How a Toronto reading group revived a 300-year-old tradition of building community on purpose
The church at the end of my street in the West End of Toronto is a very subdued place. On a Sunday morning, many of the pews are empty, and the ones that aren't are dotted with mostly solitary people of a median age over seventy. The choir consists of one or two younger people, probably part-time hires from the conservatory. The sermon is preached, the rituals are observed, and then the congregants shuffle out. A handful of the oldest members stick around for coffee. This experience, while particularly disconcerting in a church, is not unique to this setting.
The evidence appears irrefutable: It is impossible to bring people together, most of all young people. They no longer wish to spend time together; they have no collective projects. They sit at home watching Netflix, order in, and don't join up. They don’t party, they have no friends, they are even forgoing sex. This trend has been taking place for some time; it was famously detailed at the turn of the millennium by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and has only gotten worse since with the acceleration of digital entertainment and optimization technologies.
Derek Thompson’s 2025 Atlantic essay, “The Anti-Social Century,” is a particularly chilling account of just how people have drifted apart, socially, emotionally, and in a literal physical sense—as well as just how thoroughly normalized and taken for granted this atomization has become. In the Canadian context, a study published last year by Statistics Canada showed that the time young people spend with their friends has been declining for almost 50 years, reaching new all-time lows in the post-pandemic years.
This phenomenon has been given epithets like the “loneliness epidemic” and the “social recession.” No matter the name, though, the condition has profound implications. If people don't join groups, then civic participation, everything from voting to engaging local politicians, declines sharply, and we end up with worse candidates and declining skills in political organization. If they never meet with like-minded people, it hurts business formation as peers with complementary skillsets don’t associate to learn about new techniques, find co-founders or have a market of friends willing to buy their first half-baked product. If members of the opposite sex never spend time with each other in casual settings, then they will never couple up and have children. In short, it will undermine all of the essential activities needed to maintain our society.
Many people present these trends as inexorable. They are explained as being downstream of our individualistic culture; the technological environment, especially social media; or even the great boogeyman of “capitalism.” Grand forces fighting against us that no individual can resist.
It turns out, however, that this narrative of ever-growing social isolation and disengagement from political, social, and moral projects is not an irreversible trend without hope for revival, and I have proof: In the last few years, I have become part of a vibrant community in Toronto that sees each other every single week and is working together to try and improve our world.
Along the way, I have run two dozen events, including lectures, roundtables, film screenings and a debate aimed at developing a richer educational ecosystem. These events have attracted thousands of people from across the city, from every gender, ethnic, social and economic background.
I have also co-facilitated a group that brings together around twenty people every week to read and discuss seminal, that is, difficult academic papers. We meet to challenge ourselves. To develop a more accurate, informed, and effective understanding of the world while gaining useful knowledge.
At Christmas, we threw a party where we surrendered our phones and read McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message in silence for ninety minutes under a projected looped video of a roaring fire on YouTube, before going on to discuss the finer points of our technological society and the impacts of our technology.
At a macro level, it remains true that we are facing real problems with community formation, and while there are glimmers of hope and small pockets where vibrant communities are thriving, we have yet to see any major reversals. Nonetheless, these projects have shown me that it is possible to fight back against the atomization of our culture and the meaninglessness of our individualized pursuits. In fact, people are yearning for it.
Institutes and Societies across History
When I first started working on these projects, my aim was not community as such; I simply wanted a place where I could go for a serious education in the humanities. Since leaving university, I hadn’t had access to anything that would challenge me, push the boundaries of what I understand, and help me grow, and I had a suspicion that my city didn't either.
To fill this need, I planned to create an organization that could develop and intentionally use social technologies — techniques of social organization, ways of gathering, reading, learning from experts, and finding collaborators — to enable my city to thrive. As I looked to create this organization, I was inspired by stories from the past.
In the early modern era, self-organized groups aimed at the improvement of society were a regular part of people's day-to-day lives. There were, of course, religious groups and mutual aid societies, volunteer firefighting organizations and the like, which people belonged to as part of their daily life, but alongside these existed a wide network of groups for research, education, moral and political formation. These institutes played an outsized role in the political, technological, social, and even moral progress of the last several hundred years.
The vast majority of these efforts were informal. They looked more like recurring dinner parties, debate nights, or book clubs: ways for like-minded people to meet for “mutual improvement,” to develop ideas and think more clearly. However, despite their small scale and lack of sophisticated structure, some of these groups had a profound impact on the world around them. One need not agree with the worldviews of every group that has ever come together this way to recognize that history simply would not have moved in the direction that it did had they not come together to form and then assert their common aims and ideas. To take just a few examples from the rogues’ gallery:
In Philadelphia in the early 1700s, the Junto club, created by Ben Franklin, brought together dozens of key business and political leaders over dinner to debate philosophy and morality, as well as share updates from their work. Over time, they also began to identify and find solutions for civic issues, spawning Philadelphia's first library, hospital, and university.
