How to Do Nothing Read online

  One very early example of this approach was the garden school of Epicurus in the fourth century BC. Epicurus, the son of a schoolteacher, was a philosopher who held happiness and leisurely contemplation to be the loftiest goals in life. He also hated the city, seeing in it only opportunism, corruption, political machinations, and military bravado—the kind of place where Demetrius Poliorcetes, dictator of Athens, could tax the citizens hundreds of thousands of dollars ostensibly because his mistress needed soap. More generally, Epicurus observed that people in modern society ran in circles, unaware of the source of their unhappiness:

  Everywhere you can find men who live for empty desires and have no interest in the good life. Stupid fools are those who are never satisfied with what they possess, but only lament what they cannot have.9

  Epicurus decided to buy a garden on the rural outskirts of Athens and establish a school there. Like Felix, he wanted to create a space that functioned both as an escape and a curative for people who visited, although in Epicurus’s case, the visitors were students who lived there permanently. Articulating a form of happiness called ataraxia (loosely, “absence of trouble”), Epicurus found that the “trouble” of a troubled mind came from unnecessary mental baggage in the form of runaway desires, ambitions, ego, and fear. What he proposed in their absence was simple: relaxed contemplation in a community that was turned away from the city at large. “Live in anonymity,” Epicurus enjoined his students, who rather than engage in civic affairs, grew their own food within The Garden, chatting and theorizing among the lettuces. In fact, so much did Epicurus live by his own teachings that for most of his life he and his school remained relatively unknown within Athens. That was fine, since he believed that “[t]he purest security is that which comes from a quiet life and withdrawal from the many.”10

  Quite contrary to the modern-day meaning of the word epicurean—often associated with decadent and plentiful food—what the school of Epicurus taught was that man actually needed very little to be happy, as long as he had recourse to reason and the ability to limit his desires. It’s no accident that this sounds similar to ideas of non-attachment in eastern philosophy. Before founding the school, Epicurus had read Democritus and Pyrrho, both of whom are known to have had contact with the gymnosophists, or “naked wise men,” of India. One can certainly hear echoes of Buddhism in Epicurus’s prescription for the soul: “The disturbance of the soul cannot be ended nor true joy created either by the possession of the greatest wealth or by honour and respect in the eyes of the mob or by anything else that is associated with causes of unlimited desire.”11

  The school of Epicurus sought to free its students not only from their own desires but from the fear associated with superstitions and myths. Teachings incorporated empirical science for the express purpose of dispelling anxieties about mythical gods and monsters who were thought to control things like the weather—or, for that matter, one’s fortune in life. In that sense, the school’s purpose might have been similar not only to Camp Grounded but to any addiction recovery center. At the school of Epicurus, students were being “treated” for runaway desire, needless worry, and irrational beliefs.

  Epicurus’s garden was different from other schools in important ways. Since only an individual could decide whether he had been “cured,” the atmosphere was noncompetitive, and students graded themselves. And while shunning one type of community, the school of Epicurus actively constructed another one: The Garden was the only school to admit non-Greeks, slaves, and women (including hetaera, or professional courtesans). Admission was free. Noting that, for most of human history, schooling has been a privilege restricted by class, Richard W. Hibler writes:

  Nothing was traditional about the Garden in comparison with most schools of the time. For instance, anyone with the zeal for learning how to live the life of refined pleasure was welcomed. The brotherhood was open to all sexes, nationalities, and races; the wealthy and the poor sat side by side next to “barbarians” such as slaves and non-Greeks. Women, who openly flaunted the fact that they were once prostitutes, assembled and joined men of all ages in the quest for Epicurean happiness.12

  This is even more significant given that students of the school were not merely pursuing their studies in parallel isolation. They might have been escaping the city, but they were not escaping other people—friendship itself was a subject of study, a requirement for the kind of happiness the school taught.

  Epicurus was neither the first nor the last to seek a communal refuge in the countryside. Indeed, the Epicurean program—a group of people growing vegetables and focusing on chilling out, with vaguely Eastern influences—will sound familiar to a lot of us. Although similar experiments were repeated many times throughout history, the garden school reminds me the most of the commune movement of the 1960s, when thousands of people decided to drop out of modern life and try their hand at liberated country living. Of course, the flame of this movement burned brighter and shorter than the school of Epicurus. But in a time when I’m often seized by the urge to move to the Santa Cruz Mountains and throw my phone into the ocean at San Gregorio—without having really thought that through—I find the varying fates of the 1960s communes to be especially instructive.

  First, as relatively recent versions of this experiment, the communes exemplify the problems with any imagined escape from the media and effects of capitalist society, including the role of privilege. Second, they show how easily an imagined apolitical “blank slate” leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics, ironically presaging the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley’s tech moguls. Lastly, their wish to break with society and the media—proceeding from feelings I can sympathize with—ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society. This reminder paves the way for a form of political refusal that retreats not in space, but in the mind.

