Book Review: Por Que Vivimos en Comunidad

Title: Por Que Vivimos en Comunidad 

Original title: Warum Wir in Gemeinschaft Leben

Author: Eberhard Arnold, with two chapters by Thomas Merton, one by Peter Stucky, and one by Basil Pennington

Translator: Claudia Amengual

Publisher: Plough

Date (German): 1925

Date: (Merton passages in English): 1989

Date (this edition): 2023

ISBN: 978-1-63608-060-4

Length: 85 e-pages

Quote: "[N]os situamos junto a los desposeídos, junto a aquellos privados de sus derechos y junto a los degradados y oprimidos. Y, aun así, evitamos ese tipo de lucha de clases que se vale de medios carentes de amor para cobrarse su venganza en aquellos que han explotado a los trabajadores hasta hacerlos sudar sangre."

In the nineteenth century, as Europe realized aghast that American democracy was working, Europeans scrambled to come up with alternative political systems that would feel like "their own" and allow their aristocrats and money-handlers to remain in power while disposing of the monarchs. In their brain-drained, tribal-war-addicted, proto-civilized way they blathered at length about socialism and communism. This web site agrees with those who say it's not logical to imagine that the English language made the great difference--actually some have pointed to historical influences on Anglo-culture that Euro-culture lacked, but that's not part of this book review. 

Anyway, in the English-speaking countries people easily came up with clever sayings to dismiss socialism and communism as the bad ideas we recognized them to be. 

"

I've just become a Socialist. It's a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it.

"

(P.G. Wodehouse)

"

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

"

(George Orwell)

"

[N]othing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

"

(C.S. Lewis)

Europeans probably came up with clever quotes too, but it did them no good. They had to work out their political decisions in their own way--by dragging the whole world into their endless tribal wars. Their recent bids for control of a global government make Gandhi's contemporary observation newly relevant: European civilization would be an excellent idea, if it had ever really been tried.

(I don't get any particular pleasure out of belittling Europe; I had a few French and German ancestors too, but until the UN gets back to its mediation business and earns its keep, and the "World Economic Forum" disbands, apologizes, and goes home, it is the whole world's duty to notice how unfit Europe is to dictate policy to less barbaric parts of the world.)

Nevertheless some of "the courage and unselfishness of individuals" did exist in Europe a hundred years ago. One of those individuals was Eberhard Arnold, whose biography this web site considered last week. This German ecumenical preacher not only imagined, but put into practice, a truly Christian response to the valid concerns of the socialists and communists. Things written in German rarely translate into concise, quotable English but Arnold did describe his vision in several books, which the descendants of his congregation are still translating into English, Spanish, and other languages.

Arnold's solution--clearly identified in this book as a reaction to concerns about entrenched poverty and oppression--was religious communities where members gave up all personal property, pooled their resources, and lived frugally, with the formerly rich and the formerly poor on equal terms. It had worked for the early Christian church. It worked for Arnold's own little flock. Why should it not work for other Christians who cared about the poor, but could not support a totalitarian dictatorship? 

Why didn't it? Because neither the Marxist Communists nor the National Socialists actually gave a flip about the poor. Both parties dismissed Arnold; the Marxists overtly, and the Nazis covertly, despised Christianity anyway. And the conventional "churchian" types didn't want to bother reading books like this one; they wanted to preserve the status quo, and all it took was a bit of heaving and frothing about, shudder quake, communes--didn't that mean everybody was having sex with everybody, probably in strep-stinky beds amidst piles of unwashed laundry and ruins of untended crop fields?

Wrongi. When people voluntarily commit to practice courage and unselfishness in intentional communities, they break up feudal class systems and provide social mobility to places like Europe that still needed social mobility. They offer poor people a far more satisfactory alternative than leftists' feeble "Just be a gracious recipient of handouts," which sounds nice to rich people but more emetic than inspirational to poor people. They make "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" a viable, even sustainable idea. 

In 1925 it was easy to dismiss Warum wir in Gemeinschaft leben as too radical to be practical for Church and too private to interest the State. A hundred years later, as the Bruderhof groups have survived a few generations and grown and spread, Americans are more likely to agree with Thomas Merton that Arnold's life, work, and followers are worth studying. Merton was a man ahead of his time, and he could read German. His comments on Warum were not part of a book, but were part of two speeches he made that were posthumously published in a 1989 collection. They have been published as the last two chapters of this book, while Stucky's and Pennington's recommendations form the first two chapters. 

In the US today, the cost of living has been the main incentive for young people to live communally. A far more pleasant alternative to tax-funded, social-worker-managed, usually ugly and dirty and dangerous "housing projects" are the "group houses" rented by any number of single twenty-somethings (sometimes including single parents with young children). Each resident rents one room that can be used as a bedroom, sharing a kitchen, bath, and usually some sort of sitting room with seating for guests and the house television set. Successful "group houses" I have known might or might not include an older couple who agreed to serve as de facto house parents. Usually the house rules include at least temporary celibacy; some houses allowed "overnight guests" but all successful group houses banned sexual relationships between housemates. Usually one person is buying the house and the others are merely paying rent to help the buyer make house payments. Rarely is any attempt made to spiritualize the relationship among housemates. Since most people have no intention of making their house sharing a permanent commitment, and in fact most group houses do not offer room for children to grow properly, the slack of any attempt to spiritualize the house-sharing experience may be appropriate. 

