"H ασφάλεια είναι θανατηφόρα" : ένα ενδιαφέρον δοκίμιο για τον κίνδυνο αφανισμού που απειλεί τις "περίκλειστες" κοινωνίες

 

Fiddlesticks Country Club, μια εσώκλειστη κοινότητα στο  Fort Meyers,της Φλώριδας . Photo by Michael Siluk/UIG/Get

Safety is fatal /Η ασφάλεια είναι θανατηφόρα 

Humans need closeness and belonging but any society that closes its gates is doomed to atrophy. How do we stay open?

Οι άνθρωποι χρειάζονται την εγγύτητα και την αίσθηση του  συνανήκειν , αλλά οποιαδήποτε κοινωνία που κλείνει τις πύλες της είναι καταδικασμένη στην ατροφία. Πώς μένουμε ανοιχτοί;

David Napier

Professor of Medical Anthropology, University College London

Source :aeon.co/essays

 

Many of us will recall Petri dishes from our first biology class – those shallow glass vessels containing a nutrient gel into which a microbe sample is injected. In this sea of nutrients, the cells grow and multiply, allowing the colony to flourish, its cells dividing again and again. But just as interesting is how these cells die. Cell death in a colony occurs in two ways, essentially. One is through an active process of programmed elimination; in this so-called ‘apoptotic’ death, cells die across the colony, ‘sacrificing’ themselves in an apparent attempt to keep the colony going. Though the mechanisms underlying apoptotic death are not well understood, it’s clear that some cells benefit from the local nutrient deposits of dying cells in their midst, while others seek nutrition at the colony’s edges. The other kind of colony cell death is the result of nutrient depletion – a death induced by the impact of decreased resources on the structure of the waning colony.

Both kinds of cell death have social parallels in the human world, but the second type is less often studied, because any colony’s focus is on sustainable development; and because a colony is disarmed in a crisis by suddenly having to focus on hoarding resources. At such times, the cells in a colony huddle together at the centre to preserve energy (they even develop protective spores to conserve heat). While individual cells at the centre slow down, become less mobile and eventually die – not from any outside threat, but from their own dynamic decline – life at the edges of such colonies remains, by contrast, dynamic. Are such peripheral cells seeking nourishment, or perhaps, in desperation, an alternative means to live?

But how far can we really push this metaphor: are human societies the same? As they age under confinement, do they become less resilient? Do they slow down as resources dwindle, and develop their own kinds of protective ‘spores’? And do these patterns of dying occur because we’ve built our social networks – like cells growing together with sufficient nutrients – on the naive notion that resources are guaranteed and infinite? Finally, do human colonies on the wane also become increasingly less capable of differentiation? We know that, when human societies feel threatened, they protect themselves: they zero in on short-term gains, even at the cost of their long-term futures. And they scale up their ‘inclusion criteria’. They value sameness over difference; stasis over change; and they privilege selfish advantage over civic sacrifice.

Viewed this way, the comparison seems compelling. In crisis, the colony introverts; collapsing inwards as inequalities escalate and there’s not enough to go around. In a crisis, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, people define ‘culture’ more aggressively, looking for alliances in the very places where they can invest their threatened social trust; for the centre is threatened and perhaps ‘cannot hold’.

Human cultures, like cell cultures, are not steady states. They can have split purposes as their expanding and contracting concepts of insiders and outsiders shift, depending on levels of trust, and on the relationship between available resources and how many people need them. Trust, in other words, is not only related to moral engagement, or the health of a moral economy. It’s also dependent on the dynamics of sharing, and the relationship of sharing practices to group size – this last being a subject that fascinates anthropologists.

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See more:

On the dynamics of social trust in human cultures | Aeon Essays