Cities on a Hill

...When she errs in this respect, the sophisticated New Yorker slips through...

...Internal and external resistance to this tyranny eventually became so great, however, that the commune collapsed...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 41...

...This argument is, unhappily, only That argument is, of course, the basis implicit in most of the book...

...Expanding the family principle to the level of the community as a whole destroyed Rajneeshpuram...

...And, of course, it is always "Falwell"--never "Jerry...

...And Ma Anand Sheela—familiar to many from her contentious appearance on "Night-line" in July 1981—was the family's "mother...

...ville, who, as it turns out, visited America in the midst of the Second Great Awakening...

...Meanwhile, it must be noted, the two communities that remained faithful to the nuclear family—normally the buffer between the broader community and the individual—prospered...

...The Castro almost lost its sense of community, she suggests, when it was overrun by trendy boutiques, restaurants, hotels, and other businesses catering to a world-wide clientele of gay tourists...

...Men and women would stay together "only as long as they loved each other" and "children would belong to everyone...

...It is the American genius to establish communities that are both new, and safe...

...forever obsolete the small community...

...that communities may be built, not necessarily on tradition or by looking back- EI itzGerald's book is a welcome reward, as the Vietnamese would have it, joinder to one argument heard but precisely by shattering tradition frequently today, that modern technoland by looking forward to a dramati- ogical developments have rendered cally new self and society...

...Their community seemed to flourish on this basis—until the onset 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1987 of the AIDS epidemic...

...And rejecting that principle on behalf of a radical individual freedom almost destroyed the Castro...

...This, of course, is nothing more William Schambra is co-director of con- than a reiteration of a point made constitutional studies at the American siderably earlier by Alexis de TocqueEnterprise Institute...

...The American capacity spontaneously to generate completely new but nonetheless genuine communities, without traditions or roots and out of virtual strangers, quieted his concern...

...And from her description of the fundamentalist enclave in Lynchburg, one might suppose she had been transported back to the inscrutable culture of Saigon...

...Because FitzGerald believes that all four of her case studies are equally legitimate manifestations of the American communal impulse, she struggles (and largely manages) to discuss objectively a range of cultural practices and beliefs that would have severely strained the tolerance of a lesser journalist...

...Those forces keep community boundaries permeable...

...CITIES ON A HILL: A JOURNEY THROUGH CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CULTURE Frances FitzGerald/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 William Schambra rances FitzGerald's Cities on a Hill American society, she argues, is is, in a sense, the mirror image of peculiarly unsettled, fluid, and her earlier, Pulitzer Prize-winning atomistic as a result of modern book Fire in the Lake...

...Her treatment of the retirement village, by contrast, is stunted, detached, and relatively unenlightening...

...The fatal or near-fatal flaws of both experiments, in short, were to be found precisely in their points of departure from the principle of the traditional family...

...Presumably with the Bhagwan's blessing, Sheela drugged, poisoned, and electronically eavesdropped upon her internal opposition...

...Jerry Falwell clearly spends far too much time raising money for the "Old Time Gospel Hour," and preaching to his congregation about the importance of material success...

...But the Castro came close to self-destruction when its inhabitants refused to accept such moral strictures, preferring to cling to their bath houses, and the absolute freedom they represented...

...The community finally accommodated itself to the epidemic, but only after it had adopted a new life-style—one characterized, as FitzGerald notes, by committed, monogamous, long-term relationships, or, in other words, by relationships suspiciously resembling those against which gays had initially rebelled...

...She clearly enjoys her work on the Castro, for instance, as she follows its fortunes through the rise and murder of Harvey Milk, and the onset of the AIDS epidemic...

...Jerry Falwell's construction chaos...

...The gays in the Castro, for instance, renounced traditional family values in the name of a radically individualistic, and usually quite promiscuous, sexual freedom...

...Only in the conclud- demonstrates, form not in spite of, but ing chapter, tacked on to the original precisely because of, the social changes essays, does she develop fully her thesis...

...From her account, it seems that she tagged along happily with her pals Peter, Ken, and Armistead to virtually every gay bar, restaurant, festival, and demonstration in the district during this period...

...and Rajneeshpuram seemed to be losing its communal bearings when it, too, began to build boutiques, hotels, and other tourist attractions, and Bhagwan became obsessed with collecting limousines (final count: ninety-three...

...Her case studies give us an opportunity to test this proposition, for two of her communities reflect this conventional understanding, and two were founded explicitly on the rejection thereof...

...and the rise (and sudden she argues, it explains a similar explofall) of the notorious Rajneesh com- sion among the American middle class mune in Oregon...

...Although I'm certain Fitz-counts, occasionally brushing up Gerald would not be pleased at this against substantive points, but never suggestion, nonetheless, she shows us pursuing them with an intensity that why Reagan's theme is by no means abreaders of the magazine would have surd...

...Until recently, for instance, it was widely believed that a healthy community (no matter how otherwise new or different) necessarily emerges from, and retains an honored place for, the traditional family...

...Communities in America, she found unseemly...

