The Beer Hall at the End of the Universe

"Between utopia and beer lie existential decisions" 

 

Traveling to Iowa just as cold nights start to drive multicolored sugars into the leaves is a psychedelic treat. Along the way, I stopped at Cahokia, now a state park near St. Louis, to pay my quiet respects by biking the 11-mile trail weaving through the massive earthen mounds and woodhenges. My audiotape for the 1500-mile round trip was Luke Kemp’s reading of Goliath’s Curse, and he spends no small amount of time on Cahokia—in its day, perhaps the largest city in the Western Hemisphere, if not the world. What ended it remains a mystery, although climate change and the Gini coefficient are leading candidates.

The Gini index is a statistical measure of income or wealth inequality within a population, ranging from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality), though it’s often expressed as a percentage from 0 to 100. It is based on the Lorenz curve, which plots the cumulative income distribution against the cumulative population. A higher Gini index indicates a greater disparity in income or wealth distribution.

As Kemp relates, utopian dreamers have been with us just as long as warlords, but history, being written by the victors of wars, remembers tyrannical empires more than multimillennial peace-and-prosperity civilizations like the Zapotec. The Gini index is an apt indicator of a society’s vulnerability to collapse because, as Lord Acton reminded us, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

 

The statistics reflect what we’ve seen in the case studies: many societies do appear to become more fragile over time.

—Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse

 

Kemp gives four tests, stages or elements of collapse: threat, vulnerability, exposure and response. The threat could be a hostile neighbor, the viral spread of a disease, or extreme floods and droughts, for instance. Cahokia had a large warrior class to fend off neighbors and a trading culture that kept them in check. Its earthen mounds (being in the floodplain of the Mississippi) may have been more than religious status symbols. The high density of dwellings and the constant comings and goings of visitors likely made Cahokia vulnerable to viral epidemics for which it had no adequate response. It may also have been vulnerable to the same forces that brought down and dispersed other Mesoamerican pyramid builders—wealth inequality.

It was this last bit—response to wealth inequality—that occurred to me at the Annual Meeting of the Communal Studies Association at the Amana Colonies.

Amana’s Story 

The Amana Colonies are 170 years old this year, but their story goes back to 1714 when the group first formed in Europe. At that time, Germany was in the midst of a religious awakening, a sort of Summer of Love, and two fathers, Eberhard L. Gruber and Johann F. Rock, refused to send their children to Lutheran schools, believing instead that by teaching them to meditate, they could be directly guided by the voice of God. They gathered together those of like mind to form the “Community of True Inspiration.” To escape fines, imprisonment, and torture for advocating free speech and independent beliefs, the Inspirationists relocated to the Wetterau. Their preachers were called not priests but werkzeuge (instruments). Eventually, the persecution, excessive rents and poor economy combined to force the group, led by Werkzeug Christian Metz, to look for a new home across the sea. 

In 1842, Metz and three other scouts bought 7,000 acres of land near Buffalo, which they named Ebenezer, unaware that they were being sold land on the Seneca Reservation. In the ensuing decades, 1,200 German immigrants arrived and built houses, barns, and shops. However, the Inspirationists were determined to leave, sending scouts to Kansas and then Iowa, where in 1855 they built the first of seven villages, each a mile or two apart on a river tract of some 26,000 acres. They chose the name Amana from Song of Solomon 4:8, where Amana means to “remain true.” 

Amana proved to be one of the greatest communal experiments in history. Property and resources were shared. All residents received housing, medical care, food, all household necessities and schooling for their children. Over 50 communal kitchens provided three daily meals, a mid-morning snack, and a mid-afternoon snack to all colonists. No one received a wage. No one needed one. Called to work before dawn by the gentle tolling of the bell in the village tower, the unhurried routine of life in old Amana included the production of wool and calico, clock making, brewing, and putting up winter preserves. Craftsmen took pride in their work as a testament to their faith and community spirit. Amana churches, located in the center of each village, built of brick or stone, have no stained-glass windows, no steeple or spire, and reflect the ethos of simplicity and humility. There were no overlords.

