Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Cohousing exclusiveness

[Paul Barton-Davis (pbd]

>One thing I have been wondering is whether specifically choosing one's
>neighbors because you share their worldview/lifestyle, etc actually
>makes for a pretty closed-minded community. Do you think that it's
>important for children to learn to live side by side with people with
>whom they have very little in common? Is clannishness a necessary
>byproduct of "intentional" communities?

Here's a related anecdote. Some friends of mine belong to an Utne
salon that they joined when they moved to the Philadelphia area. It
was just starting up, and it had a pleasantly and suprisingly diverse
membership. Many different cultural, economic, religious and
philosophical backgrounds. Over several months, the group became less
and less diverse. Finally, a few months back, they had a discussion
session specifically to talk about why the group had become so
dominated by broadly similar people. At that time, there was still one
african american in the group, and she was really quite amazed that
this should be a mystery to the rest of the group. "Do you have any
idea", she asked "how uncommon it is for any of my family and friends
to even *think* about going to someone's house to sit around and
*talk* about nothing in particular ?" Her implication, which was
expanded a little during the evening, was that the discussion group
had self-selected a set of people who were comfortable with
free-ranging, non-directed philosophical discussion, and that far from
this being a neutral property of people from many different walks of
life, it actually correlated very strongly with other, more visible
characteristics such as race, economic and educational background,
etc. It just isn't a property, however, that one normally labels.

I don't think there's anything mysterious about the fact that as
people, we like to surround ourselves with other people who make us
feel good, or at worst, don't make us feel bad. It would be nice to
imagine that a very diverse set of people could meet this test, but I
fear that it often is not the case. I find it very valuable to hang
out with people I don't like or whose views I don't agree, as well as
read publications that I find offensive or stupid. But ask me to
construct a living situation like this and I'll walk the other way.

Now of course, this is all a matter of degree. A cohousing group, just
like any other human association, doesn't need to be all of one mind
on everything, and of course, such a group probably could not even be
formed. Any collection of people is going to include some diversity of
opinion, and perhaps even of background. 

Even so, the very things that are important to the people who are keen
on cohousing may well turn out to be just as self-selecting as the
characteristics that lead people to stay in a discussion group. It
would be nice to say that "a longing for community" is a feature
shared by all people. It may very well be. But anthropology should
have taught everyone by now that "community" is a word with very
meanings to different cultures. Cohousing is a fairly specific idea of
community, at least relative to the breadth of meaning visible across
the planet. I think it entirely possible, and even likely, that
intentional communities (and cohousing groups are certainly examples
of these) are going to self-select over time. Maybe it will be hard to
write down what the selection criteria are, but they will be there, in
the collective and individual subconscious of the group, and when
people join who violate these criteria enough, there will be strong
(if subtle at times) pressure on them to leave, or for the others to
do so.

This doesn't mean that cohousing groups are destined to end up full of
white middle class baby boom technophiliacs. But they may be just as
selective on other grounds that we don't tend to attach such
simplistic labels to, just like that discussion group.

--p