Who believes that more police and gun control will "solve" Toronto's shooting problems? Who believes that allocating more money to healthcare will help our health when so many of our problems are chronic, social and behavioral? Who believes that more funding in education will heal the malaise that our children suffer from in school? Who believes that politicians can solve our problems?
Many still do.
Some of us know that the real answers are to be found not "out there" but "in here" in our community.
This is not new thinking. There is a lot of jargon calling on community to take the lead. There is clear and authoritative writing on the value of Social Capital. What is community? How did we lose it? How do we build stronger community?
What passes for community leadership today is often a bunch of activists who have an agenda and who use "Community" as a label to get them a voice, power and money.
In this occasional series I am going to draw extensively on the work of Christopher Alexander whom I will now refer to as CA. Please enjoy his site and even more dig into his writing.
CA's work establishes that all beings operate, socialize and interact with their surroundings (constructing things such as nests and colonies, ideal social groupings for the species such as packs for wolves, prides for lions, troops for baboons, schools for fish etc) according to a small set of rules that enhance life itself. Life works against entropy and builds structures that enhance all life.
My community restoration hypothesis is this. We humans are part of nature, we have innate social and design skills that have been atrophied, and in many cases suppressed altogether, by a machine mindset. In a machine world, the natural complexity of life has been flattened to a point where very few of our natural relationships exist anymore. So we stop being human and become objects who live in an objective universe. We now are on the side of entropy. We are working not only against life as defined by the environment but of course against our own lives as natural beings.
I suspect that the reason is that we have adopted a culture and hence a set of behaviors and a lens that is making us less human.
Our adoption of a culture of the machine has removed us from the innate world of natural knowledge and has set us on a course to take life out of our societies and hence the biosphere. Our only chance is to find a way home to being human again. The great irony is that I think that the internet is part of our way home. This is quite a statement to make.
I intend to fully explain this idea of the fall and the return in a series of posting over the next few months.
I leave you though today with a few pictures as a hint of why I think we have fallen and also how we can find our way home.
Which of the choices feel more "Human" to you? Ask yourself why. I will be back with more soon
Here is a street in Sitges near Barcelona.
This a new suburb in Kentucky
This is picture by CA of a flower market
This is an extreme cubicle world
This is how millions get to work
This how many get to work in Barcelona
This is a typical modern kitchen ideal
This is a kitchen designed by CA
Technorati Tags: Community, Culture, Ideas, Natural Law, Organization, Tribe, Work
