Charles F. Dole envisioned a world shaped not by dominance or wealth, but by the quiet strength of justice, kindness, and shared purpose. His writings call forth a new era led by gentle people—those who live cooperatively, act ethically, and sow peace through every daily choices.
In The Coming People, Charles F. Dole draws a powerful moral parallel between the arc of nature and the unfolding of human society. Just as the gentle animals—those who graze, flock, and live without violence, have endured while the fierce and predatory have faded, so too will the world be renewed by people who live with kindness, fairness, and cooperative purpose. “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword,” and as foretold, “The Lion Shall Lie Down with the Lamb.” Dole offers a powerful and exciting vision of societies transformed through gentleness, which in his eyes, is not weakness, but the enduring force that will guide humanity forward.
“The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth”
The Rise of the Gentle People
In The Coming People, Dole radically reframes the Biblical phrase “The meek shall inherit the earth,” emphasizing not weakness or submission, but gentleness as the natural evolving civilizing force. Dole explains that meekness is not passivity – it is the most potent characteristic of those who refuse cruelty, domination, and greed.
The “meek,” Dole insists, are those who possess the moral courage to choose kindness, living simply, mutual service, and reverence for the life and liberty of people and animals over conquest.
He writes: “The gentle shall possess the earth, not by overthrowing others, but because they fit best to dwell in it.”
This prophecy of an emergent moral class – a “coming people” deeply resonates with evolved social, economic and ecological principles for the reason that akin to communitarians, these gentle inheritors are not awaiting salvation from without; instead they are building it through their daily actions, communal ethics, and rejection of external coercive power.
In modern communitarian terms, Dole outlines a deeply participatory and post-hierarchical model of collaborative unity: one where right living replaces rigid governance and where care for one another and the earth supersedes extractive systems.
In The Coming People, Charles F. Dole outlines a bold and hopeful vision of a society guided by compassion, fairness, and common purpose. He calls for a shift from competition and inequality to a cooperative social order built on ethical living and shared responsibility. This accessible and practically visionary work lays the ethical foundation for a gentle, just, and sustainable future born of seeding & adopting ‘common good’ principles & practices.
Tending the Ethical Commons
Nurturing the Rise of the Coming People
Charles F. Dole’s relevance to the development of eco-social communal unions emerges through the strong alignment between his ethical-social vision and the evolving practices of Communitarian Unions. Below are some of the core principles where this alignment is most evident:
Participatory Moral development
Charles F. Dole placed his faith not in institutions of power or elite intellects, but in the moral potential of ordinary people within communities. For Dole, the “coming people” were not to be led by rulers or experts; rather these gentle people would be awakened and activated through close associations formed by shared purpose resulting in discovering what is good through experience, reflection, and mutual challenge. This moral development was not abstract theorizing – it was participatory, developed by deliberate collaborative dialogue, and grounded in daily life that included sharing all with all. The community itself was the ethical laboratory.
Dole envisioned moral growth as unfolding in and through communal association, where individuals are called to develop their higher selves by practicing fairness, kindness, self-restraint, and courage in relation to others. Each person’s transformation was interwoven with the group’s evolution; thus, character development was not an exclusively private endeavour – rather it was a collaborative activity intended to be ever-expanding – deepening, revealing, correcting and rippling out to positively impact people, animals and planet.
This vision aligns closely with the network of Communitarian Unions’ emphasis on collaborative ethical growth through daily Observances and Gestalt-based group development. In these practices, ethical development is lived, not merely discussed. The Observances create structured opportunities to reflect on personal conduct, cultivate virtues like humility, responsibility, accountability, personal progression and productivity.
Gestalt group development brings a relational depth to communitarian practice by creating spaces where individuals are acknowledged in the full complexity of who they are. This includes their lived experience, emotional landscape, inner world, social roles, and evolving identities. Within this shared space, people are invited to bring forward their thoughts, feelings, histories, and aspirations, alongside their contradictions, values, struggles, and unique ways of relating.
Attentive listening, non-judgmental feedback, and the shared courage to stand with one another in the sometimes-uncomfortable revealing of truth, allows each associate’s vulnerability, their hard-earned wisdom, and their emerging potential to be received with care. Through this process of witnessing, challenge, and support, emotional maturity is nurtured and the foundations of deep, enduring trust are laid within the community.
