Helping me.............................

..............in many ways, including the leasing of office space:

 People are social beings, not mere transaction devices or vending machines. They seek to connect with others and to find a higher purpose . . .

genuine........................

 

Unless we, both as individuals and as a society, start to embrace a genuine existence that brings risks of failure, unpleasantness, and unpredictability as well as achievement, happiness, and love, we will eventually wind up in a very artificial and narrow existence: a prison cell of our own making.

-Michael Wade, as culled from here

Community.................

 Communities depend upon the force which Burke called prejudice; they are essentially local, bound to a place, a history, a language and a common culture.  The Enlightened individualist, by forgoing such things, lives increasingly as a stranger among strangers, consumed by a helpless longing for an attachment which his own cold thinking has destroyed.

     These conflicts within Enlightenment culture are part of its legacy to us.  We too are individualists, believers in the sovereign right of human freedom, living as strangers in a society of strangers.  And we too are beset by those ancient and ineradicable yearnings for something else—for a homecoming to our true community.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Confronting head on...............

 ..............................the community.

a human community.....................

Out here, surrounded by trees and the presence of wild beasts, we are a human community of three.  Individuals made more by our trinity.  People help each other grow through shared endeavor.  I am traveling miles beyond where I could go alone.  Alex has goon beyond where he could go, and Renias has had his life opened because of us.  True giving gives in every direction.

-Boyd Varty,  The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life

Uneasy.............................

     As modern society reduced the role of community, it simultaneously elevated the role of authority.  The two are uneasy companions, as one goes up, the other tends to go down.

-Sebastian Junger,  Tribe:  On Homecoming and Belonging

but it just might give them a better chance at having a life filled with grace and joy...

But the world looks different from the perspective of middle age. In her last 19 months of life, Ruthie showed me that I now had important work to do back home. Hers was a work of stewardship—of taking care of the land, the family, and the people in the community. By loving them all faithfully and tending them with steadfast care, Ruthie accomplished something countercultural, even revolutionary in our restless age.

-Rod Dreher, from this incredible essay on life its ownself

The uncertainty of Socrates.............

He had his own religious faith:  he believed in one God, and hoped in his modest way that death would not quite destroy him, but he knew that a lasting moral code could not be based upon so uncertain a theology.  If one could build a system of morality absolutely independent of religious doctrine, as valid for the atheist as for the pietist, then theologies might come and go without loosening the moral cement that makes of wilful individuals the peaceful citizens of a community.

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy

On leaving us alone...................

"Politics can oppress people, but it cannot make them wiser or more sensible, independent of mind, or just. Happiness in the older sense has never required “political action.” Instead, it takes joy in friendship and community."

-David Warren, from this blog post

Might be more than "simply a tool".......

.........................................."And the cognitive load is enormous."

On rituals.................................

     "If you're speaking of tribal societies in primitive cultures, weren't their rituals often based on fear and superstition?" asked Rob, a middle-school teacher.
     "Sometimes, but that's not what matters here.  Why they did it is not as important as the fact that they did it.  Their coming together reveals something essential for human life, even for all of us today.   It comes from here," he said, tapping his heart, "from the guts.  When you study history and human nature, when you look at how we human beings have always lived together, you see this need for familiar and recurring rituals, regular ceremonial and formal commemoration, which express, strengthen, and define the state of our relationships, our common ideals, our shared triumphs and griefs.  That's something we can't afford to forget, for it's just as true for us."

-The Monks of New Skete,  In the Spirit of Happiness

Opening paragraphs.......................

On winter days when she was a child, Jane's grandmother told her, they'd skate on the canal, along twenty miles of it frozen solid near their house.  Back in the 1850s, before the railroad finally won out against it, the canal was how you got clean-burning anthracite coal from the mines of central Pennsylvania to big-city markets.  It would be loaded on shallow draft boats, maybe fifteen tons at a time, then towed down the canal that ran alongside the North Branch of the Susquehanna River, by mules on an adjacent tow path.  A dollar a ton, you could figure, from Wilkes-Barre, in the heart of anthracite country, to Philadelphia.  Making the boats, and repairing them, was its own little industry.  And since the 1830s a key center of it was Espy, a town of a few hundred drawn out along the north bank of the canal, home to lock tenders and canal maintenance workers, as well as a tannery, pottery, and a brickyard.  From early spring, when the ice melted, until late fall, according to a 1936 memoir, the locals "set the tempo of their lives to the tireless plodding hoof beats of the mules."  Boys in town looked with envy at those their own age driving the mules or else lolling on the decks of the passing boats.

-Robert Kanigel,  Eyes On The Street:  The Life of Jane Jacobs

One of these days I'm going to finish reading The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.  Kanigels's book will have to wait its turn to be next in the queue.  Jacobs's claim to fame as a community organizer came in the mid-1950s when she was able to thwart Moses's plan to run a highway through Greenwich Village.

Shared responsibility..................

     Some self-help books have made "codependence" into a pathologic diagnosis.  Certainly, unhealthy relationships do exist that reinforce people's addictions and unhealthy patterns of behavior.  That's not what we are talking about here.  It is wholly natural, normal, and necessary for human beings to depend on one another.  Wholesome codependence is part of loving relationships between spouses, parents, and children and close friends.

