Expanded Community of Fate
Contextual Quote
"Expanding a community of fate is a cognitive-informational issue. It involves changing citizen beliefs about how the world works and who is winning and losing. It requires internalizing norms of fairness and equity into citizen thinking and practice and clarifying how these norms apply in unfamiliar circumstances and contexts. Even when these critical steps are achieved, there is the question of scaling — how to mobilize enough people around shared norms and destinies to actually stop objectionable policies and practices. ... All of us have some community of fate — those with whom we perceive our interests as bound and with whom we are willing to act in solidarity. But sometimes that community is exclusionary, emphasizing race, nation or religion rather than common humanity."
- Margaret Levi [1]
Description
Margaret Levi:
"So how do we go about constructing a new moral political economy? The keystone is generating an “expanded community of fate.” For societies to survive and thrive, a significant proportion of their members must engage in reciprocal altruism. All sorts of animals, including humans, will pay high individual costs to provide benefits for another perceived as part of their family, herd or tribe. Indeed, this kind of altruism plays a critical role in producing cooperative cultures that improve a group’s welfare, survival and fitness. This is what constitutes a community of fate.
What we want to do, however, is stimulate an expanded community of fate, which goes beyond the limits of a particular group’s boundaries. Our goal is a form of farsighted reciprocal altruism in which members are willing to make costly sacrifices on behalf of those with whom they believe their fates, and their descendants’ fates, are entwined but who may never be able to directly reciprocate. An expanded community of fate is critical to the survival of humanity, extended human cooperation and the development of societies in which people flourish."
(https://www.noemamag.com/an-expanded-community-of-fate/)
Examples
From the Digital world
Margaret Levi:
"Using digital technologies now available, numerous organizations are experimenting with creating new bases for communities that extend well beyond family, friends and tribe. Code for America uses digital technology to build “delivery-driven government” responsive to user needs. Societal collaborations, such as Wikipedia, not only swell the ranks of those engaging in a cooperative endeavor, they also develop novel forms of governance to correct mistakes and guard against false information. Other efforts, such as Democracy Earth or Urban Array, use blockchain to facilitate decentralized government, voter mobilization and community building. Their strength lies in creating networks of people across multiple boundaries to solve common problems. They offer novel approaches to drawing on the variety of skills and expertise within their relevant populations.
Although they may sometimes foster a wider circle of obligation, responsibility and even empathy, these approaches, exciting as they are, are not enough. Fundamentally, they represent technical, engineering approaches to governance."