Change of Direction . . .
“The urge to community
seems to be inherent in society. In
mediaeval society the urge to simpler forms of community expressed itself in
the cities and towns by a subdivision into rival districts and quarters called
wards, where, as one description of it goes, ‘The ward is a social unit where
people meet, congregate, celebrate, and gossip.
It is a true neighbourhood, where everyone knows each other, where
people vouch for each other, and where people perform their everyday routine’.
Dundalk
was at one stage divided into four wards, which seem to survive solely as vague
memories. Modern day Siena continues to
have seventeen contrade or city
wards, all of them still active and passionate, and which add a spice to life
at odds with the otherwise drab uniformity of urbanisation.
Like
a plant cut-back and cut-back, yet still struggling to grow, there seems to be
a basic and hidden longing within humanity for a more limited and local
identity than simply that of citizen.
Yet
the atomisation of modern society makes it harder and harder to express this
longing in any practical form. To the
extent that people are aware of this, it is as a vague dissatisfaction, an itch
that can’t be scratched . . .”
The above represents the
beginning of my third mailing to do with community, but even as I wrote it, I
found myself diverting away from my original purpose in writing it. My intention was to try and offer a rough
template for the rescue of the better and more important elements of
traditional community. But the more I
tried to do so, the more presumptuous it began to seem, and the more
pointless. At best one would be proposing
starting again from scratch, something that would be quite impossible.
At
most it would resemble those monkey compounds in the better zoos, where all sorts
of climbing and swinging and self-hiding devices are provided in an effort to mimic
the natural habitat of the animal, without ever at all being able to recreate the
actuality of what really has been lost.
The
ancients had a much simpler and deeper idea of what was involved in community
building. In the 5th century
BC, the Athenians undertook the task of re-establishing the southern Italian
city of Sybaris, which had previously been destroyed in local conflicts. And one of the first things they did was to
create twelve separate tribes to inhabit it, and, it would seem, to give it an
internal vibrancy—rather like adding yeast to dough—that would cause it to
flourish, even as it presented a united outwards face to the world.
Rather
like looking into the workings of a watch, the overall purpose would be
achieved by creating an interior system of competition and divided communal
allegiances and the various contradictory processes arising from the same. In some sense, it would resemble a living
body, full of circulation and movement.
Yet
the fact is that nowadays we are way beyond that stage. The ancient way was organic, a sort of ‘not
by bread alone’ approach, as opposed to the twentieth century insistence on
creating huge undifferentiated wodges of local government and other housing, on
the patronising assumption that all people required was a roof over their heads
and sufficient to eat in order to feel fulfilled.
It
should also be recognised that the process of dividing ancient and mediaeval
urban settlements into smaller internal communal areas, wards, or tribes, had
the effect of recognising, however inchoately, the limits seemingly imposed by
nature on the optimum size of community, something discussed in previous
mailings.
It
was in the bigger cities, such as Athens, where the system eventually broke
down under sheer weight of numbers, resulting in the most fearsome of class
warfare, leading eventually to the emergence of modern political democracy as
we know it.
I
considered deleting the previous two mailings, as a result of the change in
direction of my thinking. Nonetheless, I
decided to lead them stand, in that they contain, I think, certain small things
of value within them.
The
matter requires a lot more thought . . .
I
may return to it in time.
