A Bad Dystopian Novel

Found in the Daily Planet archives, dated April 31, 1984

USA 2020—a review

by Jim E Olsun

First time novelist, Peter Parker, has produced one of the most outlandish pieces of fiction of the year. While USA 2020 is certainly an imaginative work, it stretches credulity past the breaking point by throwing in disaster on top of disaster and imagines a year where the president of the United States is a failed businessman, casino operator, and former TV star who attempts to use the office to make himself into the type of dictator more often found in Latin American countries and spends his time sending crazy messages to the public who apparently carry personal computers in their pockets disguised as mobile phones. (I am imagining the author intends this as some type of satire.)

The book has five gigantic wildfires sweeping across California and three burning through Colorado, so many hurricanes cropping up in the Atlantic Ocean that the meteorologists run out of people's names and have to use Greek letters, and a derecho (I had to look that one up—it's a rare windstorm) devastating much of Iowa and Illinois. The book also has multiple killings of Black men and women by police culminating in over 10,000 protests throughout the summer. A whole novel could have been written about any of these horrors but to claim that they all occurred in one year is way too much. There is even the mention of something called “murder hornets”.

Yet this doesn't even approach the biggest disaster facing the various people caught up in this insane imagining of a year in this country. The author actually throws in a plague-like pandemic which virtually shuts down the nation (and most of the world) and makes it completely unlikely that half of this stuff would occur. Then the author throws in characters who claim that the pandemic is a hoax and refuse to take measures to ensure their safety even as hundreds of thousands die around them.

To top all of this off, there is a presidential election that is unimaginable, won by career politician who barely campaigns. Although he is your typical presidential figure, his wife is a college professor who insists on being called Doctor and intends to keep her career rather than settling into being a first lady, his vice president is not only a woman but born of immigrant parents from Jamaica and India, and her Jewish husband refers to himself as the “Second Gentleman”. (The author certainly subscribes to political correctness) Although they win both the popular and electoral votes, the sitting president (who comes across as an out of control narcissist) refuses to acknowledge this and incites his followers claiming that the election was stolen through voter fraud.

This leads to the most unbelievable part of the novel, as it ends with a mob breaking into the Capitol building wearing fur and horned helmets and carrying spears and a Confederate flag, running around trying to find the vice-president so they could hang him while members of congress hide under their desks. Just the idea that so many people could just break into the US Capitol, one of the most secure buildings on the planet, with that much ease is simply highly unrealistic.

I am giving this book a C+ rating, only because it is a first attempt and is so highly imaginative, if equally improbable. My suggestion is that the author focus on only one disaster at a time in his next book. A year that had that many things go wrong in it is obviously impossible.

 

Social Change is Slow

I sometimes joke that the reason why I like cleaning things so much, is that I’ve been involved with both mental health work and social change for most of my life, and improvement in both cases takes decades. With cleaning, you can see changes quickly. It gives me fairly instant gratification.

Since blog is dedicated to social change, I want to talk about, not only how slow social change is, but why it is so slow.

I want to start with an example where social change seemed fairly rapid, but wasn't.  I’m talking about the campaign for same sex marriage.

Although I remember much of this, I refreshed my memory with the Wikipedia article on the history of same sex marriage in the United States.

By 2007, at least twenty-one states had bans on same-sex marriage and it was legal only in one state: Massachusetts.  At that point it seemed like more and more states were writing ordinances against it. It looked hopeless. The tide seemed against same sex marriage.

In 2008, even though the California Supreme Court legalized same sex marriage, voters overturned the decision and two more states passed bans on it. Only tiny Connecticut legalized it.

In 2009, it was legalized in Vermont, New Hampshire, and the District of Columbia, and almost in Maine. In 2011, it was legalized in New York. In 2012, Maine, Maryland, and Washington state legalized it. In 2013, California, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, Hawaii, and Illinois followed suit. Suddenly, there was momentum.

In 2014, it became legal in fifteen more states due to various court decisions. There were court decisions that upheld marriage bans that year as well, but change was clearly happening.

On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled that all states were required to issue licenses to same sex couples.  

That seems like fairly rapid change, until you realize that activists had been pushing for same sex marriage since the 1970s.  What changed in the twenty first century? Mostly, the issue of ‘gay rights’ had been before the public so long, that young people didn't understand why same sex couples weren't allowed to marry. One thing I noticed at the time was that President Obama came out in favor of same sex marriage before the Supreme Court decision, but after a poll was published where, for the first time, a majority of Americans approved of same sex marriage.

