It is lazy, easy and fashionable to mock the middle class hippies whose rural idyll turned sour or, say, the ashram dwellers whose personal journey of enlightenment led to the neglect and abuse of their children. The automatic assumption is that these people had their heads in the clouds and could not come to terms with "reality", just as  those of us who built and ran "Little Schools" like the ones advocated by Satish Kumar were warned that sooner or later the children would have to go "out" into the "real world"; the implication being that it is better to do so sooner than later.  Yes, well, by the same logic we have to die sooner or later - does this mean we should advocate euthanasia rather than improving palliative care?  Why don't we just blow up the planet now and have done with it! 

The point is not that these attempts at self-defined, self-sufficient communities were too perfectionist, or set their sights too high.  The truth is that most of them set their sights too low. It was not because they refused to accommodate themselves to the inexorable logic of  modernity that their projects became emotionally and materially unsustainable. Rather it was the simple fact that they never understood that their own brave new frontiers were being pushed further into land that was already occupied. The "rights" they assumed for themselves and their offspring were being asserted at the expense of people who were as invisible to them as were the North American Indians to the new settlers.

No man ( or woman,  or child, or group of people) is an island: "Send not for whom the bell tolls" for, unless we grasp the nettle of our common humanity, it will toll for us all. 

We live in a tiny world overflown by a rapidly expanding airtravel industry in which some of us offset the boring bits with "cheap holidays in other people's misery" while dreaming of the day when they can "get away from it all" and start anew. Meanwhile the rest of us want nothing more than to return "home" from an exile we or our forbears were forced into by violence, poverty or politics.

We don't have to reinvent the wheel. We can learn from others' experience.  

In order to see what happens when  groups elevate their own beliefs and needs above those of the rest of the dwellers on this planet we can look at two examples,  two very different groups who struggled and fought against overwhelming odds to achieve their "return" - and really did succeed in setting up communities dedicated to their high ideals. 

Consider first  the pioneers of the Israeli kibbutzim whose down-to-earth agricultural communities bravely advocated the communal raising of children, a model of child freedom  and adult responsibility ( based on "primitive" communities)  which inspired some of the most radical of  the twentieth century European and American communards. Compare these with today's "settlers" degraded into family groupings based on genetic ties, exploiting local indigenous labour, armed, self-righteous and an embarrassment even to the most reactionary Zionists. They justify exempting  themselves from normal human responsibility because they believe they hold a particular patch of land by divine right. The consequences of this terrible mistake reverberate throughout the geopolitics of the entire planet and can even be made to appear predetermined, as in WB Yeats well-known poem in which "things fall apart" and an unnamed horror "slouches toward Bethlehem to be born".

Another group whose dream of Zion sustained them through the most terrible times were the Rastas of Jamaica. Emperor Haile Selassie's grant of 500 acres of land for any of the descendants of African slaves who wished to return to Africa coincided with the rape of Jamaica  by the bauxite companies. Between 1950 and 1970  560,000 rural Jamaicans were uprooted from their villages, some to suffer poverty in Kingston, many to face racism in Britain; but a few conscious members of the working poor saved up to get to Ethiopia.  One Rasta, working in London, set out on foot and arrived in Shashamane in 1964 after a year-long trek during which he learned French, Spanish and Arabic, got lost in the desert, and was arrested in Sudan for having no visa.

  At its peak the Shashamane settlement had about fifty Rastas and Afro-Americans, a clinic with a pharmacy, a school, a store and houses. But  the settlers from urban backgrounds who started to dominate the humbler rural folk did not have the necessary skills to sustain self-sufficiency. Rather than reading a chapter of the Bible every night they could have studied the local circumstances, soil, topography, rainfall etc.  There were no efforts at cooperative farming, so the afflictions of individualism, competition and envy which the younger settlers brought with them made it more and more necessary to rely on the financial dispensation from the Royal family which became the basis of their survival.  But, like the Israeli settlers the worst mistake of the dominant members of the Shashamane Rastas (called The Twelve Tribes of Israel) was their lack of consideration  for the indigenous people in whose midst they had imposed themselves.  Things came to a head when, in 1975, the Ethiopian people expropriated the land from the Rastas as an expression of opposition to the monarchy.  Though part of the land was eventually returned, and  the new regime was itself deposed, the settlement  at Shashamane only survives through the financial backing of  outside forces - and its daily life is far from the principles it was set up to uphold.

          "A universal principle is a unifying field that heals and gives meaning"

                                                           "Think Global. Act Local!"