Later in the century and into the early 1800s, the Lunar Society, a collection of some of the great Birmingham-based figures of the early industrial revolution—Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton and James Watt, the inventor of the steam engine—met to discuss natural philosophy and the latest scientific discoveries in electricity, meteorology, geology, and all manner of machines. Their work not only expanded their thinking, helping to lead to scientific discoveries like the composition of water, but, just like the Junto club, also helped them create a mutual aid network for employment, financial support, and civic engagement with major public works throughout the city.
In France, in the 1920s, a number of Chinese foreign students began to regularly convene in each other’s apartments to read the works of Marx and learn about the communist movement. They formed close friendships and developed a shared, deeply held commitment to a political project. As a result, when they returned home, some of these students, including Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping, would end up becoming essential members of the Chinese Communist Party, helping to shape its ascension to power and continued development over the next five decades.
These cases have been wrapped in mythology and legend, but the important thing is that there were once thousands upon thousands of experiments where ordinary people would meet with their friends to read, debate and discuss. In a world before formalized mass adult education, these groups sought a way to develop critical thinking, intellectual independence, and clear-eyed visions of a better world, thus ensuring the health of society.
These desires for self-improvement were also reflected in the more formal organizations that were set up. One prototypical example in Britain, following the French Revolution, was the London Corresponding Society, created to read and debate political philosophy and push for democratic reform of the British government. Members would print copies of Thomas Paine's The Rights of Man and distribute them at weekly meetings for discussion and debate. In 1795, the group boasted five thousand paying members and organized meetings and rallies with tens of thousands of participants.
Later groups expanded on these structures: the Mechanics Institutes were formed in Britain in the 1800s to provide technical and engineering education to working-class men through seminars and lending libraries. The hope was to “address societal needs by incorporating fundamental scientific thinking and research into engineering solutions.” This goal resonated with the new class of workers that had increasing time and money, but little access to the gated educational institutions of the time. At the height of the group's success, there were thousands of institutes, each with hundreds or thousands of members across the English-speaking world.
Canada’s own nation-building experiences were no less dependent on communal associations. In many respects, the country would not exist in its present form without them. In the pre-Confederation era, the educated reformers of Lower Canada developed an equivalent venue in the Institut canadien de Montréal, founded in 1844. At its height, the institute counted over seven hundred members who gathered to debate political philosophy, circulate banned books, and argue for liberal democratic ideas. The group’s influence became so significant that it alarmed the existing authorities. Eventually, Bishop Ignace Bourget moved to suppress the organization outright, a conflict that itself became a defining episode in the struggle over who would shape the emerging public mind.
At the same time, the Freemasons, a fraternal order organized around the structures and symbolism of medieval stonemasonry, brought together British North American subjects across colonial and regional lines, and created a shared grammar of brotherhood and discretion that helped create conditions for a pan-Canadian consciousness.
In all of these experiments across history, whether the meetings were informal dinner clubs, impromptu tavern debates, or organizations with tens of thousands of members, the key to their success was not capital, technical innovations or government policy. These factors were sometimes part of their reason for existence, but they were never the deciding piece. In fact, these things were as likely to work against the groups as for them. When the London Corresponding Society became a significant political force and the existing political establishment felt threatened, they signed the Unlawful Societies Act 1799 to monitor and curb their activities.
Instead, in all cases, the association’s growth and impact relied on a set of social technologies, habits, and patterns of behaviour specifically developed to create friendships, i.e., social capital —bonds of sympathy and organization that would allow, not only for reasoned debate and shared improvement, also broader ties that could be part of helping each other to find employment or organize civic projects.
These patterns of behaviour may seem innocuous but can have major effects. For example, in the 19th century in Germany, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn created the Turnvereine, regular open-air gymnastics sessions where members would gather to work out using things like the parallel bars. To create an atmosphere conducive to group formation and a focus on the workouts, all members were asked to address each other with the informal “du” rather than the class-marking formal “Sie.” For the heavily stratified German society of the time, this was a transformative use of language and immediately marked out the group members.
What made these gatherings generative rather than merely convivial was a particular quality of social intimacy that cut, however imperfectly, across the hierarchies of ordinary life.
DIY Communities
If these stories resonate with you, then you may be the right person to set up organized societies today. How should you go about doing it?
The patterns are not something you can easily write down. The details are highly time- and location-dependent, and there is a lot of tacit knowledge involved in what it takes to form a community. In part, this is because every community must form its own norms communally. If you tried to reproduce it by making a list of actions like “have a firm handshake,” then the formula would break down almost immediately upon encountering a group of people for whom the idea had no purchase. The best way to learn is to try and spend time with people who are good at it.
Nonetheless, there are invariants in the way communities organize that have been true for a very, very long time, and there are some things that I've discovered in the last couple of years that seem to work very well right now. So, here are some heuristics you can follow to make it easier:
First, for a group to thrive, it must cultivate virtue and exclude those who don't live up to the standards. Virtues are the habits of character and thought that shape a space. This means asking questions that may seem awkward for a modern person. Things like: Are people honest and forthright? Do we accept cynicism? Are people generous with their time and ideas?
