Experiments in Living

Buddha


"The male, destructive principle is diametrically opposed to the female, constructive one, which is based on mutual aid, on grace, on understanding and dialogue. In the modern, male, states, women have not only been deprived of any possibility of expressing their essential nature, they had to submit to the male principle, they were forced to recognize it..."
---Lida Heymann (from the Vertigo Years)

"Every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac" now thought he had a political message.
---George Orwell.

"Genius is not allowed for by regulation."

'The English alternative vision of the future , it seems, was essentially private and domestic'

The pacifist movement as one way of imagining a new type of living together, against the dominant culture of war and (male) aggressiveness.

'These newfangled designs for living were often intertwined with bohemian lives..an ever-shifting landscape of spiritual leaders and hangers-on, of mystics and scholars, charmers and charlatans.'

Of course, these sentiments have probably always been with us in one form or the other, are in all likelihood as old as humanity itself. Who hasn't, after all, dreamt of escaping from one's family, home, and country, the weight of the world with all its attachments, responsibilities, burdens and complexities into a realm of uninhibited freedom, lightness, or towards a utopian island of equality and meaningful idleness, with the toil and drudgery from work on the one hand, and the divisions between people- man and woman, class and caste, religion and race-on the other, finally and permanently abolished? "Whither shall I flee?"

But there are certain times as well in which the pressure of such feelings, aspirations, become more keenly felt. This desire for escape (Levinas, or Peter Brown's Making of Late Humanity) becomes more acute at particular junctures in history. Is it any wonder, then, that such an 'ecstatic, irrational dimension' would appeal to a 'young generation whose childhood had been dominated by rigid notions of discipline, control, reason, self-sacrifice', and mechanization?

But what kind of freedom can be imagined when those boundaries are less restrictive, when things can be acquired at the click of a button, when neither nation nor God can inspire and, more to the point, be worth the effort of rebelling against?And when the shock of the new doesn't shock any more? (Of course, class and gender inequalities and exploitation still exists, but the trend has surely been to one of greater freedom and equality, and less stuffiness?)

The 'experimental communities' might have been set up rebel against conventional morality and decency, but in an age when conventions are themselves almost synonymous with conservatism and have the slight whiff of backwardness about them, one has to ask: rebel against what, exactly? (Iris M., in Existentialism and Mystics: the left has run out of steam because it has achieved a lot of its historic goals)

'The cult of life and the idea of true community, of free spirits not subjected to the rules of society, and the vision of a rebirth of truth long lost, fascinated German artists...Society is always prone to suppress the charismatic ferment of communal visions.'

Er..well, we know how that ended up! A sense of place, attachments, middling morality and middle-age duplicity, the acknowledgement of constraints, the daily bourgeois compromises and numb-like passivity before spectacles, all that seems infinitely boring and trivial in comparison.