I’ve been thinking a great deal about intentional communities lately. Basically, I look around the world and see that the not-so-intentional ones are rapidly destroying themselves. So I figure we’ll need some new ones and it would probably be better to actually put some thought into it this time around. There are a surprising number of these already underway, but I’m interested in putting my own spin on the matter.
There are many schools of thought to be found on the topic, but it seems that I more or less fall into a category called neo-tribalism. The idea is that one of the most fundamental reasons our communities are failing is because they’re just too big. This guy called Dunbar did some research and came up with a theoretical cap to the size of a workable community, which has come to be called Dunbar’s Number. To the modern mind, it is shockingly small: about 150. This represents the maximum number of people that the average person can recognize as individual human beings which can be valued, respected, and loved. Beyond that, people begin to become faceless abstracts, not much more than statistics. It’s worth noting that 150 is the high end, which Dunbar argued would only be sustainable under highly favorable or needful situations. Which means a community that wants to be more "fault tolerant" would need to be even smaller.
This whole notion is well presented in an amusing and illuminating article called Inside the Monkeysphere by David Wong. I recommend it.
All of this makes sense to me on a number of levels. Alienation is one of the most crazy-making things we can experience and it’s becoming more and more the norm. I can easily see how this would be a foundational factor in all manner of ills in contemporary human life. So making communities small enough to solve the alienation problem seems like a very practical first step.
However, that only (theoretically) solves the problem of the people in any given community. There’s still the matter of how each "tribe" is going to interact with its neighbors. If Dunbar’s number dooms the next community over to forever remain "the other", then we’re really not going to be much better off. Rather than feeling alienated from everyone, we’ll only feel alienated from the other 6,700,000,000 people out there. Which is a problem. Again, I think some intention is called for this time around.
All the world’s enduring spiritual traditions tell us that the answer is, roughly, some form or another of monism. For example, as Wong says in the above article, "a personal idea of God in our heads who says, ‘no matter who you hurt, you’re really hurting me. Also, I can crush you like a grape.’" In a way, it’s a pragmatic use of semantics to bypass the Dunbar problem. Rather than trying to squeeze in far more people than we can recognize as individual entities, we just add one more super-entity which is representative of all the others. So when you see a stranger, you don’t need to see Elizabeth Swanson of Elderberry Lane who has two siblings and likes jazz, you can just see God and interact with her at that level.
To a certain degree, this is a useful tactic. If actually carried out, it would certainly lead to peaceful relations. However, there are two glaring problems with this that immediately present themselves to me. First, it isn’t any less de-humanizing than the first approach. Seeing the face of "God" in everyone might lead you to treat them nicely, but it won’t lead you treat them as who they are. I am in fact a devout monist (and a dialetheist, so also a dualist, but I digress), so I do believe that we are all "inter-being". Beyond tactical semantics, the notion that we are one also happens to be true. But, in addition to our divine unity, we are also discrete, unique individuals. Ms. Swanson really does like jazz, and if you don’t see that then you don’t really see her.
The second problem is that the notion of "we’re all God" is directly at odds with much of our experience. If Ms. Swanson makes off with some of our resources, then we’re left with the prospect that God just left us cold and hungry. Faced with this contradiction, we typically react by reverting her status back to "the other" (which in this scenario is analogous to Satan), killing her, taking back our stuff, and probably taking anything else we can get our hands on while we’re there (all the while ensuring a counter-attack by her siblings).
So, what do we do with all of this? I think the whole "placeholder" strategy is a sound one. However, I don’t know that God is the best candidate. It seems like we need another concept. Something that doesn’t try to gloss over the problems other people can present, but simultaneously acknowledging that they are ultimately good things. Perhaps something akin to the Christian tradition of referring to others (admittedly usually other Christians) as Brother and Sister, even if they’re total strangers. Something that says "I don’t know you, but I know we’re connected".
I like the way that feels. Rather than trying to see everyone as God, trying to see everyone as family. Brothers and Sisters are fully human, and sometimes we don’t even like them, but we try our best to get along. We try because we know that, for better or worse, we are part of each other’s lives. And, in the big picture, that’s just about the best thing there is.
That sounds like a pretty good intention for a community to me.