By Chris Roth
When the theme for this issue (originally simply “Scaling Up”) entered our conversations well over a year ago, we envisioned it in a fairly cut-and-dried way. The basic premise of the theme, as I remember it, was this:
Intentional communities and similar examples of cooperative culture have so much to offer the world at large that they need to grow. How do we reach more people with our ways of living and with wisdom and practices that are applicable more widely? How do we expand our own individual communities, expand the total number of communities, strengthen the networking among these groups, and increase the influence of community living and its insights in the wider society? How do we become once again a notable part of the national and international conversation, as “communes” were in the late-’60s/early-’70s, but with a firmer foundation and in a more enduring way this time? How do we “scale up” at every level, from the micro to the macro, in order to help facilitate the transformation of society, so desperately needed in these times when the human future is so uncertain?
Since then, a number of events have conspired to suggest: not so fast. Our former publisher’s efforts to scale up through rebranding and through hoped-for projects including a new print Directory and eventually a multi-faceted online platform for community-seeking-and-matching ran into the brick wall of lack of finances. As one part of scaling down in hopes of scaling up again in new areas, publication of Communities was discontinued. Magazine staff regrouped and, through much conversation, networking (including the key connection to GEN-US made through our former editor and current Editorial Review Board member—thank you, Diana), and strong support from dedicated readers, we arrived at a new publishing home. Even here at GEN-US, though, after a much-larger-than-usual print run of our first issue (sending complimentary copies to many former subscribers), and a still-expanded print run of our second (to create sample copies to hand out at communities-friendly public events scheduled to happen in Spring and Summer 2020, but subsequently canceled by the pandemic), by the time of our third issue we needed to cut page count by eight, reduce the press run to a number just a little more than already-known demand, and even operate for several months without pay.
Economic forces beyond our individual control had already been putting a damper on ambitions to scale up the communities movement and our projects within it; COVID-19 humbled us further. And the murder of George Floyd, following a slew of others, brought to light beyond deniability that systemic racism is so embedded in our world that we have all been fish swimming in water that we take for granted, because it is so ubiquitous—but that water is toxic. Predominantly white groups, especially, need to ask ourselves: If our own tanks are full of that toxic water, how can we hope to viably scale up anything? And why would we want to? Perhaps we need some “schooling” before we can pretend that we are ready to scale up, as we have so far failed to do anyway.
Moreover, much of the impulse to scale up may be unconsciously based in the same assumptions that have created the untenable world that we are wanting to create an alternative to (ironically, by scaling up). “Bigger is better,” “visibility is success,” “acclaim is virtue,” “immediate results are what count,” “growth is good,” etc., are ideas most of us have been immersed in even as some of us have learned to question them. But those ways of thinking are what have built the civilization that currently threatens to destroy the planet (or at least eliminate conditions on the planet conducive to our own species’ and many others’ survival) while in the process destroying itself. In what ways do we need to “fight fire with fire,” and in what ways do we need to take a whole different approach?
Sometimes it’s appropriate to scale down. That’s what both FIC and the magazine (now with GEN-US) have chosen, doing what we have capacity to do given current resources and conditions, not basing our sense of self-worth on how big a splash we can make immediately. Scaling up can be about taking the long view, not just the short view; scaling down almost always is. Accepting limitations can make space for whatever’s next, and can release us from illusions, misconceptions, or ineffective modes of being that we may have been clinging to. It can shake us of ignorance or bad habits. It can be a learning experience.
For a host of reasons, “Scaling Up, Scaling Down” became the theme of this issue.
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Scaling up can bring liabilities as well as benefits. It can create institutions whose values and practices are antithetically opposed to the initial impulse around which a movement is based. Does anyone think that Jesus of Nazareth would endorse the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, witch-burning, widespread indigenous genocide, colonialism, or kidnapping Native American children to raise them in boarding schools in which speaking their own language resulted in beating or worse? (I won’t even wade into more contemporary examples of Christian hypocrisy.) On the other hand, would slavery have been abolished, or the Civil Rights movement have gained as much traction as it did, without a scaling-up of a very different brand of Christianity? The same can be said of many a person or cultural artifact whose adherents have attempted to scale up their work or interpret their vision, from Buddha to Karl Marx, from Walden1 to The White Album2. Scaling up can be a double-edged sword, sometimes literally.
Scaling up risks not only losing the core values and attributes originally present in a project or vision. It can also bring legal and logistical perils, even for groups and institutions that may do a good job of adhering with integrity to their core principles. The bigger a community becomes, the more events it sponsors, the more it attempts to serve the public, the more it opens its doors and engages with the wider society, the more vulnerable it may find itself to lawsuits, bad publicity, “bad actors,” etc. The real possibility of something going wrong, of a major accident or tragedy, of debilitating real-world financial liability, increases along with the scale of a group’s activities and ambitions. The likelihood of being targeted by litigation may also increase with the size of one’s bank account and/or insurance plan. At the same time, even very visible but cash-poor organizations can find themselves the targets of lawsuits, whether frivolous or not, which would not have happened had they scaled down rather than up.
