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Jonathan Korman's avatar

As someone who has developed my own (notably childless) alt micro-community, I think a lot about how hard it is to build community networks in the face of shattered cultural norms & skills, and how I would not have it in me to build what is necessary for healthy childrearing. I grant that the broad right are pointing to real problems emergent from lost shared-community-capacity, while the broad left whom I align myself with shy away from even recognizing it.

But of course the right are confused about the roots & remedies. They want to blame feminism and The Queers and so forth for screwing things up. They think that we can just return to the 1950s dream of the suburban nuclear family if we just Try Harder and punish deviance enough. But that is not just an ugly dream because of its intolerance. It is also doubling down on the very thing which ate the seed grain of our shared-community-capacity: the atomization inherent in suburban life and the nuclear family.

Addressing our need for shared-community-capacity aligned with left cultural sensibilities requires a radical vision of what we want the social order to look like, exploring genuinely novel social forms. I tremble with dread at attempting society-wide transformation of that profundity; history is rich in cautionary tales about unintended consequences. But pursuit of the Suburban Nuclear Family Dream •is one of those cautionary tales•. The only way out is THROUGH to something new.

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Maxwell E's avatar

This was a fascinating read. I've seen that point made so many times, that the long-lost culture of a co-supportive community of young professionals (with children) with shared values no longer exists in America. Every time, I think about the one glaring exception: Provo.

There are other spots within the Mormon corridor as well (Rexburg, notably, but also Manti, Orem, Spanish Fork, all to varying extents), but Provo is just this beacon of a community with the exact kind of shared cultural understanding and shared values, all in a professional milieu, that this long-standing overarching conversation we keep having could benefit from. I would really be fascinated to read about someone who has thought deeply about these issues -- as you have -- going to immerse themselves in the Provo scene and just writing about the intersection of all of these cultural and structural elements. It could be you.

Anyway, I really did enjoy this piece. Thanks for sharing your impressions of what makes this communitarian counterculture tick and where it stumbles. I continue to be fascinated by these spaces and the people who try to make them work.

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