Max Planck said that science advances one funeral at a time (or something like that).  So does social change.  And where a campaign can take decades, systemic social change (transforming a whole society, which is what I am calling Social Alchemy), takes even longer.  I once was a revolutionary, but as I have studied history, I’ve learned that isn't the way it works.

The Soviet Union is an example of how not to do communism. Don't foist it on millions of people from the top down.  I think Twin Oaks is an example of communism done right. It is small, voluntary, and built from the ground up. A basic permaculture principle is “Use small and slow solutions.” There's a good reason for that.

I am not a big fan of Karl Marx, but I think he gets a bad rap.  He would not have approved of the Soviet Union. That was Lenin’s doing.  And, surprisingly, he even had good things to say about capitalism. He definitely thought it was an improvement on feudalism, which preceded it.

And if we want to get beyond capitalism, and replace it, it's probably useful to look at how capitalism replaced feudalism.

There are several different views on the rise of capitalism, but what they have in common is that it was a gradual process that happened over centuries. Adam Smith didn't start capitalism, he merely documented its rise.

And for that reason, I think it will take decades, or more likely centuries to replace it. Of course, the question is, whether it will wipe us out (see my most recent posts) before it can be transformed. And my answer, again, is I don't know. But I do know that it can't be rushed.

It's a sexist quote, but it sums up the dilemma. Warren Buffett said, “You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”  And you can't produce a new society overnight by any means that won't result in something worse.

Quote of the Day: “We are beginning to understand that the world is always being made fresh and never finished; that activism can be the journey rather than the arrival…” - Grace Lee Boggs

Commune Dramas

I often joke that all these utopian communities that I’ve heard folks dream up would work great if they didn't need to be filled with people. When someone can't figure out why it’s so hard to start communities or why so many fall apart, I want to just say, “It’s people!”  Communities are made up of imperfect people. It's the only kind of people I know of.

We recently had a visit from a leader in the communities movement. He and I spent a couple of hours going over some of the turmoil roiling through various communities. He made some remark about all the ‘commune dramas’.

Even more recently, I was on call with members of the Federation of Egalitarian Communities. (The good news is that our little commune, Cotyledon, is now officially a Community in Dialogue with the FEC. It was approved of with Guinea Pig noises. I’m not making that up! Who says that communards don't have a sense of humor?) We spent more than a half hour of that call talking about just some of the conflicts and problems that were going on at a member community dealing with some serious issues. When it was finally decided that we had talked through stuff as much as we could and figured out what kind of support the FEC could bring to the commune in question, we decided to turn to other business and the woman facilitating the call announced to a completely different community, “I should make you a certificate for being the ‘Community with the Most Problems, Spring, 2018’.  You could put it up on your wall.” (Again, humor. Very necessary.) We then launched into a discussion about some of the many difficulties that this other community was dealing with.

Commune dramas happen (and dramas happen at co-ops and cohousing communities, although not as often and intensely since people at those communities aren't as intimately involved) because you have lots of very imperfect people trying to work closely together to do some really tricky stuff.

On top of that, even the most isolated communes have lots of people going in and out and these people bring all of the problems of society (competition, scapegoating, racism, patriarchy, privilege, homophobia, intolerance, sensitivity, judgement, etc) in with them. Communes are always struggling with the question of who they will accept and who they won't and when to ask someone to leave and what behaviors can be tolerated (or not).  If you limited communities to only people who have it all together, they would be empty. As a result, there is lots of struggle and lots of drama at the communes. Given that, it's amazing, when you think about it, that a community like Twin Oaks could last more than fifty years (and it's still going). I think that’s an an incredible victory.

I have little illusions that  communes are all wonderful utopias.  I see the myriad problems that they deal with. I’ve seen the dark side of communal living.  It comes with the territory.

So, when you hear me go, “Rah! Rah! Community!”, know that it's because I believe strongly in what they are trying to achieve. Yes, in many ways they are poor vehicles for social change. But I don't know of anything better.

Quote of the Day: “Folks have found their own level after the first years of being overwhelmed.  Some of them have been disappointed with the lack of emotional intimacy, while others, especially teens, have felt uncomfortable living in a fishbowl.

