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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] sustainable and humane model
  • Date: Mon, 01 Sep 2003 05:19:05 -0600

a reply to a list about intentional community

Agree completely with trying to replace much of our culture with "a more
sustainable and humane one". And I would agree that "anyone with an
alternative vision of community is free to join with others and try to create
it" - EXCEPT that freedom is denied to so many by the facts of life. They
should be free, but freedom to do so depends on being able to afford it,
having the time to do it, and other constraints. Millions really need
affordable, sustainable alternatives, yet many of these pie-in-the-sky plans
mean nothing to them. And that doesn't change society, it stratifies it
further between haves and have-nots. I'm a retiree on a fixed income, lucky
not to be one of the disabled or chronically ill, lucky not to suffer many of
the disadvantages of others, and I'm dealing with these issues now in my own
life.

You point out that
People
>are getting together to share their lives in many
>different ways, and the attempts are all important
>parts of the IC movement

Yes, that's so. But whether all those ways are your "more sustainable and
humane" social arrangements is the question -- hmm?

I'm curious what people really want when they yearn for intentional
community. Is it to regain something they never had, some sense of
belonging? The one-house-and-2.5-offspring model is unsatisfactory, and many
are alienated even from that small family. Yet that's all they know. Is it
to keep up the comradeship of dorm life or the frat house model? And is that
sustainable and humane? Is that a model for society?

The most sustainable and humane social arrangement through history has been
the small town/village composed of extended families, and it still exists in
many places, here and worldwide. Sustainable because it's worked for eons,
among other reasons, and humane because it has the natural safety net for
those who need it, young and old. It flourishes naturally everywhere it's
allowed to arise out of universal human needs, and contrasts with the
alienated commercial model of today that creates more social ills than it can
cure. If we "intend" to have "community" at all, then sustainable and humane
is the litmus test. I suspect this is the only kind of community that people
don't consider, possibly because they never knew it in the past. But maybe
their great-grandparents did.


paul tradingpost@gilanet.com

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau

That is well said, replied Candide, but we must cultivate our garden.
--Voltaire [Francois-Marie Arouet] Candide




  • [Livingontheland] sustainable and humane model, Tradingpost, 09/01/2003

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