PRESENTATION

DAN MCKANAN

Harvard Divinity School

10 Februari 2020

 

“The Challenge of Intentional Communities

from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Today”

Introduction:

Intentional communities have been important centers of social and spiritual experimentation for centuries. Nineteenth-century Americans built communities according to the utopian blueprints of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier; today, the quest for social and ecological harmony has inspired hundreds of ecovillages and cohousing developments. And a remarkable number of communal movements are now approaching their centennials. Among them is the Camphill network of communities, where people with and without intellectual disabilities share life, work, and celebration.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Transcendentalist, inspired many of his friends to create intentional communities. But he personally was skeptical. The utopian theorists, Emerson observed, had “skipped no fact but one, namely life. . . . The faculty of life spawns and scorns system and system-makers.” Though Emerson was largely right with regard to the communities of his own day, contemporary communities are more enduring because they have found ways to take the fact of life into account.

 

Rather than withdrawing from the rest of society, they seek to evolve in creative relationship with their neighbors. By this means, Camphill and other communal movements are able to foster ongoing social renewal.

 

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the greatest American philosopher of the nineteenth century, lived at a time of great social and cultural ferment. He and his contemporaries were born a generation after the American Revolution. Emerson’s grandfather had watched the first battle of the revolution from his parsonage in Concord, Massachusetts, and Emerson and his friends returned to that site again and again as they dreamed of creating a revolution of their own. Their forefathers had won political freedom; perhaps they could bring about social freedom by abolishing the distinction between rich and poor. Emerson’s close friends George Ripley and Bronson Alcott were among thousands of Americans who created intentional communities in the 1840s. Though none of these communities endured for more than a generation, they continue to inspire new communal experiments today.

George Ripley’s Brook Farm, located on the banks of the Charles River within walking distance of Boston, is the best known of the communities started in Emerson’s generation. Brook Farm called itself an “Association for Industry and Education,” and it combined the features of a farm, a village, a factory, and a school. It set out to achieve “a radical and universal reform” that would combine the many social justice causes of the era. It hoped to break down class barriers by offering education and cultural opportunities to working class people, and requiring its professional class members to work with their hands and even shovel manure. Its innovative school combined practical work with time in the classroom. No Brook Farmer was pigeonholed into a narrowly defined role; each was free to be a farmer on Monday and a teacher on Tuesday, a weaver in the morning and a student in the evening.

Brook Farm was inspired in part by Emerson’s philosophy. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” Emerson taught in his essay on “Self Reliance.” Again and again, he counseled his friends to look beyond the expectations of existing institutions and find their own path. Most of those friends discovered that such a path led not to solitary isolation, but to more intentional forms of community and cooperation. But the friends who gathered at Brook Farm also took counsel from another, stranger thinker. The French utopian thinker Charles Fourier was one of the first people to call himself a “socialist.” Troubled by the violence of the French Revolution, Fourier concluded that political democracy was not sufficient to cure the ills of humanity. Social and economic change was just as important. Fourier was committed to cooperation, and believed it could be achieved without sacrificing individual freedom and diversity. The secret, he taught, was not to suppress our passions and desires, but to give them free rein and trust that they had been divinely created to harmonize with one another. Fourier envisioned cooperative communities, known as phalanxes, in which hundreds of different personality types would practice “attractive industry” or the free choice of occupations. Some would grow apples because they liked apples, some would sew dresses because they liked the other people in the dressmakers’ group, some would flit from station to station because they liked variety, and the ten-year-old boys would clean up the toilets because, according to Fourier, ten-year-old boys like that sort of thing. Social harmony would bring about ecological harmony, dangerous and annoying animals would become friendly, and soon enough the planet itself would develop sexual organs and make love to other planets.

Emerson liked his friends at Brook Farm, but he did not share their enthusiasm for Fourier. After attending a conference of Fourierists, he shared his impressions in an essay published in the Dial, the main journal for Transcendentalism. Fourier’s system was admirably comprehensive, Emerson admitted, and his disciples were full of enthusiasm. “Certainly we listened with great pleasure to such gay and magnificent pictures.” But, he went on, “our feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader; or, perhaps, as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced, but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns systems and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New-Harmonies with each pulsation.”

By referring to “phalanxes and New-Harmonies,” Emerson linked Fourier’s utopianism to that of his British counterpart, Robert Owen. Owen had transformed a Scottish factory into a utopian village, then founded a more ambitious communal experiment at New Harmony in Indiana. In theory, Emerson’s critique applied better to Owen than to Fourier. Owen truly believed that each person was a blank slate who could be molded into either cooperation or competition depending on outward circumstances. Fourier, by contrast, sincerely tried to honor what Emerson called the “faculty of life” by insisting that each member of his proposed utopia be free to pursue their individual passions. But Emerson rightly sensed that Fourier had betrayed his own best insights by spelling out a communal blueprint in such detail. Because Fourier insisted that a community could not succeed without the perfect balance of personality types, for example, his disciples were consumed with guilt and doubt, always questioning whether their deviations from the master plan would doom their communities.

