The Immunity Community: How and Why Human Beings Stick Together

Communities have come and gone throughout history Different forms of community have ‘come together’ for specific reasons – the Tribe – The Nation – The family – the Intentional Community. What constitutes success for these communities is maybe their ability to come upon a form, a model, which one way or another allows that group of individuals, in that cultural setting to stick together and to operate to cooperate in an effective, functional and healthy way over time.

Associated with evolving forms of community is the way in which individuals see themselves - in the tribe perhaps as part of the whole, in many intentional community, as individuals within the context of a specific cultural economic or social whole. New community forms are related to the evolution of the human being himself, to his relationship with his given cultural zeitgeist, to his ability to find context, commonality, congruence, cooperation – community with others. I will define and try to identify this evolving congruence as a continual adaptive form of social immunity, something which clicks, something which enables human beings to understand each other, live together, work together.

The model of human immune defense I believe can help us understand the living evolving sea in which we swim  – economically, socially and culturally. The human immune system is threefold, it crashes in the face of physical trauma, emotional trauma, and existential trauma. When it fails in any single dimension individual cells lose integrity, cell walls break down in what we know as inflammation a phenomenon we now understand sits at the root of all disease.

Threefold Immunity is more than a metaphor it is a concept that can bring metamorphosis, the ability to adapt, change and evolve. I will draw on thirty years of experience working with medicines from the honeybee and with a relationship to Camphill Communities to offer a model which could help us to evolve.