“At times, most of us have probably asked ourselves, ‘What am I doing here?’--a question, I believe, that arises from a complex calculation of time and energy spent and one’s tolerance for conflict.  Sometimes I’ve asked myself, after a difficult confrontation, why I should put so much of my life energy into something that seems, at the time, to give back little. Yet I’m sure that at other times each of us has surely declared: ‘I can't imagine living anywhere else!’--a response to the very personal exchanges that make living in community so rewarding.” - Roberta Wilson  

Reclaiming the Commons

In 1968, Garrett Hardin wrote an often cited paper for Science magazine, called “The Tragedy of the Commons”.  He claimed that any common property “remorselessly generates tragedy” since it’s to the advantage of each individual to use as much of this common thing that they share (called by those who deal with this stuff, “The Commons”) and thus deplete it to the point no one could use it.  While this might make some theoretical sense, many writers since (most notably Elinor Ostrum--who I talked about in my post on Original Virtue, 9/14/08) have pointed out that tribal societies have managed the commons without difficulty for generations and generations.

The book, Whose Common Future? by the staff of the magazine The Ecologist (subtitle “Reclaiming the Commons”), is an in depth look at the use and misuse of the commons.  They begin by citing several examples from around the world where local folks carefully manage their common assets.  They point out that tribes, neighborhoods, and societies have developed checks and balances so that no one takes a lot more than their share and resources are sustained rather than depleted.

Then they look at the enclosure movement, which was the end of common property and the beginning of almost all property being private. (For more on this see my post on Land, 5/28/09, where I reference Whose Common Future?)  The book goes into great detail about globalization and privatization, how power elites want to manage the commons and profit from it.

In their final chapter, called “Reclaiming the Commons”, the writers return to examples of how people can take back common resources and how they can collectively manage it.  They finish with “A Concluding Remark” where they are careful point out that they have no policy recommendations.  First, because policy recommendations assume that there’s some policy-makers that they want to appeal to, which is once again giving power to the elites.  And, most importantly, it implies that there are global, overall solutions where their point is that the commons need to be managed by local communities and in each case, the community itself will find a way that works for that specific community.  Local solutions are diverse solutions.

Quote of the Day:  “One cannot legislate the commons into existence; nor can the commons be reclaimed simply by adopting ‘green techniques’ such as organic agriculture, alternative energy strategies or better public transport--necessary and desirable though such strategies often are.  Rather, commons regimes emerge through ordinary people’s day-to-day resistance to enclosure, and their efforts to regain the mutual support, responsibility and trust that sustain the commons.” - The Ecologist

Chimps, Bonobos, and Tribes

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about our primate relatives and what their social structure says about what human beings are capable of being.  

Way back at the beginning of this blog, I wrote posts about Bonobos and Chimpanzees (7/30/08) and about Peacemaking among Primates (a book by Frans de Waal) in a post entitled Peace on Earth  (12/24/08).  These bonobos and chimpanzees are our closest animal relatives.

In many ways the behaviors of chimps and bonobos couldn’t be more different.  In a very broad generality, chimpanzees are hierarchical, patriarchal, competitive, and violent, whereas bonobos tend to be more egalitarian, matriarchal, cooperative, and much less violent.  In books like Our Inner Ape (another book by Frans de Waal) they represent opposing tendencies that humans have--people perhaps are a bit of both.  But is there any behavior that both species have in common?

Here’s one.  Both chimps and bonobos are what’s called fission-fusion species.  Baboons, orangutans, and spider monkeys are as well--and so are humans.  What this means is that populations combine and separate.    Often during the day they split up and travel in little groups and at night they all get back together.  This is especially common among the chimps and bonobos.  To quote Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre, “The most fluid societies of any nonhuman primate are found among chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), humanity's nearest living relatives.”

The point is that chimps, bonobos, and humans are all tribal animals.  There is a bigger ‘parent group’ (which I will refer to as the tribe) and smaller subgroups (which I’ve heard called clans or bands).  Again, quoting Couzin and Laidre: “More than 99% of human history was spent in a hunter-gatherer existence, characterized by dynamically shifting social groupings at multiple levels. At the highest tier in hunter-gatherer societies is the ethno-linguistic group or ‘tribe’, formed by several local ‘bands’ that fuse together when resources like water are clustered during dry seasons. Bands themselves, which are made up of around 30 individuals, break up into smaller foraging parties during daily forays out from a base camp. While some individuals remain at the camp to watch over youngsters and tend the old or injured, the foraging parties gather edible plant material and hunt animals, afterward bringing the bounty back to a central place for sharing and redistribution.”