Articles in past issues have looked at the inevitable changes that happen in the transition from a founding generation to those who succeed them. An inspired, effective group can become, as it grows, a much less inspired group, made up of “maintainers,” “bureaucrats,” and “followers” rather than visionaries and creators. Scaling up can dilute the impetus and strength of vision and commitment that created a community in the first place, resulting in a muddled reality for all who join, rather than the former clarity and “total engagement” of the pioneering generation.
And yet transitions happen in communities whether or not they try to expand; the founding stages only last so long. Scaling up can be a natural next step in the life cycle of a group, and suppressing that impulse can turn out to be the stultifying, purpose-thwarting choice. There is indeed a time for expansion, for reaching out, for growing, just as there is a time for contraction, regrouping, attending to baseline needs, rather than nursing grand ambitions.
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Communities inevitably go through cycles of scaling up and scaling down, and individuals do too. At times, I’ve benefited from being part of a small, more intimate group; at times, I’ve thrived in the excitement and expanded possibilities within a larger group. I find myself naturally drawn to different size groups at different times; and often, the group itself fluctuates, corresponding to these natural needs for fluctuation within all of us. In my 20s, I followed my first two years of intense, relatively larger-group, traveling community experience with a year-and-a-half living a more circumscribed life, involving more personal space and staying in place. I returned to a larger educational community for half a year, then spent two years in a smaller, land-based intentional community which ranged from four to 12 in population. When that intimacy turned into a feeling of claustrophobia, the locked-in power dynamics seeming unlikely to resolve within that small group, I explored different options and settled on a group of nearly 100, where I found more “freedom” but also greater anonymity (sometimes welcome, sometimes not). After a six-month trial there, I craved a more family-like setting and the more direct connection to land that a focused farming-based community can bring, so joined a group whose population ranged from about half a dozen to a dozen, discovering that small communities (despite my earlier experience) could be functional and healthy interpersonally.
And so the cycles went, scaling up or down every one to three years, until my mid-30s. Over time I found more ways to “expand” and “contract” in place. As a result, I’ve been based in the same intentional community (a happy medium for me between very large and very small) for all but one of the past 23 years. My break from it consisted of sampling first a smaller and then a larger group, and I subsequently returned to a decimated community, just starting to rebuild, having left a much larger iteration of that same community a year earlier. Over time, I have found it easier to adapt to and even embrace the natural cycles in our population, the periods of seasonal expansion (summer) and contraction (typically winter), the alternation between outward focus/activity, inward focus/rejuvenation, and combinations of the two at any one moment. Trips away from that community, including extended periods with my family of birth and with former community-mates now living elsewhere, add to the fluctuations in my life that seem necessary and natural—accompanied by scaling up and scaling down not only work-related ambitions but engagement with modern technology, media, money, homegrown foods, etc. The process of fluctuation, of change over time, of experiencing cycles, is the one pattern that is constant, for both me as a communitarian and for the communities in which I’ve participated.
At times, scaling up is enlivening. At times, it’s much ado about nothing. At times, scaling down is what my soul needs, or what my community needs.
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And at times, scaling down is what our culture needs—at least until we can “get things right.” This issue explores “scaling” from many angles. We start with an extended book excerpt from Crystal Farmer, whose insights may help communitarians (the majority of whom in North America, at least, are white) understand why Blacks and other marginalized groups may feel unwelcome despite communities’ stated intentions to be more inclusive. Crystal gives suggestions for how to initiate the cultural changes within groups that will allow eventual scaling up of a more inclusive form of community. Daniel Wahl advocates scaling out rather than up, and Jan Spencer describes many replicable, practical examples of scaling down our ecological footprints—necessary if we are to have anything left to scale in the future. Audrey Yang and Lois Arkin describe Los Angeles Eco-Village, a model of the kind of project that the rest of the world could learn from, while Adriano Bulla and Dr. Adrian Cooper take us to Southern Europe and Britain to look at scalable projects there.
Authors also explore the coronavirus pandemic and its impacts on intentional communities and on the scales at which they are currently operating around the world: Indra Waters surveys reports already compiled, Bill Wiser draws lessons from his experience at a Bruderhof in New South Wales, Matthew Goeztke and Diedra Heitzman reflect on quarantining at Camphill Village Kimberton Hills, Alan O’Hashi celebrates the “cohousing” vaccine, Niánn Emerson Chase and Stephen Wing draw from lifetimes of observing natural cycles, and Ron Gordon offers some improbably practical pandemic poems.
Thank you to all those who work behind the scenes to bring this magazine to you and/or support its smooth functioning: Yulia Zarubina, Linda Joseph, Gigi Wahba, Kim Scheidt, Melissa Ketchum, Orlando Balbas, our Editorial Review Board (see masthead for full list), and the people at Sundance Press, SimpleCirc, the US Postal Service, and IMEX—as well as, ultimately, others far too numerous to mention, most of whose names we don’t even know.
And to our readers, too, thank you for being part of the Communities community!
Chris Roth edits Communities.
Excerpted from the Fall 2020 edition of Communities (#188), “Scaling Up, Scaling Down” (available here or by subscribing).