North Country Dreaming

On My Weekend at the Bruderhof Community, Enchantment, and Loss

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
Their shadows, o’er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it—he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love,
But found them not, alas! nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows, a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Lift Not The Painted Veil”

I spoke on “Transhumanism as the New Frankensteinism” for the Romanticon panel at the Doomer Optimism event held this past weekend at the Bruderhof community in the Catskills. I didn’t know much about the Bruderhof movement prior to these last few days and assumed they were Amish or Mennonite adjacent. But, I learned, that while the Bruderhof draw inspiration from the Anabaptists, the movement began in 1920s Germany, an offshoot of the various Weimar era youth movements. The idea was to recreate the communism described in the Acts of the Apostles. They were driven out of Germany by the Nazis and ultimately settled in the US.

The community is self-sufficient—dependent on a toy factory, in this case, where adult community members work—and hold all property in common. But unlike, say, the Amish, they dress in modern clothes, drive automobiles when necessary (which they share), and even use smart phones (the Amish have the better idea in this case). They also make their own beer and drink a lot of it.

The Bruderhof, in other words, hold a flexible attitude toward modernity and its contraptions; they also have a more libertarian (in the strict sense) and democratic organizational structure. They push (and fund) all of the younger people into attending college—I met a lot of CUNY grads(!)—and these younger people are free to leave. Many do (and a good number come back later on in life). The people there at least appeared happy, unlike the typically neurotic and contentious culture war addled conference goers.

Is another way of being-together possible outside of religious commitments and their often explicitly ascetic strictures for living? On the other hand, the secular equivalents and successors—such as the utopian communities that once dotted upstate New York—oftentimes retain these strictures and structures.

I grew fascinated with alternative utopian and religious communities while living in Hudson a few years ago when I also had some contact with the people at Hawthorne Valley, the Rudolf Steiner community* in Columbia County. They were much more successful socialists, in a pragmatic sense, than any of the NYC area Trots and assorted toy Bolsheviks I ran (or barely walked) with prior to 2021, when I moved to Columbia County for three years.

*Mystical bits about cow horns and etheric bodies aside, in the case of the multi-pronged Steiner movement, biodynamic farming represents a successful and reproducible example of agro-ecological food production in the global north, while the Camphill communities exemplify a humane and egalitarian model for accommodating and educating disabled people. The last is ironically a great dream of the same identitarian American left that dismisses Steiner’s various efforts and experiments as eugenicist in toto.

Are the mystical bits necessary prerequisites for collective effervescence and cohesion? Mystical bits or re-enchantment of a certain sort is exactly what moderns and postmoderns require to build another, non-alienated, life in common, or such is Romanticism’s wager; but the Romantics also argue that this enchantment must happen without the firm foundations of old time dogmatic religion or metaphysics: in a state of negative capability.

Anyway, it was my divorce from orthodox Marxism—with as many strictures and prohibitions as any religious orthodoxy—that allowed me to consider these utopian and alternative religious arrangements as serious, if flawed, experiments in living: important models in the face of our slow motion eco-social collapse.

Going up there again this weekend revived in mind what were mostly idyllic years: the seasons, weaving themselves into the warp of our lives, happened above ground and out of doors. Golden light laced with leaf shadows playing on the face of the girl in this one summer’s river; a cold gloaming all of a sudden snagging us in a red halfway between blood and ruby as we stumbled out from that late autumn’s open field; blue faces shaking and bereft in their parting midway up a last winter’s relentlessly tangled forest climb. And these ghosts make me despise the newest New York City—a gleaming yet sordid grinder designed to shred human soul meat—and the influencer-prostitutes who play act “counterculture” here all the more. To other worlds or their specters.