 We're
starting to discover that the only effective way to make the world
better is from the bottom up -- by creating or evolving self-sufficient
communities. As we saw in New Orleans, and as we see with failed states
and failed cities everywhere, top-down political and economic solutions
don't work; when they change anything at all, they seem to make matters
worse.
But creating community is not easy. In Creating a Life Together
Diana Leafe Christian describes some of the challenges of intentional
communities -- finding members, creating honest consensus, resolving
disputes, finding the right place to live, keeping it sustainable. This
is tough work, and most intentional communities that do work are, well,
rather pathetically small. It almost seems as if, as soon as you put
more than a certain number of people into one interdependent group, you
need hierarchy to keep things in order. Why might this be?
In gatherer-hunter communities, there was lots of space for community
members to get away from each other temporarily, and lots of space between
communities. Evidence
suggests that such communities or clans consisted of
about 150 individuals (depending on the ecosystem) which operated via a
'fission/fusion' social system, where the group continually split up
into smaller, constantly changing (likely to vary and optimize individual
learning) 'foraging parties' or bands
of 30-50, and then re-formed as a cohesive group. The theory is that
150 is the maximum number of individuals you can get to know well
enough for meaningful social interaction, and beyond that the group
starts to splinter into a more self-manageable size.
Tribes consisted in turn of several clans, and comprised
1000-2000 individuals. Bands were the optimal size for short-term
collective action, clans for mutual knowledge and learning, and tribes
for buffering (to optimize inter-tribal physical and cultural diversity and to
minimize inter-tribal conflict, both Darwinian advantages). Interestingly, early
villages and early professional armies were usually the same size as
gatherer-hunter clans, and military platoons the same size as
gatherer-hunter bands. The clan defined the boundaries of both collective
intellectual (recognition and distinction) and physical (mutual
grooming and love) behaviour.
Today we find ourselves born into societies that have no band, clan, or
tribal cohesion. Instead, at the micro-level, we have substituted the
nuclear family, much smaller than a band and too small to comprise a
self-sufficient functional unit. And at the macro-level, we have
substituted the state and corporation, hierarchical and
multi-tiered constructs much larger than a tribe, and too large to function
as an integral unit.
One could cynically surmise that the nuclear family was devised
deliberately to be inadequate for self-sufficiency, so families were
dependent on and non-threatening to the inherently dysfunctional
corporation/state. One could also cynically surmise that the
corporation/state is a purely cultural construct designed to organize,
suppress and keep individuals from seeking more natural and effective
forms of organization, by presenting them with a simple, monolithic
pyramid scheme and promising them the moon and stars (fame, fortune,
sex, salvation, happiness) if they dedicated their lives to climbing
the pyramid.
It has been suggested, for example, that the Great Wall of China was
built not to keep Mongol Hordes out, but rather to keep stooped and
malnourished rice-paddy slave-families from fleeing back to the more
natural life and tribal social organization of Mongolia. Once you mess
with the natural band/clan/tribe cohesion, it seems, you need a brutal,
hierarchical, inherently undemocratic political and economic machine to
keep individuals divided and in line.
The history of our civilization has been largely one of pioneers fleeing the
ghastly tyranny of the hierarchical corporation/state, slaughtering
gatherer-hunter societies in the 'unincorporated' lands they fled to,
and then, as their numbers grew, replicating the hierarchical
corporation/state themselves, and then constantly warring with other
corporation/states. Now we have run out of places to flee to, and,
thanks to immigration laws, we do not even have a choice of which
hierarchical corporation/state to 'belong' to. Our resultant anger,
frustration and impotence is acted out with distressing frequency in both family violence and
corporation/state violence.
So much for the dismal history. Let's turn to the present and the
future. Theoretically, the modern equivalent of the band should be what
I have called the Natural Enterprise, a non-hierarchical partnership of
around 30-50 people working towards a mutual goal of providing a living for
themselves. Not all that different from the hunting bands going out to
round up grub for the rest of the clan, is it?
And, theoretically, the modern equivalent of the clan should be the
Intentional Community, a cohesive group of about 150 people comprising
several bands, who love each other (you can't spend 15-20% of your life
physically grooming people you don't love) and live together, their
society cemented by rites and shared principles.
But most entrepreneurial businesses strive (either for ego reasons, or
because their flawed organizational structure requires them to) to grow
far beyond band size, without limit. And most intentional communities
fail to sustain membership of much more than a dozen, far below clan size.
Why might this be? Have the instinctive social dynamics that governed
us for three million years been forgotten, or do they no longer apply?
After three million years of making a living with 30-50 cohorts and
living with and loving 150, why are humans suddenly so incapable of making
a living in a small group and loving a large one?
Maybe it's a lack of practice. Working in groups of 30-50 and living
and loving in groups of 150 may be instinctive, but we lose our
instincts if we don't practice them.
Maybe it's because we're brainwashed, culturally conditioned by peers
and media who say small business can't compete until and unless it gets
big, and by religions and politicians who say it's wrong to physically
love more than your family and wrong not to
intellectually love your state.
Maybe it's because civilization is now the only life we know, and like Lucky
the dog, we keep returning to an abusive and unnatural way of
life because we can't imagine anything better.
Or maybe it's because there is no longer space and time for pioneers to
rediscover our natural social ways, and hence there are no natural
models for others to emulate. Even modern gatherer-hunter cultures, now
so astonishingly different from our monolithic culture that we can't
conceive of ourselves living that way, are so compromised by
civilization's encroachment on their land and depletion of their
resources that their culture has been altered and pushed to the edge of
extinction. There are no natural models left. There is no
'unincorporated' land left, clean, undeveloped land with good soils
that pioneers can move to and take the time to evolve intentional
communities in. In our ubiquitous globalized civilization, we must live
every day with the fear of not having enough, so there is no time to
imagine a better way to live.