Though Emerson’s words were dismissive and even ungenerous, they provide a helpful tool for thinking about what works and what doesn’t in intentional communities today. The abiding challenge is to take life, in all its complexity and messiness, into account. Every living person has a unique mix of gifts, challenges, dreams, and aspirations. Nobody wants only to be part of a vibrant community. We also want to establish intimate friendships and sexual partnerships, to nurture future generations, to do work that other people appreciate, to spend time by ourselves, to create beautiful things, to think big thoughts and to labor with our bodies. An intentional community cannot thrive if it prevents its members from doing these things, and more.

Intentional communities that wish to take life into account must find a middle path between what I call “institutions” and “utopias.” Institutions are rigid social structures that lock people into fixed roles. In an institutional school, for example, everyone is either a teacher or a student. In an institutional hospital, everyone is either a doctor or a patient. Utopias are abstract blueprints that hope to dissolve all institutional barriers in an instant. But in the process, they can also dissolve the freely chosen roles that people cherish. Those of you who work with the philosophies of Rudolf Steiner are familiar with his image of the two demons, Ahriman and Lucifer, who tempt humanity in opposite directions, toward materialistic rigidity or airy spirituality. For intentional communities, institution is the Ahrimanic temptation and utopia is Luciferic.

Because the communal movements of the nineteenth century failed to find the middle path between institution and utopia, most failed to endure for even a single generation. The Fourierists were sometimes called Four-Year-ists because most communities had failed within that timespan. The Shaker movement, founded at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, was by far the most enduring communal experiment of the era, since several of their villages lasted into the twentieth century, and one tiny community persists even today. But they reached their membership peak just sixty-three years after their founding—after that, their story was one of long, slow decline.

Many intentional communities founded in the twentieth century have proved far more enduring than their nineteenth-century counterparts. Eighty years after its founding, the Camphill movement, consisting of villages and schools where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together, is still expanding. New Camphill communities are currently being born in Columbia, Kenya, Lithuania, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, South Korea, and Thailand. Some older Camphill places, especially in England and Ireland, face grave challenges, yet the total number of people connected to Camphill continues to grow. And Camphill is just part of a bigger story. Many other communities draw on Rudolf Steiner’s spirituality as they support people of diverse abilities. Here in the Netherlands and in Germany, these other social therapeutic communities outnumber Camphill places. Israel’s kibbutzim are even larger and more enduring than the social therapeutic communities, with 123,000 people living in communities that are as much as one hundred ten years old. The Catholic Worker movement, the Bruderhof, and L’Arche are other international communal networks that have thrived for multiple generations.

Scholars have yet to fully account for the remarkable longevity of communities founded in the twentieth century. Both among scholars and the general public, movements like Camphill and the Bruderhof are still less well known than the short-lived utopias of the nineteenth century. They are also less well-known than the “hippie” communes of the 1960s and 1970s. Most of those were just as ephemeral as the Fourierist phalanxes, though a few still thrive today. Because enduring communal movements are little known, many people still assume that it is the destiny of every intentional community to have a short lifespan. And it is still true that most intentional communities fail to outlive their founders. But the presence of multiple movements that are in their third or fourth generation provides us with a golden opportunity to identify the factors that give abiding life to community. For the past few years, I’ve been thinking about this with special emphasis on Camphill. So much of what I have to say today will focus on Camphill. But I will also bring in some of the other movements that started around the same time as Camphill, or in the decades since.

The communities of the early twentieth century had much in common. They responded to the global crisis of two world wars and a devastating depression. Most were founded by refugees who fled the violence and oppression that engulfed German-speaking central Europe. Camphill itself was born in Scotland between 1938 and 1940. Its founders were a group of refugees from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Most were Jewish; all were spiritual students of Rudolf Steiner. Most were interested in Steiner’s method of “curative education,” though only one was formally trained as a teacher. Others had studied medicine, nursing, chemistry, dance, and art. They took on the task of creating a residential community for children with disabilities. One among them, Tilla König, had been raised in the Moravian church, which had been creating residences for people deemed disabled for centuries. She and others brought that accumulated wisdom into the movement.