     Human beings are innately social animals.  It is natural for people to live in community with one another - rather than merely in proximity to one another.  Living in community means acknowledging our innate interdependence and accepting a level of mutual  responsibility for one another.  The most concrete example of this fact is the government's pledge to care for its citizens with Social Security.  But the principle of shared responsibility is evident in a thousand expectations and norms of behavior not only within the body politic, but also in the civic communities of towns and neighborhoods and in workplaces, social clubs, and congregations.  It is a mark of a healthy community that members care for one another during periods of stress and need, and can be counted on to do so.

-Ira Byock, M.D., The Four Things That Matter Most:  A Book About Living

Reasons why I like living in Newark and Licking County.......

Reason # 32.......................investing in our heritage.   The County Commissioners agreed to spend invest at least $4,000,000 in the restoration of our historic County Courthouse.   While it is not sexy, spending money today will insure that this focal point of our community will be here for future generations to enjoy.  For those of you interested in such things, the Courthouse was built in 1876 for the sum of $190,000 (plus or minus).

Here is what the building looked like before the scaffolding showed up:

Designs................................

      What follows is neither a political manifesto nor a plan for building a utopian society.  To the contrary, I will argue, among other things that the desire to design a perfect society in theory is one of the main obstacles to achieving a better society in fact, and that the very desire to design  human communities is itself destructive.  The fundamental political problem is politics itself:  not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not politics corrupted by big money or distorted by special-interest groups, but politics per se - the practice of delivering critical goods and services through the medium of federal, state, and local governments and their obsolete decision-making practices.

-Kevin D. Williamson,  The End Is Near And It's Going To Be Awesome:  How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure

Can I get an amen...................

So, opinions were sought about whether us humans past "the age of reproduction" were "evolutionarily useless."  One brave soul (not me, I promise) took a stab at it.  I'm liking his notion of "communal learning."  It's sort of how I feel about our wee corner of the Intertunnel, it's a place of "communal learning."   Thanks neighbor.

Believe it or not, this was written in 1955...........

      Like the machines which delight and enthrall them, the masses are neither good not bad.  Machines have made our lives complicated and intellect has made our minds restless.  Poise, assurance and serenity seem to be beyond our grasp, and to gain a false sense of security the individual blends with others in a new entity, the mass.  The spectre of the mass hovers over public affairs, industry, business, social life and manners.  The great danger with the mass is not right thought or wrong thought but the utter absence of thought.   The immense impact of mass media on our lives encourages passivity, acquiescence, conformity.  The mind is benumbed and the will paralysed.   Instead of courageous independent thinking, there is a susceptibility to words, to symbols of crude emotion.  The collective wisdom of the masses is a misnomer for surrender to emotionalism.  Those who manipulate the people acquire great influence.  Politics has become a gamble in mass psychology.   It was the masses that stoned the Bastille; it was the masses that responded by collective rapture to Hitler-in-the-brewery.  It is the masses who are being exploited today for ideological crusades.  The leaders of public opinion use the techniques of propaganda for controlling public opinion.

-Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan,  Recovery of Faith

If you ever want your assumptions challenged...

......in a thoughtful manner, I suggest you read some Wendell Berry.

     "The disease of the modern character is specialization.  Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough.  The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared, people.  The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint - that of individual persons.  We then begins to see the grotesquery - indeed the impossibility - of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

     "The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists - people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing.  We get into absurdity very quickly here.  There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing.  More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices.  Specialization is thus seen to be a way of institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character:  workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility."

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America:  Culture & Agriculture

We took...............................................

......................................our annual turn ringing bells for the Salvation Army last evening.  It was seasonally brisk in the north end of Newark.  We were reminded, once again, of the extreme generosity of this community.  As always, one of the fun things is watching parents teach their little ones about charity by having them put the money in the kettle.  Very cool!

Great philosophers...............................

Mathew Arnold   (1822-1888)

There was a lot that bothered Arnold about the modern world – as it was just beginning to reveal itself. But he summed it up in one embracing idea: Anarchy. By ‘anarchy’, he didn’t mean people in black balaclavas breaking shop windows. Rather he meant something much more familiar and closer to home: a toxic kind of freedom. He meant a society where market forces dominate the nation; where the commercial media sets the agenda and coarsens and simplifies everything it touches; where corporations are barely restrained from despoiling the environment, where human beings are treated as tools to be picked up and put down at will; where there is no more pastoral care and precious little sense of community, where hospitals treat the body but no one treats the soul, where no one knows their neighbours any more, where romantic love is seen as the only bond worth pursuing – and where there is nowhere to turn to at moments of acute distress and inner crisis. It’s a world we’ve come to know well.

Arnold believed that the forces of anarchy had become overwhelming in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Religion was in terminal decline. Business reigned triumphant. A practical, unpsychological money-making mentality ruled. Newspaper circulation was growing exponentially. And politics was dominated by partisanship, conflict and misrepresentation.

Source of quote and one back story on Arnold is here.  Wiki here.