I used to long for a community of kindred spirits gathered together in one small, remote, lovely place. When I tried it, I discovered there is a reason such places don’t work “as advertised” — or more fairly, fail to satisfy the pilgrims’ longing. You cannot force community, you cannot create a box of ideals and then try to fit assorted humans into it like Cinderella’s sisters’ feet into her slipper. And if the container is tight, essential truths can no longer be told and the feedback loop falls apart.
Organic communities cannot be planned. They evolve in the midst of Babylon, here and there in the cracks. As Jesus said, the divine kingdom is among us, and within. It’s reachable, here and now. Once a person learns to recognize and ally with cooperators and to avoid defectors (to use the language of Game Theory), the world shifts and aligns itself along the lines of magical bonds. The decisive factor is the quality of the bonds, not the place. When a small place delineates what is possible, the pool of potentially compatible people shrinks significantly.
Most historical and current communities didn’t and don’t work well. I know only of one cluster that ran smoothly and took care of its members well. They were known as the Shakers. They lived in gorgeous places, created beauty for which they are remembered to this day, ran well-oiled farms that fed all the members and earned cash selling medicinal herbs. The living standards compared to those of the day were high, and leadership included women. Yet, the communities died out and the remains have been turned into tourist attractions. Why? No, it was not lack of sex (and therefore children). Most people joined after they had a family, and in any case, the Shakers took in orphans. They never lacked newcomers. But after the Civil War, the young people did not stay. Partly, they were drawn to the cities and their freedom, and partly, I think, the container got too tight. People chafe when their lives are too circumscribed. The Shakers, once known for their weird, noisy and ecstatic dances instituted decorum. Rules and order, rather than creative joy, weighed too heavy on one side of the scales.
Why did I leave Earthaven? I never finished that story, did I?
Pet wars!
I came to Earthaven with two kitties, after carefully arranging with my neighborhood for the permission. I knew Earthaven was not pet friendly, but I was assured that neighborhoods had autonomy in such matters. The situation turned strange as soon as arrived. What had been presented to me as a pet-free neighborhood turned out to have two cats living on its edges while people looked away. These kitties were not happy about my cats, and Earthaveners were quick to blame me for drawing strange cats out of the woods by my porch bowl.
After considerable effort and time, I found that one of them belonged to a long time member who basically let her live there, scrounging, for a year and a half, while he went back to town. The other cat had been abandoned by a former ag volunteer, and had lived off the wildlife in the area for over 3 years. I found homes for both of them.
Nevertheless, I was accused of breaking the rules; the person who had assured me my two cats were ok profusely apologized to the community and threw me under the bus. A special meeting was converged where people felt free to tell me that people who love companion animals have psychological problems, and pets ought to be composted. The only other animal lover at EH was attacked concurrently, because her dog “was not really a working dog.” (She was, and a well-trained one.) A long-time member, the woman left the community soon after.
In the end, I agreed not to leave cat food outside. It was winter, and doable. But by May, endless processions of ants would be marching into my shack again and making my life impossible. I knew then and there that my days at Earthaven were numbered.
Boundaries
Earthaveners had major issues regarding healthy boundaries. People being verbally abusive in meetings were suffered in silence or counterattacked. Even the considerably skilled facilitation failed to clear the toxic fumes. And the problems caused by members who created huge messes on their allotted land — basically leaving collections of aging building materials, unfinished crumbling structures, and assorted heaps of trash — were never successfully addressed.
It’s not that boundaries were not set; people did not seem to have the ability — or the courage? — to defend them against habitual trespassers. Too many topics were swept under the rug. Perhaps because of this, the biweekly meetings were unpleasant to endure, and ignored by most of the younger people.
Lack of kindred souls
Paradoxically, I made my best connections outside the community, among people who lived near Earthaven but were not bound by it. But I came there with the express purpose to live in, not outside, the community, and experience it in depth. And I felt that there were a fair number of folks that were flat-out uncongenial. People were afraid to trust, and to say openly what was on their minds. So in the end, the magic of close connection rarely ever happened.
