It would be claustrophobic. It would feel like a cult.
This is also a fundamental concern, and it was to ward off this feeling that I included the train station and the trips to the metropolis, that I insisted the town not be insular and cut off from the world around it. We’re on the electrical grid. We have a movie theater. We buy books from Penguin-Random House. And we’re subject to the law of whatever land we’re in.
But we are, after all, an intentional community with an unusual way of life. And this introduces problems of two kinds.
First there are the classic problems of small-town life: one does not have the (for some, at least) soothing anonymity of the city. One cannot go out on the street without meeting people one knows. One cannot keep one’s doings entirely to oneself. And there are social pressures and conformities that come with this.
Of course there are social pressures and conformities in urban life too, driven by advertising, mass media, mass culture. But these operate differently. We are, or seem to be, free to choose or reject them. (Indeed, subcultures of people who rail against and flout these conformities are an essential part of modern urban life—and maybe this is a clue: either to how to make conformity tolerable or else to the falseness of these resistances, I’m not sure which.)
The second problem is that of artificiality. A group of any kind—a religion, a town—that grows up “naturally,” “organically” has, in its social relations, its rituals and institutions, a certain solidity and genuineness that it gets from time, habit, tradition. One may find it oppressive, but it does not appear false or ridiculous. But a group that is created intentionally, according to a plan and with specific aims and values in mind, is always at risk of feeling artificial, forced, affected, uncanny, corny, embarrassing, absurd. Those outside it laugh or cringe; those inside, struggling unconsciously to overcome the feeling of falseness, compensate with an overblown and even more embarrassing sincerity.
But this conformity and this “newness” and intentionality are not side-effects of having a town—they are direct consequences of the whole project, maybe even the intended effect: we want to live differently, and we want to do so as a group. I don’t know what that could mean except that we want certain norms of conduct that are agreed upon initially but also upheld, which is to say enforced, socially; and that we want them to be not traditional but newly defined.
I point this out not in order to suggest that there is not really a problem with claustrophobia, conformity, artificiality, intentionality—but to say that these problems are essential. They are built in, not to the specific idea of a town, but to the basic problem (the degradation, material and spiritual, of our immediate surroundings) and the basic longing (to live differently) with which I began. They are fundamental to the modern world. Their appearance does not indicate that our project is misguided; indeed, it indicates that it is exactly the right kind of project, the kind that will bring us face to face with the right kind of problems.
Facing these problem must mean, in part, deciding just how much freedom we're willing to give up. But it also has to mean figuring out what it is that makes certain social contexts feel so artificial. I want to say, there is something missing from these
contexts—maybe
a sense of the difficulty and complexity of human life.