A New Kind of Family

Like sex ‘family’ is a fundamental topic. To achieve a humane non-destructive truce with ourselves and the rest of nature we need to make an effort towards better understanding and changing the concept of the family.

In a sort of traffic pile-up of Freudian, Feminist and Communitarian ideas the 1960s saw the family — in its stripped-down Western middle class version — as something mainly destructive and toxic. To be somehow abolished in radical configurations like the Israeli kibbutz or in communes like the c19th Oneida Community or today’s Tamera (see below).

But today’s understanding of how positive social change can happen, after the accelerated history of the last two centuries, is more on the ‘tweak’ plan.  Rather than destroy then start from scratch and build the perfect society — a tall order given human complexity, make improvements and evolve existing systems. It’s self-evident that in a family mutual love and solidarity, although not universal, is a great boon. And of course children cannot survive without some kind of family or family-like structure in place. It is also really the only successful social model we have because it stems from our mammalian biology; from  the impulses of sexual attraction, reproduction and nurturing.

I believe that far from being toxic and needing to be dynamited the Family is a great hidden-in-plain-sight template for a radically better society.

Without dumping the traditional or ‘bio’-family (and communitarian experiments like Oneida and the Kibbutz have all failed to do that over more than one or two generations) or the love of couples that seeds families we should understand how to extend the family model beyond its biological, kin and sexual bonds. The classical anarchist movement for example spoke of the voluntary ‘affinity group‘ as a political actor different to hierarchal political parties and businesses. Affinity groups work with shared values and friendship and could be the basis of living arrangements and small-scale social change not just political action.

Our aim is to encourage links of solidarity, co-help, co-responsibility, co-ownership amongst conscious world citizens who identify with the living planet and her avatar the Great Mother.

So with the one(s) we love it’s not our goal to have a 2.5 children monogamous nest in a single family house scenario but live and love and support each other in a community of affinity.

Which brings us to Tamera, one of the worlds most successful and long-lasting ‘conscious communities’. In a highly isolated patch of land in Southern Portugal a largely German group have maintained an eco-respectful community that has also maintained relative sexual liberty while maintaining long-term relationships, unlike the usual western model of ‘serial monogamy’ or ‘love one, dump one’.

Study their effort, they have been quite thoughtful. My reaction is that Tamera sounds in a way like a mini East Germany, all that German discipline and cut off from the rest of the world, not in this case by the strict use of ditches, automatic machine guns and visa restrictions but living as expatriates in the middle of nowhere. And as Jamie Bartlett’s Radicals Chasing Utopia makes clear it is a kind of gurocracy, i.e. with top-down thinking and highly managed debate.

Unfortunately their linguistic and physical isolation means their influence outside their fences is minimal. If you even want to visit you have to pay €560 for a week’s stay in a tent.

Perhaps an important innovation of the Towerland Project is the idea of the ‘dispersed community’ — just as a bio-family can be physically spread over four or five continents (like my emigration-prone Irish family) and still maintain live feeling and acts of helping and celebration this model of community does not depend on us all living together in the same big house or village fulltime (like our communal or perhaps ex-communal neighbours, also mainly German, in Upacchi, near Anghiari).

Partly this becomes more possible through modern communication media.

Just as one might expect a bio-family that went off to live in great isolation to fracture through too much contact and too little release so with the isolated communitarian experiment, unless, as in the ‘Old Days’ there was a Patriarch or Matriarch to enforce the rules.

Hence the dispersed and spreading affinity-community idea.