Trashed
It did not help that my shack looked directly into the community dump. It had been created to get rid of cardboard boxes, and degenerated into an eye sore which was not only ruining my view and annoying visitors, but also polluting the adjacent creek. In my subsequent visit, I discovered another such dump, more out of sight, and heard of yet another one. The people who disposed of their boxes this way were not required to strip them of plastic tape and labels. The whole issue was strange, because of all the things you can do to behave ecologically, cutting up cardboard boxes seems like a minor nuisance. Particularly since Earthaven had injudiciously invested in a wasteful wood furnace to heat its Council Hall that was consuming the surrounding woods at an alarming rate. The cardboard could have contributed much needed fuel. Apparently, and unannounced to the outside world, certain influential members of the community never bought into the eco part.
Earthaven, when I arrived, was in the middle of a paranoid episode that had been called their worst summer by one of my acquaintances there. A younger member had turned psychopathic, terrorized his neighbors, got into trouble with the law, and occasioned a prolonged period of angst in a community that had always been skirting the law one way or another (mostly, it must be stressed, in ignorance or experimental disregard of building codes and evolving laws about shared communities, and straddling two counties each with different requirements). But this was much more serious. The episode resulted in the formation of a safety committee that followed the individual’s activities and acted as liaison with the police, the psychiatric institution evaluating him, and his family; he eventually left Earthaven, got in trouble in other places, and committed suicide a year later.
As I had no idea for quite some time what was really going on around me, why meetings were being canceled, why people seemed so upset and so loath to converse, why newbies were left to shift for themselves, my sense of being unwelcome and alone was fairly intense. It was unfortunate that my sojourn was so ill timed and so weighed down by a tragedy in the making.
I did like a number of things about Earthaven, of course. The woods and creeks were a delight. I loved working with natural plasters, repairing walls at the Council Hall. It was good to hang out with the neighbors at the weekly cookouts. Often, the visitors to Earthaven turned out to be interesting people eager to swap experiences. I loved walking the forest paths with my cats and praying at the confluence of the creeks in a forest garden appreciated by visitors and members alike. I was drawn to the seasonal Celtic rituals. Perhaps my best memories harken back to night walks illuminated by fireflies, running into random neighbors, and stopping for spontaneous conversations. Earthaven, after all, is a true neighborhood, and I treasured being a part of it.
When I fled Earthaven at the end of that hard winter, well before the ant season, I went back to Colorado, and was suddenly surrounded by warm friends who were not afraid to speak what was on their mind, and openly enjoyed having me in their midst again. I felt then that I had to leave my village at the foot of the Rockies to rediscover it, and to recognize it as the somewhat remote and certainly lovely place, though well within Babylon, but one with true friends.
Sometimes, you have to leave home to find it.
June 21, 2020 at 8:00 pm
A familiar story from my past in the 60s and 70s. Intentional communities are often fraught with problems such as this, resulting in interminable meetings, backbiting and behind the scenes conflicts. I’ve never been to or heard about any community that didn’t suffer the same problems at one time or another.
Don;t blame yourself. It comes with the territory!
June 21, 2020 at 11:44 pm
Sorry to hear that your attempt to leave was so unsatisfactory. Will you try again?
June 24, 2020 at 10:39 am
Small groups and small towns in general suffer from the tempest in a teapot syndrome, yes? Small town gossip and suffocation of ‘different’ people; the viciousness of academic politics, with the smaller the issue the more vitriol released; prison becoming a tribal warfare among gangs as much as with guards; monasteries being a trial to the spirit and an opportunity for petty bickerings and vengeances. One fairly reliable method for maintaining a level of peace and harmony is the Great Man where everybody defers to the Alpha Male and submerges their differences with each other to win his fatherly approval or obey his stern decrees.
