"THE COMMUNITARIAN RESIDENCE LIFE MOVEMENT"

Our work has been recognized by The National Association of Scholars (NAS), "an independent membership association of academics working to foster intellectual freedom and to sustain the tradition of reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities."

At first glance I thought this paper was from the No NAIS people, and I was impressed by the author's level of scholarship. Woods' bibliography is a thorough listing of all the major communitarian thinkers. He includes a long list of my anti communitarian works as well, beginning with my first attempt to expose it publically in a speech before the WA State Libertarian Party convention in 2001.

I wondered how long it would take before upper academia took critical notice of communitarianism. Now that they have and we are included, I wonder how long it will be before we are invited to defend our thesis before an academic review board. I've been asked many times to leave my Alaskan sanctuary and make myself more accessible to the American public. If I am ever invited to debate the communitarians, I will come. If I receive adequate funding for the expenses, I will travel the country as a speaker. I don't live in rural Alaska because I'm "hiding." I live here because it's cheap and my gertee lifestyle allows me to write and study.

This has been a very difficult summer and I'm not even sure I will survive out here the coming winter. I was hoping to be able to finish overdue projects this summer and devote the coldest months to a simplified version of the manifesto. But I'm behind on everything after camping the whole cold summer and I had to winterize gertee because I was burning up my woodpile keeping the baby warm. I don't have any vegetables, meat or fish stored so it's going to mean living on beans and rice again. I've been below poverty level for so long I can't imagine what it would be like to study and write in a heated office, to have a real kitchen to cook and clean up in, and to take for granted the daily comfort an indoor toilet and shower brings. For a minute this summer I thought maybe the von Mises Institute would finance our education, and I was pretty excited about being included in that Vassar College seminar last spring. But Nordica thinks I'm silly for thinking we'll ever get academic recognition and she never hoped for a scholarship the way I did. Many people have suggested I start my own "school" but I really don't have the means or the confidence for such an endeavor. If someone else was to start a school of thought that included ACL studies, I could be persuaded to contribute.

I always hoped "real" scholars would use our anti communitarian thesis in their academic debates, and even if nothing else happens to make our life easier, this one hope has been answered. The ACL gets its own section in this bibliography:

BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR:
"THE COMMUNITARIAN RESIDENCE LIFE MOVEMENT"
by Thomas Wood, June 16, 2008

http://www.nas.org/postings/how_many_delawares/communitarian-bibliography.htm

Wood explains the difficulty in studying the topic:

"THE LANGUAGE OF SUSTAINABILITY

"It is important to consider the whole range of issues that “sustainability” covers. Since enlisting as the principal researcher and investigator for the NAS’s “How Many Delawares?” project, I have been frequently struck, even bewildered, by the multitude of topics “sustainability” is supposed to cover. Below is a selection. Since they are so numerous, I have categorized them as follows: GENERAL TERMS, DOMESTIC POLITICS/IDEOLOGY, INTERNATIONAL POLITICS, LAW, ECONOMICS, ECOLOGY, DIVERSITY & IDENTITY POLITICS, and ACADEMICS:

"GENERAL TERMS: the common good, the collective good, communalism, social justice, civic virtue, strengthening the bonds of community, "moving in the direction of favoring the community in the balance between community and the individual," commitment beyond "mere individual self-interest," socially caring communities, moving away from privacy and a rhetoric of rights to a "vocabulary stressing responsibility and obligation," introducing (or rather reintroducing) the vocabulary and rhetoric of values and morals into civil life, attacks on (extremes of) individualism

"DOMESTIC POLITICS/IDEOLOGY: civil society, green politics (Europe), attacks on, or critiques of, private property, critiques of free markets, global warming activism, critiques of “uncompromising defenses of individual rights,” community building, supplementing or devaluing representative democracy in favor of community action, community activism and organization, critiques of "rights-oriented liberalism"

"INTERNATIONAL POLITICS: internationalism, globalism, elimination of borders, global world government, global citizenry, restoring the balance between global community and prerogatives and rights of autonomous nation states—in particular, correcting the imbalance that presently exists in favor of the big and powerful nation states, especially the U.S.

"LAW: communitarian law, community justice, restorative justice, social justice, restraining individual rights in many circumstances in order to defend and promote community values

"ECONOMICS: critiques of capitalism as inimical to genuine, wholesome, personal and spiritual values, ecological economics, communities versus markets, socio-economics

"ECOLOGY: sustainability; sustainable development; sustainable economies; saving the planet, the Green Movement; the anti-global warming movement

"DIVERSITY & IDENTITY POLITICS: cultural diversity; respect for other societies; multiculturalism; racial and ethnic diversity; social diversity; critiques of heterosexism/ ableism; racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, ageism and every other divisive –ism, including nationalism and ethnocentrism

"ACADEMICS: community service; service learning, civic engagement, campus compacts (linking course content with community-based work), engaged scholarship, holistic thinking (versus linear, logic-chopping, individualist thinking), emphasis on the civic and democratic mission of the university, community-university partnerships, education as an essentially moral enterprise, learning communities, holistic education and holistic learning, educating to develop moral and civic responsibility; community values, contextualized knowledge, transformative learning toward sustainability, participative learning, emphasis on the social nature of life and learning, critiques of “academic competitiveness,” cooperative learning communities, creative learning (vs. mere “information transfer”), non-hierarchical education, education built on social interrelatedness"

http://www.nas.org/polInitiatives.cfm

The NAS biblio also includes references to Michael Shaw, Chris Gerner's Amerikan Expose and Berit Kjos. Funny how the only thing missing from the list appears to be a section on religion, which appears to be the most likely source for communitarian thinking. This would mean their discussing the Heirarchy of the Plan, as is covered extensivley by Bobby Garner at congregator.net. Some of my articles referenced do include mentions of Blavatsky, Bessant, freemasonry and Talmudic Law so maybe the academic discourse will open itself up to include every available factual document.