Where there is no vision the people perish: ethical vision and community sustainability

Abstract

This paper supports the inclusion of Christianity in the European constitution. It does this by analysing the role that an ethical vision plays in sustaining a community and the impact on other critical factors such as ethics, work, management, social structure and education that ensues when vision is undermined. It examines in particular the contribution that the Christian vision has made to communities in the past and the systemic role it can play in ensuring their long-term viability today. The study applies a multi-modal systems framework to analyse the links between the vision and these critical factors and projects that may unfold in communities once they lose their vision.

Building sustainable & resilient communities: a balancing of community capital

“…Components of human capital, additional to education and skills, include: level of personal spirituality or religious affiliation (Machlup 1987;De Raadt and De Raadt 2005), basic moral character, emotional stability, and physical health. Institutions for building the various components of human capital include the schools, churches, recreation centers, and the not so obvious spaces, such as, a place to sit quietly and enjoy nature, or community gathering places.…”

Community Development and Renaissance Social Humanism: Some Lessons for Systems Science

“…To satisfy the cities' insatiable appetite for humanity, rural and remote regions have had to sacrifice their populations. Most who emigrate from them are young and with talents that rural communities desperately need to retain in order to stabilise and develop (de Raadt and de Raadt 2004). True, the metropolis offers privileges that rural areas cannot provide, but these benefits are accessible only to a small proportion of the population.…”

“…These are people who live what Unamuno (2005) and Ortega y Gasset (1996) call historical lives, people who have a vision that transcends the immediate horizon and extends into the future. This projection into the future is driven by a Samaritan ethic, an ethic of agape love that has been discussed in detail elsewhere (de Raadt 2000(de Raadt , 2001(de Raadt , 2002(de Raadt , 2006de Raadt and de Raadt 2004. It is a type of ethics, I heard my wife recently say, that does not gather treasures on earth, but in heaven .…”

Samaritan Ethics, Systems Science and Society

“…Samaritan ethics constitutes therefore, the ultimate normative inspiration of culture. It has been so in classical European culture, where agape has been regarded as a divine quality: "God is agape" (de Raadt and de Raadt 2005). Mankind is challenged first to believe it and then to emulate it.…”