Whether he is mild judge, mad chieftain or warband wolf, it is the he-ness that people respond to just like any other band of great apes. It may have to do with pheromones and hormones or cultural conditioning or innate psychological structures or all or none of those models. But it certainly is a widespread phenomenon, and one little studied, as fish fail to study water. There have been plenty of instances of Great Women filling the same role, but not 50% worth of them, which makes me incline to the hormonal / pheromonal / ape psyche models.
Some Sufi writings provide hints toward another model for a successful intentional community.
It has at least three obvious components.
1) There is a Great One at the center who teaches and exemplifies the desired Way of Life.
2) There are group spiritual activities (prayer, meditation, singing, dance, ecstatic drugs, sex or sex-tinged polarity work, among many other techniques) that allow the members to forget self and feel the ego-dissolving uplift of a group bond (oxytocin mediated?).
3) There is a useful and important function that the Group serves for the surrounding, non-initiate community. Examples abound, like the Shakers with their furniture and ale, monks who provide Benedictine liquors, feed the poor, make medicines and tend the sick, act as an inn for benighted travellers, house orphans and aged folk, make paper, attract pilgrims and bring brisk trade, etc.
4) They have a balanced life that requires some study, some routine spiritual work and a lot of routine physical work, even if it is only cleaning the Temple.
There may be many other hidden gears and sources of lubrication that make the wheels of life in community turn smoothly, but not having been inside I cannot rightly say one way or the other.
There is the Ostrom model of commons management with an elected elite imposing consequences on violations of the community compact in a graduated series of severity. That can be a very stable long-lived entity. Great One models can also endure with a council of elders to supplement the One as Parliament does for the King
In smaller group models, there are the moai of Okinawa: friendships with a handful of people begun in early childhood and maintained life- long as a counterbalance to work life and married life. There are single purpose action groups of 5 to 7 people who focus intently on achieving a specific, limited aim and then disband. Over time, these can form the core of a reliable and trustworthy group of people, much as a good marriage can be a steady social support with extended family ramifications.
Groups that exceed the Dunbar number of say 150-200 accrue a different set-class of problems, probably related to the limitations of the human brain for processing information on more than one’s tribe of origin. A successful group appears to be a combination of innate biological tendencies mediated by cultural traditions, religious precepts, work-life balance, and/or common sense about commons cents.
June 24, 2020 at 9:11 pm
Here’s a factor I’ve seen pointed out by several observers of intentional communities about why they often run aground. If the larger surrounding society offers an easier, less time-consuming, more profitable way of making a living than remaining in the community, most people will defect over time and it eventually undermines the community.
There are also the personal-privacy issues, and lack of freedom in not being able to pursue projects you want without having to consult everyone else first. These issues, too, people can escape by going back to the mainstream. Only if there is no choice or no easier alternatives will people stick it out long-term.
Up till now, life in an intentional community compared to the mainstream has been a hard row to hoe except for the most stalwart. It hasn’t been much of a contest. That may change, though, if the recent economic difficulties exacerbated by the pandemic (difficulties that have long been in the making anyway, from what I read) lead to a domino effect where the mainstream fails larger and larger numbers of people.
Even so, I would bet as you suggest that it’s the more natural and informal coalitions of people, and in forms that have worked before (small villages, say) that will come to the fore.
June 25, 2020 at 7:22 pm
No blame, Michael. I really enjoyed the adventure, and learned a lot. It helped that the location was so beautiful. And it was somehow easier to be in the NOW, around all those gushing creeks. 🙂
Gotta check out your doings. I love your term “panicdemic.”
June 25, 2020 at 7:23 pm
The quest continues, Wibbler. But I will never do an “ecovillage” again. The very name gives me the willies.
June 25, 2020 at 7:40 pm
Right, GKB. I tend to call it the “big frog in the small pond” syndrome. And then, they all love meetings, and hog the agenda. All them croaking frogs! Enough to drive a person insane.
