Page 27 - C.A.L.L. #26 - Winter 2005/2006

Dear Oh Dear
Dear Sol & Anton;
I have just received C.A.L.L. 25 (Spring 2005). As
usual, it is full of interesting material.
Most interesting, at least to me, is the article on
page 7, ‘Utopian Societies: from Pythagorus to
Damanhur’, based on an interview with me when
I was at Damanhur last year. The reason why this
is so interesting to me is not because I am vain
and like to read my own words — but because
there are so many errors in the report.
I have no idea why these
errors have arisen but three
theories come to mind:
1) Both the interviewer and I
may have been too far into
our third bottle of Chianti
when I was interviewed?
2) This material has been
translated from English into
Italian, through Hebrew and
Korean, then back to English (perhaps via
Swahili) and got rather garbled along the way?
3) Having recently turned 60, my occasional
‘senior moments’ might have sort of slurred
together that afternoon and I was losing the plot
when interviewed. (Some of my students would
probably agree to this assessment ! )
I do not mean to malign the good folks at
Damanhur who interviewed me, but please let
me correct a few errors in this article in the last
C.A.L.L.:
a) ‘We always speak about intentional
communities, so as to distinguish them from
those that have always existed’ is probably
supposed to refer to the distinction between
those social groupings which appear to exist
simply because that is ‘just the way things are’
— and those which are intentionally created
through a conscious process. We refer to the
latter as intentional communities.
b) Homakoeion was probably the first intentional
community (at least in the west). It was
developed by Pythagorus and his followers in
about 525 BC, not ‘250 A.C.’
2 2 2 27 77 7
c) The Anabaptists did not develop in the United
Kingdom but in eastern Europe. Several
Anabaptist communes developed later in UK but
never to such a significant extent as they did
throughout North America.
d) New Italy (Nuevo Italia) formed in Australia in
1882, not 1880. Its collapse had as much to do
with their young people losing interest in
utopianism as to their intermarrying outside the
community. Many young men went to fight in
WW1 to escape communal restrictions. The
second and third generation moved into
mainstream society.
e) Sol & Anton, please rest
assured that I am, of course,
aware that the idealism of
the Jewish youth movement
from early 20th century
Germany persists, at least to
some extent, within the
contemporary Kibbutz
movement of Israel. I believe
that I probably stated that
‘there is almost no trace left
of this in Germany’. But
please be reassured — I have not forgotten my
Kibbutznik friends.
f) The oldest still-active intentional community
is called Sabbathday Lake (not The Sabbath
Lake), and was established by the Shakers in USA
in 1794.
g) I certainly still regard Findhorn Foundation as
an intentional community. I have no idea what I
would have meant if I really said that it was
‘something less than an intentional community’.
It has certainly changed dramatically over the
past decade but that does not mean that it is no
longer an intentional community. There are
elements in the rapid growth of Damanhur which
remind me of the Findhorn Foundations dramatic
changes, and the problems this has entailed, and
I was trying to make this comparison rather than
maligning Findhorn, Damanhur or anyone else.
There may well be other errors in this piece, but
these are the most obvious and troubling.
I would really appreciate if you could include
these corrections in the next C.A.L.L.
Bill Metcalf
B.Metcalf@griffith.edu.au