Читать книгу The Promise of Paradise - Эндрю Скотт - Страница 9

British Columbia

Introduction

Promised Lands

Over the past 150 years, British Columbia has attracted its fair share of experimental communities. The model villages of the missionaries, designed to transform the bodies and souls of the province’s First Nations inhabitants, were in full swing by the 1870s. Before and after the turn of the twentieth century, idealistic Scandinavian and Russian immigrants established impressive colonies. The early 1930s saw the titillating, far-reaching scandals associated with Brother XII and his cult. The back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s led to a grand blossoming of communes. And in the 1990s, Canada’s first co-housing projects were making the news.

British Columbia is not unique as a proving ground for quixotic ideas. Cults, colonies and communes have come and gone elsewhere in North America and around the world. But the fact that Canada’s westernmost province has seen such an abundance of utopian settlement attempts, over a relatively short period of time, calls for closer scrutiny. This book examines some of the most significant alternative communities and looks at the impulses that inspired them.

Why is BC blessed with this rich history? Was it because the province was part of the last hospitable corner of the world to be explored and colonized by representatives of western civilization? To the European mind, preoccupied with the noble tasks of improving the human condition and getting rich, the Pacific Northwest was a vast remote space on the map, a blank slate where any number of ambitious schemes might take root and flower. The age of exploration—at least for the temperate zones—ended there.

The region attracted visionaries and schemers from around the world. Those who were chronically dissatisfied with the familiar and routine frequently ended up in British Columbia. Those who were used to moving on and starting anew stopped there as they searched for the kingdom of their dreams. They found they could move no farther. BC was the end of the road.

People came when times were good, to share the bounty of the land. They came when times were bad, to escape poverty and discrimination elsewhere. To many northern Europeans, BC’s landscapes appeared reassuringly familiar. The climate was mild, the terrain frequently spectacular. Caucasian newcomers were tolerated, even encouraged. Jobs were often available (albeit not very good ones). Governments offered incentives to settlers, and promised schools, roads and land grants. The appearance in BC of potential communitarians was not based on blind chance or mystical insight, but often had to do with economic and social imperatives. Economies are barometers of social health, and when one peaks or sinks to some new low, small, hardy bands of pioneers set off—sometimes far, far off—to try to create a better life.

Early intentional communities formed and flourished in BC for philosophical and religious reasons also. Some participants wished to perfect themselves, to attain a more spiritually evolved condition. Others wanted to create more equitable, sustainable and co-operative societies. A few, like the Doukhobors, were escaping social or political oppression. A constant thread over time was a yearning for deeper, richer human connections and a sense of belonging. More recent motivations include a desire for grassroots power, for harmony with one’s surroundings, and for safer, more productive and satisfying human networks and neighbourhoods.

The model Christian village of Metlakatla, BC, and others like it, were founded during a period of great colonial expansion. William Duncan, his missionary brethren and the English church societies that financed them were products of Victorian prosperity and moral certitude. But the resources of the frontier, which kept British mills running and made money available for missionary work, were extracted at a terrible cost to First Nations people. The degradation of the Tsimshians, which caused Duncan to come to BC’s north coast in 1857, had direct links to commercial avarice and corrupt trade practices. Ironically, the kind of community sought by many of those described in this book—one characterized by simplicity, environmental sensitivity, spiritual cohesion and a high degree of communal activity—was one that First Nations groups have had much experience with. They may yet lead us forward to a revised version of this old form of existence.

A depression in the United States in the early 1890s prompted the arrival in British Columbia of groups of Danes and Norwegians, who formed agricultural colonies in remote parts of the province. The Finns who followed at the end of the century were also economic migrants. All three groups chose to stay in BC because the government of the day offered them free land and other inducements.

The Doukhobors did not head west for economic reasons but because they felt betrayed by the Canadian government over the final settlement of land granted to them in Saskatchewan. They were able to develop their remarkable communal empire in British Columbia largely because of their agribusiness success before, after and during World War I. The same forces that caused their collective enterprise to decline during the Depression-era 1930s, and eventually fail, also attracted Brother XII and his disciples to BC. These Aquarians intended to hole up and wait out the coming global collapse, then emerge from the ruins and establish a new civilization.

After World War II, North America enjoyed an era of unprecedented peace and plenty, and the formation of utopian communities surged. Starting with the Emissaries of Divine Light in the late 1940s, the Quakers at Argenta in the ’50s and some early countercultural experiments in the ’60s, the wave of naive, optimistic activity reached a peak in the 1970s, when America’s children of affluence, the hippies, reached adulthood.

And today? As the third millennium and twenty-first century get off to a rough start, clouds of economic fear cast familiar shadows on the psychological landscape. The service sector is shrinking under the onslaught of technology; dwindling natural resources put other jobs at risk; the gap between rich and poor is rapidly widening. Yet our human population grows and grows. Globe-spanning corporations and giant bureaucracies grapple impotently with an ever-lengthening list of social and environmental problems.

