After reading this thread, I wonder if the term “gated community” should even be used. The term, itself, has been so convoluted by critics, eager to throw around the negative connotation toward whatever construct that they find personally loathsome, that it is dangerously losing any specific meaning. The above posts struggle to justify the use of the term predicated of certain social constructs, even though such predicating contradicts what we all experience in every day real life.
To clarify my point: in this thread the term is being applied primarily to social constructs that are both racial and national, i.e. the Shire or Lothlorian to name only two. But I wouldn’t call either of these, nor the dwarven peoples, nor the peoples of Gondor, etc., to be the type of communities that one can call “gated communities”; they are nations, nations with their own racial stock, cultural traditions, languages, and histories. It’s like calling France a gated community because the people of France refuse to dissolve their borders, give up their language, and forget their cultural and historical heritage. Seriously, can the term really be applied to France? Of course, not. So why apply the term to the Shire?
At any rate, Tolkien seems to go to extraordinary lengths to highlight the idiocy of isolationism. Even the woses are affected by world events and moved to action.
Perhaps the only true gated community in LotR would be Tom and Goldberry, and even then, should we consider two hermit like beings (that are, themselves, racially distinct from all others) as a community model, or just an oddity living in the woods near the Shire?
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We're essentially talking about underlying attitudes, a desire to protect and preserve your own culture from outsiders, to hold yourself aloof and apart in some way.
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Is this a bad thing? Should the whole world have but one culture? Aren’t individual cultures, languages and heritages worth preserving? Do we really want a brave new world?