We are tribal animals.  We belong in tribes.  “...99% of human was spent…” in tribes and our closest animal relatives live in fission-fusion tribes.  It’s in our biology.  So current human civilization is an anomaly.  And we are constantly trying to reform into tribes.

Conservative Republicans know this--at least at a gut level.  Their loyalty is to their tribe--and they see themselves besieged by those who don’t fit: pinkos, queers, Muslims, and Mexicans.

I think small towns and villages are our tribes--and in the cities, neighborhoods.  There was a story about the Portuguese population of East Cambridge (MA) several decades ago, that if a kid misbehaved several blocks away, his mother would know about it (via a phone call) before he got a chance to get home.  The pluses and minuses of villages, towns, and neighborhoods was that most folks knew one another.  This was a problems if you didn’t fit in--if you were too liberal or radical or queer or whatever.  But a big problem with big cities is that few people know each other and that gives many folks the liberty to be anonymously rude or worse.  You can much more easily mistreat someone you are not likely to see again.

I think intentional communities are part of what I will call the re-tribalization movement.  Even at large communities like Twin Oaks, or Dancing Rabbit, or Ganas,  I feel more at home since as I walk around I realize that I know most of the people I walk by.  Since being in community, I often feel bewildered by walking city streets and realizing that I don’t know any of the people I see.  It feels wrong somehow.

And, in larger communities, I see smaller subgroupings happening--which some of us (ironically given the info I have above) call ‘finding our tribe’.  I think these subgroups are reenacting our history of clans and bands within a tribe.  This fissioning and fusing is in our genes.

What else can we learn from primates?  I’ve talked a lot about bonobos and chimpanzees.  In my next post I want to focus on a study done with baboons.

Quote of the Day:  “...why is gossip necessary? Far from being mere small talk, gossip serves myriad vital functions within our fission–fusion societies, both at the individual level and at the group level. Gossip can facilitate social cohesion in the face of repeated separations, reminding individuals of the bonds they have with distant others. And it can also allow information to percolate through the group about the trustworthiness of each member, enabling listeners to keep track of others despite limited first-hand observation. Gossip, therefore, and maybe even language more generally, may have evolved specifically as an adaptation to the highly fission–fusion-oriented societies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.”  - Iain Couzin and Mark  Laidre

Viruses, Lichens, and Slime Molds

Life is weird.  Biologists have a basic understanding of what life is, but then there are all these exceptions  There are all these things that refuse to fit into categories.  

Like viruses.  Are viruses alive?  Depends on your definition of life.  One source refers to them as being "at the edge of life."  Another gets around the question by defining viruses as “A submicroscopic infectious agent that is unable to grow or reproduce outside a host cell.”  It further points out that a virus “is non-cellular but consisting of a core of DNA or RNA surrounded by a protein coat.”  Viruses kind of mess up the idea that there is a big divide between living things and nonliving things.  And viruses are at least closer to life than prions which still manage to cause disease in spite of not having any genetic material.

And then there’s lichens.  Lichens are not plants.  Above all, they are not mosses, although they sometimes look like them and even occasionally have names like reindeer moss that would make you think they are mosses.  They are not even one particular kind of living thing.  They are a ‘mutualistic symbiosis’, a composite of a fungi and either an alga or a cyanobacterium, and these two organisms are so intertwined that they act like a single organism.  Sometimes the organisms can not live on their own and other times they can but they look very different. One lichenologist described lichens as “...fungi that have discovered agriculture".  Lichens blur the boundary between the different ‘kingdoms’ of life: fungi, plants, and animals.

Finally there are slime molds.   The slime molds also don’t fit in a clear ‘kingdom’ model.  But what makes them really interesting is that they are a single celled creature that occasionally aggregates into a multicellular being and ends up looking something like a slug.  They’re found on every continent and seem to get everywhere.  They can find things in mazes and imitate highway systems.  Scientist love them.  (And I wrote about them in my post on Emergence on 6/10/15.)

Alive?  One thing or a conglomerate?  Uni- or multi-cellular? Life sometime just refuses to fit into easy categories.

Life is weird.  Life is wonderful.

Quote of the Day: “Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly.” - Lynn Margulis

Statified, Nesting, and Hierarchy

Oops. I thought I’d done that review of Donella Meadow’s book Thinking in Systems that I promised long, long ago but I can’t find it looking through this blog.  Unfortunately, this won’t be that review.

