Music as Ethics in an American Intentional Community

Abstract

Twin Oaks is a 90-member egalitarian community located in rural Louisa, Virginia. Originally inspired by the psychologist B. F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two, it is the oldest continuously operating secular commune or “intentional community” in America. Rejecting fixed forms of governance, the community organizes itself through flexible guidelines reached through consensus, for which rhetoric and listening skills are key. Members’ ability to act in ways perceived as morally appropriate is dependent on their ability to listen effectively to others and engage in productive conversation. Despite its small population, the community hosts a surprising number of ensembles in which members rehearse techniques of listening, play, improvisation, and flexibility crucial to a society that rejects top-down forms of governance. I argue that an ethics of virtue is a better fit for describing music as an ethical practice within many small-scale, non-hierarchical communities such as Twin Oaks. Cultivating virtue is a process involving the development of the whole person over time within the context of a community. Virtues are honed within practices, such as music, and applied through situated reasoning (phronesis). Virtues are complex because they cannot be straightforwardly determined by observing behavior in any single interaction but are dispositions that are internalized and enacted in a range of situations within the context of a historical community. Ethical crises at Twin Oaks sometimes emerge when the application of behaviorist governance concepts fails to reinforce the community’s stated ethics, which most communitarians understand to be expressed as virtues. In this chapter I analyze this dynamic through a debate at Twin Oaks regarding the ethical desirability of playing “trashy pop” at community dance parties.