When is a Society a Community?

If the social road to utopia is the spiritual transformation of a community, when does a society become a community? And, what precisely, is the process of spiritual transformation for a society?

The late great M. Scott Peck has written extensively and over many years on this topic.The two books most relevant to the current discussion would be "Road Less Traveled", and "The Different Drum". The first is about the individual spiritual transformation, and the second is about community building. Both are highly recommended classics that I think, in my humble opinion, should be in the standard high school curriculum.

According to Peck, on page 86 of "The Different Drum", there are four stages of community formation. A society can only become a community when it has traversed the journey through the four stages. There isn't any empirical research on the upper limit of the size of community, and there isn't any obvious rule about the duration of the four different stages; they can be very short, or lasting an agonizingly long time. Here are the four stages as Peck named them:

1. PseudoCommunity
2. Chaos
3. Emptiness
4. Community

A small group of people will obviously achieve community faster than a larger group, but there are anecdotes of a fairly large group achieving community fairly quickly. The key is stage three, emptiness. It is equivalent to a number of different concepts in religion and philosophy: from Christian humility, to zen's nothingness, and even psychoanalytic dissolution of ego boundaries. As it says in Tao, the Name that can be named is not the real Name. So I won't try to define it, or even describe it. As in quantum mechanics, the only true measure of an entity is to obsever its impact on the environment. And the act of observation will change the nature of the entity, and affect the accuracy of the measurement. Ironically, the more precise we try to define or measure something, the more fuzzy it becomes in its orthogonal quality.

In any case, I digress...

I think there is a need for balance between patriotic pride within a society, as there is an indisputable need for personal sense of self-worth, and yet, at the same time, to have a sense of humility towards the greater whole, a sense of empathy for others, and a sense of connectedness with the others, not only individually, but also collectively.

Only in this complicated balancing act of Self and Not-Self, that we can achieve a society that is also a community - when ALL the individuals of the society are spiritually transformed to become leaders and followers simultaneously. This is the fractal networked utopia of my technocratic dreams. The quality of our individuals, every single one of them, is the difference between utopia and the techno-nightmare forewarned by Bill Joy's Wired article. The war on terrorism, whether it is against bombers or hackers or just the neighbourhood bullies, must be fought on a spiritual level, through education, and not with guns and bombs. Christ said that those who live by the sword will die by the sword. Although there are drastic times, as in World War Two against Nazi Germany, when guns and bombs are needed, there are also times, as it is said in the Art of War, when to win a war is not to fight it. And to achieve utopia is a long process, not achieved overnight, but as described in M Scott. Peck's book "A World Waiting to be Born" requiring painstaking patience and forebearance.