Cohousing-L Mailing List: The price of community

[Frank Mancino (fmancino]

I recently read an article in the Wilson Quarterly that seems quite
appropriate to cohousing.  The article is entitled, "Learning from the
Fifties", and is an adapation from a book called *The Lost City: Discovering
the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s* by Alan
Ehrenhalt, and due to be published this September.  I know nothing about the
author but I can recommend this article to all those interested in community
and concerned about the tension between indivdual values and community
values.  I doubt that I could do justice to his thesis but I think it is
basically that community depends upon authority and the dilemma of modern
America is that authority in most of our lives has been lost.  His analysis
of the reasons for that loss are both sophisticated and unnerving: indicting
both commerical/market forces, and my/our generation that came of age in the
60's.  I will say no more except to provide some of his summary to give you
a flavor of the article, and to say that although it made me quite
uncomfortable to read it, it echoed some of my own thoughts about community
building, and made me think about the basis for community. (I hope this
excerpt will not be too long for you; if so, I apologize in advance)
*We are never going to return to the 1950s in America, any more than we are
going to return to Victorian standards of morality.  And we should not want
to return to them.  What is past is past.  What we badly need to do, once
our rebellion against the 1950s has run its course, is to rebuild some
anchors of stability to help  us through times of equally unsettling change.
For that to happen anytime soon, the generation that launched the rebellion
will have to force itself to rethink some of the unexamined "truths" with
which it has lived its entire adult life.  It will have to recognize that
privacy, individuality, and choice are not free goods, and that the society
that places no restrictions on them pays a high price for that decision.  It
will have to retrieve the idea of authority from the dustbin to which it was
confined by the 1960s deluge.  The middle-aged communitarian who yearns, in
the words of Hillary Clinton, to "do what I used to be able to do when I was
a little kid", has no alternative but to develop a realism about the natural
limits of life that most of the baby boomers have yet to demonstrate. There
is a good chance that this will not happen . . .*

(As I said, makes you squirm but does make you think)

Frank Mancino
(the doubting Thomas of cohers/waiting for the miracles)