Both the founders of Camphill and the children who joined them had, in a sense, been cast out from society. This helped them form a strong bond. But, unlike some nineteenth-century utopians, their goal was not to separate themselves from the evils of society. They hoped, rather, to revive the central European cosmopolitanism that had been destroyed by Hitler. And they were not without friends in the larger society. Wealthy families helped them obtain several ancient estates, among them the Scottish property known as “Camphill.” Without that help, the new movement would not have survived. Each subsequent generation brought new opportunities to collaborate with outsiders. At the end of World War II, the founders welcomed a new wave of refugees to Camphill. They experimented with educational inclusion by creating a single school for the children with special needs and the children of the caregivers. When their students grew up, they created “village communities” that would allow them to continue sharing their unique gifts with the world. Amid the upheaval of the nineteen-sixties, they made room for Baby Boomer idealists, spiritual seekers, and even a few ex-hippies. They also followed the lead of adults with special needs who wanted to bring Camphill out of its rural isolation and into urban spaces. Today, Camphill is making a transition to a fourth generation, in which people who live in the community create life together with employees and day participants who live outside.

Camphill is impressively global, with communities on four continents and soon to be five. But it is numerically smaller than the kibbutzim, which are largely restricted to one country. The kibbutz movement began in 1909, a generation before Camphill, and experienced its most rapid growth in the 1930s and 1940s. Like Camphill founder Karl König, many kibbutz founders were Jews from German-speaking territories; also like him, most were influenced by socialist youth movements. Just as the Camphill founders welcomed developmentally disabled “refugees” from an uncaring society, as well as refugees from Communist East Germany, so too the kibbutzniks welcomed Jewish refugees from persecution in both Europe and the Middle East. They achieved a dual success, establishing a communal culture that was robust enough to last for generations and helping lay the foundations for the new state of Israel. They also provided significant inspiration for other communal movements, including Camphill. Camphillers Carlo Pietzner and Marianne Sander both visited kibbutzim in 1958 and came away both impressed and intrigued. Pietzner admired the “spectacular show of willpower evident everywhere,” but worried that the idealism might ultimately serve no higher end than “the establishment and maintenance of the state.” Sander worried about the kibbutzniks’ lack of spirituality and willingness to hand over parenting duties to the communities. Those worries were prescient: one of the ways the kibbutzim took life into account was to abandon collective childcare, because most parents wanted deeper ties to their children. More recently, people have created religious kibbutzim.

Other communal movements were founded by idealists who were troubled by the economic crisis and subsequent militarization of the 1920s and 1930s. The Bruderhof was established by Christian pacifists who modeled their communal settlement in Germany on the Sermon on the Mount; like the Camphillers, they migrated to the United Kingdom and then beyond after being attacked by Nazis. Taena and Iona sprouted among radical Christians in the United Kingdom, just as did Koinonia and the Catholic Worker in the United States. Also in the United States, college president and government official Arthur Morgan promoted cooperative rural communities as alternatives to what he saw as the failures of industrial society. In 1939 he organized the Celo Community, in which economically autonomous households owned their own homes but leased land from a community land trust. A year later he organized the Fellowship of Intentional Communities, an umbrella organization that was revived by latter-day communitarians in 1986. (It is now called the Foundation for Intentional Community.)

Both Iona in Scotland and Morgan’s Fellowship in the United States helped welcome Camphill to their respective territories. Iona was founded by George MacLeod, a minister who served a parish “in one of the worst slums of Glasgow,” and simultaneously led a group of idealistic clergy and workers who had rebuilt Saint Columba’s ancient monastery on the island of Iona. König met MacLeod on he day he signed the contract to buy the Camphill estate, and they quickly became friends. MacLeod helped König understand his new cultural context, and König introduced the Ionans to anthroposophical medicine and Rudolf Steiner’s views on the Gospels. Twenty years later, soon after Camphill arrived in North America, Arthur Morgan’s son Griscom arrived to inform the Camphillers that they were part of an enduring tradition of American communities. He advised them to recruit conscientious objectors as young volunteers, and immediately sent his own son John as Copake’s first young coworker from the United States.ⁱ

One of the things that helped 1930s communities survive was the fact that most were founded by refugees. It may seem odd, but I believe the refugee experience is a major predictor of communal success.. Refugees rarely have good alternatives to living in community. If they don’t speak the language of the surrounding community, they need to maintain close and cooperative connections to the handful of others who do speak their language. Perhaps they are not allowed to seek employment in the larger society. Perhaps they have previously lost all of their individual or family property, and believe that they can achieve more future security by pooling resources cooperatively.

This aspect of the refugee experience adds a nuance to the term “intentional community,” which was coined in 1945 and is now the most popular designation for a communal movement in the English-speaking world. This phrase implies a distinction from the “traditional community,” in which accidents of birth determine who is and is not a member. The members of intentional communities, so the notion goes, are there only through active intentionality—they could be someplace else but have chosen to be here. This is only partially true for refugees and, in Camphill’s case, for people with intellectual disabilities who may have been placed in community through the initiative of parents or social workers. The necessity of the refugee gives a needed ballast to the free-floating intentionality of the volunteer.

