Sharing Beliefs (post 18)

I have made the observation that I and most people are intentionally trying to maximize rewarding experiences.

In doing so (or attempting to do so) we come up with and employ numerous theories and strategies.  And while many of these may be unconscious or unrecognized, others are explicitly adopted and endorsed.  The type of theories and strategies one praises says a lot about who one is.

For myself, although the articulation changes, I assign great importance to strategies such as:

• Orienting one's life, as much as possible, to causes, goals and entities greater than oneself
• Striving to derive one's happiness from the happiness of others
• Searching for and pursuing overarching purpose
• Seeking fellowship and community

In this I am not unique.  Similar lists find prominent places in many different religious, philosophical and psychological programs.  Hedonists and rugged individualists may reject the above strategies, but I think most people would have at least a neutral if not positive view of them.

Among the people who most strongly agree with these statements, there are still bitter, violent disagreements over the nature of the goals, causes and purposes that people should be uniting behind.

This is ironic but it also makes sense.  People who seek unity with others are more likely to find unity with others - but only among those who hold compatible beliefs.  They are more likely to find tension with those with incompatible beliefs.

This leads us to a set of alternative choices:

1) Not holding strong opinions about our purpose, and thereby being easy to get along with, but perhaps missing out on the experience of commitment to a community or the fulfillment of greater purpose.

- or -

2) Embracing strong beliefs about our purpose and committing oneself to a cause, but thus inevitably creating tension and possibly even violence with people who disagree.

These options are clearly two ends of a spectrum, and, as foreshadowed in earlier posts, I see the optimal path as lying closer to the middle than to the extremes.  I believe is possible to find a balance where one can hold beliefs about our purpose strongly enough to help one commit to higher causes and to a community, but not so strongly that one would lose humility or that one would feel the need to hurt or to force one's beliefs on those who disagree.

Take, for example, two hypothetical people - one holds the sincere belief that science is evil, that it is literally the work of Satan, and that we should not trust scientific institutions - the other holds the sincere belief that God's purpose for us is inextricably tied to using science as a means for learning more about the world.

Both of these individuals face a very similar set of problems.  Should they share their sincere belief with others?  Or should they keep it to themselves?  If they tell others they risk triggering tension, rejection and, potentially, violence.  If they keep their belief to themselves, they may feel they are being dishonest with themselves or others.

The optimal solution would be for such individuals to share their beliefs in a way that is sensitive, venerable and respectful.  If you share your beliefs and you aren't trying to persuade or convert anyone - you are just trying to share something important about yourself - then you are not the cause of any tension, conflict or violence that may result.

Fear of Oneself (post 17)

You cannot create community if you are afraid of yourself.

I know this through experience.

Being afraid of yourself means being afraid of making yourself a target for others' ire or jeer.
This fear is not irrational.

You live in a gigantic pack of murderous animals.
Even if you have no intention of harming or insulting or annoying any of them, you inevitably will.

People will retaliate against you.  People will reject you.  People will mock you.  People may potentially do far worse.

If you are too afraid of this, you risk becoming unwilling to say who you are - what you value, what you believe, what you think your purpose is.  Either that, or you risk prematurely going on the offensive and deriding, mocking or rejecting others before they have the chance to do the same to you.

Either way, you become impaired with respect to establishing deep connections.

Throughout most of history this wasn't a great problem - because most people lived in communities where almost everyone already shared the same world-view.  This is rapidly becoming no longer the case.

In places where people of different cultures interact for purposes of commerce, it has been considered polite to refrain from discussing religion and politics.  That's fine for commerce, but it is a huge impediment to finding or establishing communities.

There is the added problem of proselytizers and missionaries - those who impose their views on others.  Such people impede the formation of new communities as they add an extra element of fear to those who would broadcast their beliefs - the fear of being mistaken for one of them.

In my last post I spoke of the importance of balance.  We can apply that lesson here.

Being unafraid of yourself requires its own kind of balance - a path between extremes of hiding your beliefs, insulting others, or trying to make converts.

Somewhere there must lie a space where one can affirm to the world, "this is who I am", without hostility or ego-centrism, but as a message.

I am alive.  I am looking for those who'd live with me.

The Importance of Balance (post 16)

I value diversity, but I also value searching for common ground.
I value freedom, but also commitment to common goals.
I value power, but also humility.
Competition and cooperation.
Wealth, but more so charity.
Truth and uncertainty.

We continuously search for optimal paths for ourselves, our families and the world.
In this search we face a multitude of trade-offs and contradictions.
Our choices are rarely binary - they most often include a spectrum of options.
The optimal path almost never is found on the extremes or in the exact center - but those are the most obvious places to look, and too often they are the only choices we bother to consider.

Fulfilling our purpose requires balance.
Balance is never accomplished - because it never remains in one place.