Thinking in Systems is a pretty good book.  I reread it regularly and I still hope to review it, but one thing that bothered me about the book was Donella Meadow’s use of the word ‘hierarchy’ to describe what I think of as nested systems.  Here’s an example:

“The world, or at least the parts of it humans think they understand, is organized in subsystems aggregated into larger subsystems, aggregated into still larger subsystems.  … This arrangement of systems and subsystems is called a hierarchy.”

She goes on to say: “Corporate systems, military systems, ecological systems, economic systems, living organisms, are arranged in hierarchies.”

I have just been rereading parts of Fritjof Capra’s The Turning Point (which I reviewed almost seven years ago in a post called Capra 1:The Turning Point, 8/23/08).  I wasn’t that impressed with much of it (I think it was more of a turning point for Capra’s thinking and work than anything out in the world) but I really liked his take on the use of the word hierarchy to describe what happens in systems.  I’m going to quote liberally from his book:

“The multileveled structure of living organisms, like any other biological structure, is a visible manifestation of the underlying processes of self-organization.  At each level there is a dynamic balance ... between systems levels.  Systems theorists sometimes call this pattern of organization hierarchical, but that word may be rather misleading for the stratified order observed in nature.  The word ‘hierarchy’* referred originally to the government of the Church.  Like all human hierarchies, this ruling body was organized into a number of ranks according to levels of power, each rank being subordinate to the one at the level above it.  In the past the stratified order of nature has often been misinterpreted to justify authoritarian social and political structures.

“To avoid confusion we may reserve the term ‘hierarchy’ for those fairly rigid systems of domination and control which orders are transmitted from the top down.  The traditional system for these structures has been the pyramid.  By contrast, most living systems exhibit multileveled patterns of organization characterized by many intricate and nonlinear pathways along which signals of information and transaction propagate between all levels, ascending as well as descending.  That is why I have turned the pyramid around and transformed it into a tree, a more appropriate symbol for the ecological nature of stratification in living systems.  As a real tree takes its nourishment through both its roots and its leaves, so the power in a systems tree flows in both directions, with neither end dominating the other and all levels interacting in interdependent harmony to support the functioning of the whole.

“The most important aspect of the stratified order in nature is not the transfer of control but rather the organization of complexity.”

(The asterisk (*) in the fifth line of this quote refers to the following note: “From the Greek hieros (‘sacred’) and arkhia (‘rule’).”)

I totally agree with Capra’s take on systems and hierarchy except I would use the term nesting (like Russian dolls) rather than stratified to describe systems within systems within systems.  The hierarchies of corporations and the military are completely different from the way that living organisms and ecological systems are organized.  There is no one at the top of a living system that gives commands.  Rather you have decentralized systems enfolded within decentralized systems and things are worked out by emergence.  (See my last post.)

I understand what Donella Meadows is saying about the need for system to work within systems, but I agree with Fritjof Capra that we need a different word rather than ‘ hierarchy’ to name this process.

Quote of the Day:  “Hierarchies evolve from the lowest level up--from the pieces to the whole, from cell to organ to organism, from individual to team… Life started with single cell bacteria,  not with elephants. The original purpose of a hierarchy is always to help its originating subsystems do their jobs better.  This is something, unfortunately, that both the higher and lower levels of a greatly articulated hierarchy easily can forget.  Therefore, many systems are not meeting our goals because of malfunctioning hierarchies.”  - Donella Meadows

(Add:  I would say the beginning of this as ‘Nested systems emerge from the lowest level up….’)

Emergence

Emergence by Steven Johnson is a wonderful, frustrating book.  

It starts off talking about slime molds, which are sort of the mascot of the self-organizing systems world.  These are tiny single celled creatures that, when threatened, coalesce into a multicellular organism.  For years scientists searched for the ‘pacemaker’ cells that started the process.  It turns out there are no pacemakers.  Slime molds have a completely decentralized method of coalescing.  

I’ve referenced Steven Johnson before--way back in a post on Clustering and Coping (8/13/08).  Even then I mentioned he had a book called Emergence.  I just hadn’t read it until recently.  I picked it up in the bookstore that I’m now working in when I visited it in November.  I’ve now read it twice.

