Towards Building New Communities (post 15)

While some of our decisions may be made at random, more often, when deliberating a course of action, we are attempting to gain satisfaction from the resulting chain of events.  What that satisfaction might be can vary widely for different individuals and in different circumstances, and there are always trade-offs.

Given this observation, a question we may ask is, what sorts of practical things can we do to increase the satisfaction we experience throughout our lives?  The answering of that question is, essentially, what this blog is all about.  And toward that end, certain claims have been made:

1) The most satisfying things in life are our relationships with others.
2) Life is more satisfying when we believe that we have a purpose.
3) Our purpose is to share our lives with each other, to believe in each other, and to forgive each other.
4) A pragmatic goal to work toward, in accordance with this purpose, is building community.

The legitimacy of any of these statements can be questioned or denied - we have not spent much time justifying them.  Perhaps that is something to consider for future posts, but of more immediate concern is the question of how to proceed with building community.  How do we do that?

As was touched on in the previous post, "community" can be defined broadly or narrowly.  In this blog we are taking community to mean something rather specific, and that is a group of people with well defined membership that spans generations where all members know and interact with each other and share a group identity.

Under this strict definition, I am not a member of a community - nor is anyone else that I know.

As has been said - tens of thousands of years ago, all humans lived in such communities.  As civilizations emerged this began to change.  Agriculture and urbanization weakened communities and, in some cases, led to community-less lifestyles.  Today communities still exist, and some prosper - mainly in rural villages, small towns, pockets of old cities or through fundamentalist religions - but overall they are in a sharp decline which seems to be accelerating.

Contributing to this acceleration are globalization, urbanization, mass media, digital/cellular communication, multiculturalism, and moral relativism.  Not all of these things are unwanted.  And when we look at the strategies employed by communities that have survived or prosper, we often see an embracing of isolation, homogeneity, ethnocentrism, xenophobia or fundamentalism - ideas that seem distasteful and shortsighted at best.  As relocation, global integration and access to foreign information continue to increase, communities that preserve themselves through isolationist and fundamentalist practices will be increasingly forced towards myopic and draconian extremes - a pattern that is ultimately unsustainable.

Communities as they have been known throughout history - made up of small groups of related individuals largely ignorant of the larger world around them - are necessarily dying out.  This is, in and of itself, not a bad thing.  Yet the community-less (network based) existence that replaces them - a situation that a growing majority of humans now find themselves in - is incapable of providing the sense of common purpose, group identity, social security and cultural legacy that people crave as a part of a satisfying life.  This has led to the unprecedented levels of dissonance, anxiety, depression, apathy and despair that we now see throughout our population.

Hence this community-less/network-based lifestyle also seems unsustainable.  Communities have been the basic social structure for our species for hundreds of thousands of years.  It seems implausible that we could simply do away with them and be just fine.  They are too important to who we are as a people.  They are too essential to the purpose for our existence.  And if they cannot continue to exist in their known form, and they cannot disappear, then they must transform.

One of the central premises of this blog is that the structure of communities as we know them stands on the cusp of a major transformation.  How that transformation will unfold is an open question - one this blog seeks to explore.  Certainly, its nature depends on the decisions of individuals - on what we modern, urban, network-based people do as we attempt to resurrect a sense of purpose, identity and belonging for ourselves and our children.

So let us now return to the original question of this post: what pragmatic things can we do right now to build community - especially without resorting to ignorance, extremism, xenophobia or counterculture?

This is not an easy question to answer.  While most of us acknowledge the desire for a stronger sense of community, we are also reluctant to give up the freedom afforded by solitude and are wary of engaging in anything involving commitment.  And rightfully so.  We have all found ourselves committed to ventures that we later fervently wished we had avoided.  We have all felt the disappointment of failed friendships, and the headache and heartache of cooperative endeavors gone awry.  We all realize the extent to which our fellow humans are capable of selfishness, betrayal, laziness, cruelty, dishonesty, and stupidity and thus we can easily convince ourselves that we are better off keeping them at a healthy distance.

