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It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival. Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail. Until recently, individuals needed to be par
by tycho-newman 1y ago
It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival.
Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail.
Until recently, individuals needed to be part of some sort of kinship group to get their needs met and to survive. To communicate with anyone in near real time you had to be close by.
We have managed to engineer a society where individuals can survive "on their own" - basically outside their kinship groups. This is possible thanks to globe-spanning networks of communication and trade.
Kinship groups are great, but many of them have painful costs. Some 60 percent of Americans, for example, suffered an adverse childhood experience in kinship groups. Some of these could not be avoided - like a loved one's untimely death. Most of these negative experiences were intent or neglect by kinship group members.
If your early experiences of kinship groups are negative, you are less likely to seek out other human connection. You have learned that your kinship group is not reliable. If people genetically close to you cannot be relied on, then why should it be different for strangers?
The connections you do find tend to be focused on your interests, and those people don't need to be nearby for you to have a strong connection. But you still have your prior experiences keeping you skeptical of human reliability.
Personally, I sympathize with everyone who is sad about communities becoming fragmented.
I think, though, that if these communities were as supportive, inclusive, or beneficial as they imagine themselves to be this would not be a problem.
Bad communities should be allowed to fail. That is probably what is happening here.
- BruceEel 1y ago> Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail. Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder. And, what would be some sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale.
- sameasiteverwas 1y ago> sensible ways of detecting and handling failure at such scale War and revolution. 'Burn it down and start from scratch' is an extreme path to fix a failing country. Historically, the people that rebuild are rarely the same people that burned it down.
- BruceEel 1y agoGrim and plausible.
- tycho-newman 1y agoSure. That said, the nation state is often little more than regional elites legalizing their control over workers and capital. If your local elites are generally better than the alternative people tend to stick around
- BruceEel 1y agoBroadly agree. I'm probably too upset to write about the local elites with anything bearing even a passing resemblance to objectivity, but an outbreak of incompetence is the overall impression.
- carlosjobim 1y agoYes, when the nation is ethnically homogenous you can have that. But it's not a guarantee. "I against my brother. I and my brother against my cousin. I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" -Arab Proverb
- BruceEel 1y agowell put.
- tycho-newman 1y agoI did nazi this coming …
- barry-cotter 1y agoIt’s a Bedouin proverb, not an Arab one, and it’s me, not I.
- barry-cotter 1y ago> Are there circumstances under which nation states could/should be seen as 'communities', I wonder. No. Imagined communities are fake communities with none of the feedback mechanisms that make real communities resilient to elements that have extremely different priorities to the median member. See how the Swedish Social Democrats imported over 1% of the Swedish population in one year from Syria.
- BruceEel 1y agoInteresting take. And yeah, indeed, Sweden. It breaks my heart.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago"Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail." Are you not assuming something is not killing these communities from the outside? Should all people who get an infection be allowed to die? People are being squeezed to death by hypercapitalism and you blame the communities?
- tycho-newman 1y agoLife has a 100 percent fatality rate People fight for communities they want to preserve. There’s no guarantees that fight will be successful. But when they don’t fight? Maybe it’s because they can’t. Or don’t want to. No one should ask them or force them to.
- FollowingTheDao 1y ago"Life has a 100 percent fatality rate" So, "no one should ask" a suicidal person to not kill themselves "or force them" not to. It is when people cannot fight for themselves that those of us who can fight have to fight even harder. I am saying this as someone who has attempted suicide twice. You are literally arguing in favor for shrugging your shoulders to things like slavery.
- tycho-newman 1y agoNo one should ask a suicidal person not to kill themselves. If you believe in autonomy, every human has the right to decide when and how to end their lives. Slavery denies human autonomy by taking all control away. Even when you think their decision is a bad one, it’s their life and their decision.
- daseiner1 1y agoAsking isn’t forcing. And people who are suicidal are often in an unhealthy state of mind that doesn’t persist over an extended period of time. And we obviously place limits on autonomy in all sorts of ways.
- closewith 1y ago> Also, bad communities fail. They should be allowed to fail. This is wishful thinking. The resilience of communities is orthogonal to their moral worth, which is inherently subjective. Many communities which have horrific traits survive and thrive for centuries and even millennia. Many which I'm sure you would consider morally good are perilously close to failure.
- tycho-newman 1y agoCommunities, like all living things, are subject to the whims of extinction events. When a mountain falls out of the sky, it’s no one’s fault (not even the bad people) that the community failed.
- BlueTemplar 1y agoHow a child is supposed to survive "on their own" ? And why do you think this would even be a good thing ?
- tycho-newman 1y ago“On their own” is in air quotes because it’s a vast simplification. In kinship group days, and especially before vaccines, children simply didn’t survive. They died by the millions. Today, a child has a viable alternative to the abusive or neglectful kinship group. Very often it is The State, but still. An alternative!
- BlueTemplar 1y agoAh, I had a different interpretation of "until recently"... I am afraid that the child is still pretty screwed... especially if you try to generalise this to 60% of children !
- tycho-newman 1y agoIn "On Love", bell hooks points out just how screwed children are by their circumstance and their lack of agency/autonomy. Highly recommend reading her.
- heresie-dabord 1y ago> It's not lost, just no longer necessary for survival. The psychological argument is that it is necessary for survival — that a society that has long taken underlying healthy behaviours for granted is discovering that it's losing what defines society itself. Trust, cooperation, sustainable development, sound policy-making, education, child-care...
- tycho-newman 1y agoAltruism, trust, and cooperation often emerge from acts and choices that seem completely self-interested. Heck, cooperation is a survival strategy that came out of evolution. It exists outside of humans. It doesn’t need to come from human intent. It feels weird to me that people think they can intelligently design cooperative societies and groups. You can try, but there’s always going to be trade offs between individuals and the group. In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs. I think this is generally positive considering my own experience of costly kinship groups. But I can see why others disagree.
- heresie-dabord 1y ago> In this moment, individuals are in a place where they can avoid many of those trade offs and costs. This sounds like what some call the Libertarian Housecat position. "My needs are met, and I am unaware of complex externalities that make meeting my needs possible."
- tycho-newman 1y agoIndeed. For me, being aware of those complexities is what gives me hope that there’s a new emerging paradigm.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]