Resurrecting the Heart of Community and Celebration at the end of the Rational Age
Bringing community life back from the dead by resurrecting the essential sacred arts of
cooperative life and the practices and technologies necessary to maintain them, including
a consideration of the issues of appropriate scale for human social life, and a discussion
about how we got into the current situation.
Community - Alive or Dead?
In the western world today, community life is dead, dying or gasping for air with no relief
in sight. The rest of the world is staring at a similar fate. The fundamental social, cultural,
economic, psychological, environmental, spiritual and even physical systems that are
necessary for community to thrive have been systematically broken down, digested into
their component parts and used to feed the growth of mass produced forms of human
collective life previously unseen. This process has been underway for a long time and
began in earnest around five hundred years ago with the dawn of the modern world in
Europe. The pattern begun there has since spread over the globe, accelerating violently in
the past fifty years so that despite a visceral resistance among some peoples, its
proliferation seems inexorable. The general phenomena of modernity and its agonies is a
common topic of dismay and commentary. Yet apart from some cries of alarm in the late
nineteenth century, the withering of human scale communities in modern times has been,
for the most part, ignored or deeply misunderstood. This despite the critical role
communities play in the essential health and sustainability of humankind altogether.