Another strength that refugees bring to community is the fact that they often carry a cherished vision of the society they have lost and hope to recreate. Karl König never broke faith with what he regarded as the true spirit of central Europe, epitomized in the Vienna of his youth. He referred to Camphill as a seed of social renewal, and encouraged Camphillers to preserve aspects of central European culture regardless of their physical location. One consequence of this is that most Camphills have a distinctive look and feel to them: visitors have an immediate sense that they have arrived somewhere in particular, and people who spend time in one Camphill will immediately recognize the Camphill spirit when they visit another.

A third strength that refugees bring to community is a bit paradoxical: refugees are, almost by definition, people of privilege, and they are able to apply their considerable privileges to the task of building community. I say that refugees are people of privilege because in order to be classified as a refugee by the United Nations, one must not only lose one’s home. One must also cross an international border. Only about a third of displaced people today have crossed a border, and far fewer have made it to a country that does not directly border their country of origin. That’s what the founders of Camphill, the Bruderhof, and the kibbutzim all managed to do. It was possible only because they started out with significant economic and educational resources. At least for the Camphillers, it was also possible only because they had sponsors in the host country. Enthralled by the Camphillers’ refugee story and vision of care for persons with disabilities, the sponsors sometimes made large estates available to the new movement. As a consequence, life in Camphill can bring the opportunity to live on a stunning seaside estate, in an elegant castle, or in a rural village that regularly hosts the finest classical musicians from New York City.

To some extent, the strengths that refugees bring to intentional community last only as long as the founding generation. But there are a few ways in which the strengths can persist over multiple generations. First, the refugee generation, through a contribution of their own hard work and the financial gifts of their sponsors, often succeeds in putting a fledgling community on a solid economic footing, ensuring that future communitarians will not have to sacrifice as much to live in community as the founders did. Second, the boundary between the refugee generation and those who come after may be fuzzy, with the share of community members who have been refugees declining very gradually over time. This shelters the community from the abrupt shock that might be experienced with the sudden death of a charismatic founder. The transition can be extended even further if—as was the case for Camphill, and also for kibbutzim and many other communities—a significant number of newer members are also refugees, either literally or metaphorically.

Nevertheless, Camphill and its sister communities must recognize that they cannot rely forever on their refugee roots. A thriving community must eventually be planted in its own soil. Karl König expressed this at his first Whitsun celebration in Scotland, when he told his friends that “we would not live in our new country as foreigners, but would learn to act for its good in the service of the needs of its handicapped children, even if only in a preparatory way.”ⁱⁱ Yet he never lost his sense of the initial value of the refugee experience. As he announced sixteen years later, at the founding of Botton Village, “the outcasts of today are to be the forerunners of the future.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Camphill was able to move beyond the isolation of its refugee beginnings because it never understood itself as a utopia set apart from the larger society, but rather as a “seed of social renewal.” The kibbutzim expressed a similar sensibility after the establishment of the state of Israel, when they worked actively to build up national institutions—and also to ensure that the cooperative values of the kibbutz would infuse the whole society. The Bruderhof and Catholic Worker movements, similarly, continually sought out ways to cooperate with peace activists and racial justice advocates in the larger society. In all these ways, the twentieth century communities avoided the mistake that Emerson attributed to Fourier and Owen. They did not skip the fact of life, but instead took an active interest in the life of the society surrounding them. As a result, that surrounding society also took an interest in the life of the community, and found ways to support it.

Recent scholarship on communalism can shed important light on the way intentional communities manage not to skip the fact of life. Since 1975, scholars of diverse communities, both past and present, have connected through the Communal Studies Association and the International Communal Studies Association. Many of these scholars are indebted to Don Pitzer, the founding director of the Center for Communal Studies at the University of Southern Indiana, for offering an interpretive approach that he calls “developmental communalism.” This approach assumes that all communities, whether or not they are inspired by utopian blueprints, grow and change over the course of their history. Drawing on decades of study of communal movements in the United States and around the world, Pitzer observed that movements “that do not adjust their strictly communal efforts or adopt new organizational forms more suitable to changing internal and external conditions and the needs of rising generations can arrest their own development,” while those that create “more pliable social, economic and administrative forms usually see their causes not only survive but flourish.”^iv Pitzer’s model built on the insights of other communal scholars such as Donald Janzen, who argued in the first issue of Communal Societies that communities should not be studied in isolation but with an eye to the “interface . . . between the communal society and the larger national society of which [it is] a part.”^v

