Unity, Diversity and Federation

There are two competing worlds: a centralised one that is peaceful and cosmopolitan, cooperative and universal, but comes with a price of political hegemony, colonisation and cultural, economic and ecological homogeneity. The other is a decentralised one that is culturally, economically and ecologically diverse, with political autonomy for each nation and tribe, but which suffers from parochial thinking that shades into competitiveness, belligerence, xenophobia and bigotry.

I hope these aren’t the only two options, but I sometimes feel that they are, and that there is a thin path to tread between them, enjoying the positives of each one and keeping the negatives at bay.

UN, EU, British, English and Sussex flags together, representing something of my multi-level “affinities” (to be honest, there’s more flags to fit in there, but this’ll have to do for the blog).

There has to be a balance between centralisation and decentralisation, between independence and coordination. The answer, I believe, lies in federalism, that allows autonomy of local levels, and allows for coordination and cooperation on national, continental and global scales.

International institutions like the EU and UN are essential is today’s world, to avoid parochial thinking and promote peaceful cooperation between peoples, but their potentially “imperialistic” tendencies have to be offset by retaining sovereignty at local and national levels.

I hope, with a graded sovereignty from local to global levels, unity can be ensured without loss of diversity, and diversity can be preserved without a loss of unity.

Community Belonging

Many who talk of community talk about “belonging”, which is a sense of shared identity, a feeling of acceptance and perhaps understanding. You can go along to a party and for a brief moment have a feeling of “community”, but then you have to go back home – where is the community then? Do you have to wait until the next event appears on the calendar? That’s been my experience in many Neopagan groups, where likeminded people get together outside of their normal routine, have a great time discussing “meaningful” things, doing rituals, attending camps and workshops, but then they have to go back to our normal routing – the bills won’t pay themselves, will they?

But this belonging doesn’t often sustain itself beyond the events that produces it, there is no commitment beyond that feeling of “belonging”, whatever that may be. Which conveniently stops short of conflict appearing, which invariably happens in community. You go along for a weekend camp, get the benefits of “good feeling” which you can take back to work with you and not have to face the possibility of conflict, and perhaps that is why some many “communities” don’t develop beyond a sort of Sunday Christian phenomenon, because they don’t want to face the conflict that lies behind the “good times”.

Sustainable community takes more than a weekend of “belonging”, it involves facing conflict and working through it, coming to a consensus, and cooperation and compromise that sometimes mean putting aside personal interests, and commitment to a project that doesn’t rely on personal interests alone.

The theme of “co” is no accident, and if there was no “co”, then community wouldn’t be(long). 🙂

Synergy

This concept is such a wonderful concept. Put simply the effects are more than the sum of components in a way that reductionism cannot account for.

The properties of water cannot be predicted by neatly looking at the properties of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen and then adding those properties together, water is something completely new and different from its component parts; when we study the earth’s geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere as distinct from one another then the activities of the whole cannot be fully understood; when people consciously cooperate with each other the creativity that is produced is more than all the creativity they can create separately.

It is creativity that generates creativty and thus takes on a life of its own. It cannot be seen by pure reductionist thinking but only by a holistic vision of things.