After Hug Withdrawal

springboards for reflection on
post-pandemic community

The pandemic is forcing us to re-think what we mean by community and the role face-to-face contact plays in it.  In certain ways I'm becoming ever more converted to screen culture.   I'd been a member of this culture for some time. and there are aspects of it appreciate and aspects that trouble me.  But, as the poet Christina Hutchins puts it, "the tactillian says: I think I'm in hug withdrawal."  I miss handshakes, gentle touches, hugs.  I'm seeing more wisdom in the custom of bowing but not hugging.  

It leads me to wonder what role hugs and other forms of face-to-face contact will play, and should play, when, as the saying goes, we return to normal.  Actually, I don't think we will return to normal,  But I'm not sure anyone really knows that the new normal will look like.  We're inventing it as we go.  

In the essay below, John Cobb writes:

The collapse of the global economy and all the institutions connected with it will force people to make do with local resources.  If they approach this task with the same mindset that has created the unsustainable global economy and the overshoot of the earth’s resources, the future for humanity is very bleak indeed.  There is an alternative.  Humanity will have the opportunity to construct local communities. 

What kinds of community will they be?  The hope is that they will be creative, compassionate, participatory, diverse, inclusive, humane to animals, and good for the earth -- with no one left behind.  These are the building blocks of what John Cobb and others call "ecological civilizations."  In the essay below John Cobb makes a case for this the construction of communities.  The other portions of this page (music and quotations) are springboards for reflection on the nature of "community."  No answers, just springboards.

constructing local communities
​
john b. cobb, jr.

​Every community should be a part of a community of communities.

The collapse of the global economy and all the institutions connected with it will force people to make do with local resources.  If they approach this task with the same mindset that has created the unsustainable global economy and the overshoot of the earth’s resources, the future for humanity is very bleak indeed.  There is an alternative.  Humanity will have the opportunity to construct local communities.  

A community is not automatically generated by people living in close proximity.  Most suburban neighborhoods today are not communities.  A community gives identity to its inhabitants.  That is, I identify myself as a “Pilgrim” because my participation in the life of my retirement institution, Pilgrim Place, is part of who I now am.  It is a community in which I participate.  Pilgrim Place is a community because participation in it means sharing in concern for the well being of other Pilgrims and taking some responsibility for the whole.  We work all year to raise money for those whose funds are exhausted.  We are committed to preventing anyone from having to leave because of financial problems.

When nation states arose, they intended to be communities.  Their citizens identified themselves in large part by their nationality.  They expected the nation as a whole to take some responsibility for the welfare of all its citizens and were willing to make some contribution to enabling the nation to do so.  

The organization of Europe in terms of nation states was part of the rise of modernity.  It weakened local communities and communities based on religious identity for the sake of strengthening the national community.  Nevertheless, much of the economy remained local, and local community remained strong.  The industrial revolution greatly weakened local economies and increased mobility within the nation.  Local communities lost much of their importance and often ceased to function as communities.  This whole process was strengthened by the individualism that was encouraged by Enlightenment thinking.  

This individualism has now been turned against the national community as well.  The economic elite no longer identify themselves particularly as American.  If they belong to any community, it is a transnational one of wealth and power.  

It is no longer self-evident to many Americans that they should be prepared to contribute to meeting the needs of all Americans.  That idea, rooted in the very meaning of community, is dismissed as “socialist” by an increasing, and increasingly influential, segment of the population.  They believe the national government should give them freedom and support their interests.  It should protect them from interference by other people.  But it should not expect any contribution from them for other purposes.

The now developing global crisis can lead to fresh reflection that will make people aware of the importance of community.  If it does so, this will express itself most clearly at the local level.  Confronted by acute shared problems, we may hope that people will agree that they need to work together for their solution and to build a new life.  The preceding sections have sketched, in the most hopeful way, what will be possible.  

The major problem with communities is that they are in danger of defining themselves over against other communities.  Individuals who identify themselves strongly with one community may perceive others as actual or potential threats.  The we/they understanding of the world easily arises, with “they” understood negatively.  A world composed of local communities all of which face scarcities of important types is threatened by conflict that can easily become violent.  That sort of world is unsustainable.  

Hence the goal must be not only to have strong, healthy local communities, but to have also communities of communities.  We can see something like this in the world of sports.  Consider the high school teams of small towns.  The citizens of those towns feel a strong sense of identification with their teams and root for them vociferously.  But the teams that compose a particular league also gain some of their identity from their participation in that league and want it to be strong and healthy.  Also when wider concerns are in view, those who root for their teams show their concern for the other towns that support the other teams.  The rivalry among the teams is contained in a context of sportsmanship, and the teams learn the importance of respecting their rivals.  

