24
Is It Paradise Yet?

      Does the idea of living in a caring, friendly rural community appeal to you? But have you resisted exploring this lifestyle option because you can't shake the images dating back to the sixties when the media portrayed communes as being full of hippies who are into unbridled sex, drugs and sloth? Take heart. Those kinds of communes are history.

      But unfortunately, this outdated image of communes still remains firmly ingrained in the public mind. That's why those who have opted for communal life like to refer to themselves as being in "intentional communities" rather than communes.

      For a variety of reasons, the nineties have seen an explosion in communal living. But this chapter is not about people who rent houses together and share living expenses for economic reasons. The dictionary defines a commune as consisting of a group of unrelated individuals living together who share work, income and possessions. For more information see the Intentional Communities Website at www.ic.org

      The 1990-91 Directory of Intentional Communities listed 304 such groups in North America alone (primarily in the U.S.). In the 1995 edition of the directory the number jumped to more than five hundred. The year 2000, third edition of the Communities Directory has a comprehensive description of over 600 North American intentional communities as well as over 100 communities in other countries. But the actual number of such groups in North America is estimated to be over a thousand. A lot of the smaller communes refuse to be listed because they don't have the inclination or resources for responding to public inquiries.

      Kat Kinkade, one of the founders of Twin Oaks and author of two books on it, says that the people who come to communes "Speak of alienation, of commercialism, of the overwhelming influence of television, of crime in the cities, of ecological disasters, of a search for meaning, a desire to live close to nature and so forth." But what ultimately keeps then in a commune, she indicates, is love. "Whatever else brings people to a commune, the hope of a compatible mate or a close, warm group of friends is usually just underneath the surface, and the success or failure of a person to be content with a commune often depends on his success or failure in finding love."

      I also discovered that broken love affairs are one of the major reasons why members leave communes. Often they just can't endure daily contact with the person who had spurned them and seeing him or her being affectionate with another person.

      Aside from love and a sense of close-knit community, the paramount attraction to a commune such as Twin Oaks is the great variety of available activities for which you also get work credits. All adult members fifty years of age and under are required to earn 45.5 hours of labor credits a week.

      But you have a wide choice of how you will fill up your time. You can garden for a couple of hours in the morning, work on the computer for a while, make hammocks, help out at the dairy farm, give a hand at constructing a new residence hall in the early afternoon, bake bread in late afternoon and help produce or star in a play in the evening.

      Does this seem vaguely familiar? Feeling a sense of déjà vu? Twin Oaks has put into practice what communism so ignominiously failed to do: to bring into being part of Karl Marx's vision of a utopian society.

      To quote from Erich Fromm's Marx's Concept of Man, "Marx's central criticism of capitalism is not the injustice in the distribution of wealth; it is the perversion of labor into forced, alienated, meaningless work... Marx's concept of labor as an expression of man's individuality is succinctly expressed in his vision of the complete abolition of lifelong submersion of a man in one occupation. Since the aim of human development is that of the development of the total, universal man, man must be emancipated from the crippling influence of specialization."

      As Marx himself points out, the individual has had to specialize as "a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a social critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."

      The counter-culture movements of the sixties generated a plethora of communes. Most of them folded after a few years. Twin Oaks, founded in 1967 on a 123-acre tobacco farm ninety-five miles southwest of Washington D.C., not only survived but is thriving. From its original eight founding members it now has become a community of a hundred people on 465 acres and has over a million dollars in the bank. It has even founded a small, offshoot community a few miles away named "Acorn."

      Twin Oaks was originally started as an experiment to bring to life B. F. Skinner's vision of an ideal community outlined in his novel, Walden Two. With the exception of "labor credits," that require each member to perform a certain number of hours of work each week, most of Skinner's ideas had to be modified, as fiction was translated into reality.

      Here is how Twin Oakers now describe themselves: "Twin Oaks is an intentional community of 85 adults and 15 children located on 465 acres of land in rural Virginia. We are a non-sectarian community which espouses the values of cooperation and egalitarianism while striving to eliminate racism, sexism, violence, consumerism, heterosexism, ageism, and competition from our everyday lives. We believe in living lightly on the land, and conserving and reusing as much of our natural resources as possible."

