Walden Three?

How would you like eight weeks of vacation every year? Me too — that's one reason I haven't held a full-time job in decades, because there's so much I want to do outside paid work.
The catch? To get that eight weeks, you wouldn't be taking a job: you'd be joining an "intentional community" in central Virginia, one loosely based (read, "much less top-down") on the utopian novel Walden Two, by behavioral scientist B.F. Skinner. You'd work at least 42 hours a week, get a good medical and dental plan, and eat all kinds of fresh food... but you'd also give up your car, put outside assets in trust and live with (and on) very little money. At Twin Oaks Community, though, that's not so hard: in return for your labor the community supplies basic human needs in a cooperative, egalitarian environment, and yes, that long vacation... if you can afford to take it.
I toured Twin Oaks last week with my friend Charlie, and it was eye-opening — to a large degree, simply because you don't hear much about "communes" anymore. Scores still exist — none in Connecticut, so far as I can tell, but some in the Hudson Valley and in Massachusetts — but they generally favor the term "intentional community," to avoid the sex-drugs-rock-'n'-roll vibe that the word "commune" evokes. Not because those things are lacking — long-time Twin Oaks resident and international activist Paxus Calta promotes "polyamory," a fancy word for open relationships — but because today's communities are more about 'building together' than 'rebelling against.' Sure, clothing is optional when it rains — so our gay, 58-year-old tour guide, Cameron, told us — but a far bigger political issue is air conditioning: only senior residents (some, well past retirement age, have lived here more than 30 years) are allowed a/c, because it takes so much energy to run. Commercial television (though not computers) is banned for other reasons — because, the website says, "we want to avoid its influence in importing mainstream values such as consumerism, violence, pre-packaged 'canned' entertainment, etc." Twin Oaks does have a sense of humor, however: this winter's musical, "Grease," paid homage to polyamory with the song, "You're the Ones That I Want."
Founded in 1967, Twin Oaks sits on 465 acres within commuting distance of Charlottesville (35 miles away), and with around 18 cars, the community isn't isolated. But being self-contained, it feels that way. The community's 95 or so residents live in 8 buildings scattered around the property, and most work locally, too — making hammocks (I'm writing this in a Twin Oaks model), processing soybeans into food products, or indexing books (residents occasionally do contract work for Google as well). Work at the community doesn't seem like a necessary evil, at least as Cameron describes it, because most residents can opt for work they like (with "newbies," of course, getting the undesirable jobs). Cameron once ran the hammock business ("then I had a nervous breakdown"), and now spends a lot of time in the tofu workshop; he also gets "labor credit" (a key Walden Two idea) for giving tours, running errands in town a couple times a week and doing various administrative jobs. As a result, he often records more than 60 hours of work per week, which sounds like a lot... until you realize that Twin Oaks counts as "work" things most of us do without pay, often on nights and weekends — gardening, carpentry, sewing, home maintenance, cooking, shopping, cleaning, financial management, taking care of the kids. Many residents "bank" far more time than they can possibly use, if only because there's plenty to do, and not so many alternative entertainments.
Twin Oaks has more rules than most intentional communities — clipboards and time-sheets and sign-out forms are in every non-residential building, and apparently there's a "norm" (the word "rules" is considered too coercive) regulating the use of squirt guns — but that may explain the place's longevity. Most such communities burn out within five or 10 years — residence houses are named after other utopian-style groups, only a couple of which still exist — because they don't plan for or deal well with unavoidable internal conflict. Here, conflicts seem to be addressed rather than forced underground to fester... and since Twin Oaks' philosophy is secular, tolerant and inquisitive, residents tend to be willing to "work through" their differences.
Cameron mentioned a few instances of expulsion, and dishonesty, and suicide, and that transparency — the willingness to admit utopia is still a distant dream, that community-building is hard work — struck me as very healthy.
You can't judge an organization by a three-hour visit, but Cameron certainly seems to like it here, even as he detailed the above-mentioned troubles. He's lived in a dozen different intentional communities, and this, he says, is the best — a credible claim, since he returned for a second stay three years ago, after becoming restless in Key West. So who knows: perhaps Paxus Calta was right when he called Twin Oaks, in response to a 1998 Washington Post profile of the community, "a workable alternative to the 'American Dream.'"