At the end of last month I had an opportunity to give a talk at Carleton College in Northfield MN. I'm an alumnus there and was on campus as a guest speaker for a freshmen course on Utopias. The philosophy professor who brought me in offered me a chance to give a talk during the noon hour that would be open to all students. I accepted, and today's blog is the essence of my presentation, Sept 29.
Fifty years ago this fall I had just arrived on campus as a
Carleton freshman. Those were days of foment and change. Among other things, they were
the last days of in loco parentis. My first year men were allowed on women’s
dorm floors from 2-4 pm on Tuesday; women had reciprocal privileges on Thursday
afternoons. The door was supposed to be open at least six inches and three feet
were supposed to be on the floor at all times. By the time I was a senior I was a resident assistant on
a coed dorm floor. All efforts by the college to keep men and women physically separated from their animal urges were abandoned.
During my tenure, students were not allowed to have cars, everyone
lived on campus, and the winters were long and cold—this was back before
climate change, and Al Gore had not yet invented the internet.
Having been raised in the Father-Knows-Best Republican suburbs of
Chicago, campus life brought me face to face with a number of potent realities
for the first time, including institutional racism and the early days of
feminism. There were riots on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic
convention. Vietnam was raging. Kent State happened in 1970. That same spring I got arrested
protesting at a draft induction center in St Paul—along with scores of my
fellow students and the college chaplain. I received a lottery number and
prepared to apply for a CO status if I got drafted after graduation.
Cooperation as the Obverse of Competition
In the classroom, I took an introduction to sociology course in
which I learned that cooperation is the opposite of competition. While that caught my attention right away, I had no idea how central that revelation was to become in my life. Bookmark that insight. I’ll come back to it later.
I loved my Carleton years, where I experienced a combination of stimulation and support
that fostered both inquiry and personal growth.
When I graduated (1971) I wanted to make a difference in the world, and
took a job with the federal government in DC, to see if that was the right stage
on which to apply myself—in the belly of the beast. Working for the US Dept of
Transportation, one day I met the person who was the secretary of the
administrative assistant for the Assistant Secretary for Administration. When I
simultaneously realized both how funny that was and that I knew what it meant, it
occurred to me that I might have been in Washington too long.
So, at the advanced age of 23, I retired from the M-F 9-5 world—which,
incidentally, I never returned to—and rebooted my post-college life, beginning
with a different question: instead of "what would I do?" I asked "who do I
want to do it with?" I was beginning to understand the primacy of relationships
in the pursuit of happiness. I wanted the milieu I tasted at Carleton but I didn’t want to go
back to school to get it. It was at that point that I stumbled onto the arcane
world of intentional community: groups of people living together on the basis
of explicit common values. This, I thought, might be what I was looking for. And
it was. Not as an escape from mainstream society, but as a base of operations.
I was part of two couples (three of whom were Carls) who founded Sandhill Farm in 1974. Located in the rural, northeast corner of Missouri, we pooled our income and dedicated ourselves to organic
food production, land stewardship, and right livelihood. I lived there happily for 40 years.
In 1979 I became restless with an exclusive focus on Sandhill, and started looking beyond the property lines to expand my locus of attention. While I considered community living to be a political act (not escapism), I wanted to expand my field of operations. With that in mind I got involved in community networking, promoting dialog
and collaboration among sister communities. At first I did this via Sandhill joining the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (in 1980) and my serving as a delegate. Seven years later I helped start the Fellowship for Intentional Community, a clearinghouse of information about communities of all stripes with a special
emphasis on North America.
Also in 1987 I launched a career as a process consultant
working with cooperative groups, helping them to successfully weather internal tensions and to develop effective structures. Although I no
longer live at Sandhill (I left in 2014), I continue my consulting work and in the last three
decades I’ve stepped into the fire to work with more than 100 groups across the continent.
Over time I’ve become an expert in cooperative group dynamics.
Why Does This Matter?
The world of intentional community is small and not widely known.
FIC figures there are roughly 100,000 people in the US who live in some form of
self-identified intentional community—groups who willingly wear that label. In
a country of 325 million that’s less than 0.03%. While the number of communities is growing,
it's statistically insignificant. Do I think it’s the wave of the future? No.
