About ten years ago, an old convent came up for sale in a neighborhood where we lived. There are a few families that we are close with, and we seriously considered buying it together and living communally. None of use have family nearby, so I had this vision that we would all be able to take turns watching the kids and helping each other with things as the ebbs and flows of life happened.
As I look back on this idea and reflect on how hard parenting has been and how much work my spouse and I have had to do to make our marriage successful, when I think about multiplying that effort across a lot more parents and a lot more kids, I'm not sure whether we could have made it work. That said, I have my own thoughts about what I'd like an intentional community to look like:
Principles for intentional community
When I thought about the idea of intentionally forming a community, I think the challenging thing is to find people who are like-minded: what are the essential elements that people need to agree on and in what ways can we be different?
I think an articulation of principles that the community would agree to promote and live by would be better than what is written in the OP, which is largely an administrative structure. I think HOAs are a good example of a community with an administrative structure but no guiding principles, and they are almost universally panned. It seems like the overriding reason is that they attract a certain busybody personality type that becomes overly invested in policing the petty minutiae of the community. This is probably an instance of "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts non-differentiably at the originabsolutely."
Here are a couple of principles that I can see enshrining in a community's structure to the benefit of all. I think these need to be a mixture of rights, "this is what you should get when you are a part of the community" and responsibilities "this is what you must do to be a part of the community".
You'll see coming through in the principles the aspect of the problem that (I believe) family structures need to be inherently autocratic (between adults and children) because the adults are the ones who need to be responsible decision makers and to teach the children how do likewise as they mature. I'll address this more further down in the post.
Some principles for intentional community:
the absolute right to bodily autonomy - for anyone, of any age, they have the right to say what can and cannot be done to their own body. We practice this in our parenting so that our child will have the conviction that they can say "no" when it comes to their body. This is not to say that choices are not without consequences (therein lies the slippery slope), but if she says she won't brush her teeth, we don't make her brush her teeth, but we do let he know there are consequences with privileges like TV shows. A more adult example might be refusal to be vaccinated, with the consequence of having to wear a mask or be banned from public venues or from the community altogether.[1]
the right to privacy and the freedom of private expression - the community should permit you to do whatever you want in your own spaces and should not police or even try to observe that activity unless it is harmful to members in the private spaces or violates their bodily autonomy. Some examples might be the right to paint the inside of your house any color you want or to run a sex dungeon out of your basement.
the right to call upon the community for support - community means working together and supporting each other, which means there should be recognized ways that the community allows its members to call on them.
the right to be treated as a reasonable person - at least until we have established otherwise, we should assume that people are reasonable and treat their needs and desires as reasonable even if they are different from our own.
the responsibility to balance benefit to the community with one's individual benefit - recognizing that they benefit from being a part of the community, individuals should be willing to set aside their personal wants when they can choose something that benefits the community as a whole. This might mean that even though you could play loud music at 3 AM, you would choose not to because it negatively affects the whole community.
the responsibility to contribute to the community - this doesn't mean that you have to go to all the block parties, but that you find some way to "give back". For sure, different contributions will be valued differently by different members of the community, so it should not be that each person's contribution would need to be equal or fair, but that there be some contribution. This balances (or is perhaps tied to) the right to call on the community for support.
the responsibility to treat community members reasonably and with compassion and empathy - this is the balance to being treated reasonably. If we can look at what people are doing and understand the things that are driving them to those choices, then we can make more space for acceptance, forgiveness, and continued community. For example, if there is a child who is stealing bikes and pawning them, we might look at the ways their needs are not being met that are driving them to that behavior and try to correct those things compassionately. This doesn't mean that theft should be allowed to continue, but retributive justice is sort of the opposite of community building.
I feel like this list is unsatisfyingly incomplete, but one of the problems with trying to write a list like this is that the emotional cost of dealing with people in a nuanced and principled way is very high. I think most people would rather have a set of clear rules than have to make principled decisions on a daily basis.
You see a tendency toward legalism all through human history. I used to live in an Orthodox Jewish community, and I learned that the set of rules they followed were all derived from thousands of years of teachings layered over the principles laid out in the Torah. For example, what constitutes "work" on the Sabbath in the modern world requires not pressing buttons to make a machine do something.[2] We can also see the dangers of trying to legislate every little thing in the US legal system, where an attempt to make the law comprehensive ends with every law having loop holes and laws passed to close those loopholes having their own unpredictable side effects.
Administrative structure
Maybe you do also need some kind of basic administrative structure. For that part, I'll express a few reactions to the original post:
I would not set the minimum number of adults in a family at 2. There are plenty of families with only one adult. If I were a single parent, I'd be very happy to have the support of an intentional community.
I find the "Head of Family" to be a distasteful concept - to be transparent about my own baggage, I was a raised in a conservative Christian setting, so headship for me is specifically tied to ideas of chauvinism, patriarchy, and authoritarian leadership. To be fair to the OP, they did not say that the Head of Family should be the man or that families should be only two specific kinds of people, or anything like that, and that is good. But I'd rather see an expectation that adult family members are equal members of the family and equal members of the community.
I don't think voting on family leadership is a workable administrative structure. Since a vast majority of families are two-adult households, the common case might be a "tie" which is broken by a teenager. You can see how this would align perverse incentives where the child (or children) align with one parent against the others, and how that might be manipulated.