While these questions may, at first blush, seem grandiose, answering them does not require a heroic effort. It can start with very small and carefully placed tasks: show up on time, dress a little nicer than you usually do, and ask good questions.
Success comes not from the scope of the vision, but from whether these virtues are stated clearly and taken seriously. The aim is not to prevent anyone from joining. Pick rules that anyone could choose to follow, then actually track whether or not they are making the choice to follow. For some people, this will feel exclusionary. That’s OK. The vast majority of people crave spaces that hold them to higher standards and create real consequences if those are not achieved.
At the reading group I am part of, we start reading together at the same time every session. No exceptions. If you have not yet arrived, then you will have to catch up later or come back next week. We ask everyone to give up their phones to create a space of sustained attention and presence. Every time, before we begin discussion, we recite a set of rules for good form to help set the baseline for the kind of quality we expect in commenting and treating each other with the proper respect.
At the lecture series, we ask every person to confirm they have read our guide to etiquette, which includes an ask for people to dress 10 percent better than they usually do. After every single lecture, I receive multiple comments from people who are grateful for the chance to make an effort.
The ultimate test of whether or not these rules will have an impact is entirely in how carefully they are enforced. This means you need to call people out. This will not happen often. At this point, I have run dozens of events with thousands of attendees, and I have only had to specifically ask people to leave once or twice because they weren't meeting the standards we asked for. When I ask, they always understand. In the more common cases where I offer a suggestion or two, the response has usually been one of gratitude. Regularly, those who have received some correction have become the most engaged members of the group.
Once you have set ground rules for behaviour, the second thing you need is to be on a mission. When people show up to be part of a group, they, by definition, want to feel that they are part of something larger than their one solitary life. Different people will have different ways of making this land, but in my experience, creating this requires setting an ambitious vision.
You should have a view of things that makes it explicit that you want to change the world in a particular way. To make this concrete, a good approach is to set large, significant, but achievable goals, such as changing a discourse in a measurable way, learning some long and complex materials like a religious text, or making a clear technical breakthrough. You could aim to get new signage added to your city’s transit system, read the entirety of the Bible over the course of a year, or produce original research that gets presented at a local conference.
You should also plan to spend real time—like half a decade or more—working on it. In short, you need to commit to something that, when you first hear it, seems outrageous in our culture. Most importantly, the mission cannot be arrived at democratically. You must state the mission upfront and not modify it for the group. For my reading group, one of the most common pieces of feedback I have received is that people liked that it was "not a democracy." People can be sure of the mission because it is non-negotiable.
Again, some people will not like your mission. Anything that you put real force behind will be exclusionary to some degree. And again, that's okay . For any community project to succeed, you must have people who care. That will mean there are some people who don't care. All of the previous institutes had this. They saw themselves, at the very least, as participating in grand projects of education, society-building, or political change.
Third, you must do the legwork. If you are organizing a new institute, you are going to have to do the work. You will need to work harder, put in more hours, and pay more attention than any of the other people who show up. The exact way this looks will depend on the organization, but it will likely include at the least finding a physical space, doing the marketing — even if this is just purposeful word-of-mouth — and addressing community questions.
All of this, plus the actual activities your community undertakes, will cost some money. While you as the organizer and host are responsible for this, you can and should ask people to help you with resources and time to ensure this remains sustainable.
This legwork is not the reason to be pursuing a project like this, and at times, it may feel like it’s taking you away from the more philosophically stimulating work. But these small steps cannot be skipped if you want infrastructure that can actually support your mission. These logistics are not the core of what makes the group work, but they are needed. More importantly, though, you will need to do the work to create strong and weak ties that can keep the community engaged and growing. That essentially means talking to people. Finding time to meet people in the community individually, practicing regular outreach to new potential members, and encouraging attendees to meet and become friends with each other.
Lastly, you must have fun. People show up because they want to have a good time. But they must have fun to keep coming back. Fun means laughing, playing, and flirting. In the first year of running projects with the Toronto Society, I know of four relationships that in some way owe their genesis to the community. Perhaps one of the best tests of a community is how many marriages it generates.
Concretely, this means you should regularly have a party. And everyone should probably drink a little bit more than they usually do. So, prioritize virtue, be on a mission, do the legwork, and have fun. These things seem simple, but they take real effort, and they are surprisingly countercultural. However, they are doable.
It may seem that our societies are inevitably trending towards atomization and an inability to practice meaningful community formation for mutual improvement. But this is not true. The skills that were used previously to create dinner clubs, reading groups, debate organizations, and informal educational institutes with tens of thousands of members are still available to us. The exact way that they are instantiated today is going to be different than in the past, but it is a project that you could participate in. It is still possible to organize and create wonderful, enjoyable, and profoundly useful things together.
Thank you to Michael Cuenco for significant help with finding and laying out the Canadian historical examples of association.
Benjamin Parry runs the the Toronto Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. You can find his commentary @_benjaminparry and at benparry.ca.