Thinking About Community

Arthur Noll writes: If we want a solid community, we need agreement on basic beliefs.  Communities that are riddled with divisions of different belief systems will fail under stress.  The ultimate division happens when the belief is that people are independent of each other.  To go back to the analogy of fault lines, an interesting phenomena with earthquakes is that sometimes apparently solid land becomes like quicksand, or soft mud.  Buildings lose their foundation.  It has happened that buildings completely disappear, swallowed up by the quivering land. The stress of the earthquake separates all the particles of soil, like billions of tiny faults.  That would be the condition of a society with powerful beliefs of individual independence, under enough stress.  Things built in times of no stress would crumble,  foundation gone. We have actually seen this happen in small degree.  Riots have sometimes happened with societies that believe in individual independence, with people looting, setting fires, doing destructive acts, but not as a coordinated thing, just everyone doing what they want.  Always there is some stress that happens to set loose these actions, but they only happen because there is no real bond between people, they are like the individual grains of clay or sand, with no structural integrity.  Under enough stress, they separate out and do whatever seems good to each individual, and what was built together is torn apart in a flash. (07/07/02)