There are many social inventions that we can create. None is as seminal to the planet as the community. Communities are any fair sized grouping of people who have a story together and cooperate to pursue a purposeful lifestyle.Today communities span a grand range of interests. We find them in small towns, we find them in large corporations, we find them on the world-wide web, and we find them among hobbyists, sports enthusiasts and non-governmental organizations. Collectively they may be physically close or strung out across the planet. The factors that bind them, however, are knowable and often similar.
The social architect designs communities. We normally think of a community as a small township like the ones our grandparents grew up in. We imagine they have a mayor. We also imagine most everyone knows everyone else and always has. Ah, the good old days.
Those groupings are difficult to find these days. It is more common, at the turn of the millennium, to find a large chat group on the internet that spends weeks of time having an extended conversation about the purpose of this or that.
Corporations today, when polled using a social science instrument describing various cultural models, consistently choose the "clan" as a model to aspire to. Winning corporations tend to have very strong cultures. This is to say, they have many reinforcing elements that remind everyone in the game that they are more a part of the collective force than anything else. They have and want team spirit.
In some senses the strongest of them emulate "cults". Of course, cults have a bad name today because of the fact that in the worst of cases the strongest cultures may attempt to hold on to their members against their will. The good side of a cult is that the togetherness and strongly enforced participation actually produce or can produce a lot of whatever their focused upon. A national football league dynasty is a cult and so are elite military units.
The actual detailed description of these reinforcing elements is the subject of this journey together. Thoughtful application of social architecture can produce a strong group effect. The effect can be powerfully good. It just depends upon the focus designed into the culture. Knowing what the reinforcing elements are and how they are applied seems to be a lost art. With just some basics you can make a real difference.
But, can we afford to hold up examples of strong cultures gone wrong and deny purposeful groupings of people the chance to feel the genuine joy of being congruent and deeply linked with others in a common adventure of consequence? No. People everywhere are deeply disturbed by the lonely existence of the masses huddled beside their television sets in neighborhoods where they know absolutely no one around them. Yes, it is nice to have discovered privacy in the latter part of the twentieth century, but lack of community is a sore point. We can have both.....but it does require thoughtful design.
Just imagine if your community had a heraldry department? Yes, so that your most precious beliefs would be waved on high on a flag, printed in relief on a crest, emblazoned on a sash that all would wear, be trumpeted clearly at the festive gathering, and so it goes. Had you ever thought that these basic tools that were available to the tiniest dukedom in the middle ages could be used to bring meaning to those ideals you care about. Isn't it time to go beyond T-shirts and baseball caps ? Isn't there any ideal out there that deserves treatment more noble than a bumper sticker ?
And what about ceremony ? You may have nothing in common with the religious cultures that have grown around you and at the same time wouldn't it be nice to meet in a place as beautiful as a church ? Think if all the values you cared about were remembered in song ? Think of how nice it would be if the major modern day accomplishments of your children were honored by ceremony ? What ever happened to the fireside gathering with all of it's grounding stories. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What does it matter? What does it mean? We can give more presence to those things that we value....its a matter of design.
It is so obvious that we have mistaken the forms of honor with the original values they carried. For example, can you wave a red flag and not have people think you are espousing a communist ideology? Does that mean we have to bury the forms of celebration with the ideas they carried that are now out of date ? Because Hitler had rallies with fire and drums does that mean they are evil in themselves? The Tibetan Buddhists use similar tools but that does not make them bad. Do you have any idea how many absolutely exquisite forms that have been created throughout the centuries are now dying with the last ideas they carried ? We can ritualize what we care about again.
In many cases the oldest tribes have the best rituals. Because the Zuwangi tribe didn't have toasters does that mean they also didn't have exquisite rites of passage ceremonies for their children ? Mindless associations have made people leery of dramatic ceremonies. Unfortunately that concern is denying passion to communities who need the juice to rebuild their togetherness and all the conventions that reinforce togetherness.
The average military unit in the western tradition has forty to fifty thoughtful conventions to celebrate the ideals determined to be important. Yes, and new conventions must be created and some of them must be revised from time to time. That is why even the American army forged in modern times has a heraldry department that tends to match the right symbol to the right ideal. It is also why the military bands are budgeted in the millions. The manifestation of spirit in music is powerful and necessary to empassion courage.
The uniform of the career soldier can carry as many as thirty specific heraldic elements to honor as many ideals. Sometimes they are recognized in terms of service time, sometimes they are recognized in terms of superlative performance, sometimes they are just to establish the affiliation with traditional skills, but they are RECOGNIZED !
The social architect uncovers deep ideals and then sees that they are recognized with appropriate cultural artifacts. Hopefully, after these examples you may be able to associate the importance of knowing what you care about as a group and then properly recognizing each element with a culturally crafted solution. You may further notice that just because a cultural form like a church ceremony has been used to honor one set of ideals it is not off-limits later on for another set.
In the end, there will be no community that lasts if it doesn't recognize itself as such. In the end, if there is no cultural reinforcement for common beliefs there will be no commonality. It is likely that the richest possible form of civilization on planet earth will come from a grand infrastructure of communication and resources that itself supports the most original and fully celebrated communities.
We can have underlying unity with maximum diversity. That is high culture and a civilization worth having! We can think of community as clans of several hundred people or more. We also imagine that they can be collocated together in a village of some sort. Notions of how we group ourselves are based on tribal and farming village notions. In the future, we may see smaller and more virtual groupings. People will belong to more than one community. Some physically co-located and some virtual.
The spiritual family comes to mind as an example of a 21st century community. It could be an extended family of people who want to commune in order to grow themselves spiritually. They also may want to work together at a business that takes them to interesting locations. They may have individual sources of income as well as the one they get from working together. They may be intimate and that could take a variety of forms.
Choices come from having more freedom to communicate, travel and not be bound by the small town traditions of former times.
The social architect structures communities to support the values decided upon by the group.
