The loss of the organic . . .

Ernest Hemingway wrote that a man on his own has no chance.  So isolating oneself in expectation of disaster is never going to work.  It is like survivalists in America, building retreats in the woods in face of some anticipated apocalypse.  They might as well put up signposts saying ‘here be food and guns’.  Because really that is what they are doing, stockpiling things for others much tougher—and there’s always someone tougher—to take off them.

And yet we live in a world beset by war and rumours of war and the threat of all sorts of economic, ecological and other disasters.

So what is one supposed to do, other than hide one’s head under the blankets?

For a long, long time now, I have believed that communities need to deliberately foster a local resilience, not necessarily in expectation of disaster, yet that will stand them in good stead should disaster in any event come.  It is more than simply a matter of community spirit, though such a thing is important in itself; it is rather a deliberate policy of looking at things in terms of the community as a whole and seeing what needs to be and what can be done on a practical level to insure the ongoing health and survivability of the social organism.

Now when I talk of community here, I am talking of localities and the people who live in them—and not in the nowadays fashionable terms of communities of this and communities of that—the gay community, the immigrant community, the journalistic community, the faith community and all other such neologisms.

For the fact is that real communities have traditionally been at the the root of healthy societies.  Neglect such roots and the whole social structure is quite likely to come down, not immediately, but perhaps suddenly, when placed under challenge, like a rotten tree in a storm.

In the same sense as studies have shown that the most effective committees occur within the range of 4 to 8 members—above or below that and efficiency begins immediately to taper off—so also there seem to be parameters for community.  These parameters suggest that the upper and lower limits for effective communities lies between 100 and 250 individuals, with the optimum number set around 150. And there seems to be historical evidence as well as scientific evidence to underline these conclusions.

It seems also that these figures refer only to adult acquaintances, so that the numbers can be inflated upwards by allowing for children.

The same research tends to show that the individual human being can really only organically integrate with others within these same parameters.  And it is these parameters that control the possibility of forming true communities: communities which act like mutual-aid and mutual-defence societies, where everyone knows everyone else, and each can depend on the backing of the rest in the general vicissitudes of life, as they effect the community.

It is exactly such circumstances that allow for the development of community-based institutions that involve a high degree of trust, such as credit unions.  Where credit unions stray beyond the boundaries of such long-accumulated local knowledge and experience, they often tend to run into trouble.

Yet the fact is that the existence of such communities is becoming less and less a reality—what with ease of transport and immigration and town-to-country and country-to-town migration.  It would be comparatively rare to find a community nowadays that has been allowed enjoy its own slow process of natural fermentation undisturbed by at least some of the factors mentioned above.

Yet at the same time one can’t turn back the clock, no matter how much is being lost in this process of, if you like, social and cultural ‘globalisation’.  The best that can be done is, like shipwrecked sailors, to try and rescue what can be rescued from the disaster.  Especially in a world, the way it is, that may not allow for very much time.

More anon . . .