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This letter to the editor, which had the above Manifesto attached, was written by DeeDee Cuddihy (1975)
This poem was written by Julie Redpath, who often babysat for Thea.
Peter Chaloner's story Keen was published in Scottish Short Stories in 1978.
Dave Robertson's comments above and on the next page...
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Peter's thoughts. To comment, please send to Terry for posting.
10 March, 2019
WHY ARE SO FEW COMMUNES BEING FOUNDED IN 2019?
(Reply sent to James Murphy, who asked).
Hi James,
To set the scene: you and your son, aged 27, have been discussing communal living. How it seemed possible until recently, and now seems impossible, or close to it. The question is why.
Who found it possible? Followers of Buddha, during the 500s BC; followers of Christ, during the 100s AD; the desert followers of St Anthony, shortly after that; followers of St. Benedict, and other monastic founders, from the 600sAD; followers of Marx, from the 1850s AD; the Jewish founders of the state of Israel, with their kibbutzim; and from the discovery of LSD in 1945, through the 1990s, various Hippies and neo-Hindus and neo-Buddhists.
Shared characteristics of these communes are the following. First, each must be about something well defined. Whether it is Conditioned Coproduction, or the Eight Beatitudes, or ascetic, lonely living leavened by brotherly comings-together to eat and worship, or the laborare Est Orare slogan of Benedict (To work is to pray), or Dialectical Materialism and promoting World Revolution through creating the Vanguard of the Proletariat, or acknowledging oneself as the Crown of Creation and grooving to Blake’s truth-- “He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise”--whichever it may be, there is a kernel, an Ideal. The little piece of grit around which the pearl is constructed.
SED NON (to use Thomas of Aquino’s term) But No: now, meaning post-2008 when I-Phones became omnipresent, it is impossible, or near to it, to offer the young an ideal in this sense. For any young person with a smartphone, an externalised brain and spirit in hand, it is impossible to embrace such an ideal. The smartphone offers 18, 108, 108,000 ideals-- why pick one? Why be committed to one thing, and thereby limited? The delusion of personal Omniscience is created by the smartphone.
Moreover, there is the ‘no need for others’ phenomenon. Old societies revered elders because they knew useful information and possessed helpful attitudes. Post-2008 society needs no elder mind. It is all there, on the smartphone. The same goes for erotic life. It is all there, on the smartphone. Thus Japanese young men eschew girlfriends, who have become redundant. Still less do they want to tangle with wives and children. Doing that, costs money-- and it severely cuts into one’s video-game-playing time. Where Japan leads, the rest of technologised societies follow. Scandinavian households are now 40% like mine: a single person in a very small flat, living alone, and occasionally being visited by offspring. Where there is no felt need for others, there can be no communal living.
Turning to my personal experience: I was camping in London in 1967, listening to The Beatles singing ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and I wore a little bell around my neck because I heard this was the custom among Hippies in San Francisco during that Summer of Love. I was eager to join in as a Hippie. I hitch-hiked from Detroit to San Francisco the following summer, almost 3,000 miles, and slept on the floor of the HQ of the California Peace and Freedom Party. The following year I emigrated to Canada, aged 19, and lived in Hippie communes in Toronto and Vancouver. Some LSD of the kosher variety from Sandoz Laboratories came my way at that time, and-- though I had taken what purported to be LSD twice before, in Toronto’s Hippie Skyscraper (Rochdale College)-- this was the real stuff and it permanently altered my sense of time.
Out went the model of Time as a bead moving along a horizontal wire, as on an abacus. In came the eternal flowering of a blossom that comprises all of us and everything. This blossom endlessly blooms in the centre of one’s forehead if one closes one’s eyes while tripping.
Like the Chosen People of Yahweh, forever adhering to and breaking away from the Covenant, I have been faithful to the endlessly blossoming model. Except when it got too much for me, and I faithlessly embraced the bead on a wire model, just to get a bit of a rest. I am secretly with the blossoming model now, though purporting (since 2006) to be with the bead model because it is easier to explain to other people and, generally, gets one persecuted less.
All the ideals mentioned above as making communal living possible, naturally embrace either the teleological, gotta-get-somewhere-without-delay, bead-on-a-wire model, or the nonteleological model of endless blooming.
