Essay: Human Community

In many ways we construct our own realities: we choose what beliefs to endorse and what values to follow. And our job as cognizant human beings is to integrate our perceptual experiences into this mental framework of how things should be. Many of us borrow belief systems from institutionalized religions; most of us inevitably inherit them from our parents, for better or worse. Today, I am borrowing from Lewis Thomas - medical doctor, researcher, essayist, and strong believer in human community.

In his collection of essays, The Lives of a Cell (thanks Jingy!), Thomas proposes that the purpose of all living things is to collaborate and form sustainable communities. Reading his works, reminds me of the population equilibrium graphs from ecology; the ones where you plug in the number of prey and predators into an equation to figure out just the right number of both so that the graph reaches some semblance of stability around a value - the populations of prey and predator are then said to be in 'equilibrium', i.e., sustainable to mathematical infinity. Thomas expands the concept to more than just prey-predator relationships. According to Thomas, single-celled bacteria and humans alike are unconsciously driven toward symbiosis (both intra and inter-species) to reach an equilibrium point. Contrast this with Richard Dawkin's philosophy espousing selfishness as the supreme and universal value that drives each gene to out compete all other genes manifesting macroscopically as ruthless social darwinism. I prefer Thomas' world view.

What belief system and code of conduct leads to sustainable human community? What values should one live by and what behaviors should one exhibit? Really I'm just trying to put into words a process that the natural world carries out so effortlessly. Perhaps it is not meant for us to know this process on a conscious level or maybe it's so inevitable that it doesn't make much of a difference anyway.

My imperfect initial attempt:

The supreme value would be sustainability. Because no one lives in a vacuum, people must find a way to interact harmoniously in order to attain sustainability. The most harmonious interactions will be symbiotic where both parties can benefit. Unbalance in interaction is a threat to sustainability. Both selfishness and selflessness leads to an unbalance, so the most effective self-identity would lie somewhere in between capitalistic individualism and socialist group mentality. To achieve this, one has to practice the difficult task of spurning both self-abnegation and excess. It would be nice to have a differential equation for figuring out set-points in human interaction, but unfortunately life is not a quantitative experience.

Instead, people begin to figure out this set-point naturally when they get together in groups, small or large. They begin to form informal rules of acceptable give and take, appropriate ways to dress and greet one another, what is good for the group and what is not, i.e. culture. But the problem arises when “culture” is not universally applicable; codes of conduct change from group to group. Aren’t there universal practices that will always contribute to the longevity and quality of human interactions? A few that come to mind include meditating, open communication, practicing good manners, keeping things simple and direct, and regularly participating in a few self-sacrificing activities (i.e. volunteering, charity, paying taxes without complaining too much, tithing, etc.). I suppose that is the dogma for almost all religions :) But how do you know when you have contributed enough? How do you know that you are taking enough? In every single human interaction you have?