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  THINGS MAY SEEM bad now, but some would argue that the late 1960s were worse. Nixon was president, the Vietnam War was raging, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and unarmed student protestors were shot at Kent State. Signs of environmental devastation were accumulating, and large-scale urban redevelopment projects and freeways were destroying the fabric of “blighted” ethnic neighborhoods. All the while, successful adulthood was pictured as a two-car garage house in a white suburb. To young people, this looked like a sham, and they were ready to quit.

  Between 1965 and 1970, more than a thousand communal groups formed across the country. The writer Robert Houriet, who visited fifty American “communal experiments” between 1968 and 1970, described this movement as “the gut reaction of a generation” who saw no other way to resist:

  To a country seemingly entrenched in self-interest, deaf to change and blind to its own danger, they said “Fuck it” and split. If the cities were uninhabitable and the suburbs plastic, they would still have to live somewhere. If the spirit of humane community and culture were dead in urban Amerika, they would have to create their own.13

  Those who fled to the communes took a particularly ahistorical view of time; according to Houriet, the communes were relatively unaware of the history of utopian experiments—maybe even Epicurus’s garden school. But this is perhaps to be expected from anyone desperately seeking a complete break from everything. Houriet writes that those who fled “had no time to assess the historical parallels or to make careful plans for the future…Their flight was desperate.” After all, this wasn’t the 1960s; it was the Age of Aquarius, an exit from time and a chance to start from scratch:

  Somewhere in the line of history, civilization had made a wrong turn, a detour that had led into a cul-de-sac. The only way, they felt, was to drop out and go all the way back to the beginning, to the primal source of consciousness, the true basis of culture: the land.14

  In his description of the Drop City commune in a book by the same name, Drop City resident Peter Rabbit describes the
general outline: “put together some bread, buy a piece of land, make the land free, and start rebuilding the economic, social, and spiritual structures of man from the bottom up.” He adds, however, that “none of these people had any idea that that’s what they were doing…We just thought we were dropping out.”15

  Some of the communes Houriet visited on his tour became viable for a few years or more; others he heard about were gone by the time he arrived. At an old resort hotel in the Catskills, Houriet found just two people left, and they were on their way out. Left over in one of the bedrooms were a mattress, a crate, the stub of a candle, and some roaches in an ashtray. “They had burned all their furniture and smoked the last of their grass. On the wall, writ in Magic Marker, was the self-epitaph of a community that never was: FOREVER CHANGE.”16

  What the communes did have in common was a search for “the good life,” an experience of community opposed to the competitive and exploitative system they had rejected. At the outset, some were inspired by the articulation of modern anarchism in Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. In that book, Goodman had suggested replacing capitalist structures with a decentralized network of individualized communities making judicious use of new technology and supporting themselves with cottage industries.

  Understandably, this turned out to be much easier said than done in 1960s America, and most of the communes had vexed relationships with the capitalist world outside. After all, mortgages had to be paid, children had to be raised, and most communes couldn’t grow all of their own food. Even if they were far from the city, they were still in America. To manage, many members had to continue working regular jobs and some communes relied on welfare. The eclectic menu at High Ridge Farm in Oregon illustrates this mixed bag of income. Among the many jars of homegrown produce, Houriet observed expensive store-bought organic food and commodities donated by the US Department of Agriculture (“commodities cheese” was a favorite). Along with “exotic salads with Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi,” they had “a commodities hash or a curry made from turkeys donated last Thanksgiving by the Welfare Department.”17

  Much as they wanted to break with capitalist society, those who escaped from it sometimes carried its influences within themselves, like ineradicable contagions. Writing about a communal house in Philadelphia in 1971, Michael Weiss says that all eight members of the group were “more or less anti-capitalist” and hoped the commune would offer an alternative in the form of equal wealth distribution. But because some of the members made so much more than the others, they agreed to a compromise: each person would contribute half, not all, of their earnings to the house fund. Even so, Weiss writes that any conversations about money were marked by “defensiveness, self-righteousness, inexperience with money sharing, and the fear of having to relinquish one’s most cherished comforts and pleasures for the sake of group amity.”18 In his commune, the first “money crisis” ends up not being a shortage, but hurt feelings when one of the wealthier members comes home with a sixty-dollar coat. The coat sets off a long house meeting about class consciousness, which, like many of the other meetings chronicled in Living Together, is ultimately left unresolved.

  Other ghosts of the “straight” world complicated the communes’ dreams of radicality. Like the hippie movement they came from, commune members were mostly middle-class and college-educated—a far cry from Epicurus’s radically reconstituted student body. They were overwhelmingly white; several times in Getting Back Together, Houriet mentions talking to “the only black” in a commune, and he describes a strangely tense scene between a Twin Oaks community member and a local black family. The rural setting sometimes created “a natural impetus to revert to traditional roles: Women stay inside, cook, and look after the children, while men plow, chop, and build roads.”19 In What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm, Stephen Diamond states it outright: “None of the men ever washes dishes or hardly cooks.”20 A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies.

