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.
5 comments:
The crumbs become tastier as we began to think about this town, the alternate world. The town will be established by people who largely agree with its intentions, but some of their children will have different ideas or will rebel against the town's ethos just to assert a distinct identity. Which raises the question of dissent. How much is to be tolerated? How will that be decided? How will the rules be enforced? In short, what happens as the desires of the citizens evolve?
Disagreement will arise even in the first generation, for at least two reasons: (1) we do not want to begin with a group of people who think all alike; we want in fact a group with diverse attitudes and opinions-- but obviously with some central agreement that brings them to the table, that makes them able to collaborate on this project. (2) Even if we did begin with an extreme uniformity of political and cultural positions, the moment people are living and working side-by-side subtle differences of a thousand kinds inevitably emerge and must be navigated.
So before a question of dissent can arise, there is first the problem of establishing any sort of consensus; and establishing that consensus will require working out a great deal of disagreement and discovering which disagreements cannot be worked out and thus what gamut must be left open for differing views; so there is some hope that, when new dissenting views emerge later on, there is already a certain flexibility to the culture, an ability to stretch to hold new ideas.
But of course not an infinite extensibility; there would be some ideas & behaviors that could not fit. There is always the possibility that a community will have to part ways with some of its members; no community can exist without that possibility. (Is "part ways" here a euphemism for "expel," "excommunicate"? Maybe under certain special circumstances, but I think that, in the great majority of cases, if someone doesn't like the culture of a town (or a social-circle, or whatever), they choose to leave.)
But there is something in your question that I have not addressed: "what happens as the desires of the citizens evolve?" This could mean: would the town hold onto its values or would it gradually revert to the mean, or else simply die out through attrition? I think of the many wonderful, weird, progressive schools and summer-camps and and coops and so on of the 1960s and '70s that, since the '90s, have lost their distinctiveness and melted back into the mainstream or else closed their doors forever. This is of course possible (and, sad as it would be, it would not make us sorry that we'd tried the thing), but the scale here is meant to help prevent dissolution. Part of my conviction here is that a school or a summer camp or a commune is too small a thing. It can't sustain itself in the long term; finally it is washed away long with everything else (and note that this is generally despite the fierce partisanship and attachment to tradition of those who have long been a part of these institutions). What is needed is something big enough to replenish itself.
a new religion? having fun reading you backwards. unspooling.
What a town would have (that a school, summer camp and maybe even a coop wouldn't) is the town itself, the land, buildings, streets, utlities, etc, things of real value in which everyone would have a material stake, giving them an incentive to resolve conflicts.
That said, I have an intuition that the town would need something else of a non-material nature, e.g. a Constitution, in which one would have a different sort of stake, without which (though maybe even with which) the town would not hold. By this I mean not just a subjective sense of common values, but an objective expression of those values, to which the founding generation would collectively contribute, and to which each individual, then and afterward, would do something like swear allegiance.
If, hypothetically, it were a Christian community, there might be some statement of Christian faith, sufficiently broad to include varieties of that faith, yet sufficiently narrow to exclude what fell outside it. As a friend of mine once said, a true community is defined, in part, by whom and what it excludes, as well as includes.
Whatever faith or principles or behavior constituted the community's faith would inevitably shift and change, but at some point they might -- perhaps inevitably would -- shift so far that the original purpose could not be revised to accommodate the change. At that point, the town would either break apart, devolve into a purely material entity, or forge a new faith.
As you point out in another comment, what you're thinking about here is closely related to what I wrote in the crumb on "Visions, more precisely." But it's also related to, and somewhat in disagreement with, what I wrote in "A society." The disagreement is over the centrality of a written "constitution" or creed. A written document always has to me the feel of a contract, a treaty, a legal commitment.
It seems to me that what we need is a system of commitments, values, and obligations as thick, as rich, and which will become as deeply rooted, as those that existed in the premodern world. Those commitments & obligations were widely understood and spoken of, but they were not and could not be wholly captured in a single document. The participants in that society had a sense of them. To a some extent I think that what we often (disparagingly) call "capitalism" is simply a world without those sorts of commitments, obligations, etc.
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