In response to these threats, another cycle of utopian community-making is taking shape in British Columbia. Innovative living arrangements such as co-housing, where bands of people circumvent the traditional market to build their own custom-designed habitations, are just the beginning. User-designed neighbourhoods are the next stage. Other steps forward in this progression are ecovillages: small, planned settlements with an emphasis on sustainability, where human activities enhance nature rather than harm her. Ecovillages are springing up around the world and have begun to appear in BC as well.

To face the inevitability of change, many groups and individuals have turned quietly away from the dominant culture and its unfulfilling, wasteful emphasis on consumption. Some are thinking small, designing local land-use systems that integrate food production, housing, wildlife habitat and appropriate technology—a process called permaculture. Some are thinking large, applying the permaculture approach to bioregions. All are searching for enduring, decentralized alternatives that celebrate diversity and human co-operation. The future may depend on their efforts.

Before proceeding further, it may be helpful to clarify a few terms and sketch in some background. What exactly are utopian communities, anyway, and how did they get started? No universal standards exist for classifying such settlements. A number of adjectives are commonly used to describe them, including alternative, experimental and intentional. They are also called colonies, communes, collectives, co-operatives and cults. The places described in this book were all created with deliberate intent; none were accidental or haphazard. They were not necessarily isolated. They had a common purpose of some kind and were established as alternatives to the surrounding society. These criteria do not define them, though, but merely bring an illusion of order to bear on a changing social phenomenon.

The phrase “intentional community,” which originated in the US in the late 1940s and is now in widespread use, refers to a group of people who live together by choice, have collective goals and co-operate to create a way of life that reflects their shared values. Monasteries and ashrams, student housing co-operatives, communes—all are intentional communities. The term “commune” had a slightly sinister connotation forty years ago; today it designates an intentional community where income and assets are shared. Some degree of authoritarian control or manipulation is implied by the word “cult,” and, at the very least, the free will of a cult member may be restricted or interfered with.

It is the concept of utopia that gives the most trouble. Each person’s version is different. Those who have this dangerous word applied to their community unfailingly reject it. There is a world of difference, apparently, between “utopian,” a useful term describing the intention to achieve a better society, and “utopia,” the improved society itself, which is imaginary and can never be achieved, except in books. These days, “utopian” is often misinterpreted as “naive and impractical,” and “utopia” can mean just about anything. An advertisement in the Vancouver Sun defined it as “a place where the sun always shines, where Mother Nature teaches surfers who’s boss, where a slice lands your ball in the ocean, and where Alaska Airlines gives you Double Miles.”

The word was coined, of course, by Thomas More, that “man for all seasons” who was beheaded by Henry VIII for his adherence to the Catholic faith. Published in 1516, More’s Utopia is both a political essay and a fictional account of travel in a communistic island state where all men and women received an education and religious freedom was accepted. The title is taken from the Greek outopos, or “nowhere,” though it also plays on the word eutopos, or “good place.” Utopia is short but multi-layered: a satire on English laws and social conditions, a discourse on effective government, a parody of the explorer’s journal and a futuristic fantasy. It invented a new narrative form—the “utopian” novel.

Other writers before More had described ideal societies. Biblical interpretations of paradise on earth, from the Garden of Eden to the prescriptive visions of such Hebrew prophets as Amos and Ezekiel, have influenced Judeo-Christian thinking. One early utopian author was Plato, whose blueprint for an alternative society, The Republic, was published in the fourth century BC. Plato’s plan was far from egalitarian and outlined instead a rigid class system ruled by a caste of benevolent philosopher kings who owned no property, lived together in spartan unity and participated in a selective breeding program designed to encourage intellectual rigour.

A number of historic utopian communities are known to have existed. The Essenes, an ascetic Jewish sect that inhabited the western shores of the Dead Sea in the first century BC, dwelt communally, sharing possessions, agricultural production and meals. Biblical scholar Barbara Thiering has suggested that Jesus Christ may have grown up in an Essene settlement. After Christ’s death, his persecuted followers formed countercultural communes based on the principles of equality, common ownership of goods and shared work, food and ritual. These groups were the forerunners of the monastic movement.

As the Christian church grew rich and powerful, its communal foundations weakened. Hundreds of groups of heretics, disillusioned with ecclesiastic excess, broke away from the main body of the church and sought renewal in Christ’s teachings and a simple, co-operative way of life. A tradition of dissent began that would eventually include the Hutterites, Mennonites and Doukhobors. These sects, persecuted in their homelands, found refuge in North America, where they retained their utopian, collective lifestyles and flourished.