The insights of Pitzer and Janzen are especially relevant to those twentieth century communal movements that actively seek to chart a middle path between utopia and institution. What sets Camphill and its peers apart from their utopian predecessors is their refusal to draw a binary distinction between the “good” community and the “bad” society. To be sure, these movements criticize aspects of mainstream society, and they hope to help create a future that is different from the present. But they have not assumed that the new society would emerge exclusively or even primarily from within the walls of their own communities. Instead, they have joined in broader currents of social renewal. The kibbutzim, for example, did not seek to displace the rest of Israeli society; they helped build a new nation and hoped to infuse that nation with cooperative and socialist values. Gandhian ashrams sought to free India from the political and cultural domination of Great Britain—and they inspired a cluster of urban ashrams in the United States designed to fight Jim Crow segregation. The Catholic Worker was part of a larger impulse to end war and foster a land-based, agrarian culture. Arthur Morgan was responsible for both the enduring intentional community of Celo and the rural electrification projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Camphill’s founders similarly hoped that their cooperative venture would be one “seed of social renewal” alongside other efforts to restore the cosmopolitan culture of their childhood. They embraced the work of honoring the human dignity of persons with intellectual disabilities and, increasingly, of defending the dignity of the land on which they lived and worked. But at no point did they ask their neighbors to take sides for or against them. Indeed, as one Camphiller memorably put it, a Camphillian parliament could never be organized into two opposing sides: “It would be an octagon or something bananas with lots of different levels and you’d be able to move through it.”^vi

Camphill’s reluctance to take sides has been reinforced by the presence of persons with intellectual disabilities as a core constituency of every Camphill place. With a few exceptions, these Camphillers do not come to community because they have rejected mainstream society. Most want to participate in society as fully as possible! They want to live in homes shaped by the rhythms of family life; they want to do meaningful work that benefits the people around them; they want to receive support and help from people who are genuinely their friends; they want to pursue romantic and other relationships of their own choosing. Camphill promises to help them do all these things. The simple fact that different Camphillers have followed radically different paths to community life means that the movement is continually drawn into deeper interaction with its environment, and this effect has intensified as the larger society has become more welcoming of persons with disabilities.

Camphill’s avoidance of a binary opposition between community and society is also shaped by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy. This is so for two reasons. First, a core commitment of anthroposophy is to balance. One of Steiner’s favorite paintings was Raphael’s “School of Athens,” in which Plato gestures up to heaven while Aristotle points down at the earth. Rather than pitting spirit against matter, students of Steiner seek their spirituality in the way they set a table, weave a rug, or turn a pile of compost. Second, because communal living is not an intrinsic part of anthroposophy as such, Camphillers have always had close ties to other people who share their interest in the work of Rudolf Steiner but choose to live out that interest in different ways. Though in most respects Camphill is quite different from monastic life, it has this in common with monasticism: both are communal expressions of spiritual movements that are not uniformly communal. The support of spiritually sympathetic outsiders has been essential to the longevity of monasticism, and it plays a similar role in the life of twentieth century movements including the kibbutzim, the ashrams, and the Catholic Worker, as well as more recent arrivals such as new monasticism and L’Arche.

Because Camphill and other twentieth century communal movements are not opposed to society as such, they have been able to forge different sorts of relationships with their neighbors, creating symbiotic connections earlier in their histories. These symbiotic connections are a major reason for the greater longevity of twentieth century communities, since they are more likely to have neighbors who are invested in their longevity. All communal groups, to be sure, have sold products to and borrowed money from their neighbors, but the twentieth century groups have been much more likely than their predecessors to derive a significant share of their income from outright gifts. Donations of cash, land, and buildings have saved many communal groups, Camphill included, from an early demise—just as the failure to pay back loans helped doom Brook Farm and many communal groups of the nineteenth century. The resulting longevity of twentieth century communities has, in turn, increased their connectedness—for almost every communal movement, even those that start out quite hostile to their neighbors, develops more complex connections with the passage of time.

It is too soon, of course, to know if the symbiotically connected communities of the twentieth century will endure as long as the equally symbiotic traditions of Christian and Buddhist monasticism. But the time is ripe to start asking the kinds of questions that can only be asked of communities that have already weathered one, two, or more generational transitions.

Developmental communal scholarship provides the essential framework for understanding the diverse paths of enduring communities. Many developmental trajectories are open to communal movements. The most common path, alas, is that of the community that fails to foster sufficiently intense commitment to overcome economic challenges and personality clashes, and thus dissolves within a few years. The second most common path is taken by communities that achieve intense commitment through the charismatic leadership of their founders, but fail to sustain their cohesion after those founders’ deaths. For communities that survive for three or more generations, three additional paths are possible.

