New Harmony, a utopian experiment in the American wilderness

Examiner ^ | November 18, 2012 | Richard Thornton

[samtheman]

I work with a former soviet union army officer (mid-level), who repeats the “never been tried” line in all seriousness. I tried to talk to him about Stalin once and he said, in all seriousness, “that wasn’t communism, that was Stalinism. If Stalin had actually been a communist, things would have been a lot better.”

[SauronOfMordor]

The first is that there are no sexual rules which leaves people angry, confused and disinclined to cooperate. While the egg heads tend to disregard this segment of human personality we WANT to know that who we are sleeping with is only sleeping with us. If we leave for five minutes we don't want to come back and find them in the sack with someone else.

There are a lot of women who would rather share Prince Charming than have Joe the Plumber all to themselves. This creates social instability. In today's "hookup culture", a large percentage of the hookups are going to a relatively small percentage of men.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

There are a lot of women who would rather share Prince Charming than have Joe the Plumber all to themselves.

You see you are spouting the "Kinsey" mantra. There are some yes, same as there are some men who don't care who their women is doing as long as she is available when they want it.

Neither of these things are the norm or even "a lot". I would say it is about at the 1-2% level.

In today's "hookup culture", a large percentage of the hookups are going to a relatively small percentage of men.

And a relatively small percentage of women.

I know it is not what TV and movies tell you but average number of sex partners a straight person has in their life time is in the single digits.

[sphinx]

There have been many communitarian and communist experiments over the years, including many in the U.S. The most successful have been small, religiously based, and with very strong patriarchal authority structures. Taking the long view, the most familiar model in the West has been the monastery; Thomas More's Utopia, in fact, is essentially an effort to imagine an entire society constructed along monastic lines (with the obvious addition of children).

New Harmony was an interesting case, but an even more intriguing (because longer-lived) U.S. example was the Amana colonies, which were founded by another of those innumerable German pietistic sects (as was George Rapp's Harmony colony). The Amanas were quite successful for several generations, but when economic and social pressures (and the Great Depression) brought matters to a head, the Brethren separated the church and the economically productive properties, and turned the economic base into a joint stock company. (You will probably recall Amana Refrigeration.)

Such experiments are quite interesting and are too little studied, in part because the religious and familial bases of successful communist communities are lessons the left does not want to recognize. Such communities also tend to thrive on a small scale but are defeated by problems of scale, which massively complicates decision making and requires structures beyond a conclave of church elders and heads of families. Retention of the next generation is also an issue; the deliberate retreat to rustic simplicity and communal living will always appeal to some people, but one's children are quite likely to have other aspirations.

Last but not least, all successful communal societies have been voluntary. None of the great experimenters in the story of U.S. communitarianism would have put a gun to people's heads to force compliance. It is impossible to think of George Rapp or Robert Owen or the Amana colonists running a gulag, or wanting to. They wanted to march to a different drummer, and build a better mousetrap. This country gave them the freedom to try. Theirs is a positive story, and I wish our strutting little would-be dictators on the left would learn from their example. I could respect the OWS types if they would actually trek out to the wilderness and try to build a different kind of life for themselves. This, of course, would require doing actual work, which is why most of them are not interested, but here and there you will trip across the grown up flower children running their little shops in out of the way places, or producing holistic organic macrobiotic stuff for the local foodie market, and I say good for them. Take a chance, break a sweat, and see what you can do.

Some people still find these kinds of living arrangements attractive. I have not seen a statistic in recent years, but there used to be, and probably still are, a rather large number of communitarian groups, mostly small, low key, and very quiet, which go about their own business and leave the rest of us alone. They also tend not to proselytize, but are quite happy to share if you ask. I imagine the greatest threat to alternative communities today is the relentless drive of the big government left to control and standardize everything that lives, moves, breathes, eats, and sleeps. The zone of personal autonomy is steadily shrinking.

[familyop]

Susan B. Anthony and her friends were also followers of Charles Fourier.

[Mozilla]

Never knew that, but in searching out info I found that Charles Fourier was the person who coined the term feminism and as such he was considered a hero in the feminist movement.

[Mozilla]

These Utopian guys were different than the Marxists that came after because they wanted to force people to remain in their society and if not by force then kill them for opposing or not doing what they wanted. They became totalitarian.

But all socialists share the same traits and wanted to achieve the same goals.

[Mozilla]

By they I mean the Marxists. Stalin didn’t care about people living no more than Hitler. People were expendable to them. In fact, they hated Humans and looked to purge the world of them. It became Eugenics.

[AZLiberty]

Communism — It fails every time !

But sometimes too slowly. The Soviet Union maintained the suffering for more than seven decades. North Korea and Cuba are approaching that sad milestone.