...He proposed to build a "new commune" in Oregon, which would itself be an all-encompassing "liquid family...

...generated by capitalism and technology...

...Bhagwan became the "father" of this extended family, holding it in thrall with his idiosyncratic gumbo of traditional Oriental practices and New Age psychotherapeutic techniques...

...rf he only time FitzGerald's tolerance seems genuinely strained is when her subjects permit their purely communitarian purposes to be warped or distorted by the capitalist surroundings...

...And this, of course, is just as the Founding Fathers of the republic planned it...

...But, as she fails to emphasize, commerce simultaneously softens the harshest and potentially most oppressive features of community...

...One family," she notes incredulously, "had not only a living room but a family room with a Naugahyde pouf, a twenty-four-inch television set, and a sliding glass door looking out over a stone-paved terrace...

...He understood that the forces of modernity had doomed traditional, rooted communities, and he was deeply concerned about the consequences of this for mankind...

...As Fitz-Gerald herself notes, American communities therefore cannot achieve the sort of isolation that breeds fanaticism...

...That our Bhagwans collect limousines, rather than the heads of infidels, is silent testimony to their success, and their wisdom...

...Not enough evidence here for firm scientific conclusions, per-haps, but enough for some interesting speculations—speculations that Fitz-Gerald's exaggerated tolerance prevents her from making...

...FitzGerald approaches her new perimenting with dramatically different subject through four illustrations of and often wildly eccentric alternative community-building drawn from the cultures, but all characterized by a American experience of the sixties and desire for cultural and individual regenseventies: the growth of the gay corn- eration and by the effort to re-establish munity in the Castro district of San communitarian control over social Francisco...

...One detects here the same skepticism about commerce and technology to be,found in Fire in the Lake and its accounts of the misery visited by those forces upon Vietnam...

...same, uniquely American belief...

...The reason this is open to us is that our society sustains a complex balance between technology or commerce, and community...

...Although seemingly during the sixties and seventies, in the radically disparate, the four experi- wake of that period's economic, social, ences, she insists, reflect essentially the and political upheavals...

...T he final message of FitzGerald's earlier book, Fire in the Lake, is a grim one: in the wake of the collapse of Vietnam's traditional communitarian society before the onslaught of modern technology, the Vietnamese people, she insists, were understandably drawn to the sort of totalitarian community proffered by the National Liberation Front...

...T he deeper problem with Fitz-Gerald's approach, though, is not her failure to be objective, but her reluctance to discriminate—to make some hard, interesting judgments about the nature of community to which her own evidence points...

...Sometimes this that the war could be understood only challenge is particularly acute—she as part of a larger process: the destruc- points to the period preceding the Section of traditional, backward-looking, and Great Awakening in the 1820s and communitarian Vietnamese society by 1830s, when technological advances the forcible introduction of Western disrupted established family and comcapitalism and technology...

...The message of Cities an a Hill is a happier one: Americans, she tells us, have found a way to establish new communities in the very midst of modern technological society—without resorting to the totalitarian techniques of the NLF...

...Maintaining tight family bonds across several thousand people requires nothing short of despotism, however, as everyone has known since Plato's Republic, and as the hapless Rajneeshi soon rediscovered...

...As FitzGerald notes, community softens the harshest and most disruptive features of commerce...

...the develop- secular communal movements during ment of a retirement community in Sun the Second Great Awakening—and, City, Florida...

...Whatever commerce and technology did to Vietnamese community, however, we may be profoundly grateful for what they do to American communities...

...This, according to FitzGerald, of a fundamentalist Christian enclave explains the explosion of religious and in Lynchburg, Virginia...

...At such times, she Hill, by contrast, examines the suggests, we are likely to see an efreconstruction of communitarian soci- florescence of community-building efety within that great bastion of Western forts, all of them rejecting the old and capitalism and technology, the United now-discredited cultural ways, all ex-States...

...The latter capitalism, and therefore is constantly volume—a major contribution to the challenging established cultural and anti-Vietnam war literature—argued communitarian norms...

...at the same time, she deliberately antagonized the commune's neighbors, so that she could legitimately say that Rajneeshpuram was alone and friendless in Oregon, needing more than ever to stick together...

...They feared above all the sorts of tyrannical majorities that form in small, insulated communities, and they counted on the commercial character of their new, extended republic to soften and moderate the zeal of such groups...

...Cities on a munity customs...

...moderating influences necessarily seep in from the outside world, and the outside world is permitted to keep a watchful eye on the workings of the group...

...The only way to halt the spread of the virus, it was clear, was through sexual restraint—a value taught by, and central to, the much-despised family...

...the case for the derision that usually greets studies appeared originally in the New President Reagan's call for a regeneraYorker, and so the author is permitted tion of family, neighborhood, and local to meander amiably through her ac- community...

...The Rajneesh community also rejected the traditional family, because, its Indian guru "Bhagwan" taught, man had "outgrown" it...

...But this lesson is lost on FitzGerald, who contemptuously dismisses as corruption precisely those aspects of her communities that the Founders would have considered evidence of moderation...