Community

I listened to the recent podcast on permaculture thorns and purchased the unfinished book this morning and plan to read it this weekend. I had some thoughts and I wanted to get a conversation going around those thoughts, if possible, and any other thoughts. I have been having these thoughts for years and years.

We have what could be considered a large family by today’s standards. 6 kids so far, myself and my wife so 8 total. We have lived together in intentional community or some variation of that 3 times (depending on how you’d define the term). The first time was full-time RV’ing with another family. We had 3 kids at the time, had the 4th during the time and were pregnant with the 5th when the time ended. The other family had 4 kids, then a 3rd family joined with 3 kids.

The second time we lived in a house with 2 other families and eventually went down to the homeowner’s family and ours. The homeowners had 2 kids, and the 3rd family had 3 kids.
The third time we invited a single person to stay at our property we bought after we stopped traveling full time.

These experiences ran their course and ended for various reasons and were generally positive experiences except for the last one.

Due to the size of our family, I was always asking myself why the nuclear family seems to experience less strife than a collection of various people living intentionally. For a while, I was certain that it was due to the hierarchal nature of the family, structure, and the heightened level of communication inside that nuclear family unit.

I still think those things are very important, structure, some rules and lots of communication but I have shifted away from them being the primary things that make the nuclear family generally work out well when intentional communities have a high failure rate.

My current train of thought on this is in reference to culture juxtaposed against the family, in some ways. The family IS an intentional community. It must function that way for the survival of that community/unit. Our culture and institutions, along with most families in how they function, are training the community members (family) to become autonomous, independent, successful (?) members, at a future time, within our culture. This culture prizes those very things, autonomy, independence, success.

In the past, participation in the community was prized, trained, and sought after by most. An extended community of nuclear families, local economy, etc. You basically just continued what you did while you were growing up and translated that into a much larger family that is the community. Now, we are taking people, born into an intentional/necessary community, and training them to be independent and autonomous one day in the future.

This is highly contextual and nuanced. An example would be that our children are taught to cook, clean, do household chores, homestead chores, etc. from a very early age. Not from necessity as in times past but to afford them the opportunity to serve one another. My neighbor could be doing the exact same thing, but the purpose is so that his family members can one day become self-sufficient, independent and autonomous.

To keep this short, I think hierarchy, structure and communication are very important. I do think one of the main challenges is that although most of us experience community within our nuclear family, during that time and after, we are trained to seek autonomy, independence and success as defined by culture.

Where the common goal used to be the success of the community, it is now the success of the individual.

So, for whatever reason someone desires community later in life, that person has the baggage of an entire life lived being trained by the family and culture to be autonomous.

That can become very challenging to overcome no matter how much desire there is for community.

Jackson Bradley wrote:I was always asking myself why the...nuclear family generally work out well when intentional communities have a high failure rate.

I think you're on to something with our changing acculturation practices, but I also want to insert something about this. At least some of it must have to do with the cost of failure. When it's relatively easy to separate, more separations happen. You can argue the merits of easy marital divorce, and I see truth in both sides, but it's an example of the trend. If I'm one family and you're another one and I didn't know how weird you were going to be when we moved in together, I'm not going to consider it the end of the world to just leave. (Maybe that changes if we've lived that way for twenty years, but I bet things don't usually make it that long before dissolving.) If a married couple splits, it's a big deal. If a bigger family comes more generally unhinged, what does it even mean? It's so bad, that only people in really exceptional circumstances allow it to happen.

Christopher Weeks wrote:
I think you're on to something with our changing acculturation practices, but I also want to insert something about this. At least some of it must have to do with the cost of failure. When it's relatively easy to separate, more separations happen. You can argue the merits of easy marital divorce, and I see truth in both sides, but it's an example of the trend. If I'm one family and you're another one and I didn't know how weird you were going to be when we moved in together, I'm not going to consider it the end of the world to just leave. (Maybe that changes if we've lived that way for twenty years, but I bet things don't usually make it that long before dissolving.) If a married couple splits, it's a big deal. If a bigger family comes more generally unhinged, what does it even mean? It's so bad, that only people in really exceptional circumstances allow it to happen.