I've read everything I can get my hands on on intentional communities,
and what strikes me most is that their failure, just like the failure
of so many new-age business models, is a failure of imagination.
The intentions are good. They invest a lot of time and energy in
research, and in trying to make it work. But when they run into
difficulties, they keep falling back on 'conventional wisdom': we need
a council, and committees, and voting and non-voting shares, and
strategic plans, and legal agreements, and to borrow lots of money; we
need to work harder, and to wait until conditions are exactly right. I
appreciate that creating a new community is scary, but the social,
political and economic failings of the old system are exactly what got
us into this mess, and incorporating them into the new models is just
asking for the same terrible results.
Perhaps what is needed to overcome this failure of imagination and the
resultant relapses into old-model orthodoxy, are some guiding
principles for the new models. These might include:
- Reject all the practices that have made the old
models for community and enterprise oppressive and dysfunctional: There
will be no voting, no shares, no political hierarchies, no work
assignments, no lawyers, no laws, no titles, no delegating, no private
property, no regularly scheduled meetings, no money changing hands. If
you feel you have to have some of these things, don't even start.
- Do lots of research, and have lots of conversations,
but don't plan, improvise
instead. One step at a time, taking things as they come, finding
creative workarounds without compromising, without stopping.
- Trust your instincts. If you're troubled about
something, talk it out, figure out why, get it out there. Don't suck it
up. Life is too short for stress. Discharge it.
- We are all equal. The value of our ideas and opinions
is all equal. The value of our time is all equal. If you can't accept
that, get out.
- Never compromise with The Man. Once you prostitute
your principles to get something accomplished, you're hooked, and
you're no different from the billions caught in the old model.
- Don't grow too big. Beyond 150 people, the community
needs to self-restrict membership. Members who don't like that should leave and start other new communities.
- Stay sustainable. No degrading of the land. No
expansion of development. No taking more than you give back.
- Be a part. The community must be within a natural
ecosystem and intensely aware of and respectful in its 'part'-nership in that ecosystem.
You can't learn to live a natural life unless you have natural life all
around you to learn from.
- Learn about and use Open Space. This is how
non-hierarchical, gatherer-hunter cultures have always self-managed. Invite. Open
yourself to possibilities. Listen. Learn. Converse. Share. Let
understanding emerge. Then just
go and do what you've learned needs to be done.
- When you're stuck, get together with others you love
and trust and imagine possibilities. Think outside that horrific,
stifling box. Study and imitate nature. Create your way out.
Not easy. But isn't this worth striving for, more than anything else?
Or am I just a hopeless idealist?
Because of the ubiquity of civilization and its oppressive rules and
restrictions, the new model will need a sponsor, someone to run
interference for us, deal with The Man so we don't have to. A George
Soros type, perhaps, who will, no strings attached, donate the land and
buffer the members from the politicians and the lawyers and everyone
else who will be threatened out of their skin by this new model.
Suppose we succeed. Suppose this new model community of 150 people
proves to be sustainable, perhaps even without the ongoing need for a sponsor
to buffer us from the fear and loathing (and envy) of civilized humans.
Suppose the natural enterprises of this community allow the community
members to be completely self-sufficient, independent of the rest of
the world, trading only its surpluses to the outside world in return
for occasional luxuries for its members. Suppose the love and joy among
members of this community are so startling, so awe-inspiring that it
causes the students studying the community, and the film crews telling
its story, and then the people watching the story, to long for a
similar life, to realize there is a better way to live. Then what?
Even if it were replicable, even if there were enough sponsors to
bootstrap many more communities to follow this model, I think it
unlikely that it would replace our civilization culture. We are not all
pioneers, and many of us who aspire to be have acquired too much of the
baggage of civilization to ever be able to live a natural life. To the
extent that the copies of the model community compromised its
principles, they would fail. And there is not enough land to
accommodate more than a tiny fraction of today's human population in
such an extravagant, natural manner.
So why do it? Three reasons:
- To give us hope. The latter part of this century is
going to be grim. Knowing there is a better way to live, that can work,
will be important to those struggling with the collapse of
civilization. At least they will know there is a chance for their
children to learn from their, from our,
mistakes.
- To serve as a post-civilization model. Life after
civilization will be unplugged and pedestrian. It will be useful for
its human inhabitants to have a model, one that works in such circumstances,
to follow.
- To make us think and imagine. We learn from being
shown, not by being told. The success of this model could make us
radically rethink many of the things we do today. Not enough to save
the world, but enough to make life genuinely better, more egalitarian,
more meaningful, happier. Once we start to trigger people's imagination
of what's possible, we may be astonished at the improved quality of
life some focused human imagination could produce in a
surprisingly short time.
I like the 'how to build community' bookmark reproduced in the
illustration above. It certainly can't hurt to do these things. But I
don't believe there is any chance that we can bring about sustained
change within existing communities, even if to some extent these
activities are paid
forward for awhile. Things are the way they are for a reason,
and that reason has a billion tons and thirty millennia of inertia. It makes more sense, I
think, to walk away from that inertia and to try to build something new.
That's all I've got. As you've probably guessed, I'm trying to think my
way out of the inertia of my own life. I keep hoping that an
opportunity to do something this important will fall in my lap. Not
likely to happen. Courage, as I keep saying, is doing what you have to do. Sooner or later, I have to do something.
Image: By Karen Kerney for Syracuse
Cultural Workers |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
