We recoil with horror from the unfamiliar, certain that we could never accept it in our own lives. But I'm confident that humanity is more resilient than that. We've survived -- and even thrived on -- much that seemed intolerable in the past, once we accepted its necessity.
I'm in the early stages of reading The Dispossessed, by the interesting author Ursula K. Le Guin (see past posts to this blog). I have no idea yet where the story will go; I merely want to think about one small matter it touches on.
The setting is a planet, settled by humans in the distant past, circled by a moon only slightly smaller than the planet. The planet is somewhat earth-like in terrain and in politics and economics. But several centuries earlier, a dissident group of anarchists voluntarily emigrated to the moon (Anarres) -- a bleak desert with slightly less gravity and a thinner atmosphere -- and formed their own egalitarian society.
Shevek, a twenty-year-old brilliant physics student, grew up on Anarres, and has naturally absorbed its values. He now has been accepted as a student at a remote location on Anarres set aside for very advanced scientific studies. He has been given a room of his own, similar to what we find in dormitories at our own universities. He is bewildered and filled with shame. He has never had a room where one could simply close the door and be alone. Such rooms have been reserved for cases of obnoxious misbehavior -- as we would send children to their room for "time out."
Since he was two years old, Shevek has always lived in a dorm room of four to ten beds.
Only gradually does he accept the advantages such a luxury -- if that's what it is -- provides for a person of his introverted personality and engagement in intense personal study..
He describes the normal quarters for Anarres citizens of all ages and occupations:
Everybody had the workshop, laboratory, studio, barn, or office that he needed for his work; one could be as private or as public as one chose in the baths; sexual privacy was freely available and socially expected; and beyond that privacy was not functional. It was excess, waste. The economy of Anarres would not support the building, maintenance, heating, lighting of individual houses and apartments.
Imagine! A society so egalitarian that everyone slept in identical accommodations. And a society economically so close to the minimum required for civilization that those identical accommodations were beds in dormitories. It's enough to make Fox News experience a meltdown.
I sit here, alone -- even my cats having passed on -- in a large house with four bedrooms and all the privacy I could ever need. How would I ever survive in such a society?
But then I think, maybe pretty well? In my younger years, I happily and voluntarily slept in huge dorms with bunk beds in youth hostels all over Europe. And loved it, at least while traveling, because of the company and society afforded by fellow travelers.
But forget the huge hostel-like dorms. Anarres chose such bare-bone accommodations not out of ideology, but because it was all they could afford. We are a rich country, living in a poorer world, but a world still rich compared with Anarres. Let's assume, without proving, that we could afford to provide a private room -- similar to the Spartan rooms of my college dormitories -- for every man, woman, child, or couple in our country. Maybe an additional adjoining room for children, if we blanche at sending our two-year-olds to the children's dorm.
Why not make such dorm rooms the default accommodation for everybody, provided by the government free of charge and paid for by our taxes? Anarres was a completely egalitarian society, but I"m not arguing for that. I'd say that if you had a job that permitted you to buy a McMansion on Lake Washington, and you just had to have it, go for it. But these dorm rooms would be there waiting for you, whenever you chose. Dorm rooms not just for mentally ill or unemployable vagrants. Not just for the rejects of our society -- although for them, too. For all of us.
These rooms would be available for the temporarily unemployed, for students paying off their student debts, for young adults who were engaged in their community and needed only a bed to sleep in, for empty nesters after their kids left home, for the elderly. For single people who valued the opportunity to hang out with neighbors in the common room facilities provided, rather than live alone in isolation. For folks like me who keep complaining in their blogs about home maintenance!
In some ways, these rooms would be like assisted care facilities for folks who didn't need assisted care. Or like England's council housing, but consisting of just rooms and access to common areas, not apartments.
Maybe for a fee, dining facilities would also be available, serving something like the dreaded dorm food of one's college years. The food would not be of gourmet standard, but its eating would provide additional social opportunities.
We are faced with enormous housing problems in this country. Not just for the homeless. The major problem is providing housing for those who cannot afford to buy a house or rent a decent apartment. Housing in many cities today, whether owned or rented, is costing forty to fifty percent of a worker's salary. My dormitory suggestion would address those problems, while providing a housing option to many others, people who, given the option, would be happy to live in minimal but safe and healthful housing and use their money for other purposes.
Of course it would cost money to build and maintain free dormitories. Maybe we should just keep building new houses all over the landscape for those who can afford them, bus those who cannot afford them thirty miles or so each day into the city to work, and continue to walk around the homeless, the addicted, and the mentally ill who lie sprawled out on our sidewalks?.
Personally, I'd rather live on Anarres.
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