The first is for the movement to grow large enough that it can function as a self-enclosed society, with sufficient stability and internal diversity to allow its members to meet the full range of human needs without leaving the community. To my knowledge, the only communal movement to follow this path successfully is the Hutterites, an Anabaptist movement that practices complete community of goods. The Hutterites began in Switzerland, migrated to Russia, then emigrated to North America at the end of the nineteenth century. High birthrates have allowed them to grow rapidly without recruiting new members, and today they constitute 45,000 people in hundreds of rural villages across western Canada and the northwestern United States. Unlike the twentieth century communities, they have little sense of connection or accountability to the larger society, and thus their relevance for other communal movements, or for those of us who do not live communally, is limited.

A second path might be called “evolving beyond community.” In this path, a movement dissolves its specifically communal structures while continuing to pursue other defining ideals. Sometimes this process is gradual; more often, it includes one or more crises that force the abrupt termination of specific cooperative practices. In the language of evolutionary biologists, communal evolution typically follows the pattern of “punctuated equilibrium,” in which long periods of stability alternate with times of rapid change.^vii This is the path emphasized in Pitzer’s scholarship, and it can be observed to some degree in most enduring communal movements.

A final path, hitherto little noticed by communal studies scholars, is what I will call “creative symbiosis.” Movements that follow this path extend the benefits of communal living to their neighbors and others who live outside, to the extent that those people become actively committed to the preservation of communal practice. The support of outsiders makes it easier for the people who live in community to preserve their practices without sacrificing other life goals. This was the path taken, most notably, by Christian and Buddhist monastic communities. Monastics offered a variety of spiritual and educational services to their neighbors, and in return the neighbors endowed monasteries, invited monastics to create schools and hospitals, and encouraged their own children to pursue monastic vocations.

Most of the communal movements founded in the first half of the twentieth century are now actively choosing between the paths of evolving beyond community or creative symbiosis with neighbors. Iona has downplayed shared living and economic cooperation in order to prioritize its work of holding retreats and seminars about monastic spirituality. In 1992 Koinonia abandoned incomesharing and reorganized as a community development organization in order to deepen its partnership with its African American neighbors, many of whom supported its mission but did not wish to live communally. But in 2005 it reversed course, reaffirming its original self-definition as an intentional community.^viii Celo has preserved its original, relatively loose structure as a land trust in which individual members retain a relatively high level of economic autonomy. The Bruderhof, at the opposite end of the spectrum, still practice complete community of goods and mostly live in large villages that are economically self-sustaining. They may wind up following the same path as the Hutterites, on whom they have always modeled themselves. Yet most young Bruderhof now attend mainstream colleges, giving them new connections and opportunities to cultivate symbiosis.

The kibbutz movement, quite famously, has been “evolving beyond community” for at least a generation. Historically, kibbutzim have been legally required to hold all property in common and support their members based on need rather than the work they perform. After an economic crisis in 1985, many kibbutzim began breaking these rules, and in 2005 the Israeli government sanctioned an alternative. The new, “reforming kibbutzim” could pay different salaries to different individuals, often coupled with a social safety net. Typically, they also allowed non-members to live, work, or study within the kibbutz, and reduced democratic control of business activities. By 2011, more than three quarters of kibbutzim identified as “reforming.”

As Pitzer’s theory of developmental communalism might suggest, this change enabled a new flowering of kibbutz ideals. Before the change, most kibbutzim were losing money and losing members. Now, most are stable. It turns out that many people who don’t want to join a kibbutz do want to experience the cooperative culture of the kibbutz as employees, renters, or students in the popular kibbutz schools.

The evolution of kibbutzim beyond community is not the whole story, however. For much of the movement’s history, it thrived because of the depth of its symbiotic relationship with Israeli society as a whole, and especially with the long-ruling Labor Party. But the kibbutzim began to experience decline when the conservative Likud party came to power in 1977. Likud enacted neoliberal economic policies that made it harder for the kibbutzim to manage their debts. This illustrates a danger inherent in the path of symbiosis. The more a community relies on its neighbors, the more it is vulnerable to social change.

Today, there is much evidence of new forms of symbiosis that could allow some kibbutzim to retain their distinctively communal features. Several newer kibbutzim are explicitly religious rather than socialist in their ideologies, and these have not experienced the same trend away from communalism. There are also newly founded urban kibbutzim, as well as other intentional communities, that seek to rekindle the spark of idealism their founders perceive to be fading at the older kibbutzim. Some of these newer communities explicitly seek to foster harmony between Jews and Arabs, or promote permaculture and other techniques of sustainable agriculture. There is also one specifically anthroposophical kibbutz: Harduf, founded in 1985 in Galilee. Harduf includes a Camphill-style curative home for children with special needs, and in 1979 Kfar Rafael was established as a village community in the desert near Beersheba.^ix In these places, the traditions of Camphill flow together with those of the kibbutzim.