The Big Man communities often worked for a time, but tended to tyranny. I have heard of an island in the Pacific that is run by all the people past the age 60. A group of about 10, last time I looked into it. I suspect women might have a slight edge here.
Your guidelines make me wonder if psychedelics used as a sacrament would bond a community well. There is an ayahuasca church with many branches, but I have no idea how they get along. Maybe too little data yet?
The Okinawans are wise indeed. Alas, for those of us possessed by the gypsy spirit, having left one’s age group far and long behind… if I had another life to live, I think this is the path I would choose. Of course, I would remember all my adventures in this life, so I would not be tempted to gallop off again.
I like Ostrom’s guidelines a lot. If I was a mayor of a village, it would have a commons run like that. Very practical — does not require people to be better than they are, and misbehavior has consequences. What an idea!
June 25, 2020 at 7:53 pm
Ward: One of Earthaven’s (and Dancing Rabbit’s) problems is indeed the difficulty of making a living. A number of young folks left Earthaven when food stamps were cut. There were once two viable businesses there (apart from some questionable farming efforts) — a plant nursery and a healing herb salve and oil production shop. The shop moved to Asheville, and the man who ran the nursery died (I believe he was one of the founders). So it’s either people who are retired, have an inheritance, or end up scrounging, doing chores for the more moneyed members. A few end up having long distance careers. It’s a challenging life but would be more rewarding if the governance and the relationships worked more harmoniously.
Things that work, evolve. If you design it, it will be clunky and failure prone. I mean, it works for machines, but not for living beings and their communities…
June 25, 2020 at 8:00 pm
Our multiverse is not organized from the top down. It arises of itself. There is no designer, not even any “doer.” There is only what there is, doing what it does. Apple trees apple. The earth lifes.
It’s only humans who design, and plan, and control (or try to). That’s why much of human designing, planning and controlling fails utterly and miserably.
Expecting the multiverse to be something other than what it is is the source of much human misery.
June 26, 2020 at 12:46 am
Sorry to hear that.
June 26, 2020 at 7:45 pm
Curious, Michael, what convinced you that the multiverse hypothesis is solid? I am very on the fence about it.
And btw, consciousness continues to be conscious.
June 26, 2020 at 7:47 pm
Why be sorry? Old fashioned villages have proven their mettle for centuries, millennia even. Ecovillages are Potemkin villages.
June 26, 2020 at 8:29 pm
“what convinced you that the multiverse hypothesis is solid?”
Good question, two answers:
1) The double slit experiment
https://scienceterms.net/psychology/double-slit-experiment/
2) The many World’s Hypothesis, “The fabric of reality : the science of parallel universes– and its implications” by David Deutsch
High Everitt’s many worlds theory said that whenever we make a decision, a new universe is created. Deutsch refined that as all possible worlds exist in an infinite multiverse. My interpretation is that consciousness focuses on the world of choice and as we make decisions we move smoothly from one universe to another.
Sometimes it’s not so smooth. In my seventy years I’ve noted, several times, the changes from one world to another, especially at times of stress. I’ve almost died three times in my life, and all three times have provided a peek into the interconnectiveness of the multiverse.
I’ve learned that there are no separarte “things” in the multiverse. It’s all of a piece. Electrons only exist as a “particle,” a twist of nothingness, when illuminated by consciousness. At all other times, electrons exist everywhere and everywhen. Hence the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which leads to the unavoidable conclusion that electrons are only separate things when pinned down by consciousness.
Pretty weird!
“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” Richard Feynman
June 27, 2020 at 3:41 pm
Actually, my response was a bit harsh. I think Earthaven does not work as an ecovillage, but does work as a place of pilgrimage. It’s beautiful, there are spots that feel holy, seasonal celebrations and workshops happen, and you get to meet sometimes fascinating fellow pilgrims.
