“I am a soldier so that my son can be a farmer so that his son can be a poet.” –A soldier of the American Revolution.


“Who will be the mothers of men when men no longer recall care given to them. What daughter’s father can be found when all the fathers for hire are scattered around. What place is home for our children to know when all of the families are on the go? Feed each generation to captains of industry or wolves of depravation. Who are we to be makers of men when we can’t plot a course and see to its end.”


In discussing Neo-tribalism there are three points I want to make about culture: 1) there are quantitative amounts of connection between people, 2) culture is made of the customs that exist only because of the connections between people, and 3) community is simply the sharing of proximity and only provides the opportunity for connection between people; therefore, community does not necessarily cause connection/connectivity/connectedness.

When I was young enough to still be making the transition from children’s books to books intended for a ‘grown-up’ audience, I became aware of the idea that it is often difficult to define what ‘love’ is. I was met with an author’s concept that love is the state of being so connected to a person that their happiness is a prerequisite for your own happiness.

A noble thought and a useful definition when pondering the difference between lust and love, or infatuation or any of the other mental/emotional states that can be confused with the more altruistic quality of love. Yet this leaves open the definition of happiness. And happiness can be very far from altruistic, even when only found while precluded by another’s happiness. We often can choose what makes us happy, but I’m not convinced that it is so easy to choose whom we love and whom we do not love.

I have a vague memory of hearing someone speak on three different kinds of happiness. The hedonistic happiness of pleasure, the compassionate happiness of living a life that is good to others and yourself, and the transcendent happiness of belonging to something that is much larger than your life and the experience of effecting much more that just the people you are directly connected with.

What seemed obvious to me and was distilled for me by a friend, was that there is one common element to any definition of love, and that element is ‘connection’. “Love is connectedness.” My friend would say. “There are virtual threads of connection from every atom in the cosmos to every other thing in the cosmos. That connectedness already exists, therefore all the love that could ever exist already exists. The only thing about love that may not already exist is the extent of our awareness of that love. Our task as souls interested in love is to find the connections, to become aware of our connectedness to everything in our life. When we resist acknowledging a connection, we resist love. Hate can only exist when we are afraid of being connected to something or someone.”

Perhaps I should confess that this conversation took place just before the ‘Harmonic Convergence’ festival in 1986 (I’m still not entirely clear what the ‘Harmonic Convergence’ is/was). But I took my friend’s new aged concept of love and applied it to my way of looking at the world.

The concept of love as being connectedness has been very useful because it is not necessary to understand a connection in order to recognize that a connection exists. I do not have to understand the functioning of nature in order for me to be aware that in nature there is a certain configuration to things. So by correlation, I need not be concerned with exactly how my life is entwined with another’s in order for me to notice “Wow! There is love here.”

When I see an ant carrying a leaf I can only fathom a limited dimension of the countless ways that both the ant and the leaf are participating in the constructs of their existence. The system of structure of DNA, the basic need for energy that ultimately comes from the sun, the vital use of water and the gases of our atmosphere, the vulnerability to extremes of temperature, the inter-relationship of each being just one of countless ants and countless leaves that have previously existed over the eons. Yet I can only wonder how much the ant or the leaf could be aware of the connections between them. I can only wonder how much I am connected to each of them in turn. Even still I can only wonder how much my mental image of them and the mental gymnastic I go through in this pondering is connected to them. (Where do thoughts really come from? Are thoughts disconnected from everything else?)

In our interactions with the people in our lives, our awareness of our connections with people has an effect upon us. A quantitatively greater awareness of our connections results in a qualitative effect. In other words, when we recognize more links between us we are better able to develop more richly nuanced relationships/exchanges.

A picture painted with more colors than the next does not make it a better picture but does enable the artist to communicate more in the content. A good example of this point is found in the graphically based video games that have a greater range of color than previous video games and thereby also have greater ability to communicate a more ‘real’ world in which the game takes place.

A person dear to you will have many connections to you. Yet often even a stranger from your hometown may have many more connections to you. Or perhaps someone who attended the same school or collage may have such a myriad of connections with you that even though you may not know them any more than a stranger, you know the customs and features that have been a part of both your life and theirs.

As we interact with people that we share a bond with, we strengthen the bonds between us and develop customs of interaction. We also form customs among us to bridge connections to interact with people who are not part of the sphere of our intimate network of connections. This is what culture is made up of, bonding and bridging to form richer connections.

A rich culture by definition is a culture with numerous forms of bonding and bridging. A weak or dying culture is one where the customs of bonding and bridging are being replaced by customs outside of the realm of that culture, or replaced by activities that do not foster bonding or bridging. (Or attrition. There are not many folk from the Shakers’ church these days.)

This is a relatively sophisticated way of thinking of culture. For the most part people tend to think of communities as the supporter of culture. You can hear it in the implied meaning when people use the word ‘community’. The phrase ‘farming community’ and ‘farming culture’ are almost interchangeable, or ‘Yiddish community’ and ‘Yiddish culture’, or ‘San Francisco community’ and ‘San Francisco culture’. Yet the primary thing that a community lends to culture (bonding and bridging) is a mutual location. A common region is no small thing. When was the last time you shook hands with a Mongolian? But sharing a location alone is not enough for culture ‘to do its thing’. What are the chances that you would shake hands with a Mongolian if there was one in your midst?

