I began writing this in a motel in Winnemucca, Nevada, the location of the Martin Hotel, a Basque restaurant we ate dinner at the night before. We try to time our annual summer trip across the country to reach Winnemucca at dinner time. The food is good but the other reason is the family style dining; if you are a party of less than eight — we were three, myself, my wife, and our adult daughter — you end up sharing the table with strangers.
Everyone needs a community. Essentially you're suggesting alternatives to religious community?
And yet, despite your lack of connection, and your choices against it, you still felt connected ...
The problem with chosen communities like this is that they're optional. You could, at any point, decide you no longer wish to be in SCA / folk dancing / knitting club. And so can anyone else.
It is much easier to build community on things that most people find difficult to change, like location, religion, or handicap.
“The problem with chosen communities like this is that they're optional.” You think that’s a bug? I think it’s a feature. Freedom is a Good Thing. If someone decides that he’s grown out of a particular little world, he should be able to move on and leave it behind.
People can also move on and leave religions and locations behind. I’ve personally lived in 12 different countries. I’ve never moved on from a religion, because I’ve never had any religion (nor wanted one), but I think some people manage to abandon religion, or change their religion.
My experience is that everything in this world is transient and you cannot expect permanent stability in anything. For most people, the family is the most stable feature of their social situation, but by now I’m the only survivor of my original family. Even if people don’t deliberately move on, sooner or later they die.
Modern transportation technology has destroyed the location-based communities of olden times: people move around, they don’t stay put in their original villages. I was born and educated in England, but I haven’t lived in England since 1986; I now live in Spain. However, oddly enough, modern communication technology enables people to stay in touch, if they want to. Through the Internet, I’m still in touch with some members of communities that I first encountered in the 1960s and 1970s—though not with all of them, of course. My friends are scattered around the world.
I can't speak for Jonathan, but I notice there are stable communities and transient ones (in at least two respects - long-standing communities whose members rarely stay in longer than a few years, and types of communities that don't last, but frequently emerge). That suggests that community can be driven by more than one thing.
Consider how many people express distress at a small town they live in, despite that small town being quite stable. They might value its stability, but still grow tired of its boredom, or its entrenched leadership, or its weather, or the politics of their neighbors. It makes sense for them to pine for a different community; it doesn't mean that community stability is in trouble.
It depends on how you define “stable community”. But it seems to me that, in every community however defined, over a period of time some people will move on, and over a sufficient period of time all the original members will be dead. As members move on or die, the community may seem to continue, but it's no longer the same as it was. In fact, even a community whose members haven’t changed much will tend to evolve over time: people change as they get older. Back in the Middle Ages, such changes may not have seemed significant, but by now I think the passage of time causes more significant changes.
I’m reminded of Heraclitus: “You can’t step twice into the same river.”
At Porcfest, I talked with someone who was a libertarian friend of mine about fifty years ago — I have the lyrics of one of his songs at the beginning of my first book. At Pennsic some of the people we will be seeing I have known for more than forty years; my closest SCA friends won't be there because they are no longer alive.
Veganism is a village too. Within a few hours of visiting Mexico City I already made a friend I still know to this day. Within 24 hours I’d met more people than my friend who’d convinced me to visit the city.
Whenever I meet a new vegan here, they inevitably know or know of the guy who organizes most of the big vegan parties here.
It's counterintuitive, but you will know and deal with a broader ranch of people in a small town than a big city. I live at Lake Tahoe. At the local beer bar, restaurant, supermarket, etc., I will know and mingle with contractors, doctors, casual laborers, and wealthy entrepreneurs. If you live on the upper east side of New York, almost everyone you meet will be like you: a lawyer or investment banker.
That's similar to GKC's point that your friends are a narrower world than your family because you get to choose your friends, are just dumped into your family.
I suggest somewhere, possibly a substack, that improved transportation and communication increase the amount of assortative mating, because you can find a closer match in a larger pool.
I just went to Freedomfest two weeks ago. It was very cool meeting online friends face to face for the first time and meeting celebrities that are only celebrities in our little village.
Younger, more couples, many more children and dogs, someone selling you a roast from a pig he raised himself rather than gold coins or stock in a gold mine, northern New Hampshire instead of Vegas.
Again, my picture of Freedomfest is a decade or two out of date.
There were some babies, I watched an 8-month-old who climbed me like a tree. Made me want to have one more. So small compared to my 4-year-old.