Within this environment, those on the path to gentle living are also constructively challenged and supported by others, encouraging emotional honesty and maturity that builds strong, enduring bonds. As Dole envisioned, moral insight is revealed not from abstract rules, but from the real-time navigation of relationship tensions and shared conflicts and dilemmas.
Dole’s approach prefigures this kind of eco-social moral learning: participatory, iterative, and inseparable from one’s embeddedness in community. It is the people, rather than systems, who, through mutual striving and self-questioning, become good by doing good together.
Peace Through Gentleness
For Charles F. Dole, peace was not the absence of conflict imposed by force, but the living presence of harmony cultivated through conscious gentleness. He rejected the notion of peace as top-down control, instead envisioning it as the natural outgrowth of everyday choices made in alignment with goodwill. True peace, Dole argued, begins in the self and radiates outward through acts of consideration, restraint, and solidarity. It is sustained not by laws or weapons, but by daily habits that reflect in actuality, the right to life, liberty and happiness for every citizen of the Earth – including animals.
For Dole, peace began not with laws or institutions, but with the quiet, everyday discipline of how we speak to one another, how we listen with care, how we source our food, how we labour without exploitation, and how we honour our shared dependence on the earth. To him, peace was cultivated in kitchens and gardens in a much more impactful, honest and productive way than in parliaments or preached from pulpits. His emphasis on gentle living that involved choosing cruelty-free diets, right livelihood, and liberated relationships—reflects a profound eco-social ethic: one that treats all beings, human and nonhuman, as kin to live alongside in cooperation, not to be exploited, or use for our own ends.
This vision directly shapes the Communitarian Union principle of non-coercive social relations. Within the Union, peace is not mandated; it is practiced and grown. It is expressed through relational ethics which involves a commitment to resolve tensions through open-hearted communication, mutual listening, and shared responsibility, rather than domination or avoidance. The daily practice of gentleness, including cruelty-free nourishment, restorative work, and conscious speech, becomes a political act which secedes from systems of violence and models an alternative rooted in love-in-action.
Dole’s peace is not passive or utopian—it is painstakingly built, habit by habit, word by word, through our treatment of one another and the earth.
Living Simply to Live the Principle of ‘Common’ Wealth – Rich By Association
Charles F. Dole championed a way of life that rejected excess and individual hoarding in favor of simplicity rooted in generosity, relational ethics, and purposeful cooperation. Rather than mere calls for “mutual responsibility” and “shared well-being,” Dole envisioned a living social fabric he called the “commonwealth of good will” – a society in which every person responds to an organic duty to support others as part of a moral whole. This wasn’t a call to set up and give endlessly to charities that provide only band-aid treatments to socio-economic injustice. Instead, Dole proposed major structural re-orientation toward reciprocal contribution, where each individual offers what they can and receives what they need, without shame or superiority.
In this vision, living simply meant more than material frugality. It involved realigning one’s desires and habits to reduce dependency on extractive systems, allowing space for community-rooted sufficiency. Sharing all with all was not an abstract ideal but a daily practice of provisioning which including tending common production instruments, distributing harvests, and sustaining one another through coordinated efforts.
Dole’s ‘common’ wealth ideal directly prefigures Communitarian Union principles, where communal economies are built around collaborative provisioning rather than private accumulation. Economic cooperation, in this sense, is not simply about fairness; rather it is about designing lifestyles and social bonds that foster mutual thriving, where responsibilities and joys are distributed resulting in no one being left alone to bear the burdens of existence. In this framework, well-being becomes a co-created reality, not a competitive prize.
Reverence for All Life
For Charles F. Dole, reverence was not confined to ritual or religion; instead, it was a lived ethic expressed through how one regards and responds to life in all its forms. It began in awe: a quiet recognition of the mystery, fragility, and interdependence of existence. However, reverence did not stop at reflection. Dole emphatically believed reverence required responsiveness. He taught that to truly revere life is to live unpretentiously within it, to protect it, to nourish it; and most of all, to actively participate in shaping and demonstrating social systems that cultivate communities where dignity, equity, and kinship guide our relations with one another, animals, and the earth.
