Civil Society
February 8th, 2004 | by Jason |Yesterday I want to a conference called Developing Others, Developing Ourselves that my friend Adrian Dedomenico organized. One of the panelists, a man named Ajume Wingo from Cameroon, talked about the role of “civil society” in African development. By civil society, he meant the voluntary associations and organizations that occur outside of the commercial and governmental spheres. His argument was that civil society isn’t always a good thing – the KKK is an example of a civil association – and in Africa it often provides an escape for people who are fleeing the corruption of government and the ethnic conflicts pervading the public sphere. There is a real need for human and spiritual connection that is met by civil associations, but they can also mean the fragmentation of society.
This might sound sort of abstract and political and across-the-Atlantic, but somehow it hit very close to home for me. There’s been a running theme in my conversations with friends lately about the loneliness and dislocation we feel in our mid-twenties. Now that college (and even graduate degrees, for some of us) have slipped by, where is our civil society?
I was talking to one friend here in Boston the other day, who went to Harvard for undergrad and spent a lot of time with a group of international students. Many of them were from South Asia, and if they didn’t return to India or Pakistan, they scattered to London, California, or other cities just out of reach of Boston. Even a friend of hers who did stay here is working in a consulting job that absorbs both her daily and social life, and they’ve seen each other only a handful of times in the past year.
My own blogroll has people who live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston. I’m lucky to have found the friends I have in the past year here in Boston (and have one very close friend from my college years). But there are times when I think about the guys out in California who have known me for almost a decade, and the new lives we’re all building. I’m not going to be too dramatic about it, but it’s tough. Sometimes it’s hard to put all the pieces together of who I am and who I have been.
I also know that the ties here are tenuous. Adrian might be off to Africa soon. Alireza is in Tehran, and his plans may turn towards keeping him there. Corinna plans to do residency in New York.
One thing that makes all of this workable and livable for me is my relationship to God, my prayer practice. I don’t feel as alone as I once did. When I think about this, though, I start thinking about spiritual community, and about going to Shabbat services at a synagogue or finding a havurah. There I take a tenuous step into “civil society.” But that doesn’t really work for me. My friends are Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Buddhist, and I like it that way. Temple Beth Zion (the temple I like in Brookline) is open enough in its values to embrace everyone, but I don’t want to drag my friends to shul.
None of this is nearing a crisis for me, nor is it weighing heavily on my soul. Put I’m starting to pay attention, and I’m starting to look ahead to later in my life – what will be the nexus or nexi of community for me?
Sometimes I wonder about things like boarding schools and universities. I deeply believe in the vision of a diverse community, living together, learning from each other’s backgrounds, exposing each other’s blind spots as they learn to live in a microcosm of a shrinking world. But they also create a certain hope or expectation, that life will always be like that. Our friends will always be a short walk away. Our schedules will always match, giving us ample vacation time to see family and distant friends. We will always have shared venues where our cultural associations can perform, present, and hold dialogue.
Last summer I wrote a vision statement for something called the “dojo,” a long-term aspiration of mine. Looking at these thoughts, it feels like the dojo arose in my mind as a way to fill this need, to create something outside the university context and reaching beyond it demographically (age, class, etc). When I started working at Dialogos, I really saw it as a staging ground, a learning environment for me about fostering adult development and dialogue. But even beyond the skills and experience I might be gaining here, there’s just the basic life experience of my friends and me in this life transition, defining the needs that such a space might create.
To close here, I want to share something that’s been evocative for me in this whole line of thinking and feeling. A couple of weeks ago, I went out for drinks with a friend from the Harvard Ed school, joining her and a friend from her grade school years. It was the first time that my friend had people from the different phases of her life together, and she felt a wholeness and presence in herself that it seemed had been missing for a long time.
She sent us a poem after the experience:
THE LAYERS
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principles of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned campsites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a numbus-clouded voice directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformation
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
–Stanley Kunitz
One Response to “Civil Society”
By Heather Anne on Feb 13, 2004 | Reply
Though I come from the predominately white majority of South Africa, my childhood in Africa has given me some interesting perspective and has shaped my world view.
When democratic or otherwise forms of established ruling parties are not working for the “majority” of people in a country then you have civil unrest. When these people endure hardships such as lack of food, clean water, housing, and employment for long periods of time you have the makings for a violent uprising.
This is why in third world countries like Africa, and even some of the middle eastern countries such as ones that we have recently plundered are growing increasingly violent due to more environmentally induced living conditions.
Thoreau argues for civil disobedience through moral responsiibility as a land-owner and non-tax paying citizen. I would suggest this reading and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Social Contract and Discourse on the Origin of Inequality” as something that might shed light on these topics.
As “responsible” CITIZENS of a society and even greater global community we are so selfish and unaware of the implications that our actions have.
That the KKK is considered a civil society in terms of external associations is essentially true. The local militia is the same really no difference, but it does not adhere to any shred of moral and ethical definition of a civil society.
What happens in a continent across the ocean is directly related to the decisions that you and I make about our food, clothing, taxes, etc.etc…we all have the power to make conscious forward thinking decisions for the greater global good of others.