Buddha seemed to be selling the endlessly blooming, what’s your hurry? model. He took that from Hinduism. Every kibbutz was founded on the teleological model. Post-1945 Western communes bought Buddha’s unhurried model, unless they were Marxist-inspired.
Christianity, being teleological, like Judaism and Islam, sells devotees a ‘time is short’ ethos. “Ye know not the day nor the hour” of the Second Coming, and of the winding-up of the world like a scroll. Marx took this view over, coming as he did from a long line of rabbis. That is why a ‘hurry up’ ethos pervades Marxist communities.
I participated in the communal (though not living together) life of the Workers’ Party of Scotland (Marxist-Leninist) between 1970 and 1971, out of pique. I was annoyed that my acid-inspired expectation of us all just sharing the world, had failed to materialise. So I embraced Class Struggle. Back to the bead on a wire. Eternal blossoming: sacked. But after seven months, trying to be Marxist made me feel ill. I went to India. I was so horrified by what I saw of Sri Aurobindo’s Hindu commune in Pondicherry, French India in 1972 that I met up with a priest in the Church of Doubting Thomas. “Always remember the Church wants you back very much,” he said. On my way back from India I-- with my first wife, who was Jewish-- spent time working on an Israeli kibbutz.
1974-75 I plus wife plus new child joined an urban commune in Glasgow. Its founder, David Cruickshank, was inspired in part by the kibbutz ideal, though he had never seen one. 12-18 of us shared quotidian and cultural life in a commune that was the closest I ever saw to doing it right. But I was in Law School at the time, and my wife shared a bit too much, what with me being away all day, so we split up. But The Buddhists had visited us-- we sold brown rice and other hippie necessities-- and a dharma seed had been planted. One of the lady hippies and I set off and spread FWBO-style Buddhism around Glasgow and Aberdeen until we emigrated to USA in 1978.
Naturally we joined a Buddhist commune in Philadelphia because our spiritual concerns really were central to our beings. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche took over as our teacher, since there was no Sangharakshita scene in America yet. We stuck with the commune until the pulls of married family life tugged us away from it.
And there is one big point your son will want to note, James. As Sangharakshita used to insist, “The couple is the enemy of the spiritual community.”
I think it is true that in every mixed-gender community, there is a tendency for romantic couples to pair up, and for that pairing process to rob the commune of its integrity, of its sense of its own wholeness.
There is one of the most important reasons why communal living is not popular in 2019: young people today are either totally selfish, ideal-free isolates, so stinjy that they want to live alone so as to keep their own money and time; or they want to live in the couple model, since that is the one encouraged by the wider society.
A shared house, where isolates, for the sake of cheap rent, live under the same roof, is of course not a commune. Lots of young people, especially in London, seem to be opting for this arrangement. It seems to maximise loneliness, but at least it keeps one’s bills down. One can always say one is Vegan, or pro-ecology, or pro-pangendered-chem-sex, if one wants to pass oneself off as ‘woke.’
I lived in Sangharakshita-inspired men-only communes after my second wife ended our marriage in 1994, up until my ordination as a Buddhist Clergyman in 2002, and again from 2003 until I sacked Buddhism for Catholicism in 2006. I lived and worked in the Windhorse milieu in Cambridge, 1999-2000, and worked in a Windhorse shop in Glasgow 2000-2003.
The Windhorse scene in Cambridge was held together by people’s sincerity. There was no corruption, that I could see. The bigwigs lived much as the smallwigs. I found that impressive. I also found pervasive loneliness among the participants, including me.
A few thoughts in conclusion:
1. Studies have shown (and there have been many, many studies of communes) that the one most likely to succeed is the one that is definitely about something: one with an articulable goal, whether World Revolution or Nirvana.
2. The stricter, the longer-lasting. Lax communes fail. Ones with definite rules that are adhered to-- such as rising times and retiring times-- survive. This fits with my experience. How many young people today want to be subject to such askesis, such discipline? I find it hard to believe that many do.
3. Willingness to suffer a certain degree of hardship is also essential, for any commune-dweller. Again, this fits with my experience. Sleeping on the floor in an old sleeping bag; having a bath or a shower as occasion offered, maybe weekly; never using unguents-- for years, I took this as a given. In contrast, it seems 2019 youngsters are over-keen on comfort and cleanliness and hygiene and cosmetics. Where I live is common as muck, but one can smell the young men’s anointed hair and skin as they approach. Even more so the young women’s. The attention given to personal grooming seems positively neurotic, and definitely nonconducive to communal living. It shrieks a lack of confidence.