People don't always abandon communitarian arrangements the minute they start rearing children, although that seems to be usual. While I favor separate houses with a well separated bedroom and garden space for every child, some sort of communal agreement to share a farm may be the best way to give children a healthy Green experience of living on a small sustainable farm. The old European manor house and cottages, from which Americans got our idea of the old plantation with the great house and the slaves' or sharecroppers' cabins, became detestable as a symbol of inequality between the often idle and dissolute owners and the often exploited workers who shared the harvest of the same fields. That inequality can be eliminated from arrangements where any number of couples or single adults, with or without reasonable numbers of children, live in separate houses and farm the same land. That can be an egalitarian arrangement that allows people who could not otherwise afford, or even use, a full-sized farm to share the work and benefits of having one--and makes enough labor available to make True Green farming feasible. 

Both Merton and Arnold observe in this book that, in the absence of a spiritual commitment, both group houses and group farms tend to break up. Humans rarely have the ability to sustain long-term relationships, they say, without God's help. Both of them identify private property as the cause of disagreement, citing the old story of two hermits who lived in an early Christian lauro, a desert "retreat" where hermits built little houses close enough that they could hear one another shout for help, but not see each other enough to have to talk. The houses were smaller, but their arrangement resembled a residential street in a nice suburban neighborhood. In those days even Europe was so sparsely populated that these people could just go out in the country, find some unclaimed land, build their huts, plant their gardens, and have time left to catch fish in some unpolluted stream nearby, without anyone trying to tax or regulate them. Anyway these two old hermits had lived side by side, visiting with each other and the other hermits in the lauro every week or two and then going back to their solitary prayer and labor, and since interpersonal distance prevents interpersonal conflict, they'd never quarrelled. They agreed, in order to understand other people better, to find something to have a quarrel about. Why not some private property? So they walked about looking for something with some market value to fight over; since they had no money they couldn't buy anything expensive, but one hermit brought home a leftover brick and said, "My brick! Mine, not yours!" But the other hermit could not naturally get into the spirit of the quarrel; he said, "If you want it, take it," and went back to his prayer and labor.

My interpretation is that this story teaches us that good interpersonal distance frees us from quarrels about private property. I believe this to be true, based on my husband's and my experience. Unlike young couples who leave their parents' homes with relatively few belongings and have to work to build their own nests, we each had a house--he in rural Maryland, I in rural Virginia--and needed to agree only on what to bring to a smaller house we shared in the city. We had some interpersonal conflicts, but never once did we quarrel about the right to or use of belongings. All but one of our disagreements (the one about whose disabled relatives to visit first) resolved itself with the one question: "Do I want to be here with my Partner For Life and do this his (or her) way, or do I want to go home and do it my way?" and we always chose to stay together. 

We did, however, have the spiritual perspective--the fundamental understanding that no person has final authority, that only God has the authority or is always right, and that when people quarrel angrily, both of them are wrong. Trying to equalize the blame for a quarrel is a snare of Satan, and in fact, when it's possible for one person to say "I was completely wrong about this," the reconciliation may be fun. This thought was not new or original with Eberhard Arnold, but it's a point he makes in this book.

Arnold takes the position that when nobody owns anything even extroverts can live in the same house with other people, without quarrelling. I'll believe that if and when I see it. I have, however, seen that when people retain enough private property to separate themselves and their work if they really want to, whether they then propose to live together as Partners For Life, or share a house temporarily for business or educational purposes, or share a business or a farm among families living in separate houses, or share a house as a place where people with disabilities can safely do whatever work they are still able to do, an individual spiritual commitment made by each person is what makes the long-term relationship possible--whether lifelong or temporary. 

Well, the book was sent to me free of charge. Plough regularly offers one free e-book to anyone who visits their web site during a specified time; sometimes the offers repeat, since the purpose of these free books is to raise awareness of the Bruderhof as a living religious movement.. I missed the time when the English translation of Warum was offered (Why Do We Live in Community) but it's important enough for anyone interested in that denomination that they might offer it as a freebie again. But why wait? It's a small, inexpensive paperback. Buy it in whichever language you prefer, and consider the merits of communal living as a way to address poverty (and, yes, racism!) without bloating government or using any kind of force or violence. 

The epigraph that opens this book, quoted from an earlier Quaker publication, affirms: "We do not ask that anyone follow us or imitate us." If you're called to contribute money to a Bruderhof mission (anyone can always buy Plough's books or subscribe to their magazine), or consider visiting and perhaps even joining one of their communities, you'll know it. If not, you're free, even encouraged, to make what use of Arnold's insights you can.