Be that as it may, I believe we live more satisfying lives when we are able to overcome these objections and actively seek people with whom to form relationships and engage in joint ventures.  Furthermore, I believe we build the most fulfilling relationships and ventures when we ground ourselves and our initiatives on our personal system of beliefs, values and priorities - and we honestly represent these to others.

Far too often we fail to do this.  Fearing differences and disagreements - and failure - we interact with others based as much on what we believe is wanted or expected as on who we are or what we believe in.  This often results in fragile or impersonal relationships or participation in situations and activities that we find deplorable.

One pragmatic thing we can do toward building more meaningful relationships - and perhaps, eventually, communities - is to establish our beliefs, values and priorities and share them.  Learn to articulate what it is that we find most important - what we most cherish - and be willing to listen to and consider the beliefs and values of others.  We are not going to agree about what is most important.  But in learning to articulate our values and beliefs, and in learning to listen to the beliefs and values of others, we may move closer to those things that are universal.

In writing this blog I am attempting to take my own advice.  I am attempting to articulate my beliefs, my values and priorities.  I know I may be wrong.  I know I may change my mind - as I have changed my mind so many times before.  But through these changes I tack closer to a truth that does exist - despite the fact that I will never reach it.

I encourage others to do the same.  I know we begin in positions of disagreement, and that is uncomfortable.  But if we are open with each other and sincere and respectful - then I believe we move towards a common place - and that, in the process, we grow to more fully appreciate and cherish one another.

The Death and Rise of Communities (post 14)

In a previous post I said that I believe we have a purpose, and that is to share our lives with one another, to have faith in each other and to forgive each other.

What tangible goals can be worked toward with the mind of fulfilling such purpose?

Many.  But the one that is most essential is the goal of working to found and strengthen communities.

What I mean by "community" is important.  By its current use, the word seems to mean any collection of people that have some identifiable common interest.  But what I mean by community is much more specific.  What I mean by a community is a finite group of people who live and work with and for each other over lifetimes.

By this definition, most people who live in cities or developed countries do not have communities.  We have families, but our families are fractured and diluted.  Beyond them we have social networks - friends, acquaintances, business partners - and through them we meet and exchange information, advice, goods and services.  But such networks are not communities.

A network has no boundary.  It provides no sense of identity, nor virtue, nor dream for the future.  A network offers no convincing incentive for loyalty, commitment or sacrifice.

Only communities provide such things.  Communities give to their members a sense of belonging, identity and purpose.  They are greater than the individuals within them, and their members are often willing to die to help preserve their values.

Long, long ago, virtually all humans lived in such communities.  Over the past few millennia, they have been largely wiped out.  And those that remain seem close to disintegration.

Why?

Because they can not survive the deleterious effects of cognitive dissidence accumulated as civilizations become ever more massive, interconnected and diverse.  Urbanization and globalization relentlessly repartition and redistribute the people of Earth's neighborhoods, towns, villages, and tribes - shredding communities until we are left with the situation we face today - where the youth of the most urban portions of the world (and most of the world is now urban) are born without a coherent sense of lineage, heritage, culture or belonging.

Communities are, for the most part, dead and dying.  And in their place we are left with networks - social systems where people grow up with fleeting affinity to ever changing cultural amalgamations and learn to interact almost exclusively for very intentional, specialized and finite purposes.

The death of communities in their ancestral and ethno-centric form has been an unsettling but necessary consequence of globalization.  Humans could not have become as interconnected and globally aware as we are now without the killing of the traditional communities from which we originate.

But it is a high price we have paid.  And what we long for is a way to return to the sense of belonging and wholeness once afforded by small communities without losing the perspective and interconnectedness offered by globalization.

I believe this is possible, and that bringing it to fruition is the greatest and most important task that lies before us as a species.

We must somehow - in this world of constant global communication, relocation and innovation - engender new forms of community that uphold authority but appreciate respectful dissent, that enforce boundaries but encourage fluid redefinition, that hold central values but continuously explore amendment, and that foster loyalty and a sense of belonging without invoking xenophobia.

I believe this can be done.  And I cannot think of anything to do in this life that would be more meaningful.