by Susanna Crossman
For a few years through the 1980s and 1990s, there was a stream of memoirs about life in the alternative communities of the 1960s and 1970s, old hippies reflecting on their experimental salad days. As that generation has aged into its twilight years, there are fewer such memoirs appearing here and there. But, one of the significant elements of that era was the environment in which children grew up. The absolute freedom in nature that many of the hippies sought in creating a new paradigm often left children to grow up almost wild. There was both a reverence for childhood, and an assumption that breaking the chains of the past meant treating small children as independent agents, almost adults in their own right. One can easily imagine where this could go wrong (and it did). Some people like to say that "kids really want limits and discpline". On the surface, this is ludicrous. Of course kids just want to have whatever they want, including the freedoms they percieve adults enjoy. It is more that kids need limits and discipline and it is the adults' responsibility to provide these in a careful and nurturing manner. Many of the hippie experiments neglected this to an extreme. And so, the second generation of memoirs begins to appear, the children of the utopian experiments of the sixties and seventies, reflecting on the joys and harms of growing up in such a wild world. Start with the notion that small children are free agents and you can see how fast predatory adults can take advantage of this so-called freedom.
(Full disclosure: I consider myself amongst these kids, though having nowhere near as hard as many. Also one considers that there was also a second wave of utopian experiments through the late 1970s into the 1980s, and that is the world in which this particular memoir takes place.)
So, here we are in 1978, at an un-named Utopian commune (say community!) in England. The author is one of three siblings in a small single-mother family who come to join the community housed in a huge mansion that once served as a home for the elderly. It is a fairly large commune, as these things go, with several dozen adults and children. The author, who has had a career as a counselor, has an accute honest style in describing the house and its residents. She also goes into some detail about the psychological effects of this environment and the place that children find themselves in when given so much autonomy. She knows her mother by her first name, now, as parenthood is among the traditions the group is disposing of. The kids are discouraged from excelling in any of their interests, as winning prizes or getting into good schools is considered classist. The result is not so much that the kids are free of social norms, as they are wedged into another paradigm which in some cases is profoundly damaging to their self-esteem. This persists throughout this book, and, to some extent, the author dwells so much upon this that one wonders whether there were any truly joyful moments in her youth. Perhaps not?
In this particular community (and in so many like it, unfortunately), this broken social paradigm is a fertile ground for divergent and often criminal behavior. You can argue about social norms, and whether "criminal" is just giving in to the dominant social structure. But you can't argue damage. Drugs and rock & roll are one thing, sexual abuse is another. The disposal of parenthood, the bestowal of adult autonomy on kids, these release kids to their own development, but they also expose the kids to dangers they are not equipped to handle. Of course, drugs. But especially physical and sexual abuse. Our author doesn't escape this, neither does her sister, and presumably many of the kids on the commune. It's a harsh and dark reality, and to a large extent this communal movement, globally, has not been held to account for the damage done to so many kids. Indeed, this is brought home late in the book when kids are blamed for the damage and disruption that the adults refused to handle.
While we can hope for a Utopia, and experiment with it, we must consider whether the participants aren't merely fleeing the strictures of the society in which they were nurtured, perhaps escaping their own corrupted upbringing. There is something juvenile in the assumptions that many of these communal experiments accepted. An unending childhood, which which abandoned its responsibilities once childish expectations resulted in the appearance of children of their own. Utopia is not merely an escape. Utopia is a lot of work, as well it should be.
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