4. Few young people today seem to have a philosophy of history, or of life in general, as far as I can see. The state of being permanently angry and resentful (especially among women) seems to have taken over as a pseudo-ideal. Resentment holds nothing together, neither a family nor a commune. Thus I do not think communal living among the young will be possible any time soon. A solidarity among humans qua humans, and not as members of a particular ‘persecuted subgroup’ will have to be recovered, if the possibility of living together in communes is ever to be recovered.
What do you two think? I would especially like to hear the views of the young man.
Best,
Peter,
10 March, 2019
WHY ARE SO FEW COMMUNES BEING FOUNDED IN 2019?
(Reply sent to James Murphy, who asked).
Hi James,
To set the scene: you and your son, aged 27, have been discussing communal living. How it seemed possible until recently, and now seems impossible, or close to it. The question is why.
Who found it possible? Followers of Buddha, during the 500s BC; followers of Christ, during the 100s AD; the desert followers of St Anthony, shortly after that; followers of St. Benedict, and other monastic founders, from the 600sAD; followers of Marx, from the 1850s AD; the Jewish founders of the state of Israel, with their kibbutzim; and from the discovery of LSD in 1945, through the 1990s, various Hippies and neo-Hindus and neo-Buddhists.
Shared characteristics of these communes are the following. First, each must be about something well defined. Whether it is Conditioned Coproduction, or the Eight Beatitudes, or ascetic, lonely living leavened by brotherly comings-together to eat and worship, or the laborare Est Orare slogan of Benedict (To work is to pray), or Dialectical Materialism and promoting World Revolution through creating the Vanguard of the Proletariat, or acknowledging oneself as the Crown of Creation and grooving to Blake’s truth-- “He who kisses the joy as it flies, lives in Eternity’s sunrise”--whichever it may be, there is a kernel, an Ideal. The little piece of grit around which the pearl is constructed.
SED NON (to use Thomas of Aquino’s term) But No: now, meaning post-2008 when I-Phones became omnipresent, it is impossible, or near to it, to offer the young an ideal in this sense. For any young person with a smartphone, an externalised brain and spirit in hand, it is impossible to embrace such an ideal. The smartphone offers 18, 108, 108,000 ideals-- why pick one? Why be committed to one thing, and thereby limited? The delusion of personal Omniscience is created by the smartphone.
Moreover, there is the ‘no need for others’ phenomenon. Old societies revered elders because they knew useful information and possessed helpful attitudes. Post-2008 society needs no elder mind. It is all there, on the smartphone. The same goes for erotic life. It is all there, on the smartphone. Thus Japanese young men eschew girlfriends, who have become redundant. Still less do they want to tangle with wives and children. Doing that, costs money-- and it severely cuts into one’s video-game-playing time. Where Japan leads, the rest of technologised societies follow. Scandinavian households are now 40% like mine: a single person in a very small flat, living alone, and occasionally being visited by offspring. Where there is no felt need for others, there can be no communal living.
Turning to my personal experience: I was camping in London in 1967, listening to The Beatles singing ‘All You Need Is Love,’ and I wore a little bell around my neck because I heard this was the custom among Hippies in San Francisco during that Summer of Love. I was eager to join in as a Hippie. I hitch-hiked from Detroit to San Francisco the following summer, almost 3,000 miles, and slept on the floor of the HQ of the California Peace and Freedom Party. The following year I emigrated to Canada, aged 19, and lived in Hippie communes in Toronto and Vancouver. Some LSD of the kosher variety from Sandoz Laboratories came my way at that time, and-- though I had taken what purported to be LSD twice before, in Toronto’s Hippie Skyscraper (Rochdale College)-- this was the real stuff and it permanently altered my sense of time.
Out went the model of Time as a bead moving along a horizontal wire, as on an abacus. In came the eternal flowering of a blossom that comprises all of us and everything. This blossom endlessly blooms in the centre of one’s forehead if one closes one’s eyes while tripping.