One of the things it reminds me of is Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s book, The Starfish and the Spider, which I’ve talked about in two early posts: Catalysts and Network Weavers (8/31/08) and Decentralization (12/9/08).  The big difference is that Brafman and Beckstrom’s book focuses on the phenomenon of decentralization, where Johnson focuses on emergence which is a decentralized process.  In some ways this is the most important process in self-organization.  And, in many ways, it’s unpredictable.

What’s wonderful about Emergence is how clearly Johnson spells out what’s involved in the process.  What’s frustrating is that he seems seduced by its uses in corporate culture, cybernetics and the internet, and particularly entertainment systems.  However he does cover (briefly) cell systems and immune systems, and spends more time with cities as organisms (which I find very interesting) before he gets caught in the morass of the world wide web and online games.

However, just when I was about to give up on the book, he steers into emergence and decentralization in politics and gives the WTO Seattle protests of 1999 as an example.  (Of course, this type of organizing was going on long before this--I see it dating back to feminist and anarchist organizing in the 1970s.  For more about what was happening back then, see my post Social Movements in the Seventies, 3/30/09.)  I wish he spent more time on this.

This is a good book to read in conjunction with other systems books and books on decentralization.  By itself, it’s only a small (but significant piece) but it’s incredibly useful in understanding the whole.  I’ll end with the warning at the end of the book: “...it is both the promise and the peril of swarm logic that the higher level behavior is almost impossible to predict in advance.  You never really know what lies at the other end of a phase transition until you press play and find out.  That is the lesson of Gerald Edelman’s recipe for simulating a flesh-and-blood organism: you set up a system of various pattern-recognition devices and feedback loops, connecting the virtual organism to a simulated environment.  And then you see what happens.”

That’s emergence.

Quote of the Day:  “This emphasis on rules might seem like the antithesis of the open-ended, organic systems… but nothing could be further from the truth.  Emergent systems... are rule governed systems: their capacity for learning and growth and experimentation derives from their adherence to low-level rules…  If any of these systems… suddenly started following their own rules, or doing away with rules altogether, the system would stop working: there’d be no global intelligence, just a teeming anarchy of isolated agents, a swarm of without logic.  Emergent behaviors… are all about living within the boundaries defined by rules, but also using that space to create something greater than the sum of its parts.” - Steven Johnson

Community as a Living Organism

At one of the visitor’s nights here, a young man was asking for details on how Ganas functioned.  He was curious about whether it could be replicated.

Earlier a few people were talking about the differences between Twin Oaks and Ganas.  After the visitor made the remark about replicating Ganas, I pointed out that one of the similarities between Twin Oaks and Ganas is that each is a unique community, in many ways different from just about any other community out there--and, naturally, different from each other.  And that was because each of them had changed significantly to be what they are.  Neither is what they were planned to be, each is what they grew to be.

People have mentioned in meetings that I’ve been in that Ganas was not even intended as a community.  It started as a group of people who were experimenting with a process (‘Feedback Learning’) and began living together in order to do this together.  It was only when a visitor remarked that they were an intentional community that Ganas took on this identity.

Twin Oaks was started as an attempt to replicate the fictional community described in BF Skinner’s novel Walden Two.  While a sharp eyed student of psychology could probably spot a few behavioral components to Twin Oaks even now, I doubt that Skinner would want to claim it if he was alive and few Twin Oakers think of themselves as behaviorist.  It’s more what you’d get if you took the behavioral paradise and turned it over to the care of a bunch of new age hippies and then let it mellow for nearly fifty years.

Both Mildred Gordon and Kat Kinkade (the more famous founders of Ganas and Twin Oaks, respectively) left the communities that they helped start, were often critical of what they became, and literally returned to their communities to die.  (Kat Kinkade was buried at TO.  Mildred Gordon died this past January and there was a memorial held for her in Manhattan in February.)

The point is that the communities didn’t turn out the way the founders thought they would.  Each community (and I think this is true of many other communities--Sandhill, Acorn, Dancing Rabbit, East Wind, The Farm, etc, etc) evolved and grew in its own fashion, in ways that the founders didn’t anticipate or even want.  And I think that this is what healthy communities do.  They develop a life of their own.

This is why mature communities aren’t replicable.  They have grown to be what they are.  No one would design a community like Twin Oaks or Ganas, just as they weren’t designed to be what they are.  They grew into it.  They evolved.

And this is important to remember.  Communities have life cycles, the way that people do and even the way that ant colonies do.  As a community matures, it changes.  It’s got to change.  If a community doesn’t change, it dies.

