Creating Communal Culture

by Raven

In June of 2020, as the pandemic was raging away, I wrote a long post on Facebook which got over five hundred views and had 31 comments (admittedly, several were from me) about “Communes and Tribal Society”.  I reprinted the post and most of the comments on this blog in August.

It’s a question that I’ve struggled with for a while.  If humans are a tribal species, why do so many of us live (and feel we want to or need to) individually?  In my post last week (which did horribly on Facebook, by the way), I began by mentioning I know several former community folks that now live by themselves.

My belief is that the reason for the paradox of humans being tribal and many current folks wanting or needing to live individually is that we have inherited a culture that glorifies individualism.  I think that Theresa said it the best in her comment on my “Tribal” post: “It’s easy to think about individualism like it’s an individuals [sic] problem to fix,” she wrote,  “like some personality defect, when actually it’s a defect of history.”  Our society, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, have all worked to break those tribal bonds.  Our history has gone slowly from tribes to extended families to nuclear families.  Many, many folks I know have been raised as only children and love the idea of living collectively but have trouble dealing with the unfamiliar realities of close day to day living with people.

This makes the reality of creating communal living situations quite difficult.  It has almost always been easy for me, but I was raised with four siblings all of which I mostly got along with (and, yes, sibling rivalry and having to learn to live and share with one another are real and difficult).  I still enjoy my time with my siblings and we all get along pretty well.  But I know that I’m an exception.  Folks I know who did grow up with siblings often were hurt by them and may want nothing to do with them now. Abuse and trauma further alienates people from living together.

So how do we create a culture that supports community and sharing and connection?  I’m watching folks crying out for this while I’m also watching communities collapsing.  (I love this video that someone shared with me about how community can dismantle patriarchy/capitalism/the system.)

As I pointed out in my last post, this is not going to be easy.  We are fighting an upstream battle.  This culture encourages individualism and discourages sharing.  We were taught we needed to make it on our own, and so were our parents, and their parents.

This society does not want communalism to succeed.  The only way that we are going to be able to create a communal culture is to build community after community and when they collapse do it again.  And again. And again.  To reach out and join with those who crave community and work through all the hard stuff and create models for how we can live together and share more.

It’s what I am currently doing and it’s difficult much of the time to keep going when person after person expresses interest and then wanders off, partly, I suspect, because they begin to realize how difficult it’s going to be and partly because they get distracted by some other interesting thing that they decide to pursue.

Given how much is stacked against creating community, I’m not sure at all I will succeed, but I know that if I don’t try, it seems obvious to me that  it won’t happen.  

In the meantime, I would just like to ask  everyone who is reading this to think about how you could share even a little more and create a little more community in your life.  The only way we are going to create a communal culture is if lots of people keep moving in that direction.  So while I know that many people want connection and community,  it really isn’t going to happen unless we reach out and work together.