About 2/3 to 3/4 done. Then a round of editing begins.
Sustainable Community Consciousness
Intentional sustainable communities are to be based upon a behavioral norm I’m calling the “Community Transaction”. The Community Transaction would be the basis of the economy here - not the abstract “market”. There would indeed be market-places, but these would be the places where Community Transactions are conducted.
The accelerating enormity of human impact upon earth’s systems is understood and evidenced to be unsustainable for continuing human progress. Here we explore important aspects of human living which may describe the kind of community where people can continue to lead a joyful, sustainable lifestyle.
Of course this is not a novel endeavor. Many people have argued that the most important element of social organization we can put in place is the distributed, common ownership of property. However, looking at historical experience we can also see that the practical results of a more egalitarian, shared distribution of property would be at best tangential to the environmental crisis we face. Reasonably, any society which is focused upon property would continue to live in pursuit of more property, wealth, and power, thus driven to increasingly pollute the living environment. We maintain here that the focus must be upon what we do, not what we have. Understanding how the root causes of our existential crisis lie in our behaviors, our individual and social behaviors — we move to address the all-important role of culture. In order to minister to the heart of our destructive relationship with our environment we must proceed to identify and employ the arts of habilitating a sustainable life-structure supported by a robust yet evolving culture. Recognize also that the required structures of informed interdependence may not be possible on a wide scale.
Somewhat like an insurance company, the active resources of the living community deal with individual contingency while maintaining a bank of process knowledge – the community consciousness. Employing some of the analytical language of Lewin (citation), stimuli acting upon, between, and from within the interacting life-spaces of community participants push changes within this field of community consciousness (that is the enclosing field of information for the active set of habitus fields). Community consciousness functions as the primary medium carrying community forward.
Examining individual behavior within the context of this framework, our notion of a “sustainable community” reveals a pervasive tension between each individual’s motivation to prosper (concordant with the community values attached to practices and objects expressed within their life-space) versus the actual behaviors which would contribute to the health of the community body. In the pursuit of stability and sustainability these tensions must be resolved. However, the tension between individuals’ behaviors in carrying out internal motivations consistent within their personal life-space(citation) and the behaviors which could actually contribute to the health of the community body is largely fueled by the values instilled into each participant’s life-space by the living community itself!
As we have seen, reactions to external contingency along with actions originating from within member’s life-spaces can interact with the field of community consciousness to create tensional pressures. These forces may indeed signal internal or external/environmental challenges to be met by the community at large. And we have seen how our personal everyday norms exist and are created within the enactment of our wider social customs, habits, and legal processes while motivated by the given human desire to improve personal living conditions and gain greater community status from within the habitas. The key to creating a sustainable community would include some way to positively alter the wider encompassing field itself . A sustainable community will embody an ongoing ontology of value as it builds a web of communication of normative knowledge. This knowledge of value, for our sustainable community, is the actual living network of knowledge-bearers, each and all behaving with some coherence in beliefs which are constantly fortified and updated within the evolving community. These activities informed with this kind of of knowledge are the very material of sustainable community life. The “Community Transaction” is the concrete mechanism building this material.
Practically, throughout our lives and even throughout recorded history, many of our social interactions revolve around the exchange of things. Economists state that the “price of sale” in transactions strongly implies the “value” as seen by the participants. However, and this is of key importance: with each transaction something born-of and composed of human life itself is transferred. Therefore this exchange is an extremely critical point. It is precisely here that the motivations of the people participating in an exchange within the context of their community (the community field) are brought together such that the relative values the “objects” of human life are expressed: negotiation through transaction describes and defines the value-legitimacy of instantiations of value embedded in the habitas as inculcated from the communal field. So, we focus upon this nexus, “the Community Transaction”. Authentic “reality-based” assessments of value can only come about generatively through interactive life-experience engaged in the ongoing living/transacting process.
Community Transactions are the relational micromechanism which work to align the community with the ever-changing situational macroenvironment. In the earlier essay “Making Community” (citation), it is proposed that the determination of value is brought forth through the relationship between ongoing instantiations of life-space interactions (Community Transactions) and transaction consequences which feed back to the life space(s) in the community such that this information carries aspects of the history, social, “material”, and cultural meaning which inform and influence the community consciousness. The most important task for the sustainable community is to maintain the actual domain for living (or culture) where needed adjustments can take place. Adjustments to the determination of norms is the fundamental means by which the community consciousness shapes itself in response to internal and external forces - culture is the normative and self-transformative “mechanism”. The sustainable community develops and prospers when transactional relationships work cleanly and transparently within the community consciousness to inform the active library of cultural knowledge.
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