Your path is discovered by moving, walking, one step in front of the other.
Walking holds a wonderful lesson concerning balance.
Walking is a process of repeatedly losing one's balance, then recovering it, only to lose it again.

On my walk I am searching for my purpose.
I am also searching for something I believe is deeply connected to that purpose - community.

Community is many things.
It is people living together, more or less, in a common space.
It is people searching together, more or less, for common values.
It is people moving together, more or less, towards common goals.
It is giving up some freedom and some independence in order to experience something greater than yourself.

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.

The Dilemma of the Commons (post 13)

The best paper every written on political theory or economics wasn't written by a political theorist or an economist.  It was written by a biologist.  In 1968 Garrett Hardin wrote one of the most famous papers ever to be published in the journal, Science.  He titled it, "The Tragedy of the Commons".

The issues brought up in this article seem to find themselves at the center of almost all significant political and economic debates.  This is true today: the recession, Obamacare, climate change, oil prices, anti-government sentiment, anti-union sentiment, the gulf oil spill, the ongoing disaster in Japan, etc.  All of these issues have near their heart problems involved with distinguishing between public and private access and ownership of resources, services, risk and liability.  How one tries to solve these problems generally defines one's political and economic viewpoint.

I recommend reading the article (or at least the Wikipedia summary), but I will provide my own ultra-short synopsis:

Several cattle owners all graze their privately owned cattle on a public (or collectively owned or accessed) parcel of land.  The problem is that the parcel is becoming over-crowded and over-grazed, and as that happens, the health (and thus value) of each cow is diminished.  As each cattle owner breeds or purchases new cattle, they face a dilemma.  To introduce a new cow to the already over-crowded parcel will provide a short term gain for the individual, but a long term detriment to the group.  What should an individual do?  It is in each owner's personal best interest to continue to add cattle to the parcel - but eventually this will lead to the utter destruction of the parcel, the death of all cattle and the end of all owners' livelihoods.  This is the tragedy of the commons.

It is incredible to sit back and realize, if we exclude jealousy and bigotry, how virtually all of our problems stem from this dilemma.

This is true in every marriage, every household, every community and every nation.

If some of our roommates refuse to clean up after themselves, even after repeated requests for them to do so, then we face the dilemma of the commons: we can continue to pick up after them - thereby expending our time and energy (to their benefit) - or we can stop cleaning up too and live in filth.  (Remind you of college?)

Yesterday I was listening to NPR (a public resource currently facing the dilemma of the commons!) about the problem of incentives for maintaining the safety of nuclear power plants.  The argument was that there is no competitive incentive to maintain safety.

Let me explain.  Let's say that you are in charge of maintaining a nuclear power plant, and you are in competition with other people who provide power to the same region.  What competitive advantage do you gain from decreasing spending on safety precautions?  A lot.  If you decrease the amount that you spend on safety, you can spend that money on other things (like marketing or distribution) - and thus gain an edge against your competitors.  What competitive advantage do you get from increasing spending on safety?  None.  The only advantage to increasing safety is to decrease risk of a nuclear meltdown - but that is not a competitive advantage - because preventing a meltdown at your plant is not only good for you, but it is equally good for your competitors (as a meltdown at your plant would kill them too).  As a manager you are forced to choose between spending on safety (which benefits everyone - even your competitors) or spending on others things (which benefits only you - thus giving you a competitive edge).  Thus we end up with the same situation (albeit on a grander scale) as we had with cow pasture and the college roommates: the dilemma of the commons.

Many different solutions have been proposed to this dilemma.  Two of the most commonly implemented and debated approaches are regulation and privatization.

Regulation seeks to create governing bodies that mandate and enforce regulations on how people can use (or put at risk) common resources (how many cows one can graze on the parcel, how many chores one must do around the house, safely precautions one must take at nuclear energy plants, etc.)

Privatization seeks to solve the dilemma of the commons by transforming common resources into private ones.  This is done by dividing common resources into smaller units that can be individually bought and sold.  The parcel would be divided into subplots which would be purchased by individual owners.  The college apartment would be divided into a duplex which the roommates would individually own.  The risk of a nuclear disaster would be limited to only those who managed or purchased power from the plant (ha ha - see below).

Both of these solutions have merits and flaws.  Let's skip the merits and focus on the flaws.

Regulation is flawed because the restrictions put in place will always seem arbitrary and in many cases may be so suboptimal that they stifle the economy.  Furthermore, this solution is vulnerable to the wealthiest individuals using their wealth to gain influence over the governing body and undermine the regulation.

