Here’s a common pattern:
A community becomes rigid, conformist, and ritualistic, forgetting the values that animated it at its foundation.
A group of people (often younger people) find the community stifling. They long to live more authentic and open lives; dispensing with the conformity and rigidity of the dominant community.
They leave and form a new community;
The new community encounters either an external shock, predatory personalities, or the inevitable noise of human drama;
The community either dissolves or becomes as rigid and conformist as the one that it left.
Vulnerability
In a basic sense, “vulnerable” means unguarded: open to attack or misfortune.
“Vulnerability” has, for some, come to be seen as a virtue; it refers to a kind of unguarded and honest way of relating to others.
The dual meaning of the term is key to understanding this cycle.
Armor
Armor is a hard, external shell that protects us. It also restricts us. It adds effort to even basic movements. Wilhelm Reich used the term “character armor”: the way we become tightened, rigid, and closed off to life.
We long to take our armor off and be unguarded and open to life and to each other.
Not surprisingly, those who have seen and known something of danger counsel against this.
The Summer Children
If you have ever been part of a utopian or millenniarian sect, intentional community, or activist movement in its early days, there is nothing quite like it. You feel you have dispensed with the falsehood and conformity of the mundane world. You do not understand why others are caught up in such petty dramas. Sleeping rough and living off of alms does not bother you. That everyone does not abandon their narrow, myopic life to pursue this nobler, more meaningful, and more joyful one is a mystery to you.
At some point a serpent enters this Eden. Everything changes. You may long wistfully for the good old days; you may conclude that the foundational beliefs of this period were naive. Either way, innocence lost can never be regained.
Serpents and Doves
Open, trusting, and unguarded communities are a windfall for predators. Those who are wise in the ways of the world gain easy access to sex, status, money and power. The more benign ones exit with a career or book deal, celebrities born of a countercultural moment. The more rapacious ones leave a trail of ruin and heartbreak.
Communities made of summer children either dissolve quickly and dramatically or develop defenses. If they do the latter, they necessarily become less open and unguarded. They begin to reinvent the rules and defenses of older communities from first principles.
You might have had the experience of visiting a commune, squat, protest camp, or intentional community only to be unexpectedly dressed down by someone over a violation of some undisclosed rule. That person is likely a long time member (and a bit of a character to begin with) who has seen many people come and go, sat through countless meetings, and watched the community struggle to keep it together. The unpredictably of the rule and its enforcement is a consequence of this new community rediscovering the necessity of rules and norms from first principles.
This is the metaphor of moulting: leaving behind a shell that has become too small in order to grow a new one better fitted to the growing organism. It implies a period of tender vulnerability until the new shell can be regrown.
After the Summer
From the neutral perspective, there is nothing wrong with the above cycle. It is inevitable and natural. But I suspect there are different pathways that communities can follow as they regrow their carapaces.
Some are better than others at keeping a holy flame burning inside their fortresses.
In a follow-up post, I will discuss how some communities balance the tension between disruptive, countercultural and free-spirited impulses and the need for coherence, stability, and discipline.
I think about this constantly. I did my college senior project on communes, and a major theme that seemed clear to me was that when communities cohere and persist, they tend to do so either around a charismatic leader (or, possibly absolute best case, a small group of charismatic leaders), or else around a clear ideology/set of rules...and of course, there are major problems with both. I think, in some cases, the tension between community rules and powerful leaders can provide some balance. I also wonder about the specific dynamics of spiritual communities – obviously they're not immune to either of these excesses, but at least maybe there's some kind of touchstone of direct experience for participants to ground themselves in? Anyway, I look forward to reading your follow-up thoughts.