Healthy local communities will have as part of their basic self-understanding a respect and appreciation for other communities and their citizens.  If one community suffers a natural disaster, its neighbors will come to its aid.  It is healthy to have competition and rivalry, but this is not healthy unless it is contained within a wider context of respect and cooperation.  

Local communities will have their relatively self-sufficient economies, but there will be economic issues that require cooperation with their neighbors.  Those that only compete will not survive, and they will destroy others along with themselves.  Healthy communities will participate in communities of communities.  Although each will have considerable autonomy, any effort to be completely independent will misfire.  Communities of communities will also need the authority to make decisions.  And the same is true of communities of communities of communities.  Even in a world in which the focus is on the local, there will be need for some governance at the global level as well.  

A political structure of this sort will be sustainable only if we overcome individualistic ways of thinking.  In the modern world this individualism has expressed itself not only in the erosion of community at the local and national levels but in the idea that at one level or another there must be “sovereignty.”  That need springs from “substance” thinking.  Process thinking is community thinking.  Individuals become healthy persons only in community with others.  The people are not sovereign, and neither is the community.  The community shapes the people and gives them freedom.  The people shape the community and give it a measure of authority.  Local communities are not sovereign.  They can be healthy and strong only through their relation with other communities in a community of communities.  That inclusive community is not sovereign.  It exists to serve the communities that make it up, but these communities need for it to have its own measure of authority over them.  

Substance thinking leads to the idea that if one institution increases in power, other institutions must lose power.  Process thinking argues instead that no one can have any significant power except through cooperation.  Increasing the power of the agencies of cooperation increases the power of those who cooperate through them.  The most important form of power is that which empowers others.  A world in which that is deeply understood can be a sustainable world.

John Cobb, an excerpt from Ten Ideas for Saving the Planet

The process of coming together

​daniel de togni

"Putting it together is a piece about the importance of community and about the struggle of voices aiming to unify themselves. The piece begins with small fragmented and very much isolated musical germs that throughout the course of the piece, strive to come together as one....Much of the music material is not derived from, but is inspired by taiko drum patterns. The tapestries of weaving accents and rhythms created by a taiko community sets a back drop for many sections of Putting it together. Community plays a significant role in the taiko community as well as was a driving force behind the writing of this piece." Daniel De Togni
​"There is a brokenness in creation that we all know. The wolf and the lamb do not yet lie down together. We swat the mosquito. We are wary of demons cut off from grace. And yet in a calm, trusting, sabbath mind, there is a sense of the promise that birthed Isaiah's pastoral prophecy of a peaceful creation. We accept the community that we can share now, and yearn for and somehow trust the promise of that full community of creation yet to come."
— Tilden Edwards in Sabbath Time
​“The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong. To be alienated from this community is to become destitute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own existence.”
— Thomas Berry, Catholic priest and cultural historian
The only durable community is the one that embraces the whole planet, wild and tame. We need to find ways of speaking about that great community without drawing lines between nature and society, for such boundaries are . . . illusory.
— Scott Russell Sanders, Writing from the Center
"If you were alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth."
​
— Mitsugi Saotome, American aikido instructor
​"We can begin by doing small things at the local level, like planting community gardens or looking out for our neighbors. That is how change takes place in living systems, not from above but from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously."
​
— Grace Lee Boggs, social activist and feminist
"The politics we most need right now is the "politics of community." In that birthing process, a prophetic spiritual network — across the lines of race, class, gender, and region — can act as the midwife of new possibilities."
​
— Jim Wallis in The Soul of Politics
​"It becomes increasingly clear that humans have a common origin and a common destiny with every other component of the Earth community. We live on the same planet. We breathe the same air. We drink the same water. We share the same sunlight. We are nourished by the same soil. In all these ways we share in a common spiritual mode of being as well as in a common physical sustenance.
​
— Thomas Berry in The Community of Religions by Wayne Teasdale, editor, and George Cairns, editor
"New models of connectedness are emerging all around us. In the information era, access becomes more crucial than possession. Who will have access? What will this do to the economy? The Internet can move ideas faster than books; the hypertext of the World Wide Web is teaching us new, creative ways of shaping reality. Virtual community is replacing proximate, spatial community; subjectivity is no longer bounded by the skin and the brain. All of these transformations will have beneficial but destabilizing effects on our social arrangements and structures. To where shall we look for a principle, a motive of accountability?"
— Madonna Kolbenschlag in Eastward Toward Eve
​"I cannot imagine how stressful it is to be a leader today and to pretend that you have the answer. A life-affirming leader is one who knows how to rely on and use the intelligence that exists everywhere in the community, the company, the school, or the organization. A leader these days needs to be a host — one who convenes people, who convenes diversity, who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our intelligence can come forth."
— Margaret J. Wheatley in The World Cafe by Juanita Brown, David Isaacs, and The World Cafe Community
Photos from Ivan Radic, pom'.
Open Horizons