418. Identity within and between communities
At several places in this blog I have argued for substantial decentralisation of governance to small local communities. The gaol is to involve citizens as much as possible in political decision making, and that is more feasible on a local than on a national level.
This goes back to Athenian democracy, it was proposed by Rousseau, it is part of African political philosophy (item 414), and it is being tried out in several countries, in a variety of forms.[i]
However, the virtues of local ties should not be exaggerated. They can have a downside of rigidity, constraint, social pressure and closure, exclusion, lack of liberty in choosing relations, and, consequently, economic stagnation, and internecine strife between communities.
So, how can the virtues be realized while avoiding the drawbacks? For this I offer a solution taken from network theory. Here I connect with my earlier proposal to associate identity with networks and collective enablers of relations, rather than with characteristics of individuals.
In sociology there has been a debate between the view that strong social ties favour societies and the view that, on the contrary, weak ties do.
Strong ties entail frequent, durable, and ‘multiplex’ interaction (concerning a variety of resources or issues). Typically, they go together with strong trust and relation- or community-specific investments (in knowledge, skill, construction, solidarity, mutual support and trust).
Specific investment is a concept from economics, and was used before in this blog (59). It is investment tailored to specific relations and therefore has value only, or mostly, there, and has to be made anew in new relationships. They make for high quality of a relationship, but also create dependence. They create power dependence when the investment is one-sided: the least dependent party can threaten to exit, leaving the more dependent side with a useless investment, unless incentives are granted to make him stay. Such power play may be sanctioned by social pressures, but those can contribute to the rigidity of relationships, causing stagnation.
Weak ties entail less frequent interaction, limited content, and less specific investment. They are less enabling but also less constraining. They can be more easily broken, making for greater flexibility. They are more transactional than relational. They are used for trade, for diplomacy, for exploring networks, to find out about the resources and opportunities involved, and to develop entry to them, building contacts and reputations.
Network theory offers the notion of ‘small worlds’, which I used before in this blog (209): small communities with strong internal ties and weak ties between such communities. And that, I propose, is the solution to the problem of small communities. The strong ties make for internal coherence, solidarity and trust, and the weak ties between communities yield access to a greater variety of knowledge, skill, and other resources, prevent internal rigidity, and may serve to contain misunderstanding, rivalry and strife between communities. Those links may also yield avenues for exchange of people, which favours the turnover of population that prevents biological, intellectual and spiritual inbreeding.
There is evidence that the small migrant communities of hunter-gatherers, during the long period (400.000 years) of evolution of the human species before its settlement into agrarian communities (some 7000 years ago), engaged in this practice, with strong ties within the tribes and weak ties, in occasional contacts, between tribes.
In an earlier item (414) I noted the African idea and practice of ‘Ubuntu’, which implements the idea that individuals are constituted socially, requiring a sufficient degree of solidarity, and favours small communities. I now aim to find out whether this also has been combined with weak ties between those communities, and how that worked out. In how far was it able to contain inter-tribal strife?
Note the remarkable solution adopted in the past, if I am correct, by Australian aboriginals: let potential rival tribes reside at one’s own holy sites. One does not attack one’s own holy sites, and hence not the rival tribes. Unless they damage those sites, and this yields an incentive to maintain them well. This has the same logic as offering a hostage.
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