This year it was in Memphis which was a big mistake. There were homeless people outside the convention center. But it will be in Vegas again next year. Porcfest looked to have way more people.
I’m reminded of Samuel R. Delany’s introduction to Alexei Panshin’s novel “Star Well”:
“Star Well is a wise, delightful, and well-turned book; and it is something I have never seen in science fiction before. It is the first of a series of novels that examines the proposition that the world is composed of small communities of mutual interest.”
That was written in 1968. I’m not sure whether he and you are talking about exactly the same thing, but it came to mind anyway.
I belong to various little worlds myself, and it amuses me when members of different little worlds find themselves talking to each other because they all happen to be in my collection of friends on Facebook.
Do you ever find yourself in circumstances where your views on climate change generate a sense of community?
I mention it partly because you didn't, even though you've written a fair number of blog posts and essays on the subject. But also the topic is a particularly partisan one, which readily creates tribes and communities - does that sort of thing ever happen to you away from the internet?
Most of the people who are critical of the current climate orthodoxy are, in my view, critical for the wrong reasons, so I don't feel that they are members of my tribe. Some, the so-called lukewarmers, share my basic approach, but I don't have much realspace contact with them.
SCA started out doing mainly European medieval reenactment, but the only restriction in the rules was "pre-seventeenth century," so over time you got increasing involvement in the renaissance, occasionally in classical antiquity, such as feasts based on Roman sources.
The individual members have a persona, a fictional person they are playing defining when and where the are from. For quite a lot of people that just determines what kind of clothing they wear, but others try to figure out what that person would be like and do things from their persona's culture, tell stories from the sagas for a Norse persona for example or do 16th c. Italian dances for a 16th c. Italian persona (my daughter). We mostly ignore the inconsistencies — my daughter's persona is about four centuries later than mine and on the other side of the Mediterranean.
There are a lot of European personae, some Islamic, some Japanese, a few Chinese. Very rarely New World personae, and I don't think I have ever seen an SCA event based on the New World. It's very decentralized in practice, with a wide range in how authentic people are in what. The same person who is careful about correctly interpreting dance music may cook at Pennsic over a propane stove instead of a campfire.
Everyone needs a community. Essentially you're suggesting alternatives to religious community?
And yet, despite your lack of connection, and your choices against it, you still felt connected ...
The problem with chosen communities like this is that they're optional. You could, at any point, decide you no longer wish to be in SCA / folk dancing / knitting club. And so can anyone else.
It is much easier to build community on things that most people find difficult to change, like location, religion, or handicap.
Speaking of communities, they are among the best ways to stop baseless hatred, which my post yesterday was about. https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/stop-baseless-hatred
“The problem with chosen communities like this is that they're optional.” You think that’s a bug? I think it’s a feature. Freedom is a Good Thing. If someone decides that he’s grown out of a particular little world, he should be able to move on and leave it behind.
People can also move on and leave religions and locations behind. I’ve personally lived in 12 different countries. I’ve never moved on from a religion, because I’ve never had any religion (nor wanted one), but I think some people manage to abandon religion, or change their religion.
It's a very unstable feature. That's my entire point. Community is built on stability.
My experience is that everything in this world is transient and you cannot expect permanent stability in anything. For most people, the family is the most stable feature of their social situation, but by now I’m the only survivor of my original family. Even if people don’t deliberately move on, sooner or later they die.
Modern transportation technology has destroyed the location-based communities of olden times: people move around, they don’t stay put in their original villages. I was born and educated in England, but I haven’t lived in England since 1986; I now live in Spain. However, oddly enough, modern communication technology enables people to stay in touch, if they want to. Through the Internet, I’m still in touch with some members of communities that I first encountered in the 1960s and 1970s—though not with all of them, of course. My friends are scattered around the world.
So you don't think stable community exists anymore?
I can't speak for Jonathan, but I notice there are stable communities and transient ones (in at least two respects - long-standing communities whose members rarely stay in longer than a few years, and types of communities that don't last, but frequently emerge). That suggests that community can be driven by more than one thing.
Consider how many people express distress at a small town they live in, despite that small town being quite stable. They might value its stability, but still grow tired of its boredom, or its entrenched leadership, or its weather, or the politics of their neighbors. It makes sense for them to pine for a different community; it doesn't mean that community stability is in trouble.