It’s too radical. So what’s the point?
If you ask people if they have as much community in their life as
they want—without defining what community means—I figure
you might get 100 million people saying they’d like more than they have. There are that many who will tell you that they experienced a greater sense of neighborhood and belonging when they grew up than they have today. That’s
three orders of magnitude larger. Now we're talking impact. What
does intentional community have to offer those 100 million people?
Let’s go back to that point I made earlier about cooperation being the
opposite of competition.
I Versus We
In any society there is a dynamic tension between how much individuals are acculturated to identify with self, and how much with society (or neighborhood, village, or tribe). When you take a step back and examine contemporary US culture from an anthropological perspective, I think you can make the case that there has never been a time in human history when the focus on the individual was more ascendant.
In a competitive culture—which is unquestionably what we have in the US—the "I" focus is constantly being reinforced. So what? Consider what happens when you're in a conversation and you agree with half of what someone says and disagree with the other half.
For almost everyone, their first response is "But… " Even though you could just as legitimately start by acknowledging the partial agreement, that's rarely what happens—because our cultural imperative is to identify how we are unique, or at least distinct from others. When we agree, we don't establish differentiation.
This tendency has a profound impact on the atmosphere in which the conversation proceeds. If the competitive environment prevails, you're essentially hoping that a fair fight will produce the best result—the strongest ideas will survive. If however you reverse this, and start by acknowledging the common ground, you can establish a cooperative container, where everyone is on the same team and differences can be encouraged for their potential of offering hybrid vigor. This may sound like a simple trick, but it's radically different.
In competition, there is a tug-of-war, where different views are in ridden into battle to see which prevails. In cooperation, everyone is in the same boat trying to successfully navigate a stream of different ideas. While the currents may be treacherous, and there may be different ideas about the best course, the people are trying to pull together.
One way to
understand the impulse to experiment with intentional community is a desire to
purposely shift one's location on the I—we spectrum more toward the "we" end. The
trade-off is you get better connection and support, in exchange for
relinquishing some control and autonomy. When people report that they want more
community in their life, they are, in effect, saying that they’re jonesing for a greater sense of belonging.
Now let’s look at two main ways that intentional community is
pioneering critical work that addresses current societal challenges:
I. Resource consumption
There are about 7.5 billion in the world today and that number is
rising. By any sane measure we are running out of resources and it is flat
impossible for all the people in the world to consume resources at the current
US rate. Should we just thank our lucky stars and hope to hold on, or try to do
something equitable about it? I prefer the latter.
One of the ways that intentional communities are important to
the wider society is that they are R&D centers for radical sharing. What if we challenge the notion that quality of life equates with throughput and
acquisition material goods—the concept that the person who has the most stuff when they die
wins? I realize it sounds fairly shallow when I state it that crudely, yet
that’s how most people live their lives.
Here are four leverage points on how to shift this that are being actively modeled by intentional community:
A. Economies of scale
There is a lot that can be done to minimize drudgery and liberate time. If seven households living near each other
agreed that they’d each cook one night a week for all seven, think how much
time that would free up! It does not take anywhere near seven times as long to
cook for seven times as many people. Yet mostly households cook alone every
night. While cooking for only your own household gives you maximum control over menu, who wants to cook and clean up every night if there was a non-exploitative way to slash that by 80 percent? Even doing this just some of the time could make a big difference.
When I lived at Sandhill (where meals were prepared for members every night) it turned out that it was my turn to cook about once a week. Not only was that more efficient, but I truly enjoyed cooking at that frequency. If I had to do it every night, however, it would suck the air out of my happy balloon.
B. No prostitution
What value would you place on an integrated life, where work,
school, home, and place of worship are in one location, aligned with your values? There’s a
constant psychic drain that people experience when a core aspect of their life
is out of alignment with what they believe in, yet almost everyone suffers from this to some degree. Think how common it is for people to either dislike what they do to earn a living, or are unhappy with where they live—or are happy with both but accept a brutal commute as the price to have them.
While it's not easy to quantify this cost, it’s
expensive. To what extent do you think a person's long-term health is impacted adversely by having major aspects of their life unaligned with core values? I think it's pretty damn big.
