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CHAPTER III. A.

THE WISE (MOST DESIRABLE) COMMUNITY

When I discuss the Wise Community, I am discussing what has traditionally been called the Good Society. I define the Wise Community as one that believes and implements the idea that human beings are the source of meaning and value and that assisting each member to become a Wise Person must be the focus of its ultimate concern.

Although ancient Greeks wrote about the Good Society, with rare exceptions this has not been a concern of modern writers at least since the mid-Nineteenth Century. Two exceptions to the foregoing are Walter Lippmann in his book, THE GOOD SOCIETY, and John Kenneth Galbraith's book of the same title. A discussion of each of their ideas is provided at the end of this first section. The lack of interest in discussing the Good Society is a measure of our current skepticism on this topic. Today people think it is naive to believe society can become much better. It seems pointless to talk about something so unachievable. Certainly my definition of a Wise Community has never been proposed or explored before. Most writers have thought meaning and value come from God or other extra-human sources. As a result they did not associate achievement of meaning with society. The idea that each person might become a Wise Person also has rarely been seriously considered before.

However, there is a vein of relevant thought and data. This source of empirical data and concepts to further explore the above ideas relates to communes. It seems to me the study of communes and utopian writing can provide some insights and stimulating ideas. In this spirit the below analysis of an excellent reference on communes is presented[1]. The author discusses communes from a utopian perspective. Whenever she uses utopia as an ideal society it could be replaced by "Wise Community" since her ideas are consistent with mine.

(p. vii): "The focus throughout is on how groups are built and maintained....I hope to demonstrate...that in the past a number of utopian communities have in fact been successes....[But] there are important organizational considerations to be taken into account in building a viable community."

"For the current communal movement to succeed, it needs thinkers as well as doers, intellectuals as well as activists, who will discover and report what is known, provide new ideas, warn of dangers, and suggest alternative directions. I hope the findings of this book can contribute toward that end."

(p. 1): "Utopia is held together by commitment rather than coercion, for in utopia what people want to do is the same as what they have to do, the interests of the individual are congruent with the interests of the group....Underlying the vision of utopia is the assumption that harmony, cooperation, and mutuality of interests are natural to human existence, rather than conflict, competition, and exploitation, which arise only in imperfect societies."

(p. 2): "For the most part, the vision of utopia has been the vision of community."

RESPONSE: I am in total agreement with the foregoing. The whole idea of a Wise Community focuses on the importance of community. The individual is tempered and formed within community and the influence on them, particularly in the early years of their life is overwhelming. That is why I say we cannot produce Wise Persons until we have a Wise Community. In imperfect societies (Not-Yet-Wise Communities) individuals are thwarted in every way from becoming their best self.

(p. 3): "Historically, three kinds of critiques of society have provided the initial impulse for the utopian search: religious, politico-economic, and psychosocial."

RESPONSE: I would say that in one way or another each person is searching for a utopian society. However, few persons are able to correctly interpret their motivations and yearnings to properly understand what it is they are seeking. Because they have been given some confused and confusing symbols -- Nirvana, God, Heaven, etc. -- they have a poor basis to interpret their individual needs. Supernatural symbols initially appear to answer their inner longing. But ultimately these symbols are proven inadequate as one achieves sufficient experience, knowledge, and insight.

There is only a single underlying impulse moving individuals to search for utopia -- the innate human need for nurturing connection with other people. Individuals will interpret this impulse differently based on their current understanding about what is most important. But if the Wise Person and Wise Community are valid concepts, they are the only goals that will achieve a sustainable result. No other impulse, neither religious, politico-economic, nor psychosocial by itself can lead to a stable, sustainable position. A Science of Religion and Religion of Wisdom aims for a single goal which incorporates religion, political-economic, and psychosocial areas.

(p. 5): Communes sought to provide "...a refuge from the evils of the factory system, characterized by dehumanizing competition and the excessive labor of the many for the benefit of the few."

Horace Greeley, whose ideas influenced utopian experiments in the 1840s, captures many of the beliefs of these utopians: "There should be no paupers and no surplus labor; unemployment indicates sheer lack of brains, and inefficiency in production and waste in consumption of the product of a national industry that has never worked to half its capacity. This has resulted in social anarchy: isolation is the curse of laboring classes, and only in unity can a solution be found for the problems of labor; therefore, education is the great desideratum, and in association the future may be assured."

RESPONSE: These words, in my mind, capture the spirit of a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom. Putting them into practice would be a prime effort of a CPASR.

(p. 7): Psychosocial: "This critique revolves around alienation and loneliness, both social isolation and inner fragmentation. It holds that modern society has put people out of touch with others and with their own fundamental nature."

(p. 8): "...the initial impetus for the building of American communes has tended to stem from one of three major themes: a desire to live according to religious and spiritual values, rejecting the sinfulness of the established order; a desire to reform society by curing its economic and political ills, rejecting the injustice and inhumanity of the establishment; or a desire to promote the psychosocial growth of the individual by putting them into closer touch with their fellows, rejecting the isolation and alienation of the surrounding society."

"[These three strains] stress the possibility of perfection through restructuring social institutions."

RESPONSE: And this is the vision of a Science of Religion.

