In ancient times, people unhappy with a particular way of life or ruler or set of laws could just go off into another part of the woods (or whatever landscape); this is not possible now. But the reason it is impossible is not that there are no woods to go off into. (Yes, all land is owned, but some of it can be had very cheap.) The reason is that we don’t live in the woods. Off in the wilderness, ancient people could get food, shelter, clothing in the same way they had back home but arrange their community a little differently; they could experiment without starting from scratch. But for us, to go off into the wilderness would mean to throw away everything, to hurl ourselves into a kind of life we know nothing about. This is not at all the spirit of playful and pragmatic experimentation that I had in mind, but something entirely different: a wild rejection of all civilization—starry-eyed, fantastical, most likely fanatical, culty, lunatic.
What I had in mind was to play with and within the forms of life we know, to try out variations or even inversions of them, to treat our institutions, our mores, our way of life as plastic—not to destroy them. I mean things like: alternative schools, parent groups for people who don’t let their kids on social media, networks of local production and consumption, alternative systems of healthcare, interfaith reading groups, conversations across political lines, support groups for technology addiction, etc.
Of course, some of these things already exist, but they lack robustness: they are sparsely attended; they struggle to get off the ground, last a few years, go slack, fizzle. They appear as isolated and marginal phenomena. Or, when one of them gains a foothold and becomes self-sustaining (I’m thinking, for example, of certain alternative schools founded in the 1960s), they gradually become normalized: their distinctiveness slips away, and they come to resemble the ranks of established, mainstream institutions that they have joined. These various experiments never coalesce into a solid way of life, a movement, a culture of experimentation, or a viable alternative culture of any kind. They do not gather enough mass to hold themselves together, to give people a feeling of something solid, real, and reliable, something that can withstand the relentless disintegrating force of marketing, ease, abundance, safety, convenience, entertainment, lethargy, and despair.
They do not gather enough mass—what is the mass in this metaphor? It is people. There are just not enough people conducting these experiments, in communion with one another. This is in part because many of these experiments self-marginalize—because they are founded by young people with limited perspectives, radical politics, the stubbornness and narrowness of idealism; or by cranks; or by crackpots; because they have bad ideas baked into them; because they are created in a spirit of anger and rejection; because they are more vanity, theory and play-acting than plain practical doing; and maybe, besides all these other reasons, because they lack an element traditionally provided by religion and which we now don’t know quite where to access: an ability to reach towards fundamentals, to bind people by something deeper than ideas.
So, the first question is, as I said two crumbs back, where and how do we find and gather the people. But entailed in this question is another question: which people are we trying to find? How will we know them? Because, obviously, when we say “find the people” we don’t mean any people; we mean people who share something, some set of values, principles, vision, willingness to act. But we also don’t want people who are too alike. We want a diversity of viewpoints, temperaments, backgrounds, skills, professions—as great a diversity as possible—and yet, with some core something in common. What is that something?
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