On Inventing

I'm hoping that I have this straight. This group is out to invent a culture, or a community, intentionally based on social capital. I know very little about inventing, but I know more about it than I do about culture, communities, and social capital. Here is what I know about inventions.

Inventing is not the same as problem solving. Nor is it the same as adapting existing ideas and techniques to suit a purpose. Inventing is about creating something brand new.

About his own inventions, Edison said "What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration." What I have to say here is about the one per cent. That one per cent has three components.

1. Every invention has a purpose. It does something useful: lobbing a projection over a wall, providing a source of artificial light, performing mechanical calculations with remarkable speed and accuracy.
2. Every invention has an approach, an idea, a specific notion about how to do what it purports to do: pack gunpowder behind the projectile in a tube and set the gunpowder afire, pass a current through a thin conductor, connect non-linear electronic components in a way that embodies some calculation or another.
3. Behind almost every invention is a rationale as to why it should work. Bad rationales lead to non-inventions: Ouija boards, flying machines based on flapping wings, and so on. Good inventions are based on good rationales: electrical current passing through a thin conductor emits light in the visible spectrum. Machine theory teaches us that any computation can be implemented in a finite-state machine.

"Why," you may ask, "don't you bring up some inventions in the social or cultural realm? Isn't that our concern?" And, we are concerned with social and cultural invention, but, to tell the truth, I can't think of very many great social or cultural inventions. The USA stands out as being one. I'll leave it up to you to work out how that invention maps to the three elements above.

Better yet, work out how these three elements map to our little project.

1. What is the intention behind an intentional community based on social capital? Is the creation of this community an end in itself or is the aim something else, say, rescuing society, or at least ourselves from all the evils of civilization pointed out by Quinn and others?
2. What is the invention here? Is it some technique for creating and maintaining social capital? If so, what, specifically, is that technique? If not, what is the invention?
3. If we can figure out what the invention is, what reason do we have to think that it will work? Will embody the secret to the Amish's success, whatever that may be, or something else?

If we can identify these three elements, then, I think, we can get started on the 99% of the effort that requires perspiration.

We Got Started!

Sunday evening, 9/20, we had our first meeting, with 6 attending. We spent most of our time becoming acquainted with aspects of our backgrounds that brought us each to be here. Billy Trip painted a picture of a settlement of 15-20 homes built using "green" principles and able to support its members re: energy (maybe even food) in a sustainable way. Peter sees this as the ultimate desideratum--the desired end-point ("having all of one's best friends living in the same neighborhood")--but also sees the financial investment necessary for this as the major stumbling block, and wants to explore more feasible interim steps. Pierce Presley would love to live "28 miles from nowhere" (like the Washington Post journalist who is blogging his back-to-the-land experiment), but this isn't practical with jobs to hold down and schools to keep children in. This is another aspect of the financial problem--we all need to make a living, and our places of employment are pretty much here in the city. (Stephanie and Mark Walls, however, have deliberately chosen to home-school Stephanie's son Michael, which offers an alternative to the "school problem.")

Peter suggests that creating alternative culture is part of the "project," not simply creating an ideal intentional community. So, prompted by Dorothy Haecker's questions, we described the various ways that we each remain connected to the umbilical cord of Mother Culture--addictions to TV shows, surfing the internet, etc.

Stephanie asked if I would post the titles of the books that I had brought with me to share with those who might be interested. I won't list all of them, just the ones I think are most immediately relevant to us--and interesting:

All of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael books, and Beyond Civilization.
Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman, 1985 (20th anniversary edition recently re-issued).
Better Together: Restoring the American Community, Robert Putnam, 2003.
The Riddle of Amish Culture, Donald Kraybill, revised edition, 2001.
Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex, W.F. Whyte and K. K. Whyte, 1991 (the story of the worker coops in the Basque region of Spain).

I have several other, more academic books on social capital and worker cooperatives, as well. (I think the history of Mondragon is relevant because of the degree to which its alternative model of capitalist organization depends on social connections.)

Getting Started--

The first meeting of the Social Capital Study Group of San Antonio (sounds a little pretentious, but--oh, well!) will be at Community Unitarian Universalist Church (CUUC) on Sunday, 9/20 at 6:30 pm. This blog will summarize meetings and the QuickTopic discussion board for those not attending the CUUC meetings. I'll start off stating (1) what kind of "social capital" I'm talking about, and (2) what my objective is in starting this study group.

(1) Social capital is any economic benefit that results--for those receiving the benefit--primarily from their mutual participation in social relationships and communities.

(2) I would like to start, find, belong to, or participate in a community that intentionally creates social capital. In the past, many communities have created social capital abundantly, but did so unintentionally--or perhaps unconsciously. In modern society, it no longer appears that social capital can be grown unintentionally or unconsciously; it seems to require the intention to do so by a group of people for whom this is one of the explicit purposes of their association with each other.

Belonging to a social capital study group has a specific purpose for me: I would like to identify, exhaustively and precisely, the conditions under which a social capital-intensive community could create itself and function in the midst of a modern society that otherwise tends to discourage and dissipate the conditions under which social capital has been formed in the past.

Co-housing communities stimulate social capital formation by designing physically proximate neighborhoods. The elders in Shyamalan's film "The Village" do it by severing contact with the modern world and forming a self-sustaining community in a remote woods. The Amish of Lancaster County, PA accomplish this through an elaborate cultural and religious separation from the society around them. Is the proximate housing necessary? Is physical isolation necessary? Is cultural separation necessary? My starting question is this: Can a coherent, cohesive, social capital-forming community be grown and sustained right in the midst of modern urban society?

If so, what are the conditions for it? Must it have a purpose and "vision" over and above the formation of social capital itself? How many members would it initially require? How closely would they need to share a common vision or set of values? How would they compensate for physical proximity, if they do not live in the same neighborhood? (I see this study group as a "think tank" for pursuing those questions, and not yet as the core group of such a community. It could become this, but that is not my intention for it.)

Please add your own questions to the list!