We often identify ourselves in terms of belonging to a community, but our idea of "community" has changed so much that the notion of "identity" itself has become quite slippery. This is even more noticeable in our new global society. PNS commentator Walter Truett Anderson is the author of "The Future of the Self (Tarcher Putnam, 1997).

Not long ago I discovered something very interesting about community. The term came up frequently in a discussion about the future of politics and I asked the participants to identify what community they belonged to.

Most people had a very hard time giving a clear answer to what I thought was a simple question. Some answered with the name of the town or neighborhood in which they lived. Others answered in terms of a specific group -- a church, a business, a political movement. Others, after thinking it over, preferred to stress their identification with a larger, less clearly-defined entity such as the black community, the gay community, or the handicapped community.

It became apparent that there were all kinds of social groups that people described with the word "community," -- and that most people are multi-community individuals. They have many memberships, and many kinds of memberships.

Multi-community identification is of course more common among the prosperous, the educated, the mobile -- but it is an increasingly common condition of contemporary life. You can find it among groups of migrant workers who identify with the places where they live, with their fellow workers, often with a religious group, and also with the regions from which they came -- and to which they frequently return.

This slipperiness is only one example of a profound change underway all over the world -- altering one of the most fundamental aspects of personal life: identity. It is not as easy as it used to be to say what community you belong to -- and many people are finding it increasingly difficult even to say what country they belong to.

Vaclav Havel, president of the Czech Republic, said recently that he thinks strong emotional identification with a nation as we have celebrated it in the past is becoming not only old-fashioned but dangerous. In the near future, he predicted, "most states will begin to change from cult like entities charged with emotion into far simpler and more civilized entities . . . that will represent only one of the many complex and multileveled ways in which our planetary society is organized."

He is one of many people who see the world changing -- with much difficulty and bloodshed along the way, of course -- into a place that is no longer neatly divided along geographic lines or by any other clear boundaries, a world in which people have more options about where to live, how to define who they are, what to identify with. Some writers have called this a sort of "new medievalism," regaining some of the features of the world before the modern nation-state was invented, when people's loyalties were distributed among king, church, local authorities, and, often, other organizations such as guilds.

Even religious identity seems to be blurring in many ways. There was a time when we were able to visualize a two-dimensional map of world religions -- Christianity in the West, Islam primarily in the Arab world, Buddhism in East Asia, Hinduism in India. Those regional identities are still valid, but geography is losing its grip in this area of human life as well. Now anybody anywhere can choose to be (or become) a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Christian.

In the United States, people shop around among churches and frequently transfer from one to another. Many shop even more widely, sampling various Eastern religions and New Age spiritualities. People mix and match from different faiths and cultures, create new rituals, modify beliefs in ways that religious conservatives find deeply disturbing.

Of course many people in many parts of the world still cling fiercely to the one-dimensional concepts of identity -- based on ethnicity or religious faith -- but it is hard to see how those can prevail in places such as Northern Ireland, Israel or Kosovo. Either the old concepts of identity will die, or many more people will.