![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
community, struggle
May. 24th, 2009 01:13 pm"what is community?"
This question exploded in my head when someone over on LJ asked it. I went about six different directions with it, and I was happy to answer with one or two of them.
...but then I read more, and it turns out she's passing the hat for someone I don't know. So it was propaganda-for-a-good cause, that goes in my zero-prejudice spam folder. And the community question takes a sharp right angle turn, that also spawns lots of thought.
Community: first thing that comes to mind is trust. Not just a depth of trust with vulnerabilities, but also a depth of knowledge, about what to expect from others. I trust some people to be chronically late, so if I have to make plans with them, I make allowances.
There's a dimensionality idea that hits me with the C word, how flexible a particular community can be. Usually communities are thought of in terms of size: a larger community will make for a bigger resource chest, more stuff to throw at a problem. But if the community is homogeneous, then the problems that it sees will be pretty narrowly defined. There's an optimum range in there, between vast resources and vast flexibility.
But after the sharp turn, all I could think about was what happens to community when something horrible happens to one if its members. It can turn inward into itself, it can shatter into individual pieces, or it can split into chunks... It can also go on functioning exactly as it did before.
That last option makes military community unique: no other group of humans is expected to keep doing what they were doing before the awful thing happened. Even civilian first responders expect to have the kind of funeral that the military doesn't engage in. I imagine that much of the ceremony of military living is designed to front-load the inevitable funeral functions that are part and parcel of that tradition.
It's definitely worth thinking about, if you're trying to re-tool an aggressive tool into something that can only ever be used for cultivating peace. It also highlights the assumption that death is the worst thing likely to happen to a soldier in the course of his duties.
Why is it so hard to put an army to work for a peaceful outcome?
One image that pops into my mind, is a metaphor of surgery. Until anesthetics and germ theory came into their own, you couldn't do much more than amputate and still expect the patient to survive. We're kind of at that level of understanding with our peacekeeping missions, just as apt to make things worse as to make things better.
Another image goes back to the foundation metaphor: An old house built on massive foundations, suddenly tries to grow a new wing, one with a tower so tall, it needs something like a tap-root. All that digging in the vicinity of the foundation, though, has got the service staff very concerned. At some point you can't just grow a new wing, you've got to redesign the entire structure.
(If it were a city or a tree instead of a house, the metaphor might work better, but there you go.)
This question exploded in my head when someone over on LJ asked it. I went about six different directions with it, and I was happy to answer with one or two of them.
...but then I read more, and it turns out she's passing the hat for someone I don't know. So it was propaganda-for-a-good cause, that goes in my zero-prejudice spam folder. And the community question takes a sharp right angle turn, that also spawns lots of thought.
Community: first thing that comes to mind is trust. Not just a depth of trust with vulnerabilities, but also a depth of knowledge, about what to expect from others. I trust some people to be chronically late, so if I have to make plans with them, I make allowances.
There's a dimensionality idea that hits me with the C word, how flexible a particular community can be. Usually communities are thought of in terms of size: a larger community will make for a bigger resource chest, more stuff to throw at a problem. But if the community is homogeneous, then the problems that it sees will be pretty narrowly defined. There's an optimum range in there, between vast resources and vast flexibility.
But after the sharp turn, all I could think about was what happens to community when something horrible happens to one if its members. It can turn inward into itself, it can shatter into individual pieces, or it can split into chunks... It can also go on functioning exactly as it did before.
That last option makes military community unique: no other group of humans is expected to keep doing what they were doing before the awful thing happened. Even civilian first responders expect to have the kind of funeral that the military doesn't engage in. I imagine that much of the ceremony of military living is designed to front-load the inevitable funeral functions that are part and parcel of that tradition.
It's definitely worth thinking about, if you're trying to re-tool an aggressive tool into something that can only ever be used for cultivating peace. It also highlights the assumption that death is the worst thing likely to happen to a soldier in the course of his duties.
Why is it so hard to put an army to work for a peaceful outcome?
One image that pops into my mind, is a metaphor of surgery. Until anesthetics and germ theory came into their own, you couldn't do much more than amputate and still expect the patient to survive. We're kind of at that level of understanding with our peacekeeping missions, just as apt to make things worse as to make things better.
Another image goes back to the foundation metaphor: An old house built on massive foundations, suddenly tries to grow a new wing, one with a tower so tall, it needs something like a tap-root. All that digging in the vicinity of the foundation, though, has got the service staff very concerned. At some point you can't just grow a new wing, you've got to redesign the entire structure.
(If it were a city or a tree instead of a house, the metaphor might work better, but there you go.)