Quote of the Day:  “...life ... repairs, maintains, re-creates, and outdoes itself.” - Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan

Food Chain!

One of the many cool things that they do at Ganas is to organize a chain of people to get stuff up from the truck on the street that they use to get food to the pantry (or other places) in the houses way above.  (Since Ganas is on a hillside, you need to go up a long flight of stairs to get from the street to the houses.)  It’s sort of like one of those old fashioned bucket brigades.

Someone yells, “Food chain!” at dinner and anyone who feels strong and abled bodied goes out and helps.  Groceries are passed from one person to the next on their way to the pantry.  

I was watching the behavior of the chain with a systems theorist’s eye.  It was amusing seeing the people bunch up on one end and then on the other.  The whole thing reminded me of a slinky stretching back and forth in waves.

Fortunately, most folks are in a good mood while doing it and it really does make what could be a difficult task fairly easy and fun.  As a result, the whole thing works very well.  And then it’s done before you know it--and folks go back to dinner.  And all the food is now up the hill and in the pantry.

It’s pretty amazing what you can accomplish with a little co-operation.

Quote of the Day: “Obedience may have its uses, but it is no substitute for willing, uncoerced co-operation.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

Becoming MoonRaven, Sleeping Submarine Style, and Other Tales from the Communes

I’ve been living down in Virginia since the beginning of this year, mostly at Twin Oaks and Acorn.  (And taking side trips with the Point A crew up to Baltimore and New York.)  As of the end of this month, I will be moving into the Ganas Community on Staten Island.  But I’ll miss living at the Virginia communes.  They are, in many ways, the flagships of the income sharing communities movement in the US.  Here are some stories and reflections from my nearly three months here.

As many readers may have guessed, my real name isn’t MoonRaven (or Moon--first name--Raven--last name, as I’m listed on gmail).  I used the name, beginning over ten years ago, because I wanted to remain anonymous on the internet.  It’s the name Paxus at Twin Oaks first knew me as, because I would comment on his blog using it.  When I finally met him in person, I told him my real name and he said he preferred to think of me as MoonRaven because it was more poetic.  

When I moved down to the Virginia communities in January to help him with his Point A project, Pax asked if I’d go by that name.  My real first name is quite common and people at the communes often take new, exotic names--partly to avoid confusion with other people who have the same mundane names.

So I agreed to go by MoonRaven down here and that’s what people know me as at Twin Oaks and Acorn these days. I’m even considering keeping it when I move to Ganas in a few weeks.  Ironically the name I’m using on this blog and elsewhere on the internet to cloak my identity, has now become the name I’m using day to day--I’m getting getting used to people saying “Hey MoonRaven”.  In a way, now I’ve become MoonRaven and left the name I was born with behind.

When I came down to Virginia in January, Pax and I decided I’d stay at Twin Oaks for a while.  There was no visitor program until the end of the month and so I stayed in Aurora, the lovely visitors cabin that I stayed in during my two previous visitor periods.  However, ‘visitor’ has a particular meaning at TO.  It means you are part of the visitor program.  Since I wasn’t part of the program this time, I was a ‘guest’, which means a TO member hosts you, and I was welcome to stay at Aurora until the next visitor program started.  When it did, I moved over to Acorn, which does not have a visitors cabin.  

When I stayed at Acorn the first time, it was September and I stayed in a tent.  Last time I was here I got lucky and was able to stay in the new seed building.  This time I’ve been staying in a small building that Acorn has been using to house visitors, guests, and interns.  

I didn’t get my own room this time.  The building I’m staying in is one big room where someone has built a wall of bunks for people to sleep in.  I imagine it being the way that sailors sleep in bunks in a submarine.  There can be as many as five other folks sleeping around me--and one night I think we might have had six since there was also one person sleeping on a couch that someone moved into the place.  For a few nights recently, I was the only one sleeping in the building, but last night I think there were three other folks sleeping there besides me.

Both Twin Oaks and Acorn are farming communities and both communities grow food.  They also both have animals.  Twin Oaks has chickens and a herd of dairy cows.  Acorn has chickens, and goats, and pigs, and some rabbits, and a stray cow that wandered over and looks silly amidst the goats, and two dogs named Horus and Odin, and an indeterminate number of little cats (one of which regularly tries to sneak into the bunkhouse I’m sleeping in).