The Great Change

In 1932, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and a disastrous explosion and fire at the central granary that ignited and burned down the woolen mill and town center in Main Amana precipitated a financial crisis. To save its land,  the society set aside its communal way of life. For many, the communal way was seen as a barrier to achieving individual goals, so instead of leaving or watching their children leave, they changed. A new, profit-sharing joint stock corporation, the Amana Society, was formed to share assets. The 1932 transformation, known as the “Great Change,” ended 89 years of communal tradition and transformed Amana’s residents. For the first time, Amana community members worked for wages, owned their own homes and businesses, and became shareholders in the farmland, the mills, and the larger enterprises. The Amana Church was maintained (you can watch services on their Facebook Page), and an Amana Heritage Society was added. 

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Life under capitalism went well at first. In 1947, Amana manufactured the first upright freezer for the home and in 1949, it added a side-by-side refrigerator. What began as a communal business became worker-owned in 1950. It then started making air conditioners. It was sold to defense contractor Raytheon in 1965, and the company introduced the Amana microwave oven (“radar-range”) in 1967. The brand was later owned by Maytag, Whirlpool, and Daikin. The plant in Amana, operated since 1940, makes furnaces, ovens, countertop ranges, dishwashers, and clothes washers and dryers.

Today, the economy is heavily geared towards tourism. A walk down Main Street takes you past the Amana Woolen Mill, Warped and Woven, the Amana General Store, the Amana Furniture and Clock Shop, the Amana Meat Shop and Smokehouse, a toy store, the Christmas Shop, and a slew of taverns and winery outlets. 

At the opening dinner, the current president of the Amana Society gave a short report of the current state of their affairs—1600 resident members (shareholders), 11 non-profits, five major festivals each year, 7000 acres tilled, 4000 in corn, 2000 in soybeans, 4000 acres of managed forests (the largest reserve in the state), 3000 head of cattle, a health center, an insurance company, a bank, and of course the church, heritage society, and business corporation. A green energy methane digester generates power. 

His talk was followed by one of the elders of the church, who painted a picture of their vulnerabilities. To the youth, they are too rural, too small town, too consumed by their past. There is a steady turnover of newcomer residents who profit from the tourism, but increasingly, retail sales along touristy Main Street revolve around beer and wine. There is a continuity and connectivity being lost, and it is being drowned in alcohol. The looming threats of devastating export losses due to tariffs, cuts in rural and elderly social services, and climate change are not even on the radar of most. There are threats, vulnerabilities, and exposures, but no planning for response.

The conference, while not specifically themed to address this, added some nuance.  New people coming for reasons other than those of the founders, and lacking the communal spirit, have been presenting problems for many intentional communities and ecovillages, including my own in Tennessee. How do you maintain historical and cultural identity? How do you recover shared values once they are lost?

Metz himself left behind thousands of inspired talks and writings—including some 54 books—that have been translated and preserved. He compared the Amana society to a garden. It has been planted in a fertile place where the seeds of human divinity—our better angels—can flourish if nourished. Part of Metz’s metaphor, however, was pulling weeds. 

Distinguishing Weeds

The history of the United States is littered with thousands of experiments in group living and novel organizational arrangements, and most did not outlast their founding generation. We learn from scholars at this conference that since about 2010, roughly one in every 250,000 USAnians lives in a social experiment of some kind—commune, ecovillage, cohousing, gated community, cooperative, etc. The ecologically oriented are achieving their goals admirably, such as reducing their gas, electric and water consumption, but they have nothing on the Hutterites, who are closing in on 500 years. The most successful “glues” that make egalitarian experiments possible seem to be family ties, religion and environmentalism. The last of those offers some hope.

Something I noticed on the thousand-mile drive back and forth to Iowa was the number of migrant vehicles on the road. Doubtless, some are retirees checking off their bucket lists of sights to see. Others are vacationers. But a growing number, it seemed to me from the bikes and kayaks on the roofs, are “van-lifers.” Kemp says:

Stateless peoples, whether in the wake of a collapse or fleeing a Goliath, often turn to the same strategies. They limit access to Goliath fuel by dwelling in inaccessible lands and staying mobile to maximize exit options. They avoid growing lootable resources. They create cautionary tales of how hierarchy went wrong in the past. The exact approach depends on the circumstances.

Suppose people wake up to the wolf at the door (threat) before the door (vulnerability) is swept aside by its hot breath (exposure)? Suppose they band together to build arks (response). Can they survive? There is still the problem of the weeds, or more descriptively, the human traits of personal acquisitiveness, separation, aggressive behavior, and susceptibility to mass-induced delusions.

How do you weed that garden?

Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). I appreciate your support.

And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.

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#RestorationGeneration.

When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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