whether it be hardcore punk or British trad. And calling it this leaves aside the creepy moral sleights of hand that so often underlie appeals to “community”.

We don’t need to be a “climbing community”: long live disagreement and difference, in a world where individuals are grown-up enough to happily accept that actually we don’t need to all share the same fundamental goals (beyond a handful of platitudes) in order to coexist tolerably well. May the assholes be driven away, not because “the community” has banished them (creepy), but because they’re assholes and nobody likes them (grown up life). Let the rest of us sort out the kind of climbing that we want to do, for ourselves, and join in whichever group activities we see fit to further that goal.

Maybe we will do this for others, but maybe we’ll just do it for ourselves. Whatever floats your boat. If someone disagrees, argue it out if you feel strongly enough. But don’t pretend that we’re all one big happy family, bound together simply because we like to climb rocks. We’re not a community. And that’s fine. We don’t need to be.