Communal Living and Its Discontents

IF I WERE a century older, I might have grown up in the Oneida Community, a complicated nineteenth-century social experiment that sought to be a “city on the hill” both for its upstate New York environs and for the entire world. Founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes, a rogue religious leader who had been expelled by Yale Divinity School for heresy, Oneida was built on the principle that perfection on earth was within reach, and that it would be achieved by restructuring society as a single intimate interdependent family, rather than as an assortment of individuals, couples, and nuclear families with competing rights and interests. Oneidans famously believed that traditional marriage and family life had been superseded by “complex marriage,” in which everyone was married to everyone else, property was shared, children were raised collectively, and sex between community members was a spiritual practice that reinforced communal love and channeled spiritual energy. Under Noyes's direction, Oneidans practiced birth control and eugenics, using a nearly-complete ban on male orgasm to limit the number of children, and attempting to breed a new type of men and women called “stirpicults” who would hopefully one day achieve bodily immortality. Noyes, who initiated girls into the sexual life of the community through acts that would now be punishable as statutory rape, was an advocate of biological incest between spiritually superior people, which he believed would intensify desirable spiritual and physical traits.