Abstract

The growing responsibility of our global age is to appreciate the meaning of community in a postmulticultural global society. The central tenet of the new sciences of complexity illuminates the interconnectedness of all things--all complex phenomena including human person are “tied together” in time and space. Globalization highlights the importance of networks of relationship primarily through social, linguistic, economic and technological relationships, the interpersonal, material and virtual communities or the personal and the mutual meaning of community. This sense of belongingness calls for a new moral communitarianism focused on human caring and virtue ethics, and justice. Scholars in universities often have been involved with the generation and the dissemination of knowledge of humans and nature as opposing forces, irrational or constricting, or the reduction of most data to mere statistical order. In a complex world, scholars must point the way to rehabilitating the human will, the rebirth and recovery of dignity, integrity, spirituality, and the illumination of transculturality-- “relational” self-organization. Creating a communitarian caring ethics based upon first, understanding the symbolic construction of community as atomistic, organic-functional, and virtual, and then capturing community as personal-mutual will facilitate understanding of humanity not in terms of race, culture, or nation but in terms of communitas and caritas (love and caring). Communitarian ethics that values humans in authentic relation to God, self, others, and the universe for the purposes of facilitating choices for problem solving, healing, health, and well-being takes up the challenge of Socrates, that what we are discussing is no small matter but how we ought to live (Socrates in Plato’s Republic, ca. 390 BCE, Rachels, 2003).