Hey, another foray into desk-chair philosophy, including herein such warnings and disclaimers as to that these are merely thoughts, based on no research, etc., etc…

Those of you have have regularly attended Christian church services are probably familiar with the “Life-Saving Station” story. The gist is that some folks set up a life-saving station near a dangerous shore. At first, they focus on their mission, but gradually it transforms into more of a clubhouse. Ultimately, a small group splinters off, returns to original mission, cycle ensues.

This reality is not at all limited to the Christian church, but seems to me to be quite widespread amongst any “movement”, be it a political party, an environmental movement, another religion, a *-rights movement, or any other. While for some people, the cause of the degradation from active movement to clubhouse is due to laziness or the infiltration of an existing group for a pat on the back, etc., I realized another avenue I had not previously considered: community.

Movements tend to be both born out of, and create communities. It is probably not necessary to state this, but it happens to be the principle axiom of my ill-formed argument. That is, membership in a movement tends to come from within communities to which the initial members belong, and the movement itself creates, or perhaps even becomes, a community. This makes sense. Communities tend to be defined shared identities of the members. It is no surprise that a feminist will hang out with another feminist, a FairTax supporter with another supporter.

The crucial difference to my mind between a community and a movement is in how the members value immediate needs. Successful movements (according to my lax observation) focus on meeting a need and recruiting others to share in meeting that need. A movement which fails to meet any immediate needs of those being “reached” will not have any success. Hence, preaching is often best paired with meeting some physical need. Most movements have initial success because whatever the movement offers includes some immediate and significant benefit. La la la. A movement sustains its growth only so long as it continues to provide such benefit.

Initial excitement and conviction, however, tend to wane. For most people, resources are scarce (or, at least, they view resources as scarce). Decisions must be made. A movement says focus the resources on the external mission. However, a community has developed within the movement. A community places greater relative value on needs within the community. Hence, it says that internal needs are more important, regardless of “objective” comparison between the needs. A person with a sprained ankle within the community will receive more care from the community than a person having a heart attack outside.

Now, we have arrived at the clubhouse. Our community is now outweighing our movement when distributing resources. The movement suffers. Outsiders, examining the movement, see it as a failure, hypocritical, no longer caring. Insiders continue to see value, because of the community. A few insiders will receive the external criticism, relaunch the movement, refocus on meeting the external need. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Perhaps, this is a “natural” social balancing mechanism. It doesn’t seem to be overly problematic. While those at the point of “movement re-ignition”, if you will, will perhaps inevitably be frustrated with the system, but with a frustration necessary for its continuance. On the other hand, it does strike me as an imperfect balancing act.

As a thought problem, I suppose a movement whose beneficiaries are necessarily inside that community. Probably among those within the community who do not receive as much, some will become resentful, and perhaps split into another community, but in general this setup seems intuitively (read: my guess) to be more stable, hence more often focused on the goals of the movement because those goals coincide with needs within the community. As to what movements could fall into such a category, I don’t have any immediate ideas.

I wonder how possible it is to intentionally define our communities in such a way as to include the beneficiaries of our movements. For example, as a Christian, one of the communities I consider myself to belong to is that of “Christians” with a movement (that is, the movement from which the community was born) of telling the general world populace the good news of Jesus (NB: that’s “telling”, not “beating”). Is there a way to internally–both within the movement and within myself–redefine our community from “Christians in [city]” to “people in city”. If possible, is it a) beneficial and/or b) sustainable?

Again, just some desk-chair thoughts.

A final note: my wife and I finished reading (well, she had already read it, but finished reading together) Sherri S. Tepper’s The Companions. There’s a discussion towards the end about some humans acting as “pack animals”, which (for the main characters, at least) is presented as a negative thing for a people with a language because it leads to exclusion of those outside the pack (movement? community?). So, I’m rethinking the previous discussion in those terms. Maybe I will have more to say…