Like the Chosen People of Yahweh, forever adhering to and breaking away from the Covenant, I have been faithful to the endlessly blossoming model. Except when it got too much for me, and I faithlessly embraced the bead on a wire model, just to get a bit of a rest. I am secretly with the blossoming model now, though purporting (since 2006) to be with the bead model because it is easier to explain to other people and, generally, gets one persecuted less.
All the ideals mentioned above as making communal living possible, naturally embrace either the teleological, gotta-get-somewhere-without-delay, bead-on-a-wire model, or the nonteleological model of endless blooming.
Buddha seemed to be selling the endlessly blooming, what’s your hurry? model. He took that from Hinduism. Every kibbutz was founded on the teleological model. Post-1945 Western communes bought Buddha’s unhurried model, unless they were Marxist-inspired.
Christianity, being teleological, like Judaism and Islam, sells devotees a ‘time is short’ ethos. “Ye know not the day nor the hour” of the Second Coming, and of the winding-up of the world like a scroll. Marx took this view over, coming as he did from a long line of rabbis. That is why a ‘hurry up’ ethos pervades Marxist communities.
I participated in the communal (though not living together) life of the Workers’ Party of Scotland (Marxist-Leninist) between 1970 and 1971, out of pique. I was annoyed that my acid-inspired expectation of us all just sharing the world, had failed to materialise. So I embraced Class Struggle. Back to the bead on a wire. Eternal blossoming: sacked. But after seven months, trying to be Marxist made me feel ill. I went to India. I was so horrified by what I saw of Sri Aurobindo’s Hindu commune in Pondicherry, French India in 1972 that I met up with a priest in the Church of Doubting Thomas. “Always remember the Church wants you back very much,” he said. On my way back from India I-- with my first wife, who was Jewish-- spent time working on an Israeli kibbutz.
1974-75 I plus wife plus new child joined an urban commune in Glasgow. Its founder, David Cruickshank, was inspired in part by the kibbutz ideal, though he had never seen one. 12-18 of us shared quotidian and cultural life in a commune that was the closest I ever saw to doing it right. But I was in Law School at the time, and my wife shared a bit too much, what with me being away all day, so we split up. But The Buddhists had visited us-- we sold brown rice and other hippie necessities-- and a dharma seed had been planted. One of the lady hippies and I set off and spread FWBO-style Buddhism around Glasgow and Aberdeen until we emigrated to USA in 1978.
Naturally we joined a Buddhist commune in Philadelphia because our spiritual concerns really were central to our beings. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche took over as our teacher, since there was no Sangharakshita scene in America yet. We stuck with the commune until the pulls of married family life tugged us away from it.
And there is one big point your son will want to note, James. As Sangharakshita used to insist, “The couple is the enemy of the spiritual community.”
I think it is true that in every mixed-gender community, there is a tendency for romantic couples to pair up, and for that pairing process to rob the commune of its integrity, of its sense of its own wholeness.
There is one of the most important reasons why communal living is not popular in 2019: young people today are either totally selfish, ideal-free isolates, so stinjy that they want to live alone so as to keep their own money and time; or they want to live in the couple model, since that is the one encouraged by the wider society.
A shared house, where isolates, for the sake of cheap rent, live under the same roof, is of course not a commune. Lots of young people, especially in London, seem to be opting for this arrangement. It seems to maximise loneliness, but at least it keeps one’s bills down. One can always say one is Vegan, or pro-ecology, or pro-pangendered-chem-sex, if one wants to pass oneself off as ‘woke.’
I lived in Sangharakshita-inspired men-only communes after my second wife ended our marriage in 1994, up until my ordination as a Buddhist Clergyman in 2002, and again from 2003 until I sacked Buddhism for Catholicism in 2006. I lived and worked in the Windhorse milieu in Cambridge, 1999-2000, and worked in a Windhorse shop in Glasgow 2000-2003.
The Windhorse scene in Cambridge was held together by people’s sincerity. There was no corruption, that I could see. The bigwigs lived much as the smallwigs. I found that impressive. I also found pervasive loneliness among the participants, including me.
A few thoughts in conclusion:
1. Studies have shown (and there have been many, many studies of communes) that the one most likely to succeed is the one that is definitely about something: one with an articulable goal, whether World Revolution or Nirvana.