Aside from farming, Acorn’s one business and concern is the seed business.  Twin Oaks, on the other hand, is very diverse.  Besides hammocks and tofu (their main businesses) they also doing indexing for books (something that dates back to their early days) and sell ornamental flowers.   One of their more interesting sources of income comes from a nearby college that got a fancy arena that can have several different kinds of flooring, depending on the type of event they want to host.  They’ve hired a team from TO to change the flooring regularly.  

And besides tofu, Twin Oaks also makes tempeh, something I’ve participated in on occasion.  They steam soybeans and then sprinkle a culture on the beans.  Then someone (and I’ve done this) needs to spend several minutes working (nearly kneading) the mold spores into the beans (inoculating them).  The beans are then put in little bags which will be kept warm until the mycelium grow and the beans ferment.

At Acorn, mostly what I’ve done is pack seeds and pick seeds.  Packing seeds involves weighing out a measured amount and putting it in a packet which is then sealed.  I’m given instructions to do this for some number of packets ranging from six to four hundred.  It’s a fairly repetitive task.  When I’m done the seeds are put in the seed room.  Picking seeds involves looking at orders people have sent or called in and going into the seed room and walking around finding the seeds and rubber banding together all packets of seeds that make up an order.

Ironically, the work that I’ve been doing most often the last few days is washing dishes.  Like any community Acorn provides meals and people dirty dishes.  This week there have been a lot of people away and the usual dishwashers were gone--and no one signed up to do dishes.  I volunteered a few times.  Dishwashing is particularly daunting here because, unlike Twin Oaks or Ganas, it’s pretty much a solo task.  One meal can be eaten by twenty to forty people, plus cooking equipment and miscellaneous dishes and cups from people snacking.  

If no one does the dishes after a meal (which is what was happening), it means the dishes begin piling up in the dish room.  I was ending up cleaning a good twenty-four or more hours worth of people’s dishes on a couple of occasions.

And, of course, my main focus has been working on Point A projects with my comrades Paxus and Triple Threat Tony.  We’ve been having breakfast meetings where we lovingly grump at each other and divide up the tasks.  One of my latest task lists begins with my first task (sent by TTT): do “not do any more dish shifts”.

I will miss working face to face with these two folks.  I’ll continue working with them by email after I move to NYC, but it won’t be the same.  And I know I’ll need to come down here again, since I think of this place as the heart of a movement towards working cooperatively, collectively, together.

Quote of the Day:  “It amazes me how difficult it is for people to think in terms of collective phenomenon.” - Evelyn Fox Keller

Looking at Darkness and Light

This is the first year that I didn't write a post for Samhain (Halloween) and this post is a bit late for solstice and a bit early for Yule (Christmas).  Several years ago I wrote a post around this time of year entitled  The Darkness and the Light (12/21/10).  I nearly entitled this post that before I discovered I had already used the title.

Darkness and light are major themes for me around this time of year.  I'll admit, in spite of how horribly unsustainable they are, I'm a sucker for the holiday light displays, especially huge, multi-colored ones.  But, as I've written, the most gaudy, garish light display looks pretty pathetic in daylight, even as it looks so spectacular at night.  Candlelight is awesome in the darkness and barely noticeable in the light of the day and, of course, stars can't even be seen in daytime.  We need the darkness in order to appreciate the light.

This year, the darkness for me is confusion and uncertainty and potential.  The small, multicolored lights are the little things that I think I know, my few concrete plans for the upcoming year.  (Visiting Twin Oaks, Acorn, and my cousins in Virginia, and, at some point, getting into Ganas--and, hopefully, coming back to Boston to visit.)  Pema Chödrön writes about being Comfortable with Uncertainty.  I'm not sure that I'm actually comfortable with it, but at this point I am learning to cope with the confusion and uncertainty and potential in my life.  I feel like I've got all these things I need to do over the next week and then I get on the train south on New Year's Day--and then I just don't know.  I have nothing scheduled.

So I intend to enjoy Christmas, both the get together on Christmas eve with folks that I built community with so long ago and have been with each Christmas eve for eighteen some years, and then Christmas day with my family of origin, with loving sisters and brothers and nieces and a grand-nephew.  And then I chug off into the unknown.

I hope that whatever your holiday plans are (including fleeing the madness to a silent place or doing the traditional Chinese food and movies) you enjoy yourself, you enjoy this first taste of winter (assuming you're in the northern hemisphere), and that you enjoy the darkness and the little lights.  And may you find your way into the new year.


Quote of the Day: "I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light." ― Barbara Brown Taylor