Like the kibbutzim, Camphill has the potential to “evolve beyond community,” to achieve “creative symbiosis,” or to combine these two paths. Camphill is “evolving beyond community” in the many places that have abandoned incomesharing and drastically reduced lifesharing. Some disability rights advocates, as well as policymakers influenced by the disability rights movement, insist that evolving beyond community is the only valid developmental path for Camphill, given the imperative of offering persons with disabilities full access to the larger society. In keeping with this perspective, some of the places that have evolved furthest from Camphill’s communal heritage are among the most vigorous in promoting “self-advocacy” for their disabled residents, who have more freedom than residents of traditional Camphills to incorporate television-watching and other modern indulgences into their household rhythms. Other Camphillers worry that if this trend continues, Camphill will lose its capacity to contribute to social renewal and become an uninteresting network of care homes and special education schools, as “institutional” as the asylums of the nineteenth century. These worries resonate with the concerns of the most radical disability studies scholars—especially those influenced by either Marxism or queer theory—who argue that policymakers’ desire for “inclusion” and “normalization” fails to consider the degree to which disablement is intrinsic to contemporary capitalist society.^x

At the same time, Camphill is deepening its symbiotic relationship with its neighbors by piloting environmental practices that then spread throughout society, by creating cafés and walking paths and grocery stores and performance spaces that are open to the general public, by volunteering in the community, and by partnering with nearby social enterprises. In a few cases, Camphill neighbors as well as the family members of Camphill residents have mobilized politically to resist proposals to eliminate incomesharing and lifesharing. These activists hope that the twenty-first century will be a time of resurrection, when coworkers, villagers with disabilities, families, and neighbors unite to defend Camphill communalism against the excessively materialistic forces of bureaucracy and austerity. For these activists, the path between the Scylla of institutionalism and the Charybdis of utopia requires a deeper embrace of communal cooperation.

It may be that Camphill will evolve simultaneously in both directions, with some communities moving rapidly away from communalism while others redouble their commitment to Camphill traditions in the context of symbiotic partnership. It may also be that the majority of Camphill places will somehow blend these developmental paths. The future is uncertain, which makes this an especially exciting moment to study Camphill.

Whatever path Camphill takes, it will do so as a significantly more complex social organism than it was in its first generation. Every enduring communal movement starts with a tight-knit group of founders who somehow manage to hang together and to open their circle progressively to others. With each subsequent generation, the internal complexity of the movement increases, as people with new backgrounds, values, and beliefs craft new ways of connecting with the community. Today, Camphill’s ecology is also shaped not only by anthroposophy and the families of people with disabilities, but also by environmentalism, the culture of short-term volunteerism among people in their teens and twenties, the governments and professional associations that regulate social care, the politics of austerity, and disability rights activism.

Camphill, the kibbutzim, and other communities of the early twentieth century are also building symbiotic ties with newer communal impulses. These include the enduring hippie communes as well as a host of more recent initiatives. Notable among them is the movement that is most easily compared to Camphill: L’Arche. This international network, consisting mostly of household scale communities for persons with and without intellectual disabilities, was founded by Jean Vanier in 1964. Some of the closest ties between Camphill and L’Arche have developed in Ireland. The Ballytobin community began in the same area and almost simultaneously with the first L’Arche house in Ireland, and the same Catholic curate helped both communities get off the ground. On one occasion, Therese Vanier, the sister of L’Arche’s founder, intervened to defend Camphill from criticism by a Catholic bishop. And in 2003 Camphill joined with L’Arche to form a “Lifesharing Alliance” to ensure that the perspectives of lifesharing communities would be reflected in new Irish national standards for programs serving people with disabilities. After twenty years of partnership, Camphill Patrick Lydon reported that it “was a tremendous eye opener” to encounter a movement that was at once so similar and so different: “We had a wonderful experience of ‘liking them as much as we liked ourselves.’ In fact, we liked them better because we did not know all their dilemmas and failures as well as we knew our own!”^xi

Probably the two most rapidly growing models of intentional community in the world today are cohousing and ecovillages. Cohousing communities, which emerged in Denmark in 1967, are legally structured as condominium complexes, with individuals or families owning private apartments, but they also include abundant shared spaces with the expectation that residents will participate in common meals, community celebrations, and regular work shifts to maintain the common spaces. Ecovillages have a variety of ownership structures; what they all have in common is a commitment to living in harmony with natural systems and to sharing their own best practices with the larger community of environmentalists. To a degree, these two movements epitomize the contrast between the developmental paths of “evolving beyond community” and “creative symbiosis.” Cohousing begins with a structure that is similar to that of second- or third-generation communities that have loosened their original communal commitments; it is an attempt to find a balance of individual freedom and cooperation that can be sustained longterm. Ecovillages, meanwhile, actively cultivate symbiosis with the broader environmental movement. They participate in climate change activism and host educational events (such as permaculture courses) intended for people who may not wish to live communally.