It depends on how you define “stable community”. But it seems to me that, in every community however defined, over a period of time some people will move on, and over a sufficient period of time all the original members will be dead. As members move on or die, the community may seem to continue, but it's no longer the same as it was. In fact, even a community whose members haven’t changed much will tend to evolve over time: people change as they get older. Back in the Middle Ages, such changes may not have seemed significant, but by now I think the passage of time causes more significant changes.
I’m reminded of Heraclitus: “You can’t step twice into the same river.”
At Porcfest, I talked with someone who was a libertarian friend of mine about fifty years ago — I have the lyrics of one of his songs at the beginning of my first book. At Pennsic some of the people we will be seeing I have known for more than forty years; my closest SCA friends won't be there because they are no longer alive.
So considerable stability.
Veganism is a village too. Within a few hours of visiting Mexico City I already made a friend I still know to this day. Within 24 hours I’d met more people than my friend who’d convinced me to visit the city.
Whenever I meet a new vegan here, they inevitably know or know of the guy who organizes most of the big vegan parties here.
It's counterintuitive, but you will know and deal with a broader ranch of people in a small town than a big city. I live at Lake Tahoe. At the local beer bar, restaurant, supermarket, etc., I will know and mingle with contractors, doctors, casual laborers, and wealthy entrepreneurs. If you live on the upper east side of New York, almost everyone you meet will be like you: a lawyer or investment banker.
That's similar to GKC's point that your friends are a narrower world than your family because you get to choose your friends, are just dumped into your family.
I suggest somewhere, possibly a substack, that improved transportation and communication increase the amount of assortative mating, because you can find a closer match in a larger pool.
I just went to Freedomfest two weeks ago. It was very cool meeting online friends face to face for the first time and meeting celebrities that are only celebrities in our little village.
I haven't been to Freedomfest for a long time, prefer Porcfest to my memory of Freedomfest, which may be out of date.
I haven’t been to porcfest yet.
Younger, more couples, many more children and dogs, someone selling you a roast from a pig he raised himself rather than gold coins or stock in a gold mine, northern New Hampshire instead of Vegas.
Again, my picture of Freedomfest is a decade or two out of date.
There were some babies, I watched an 8-month-old who climbed me like a tree. Made me want to have one more. So small compared to my 4-year-old.
This year it was in Memphis which was a big mistake. There were homeless people outside the convention center. But it will be in Vegas again next year. Porcfest looked to have way more people.
Kurt Vonnegut had the same insight: https://sci-hub.ru/10.1086/705602
I’m reminded of Samuel R. Delany’s introduction to Alexei Panshin’s novel “Star Well”:
“Star Well is a wise, delightful, and well-turned book; and it is something I have never seen in science fiction before. It is the first of a series of novels that examines the proposition that the world is composed of small communities of mutual interest.”
That was written in 1968. I’m not sure whether he and you are talking about exactly the same thing, but it came to mind anyway.
I belong to various little worlds myself, and it amuses me when members of different little worlds find themselves talking to each other because they all happen to be in my collection of friends on Facebook.
Do you ever find yourself in circumstances where your views on climate change generate a sense of community?
I mention it partly because you didn't, even though you've written a fair number of blog posts and essays on the subject. But also the topic is a particularly partisan one, which readily creates tribes and communities - does that sort of thing ever happen to you away from the internet?
Most of the people who are critical of the current climate orthodoxy are, in my view, critical for the wrong reasons, so I don't feel that they are members of my tribe. Some, the so-called lukewarmers, share my basic approach, but I don't have much realspace contact with them.
SCA sounds interesting. American or European (or other) reenactments?
SCA started out doing mainly European medieval reenactment, but the only restriction in the rules was "pre-seventeenth century," so over time you got increasing involvement in the renaissance, occasionally in classical antiquity, such as feasts based on Roman sources.
The individual members have a persona, a fictional person they are playing defining when and where the are from. For quite a lot of people that just determines what kind of clothing they wear, but others try to figure out what that person would be like and do things from their persona's culture, tell stories from the sagas for a Norse persona for example or do 16th c. Italian dances for a 16th c. Italian persona (my daughter). We mostly ignore the inconsistencies — my daughter's persona is about four centuries later than mine and on the other side of the Mediterranean.
There are a lot of European personae, some Islamic, some Japanese, a few Chinese. Very rarely New World personae, and I don't think I have ever seen an SCA event based on the New World. It's very decentralized in practice, with a wide range in how authentic people are in what. The same person who is careful about correctly interpreting dance music may cook at Pennsic over a propane stove instead of a campfire.