Author: mcdaniel

<Shout out to Dana for knowing things about computers>

This was my first experience building a website in my life. My experience was not so much as building it as it was of helping Dana create the website as I was next to her and tried to give ideas about how to get the website to look good and work.

Our main thinking about the website was to make it simple to readers and to show them what the monks did at the Abbey through our pictures. We also wanted to set up the website so we can easily put our documents in places that combine with our analysis and differing opinions.

 

This is a nice video that gives an example of the history and how the monastery works. The monastery has a bookstore in it that focuses heavily on Thomas Merton. I am pretty sure that Thomas Merton’s books outnumber pamphlets and encyclicals written by the Pope. However, their understanding of Thomas Merton differs somewhat from how Eric Reece understands Merton. Perhaps the strongest similarity between the monks understanding of Merton and Reece’s is that Merton desired to continue Jesus’s mission of bringing the Kingdom of God to Earth. However, Reece appears to see the restrictions placed on Merton by his abbot as a microcosm for how Merton dealt with the Catholic Church. However, Merton’s censored writings that were not allowed to be published had such a meaningful impact within the Church such that Pope John Paul the Second adopted some of Merton’s ideas.

The study about the difference in how religious and secular communities survived based on how many constraints they put on their numbers makes sense. The reason given about seeming arbitrariness makes sense as a way of explanation. In my own experience I have little desire to follow rules I do not agree with if they are made by secular authorities, whether professors, lawmakers, or employers. However, if a priest, writer in the New Testament of the Bible or the Catholic Catechism instructs that some actions are to be taken and other actions are not to be taken I am much more receptive to obeying even if I do not completely agree with the idea myself.

The results that show that imposing restraint on members works for religious groups also should work on the idea that people that join religious groups are looking more for being better people on the inside and are willing to change their behaviors if that will help them.

However, I did find the idea that religion arose to help bind communities together utterly reductionist. I do not believe that using materialist ideological methods of studying religion can tell someone the purpose of the religion. All that is said is that a positive benefit of religion is somehow the sole reason for the religion.

Also I am not surprised that communism works in small Christian communities. It has a history of working since the 1st Century CE  and is similar in practice to what monasteries have used as economic practice. “Each according to his needs and from each according to his abilities” has many problems in a large society where people do not know and trust each other. But shrink the community to where the members are already committed to not be free loaders and the central powers personally know and care about the individuals and all the standard critiques of communism are not applicable.

On Friday September 29th, Dana and I went to the Abbey of the Genesee to talk to Father Isaac to discuss the potential of building an archive about the Abbey of the Genesee  for our project. It went very well. Father Isaac was very helpful and informative as I expected. I have had a few interactions with Father Isaac in the past between classes and talks that he gave and other times where I sought out guidance. We were excited to here that their is much work we could do archiving the abbey and that they would be very glad to help us.

Henry Thoreau and Thomas Merton both had conflicting desires to be hermits and to engage the world to help the world. Thoreau comes up with a secular idea why his seclusion is good for the world while Merton must struggle with how he is both called to commune with God and serve man at the same time.

In paragraphs 102 to 104 in Walden Thoreau works out why it is okay for him to only be self sufficient and not to give to charity. His idea is that his desire for genius is worthy of others charity so that he is alright not directly helping others because his acts of thinking will benefit the world.

It may be hard to say whether or not writing Walden is better or worse than being a kind neighbor that gives to charity but after Thoreau leaves Walden he is a wonderful neighbor to the escaped slaves fleeing from the government. He also helps to convince others. His genius that he has developed has enabled him to see the humanness and value of the slaves which were given little value by most of society.

This is similar to Merton who after living in a contemplative lifestyle for so long communing with God realizes he must show others the value of the human lives that are being destroyed by the United States during the Vietnam War.

Reece unfortunately does not go into detail about the difference between retreating into “ones heart and pond”. The difference is that Merton needed to go much deeper if he was to rebel against the spirit of the law that had been set out for him by his Abbot that he should not say anything too inflammatory. Merton must reach this deeper state because he unlike Thoreau has promised himself to someone or something outside himself where Thoreau was free to do whatever he felt his heart told him to do.

 

If an intentional community creates a utopia but limits itself to 100 people what good does it do? How limiting must it be to live in a community full of people that are all perfect and being content in that perfection. If you believe that you live in a utopia you either have to embrace cultural relativism or narcissism. If your way of life is most conducive to human flourishing and are content to keep it to yourself how are you not a narcissist? It is possible that someone devoted to cultural relativism would think that only their members would enjoy their community and that their perfection was shared with all other communities. Twin Oaks provides its member with many material benefits, but they are doing very little for the inner life of its residents. This inner life is what communities ought to help its members achieve if they wish to provide any sort of utopia.