At present, the Camphill movement does not have a deep relationship to either cohousing or ecovillages. Though many Camphillers are aware of these growing impulses, most have not directly visited an ecovillage or cohousing development. Yet several thought leaders in Camphill have suggested that these models have much to contribute to Camphill’s future development. Jan Bang, a former Camphiller and kibbutznik who has written books on ecovillages and permaculture, as well as on Camphill, has pointed out that most Camphill places already meet the definition of an ecovillage, even if they do not use the term.^xii What is more, environmental practices are already one of the major ways that Camphill places build symbiotic ties to their neighbors. They sell organic and biodynamic products at community groceries or through CSAs, they offer neighborhood-based composting services, they send volunteers to civic clean-up events, they host camps and courses on environmental themes, and they provide consultants to help neighbors with clean energy or water treatment projects. These are precisely the activities that ecovillages use to ensure that outsiders will be invested in their futures.

Similarly, some Camphillers see cohousing as an economic and legal paradigm that might help them avoid the pitfalls inherent in their current nonprofit status, and address the concerns of critics who portray them as segregated institutions for people with disabilities. There are two ways this might work. On the one hand, a Camphill could reorganize its residential life on the cohousing model, without changing the mix of residents. Cohousing would give Camphill residents, both those with and without disabilities, more direct democratic control over the community, since cohousing communities are directly governed by their resident owners rather than by “outside” boards of directors. As a system of ownership, cohousing would give residents more freedom to choose the type of residence that suits them best, and more protection against eviction or relocation. It would also sharpen the distinction between residential and work life at Camphill, making it easier for individuals to participate in one but not the other.

More radically, the cohousing model could be used to shift the balance among types of residents in a Camphill. Residences could be marketed to people who neither need specialized support nor wish to provide such support to others. These might be individuals who value Camphill’s style of community life but have other professions they are not willing to forego; some of them might be people with disabilities who cherish the ideal of inclusive community but are not eligible for funded support services. If, as a result of such recruitment, the share of Camphillers with intellectual disabilities declined somewhat, this would make it easier to demonstrate that Camphill is committed to social inclusion rather than segregation, while still allowing residents with intellectual disabilities to forge strong friendship networks with one another if that is their preference. A variation on this theme has been achieved by the Hertha Living Community, founded in Denmark in 1995 by people with Camphill roots. At Hertha’s center are three lifesharing houses that support people with special needs, while the surrounding village consists of cohousing units that may be purchased by anyone interested in village life.^xiii Such synthetic experiments suggest that other intentional communities can be a vital part of the symbiotic web of neighbors who help Camphill maintain its own communal traditions—just as Camphill can make it easier for other communities to follow the path of creative symbiosis.

We find ourselves today at an unprecedented moment in the history of intentional communities. There have been times in the past when new communities were being created more rapidly than they are today. The late nineteen-sixties was one such time, as was the era of Emerson and Brook Farm. But at no previous time have there been so many different communities approaching one hundred years of age and so many younger communities that actively seek to build bridges with the surrounding society. That combination is what makes our time unique. And our challenge is to make the most of it. The transformative potential of Camphills and kibbutzim, of ecovillages and cohousing, can best be realized through dialogue among the communal movements and dialogue between communalists and those living in mainstream society. And so my challenge to all of you is simple: get to know your neighbors. If you currently live in an intentional community, get to know other communities. If you are a cohouser, come visit a Camphill or other social therapeutic community. If you live in a therapeutic community, try attending a permaculture class at an ecovillage. And whatever sort of community you live in, find ways to participate in the larger life of your neighborhood. People everywhere yearn for more cooperation and connection. Some are creating cooperative businesses; some seek political paths to social and ecological harmony; some build community through the arts. They need the experience and creativity of people who have spent years living in intentional community. Share your wisdom with them as generously as you would share it with the others in your community. Finally, if you have never lived in intentional community but are intrigued by what you’ve heard today, please know that you do not have to sacrifice what Emerson called “the faculty of life” in order to join in the communal adventure. The people in this room represent many different forms of intentional community, and they are eager to meet you. Most communities have space for new members, it is true, and if you want to know how to join a community I’m sure they will be happy to tell you. But communities need friends and neighbors as well as members. Becoming a friend to a community can be as simple as attending an open day, festival, or retreat. Even Emerson, for all his skeptical wariness, was a good friend to Brook Farm, someone who reminded them not to sacrifice their own lives to their utopian ideals. Our task today is to foster the friendships that will sustain our communities and transform our world.