Dear Anna, I resonate with that comment, having spent a few years living in, and more interested in, intentional communities, some with a strong spiritual identity, I had come to the same conclusion, i.e. that no community without children AND elders, was 'realistic'. However, as the New We documentary shows, there are now multi-gender and multi-generational communities w hich have subsisted over several decades and at least two generations also of course, monasteries were hierarchical/feudal in their authoritity structure, Michel 1. Re: The Economics of Monasticism by Nathan Smith (Anna Harris) 2. Fwd: Be part of the new Edgeryders community: independent, bottom-up and self-organized. (Kevin Carson) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2013 12:22:20 +0000 From: Anna Harris <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] The Economics of Monasticism by Nathan Smith To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Message-ID: <CABmBfp65bDRhw3nTB70vKyjBi-v=hW-i4o=1UUdnWzSD1ZzMFg@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252" The element left out of this analysis is the fact that monasteries are single sex establishments which do not have to cope with child rearing. They are therefor parasitic in the sense that they live off the produce of the society at large which provides them with the personnel while leaving them free to indulge in their 'spiritual capital'. There is no doubt in my mind that child rearing is the most difficult and undervalued profession, since it is performed in the main voluntarily by untrained people out of love, and therefore does not appear to require any specific investment. Consequently it can be ignored as in the above discussion as though living in a secular socialist commune could be compared to living in a monastery. I am not decrying the need for a spiritual element in helping to sustain indivuals and groups. Indeed I think it is essential to bring meaning in the present situation of imminent 'collapse of civilisation', but it needs to be able to be interwoven into our everyday lives, not hived off into separate cloisters which may be beneficial for the inmates but do not really contribute to the sustenance of the rest of us. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/