Serendipitously, as I was preparing for my first dance teaching workshop this morning at the Idler Festival, I spotted a quote in one of my other open browser tabs a quote from David Flemming.
Commons are cooperative enterprises; they therefore depend on trust, on reciprocity, and on social capital. The market economy can get by, for a time, with a gravely-weakened culture and social capital, but the commons cannot. If you really want to save the planet and to give human society a decent chance of living on it, the first thing you should do is to join a choir. Or have dancing lessons, or both. That is not quite the hyperbole it seems: in enduring communities, the thing which defines and distinguishes them is their culture of dance, music, story and tradition—so intertwined with trust that it is hard to tell cause from effect.
David Flemming, in ‘Lean Logic – A DICTIONARY for the FUTURE and HOW to SURVIVE IT’
We always said in the Mudflappers that our mission was to make the world slightly better through the medium of dance. Well here is some compelling philosophical underpinning to back that up. I shared this quote with the dance workshop today and it was well received.
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