It’s popular now to say that a “community” is the most important thing to have if there’s some sort of emergency. If the economy breaks down, or we run out of oil, or the trucks stop running, or (fill in your favorite catastrophe here), it’s the people you know who will help you get through it.
Interestingly, among the people I know who say this most often, community doesn’t necessarily mean the people who live in your neighborhood, or the people who supply you with locally-grown food, although the movement towards localization is certainly growing. Instead, for the people I talk to it implies that if one has the ability to make friends, to be sociable, to create ties with like-minded individuals, then the people you know will offer the psychological support you need to get through any emergency.
That’s important, I’m sure, although if sociability is the thing that will help people survive, it doesn’t bode well for those of us on the more solitary end of the sociability scale. And it doesn’t actually explain where the food and other necessities will come from, unless we are to assume that the government will always be there with emergency services, and our community is only needed for emotional support.
Traditionally, a community was made up of people who had complimentary skills and traded with one another. For instance, the bee keeper, the vintner, the farmer who grows barley, the brewer, the publican, and the neighbors who buy their beer and wine, are all part of an interdependent community. These people don’t have to like each other, and they don’t need to think alike – they just need to create products that are needed by others. Bits of this kind of community still exist, and farmer’s markets and the local food movement and micro breweries and craftsmen are all trying to rebuild this kind of community now. The biggest stumbling block is globalization, because a manufactured product imported from China is cheaper than the same product created here, and vegetables or meat imported from a factory farm in California or Arkansas are cheaper than the same items grown a few miles down the road.
Even for those of us who believe that our global economy is too fragile to survive much longer, it’s hard to physically remove oneself from the current system because one individual or family can’t do enough or know enough. And besides, belonging to a larger group is demanded by our biology as social animals. We can’t go it alone, and even if we could, we wouldn’t want to. More families are needed, more skills is needed, more knowledge is needed, in order to form a traditional community. And that would mean that many people decide, more or less at the same time, that they want to give up all the comforts of modern life and return to something that’s more difficult, but which is also more sustainable and respectful of the earth.
Getting all those people in one place is a much bigger challenge than just growing a big garden. That’s why I think that a new mythology, or a common way of thinking, is the catalyst that can bring people together to build a real community. There needs to be an idea that is so compelling that people would be willing to give up the things they already enjoy doing, their homes and their neighborhoods, and go build a new tribe. Just talking about how cool that would be just isn’t enough.
Perhaps we can’t develop a new way of thinking that’s compelling enough to get us moving towards true community until we actually experience the breakdown of the current system. That may not happen within our lifetimes, but if history is any guide, it could happen tomorrow. Whenever it does, people will do what it takes to survive, and that means we’ll rebuild our communities, from scratch. It will take a while, and there may be some grief along the way, but people are resilient and we will get through it.
But maybe at least a few of us could get a head start and build those communities without needing a disaster to force us into it. Maybe we could do it with a good marketing campaign and a place where a lot of houses are currently for sale at affordable prices. Pick the spot, let people around the country know that we’re headed there, let them know what skills or products we have for trade, and that we hope people with complementary skills will come join us. That’s how most of the towns in America first started. Maybe that’s all that’s needed now. If so, one or two families have to be the first ones to uproot themselves, sell their current homes, pack all their stuff into boxes, and move (unless they just happen to live in the perfect spot already). They would have to do it with no guarantee that anyone of like mind will ever join them.
Or, and this is what I believe is probably true, there should be both a compelling idea (which I’ve called a new mythology in a previous post) plus one or two families who act as the first pioneers, based on faith that others who help build that mythology will someday join them. If that’s true, we need both an idea and a place.
What idea would be compelling enough to make you move and do the work of creating a new interdependent agrarian community? Where would you want that community to be located? Ideas welcome.