C. Substituting access for ownership
I lived for a couple years at Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage of about 45 adults that is trying to showcase the possibilities for living a high-quality life on drastically fewer resources. In line with that mission members agree to not operate private vehicles. Instead, the community runs a car co-op to meet members' needs. With some sophisticated scheduling and a willingness to share rides with others, they have been able to provide a vehicle to meet 98 percent of members needs to go to a certain town on a certain day with a fleet of three cars and a pickup.
Think about that. Their ratio of adults to vehicles is greater than 10:1. By way of contrast, in 2015, the ratio of licensed drivers to licensed vehicles in the US was 218 million to 263 million, a ratio of 5:6. What's wrong with this picture? It's apparent that the overwhelming majority of people in this country blandly accept that they "need" their own car (some apparently "need" two!), even though it sits idle the vast majority of the time. This represents an incredibly wasteful investment for the sake of convenience.
What could be freed up if you weren't chasing the dollars needed to buy, operate, service, insure, and house your own private car(s)? If Dancing Rabbit adults were operating vehicles at the US average they'd have a fleet of 54. That catches people's attention.
To be sure, sharing resources means there are some additional challenges. For one, there can be scheduling issues, when two or more people want to use a jointly owned asset at the same time. You have come up with a reasonable and fair way to settle who gets to use a thing when there is more demand than availability.
For two, there can be tension around how common assets are maintained. When everyone owns thing, there can be a tendency for no one to maintain it. Tragedy of the commons. Even if maintenance expectations are clearly spelled out, it's likely that people will vary significantly in how diligently they apply themselves to those standards of care—the end result of which is someone can discover at 4:30 am that the community car they've been assigned does not have enough gas in it to make it to the train station 60 miles away (which actually happened to me once).
So there are definitely kinks to work out. Yet, in return, there are 50 fewer cars on the road. Not a bad trade.
D. Redefining security in terms of relationships
In community, people are trying to recreate this safety net of relationships. The pool needs to be large enough that you can be reasonably secure from too many needing support at the same time, or from the burden of care falling too heavily on the shoulders of too few (strength in numbers), yet not so large that people don't know one another, and the interpersonal bonds are too dilute.
This is a huge lever in that it allows people to release the need to accumulate assets against the potentials of old age or compromised health. Think how freeing this could be! If you needed fewer dollars to make your life work, it would give you a wider choice of employment, because you could trade off lower compensation in exchange for a better values match.
II. Problem solving
Now let’s go back to the I—we spectrum, and the strong tendency in contemporary culture to focus first on disagreement—on how we are different from others. This has a profound impact on how people solve problems.
In the mainstream culture people work to aggregate enough power (or enough votes) to win. In cooperative culture, the strategy is to make sure that there’s a legitimate opportunity for all voices to be heard and then to collectively labor to find the solution that best balances the factors and interests: no one goes forward until all go forward. In the former we come to meetings hoping to change other people’s minds (so that our idea will prevail). In the latter we come to meetings hoping that our minds will be changed (because the ideas of others may enhance our thinking, from which the whole will benefit).
And it’s more than that. Think about how dehumanizing and stultifying it is that the wider culture operates as if all human input can be neatly translated into ideation, allowing little or no room for emotional and intuitive input—which are parts of our birthright as a species. Much of my group consulting requires me to work constructively with conflict, where emotional reactivity is a central component. We have little facility with this in the wider culture and we desperately need a vocabulary and orientation that allows us to welcome passion and spirit into our work.
The power of these differences can hardly be more compelling when one contemplates the current incivility and polarization in current politics, where polemics and vilification have replaced dialog and mutual respect. Greater competition is not the answer. Neither is a President who is knee-jerk counter puncher. We need a paradigm shift.
Intentional communities are important to contemporary society—not because they will become a dominant lifestyle—but because they are the R&D centers where we are unlearning competitive conditioning, and figuring out how to cooperate instead. The gleanings from the intentional community experience can be exported into schools, churches, neighborhoods, and workplaces—wherever people ache for more community and sense of connection—and that’s why it may save the world.
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