(p. 32): "The beliefs underlying the development of utopian communities stem from an idealization of social life, which holds that it is possible for people to live together in harmony, comradeship, and peace. Utopian thought idealizes social unity, maintaining that only in intimate collective life do people fully realize their human-ness....[In the view of sociologist Charles Horton Cooley] primary groups are fundamental to the development of human nature -- to fostering sentiments such as sympathy, love, resentment, ambition, vanity, hero worship, and a sense of social right and wrong."

"Human nature is not something existing separately in the individual, but [is]...a relatively simple and general condition of the social mind....[Human beings] cannot acquire it except through fellowship, and it decays in isolation."

RESPONSE: It is the foregoing belief that lies at the core of a Science of Religion. As discussed elsewhere any individual deficiency must be seen to have a social dimension. It's solution requires inputs from society to the individual, and changes as necessary within the society itself.

(p. 33): "The primary utopian idea is human perfectibility."

RESPONSE: And in my terms that means becoming a Wise Person.

(p. 37): "Education has been central in utopian thought....Many communities place great emphasis on their educational institutions, establishing schools that are often of such a high quality as to attract many non-utopian children from the outside, and providing continued opportunities for adult learning, including lectures and study groups."

"In a number of communities, perfectibility means constant attempts at self-improvement, constant striving for perfection in word and deed."

RESPONSE: Education is also central to a Science of Religion and a Religion of Wisdom. It may well be that setting up schools will be an essential step in the development of a Wise Community. Self-improvement is an essential ingredient in becoming a Wise Person.

(p. 39): "Another utopian value is order. In contradistinction to the larger society, which is seen as chaotic, uncoordinated, and allowing accidental, random, or purposeless events to give rise to conflict, waste, or needless duplication, utopian communities are characterized by conscious planning and coordination whereby the welfare of every member is ensured.

RESPONSE: And a Wise Community would display the foregoing by its clarity of goals. It would also be judged by its efforts to direct energy toward achieving those aims first which help as many individuals as possible become Wise Persons.

(p. 43): "A third utopian value is brotherhood. Just as the social world can be brought into harmony with the natural laws of the universe, according to utopian thought so can people be brought into harmony with one another."

RESPONSE: The harmonious relationship among people would perhaps be one of the greatest differences between today's society and a Wise Community. However, this harmony would not come out of ignoring differences, but by working on them constructively.

(p. 43): "Job rotation ensures everyone gets a chance to do both the most attractive and the least attractive tasks, and the least attractive may sometimes get the highest reward in the form either of 'credit' against goods from the community store or of increased leisure time."

RESPONSE: The relationship between work and the rest of life is probably the greatest challenge a Wise Community will face. For other ideas about this issue see Chapter XIV, "Bionomics -- Economics and the Wise Community," and Chapter XV, "The Hunter-Gatherer in the Modern World."

(p. 49): Unity of body and mind (harmony) is a utopian value. "Harmony [as a utopian value means] the merging of values, ideas, and spiritual matters with physical events, the union of mind and body, spirit and flesh."

RESPONSE: This to me is the core of a SFLIHM (Sustainable Feeling that one's LIfe Has Meaning). However, the SFLIHM state also requires congruency in knowledge, understanding, ideas, etc.

(p. 51): "Utopians are characterized by a spirit of experimentation." So this is another utopian value. Not only are utopian communities major social experiments, in which unique forms of human relationships are explored, but within the communities themselves new ways of doing things that may better enable the utopia to implement its ideas are often explored.

RESPONSE: However, I would say it has been on this point that all communes have foundered. Communes are not established and run so as to test the validity of the hypotheses upon which they are built. Rather they are set up to fulfill some particular goal. They may experiment with the various ways to achieve this goal, but not as to the validity of the goal.

And, yet, it is this issue that must be clarified if a Wise Community is to be achieved. What are the true requirements to achieve a SFLIHM and become a Wise Person? What does it take to have a Wise Community? Without experimental, empirical data one can never know. The answers come from the data not the working hypotheses.

(p. 52): "Utopians value their own uniqueness and coherence as a group."

RESPONSE: The group that members of a Wise Community must identify with is all of humanity. Anything that detracts from this goal must be taken as a challenge to overcome.

(p. 52): "In general it is important for utopians to believe that life is an expression of their ideas, that there is no separation between their values and their way of life. Utopian communities offer to members life's services -- food and shelter, a job, education for the children, care in old age -- in the context of an explicit set of shared beliefs about how people should live."

RESPONSE: The foregoing describes many key aspects of a Wise Community.

(p. 54): "The ideas forming the communal life-style -- perfectability, order, brotherhood, merging of mind and body, experimentation, and the community's uniqueness -- all represent its intentional quality, with harmony as their principle theme: harmony with nature, harmony among people, and harmony between the spirit and the flesh....Some utopian ideas offer romanticized versions of social practices that may be described in quite different terms. 'Mutual criticism,' for example, can be viewed as 'brainwashing'; brotherhood can be used to justify the sacrifice of individual needs to collective demands; and emphasis on harmony can cloak an unwillingness to deal with conflict or with the fact that individuals have discrepant desires."

RESPONSE: For a Wise Community it is essential to look at both sides of any idea. It is in the balance of positive and negative effects that a Wise Community is achieved, or lost. This is where study and eternal vigilance are essential. Patterns cannot be maintained merely because they have worked in the past. As individuals evolve and communities evolve many things will have to change. To ignore this is to ignore a key attribute of a Wise Community and a Wise Person.

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