A reader sends along a story about a community in Milwaukee that leads a pretty cohesive and crunchy communal existence, right in the inner city. Excerpt:
I live in a village. My children and grandchildren live in this village. I'm deeply immersed in the life of this village. I know the daily habits, the joys and sorrows, of dozens and dozens of people in the village: Our lives are intertwined.I go into the coffee shop in the village and Dave reaches for my standard order before I say anything - except he pauses, because he knows that occasionally I surprise him and ask for something different.
I go in the drug store and the pharmacists ask me, by first name, how I'm doing.
I go to the grocery store and I usually know everyone in the place. The woman running the cash register makes sure I'm up on the news of the village.
I am not reluctant to speak to my friends' children when they're acting out of line or unsafely. They're my children, too.
If there's a celebration or a tragedy among the villagers, you can count on people to pitch in and help with whatever is needed, whether it's baking, decorating a social hall, housing dozens of visitors, you name it. We're all in these things together.
I like all of this. To say my village means a lot to me is an understatement.
I've spent huge wads of time trying to build up the life of the village. So have most of my friends. It takes a village to raise a village, or something like that.
But when I tell you where the village is, there is a strong chance you will wonder about me, at least privately.
That's OK. I'm used to it.
The author's village is in what sounds like from the context a rough neighborhood, or at least a place that has that reputation. The author is an Orthodox Jew, and he's part of a community of Orthodox Jews who moved in because they needed to be able to walk to synagogue on the Sabbath, and they needed communal support to live the demanding Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. They created this village, and stuck it out through tough times because what they had together was worth more than the material ease they could have had had they broken up and moved to nicer homes elsewhere.
What fortunate people, building this new (actually very old) way of living out the virtues in community. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm hoping to explore in my next book. This community has a compelling religious reason to be together. What about Christian or other religious communities, which don't have Sabbath restrictions requiring them to live within walking distance of their house of worship? How can we commit to this kind of life? Rachel Balducci talks about this in "Crunchy Cons," by the way.
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Rod, if you don't mind my reiterating the point others have made, I think you need to take a close look at the pitfalls of religious community life. The fact that several commenters reacted in a negative way to your initial post should tell you something.
I shared with you my own experience, but I can tell you, time and time again I've run into people who went through the same thing. They belonged to a religious community, it was wonderful, it seemed to offer a healthy alternative to corrupt society, and then it became more controlling, more centralized, and more cultish. Almost always the ones who were leaders did not intend any harm, but power corrupts.
I seem to recall you posting a few weeks (months?) ago about a group in Texas that everyone thought was an excellent example of a successful countercultural enclave. Then eventually the reports of abuse started coming out, and sure enough the same dysfunctions existed there that usually do when religious groups withdraw from society to form their own.
Sorry to pour cold water on your thesis, Rod, but please investigate this more in honesty. To visit the communities you have (like the one in Alaska), and to write about the ones you have (like the one in Minneapolis), gives you the positive picture. But there is a negative one as well.
You said in your last comment that you would never submit yourself to the kind of community that I was in. I'm not so sure. I would say that neither I nor anyone I know would voluntarily submit to such a community. The problem is that you don't know there's a problem until it's too late. The often quoted metaphor of a frog in boiling water is true - he doesn't leap out if the temperature goes up slowly. When you join a religious sect or commune, and it is everything you wished for, you don't realize initially that the seeds of dysfunction are already there. (Of course, not everyone is as naive as I was. But with all due respect, Rod, I think that you might be naive because you have so much invested in your crunchy con thesis. You really want religious community life to work.)
When you are surrounded by like-minded people, you don't realize that more and more decisions are being made for you. In fact, it's kind of nice. After being in the larger world, with all its confusion, it's nice being with a group of people who seem to know all the answers, who can provide you with direction and guidance. It's only after you've committed yourself that you realize you are no longer living your own life, and that others are living it for you. Then all of a sudden you are not only a non-conformist to the larger world, you are a non-conformist to the society meant to save you from the larger world. And that can be very lonely.
I don't mean to beat this dead horse, and I apologize if it seems like I'm overdoing it. But what you experienced in the Catholic church - the abuse, the cover-ups, the pretensions, the hypocrisy - can exist on a much smaller scale. At least the Catholic church is huge enough that your life won't be micromanaged. When you're in a small Christian community, everyone knows you, and the peer pressure is enormous.
I'll stop there. But thanks for this post, and for the opportunity to vent a little. Also, you have the most terrific commenters on any blog that I have found.
And a PS: If possible, please remove my earlier comments that were redundant, since my long one got posted after my attempts to break it down into small pieces.
I live in the Midwest, a region that is dotted with the dessicated corpses of previous-century "intentional communities." Some are exhibited in perpetuam as tourist traps (New Harmony, IN); others are resurrected once or twice a year for "festivals" (Bethel, MO) and then retreat into the grave until the next revival.
So you can see I'm not too rapturous about them, given the long view.
Erin, you said it best above. Who are the "normal" people? What happened to those "abnormal" people in the past, when people were trying to build their own "utopias" of sorts? Mental hospitals? Locked in the attic? Prisons? The many 'state homes?' Maternity homes, where single mothers were knocked out and their babies taken from them while they were unconscious?
Everyone wants to romanticize the past; very few want to look at the nitty-gritty *historical* details, to find out how people *actually* lived then - outside the pages of the glossy magazines.
M_David, as far as the "patriarchy" goes, what you are describing in suburban America with women who have *voluntarily* linked themselves to "patriarchal marriages" is not really patriarchy. Any one of those "traditionalist" married women could walk out at any time, if she so chose. Any one of those of-age daughters could do the same. Whatever happens inside the family (leaving aside questions of beating, Stockholm syndrome, etc.), the wider culture refuses - and rightly so - to impose serious "traditional" controls on women. What the women choose to do on their own is another story. But at bottom it still comes down to choice. In a truly traditionalist patriarchal system, there is NO choice.
BTW, re: the Amish - there are a lot of Amish who leave the more traditional communities, both as young people and as older. Funny how no one wants to talk about that. We see them around here all the time - they become Mennonites (of varying degrees of modernity), or simply join the UCC, buy an SUV, and live like "everybody else." The Amish are *not* a closed community in any sense of the word.
dissenter,
I apologize if it seems like I'm overdoing it. But what you experienced in the Catholic church - the abuse, the cover-ups, the pretensions, the hypocrisy...
Let's see...Catholic [C]hurch = abuse, cover-up, pretension, hypocrisy. What are you apologizing for? Running out of adjectives, or just growing tired of typing?
But overdoing it? Naw.
M_David, are you a reader of this blog? I'm referring to Rod's stated reasons for leaving the Catholic church (I prefer small "c"). My wife's entire family is Catholic, and trust me, I'm not overdoing anything. There was sexual abuse of children, there was a cover-up (including transferring the abusers to parishes where they could continue the abuse), there was religious pretension, and there was hypocrisy. If you don't know this, you haven't been paying attention.
Acts 2:42-47
"They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved."
Buncha commies.
How can traditionalists stand this sort of propaganda?
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