On the literary landscape, meanwhile, Thomas More had unwittingly opened a floodgate in the human imagination. A steady outpouring of social and political commentary, thinly disguised as travelogues to distant, wondrous lands, followed his Utopia. Jonathan Swift and Voltaire took the genre to new literary heights with Gulliver’s Travels in 1726 and Candide in 1759. But it was not until the nineteenth century, with a flurry of communal experiments in the eastern US, that life seriously began to imitate art.

Several of these American communes became very famous. Some of the individuals who would help form utopian settlements in the British Columbia wilderness later in the century were certainly aware of them. New Harmony in Indiana was one of the earliest. Originally established by German Pietists, the entire village was purchased in 1825 by a Welsh social reformer and industrialist named Robert Owen, who tried unsuccessfully to turn it into a showcase of co-operative business and social practices.

Lutheran dissenters known as Inspirationists established the Amana villages, which still exist near the Iowa River. Nineteen Shaker communities, their inhabitants dedicated to lives of simplicity and celibacy, flourished by the mid-1800s. Nashoba helped slaves buy their freedom in Tennessee. The New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the founders of Brook Farm in Massachusetts, an agricultural co-operative based on the theories of French philosopher and socialist Charles Fourier. The Christian socialist collective of Oneida, founded in 1848, became notorious for rejecting exclusive sexual relationships in favour of “complex marriage.” Echoing Plato’s Republic, it endorsed what was known as “stirpiculture,” a form of eugenics where a committee decided who should procreate.

Successful novels by Samuel Butler (Erewhon, 1872), Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888), William Morris (News from Nowhere, 1891) and H.G. Wells (A Modern Utopia, 1905) added fuel to the utopian movement in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. These books envisioned ideal societies free of the inhumane, unhealthy working conditions inflicted on Europe and North America by growing industrialization.

Experimental communities, both fictional and real, continued into the twentieth century. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) became bywords for the anti-utopian or dystopian novel. B.F. Skinner’s futuristic Walden Two, published in 1948 and based on his psychological theories about human behaviour, has inspired the formation of at least a dozen communities, including Virginia’s well-known Twin Oaks and Los Horcones in northern Mexico. Since the 1960s, the popularity of science fiction has allowed writers to create a torrent of imaginative literary utopias and dystopias. To date, Canadian author Margaret Atwood has set five novels in disturbing human societies of the near future. Utopian themes have found their way into the work of many BC novelists, including Jack Hodgins, Jane Rule, Audrey Thomas, Malcolm Lowry, Marilyn Bowering, Pearl Luke, Douglas Coupland, Claudia Casper and Susan Musgrave.

In Canada, not all experimental communities got their start in BC. Mennonite and Amish groups started immigrating to Ontario in 1786. Nearly forty thousand Mennonites moved to the Prairies in the 1870s and 1920s, and large numbers of Hutterites arrived in 1918 from the US. These Protestant sects, born of the sixteenth-century Anabaptist movement, were systematically harassed for their beliefs, which were based on early Christian teachings. Only the Hutterites, with 350 colonies in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, still maintain a comprehensive communal lifestyle.

Co-operative immigrant settlements were formed across Canada, especially on the Prairies, which needed farmers. A range of ethnic groups were involved: Manitoba’s New Iceland dates from 1876, while New Jerusalem and New Hungary were founded in Saskatchewan in the 1880s. In 1887, the first Mormon settlers established Cardston in Alberta. There are many other examples.

The idea of a utopian community could only have come to us from Renaissance Europe. Before Sir Thomas More and his fellow humanists, medieval society prevailed. Everyone subscribed to the medieval world view, which was framed by the great corporate monoliths of church and state. Everything had its place, even poverty and war. There were schisms within the church, but all agreed on the primacy of Christ and his teachings. Then along came Utopia, which described a new, alternative form of existence—one not based on Christian doctrine but on how men and women might improve the social contract that bound them together in everyday community life.

Christianity, however, continued to have a powerful effect on utopian thinking. Many idealistic sects subscribed to the belief that the kingdom of God would shortly be established on earth and that those who passed the entrance requirements would enjoy a thousand-year interval of peace and prosperity. These groups, which are described as millenarian or chiliastic, did not try to form deliberate utopias—that would come naturally in due course. Their Christian duty, as they saw it, was to follow simple, communal routines and prepare themselves for the joyous day.

Age-old millenarian convictions have been curiously mirrored by more modern, secular ones. Brother XII, for instance, thought that a two-thousand-year period of tranquil, universal co-operation would follow the dawn of the Aquarian Age. In the 1970s, some back-to-the-landers shared similar views of the future. The Texas Lake Community felt itself to be “a part of the plan which will bring about the New Age on Earth.” The Marxist Ochiltree Commune recommended BC’s hippie settlements protect themselves “against those that would try to divert us from our destination—the creation, ultimately, of a new society.”

