Institute for Real God Cooperative Spirituality COOP105: A History of Cooperative Community

OVERVIEW: This course provides a survey of the various experiments in cooperative communal living that have been either proposed or actually carried out throughout history. Examples include:

• the tribe (both in its ancient and modern forms)
• Buddhist sanghas (from several thousand years ago until today)
• early Christian communities
• Utopian visions on paper (such as Plato's Republic, Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, and Thomas More's Utopia)
• the world's various monastic traditions (past and present, male and female)
• the feudal arrangement (including guilds)
• American utopian visions and communities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Brook Farm, Walden Pond, Harmony, the Luddites, the Amish, the Shakers, etc.)
• the communist ideal and its actual implementation
• the hippie movement
• contemporary communal living, from the "family unit" (including extended families) and the "neighborhood", to cybercommunities, to larger experiments, including parent nation-states that provide varying degrees of social benefits to their citizens

• the purposes, higher aims, and greater benefits (relative to both the commonly available alternatives in their own time as well as now) — either hoped for or realized — of these smaller scale alternatives to (or building blocks of) the nation-state
• the nature (and realizability) of the self-sacrifice required in order to achieve the collective purposes
• the strengths, weaknesses, and pitfalls worth noting in the various experiments (particularly the reasons behind the failure of a particular experiment)
• the ongoing tensions between a cooperative community's leadership and its members
• the differences between the purely secular experiments and those founded on a spiritual or religious basis (including a discussion of which of these tends to survive more often)
• the challenges involved in a cooperative community surviving its own birth pangs or growing pains
• the ways in which, together, cooperative communities around the world can form building blocks of a new world order
• the ongoing tensions between a small scale cooperative community and a parent nation-state (including principles such as "separation of church and state" when the community is religious or spiritual in nature)

• Chris Tong, May The Best Culture Win!, The COTEDA Institute, 2006.
• Plato, The Republic. Hackett Publishing Company (2nd edition), 1992.
• Francis Bacon, Tomasso Campanella, The New Atlantis and The City of the Sun: Two Classic Utopias, Dover Publications, 2003.
• Thomas More, Utopia, Penguin Classics, 2003.
• Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval Feudalism, Cornell University Press, 1956.
• John Hostetler, Amish Society, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
• Donald F. Busky, Communism in History and Theory: From Utopian Socialism to the Fall of the Soviet Union, Praeger Publishers, 2002.
• Sunanda Putuwar, The Buddhist Sangha, University Press of America, 1991.
• Thich Nhat Hanh, Friends on the Path: Living in Spiritual Communities, Parallax Press, 2005.
• Graham Gould, The Desert Fathers on Monastic Community, Oxford University Press, 1993.
• William Claassen, Alone in Community: Journeys into Monastic Life Around the World, Forest of Peace Publishing, 2000.
• Zygmunt Bauman, Community: Themes for the 21st Century, Polity Press, 2001.
• Mary Chayko, Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communities in the Internet Age, State University of New York Press, 2002.
• Avatar Adi Da Samraj, Eleutherios: The Only Truth That Sets The Heart Free, The Dawn Horse Press, 2001.

• A useful companion course is SF108: Spiritual Practice and Cooperative Community.