A new way of living

Findhorn for example, still operates in the UK. It holds workshops, festivals and offers accommodation and retreats in much the same way as many other New Age businesses. A “Festival of Sacred Dance, Music and Song” at Findhorn will cost the participant between £525 and £725 depending on income. While Findhorn has to support itself and may not be making exponentially high profits in relation to its costs it does support a particular lifestyle for a particular chosen elite.

A similar example can be seen in The Manitou Arbor Ecovillage [MAE] at Comstock, Michigan. The Michigan collective arose because people came to the decision that it was “difficult to live life, make good decisions … without some guide to remind us of our better selves and our deepest commitments”.

It was a shift away from politics and towards a spirituality centred on the earth and a sustainable ecology. The Michigan group consists of people from all walks of life who believe that in order to survive we have to significantly change the way we live and work on this planet. This means that any form of development must honour the earth and acknowledge a spiritual bond with all its life forms; it must celebrate life above all other interests and objectives.

Clearly, this has not happened within the current political framework and many people have lost faith in the political processes. This loss of faith in political process has led to a new paradigm of self-contained villages and communities with their own processes based upon a self-conceived spiritual ethics.

Eco-spiritual communities vary considerably in structure and how they earn their income. Some eco-spiritual communities exist on acreage in remote parts while others are being constructed in apartment blocks such as the one in central Los Angeles with its 55 residences amid the chocking smog and hostile city sprawl.

The lifestyle usually evolves around organic farming and good waste management as well as the elimination of energy dependence on fossil fuels. An even more essential component is sharing with and caring for every member of the community. Rituals of natural healing are common place, as are community arts and the creation of rituals and sacred space. Eco-spiritual communities are the latest vogue in communal idealism.

Communal idealism and/or communal autarky?

Eco-spiritual community development generally proceeds from the top down whereby a small group of people will decide on where, when, who and what will take place within their group.

They will often revitalise struggling towns and hamlets. They present as people who have made a commitment towards nourishing themselves and the planet by living in harmony and by regarding all living things as sacred. They reject politics and maintain the power by using processes of mediation and conflict resolution that fall within the boundaries of their codes and Covenants.

Many community members will be running New Age businesses and contributing to the overall growth of the group. All these activities fall within a distinctly quasi-religious and bourgeoisie framework and are underscored by the aim of converting new members into the group.

Within the eco-spiritual groups there appears to be the tacit assumption that by making decisions collectively and along the lines of an agreed Covenant there will be more ethical and egalitarian outcomes. However, there is no independent critical evaluation of the provisions for the group outside the Covenant. There is no place for the dissenting voice. The peoples’ right to criticise or deviate from the group is outside the mandate and such individuals find themselves quickly ostracised.

One of the central roles of government and Western style democracy is to ensure that there are checks and balances to protect peoples’ rights, especially the right to speak and live freely. Any kind of decentralisation tends, in principle, to work against representative democracy; at least it makes it harder. There is a wider separation between administrative laws, people and bureaucracies within decentralisation. Micro-decentralisation makes the problem acute.

In a postmodern society with so many free floating discourses and an economy that is making life tough many vulnerable people become very attracted to the new cultural and quasi-religious/spiritual ideologies. These ideologies fulfil basic human needs. They espouse love, nurture and security but it is paternalism not egalitarianism that drives these communities and entry into them comes at the cost of self-actualisation and concomitant physical and intellectual freedoms. In addition, they serve to erode the already depleted infrastructure and services of their struggling hosts.