In any sort of wilderness, people of good will might collaborate for the good of others by setting up trail markers, cairns, stacked rocks that indicate to a later traveler that the path goes by this spot. Malicious actors might come along and knock over a cairn, making it more difficult for a walker to see it. People of ill will might throw the rocks away, left and right, leaving no clue that a cairn had ever been built there, undoing the work of good will of previous passersby. A thoughtful traveler might notice the ambiguity of a stretch of trail and landscape, and add a cairn where none has existed before, to ease the necessary interpretation of those who came after. When wind and weather tumble a rock or two from a cairn, a good-hearted person passing might build the cairn back up. A person who has never seen a cairn before, never heard of one, might guess that a whimsical traveler had paused there and stacked a few rocks while taking a break from the journey. But overall, the cairns speak clearly to passersby about one of the things people need for safety as they travel. Cairns speak of our need for solidarity, even a sort of thin but enduring thing we might call community, even if the people never meet or speak. Cairns speak of our need to make our journeys in sight of or in light of the journeys of others.#
But it's not clear that this system of collaboration and community can carry any other messages than those. In a crisis, maybe someone can invent a cairn that implies "Do not pass this way! Danger!" Maybe. But as beautiful as the cairns and the cairn-makers are, as quietly inspiring as they are, their message system has next to no room for elaboration, for creativity of message, for flexibility in making communities. It doesn't even have a very good way of defending itself against malicious actors. #
A message system can be a thing of beauty, and the community that maintains it can be an expression of the human spirit in one of its better moods, yes. But without ways to gather up new communities, to encourage new forms of affiliation in new circumstances, without ways to extend the meaning-sharing and meaning-making pathways, the system can leave us in a dangerous position, unable to respond when the landscape or the climate changes.#
That's one kind of message system. Other kinds are not so narrow.#
In any sort of wilderness, people of good will might collaborate for the good of others by setting up trail markers, cairns, stacked rocks that indicate to a later traveler that the path goes by this spot. Malicious actors might come along and knock over a cairn, making it more difficult for a walker to see it. People of ill will might throw the rocks away, left and right, leaving no clue that a cairn had ever been built there, undoing the work of good will of previous passersby. A thoughtful traveler might notice the ambiguity of a stretch of trail and landscape, and add a cairn where none has existed before, to ease the necessary interpretation of those who came after. When wind and weather tumble a rock or two from a cairn, a good-hearted person passing might build the cairn back up. A person who has never seen a cairn before, never heard of one, might guess that a whimsical traveler had paused there and stacked a few rocks while taking a break from the journey. But overall, the cairns speak clearly to passersby about one of the things people need for safety as they travel. Cairns speak of our need for solidarity, even a sort of thin but enduring thing we might call community, even if the people never meet or speak. Cairns speak of our need to make our journeys in sight of or in light of the journeys of others.#
But it's not clear that this system of collaboration and community can carry any other messages than those. In a crisis, maybe someone can invent a cairn that implies "Do not pass this way! Danger!" Maybe. But as beautiful as the cairns and the cairn-makers are, as quietly inspiring as they are, their message system has next to no room for elaboration, for creativity of message, for flexibility in making communities. It doesn't even have a very good way of defending itself against malicious actors. #
A message system can be a thing of beauty, and the community that maintains it can be an expression of the human spirit in one of its better moods, yes. But without ways to gather up new communities, to encourage new forms of affiliation in new circumstances, without ways to extend the meaning-sharing and meaning-making pathways, the system can leave us in a dangerous position, unable to respond when the landscape or the climate changes.#
That's one kind of message system. Other kinds are not so narrow.#