Stef's rants, #4 in a series

[firecat]

In this entry I invited people to give me topics to rant or blather about. This is wild_irises's contribution:

Let's hear your opinions on cohousing and other forms of intentional community.

I'm historically pretty negative about cohousing and intentional community.

It's not that I think the idea is stupid -- I was musing the other day about how I lived in group houses in college and thought it was a great idea and a way to save money by being able to share, e.g., one toaster among five people instead of one or two people. The social aspects were usually good more often than they were bad, too. Of course, I think it made a difference that it was only for nine months, and if something really wasn't working we only had to wait it out for a little while longer.

But many (not all) of the people I know who are active in cohousing and intentional community seem naive and unaware of the ways people are different from them, and/or they assume that the way they are is the way everyone will be once everyone else is enlightened.

I also have a problem with the term intentional community, because it implies to me that the baroque, fragile, slow-growing organism that is community can spring full-grown from people's heads if they just call it that. So I have a saying, that I coined while watching the movie Bagdad Cafe: "I don't want an intentional community; I want an unintentional community." (The movie portrays an unintentional community well, and I highly recommend it.)

I suspect that the personal reason behind my negativity about cohousing and intentional community is because I've always been an antisocial, antiauthoritarian, cranky loner. I suppose some folks will read that and protest that I'm not - well, it's true that I'm less concentratedly that way when I get to indulge my periodic randomly timed urges for serious laziness and unscheduledness, but just watch out if I don't. I suspect/fear cohousing/intentional community arrangements would put pressure on me around this; I imagine people poking into my business all the time or grumping that I am not cleaning my space or the common space properly or harrassing me about what I eat. (I had a lot of negative experiences along those lines when I was a kid at camp and in school.)

Another personal thing: I am especially cranky with a particular kind of rah-rah recruitment enthusiasm. I first encountered it in school: "participate! join! sell raffle tickets! come to team spirit meetings!" When it's combined with "alternative politics/lifestyles" (excuse the term) it sometimes takes on a relentless flavor of "we're more evolved than the rest of humanity!" and "let's improve ourselves!" and "if you don't give back to the community right now you're a bad person!" I have very little tolerance for that sort of behavior and have a bad habit of, to use an Esalen word, "firehosing" when I encounter it. (That means pushing back with equally vehement assertions of "It won't work" and "How stupid.")

Of course there must be cohousing groups that aren't like that, but because they would by definition not recruit, I wouldn't be likely to come across them; and I tend to hear more about the groups that are like that or who have spokespeople like that, at any rate.

I'd be happy to be shown my notions about cohousing are wrong.