      In over a quarter century of its existence Twin Oaks appears to have has been successful in meeting most of these objectives. They have attempted to achieve a balance between practical self-sufficiency, while providing opportunities for members to get involved in things they enjoy. As long-time member, Jim Adams, explained:

      "We have a fair amount of time, and therefore labor, we can put into things like gardening, farming and dairy. We raise lots of hay, some of which goes to feed the cows during the winter and the rest is used to mulch our organic, three-acre garden. We grow all the vegetables we eat during the appropriate seasons. We freeze or can large amounts of our produce.

      "Besides our garden, we grow enough grapes for jam and wine, enough apples to eat for a couple of months, plus 50 to a hundred gallons of apple sauce, a burgeoning nut orchard, enough blueberry bushes and cherry trees to provide a few gallons of fruit for pies, desserts and freezing, and a herb garden from which we dry a large amount of herbs, spices and teas we use.

      "Our dairy not only provides all the milk we can drink, but we make the rest of it into yogurt, sour cream and enough hard cheeses that we rarely have to buy any. We also grow our own beef. We manufacture all the tofu and bean dip we eat. We bake most of our own bread. Our granola is homemade."

      The mainstay of Twin Oaks' economic independence is the manufacture and sale of hammocks. Other sources of income are indexing of books and mini-factories for making tofu, light furniture and hammock pillows.

      What kind of people make up Twin Oaks? A remarkably diverse group ranging in age from two to the late sixties.

      There is an architect and former anthropologist, an English teacher, two lawyers (one of whom reviewed this chapter for accuracy), a computer consultant, a Trappist monk, a member of a rock band, a first mate who used to cruise the Caribbean waters for five years before getting bored with the sailing scene. There is also a mechanical engineer with a masters degree from MIT who was pulling down $85,000 annually before coming here. Another was making a comparable income as a consultant for ailing woodworking manufacturing companies. There is a former member of Students for a Democratic Society, who abandoned the organization when it started flirting with violence, and then went to register black voters in Mississippi. Sprinkled in are a few loners and recluses of undetermined origin, who work but do not mix very much with the rest of the community.

      Twin Oaks has its fair share of practical idealists who are living out their ideals in various ways. There are over a dozen "vegans" --individuals who will not eat meat or any dairy products. Special meals are provided for them.

      Twin Oaks has a few ground rules that might take some getting used to. No individual televisions, microwave ovens or personally owned cars. Any income you earn as a resident of Twin Oaks goes into the common treasury, except for a sixty-two dollar monthly personal allowance. But everything is provided, from health care to laundry services.

      One of the fundamental requirements is that everyone fulfill their labor quota of forty-five and a half hours, which is reduced by one hour for each year you are over fifty. And nobody is required to do any job they don't want, except everyone does kitchen duty for a couple of hours, roughly once a week. Violence and loud, angry talk are spurned. Outside of that, "Nobody agrees with anybody on anything," as one member told me.

      Like all societies, Twin Oaks has its share of conflicts and disagreements. "The biggest single misconception in the public mind about communes is that they are an escape from reality," according to Kat Kinkade. "We answer patiently that, far from running away from life or social responsibilities, we are trying to make a new and better society, and that farm life isn't idyllic."

      There is considerable difference of opinion about the social climate at Twin Oaks. One member said that "We're the closest, most loving, most caring group I ever had anything to do with." Yet another member's parting shots were: "I came here expecting to find people who worked for the good of the whole, and instead I found a lot of the same kind of selfish, suspicious, petty ways of interacting that I knew in the outside world. We seem to be constantly fighting each other and trying to limit each other rather than supporting each other. I didn't want to have to fight anymore when I came here to live; I did enough of that in the outside."

      But life at Twin Oaks is far from being all serious or controversial. When I arrived there on March 24, I spotted on the common bulletin board a popular syndicated columnist's inflammatory review of Kat Kinkade's recently published book on Twin Oaks, Is It Utopia Yet?   Most members who read the column, swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Some even shook their heads, complaining how typical it was of the reviewer's abrasive writing style. As it turned out the column was an April Fool's joke. The next day, in retaliation, a copy of a humorous legal suit appeared on the same bulletin boards couched in appropriate legalese, demanding multi-million dollars in damages.