Twin Oaks has provided its members with a decent quality of life separate from the rest of the world in many ways. They do not rely on the electrical grid a feat that is quite amazing. The citizens only work 42 hours a week doing activities that have some level of meaning. The community is small enough for all of the members to know each other, maintaining about 100 members. However, except as an example it has done little to help people outside its community. The history of twin Oaks is quite different from that of the Shakers. It might seem that Twin Oaks is the successful one but if all the success in Twin Oaks is simply living a life that avoids suffering and has a nice community how can it compare with a community that provided ultimate meaning for its people and shaped their very Being.

The Shakers may have believed in countless absurdities but they managed to recognize that simply waiting around for Jesus to come again is not what he taught his disciples. The Shakers realized that to follow his teachings was to put their hope into action and live as if God has made Heaven available to humans. From the outside the Shakers lived similar lives to New Harmony and that New Harmony is successful because it still exists. However, New Harmony relies on having the correct people live in it while the Shakers called everyone to live holy lives with them. The Shakers may have had practices that we do not agree with but their motivations were pure. Their attempt to rid themselves of the consequences of original sin, woman desiring for men to rule over them and men only working in order to survive, was successful. Their success is evident because their community did not make women inferior to men. The Shakers also managed to show how wondrous a Christian communist society could be. Even by the standards of capitalist society they were surely successful given the high rate of inventions that its members created and how many well made goods were created by them.

I was not surprised to hear about the failure of the working cooperative for the mine in West Virginia. However, I am surprised that such an idea would matter when it comes to intentional communities. I think the idea of worker owned businesses is a good idea that can achieve many positive results such as lower levels of pollution, better treatment of workers, and better wages. This is similar to socialist ideas of what society should look like. However, this brand of socialism has almost never been practiced in a socialist society, only in capitalist societies have these socialist enclaves happened. It would make sense for ideas such as this to take hold in a communist country that believes in workers owning the means of production but unfortunately it almost always turns out to be some detached government employee running mines and factories like this instead of the workers themselves.

It is quite ironic that communities that plan on dominating member’s lives and actions are easiest to set up in the most libertarian places. On one hand you have the laws that come into place because of the idea that individualism is the most important value and on the other hand the people most utilizing those laws want to be a part of a community that exercises strong control over their lives and how they live. However, both groups do have the same idea that they probably do not want the government telling them what they can or cannot do.

The hunger to Be and not to Have seems to be very healthy for humans to have. This desire is probably the main reason Twin Oaks has been able to be so successful. This idea is quite common in the mystical aspects of religious traditions such as Christian mystics or Muslim Sufis or some Buddhist monks. It is surprising that this idea would be found in a secular community that had no real religion of their own except of their own philosophy.

I have had very little experience with online communities in my past. I am a part of two different Facebook groups that attempt to be online communities to the best of their ability.  Both groups are composed of devout Christians that met other devout Christians at events that lasted a couple days to a week and realized that these environments were something they could not find in their own geographic communities. The majority of the communication is prayer requests and advice requests.  This is along with sharing of some personal stories.

The online community that we are a part of has some of the same aspects. We are all very interested in an idea of intentional community and we do not know where to find others of like minds in geographic proximity to us. However, there do exist people that are interested in intentional communities and we have all found each other from some way or another.

The biggest way i think that having this community can help us is giving direction to help the groups start their research and support when we run into issues. While some of the groups have had some interactions with intentional communities before many have not so the professors and students with experience can help to teach the students without experience how best to interact learn and help the intentional communities we choose.

I clearly have a computer. This is actually my third computer and the 5th or so that I have used regularly. I do not have a computer because I find them easy or stress reducing. Perhaps the easiest way for my stress level to go from relaxed to swearing and wanting to break something is encountering problems with a computer. So many important things are required to be done on computers. Some things like applying for FAFSA are simply. Some things like fixing the mistakes I made when applying for FAFSA are much harder.

Learning to use a new website is one of the worst. One easy problem is loosing the information that I have to log in. Somehow I think that I do not have to write things down if people email me the necessary information. I tend to be very wrong when I make this assumption. Finding a website or finding a link that someone sent me does not have to be a trying experience and I understand how it makes sense that this would be an easy process but that idea does not reflect my personal experience. My personal experience when it comes to computers most closely reflects Murphy’s Law.

However, I am young, I still find that given enough time and/or hand-holding I will  learn how to use technology. But it gives me no pleasure to do this. My simple wish is akin to the wish that the Luddites or the Amish. Technology is okay now but surely we do not need to go any further.

Dear Wendell Berry, I know that you will likely never read this and for that I wish that I could be you and live a life that is free from computers and technological progression.  But, I am sure you understand that when it comes to the modern college student they are hopelessly trapped if they do not want to have a computer.

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