by Raven
In my last post I wrote a little about individualism and how it’s rampant in American culture. It’s a hard habit to break out of–but I suspect that many people fear the opposite happens in communal living, that all individual freedom will be gone.
I have sometimes thought about community as existing in the “dynamic tension” between the individual and the group. And by “dynamic tension” I mean an ever changing midpoint or community point. Too far in the direction of the individual and you are back to individualism and the community falls apart. Too far in the direction of the group and you’re talking about a cult and group think, and believe it or not, the communes are very, very far from this.
In her book,Is It Utopia Yet?, Kat Kinkade wrote this about ideological and lifestyle diversity at Twin Oaks: “All it really expects is conformity to decent behavioral standards. We don’t (officially) demand ideological adherence to much of anything, not even the Community’s basic principles…” She talks about the New Age tendencies at Twin Oaks: “…we eat a lot of beans, rice, and tofu… We subscribe to ten or fifteen radical leftist magazines. We wear used clothing made of natural fibers, and we don’t throw it out when it becomes stained… We have built geodesic domes, enjoy a rustic cabin and a tipi, and one of these days will probably get around to making a yurt… We go in for underwater births, mud pits, nude swimming, sweat huts, and pagan rituals. We think seriously about animal rights. Some people won’t even kill flies.” But then she adds: “More than half of us do several of the following: eat meat, drink coffee, read Newsweek, go to regular AMA physicians, wear clean neat clothing, ignore the tipi, take rituals with a grain of salt, and kill flies with a clear conscience.”
Having spent time around Twin Oaks, I know that there are pagans and Christians and Jewish folk and atheists and agnostics and probably a lot of other ways of believing; that there are lots of queer folk, and a lot of gender fluid folks and several trans folks and many poly people, but there are also quite a few monogamous, heterosexual, cis-gendered folk there too; and while I’m pretty sure that there aren’t a lot of right-wingers at Twin Oaks, the political spectrum runs from vaguely conservative/libertarian, through classic liberals and pretty progressive, to rather radical. It’s the old adage of having sixty folks and probably seventy-five opinions.
And it may be even more diverse at anarchist leaning Acorn and individualist/libertarian leaning East Wind. If you’ve spent any time at the communes, you will soon realize that they are far from a conforming group-think cult. In fact, I would say that there is probably a lot more individual freedom in the communes than in American society at large. Many, many communards delight in being weird in many different ways–but there is probably more acceptance of “normal” behavior in the communes than there is of weird individuality outside of them.
It’s interesting but I think that places devoted to communal living probably have more real individual freedom of expression than in “individualistic” mainstream America. (And then there’s the economic freedom of not having to worry about a job and where your food and next paycheck will come from. But that’s for another post.)
commune life 