Privatization is flawed as the process of enforcing property rights is equally vulnerable to corruption.  And there is the problem that there is often no good way to separate resources (or risks) into independent units.  In the case of the cattle, one overcrowded subplot can still have deleterious effects on neighboring plots - as urine, manure, odor and disease all spread.  In the case of the roommates, even if each where to purchase their own house, if one fails to maintain his house it decreases the property value of both houses.  And, of course, there is no way to partition the risk involved with a nuclear meltdown.  It will kill everyone equally.

And here is where we get to the real moral of my story.

Many philosophers, politicians and economists have read Hardin's article and have argued over whether regulation or privatization is the better solution.  Our stance on the issue strongly affects how we interpret the events occurring around us.  The current recession is a perfect example.  Those who favor regulation see the recession as being caused by a lack of regulation (allowing banks to over-leverage themselves while creating and selling toxic derivatives).  Those who favor privatization see the recession as being caused by too much regulation (the government pressuring lenders to grant mortgages to high risk borrowers).  Of course the answer is that it was both - along with many other factors as well.  But our philosophical views often blind us to the entire picture and lead us to focus on just some parts.

To those who favor regulation, I want to remind you that government regulation is often inept and/or corrupt.  My experiences with the public school system has taught me that first hand.  I am not in favor of vouchers for private schools - but I am in favor of dissolving mammoth school districts and promoting the creation of more small charter schools which compete for enrollment and government funding.  It is only through experiment and competition that we are going to find the solution to our educational woes.

To those who favor privatization, I want to remind you that we are not islands.  If one person's freedom ends where it infringes upon the freedoms of another, then there is no freedom - because there is nothing that we can do that does not significantly and permanently affect the lives of everyone around us.  We are connected.  We breath the same air, drink the same water, and are warmed by the same sun.  We are made of the same molecules.  We have all experienced birth, we will all experience death.  And, at some point, we will all be faced with the question of why.

We do and must compete against each other, just as children compete for the attention of their parents.  But as every parent knows, we may smile when our children compete amongst themselves (because it's fun!  And how else will they learn their strengths and weaknesses?) but we also want our children to be kind to one another and to love each other.

The solution to the tragedy of the commons cannot be regulation or privatization.  It must be a solution that encourages us to compete, but also helps us to realize how interconnected and interdependent we truly are.

Purpose (post 12)

I know I could be wrong, but I believe there is a reason for our existence.

I believe that each of us has a purpose - something that we are to do while here.  And we can work towards that purpose or against it.  It is our choice - and it is a choice that we repeatedly make throughout our lives.

I didn't always believe this.  For most of my life I believed there was no purpose other than to live for a time and then die - something no one fails to accomplish.

My disbelief stemmed from a desire for justice and a distrust of all traditional sources of authority.
If there was to be a purpose, I didn't want to believe that one person would have a better chance of fulfilling it due their religion or social class - or whether or not they had been abused or abandoned as a child.

To me it seemed that traditional measures of virtue and accomplishment were biased to favor those born to loving parents, healthy parents, and particular religious backgrounds.  And so I rejected them.  And instead I chose to believe that the world is fair - at least in the sense that our lives are equally meaningless.

This has changed.  But I have not given up my belief that the world is fair - at least not in regards to our potential to live meaningful lives.

I believe that our purpose is to gain faith in each other, to share ourselves with each other, and to forgive each other - even when our trust is broken or unrequited (as it most definitely at times will be).

I embrace this as our purpose for many reasons.  I embrace it because it feels right, but also because it makes sense.

Life is more enjoyable and meaningful when we try to see the good in each other.  And just because we put our faith in someone does not mean we must agree with her ideas.  Nor does it mean we should not take prudent measures to protect ourselves.  I can have faith in you as a person while telling you it was a bad idea to steal from me and it would be even stupider for you to try to steal from me again.  I can forgive you for a crime but still punish you to inhibit you from committing such a crime ever again.  Many parent knows this - as they know it is best to follow through with an appropriate punishment even though they have forgiven their child for the transgression.  Punishment can and should be administered with love, not anger.

Having faith in and forgiving each other is not only heartening and prudent; it is just.  It is something we all have an equal potential to accomplish.

Certainly some of us have endured much greater levels of anguish, cruelty and betrayal than others.  But are such experiences catalysts or inhibitors to our ability to trust and forgive?

Anecdotal evidence from my life indicates that it can be both and neither.

And while it is certainly true that victims of violence are more likely to commit acts of violence - that in no way implies that these victims are less capable of forgiving those who committed violence against them.  For how can we compare one's ability to forgive his abuser to that of someone who has not been abused in the same way or to the same degree?  We can't.  Our ability to have faith and to forgive is something that we can only measure within ourselves.  We can judge our own success and failure, but it is impossible to correctly judge this in someone else.

In accomplishing or failing to accomplish our purpose, we are isolated from each other.

We are isolated.

But that does not mean we are alone.