The Hippies and American Values

Chapter 4: The Ethics of Community

Chapter 4 The Ethics of Community Now you see. This is it—you only have to come here to realize it. That’s why we haven’t been hassled. All the county officials and inspectors who come here realize that this is a better way of life than theirs. They know this is the answer just as you do. —Olompali Ranch commune member, Berkeley Barb, July 12–18, 1968 Intentional community is a vision that has a long and honorable history in human culture. The Buddhist sangha, or monastic community, is alive and well after some 2,500 years, making it surely the oldest human institution. The early Christians practiced community of goods. In America, the original Native American settlers lived in close communities, and some of the later settlers established utopian settlements as well—Shakers, Harmonists, and Hutterites, to name only three of thousands of communal movements and colonies. Thus the communes of the hippies represented an old ideal—but one presented in new garb. The hippies, for their part, were not always students of communal history, and in any event many believed, as one of them put it, that “the hippie development is of a totally new order, wherein the past, in a sense, is irrelevant.”1 For one thing, most earlier communes were based on either religious or radical political and social convictions, and thus had clear ideological centers and 74 the ethics of community strong senses of purpose. Many hip communes, on the other hand, tended toward free expression, hedonism, and anarchy, and they represented an attempt to live the hippie ethical ideals of liberated sex, use of dope, love, and sharing. Although the majority did not last more than a year or two, they attracted hundreds of thousands of residents and even more sympathetic visitors. And more than a few of them have survived, some having long since passed a quarter century of longevity, which makes them “successful” in Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s widely cited analysis, and they represent tangible remaining links with hip culture.2 Several have tried to estimate the size of the hippie communal movement . Jules Siegel, writing in 1970, quoted a Newsweek estimate of 500 communes with 10,000 members in 1969, and a listing of 120 active communes in the Modern Utopian.3 Benjamin Zablocki estimated in 1971 that there were then some 1,000 rural countercultural communes and about 200 urban communes .4 Keith Melville, in 1972, similarly estimated the number of communes as “at least a thousand.”5 Judson Jerome, whose analysis probed more deeply than most, estimated that there were tens of thousands of communes with, altogether, perhaps 750,000 members.6 And beyond those who actually lived in communes, thousands more who were, for whatever reason, unable to live in them admired the whole effort from afar. The ideal of community, in short, was powerful in the counterculture. Communalism was present from the earliest days of the counterculture. Several communes founded in the 1950s and early 1960s (such as Tolstoy Farm in Washington State and Millbrook, the psychedelic commune of Timothy Leary and associates, both founded in 1963) showed early earmarks of a new, countercultural communal style, but the first commune that could be called full-blown hip was Drop City, founded in 1965 outside Trinidad, Colorado. Originally established as an artists’ community, its striking domes covered with automobile tops became a prominent landmark in the hip communal scene, and it lasted through the heyday of the counterculture until its demise in 1973.7 Another early entrant was the open-land Morning Star Ranch outside Occidental, California, founded in 1966. The mushrooming of communes after Morning Star, however, was widely believed in hippiedom to be related to the proliferation of rock festivals. The festivals were short-lived communes of a sort, as indeed were other music festivals before them. David Satterfield put it this way: “Communalism and participation, both, are best synthesized on a musical level in traditional festivals like the old-time fiddlers’ conventions. But the interaction of different social classes is more advanced in Bluegrass festivals, where dancing gives way to actually picking music together.”8 the ethics of community 75 So the rock festivals took an existing phenomenon to a new level of intensity . Festival participants repeatedly emphasized an overwhelming sense of community that provided an impulse for continuing communal experimentation . The definitive festival in this regard was, of course, Woodstock...