The Nomadic Alternative – Page 216

VII

resurrected Golden Age was a communist paradise where everything was free for the taking - free food, free clothes, free beds, free love - free, that is, for the elect. Property necessarily infected the rich, damned them, and put them beyond the pale of compassion.

And when the voluntary poor took and used the things of the rich, they were doing the rich a good turn and assisting the salvation of their souls. The initiate celebrated the release of his spirit from mundane matters by tearing off the rags of his poverty and swanning about in magnificent finery, the symbol of his election from the ranks of the poor onto the highest plane of spiritual aris[illegible]tocracy. Damned the rich might be, but in all fairness they could not be expected to subscribe to the same view of enlightenment. All salvationist movements have great difficulties in deciding where to draw the line between the chosen and the damned.

VIII

Wandering mendicants tire of solitude. The road is a lonely and dangerous place for the single vagrant, and to maintain his independence, he seeks the protection of numbers. Whereas a single specimen of the voluntary poor may titillate the conscience of the property owner, en masse they alarm him. Anxious and contemptuous, he appeals to civil authorities for protection and piously convinces himself that the voluntary poor are revolutionary activists, social para[illegible]sites, or worse, pacifists and traitors. At this stage the wanderers feel drawn to some quiet hermetic place, walled off from the outside world, where the inmates need not conform to false moral standards.

The wandering of the Golden Age thus spirals to a halt in a fixed Utopia.

The Brethren of the Free Spirit came to rest in Houses of Voluntary Poverty - where admittedly the poverty was more illusory than real. Such closed communities of the Middle Ages heralded the Utopian Socialist experiments of modern times - those of the Shakers, Quakers,