Come join my four Dispossessed Workshops at Becoming!
Our discussion will be centered around the book The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. Here's a link to the entire book in English.
They're taking place at the RO Studio on April 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th, all Mondays at 7:30pm. Address and Map
It's listed on the Becoming website as the "Utopian Society" workshop, but the real subject of our discussion is 'community', or 'what makes a community happen', or maybe 'what are our relationships within community'.
We'll also be talking about the ethics of community, seeing that our subthemes are freedom, responsiblity, initiative, boundaries, ownership and power. Looking at community through the lens of Utopia, as a kind of foreign way of organising society, can be a useful way to evaluate our own.
Here are some quotes on community to help start you thinking on all this:
“The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!” asserts a minor character in the novel, to which Shevek replies, “Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social animal, are those who are most social. In human terms, the most ethical”
--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed p.115
The individual is sovereign; the only final authority Shevek recognizes is his own conscience. But that the exercise of liberty almost always affects other human beings, and that it almost always requires interacting, cooperating, and often sharing with others, mean that free actions do impose general and particular obligations on the individual, and this is what makes Shevek’s society an ethical community.
--The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed p.115
