The word community is used in a very broad way. People talk about online communities which are a group of people that share a chat room or a forum and discuss the same topic together. People Talk about the regulars at a particular club or bar as being a community. We also talk about our neighbourhood as our community, even when we have no real connection to the people who live around us. I don't want to say any of these usages are wrong, the word really is defined quite broadly. But this muddies the waters a little when talking about community and the need we all have for it. In this text I want to talk about mutual support communities. This refers to a group of people that actually know us personally. That know where we live and where we work. People that check in on us to see how we are doing. People that share their resources with us when they have excess or when we have a lack. In a small village 1000 years ago, if you had bad luck, say your house was struck by lightning and burned down, the community would step in. Your family could sleep in spare rooms and on floors in other peoples houses while you rebuilt. The village would pitch in with resources and labour to help speed up the rebuilding. The shocks of misfortune do not land on one person in a community, they land on the whole community. This makes the magnitude of shocks that can be survived much greater. Likewise if there is good luck, for example if one farmer has a particularly large harvest, the whole community benefits.
Traditionally humans evolved for most of their history in social groups that comprised primarily of a large extended family group, often called a tribe or a clan. Nomadic lifestyles lend themselves to relatively fluid communities, it is easy to leave or join when you are moving around a lot anyway and when two groups meet it is easy enough for a few members to switch groups, assuming culture and religion and social factors permit. In sedentary agricultural societies we formed into small villages, with a similar if slightly less dynamic nature. Organised religion deliberately preached the organisation of community around the church, and restricted family groups to the so called 'nuclear family'. Organised religion, especially Catholicism, is a very deliberately and consciously designed system whose primary purpose is to pull power away from natural communities and concentrate it in the church. Taking power away from clans and tribes and moving it to church groups. With modern life we have moved away from those church communities, even those of us who are still religious have much less support from members of their local church, especially in large cities. Those who are not religious generally have nothing to replace the church community. Even worse our system drives both parents in a two parent household to work, and also is not helping families stay together. So even the tiny support community of the nuclear family is not available for many people.
Many people have no mutual support community at all. Most people have their family, or one or two close friends. Few people have a mutual support community larger than a handful of people. The need is obvious, people talk about wanting to have community. If you bring up this topic most people respond with a clear and deep desire to find this kind of support in their lives. Many people confuse this need with their romantic needs. Many people that are not, by orientation, naturally monogamous strive for a romantic partnership not because their romantic needs require it, but because they have a need for the security that a mutual support community would bring. Even those who are naturally monogamous focus all their need for community on finding the one perfect partner, rather than looking to be part of a larger group. Many people look to their friends. Some people have told me that they need to have one or two close friends in their lives and that is enough. But in a romantic partnership, or a group of two or three friends, it is easy for both or all three to fall on hard times at once. Even worse, if your only support person in the world dies how do you deal with the grief? Given that such relationships can take years to cultivate, how do you find another one when you need it most? People who have no support community die in easily preventable ways, for example if you slip and fall at home or if you take too much medication. If no one notices you are not responding to messages and comes around to check on you you can lie unconscious for days. Even though at any moment you could easily be saved by modern medicine, often with something as simple as a saline drip, eventually your body will give out. People with no support community end up homeless when they suffer financial shocks or when there is a problem with housing. People with no support community suffer from loneliness and depression because they don't have the basic human interactions that we psychologically need to stay healthy and sane.
For most modern people living in large cities and living modern lives, it is neither desirable nor possible to go back to a village filled with extended family members. What we need is to develop new types of community organisation. Culture is like software for networked human minds. We can and do develop new social culture all the time. We need to consciously focus on new models for creating, organising and maintaining mutual support communities that work for modern people in a modern world. Having started working on this, I am finding more and more that people around me are coming up with the same idea. New cultural software for community building is being developed all around us, we are in a community renaissance. A lot of this is very undirected and ad-hoc however. The usual strategy is to get a bunch of people together based around a shared interest, and then just keep growing the group and hope that a deeper more beneficial community magically occurs. What we need is to deconstruct what we need from community, and consciously design systems which will facilitate those needs being fulfilled. Such a model needs to work for everyone and be easy to set up, and easy to maintain in a long term sustainable way.
For a discussion of how this might look in detail, see part 2