Why do we struggle to do this?
Reason #1 - Geography: Finding like minded people is hard. For most of us, our families in no way represent the kind of community we might hope for.
There’s so little shared understanding of the world. The people we do find who make our heart sing live so far away. We see them on Facebook and wonder if we might ever share food with them. We wish that they could all live on our block so that we might see each other each day, garden, craft and make beauty together.
But it is not to be.
We are far-flung scatterlings gathering in virtual or too temporary village huts to get some momentary protection from the elements in our too exposed lives before we have to leave each other again back into the neon-lit, strip-malled, cultureless world into which we were borne.
In her book, The Spirit of Intimacy, Sobonfu Somé speaks about village life and how, when you woke up in her Dagara village you went outside. Village life happened outside of people’s homes. If you didn’t go outside, people noticed this and were concerned that you weren’t well. But, for too many, it’s easy to never leave one’s home and not have that be noticed until weeks or months later when their body is found, having drunk themselves to death in their apartment.
Reason #2 - Culture is Work: The root word of culture, cult is the same root as in cultivate and so culture is a made something. It’s not inevitable. It’s not the result of people living together for a long enough period of time. You can be assured that habit or prejudice might appear but not so for a life-feeding culture.
Reason #3 - A Lack of Shared Understanding: a group of people gathered together doesn’t make a village. Even if they are gathered together with a shared purpose. Even if they’ve all decided to live together, on the same piece of land and are all dedicated to the same purpose. Village life seems to be rooted in having a shared understanding of the world. Absent this shared understanding you have a crowd.
And a village doesn’t simply appear on its own.
A village has the chance to appear through our willingness to need help, and it is destroyed by our independence.
A village has the chance to appear when people are called into service of something greater than themselves. Someone has to do the asking. Someone has to be willing to convene.
Deep culture is based on a shared understanding of the world.
But, for those of us of European descent in North America, that shared understanding of anything was ended by migration which devolved to a questionable set of communities and then to the family unit and then to the individual and then to the sanctum sanctorum of our personal inner lives.
Reason #4 - Lack of Elders: Simply put, there is a steep shortage of those who are long in the tooth who have medicine to offer the community. There are a lot of olders, but not many elders. There are plenty of snowbirds, plenty of retirees joking about spending their kids inheritance but not many actively working to be become an ancestor worth descending from.
Reason #5 - Lack of Capacity for Elders: The matter is made worse because elders are not self-made. An elder can’t self-appoint themselves. After all, to whom would they be directing their wisdom? And elders can’t appoint each other.
What’s the point of having a council of elders where all they do is sit in circles, facing inwards, away from the world?
No, elders are made, in part, by young people willing to call on those older ones and, in so doing, asking them to step into elderhood. But this modern sibling society, with its deep mistrust of those older than us and intolerance for anything that even resembles authority or hierarchy, has little capacity for elders to appear.
Reason #6 - Lack of Trusted Institutions: Even if we were to actively court the appearance of elders, where would they go? Where might we gather to receive their wisdom? What night of the week? What physical place? If you have a conflict, what’s the email address you use to book a session with the elder to help you and the other work through it? We lack these cultural structures and institutions, held by real elders, almost entirely.
Reason #7 - Privatized Relationships: One of the central poverties of our age is the obsession with private property and this has, absolutely, extended to our relationships. We go to a wedding and agree to be there for the newly married couple as a community. But, when troubles arrive, we feel an immense awkwardness. “Who am I to intrude? This really isn’t my business. I should just give them space.” This privatization of relationships is a form of poverty few have even begun to comprehend.
Reason #8 - An Addiction to Competence and Self-Sufficiency: Most of us in the modern world, and particularly white culture, are steeped in this. The belief that we need to be able to do everything on our own and do it perfectly.
And this unwillingness to admit that we need help and to ask for it is killing our communities. We have a deep sense of shame around having needs and a strong fear of ever being a burden that is followed with a compulsion to repay our debts to other immediately.
It looks like responsibility, has the initial feeling of freedom but the aftertaste of it all is a loneliness we can’t rinse from our mouths.
Reason #9 - “Who Am I To Convene Anything?”: Most of us aren’t sure, and perhaps rightly so, that we have the chops to convene any kind of village-making initiative. We are scared to fail and to make things worse. Which elders to ask? What approach might be taken? How do we hold the center of it when we’re not elders ourselves and have rarely, if ever, been on the receiving end of any such endeavour?
Reason #10 - “Isn’t The Whole Thing Precarious?”: The realities of village living in which people are depended on to play certain roles seems like a rickety and vulnerable proposition. Isn’t the modern world better? Why have a flimsy house when you could have a concrete one that is built, once, for you? Why have a rope bridge when you could have a steel one? We rely on a village to get the Kula ring from Island to Island when you could just FedEx it? Why take the chance? Until we can understand why it matters that the village might fail, we will never truly be engaged in village making.
Until we can understand why it matters that the village might fail, we will never truly be engaged in village making.
My man Alex King-Harris lifted up some others worth noting too:
Cost of real estate is out of reach for most people in places where it would be ideal to have a village. In addition bylaws often prevent cohabitation in ways that would help the village flourish.
Mature systems of conflict resolution + trauma healing available to people who co-habitate are often lacking, undeveloped, or not a central part of village life.
The fundamental economy of community means that most people spend their time working to survive outside of the community, leaving them unavailable for the hard work it takes to learn how to live together again.
Way back in an Urban Geography university class, the professor described about the same geographic pattern. Naturalized now, in urban settings. In short, people don't "hang with" neighbors next door, but rather those with whom they have interests in common. That University of Calgary class was here in this same city, Calgary's Region now being 1.4 million or so. Building on this pattern, strategically looking towards the future, I hope to suggest we can allow for further distance between us, and yet still be a village. As a thirty-two-year member of AA, I see the Dunbar number 50 repeated in my regular meeting, and as the meetings run daily, I estimate the other Dunbar number of maybe 150. "Work work work" being a side-chant, towards a do-it-or-die common purpose. Elders mentioned at times by indigenous members, and old-timer and sponsors fitting in a similar context. How to bring this all together ... that's a rest-of-my-life project on the go. Stay tuned, as our planet collapses further.
Tad, I have been sitting with this very topic of Village making an Elders. As a 51 year old woman ready to birth my son into adulthood, and my mother living with me. I feel the real call that my next piece of soul work is to be the bridge between the young adults and elders. I myself, am moving into "semi-retirement" and have made the choice to just see a few coaching clients at a time. I am at the start of my yearly "visioning" time, and my own ancestors are speaking clearly that my work is to help people preserve their lineages (food, craft, language, ritual). I am diving deep with a Southern Italian elder, since my own are no longer on the Earth, and of course as a youth I was not interested in what they had to share. I did carry forth the food as best I can. So I wonder if you have any ideas on where to start? I do have the women I coach start learning more about their lineage. But that still doesn't create a Village. I wonder if I should be volunteering at the senior center. But I am afraid based on where I live that I will end up hanging out with a bunch of "olders" that have drastically different views than I do. And I am not here to convince them of their possible role of elder. And at the same time know that if we engage with them and ask their stories it may happen naturally. Just curious if this series you are writing will move towards some "possibilities" of mending this.