This is a great point, Christopher, and thank you for commenting. This idea is what I was hinting at when I said we teach the kids to do such and such but not out of necessity. I am not sure if we are fortunate or unfortunate that this is the case. I don't have the opposing experience to compare.

This idea was covered somewhat in the thorns podcast on some folks seeing the intentional community as a necessity in the future due to rising costs and especially property costs. Also, Paul mentioned incentivizing people to stay long term with the goal of owning a piece of the community there after a period of time. That certainly could make the cost of failure increase.

This also puts me in mind of employee-owned cooperatives and the increased investment each person has in the success of the whole.

I think your post is thoughtful and insightful as always. I don’t feel as attached to community ideals as others because living in an old community, yes, it isn’t a replacement for family but rather something that happens when there are a lot of families together.

Personally, I try to find ways outside of hierarchy to relate well with others. I think an essential component of this is personal space, AKA “good fences make good neighbors”. Not necessarily that we need to hole up in caves, but a stepping aside for one another, and a knowing (and being able to defend if necessary) one’s place. If everyone has a place, and others know it and respect it, then there can be some degree of harmony.

Our place is physical—the land where we garden, or sleep, or sit, where we live; it is also social and economic—we may be the one who gathers firewood, or the one who is awake at such-and-such an hour, or the one who hunts. There gets to be competition when people share a place, a niche, and with that comes fighting, domination and drama. I feel that most, the vast vast majority of decisions are up to individuals to make on how they should do X or Y or whether they should at all. I feel that it’s right for a person to have agency and autonomy over their own decisions, the sorts of things they do within their own personal domain.

I’ve come to the conclusion—don’t do another person’s chores, ever, unless they are sick or away. Leave it to them and tend to your own, but do what you can and tend to what is yours to do. And don’t try to tell people what they should be doing unless they are looking to you for direction.

In community projects, I speak if I have an idea I feel is worth mentioning, but don’t push it. If you have to push to be heard, that is a sign that you are pushing up against someone else’s niche and trying to get in their space. In the community garden, for instance, there are ideas about irrigation from the brook. One person suggested a solar pump, and I was feeling like an old fashioned hand powered one might be fine to use instead. I also mentioned earthworks, which no one else felt strongly enough to implement (though I did in my little area). But I didn’t say that—if they can make it happen then I’ll support them in whatever way I can, since I don’t have any concrete plan except to peek around antique stores when the opportunity presents itself. It hasn’t happened yet so I might think about other weird ways to make it happen.

When people come up and try to take others’ places, it’s often because they don’t have a secure place for themselves.

I have embarrassed myself by seeking a place or sense of home where I shouldn’t have, and caused friendships to go sour this way. It’s sometimes hard to find if there is bullying or domineering or people stepping on your feet in other parts of your life, or even and especially societal things like oppression/marginalization. People are constantly stepping on each other’s feet.

I think the best bet as always is partnership with nature, permaculture, creating wealth from dirt, earning our place in the community of living beings in nature. Thus Paul’s and others’ observation of how the people who are most enthusiastic about gardening tend to be the best people to be in community with—they have a place in nature, they can create their own wealth and do not need to compete for others’ niches. I think to some extent there are things that get to anyone but the more we are in partnership with nature, the less effect that has on us.

M Ljin wrote:I think an essential component of this is personal space, AKA “good fences make good neighbors”. Not necessarily that we need to hole up in caves, but a stepping aside for one another, and a knowing (and being able to defend if necessary) one’s place. If everyone has a place, and others know it and respect it, then there can be some degree of harmony.

I like this observation. There are certainly areas where this has proven true in our experiences I mentioned above. The longest lasting of those was when we were caravanning in the RV with the other families. Having the freedom of your own space and then coordinating getting together worked very well. We'd usually be right next to each other at the different places we stayed so there was a lot of random stopping by or catching each other outside as well. So in some ways, it forced interaction but it also allowed for personal space and times to focus on your family, when needed.