The Perennial Appeal of Communes

The Perennial Appeal of Communes

Kathleen Spaltro

(c) Copyright (2018).  All Rights Reserved. 

Baby Boomers like myself associate communes with the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies, but the appeal of the commune actually has attracted people for many centuries. A recent book about social experiments conducted in Illinois estimated that, in the 300 years that ended in 1964, visionaries established 516 "intentional communities" in North America. Of the 120 American communes begun between 1800 and 1850, 24 succeeded; these pre-Civil War societies usually were religious and Christian.

Despite their varying agendas, whether religious or secular, communes have persuaded many people who have tired of conventional communities to enlist as obedient followers espousing a cause or ideal of individual behavior or societal organization. As a member of a contemporary commune in Dorset, England, has explained, "It suits people who want to change, and those who want to be among people. A lot of the people [at Osho Leela] have gone through life, got married and had kids, and are just not happy with life. Then they turn to something like this."

Saints?

I admire the idealism that motivates some members of communes to transcend the expectations of our highly individualistic society, and I find interesting the accounts of the organizational, interpersonal, economic, sexual, parental, and authority issues that challenge and sometimes destroy intentional communities. Sometimes the overriding motive is spiritual, and the people are noble, and I have always found saintly projects intriguing. The establishment of a monastic rule that governs a religious community, for example, creates one kind of intentional community.

But the more common fates of marriage, establishment of a nuclear family, and membership in one or more extended families sufficiently challenge most of us. Whether we succeed or falter as wives or husbands, parents, and adult children, we accept our society's norms. To reject these norms, to declare and act upon our dissatisfaction, requires more discernment and personal strength than we can easily muster. It may also require presumption and arrogance.

Our motives may be noble, or they may be merely self-serving. As Bernard Shaw wrote in 1913, "All movements which attack the existing state of society attract both the people who are not good enough for the world and the people for whom the world is not good enough." He had expressed this insight a decade earlier:  "The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world." Shaw's friendly opponent in argument, G.K. Chesterton, agreed that the societal norms that we reject may well have a solid foundation in human nature:  "Tradition is the democracy of the dead."

Scoundrels?

Most of us are probably neither saints nor scoundrels, but perhaps the allure of experimental community attracts a preponderance of both saints and scoundrels. Sometimes, in the pursuit of individual and societal perfection, even saints may exhibit very unsaintly traits.

I thought of this when I visited a museum in Harvard, Massachusetts, that includes the Fruitlands farmhouse, a relic of the ill-fated commune founded in 1843 by Bronson Alcott. His much more famous daughter, Louisa, wrote a hilarious sendup of her father's commune, the short story "TranscendentalWild Oats." As a girl, Louisa was a cold, hungry, and involuntary participant.

Paul Elmer More's essay on Emerson included a section on the Fruitlands commune and Bronson Alcott. More crushingly explained Alcott's intention " to plant 'a love colony,' as their Eden was called, where the brotherhood of man should reign unpolluted by the lust of property, and by their illustrious example to aid 'entire human regeneration.' … The men of the colony were so absorbed in the contemplation of the mystery of holiness that the fruits of the field rather languished. As Alcott's daughter said, they 'were so busy discussing and defining great duties that they forgot to perform the small ones.' The barley crops somehow would not harvest themselves, so they were got in by the women while the masculine sages were wandering off in the amiable desire of 'aiding entire human regeneration.' Things grew worse and worse, until it came to a question of leaving or starving. It is very pretty to declare that the body is 'all sham'; but you can't feed it by shamming work."

Before Isaac Hecker founded the Paulist Fathers, he belonged to the Brook Farm (1841) and Fruitlands communes. More quoted Hecker in More's demolition of Bronson Alcott:  "by some unaccountable means the serpent seems to have crept into this Eden, as he did into the original experiment. The 'love colony' soon developed into a circle of disappointed, jealous, fault-finding men and women, who found it to their advantage to seek shelter from one another by scattering in the wicked world. This is one of Father Hecker's memoranda: 'Somebody once described Fruitlands as a place where Mr. Alcott looked benign and talked philosophy, while Mrs. Alcott and the children did all the work.' It is well to look benign, but another of the colonists wrote in a different vein. 'All the persons,' he complains, 'who have joined us during the summer have from some cause or other quitted, they say in consequence of Mr. Alcott's despotic manner, which he interprets as their not being equal to the Spirit's demands.' It looks a little as if these spiritual demands were not unaccompanied with spiritual pride; and pride, we remember, is sometimes said to have been the sin that broke up the original Eden."

It is well to remember that our attempts to transcend ourselves, to become perfect, may so strain our frail human nature that they create and reveal even more, and worse, imperfections. As the philosophy of the lamasery at Shangri-La is explained to a Western visitor, “If I could put it into a very few words, dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excesses of all kinds—even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.”