Often when people refer to wanting a ‘sense of community’, what they mean is that they want to cultivate increased connection (a culture of connection). “Does the spoon taste the soup? The tongue tastes the soup.” The people on the airplane are not the airplane. Being amidst a community does not automatically render a ‘sense of community’.

Independence Day celebrations on July 4th are an example of a community event that does not cultivate connections. People come together to watch the fireworks and take part in the picnics, yet the activities of the celebration generally involve no more participation than to find a place to sit. The connection between people at the event is not much more than the connection between people in their vehicles on the road every day. The tradition helps people connect with their individual identity as Americans and is done collectively yet there is very little about the traditions that encourages people to be more than just a group of spectators.

The fragmentation from our economic system

Our free market economic system runs on the fluid exchange of commodities and capital.

While bonding and bridging involves engaging ongoing connections between us, the fluidity of exchange in a free market purchase behaves in just the opposite way, disengaging any ongoing connection after the purchase so the value that was exchanged can immediately be available to be applied in yet another exchange.

The efficiency of the impersonal flow of goods and services in a free market system affords us access to a greater range and quantity of purchases than perhaps a barter system could offer. Yet the efficiency of the free market system is self-serving to champion for the cause of greater efficiency. Culture, on the other hand takes time. Connecting with people takes our attention in beats of time that are not generally measured in microseconds.

The greatest advances in commerce cannot be made without employing the ‘social capital’ of bonding and bridging.

www.burningman.com/pdf/spee...Union.pdf

At what point are we valuing commerce more than connection?

Culture is an experiential art. Connecting encounters take time. Time is art.

Neo-tribalism

The phrase ‘neo-tribal’ is most likely not my own invention, and the sentiment behind it is quite pervasive.

There is a simple division in classification between ‘tribal culture’ and ‘town culture’. Tribal culture has been around for eons before town culture, yet tribal peoples who live in towns cease to behave as tribal peoples. Neo-tribalism would therefore be a form of tribal culture that would cause Towns people to cease to behave as Towns people and behave in a fashion as if they were tribal.

There is a frequent thread of thought where people feel a need for a greater connection with people than what they are currently experiencing. The mythical answer to fill this need is ‘Neo-tribalism’. (Even without defining the content of what constitutes ‘Neo-tribalism’. Simply imagining that “there must be a better way of living with humans” creates the theoretical concept that can be labeled Neo-tribalism.

Community is the condition of living with each other. The incident of common environs. Tribe, on the other hand is something more. Bonding and bridging are the aspects of 'social capital' (the constructs of culture). But town and tribe are very different. Both town and tribe are communities, but that misses most of the story. Community is just the matrix/game board/field of play.

In the time when Homer was composing the Iliad and the Odyssey the concept of ‘I’ was not commonly used. By the time of Julius Caesar the concept of ‘I’ was well established.

Could the difference between tribal culture and town culture be the difference between identifying more as a group than as an individual? What would happen if people had the experience of being impacted more by the effects of the group dynamic than the solo dynamic?

Culture will always take some of its form from the conditions of the local resources. But support systems are what the real 'magic' is. "A village takes it." Community may be the table where things happen, but what's the dinner being served? A community can exist without culture. (Look out the window) But culture must have support systems.

The primary single contributing factor to the success of a relationship (of any kind) is not communication or compatibility but instead is support systems. Support systems are the means by/through which we access our resources. For those who have healthily support systems as in access to food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, employment and income, transportation/communication, positive social contact, etc. how much of a factor are the things that are 'inside' the relationship than the ‘external’ factors of compatibility?

If I have plenty of resources (‘market capital’) I can more readily tend to the issues of 'social capital' (bonding and bridging connections). Remember how in grade school there were rules and social customs?
'Twas not how well the students followed the rules or how good the rules were that lent to individual success. It was those students who where well fed and safe from danger at home, and who’s parents took part in the school experience.

What if people could gather together like tribal families, taking care of each other in the way that families do? Friends taking on responsibility saying ‘Yes, I am my brother’s keeper’, and be good stewards of themselves for the sake of their brother, to be good stewards of their brother in the best way that they know how. What if your friends sought out to always learn the most effective ways to be good to each other working to be that support system (like parents are by default), securing your needs, cultivating healthy habits, engineering circumstances to avail for you the best opportunities, protecting you, making the connections to understand the full scope of your needs?

What if friends deliberately invested themselves in an ‘intentional family’ to be each other’s guardian and advocate, wherein each person is a part of the workings of the guardianship. (Just as the Romans would tare down defensive walls and fortifications of all newly adopted cities so that all the inhabitants would take part in their own defense.)

What if friends invested in each other, literally buying stock in each other’s lives, investing in the success of each other? What if these friends held themselves to nothing less than professional standards in order to best tend to that success?

In whatever events that the future holds the best of what can be experienced in life comes from our connections with each other.