Maybe if they reframed it so, they would not have to do such impression management regarding their un-eco practices, and could be far more honest about what actually goes on. No guilt trips. What do you think?
June 27, 2020 at 3:50 pm
The double slit experiment convinced me that quantum mechanics is valid, and that reality is wonderfully weird. Also, I am a fan of the last interpretation mentioned in the article:
I figure that consciousness is one of the building blocks of reality.
The many worlds hypothesis seems far fetched, from my standpoint. But now I have to study your point 2. Back soon.
June 27, 2020 at 3:53 pm
GKB, I was also thinking that the chimps are adrenalin junkies, the bonobos went for the oxytocin/serotonin buzz, and we humans are somewhere in between, but would profit leaning toward the bonobo solution.
June 27, 2020 at 5:51 pm
An excellent point. So much of early and middle adult life is mediated by hormones. I suspect the function of ecstatic experiences (whether induced by drugs, fasting, dance, or whatever), is to periodically loosen the grip of breeder hormones (testosterone, estrogen) and foster oceanic bonding moods. There may even be a hormone as yet untested-for that gives people those experiences of mental and emotional clarity that some psychonauts have described.
Greek chthonic religious experiences happened several times a year. One was the wine festival where people get drunk and have sex with anyone they like while wearing masks to hide identity and loosen inhibition. Dionysian events occurred in the Spring and Fall, mostly, I think. The Eleusinian mysteries may have been helped along by psychoactive beverages and induced menstruation. The secrecy surrounding the rites and the fact that they were associated with women has kept the counter-balancing effects of wildness out of the social historical limelight, with the writings mostly celebrating reasoning and logic and mathematics.
June 27, 2020 at 7:37 pm
“the probability waveform collapses”
I think this is an abstract verbal explanation that is not the Tao. There is no probability waveform and there is no particle. Rather than the behavior being observer-dependent, the behavior (the observer and the quantum presence) arises of itself in dependent origination. There is no separation between observer (consciousness) and behavior, they are one and the same. The separation is an illusion.
There is no single reality. There is the All That Is, the Tao, and there is the construction of reality by the mind and consciousness.
“Do not try and bend the spoon, that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth …
There is no spoon. Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”
June 28, 2020 at 4:46 pm
I thought you were arguing science. Was it Taoism that convinced you?
I was just quoting from the article you supplied. Which highlighted several hypotheses, many worlds among them but not a fave. Was looking up some thought experiment about suicide but could not understand it. Have to try again.
June 28, 2020 at 4:48 pm
Sounds to me like the history I was taught (that Greeks kept women at home, hidden, and silent) was not quite so! Good to hear. “Counterbalancing effects of wildness” — I like that a lot.
June 28, 2020 at 8:24 pm
Quantum science and Taoism are two ways of describing the multiverse that converge in interesting ways.
I’m not convinced of anything. “Reality, what a concept.” (Robin Williams)
When we are born, we perceive everything. As we grow into our culture, we pay attention to what works, and we stop doing that. We spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to that state of child mind. Perhaps we get there at the moment of death.
The multiverse interpretation seems to explain the strange world of quantum physics. Taoism, expressed in the Tao Te Ching, seems to provide a story of the human place in that multiverse the defies understanding and explanation.
The names are not important. When we name things we place them in a box with a label on it that forestalls further understanding.
June 28, 2020 at 8:25 pm
Typo:
When we are born, we perceive everything. As we grow into our culture, we pay attention to what doesn’t work, and we stop doing that. We spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to that state of child mind. Perhaps we get there at the moment of death.
June 28, 2020 at 11:46 pm
That sounds very reasonable.
July 1, 2020 at 6:10 pm
Gotcha.
It’s strange stuff. It seems to imply that there is an infinite number of Earths, and some of them blew up in the Jurassic, and one got fried by Khrushchev and Kennedy, and it does not affect us any. (?)