At the beginning of the 2020s we were taken on an unplanned and involuntary journey into the future. I’ve been taking notes. Let’s get equipped.
It seems like absolutely everybody participates in multitudes of overlapping “communities” these days. If our world is entering a new feudal age, then our society might be swinging away from all-out individualism towards an impulse to band together, care for one another and tackle problems as a group. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that not all communities are created equal. Some seem to be thriving places filled with kind once-strangers ready to take you under their wing, and others are dingy Potemkin villages, filled with hucksters eager to fleece newcomers and not much else. What makes the difference? Why do some communities remain incredibly special to our lives and others fade away at the first sign of difficulty?
To find out, we’re going to take notes from the communal work done by Christian monasteries. Whatever these orders may be like today, the monastic project originally wasn’t to create places of entire seclusion, but corporate structures for concerted positive work in the world. The Benedictine Rule and other documents laying the groundwork for these spiritual communities describe little cities of diligent laborers praying and working together, with strict rules governing the way they treated each other and the behavior of the group in general. Monasteries typically supported themselves through productive service, cared for the helpless in nearby areas, and provided instruction and education. They were far from perfect (no community containing real people is), but they did incredibly difficult work that we cannot afford to ignore.
You see, community life with humans is actually ultimately hard, and DAOs are about to realize this. If you want to build a tiny refuge in your home or on the web, a place where people are refreshed and equipped to live righteously, then you need to learn from the best. Organizing people into work groups to accomplish some set of real-life tasks according to a shared set of ideals is basically one of the fundamental Hard Problems, and when people confront Hard Problems we tend to avoid actually dealing with them like the plague. Instead, we conjure up vast industries to smoke screen the actual problem by solving other adjacent sub-problems, or write vague courses that leave you right at the threshold of the actual problem. I'm going to try my best to not do any of that. But when tackling Hard Problems we have to familiarize ourselves with anyone who is actually doing the work, usually by conquering prejudices and going much further back in history than we initially expected to find wise practitioners. I'm not claiming that monks are the last people to have perfected the art of working together, just recommending that the monastery is a great place to start learning how.
I. Gather People Willing to Sacrifice
True community requires humility and willingness to lay aside personal goals and rights. Anything short of that might call itself communal, but really is just an extractive collection of individuals watching each other to make sure they aren’t the last to sprint for the exit. In any collection of individuals, you will have a hard core of people willing to give up something for the cause that unites them, and then a larger group of observers, enjoyers, and sometimes takers. There’s nothing the matter with the second group, but if the first group isn’t present then you don’t have a true community. Of course there were always (and often legendarily so) lazy, shiftless and corrupt monks. But the monastic order was explicitly designed to create a community of doers. Most of the empty frustrated feeling you probably experience in your average NFT Discord channel or HOA meeting or whatever is the sense of watching a lot of people stand around complaining that someone else isn’t doing the work. You need to find (and be) the kind of person who jumps right into the mess and starts giving yourself away for free. Offering up the best of what you can make or do or give, because you love the people you are offering it to, and without waiting for anyone else. Actual functional community allows the members to focus on activities where they are gifted or skilled, knowing that the rest of the community will take care of them and fill in what they lack. Loose confederations of loners looking to gain as much as possible from the community resources are spectators at best. You need to be looking for avid practitioners, those who actually do whatever you are gathering together to supposedly accomplish.
II. Bind Yourselves by the Order
What happens when you want something that the group does not want? When the club goes one way and you go another, who decides what is allowed? Community standards of behavior are one of the first tests that break faux-communal enterprises in their infancy. In choosing what to allow and what not to allow, you will necessarily have to choose a set of ethics and a standard of authority. You will be demanding submission, even in the smallest possible sense, of each member to something outside their control and will. This is a very un-modern thing to do and a large part of current web3 community protocols are engineered around trying to escape this truth of human organization. The double-edged sword of community is that the most powerful organizations in history, accomplishing the most for good or ill, have been the most structured and hierarchical. Anarchy creates nothing, except perhaps solitary artists. If you want order, you have to accept authority. The monastery was organized according to a (hopefully) benevolent system of religious and communal domination by a small number of authority figures. You can disagree with that structure, but you have to propose a substitute. I'm a very optimistic person, but I don't think "everyone will do their best out of the kindness of their heart" is a feasible option. As the most clear-thinking web3 operators are beginning to realize and suggest, "centralization" is not an enemy to be fought, but a tool to be judiciously used. We cannot remove every gatekeeper and boss anymore than we can abolish national governments and deregulate all industries. We need to accept that some form of authority is table stakes for productivity and flourishing. This should lead us to select our authority figures very carefully, but we don't have a choice as to whether we will serve one. At least, not if we want to live in community. And if you want to lead a community? Get used to being a figure of authority. You will be looked upon to make decisions, and will realize quickly that abdication is not always an act of humility and selflessness.