On this last point, I alluded to this earlier, but I think families are inherently autocratic structures. The other day, my daughter said, "You just get to tell me what to do because there's nobody to tell you 'No.'" I responded, "You're right, that is the way it is. My job as a parent is to make the choices I think are best for you, which are not always the same things as what you want. My other job is to balance your needs with the needs of the rest of the family, which means we do not always do the things you want to do." This part is very challenging because unless you are parenting a child day to day, it's easy to look at a single interaction or a small sample of interactions and think, "I could do better than that." But like most relationships, what you see from the outside is not all there is.
Defining "acceptable" parenting is one of those places where acting on principles is hard -- the community would be challenged to define what constitutes a harmful environment -- to decide whether to allow parents leeway to parent or to intervene. This is not something we do particularly well (IMO) in modern US society. I do think a community of intentional, supportive people could provide an environment to make better parents out of all of us, but it would depend a lot on the community members maintaining that intentionality and working to adapt the guiding principles to specific cases.
Final thoughts
I don't know if people will really engage with this or not, but in addition to reactions to what I wrote above, here are a few questions I'll throw out there that I'm curious on others responses to:
Are there examples of "intentional communities" as I have laid them out above, either in your own experience or historical examples? What were the guiding principles? Are there examples where applying them succeeded or failed in ways that we could learn lessons from?
What principles would you add or take away from my list? What do you think the implications for the community would be?
Do you think there's an upper limit on how big an intentional community like this can be (I suspect it is quite small)? How would you try to let communities like this coexist with others?
[1] - I'm not trying to make this post or the discussion about vaccination ethics. A community could choose not to have vaccination requirements. No matter what your opinion on it, it's a salient example of bodily autonomy issues with adults.
[2] - Obviously there is a great deal of diversity in the Jewish community (and even the Orthodox community) and this example is not representative of all of them. It's just an example of the comfort of legalism over the desire to apply principles of community in real time.
About ten years ago, an old convent came up for sale in a neighborhood where we lived. There are a few families that we are close with, and we seriously considered buying it together and living communally. None of use have family nearby, so I had this vision that we would all be able to take turns watching the kids and helping each other with things as the ebbs and flows of life happened.
As I look back on this idea and reflect on how hard parenting has been and how much work my spouse and I have had to do to make our marriage successful, when I think about multiplying that effort across a lot more parents and a lot more kids, I'm not sure whether we could have made it work. That said, I have my own thoughts about what I'd like an intentional community to look like:
Principles for intentional community
When I thought about the idea of intentionally forming a community, I think the challenging thing is to find people who are like-minded: what are the essential elements that people need to agree on and in what ways can we be different?
I think an articulation of principles that the community would agree to promote and live by would be better than what is written in the OP, which is largely an administrative structure. I think HOAs are a good example of a community with an administrative structure but no guiding principles, and they are almost universally panned. It seems like the overriding reason is that they attract a certain busybody personality type that becomes overly invested in policing the petty minutiae of the community. This is probably an instance of "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts
non-differentiably at the originabsolutely."Here are a couple of principles that I can see enshrining in a community's structure to the benefit of all. I think these need to be a mixture of rights, "this is what you should get when you are a part of the community" and responsibilities "this is what you must do to be a part of the community".
You'll see coming through in the principles the aspect of the problem that (I believe) family structures need to be inherently autocratic (between adults and children) because the adults are the ones who need to be responsible decision makers and to teach the children how do likewise as they mature. I'll address this more further down in the post.
Some principles for intentional community:
I feel like this list is unsatisfyingly incomplete, but one of the problems with trying to write a list like this is that the emotional cost of dealing with people in a nuanced and principled way is very high. I think most people would rather have a set of clear rules than have to make principled decisions on a daily basis.
You see a tendency toward legalism all through human history. I used to live in an Orthodox Jewish community, and I learned that the set of rules they followed were all derived from thousands of years of teachings layered over the principles laid out in the Torah. For example, what constitutes "work" on the Sabbath in the modern world requires not pressing buttons to make a machine do something.[2] We can also see the dangers of trying to legislate every little thing in the US legal system, where an attempt to make the law comprehensive ends with every law having loop holes and laws passed to close those loopholes having their own unpredictable side effects.
Administrative structure
Maybe you do also need some kind of basic administrative structure. For that part, I'll express a few reactions to the original post:
On this last point, I alluded to this earlier, but I think families are inherently autocratic structures. The other day, my daughter said, "You just get to tell me what to do because there's nobody to tell you 'No.'" I responded, "You're right, that is the way it is. My job as a parent is to make the choices I think are best for you, which are not always the same things as what you want. My other job is to balance your needs with the needs of the rest of the family, which means we do not always do the things you want to do." This part is very challenging because unless you are parenting a child day to day, it's easy to look at a single interaction or a small sample of interactions and think, "I could do better than that." But like most relationships, what you see from the outside is not all there is.
Defining "acceptable" parenting is one of those places where acting on principles is hard -- the community would be challenged to define what constitutes a harmful environment -- to decide whether to allow parents leeway to parent or to intervene. This is not something we do particularly well (IMO) in modern US society. I do think a community of intentional, supportive people could provide an environment to make better parents out of all of us, but it would depend a lot on the community members maintaining that intentionality and working to adapt the guiding principles to specific cases.
Final thoughts
I don't know if people will really engage with this or not, but in addition to reactions to what I wrote above, here are a few questions I'll throw out there that I'm curious on others responses to:
[1] - I'm not trying to make this post or the discussion about vaccination ethics. A community could choose not to have vaccination requirements. No matter what your opinion on it, it's a salient example of bodily autonomy issues with adults.
[2] - Obviously there is a great deal of diversity in the Jewish community (and even the Orthodox community) and this example is not representative of all of them. It's just an example of the comfort of legalism over the desire to apply principles of community in real time.