  Probably the biggest problem that the communes faced, though, was the idea of starting from scratch. In many ways, “going back to the beginning” meant rehashing timeworn struggles over governance and the rights of the individual, albeit in capsule form. There was, after all, a potential paradox at the heart of the whole endeavor. Retreat and refusal are the precise moments in which the individual distinguishes herself from the mob, declining to buy a house and a car and conform to a stodgy, oppressive society where, as Diamond puts it, “there was always some Total Death Corporation job with your name on it.” But in order for these refuseniks to stay out there and function as a commune, they needed to negotiate a new balance between the individual and the group. As Weiss recalled of the Philadelphia commune, “the slipperiest decisions always involved reconciling privacy and communality, the individual and the house”21—in other words, the very fundamentals of governance.

  Politics inevitably surfaced, sometimes like an unwelcome guest at a house party. At Bryn Athyn, a short-lived commune near Stratford, Vermont, Houriet describes the general apathy of the members when one of them tries to figure out the legal details of buying the farm. And when conflicts arose, a political process was notably lacking:

  The long after-dinner meetings were discontinued when some members rejected them as artificial “mind-fucking sessions that brought people down.” Everything would go smoothly if everyone made love, some argued. Others said vaguely that personal conflicts should be resolved through the natural and spontaneous interplay of feelings. And if that didn’t work, then those who didn’t get along should leave.22

  In fact, leaving was a common solution. Faced with what a Twin Oaks member called “the tyranny of everyone doing their own thing,” those who had escaped once were driven to escape again, this time from the commune. Houriet witnessed this especially in the early and unstable years of the communes: “Somebody was always splitting, rolling up his bag, packing his guitar and kissing good-bye—off again in search of the truly free, un-hungup community.”23

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  OF COURSE, IT wasn’t just internal politics that troubled the communes; they were also fleeing national politics and the media. The experience of Michael Weiss, from the commune that argued over the expensive coat, is especially telling. Weiss had been a journalist for the Baltimore News-American, where the task of covering politics had given him an increasingly cynical view of politicians. In 1968, he’d flown around the country with Spiro Agnew during his campaign to be Nixon’s vice president, watching with horror “how [Agnew] self-righteously pandered to the fright of decent people who were baffled by the complications of the world.”24 Although Weiss believed that Agnew was a truly dangerous man (“an unimaginative pedant with a lust for power”), he wrote a long analysis of the campaign in which he endeavored to remain objective. The piece ran one edition before being killed by the managing editor for the Hearst-owned paper, who called it biased.

  Disillusioned beyond repair, Weiss quit. For months he and two friends hid away at a house his parents owned in the Catskills: “The snow fell four feet deep and at evening we would sit and watch the sun turn the sky purple and orange across the frozen lake.” I’m reminded of my blissful media-less cabin stay in the Sierras when he adds: “For months I didn’t read a newspaper, after years of reading four or five a day.”25

  Even at Stephen Diamond’s New Age Farm, a commune that split off from the radical underground Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York with the express purpose of running their own news service, the world of politics began to feel distant from the farm. “[W]e were getting farther and farther away from it, away from the draft resistance news, birth control articles, Abbie Hoffman in Chicago, the poetry of the ‘revolution’”26 At one point Diamond fantasizes about burning down the barn in which they still prepare their LNS mailings:

  But would that stop it, though? Would that act of the flaming buildin
g help reduce those contrasts and tensions (“The ironies that kill”) that were driving me mad: would it put an end to LNS, to that poorly balanced seesaw between starting new, from nothing, and still trying to stay “plugged in,” carrying all the old death karma with us into the hills—and it bringing us down with it.27

  The problem, Diamond says, was that they had chosen exit. “We simply didn’t have anything more to say, other than perhaps get some land, get your people together, and see what happens.”

  For those of us too young to remember firsthand the intellectual and moral quagmire of the late 1960s, this attitude can easily sound irresponsible or escapist. In fact, fourth-century Greece passed much the same judgment on the school of Epicurus, whose students avoided public service and chose to live in obscurity. One of the school’s harshest critics was Epictetus. Like other Stoics, he prized civic duty, and he thought the Epicureans needed to get real: “In the name of Zeus, I ask you, can you imagine an Epicurean state?…The doctrines are bad, subversive of the State, destructive to the family…Drop these doctrines, man. You live in an imperial State; it is your duty to hold office, to judge uprightly”28

  The Epicureans’ rebuttal might have been similar to Houriet’s: They were changing themselves first. How could accusations of selfishness be leveled on a school that taught altruism to the degree that one was expected to die for a friend? More practically, in order to build the kind of world that Epicurus wanted, he needed to close it off from the world. But his critics didn’t see it that way. Clearly the students of The Garden felt deep responsibility to one another, but responsibility to everyone else was left out of the question. They had forsaken the world.