III. Spend Yourselves in the Service of God
What belief system is going to unify your community? What are we all getting together to do, anyway? Because so far, we could have been building a street gang or a fraternity by the same guidelines. What sets apart a community from a mob is their shared belief, their service to a god. Many so-called communities are now united by weak and puny gods, gods without laws, commandments or calling. How strong is your god? Can he arbitrate between his followers or decide what is worth living (and dying) for? If not, then are you sure you have a community? The reason a (good) church is undoubtedly a community and most NFT Discord servers aren't is that everyone in a church (ought) to know exactly what they are there to do. The reason they are willing to sacrifice personally and submit themselves to the earthly authority of a pastor or priest is that they believe God works through these unassuming, often flawed and chaotic organizations and people to accomplish His will. And they are personally willing to give up other ways of living to see His will done. This belief will allow them to survive catastrophic institutional failure, while communities that do not share totally encompassing beliefs shatter under far less strain. Ask yourself, is what we're doing together worth dying for? Alright, maybe I'm overdramatizing your writer's group or fantasy football league. But is it worth even dying a little bit? Because a community is a request on someone else's life, a debit against their store of time. You have to demonstrate why you have a credible reason to demand that of someone, or risk being ignored no matter how worthy you feel your cause to be. The monastic ideal was to select for individuals who were personally convinced that the only good way for their life to be spent was in total devotion to the work of God. This helps to explain the explosion of cultural productivity that resulted from monastic living throughout the Middle Ages. It's worth our own self examination, as we curate the communities that we are willing to spend ourselves for.
At this point I'm quite vulnerable to the accusation of cheapening the work of the Church, as if Christian life could be cut up into helpful tips to be sprinkled into a lifeless blog article neatly divided by listed bullets. But I’m not afraid to tell you the secrets of my religion because I know from direct experience that it’s the one that truly does what it says it will do. I’m free to open up the sanctuary wide and show you everything inside, because I know that if you carry off the pieces and put them in service of Moloch or Mammon you’ll only feel a sense of almost-there-ness, an unshakable spiritual discontent that won’t ever leave you until you come back into the sanctuary. The holy bread isn’t magic, it’s only bread. And you can eat bread anywhere, expecting it to sate you for a time. But only the bread in the sanctuary is holy.
So yes, build and operate, and expand the frontiers of human possibility beyond imagination. There is nothing wrong with this work, and someone must do it. But spare a thought for whether all this is enough for you, reasonable allocation for your precious years here. Have you experienced life in common? Perhaps when we've kept the light of written language and the works of the classical age alive in through centuries of plague and war, we can afford to chuckle at the quiet and superstitious brothers and sisters who lived and died cloistered.
(This) life is short. The age is dark. The road is beset with perilous terrors. Rest with us, pilgrim. Take heart, then take something for your journey. You will be in our prayers.
I’ll see you in the Future.
The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.
The Christian, however, must bear the burden of a brother. He must suffer and endure the brother. It is only when he is a burden that another person is really a brother and not merely an object to be manipulated. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, selections from Life Together
So the priest gave him the holy bread, for there was no bread there but the bread of the Presence, which is removed from before the LORD, to be replaced by hot bread on the day it is taken away....Then David said to Ahimelech, "Then have you not here a spear or a sword at hand? For I have brought neither my sword nor my weapons with me, because the king's business required haste." And the priest said, "The sword of Goliath the Philistine, whom you struck down in the Valley of Elah, behold, it is here wrapped in a cloth behind the ephod. If you will take that, take it, for there is none but that here." And David said, "There is none like that; give it to me." ~ 1 Samuel 21:6, 8-9