SECTOR 4:00 Family & Community
Family & Community
Family and community has a special relationship with Cultures of Sustainability for several reasons. The first is that small human groups identified with particular values, such as sustainability practices, find mutual support and reinforcement for their values and practices within their group. This could explain why experimental sustainability oriented communities seem to do better in more agrarian rural settings, and are less common in the urban context.
Family & Community: Individual
The individual receives benefit when participating in a family sized group in one case because it is natural for a person to be a member of a blood family, in fact that is how we come into the world. The family is of such a fundamental part of the human experience that when we look at human psychology and the development of appropriate human behavior it is inevitable that we eventually turn our focus on two families scale human relationship and its impact in relationship to the individual. In fact there are schools of psychotherapy that specifically focus on the effect of family on the individual. Furthermore it is the slightly larger group that reinforces good or bad behaviors and is the principal context for exploring new ideas, new ways of being in new practices. For the individual, we could say that the family group is the crucible for the emergence of Sustainable Culture.
Family & Community: Family or Group
Sector four and family and scale group represents a confluence of sector and scale for one significant reason: this small-scale human group is a fundamental unit of culture. The family group critically reinforces social norms and when cast as an intentional, selected-for group, it represents a vital and dynamic experimental medium. Plus we see at the affiliative worldview level and emergence of intentional communities (reference WWW.IC.org). Human beings have common interests who share that desire to explore and develop sustainable culture are the light for humanity at this point in time. The breadth and range of experiments being conducted is nothing short of miraculous and inspiring. Each group may have particular affinities, in fact careful study may reveal weighting on some particular direction of the Seed Logos, or possibly within particular creative axes. For instance many new age groups will be focused on spiritual values and be quite developed in sector 12, but may not be very good with economic concerns, and may founder as a result. There are other groups that are focused on economics and material dimensions and because they do not focus on values, also fail to nourish their members in subtle ways, which eventually may cause them to fail as well. We could in fact describe modern society in these terms-the achivist paradigm is ruining our world, creating a vacuous society and failing to take care of people, animals, plants and the planet at large.
Family & Community: Village
A healthy village is an extended community. Unfortunately few modern humans today have the experience of that reality. Curiously many of the things that make us modern work against this reality, the Internet being a classic example. The formation of the Corporation was perhaps the initial and principal force against the existence of healthy village scale human settlement, a trend that continues with great force today.
We might ask ourselves how do we build or cultivate healthy village scale sustainable culture in the face of such powerful forces as multinational corporations and broad-spectrum media information services?
Blending with the topic of regional scale community, and relating to smaller scale community groups, we might be finding salvation in regionally oriented groups of people who find themselves with common interests and values. It is possible that tools such as the Internet can actually facilitate the formation of these groups are which will have similar rule sets as traditional village scale communities, but may be forming in new ways such as through modern social media. Because these new villages are human structures, it will be important to confirm these new social relations with actual face-to-face gatherings and sharings of information, resources, smiles and hugs.
Family & Community: Bioregion / Region
Sector four at regional scale has an interesting quality as we are now talking about human organization at a scale that surrounds the critical sector/scale of family scale group. How does this cell relate to Sustainable Culture? We might think of a double arrow relationship where family scale groups participate meaningfully in supporting sustainable culture practices, values and dialogue at the regional level, and conversely, should there be some thread of sustainable culture available at the regional level, whether through planning processes, economic realities, or other educational opportunities, these threads might dangle into all family scale groups within their region. In a sense with this metaphor we can see how everybody can participate meaningfully in the birth of the society cohered with Sustainable Culture values.
Family & Community: World
The idea of family scale group and global society being closely related is perhaps an oxymoron. However upon reflection, we see fit here to there can be a double arrow relationship similar to that between family group and region, it is just more conceptual, more subtle, and perhaps in a deeper context of social evolution, actually more important.
In fact a special theme of our time is the possibility of communities of interest forming from disparate corners of the globe, because of the Internet. So it is possible for the concept of community to be redefined, taking a meaning in addition to a group that shares physical resources, but is connected through information. Perhaps the beginning of this arose through early print media and electronic communications such as the telegraph through the achievist worldview, being business interests and scientific disciplines. Now, we can expect the emergence of sustainable culture science and sustainable culture business, which will be fully second-tier integrative communities who are sharing information and other resources of common interest.