 We all long intuitively to be part of a natural, loving, self-selected
community. This is the way we lived for almost all of humans' time on
Earth, until civilization changed all that a few short millennia ago.
So what's holding us back?
I
think part of it is that there are so many people to choose from,
today, to make community with. In pre-civilization times, and in
indigenous cultures, you were born into a community and, from puberty
on, you had only two choices -- stay with it or leave. Communities were
sufficiently small that it was easy to know everyone in the community
well, so that choice was pretty simple. The concept of monogamy is,
most anthropologists now seem to think, a consequence of civilization
and the need to reduce sexual competition when we started to live in
settled towns, with strangers. So when it came to selecting partners
for sex and for work, pre-civilization humans had their entire
community to draw upon, and didn't have to choose. Except for the brief
and natural pair-bonding just before and just after a woman's
pregnancy, pre-civilization cultures were polyamorous, not just in the
sense of being sexually promiscuous (the word means 'shared equally',
not excessively or indiscriminately), but in the broader sense of
deeply loving everyone in the community.
This community-wide
love-bond makes Darwinian sense -- it would be hard to imagine a better
recipe for evolutionary success than a community whose members loved
each other intimately and passionately, and were not restricted in
sexual activity to monogamous pairings. These communities would look
after each other diligently, raise all their children collectively, and
(since love brings with it joy) do whatever it took to keep the
community healthy and thriving.
I suspect we still have the
instinct for this type of community coded in our DNA, which is why
civilization culture leaves us full of longing, and produces unnatural
stresses and antagonisms (jealousy, loneliness, envy, distrust, greed,
acquisitiveness etc.) because of the way it compels and constrains us
in how we are allowed to live, work, socialize and behave. We
intuitively want to belong to community, not family, not city, not country.
Most
intentional communities fail. Even die-hard enthusiasts of the concept
admit this, and try to help those looking to create and sustain such
communities to learn from these failings.
I would argue that
the reason they fail is not that people don't work hard enough at them
-- if they are natural human social arrangements they shouldn't have to
be hard work. They should be
easy, and fun. I would suggest they fail because (a) they don't have
the right people in them, and (b) people have unreasonable expectations
of them (i.e. they create or join them for the wrong reasons).
In
our modern civilization we don't love people easily. We tend not to
give love until there is some reciprocity; we're stingy with it. We
frown on both emotional and sexual promiscuity (again in the broad
meaning of the word, not its modern negative connotation) -- it is seen
as a sign of immaturity, naivety, insecurity, unfaithfulness, even
mental illness. This is all part of the civilization indoctrination we
get from birth, what e e cummings calls "making us everybody else". We
don't trust others implicitly. We move around so much that we get to
know thousands of people superficially and very few people intimately.
We are pushed into monogamy, and restrained by the limits of 'family
values', to love only one person (or at least, only one at a time),
which means we get very little experience or practice loving, and as a
result we never get very good at it.
The people I have spoken to
about intentional community tend to like the idea conceptually but be
very idealistic about who their community might contain and how it
might work. Almost everyone wants it to contain lots of people their
own age, and lots of young, physically attractive people of the
opposite sex. They want it to be industrious (everyone doing their
share of the work needed to 'maintain' it) and intellectually
stimulating. They want its members to be open and generous.
This
is a fantasy, not a vision. It is precisely this absurd level of
expectation that causes so many marriages to fail, or to be miserable
for one or both partners. It is a recipe for disappointment.
The
only social construct that we exempt from these high expectations is
friendship. We love our friends without demanding so much. This isn't
because we're easier to please when it comes to friendship than we are
marriage. We're just more accepting. We demand less because we're happy
with less. This has more to do with abundance than fussiness: If a
friend lets us down, we always (most of us) have other friends. Not so
(for most of us) with lovers -- they're always in short supply.
Furthermore, we tend to 'make' friends when we share experiences with
strangers -- friendships emerge, they are discovered, not chosen.
I
suspect that if most of us were to try to imagine who we would have in
our ideal intentional community, after getting past the fantasies
anyway, we would fill it with people we could imagine having as
friends. That is where the 'age thing' comes in, I think -- we are so
sorted into age cohorts in our modern world (nursery schools through to
work peer groups and even alumni groups) that we tend to think of
friends as being people of our own age, because these are the people we
spend most of our lives with and share experiences with. We tend to
make few friends among those of other generations because we share so
few experiences with them. As a result 'generation gaps' are huge,
because there is no shared life context, and hence no mutual
understanding.
In fact I think we are inherently capable of becoming close friends with almost anyone, of any age. We are made
to make friends -- we are by nature a social species. Put two strangers
together and have them share meaningful experiences and chances are
they will become close friends. And I think the suggestion that few
people can provide intellectual stimulation to those of us who are
experienced, informed and curious, is sheer arrogance.
Another
issue in our choice of community members is beauty. We are repulsed by
ugliness (and even, in today's demanding world, by plainness), by the
manifestations of physical old age, and by frailty (physical and
mental). So ideally we want all our community members to be young and
beautiful -- even if and when we are not. There is some evidence that
in pre-civilization communities beauty was much more common than it is
today (because the more attractive and healthy people had the most
children, and fewer of them at that). But although a proportion of all
age groups in pre-civilization cultures died prematurely (mostly by
being eaten by predators, a few from diseases when conditions were
overcrowded), these cultures had lots of octogenarians (until the
malnutrition and disease that came with civilization made old age,
until very recently, a rarity). Somehow they must not have found old,
naked, healthy, physically fit bodies repulsive, which suggests that
our modern aversion to old bodies has more to do with their flab and
their manifestations of civilization-caused diseases than with lack of
smooth and supple skin.
The third issue in our choice of
community members is industriousness -- we don't want those we live
with to be lazy, or messy. We want them to 'do their share' of the work
that must be done. This, too, is a modern social malady. There is no
need for us to have to do much work at all if we agree to live a
radically simple life. If we don't have a lot of things we need to buy
or maintain, there is no need to work to buy and maintain them. All we
really need is food, which is insanely plentiful and cheap, and modest,
maintenance-free shelter, which is today technologically simple to
create. Everything else we can make or do for ourselves, if we want it,
and comfortably do without if we don't. Almost no work is required, so
we should not care how industrious our fellow community members are.
So
while I would want my intentional community to include those I already
love deeply (provided they were prepared to join an intentional
community with me), I am not at all fussy about who the rest of its
members are, as long as they are natural people -- by which I mean
curious, imaginative, observant, open, generous, healthy and fit.
Beyond that the community should be diverse in age and gender, and able
to agree on a fairly simple set of values and principles for living
together. That's all. This is the way we lived, joyfully, lovingly, for most of the millions of years
before civilization.
How hard should it be now?
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
