Seeking community here. The fog of language.
The separations. “Les
associations sont très figés,” I offer the group of Baha’i organizers who try to
enthuse me about their vision of service and community growth at Achene's house in Fontaine.
This
is offered in response to a statement about how it is difficult to interface
with the French associations.
I
try to develop my own sense of what positive work is in the development of
community. I log onto networked
social software platforms like Twitter and Facebook, creating casual
connections with people spread geographically. Many I knew from before and I feel closeness and
kinship. But what is the common
ground of life now? An illusion of
community is created. It is
illusory because we don’t actually have shared responsibility; or not by
default, at least.
The
Baha’i group impresses me with its effectiveness, but as always, I wonder about
that which is not said. Only
successes are shown. They seem to
have such a confidence in their rightness of approach. But that approach is not up for
discussion. The answers lie in the
writings of Bahá'u'lláh, their interpretations by Abdul Baha and translations
by Shogi Effendi. Why choose this
body of writings to found a new society?
And why the reluctance to attempt to convince via the ideas and
coherence and rightness of the vision?
Instead I see the flexibility of a group that wants to govern, and its
principles will adjust to the circumstance.
Wendall
Berry writes about the value of community, and its role in protection of some
human values. He always insisted
community be tied to a geographical particularity, a piece of land. Only the ties and care for a particular
piece of land is adeauate to create the shared identity and responsibility that
fulfills the full sense of the word community.
The
Transcendental Meditation organization also seeks a new government, a new
organization of world society, here based on the writings and person of the
ellusive guru who called himself the Maharishi. Here, the outreach is achieved by
meditation and a highly unlikely link made to quantum field theory.
But
with TM, the inward turn is encouraged.
Indeed, through this turning inward, the benefits to society are assumed
to flow.
How
do we form a local community when so many have origins elsewhere? I look to my own family history, Jews
dispersing from a misty Eastern Europe of my imagination. Shtetls in Ukraine and Moldova, complex
political background in the Lithuanian city of Vladislovov on the
German-Russian border. My
step-mother’s Armenian relatives fleeing a hostile Turkey, marching through
desserts to Lebanon and Syria.
And
now I’ve gone back across the Atlantic, following abstraction, mathematics and science,
trying to settle in a mountain surrounded cuvette of Grenoble. Does it do my own life justice to
imagine there will be a complete stopping of this generational motion? Will I integrate into an old community,
adding my spice and flavor to the mix?
The
loose ties on the digital, social networks can drain meaning from attempts at
coherent social organization. But
they also create new possibilities, hinting at new stabilities.