2. The stricter, the longer-lasting. Lax communes fail. Ones with definite rules that are adhered to-- such as rising times and retiring times-- survive. This fits with my experience. How many young people today want to be subject to such askesis, such discipline? I find it hard to believe that many do.
3. Willingness to suffer a certain degree of hardship is also essential, for any commune-dweller. Again, this fits with my experience. Sleeping on the floor in an old sleeping bag; having a bath or a shower as occasion offered, maybe weekly; never using unguents-- for years, I took this as a given. In contrast, it seems 2019 youngsters are over-keen on comfort and cleanliness and hygiene and cosmetics. Where I live is common as muck, but one can smell the young men’s anointed hair and skin as they approach. Even more so the young women’s. The attention given to personal grooming seems positively neurotic, and definitely nonconducive to communal living. It shrieks a lack of confidence.
4. Few young people today seem to have a philosophy of history, or of life in general, as far as I can see. The state of being permanently angry and resentful (especially among women) seems to have taken over as a pseudo-ideal. Resentment holds nothing together, neither a family nor a commune. Thus I do not think communal living among the young will be possible any time soon. A solidarity among humans qua humans, and not as members of a particular ‘persecuted subgroup’ will have to be recovered, if the possibility of living together in communes is ever to be recovered.
What do you two think? I would especially like to hear the views of the young man.
Best,
Peter,
I was at the laptop when your msg popped in, Terry, so looked straightaway and found Peter’s views and experience interesting.
Anticipating moving house last year, I spent some time exploring shared/communal living spaces and arrangements. In recent years, several friends and I had discussed finding a community space – either existing building(s) or a plot of land, where we could retain elements of independence and privacy but also share spaces, ideas, work and contributions. But the idea of starting from scratch always got bogged down in financial problems or questions like would we all be dead before the dream was achieved (I know, I know ....).
The range of existing communities seems small – but there may well be many more of which we know nothing. I attach an available list for Scotland that I looked at last year. https://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/communities/existing/scotland
Its a bit of a ragbag, but somehow I feel confident there’s an undercurrent of sharp, connected and committed younger people (with some crusties as well) who are quietly getting on with it in various ways. There’s certainly a welcome resurgence of interest in environmentalism – I see youngsters getting excited about ‘foraging’ and setting up life in rural areas and recall Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (1970?) and The Whole Earth Catalog which were all about self-sufficiency and sustainability.
love
H xx
Anticipating moving house last year, I spent some time exploring shared/communal living spaces and arrangements. In recent years, several friends and I had discussed finding a community space – either existing building(s) or a plot of land, where we could retain elements of independence and privacy but also share spaces, ideas, work and contributions. But the idea of starting from scratch always got bogged down in financial problems or questions like would we all be dead before the dream was achieved (I know, I know ....).
The range of existing communities seems small – but there may well be many more of which we know nothing. I attach an available list for Scotland that I looked at last year. https://www.diggersanddreamers.org.uk/communities/existing/scotland
Its a bit of a ragbag, but somehow I feel confident there’s an undercurrent of sharp, connected and committed younger people (with some crusties as well) who are quietly getting on with it in various ways. There’s certainly a welcome resurgence of interest in environmentalism – I see youngsters getting excited about ‘foraging’ and setting up life in rural areas and recall Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (1970?) and The Whole Earth Catalog which were all about self-sufficiency and sustainability.
love
H xx
These times are so ripe for radical solutions to housing but ‘communes’ is not a term to be used again: it seems to have had its day and instead housing associations, flat-sharing, house renovation and conversions are the current buzzwords, obscuring anything resembling it. The profile of those communal arrangements which do exist is so low owing to failing family culture, the sects, and bad media treatment in the past.
Brian
Brian
From Dave Robertson:
Common grounders passing through Glasgow on 28th June (2019) could hear Jimmy and Dick at Websters
https://webstersglasgow.com/events/the-psychiatrists-3/
or just listen to Jimmy on the new website prepared by David Kelly
https://hearthis.at/mdmaok/#sets
Common grounders passing through Glasgow on 28th June (2019) could hear Jimmy and Dick at Websters
https://webstersglasgow.com/events/the-psychiatrists-3/
or just listen to Jimmy on the new website prepared by David Kelly
https://hearthis.at/mdmaok/#sets