Other groups were sure that the kingdom of God already existed—within the human heart. The Doukhobors, Quakers and Emissaries, who founded some of BC’s longest-lasting settlements, adhered to this belief, which may have allowed them to survive and succeed. When each member of a group can find, internally, the utopian principles that guide and energize the community, there need be less reliance on an eloquent chief. The truth is no longer invested in just one individual. Within the Doukhobor sect, for example, the role of the divine leader has dwindled in importance, replaced by the raised consciousness of the fellowship as a whole.

Leaders of many early intentional communities in BC were chosen on the basis of their lineage or their charisma. Some were capable but inflexible (i.e., William Duncan at Metlakatla), and that rigidity usually doomed the enterprise. “Distributed” forms of leadership, where executive duties were handled by a select group (i.e., in the Bella Coola valley), proved more successful in the long run. Modern intentional communities often place a heavy emphasis on co-operation, consensual decision-making and shared responsibility. Today’s co-housing groups, in fact, have become leaders in developing consensual practices. The process requires patience, trust and effort. It’s not for everyone. Sometimes the search for consensus can become so drawn out that the wheels grind to a halt. A balance—and, often, a compromise—must be found.

There are many ways for a community to founder. Financial naivety and unrealistic economic plans are a common cause of collapse (Sointula). An isolated location and transport difficulties have been fatal for some groups (Cape Scott). While a strong leader has not always been a hindrance, he (and it always seems to be a “he”) can be a hard act to follow, as the Doukhobors found to their sorrow. Succession is a big issue that intentional communities all over North America are struggling with today: handing the reins over to the next generation, bringing in younger people with new ideas and energy while still honouring older members.

But British Columbia, despite witnessing any number of community failures (many quite spectacular), has been fertile ground for some idealistic seekers. Its vast spaces, which newcomers have wrongly seen as empty, were a promising location for attempting to bring utopia—or “nowhere”—to life. Because many people fear communal modes of living, and because North American society is hostile to anything that threatens privacy and private property, early utopian communities were forced to BC’s margins. Now we seem more comfortable with alternative lifestyles, and today’s intentional projects have become increasingly mainstream and urban.

Businesses, in fact, are beginning to manufacture and market what appear to be intentional communities like any other commodity. Consider Celebration, a twenty-year-old fantasy from the Walt Disney Company, still making merry in Florida. This village development, with its old-fashioned architecture and folksy centre, was touted by Disney as an ideal community, one with “family values”—a showcase of all the most appealing and beneficial characteristics of American small-town life. Celebration is an example of “new urbanism,” a design movement that promotes environmental goals through the creation of walkable, planned neighbourhoods that contain a range of housing types and businesses.

Another housing trend that seems at first glance to be similar to intentional community–making is “co-living.” The movement got its start in San Francisco in 2014 and has since spread to New York—two cities with some of the most expensive housing in the world. Existing apartment buildings are renovated so that each unit contains several (usually four) bedrooms as well as a shared kitchen and living room, and several shared bathrooms. The units, all rentals, are chicly furnished, and a cleaner comes once a week. Some buildings offer a floor for female residents, a floor for men, with the rest of the floors mixed. Co-living is currently aimed at younger people and at singles, and has been described as “dorms for grown-ups” (though nicer). The goal of at least one developer, however, is to soon build co-living facilities for families.

But Celebration and co-living are not genuine intentional communities, designed and brought into existence by those who will be part of them. Celebration harkens back to a nostalgic past, when life was safe and predictable, rather than forward into the unknown. Co-living is cheap rental housing, born out of desperation in cities where young and low-income individuals are finding it difficult to survive. True intentional communities celebrate common values and shared objectives. They cannot be mass-produced and sold.

For two years, as I wrote this book and meandered happily down the dusty corridors of BC’s history, poking into archival attics and cul-de-sacs, I was struck by the powerful quality of faith that the early utopians possessed. They travelled to the human periphery, to the physical and psychological edge, and often truly did not know where their next meal would come from. As I met today’s communitarians and visited their homes, what touched me most was the trust they had—in themselves and each other, in the future, in life itself. They inspired me with hope.

Ultimately, all utopias are doomed. The goal is unattainable, but also strangely irrelevant; only the journey towards the “good place” has true value. We have outgrown the medieval view of the world, unified though it may have been. We have almost destroyed the First Nations unified view of the world. Yet we must find a new view, one that allows us to control the damage we are causing to ourselves and to the earth. Today’s pioneers are working to turn sustainable visions—ecovillages, permaculture and bioregionalism—into reality. Utopian communities are living laboratories, places where we keep trying to invent improved versions of ourselves so we can survive and evolve as a species.