This ethical orientation grounds the Communitarian Union’s commitment to shaping systems that nurture life through structural change – not through replicating traditional institutions of care, but by addressing root causes of disconnection and degradation. Rather than focusing on conventional service delivery for specific populations, our efforts centre on restoring relationships between people, animals, and the earth itself.
This includes cultivating organic food systems that regenerate soil and health; developing Gestalt-informed social practices that build self-awareness, mutual accountability, and collective resilience, while modelling cooperative ways of living that move beyond competitive or transactional norms. These practices are not short-term interventions. On the contrary, the network of communitarian unions are long-view responses to the deeper systemic structural issues and moral absences inflicting societies across the globe.
Reverence, in this context, is not an abstract ideal or private sentiment. It is a way of organising life around mutual responsibility, ecological preservation and restoration, bought to fruition through the evolution of social bonds. Dole’s stance anticipates the Union’s broader ethic of love-in-action: a deliberate turning toward gentleness, hospitality, and restorative effort. It is expressed in the decision to eat in ways that do not harm, to build in ways that regenerate, and to organize society around protection rather than exploitation. Reverence, in this sense, is not abstract. It’s the felt presence of compassion in daily tasks: carrying water carefully, planting food forests with others in mind, refusing to profit from the suffering of animals or people.
In Dole’s vision, to revere life is to act in solidarity with it – to see each being not as “other,” but as part of the same living Whole to which we ourselves belong.
Education for the Coming Generations
A major tenet of Dole’s work was the importance of educating young people not just in knowledge, but in ethical character and cooperative spirit. For Charles F. Dole, the true purpose of education was not to produce competitive individuals for the marketplace, rather he emphasized the critical importance of preparing conscious participants in the ethical evolution of society. He believed that every child should be guided toward acquiring knowledge, together with cultivating ethical discernment, empathy, and the cooperative habits necessary for a just and peaceable world. Education, in his view, was a form of ethical stewardship – an intergenerational covenant to pass forward not only facts, but shared values and communal responsibility.
Dole rejected the reduction of learning to rote instruction or rigid authority. Instead, he emphasized the nurturing of inner character through participatory learning environments, where young people develop confidence, voice, and moral imagination in the context of meaningful contribution to the community. The goal was to raise not obedient citizens, but thoughtful co-creators of a better world.
This deeply aligns with the Communitarian Union’s commitment to building Eco-Social Learning Networks and curating Foundational Knowledge Guidebooks – initiatives designed to pass on the living knowledge of non-exploitative, collaborative lifestyles founded on the principles and practices of Liberated Love, shared ‘Common’ Wealth, Collaborative Provisioning, Communal Living and Right Livelihood Eco-Social Productive Enterprise. These educational practices do not isolate the learner from real life, instead they embed learning within communal kitchen gardens and permanent agriculture food forests, restorative circles, and intergenerational mentorship. Within the communitarian unions, ethics are not taught as theory, instead they are brought to fruition through reflection and action.
Education, in this communitarian sense, becomes a vital infrastructure for the coming generation to inherit ecological awareness and practical skills alongside the inner compass and social frameworks needed to build futures rooted in equity, reverence, and mutual flourishing.
Supporting Works that Contribute to Communitarian Union Principles & Practices
In addition to The Coming People, Charles F. Dole authored several influential works which offer extended insights into the ethical, civic, and relational dimensions of communitarian life. Each book below expands upon themes of shared responsibility, ethical development, participatory competence-based governance, and life-affirming social action – positioning Dole as both a visionary and a practical guide for cultivating communal unions rooted in relational ethics that balance human need with ecological responsibility.
The Ethics of Progress (1909): This work articulates Dole’s conviction that genuine progress emerges through the cultivation of justice, truth, and human goodwill – not through conquest or coercion. He rejects materialistic and mechanistic notions of advancement, asserting that ethical evolution depends on cooperation, moral choice, and social responsibility. The “march of humanity,” in his view, is not a pursuit of dominance, rather a shared moral undertaking toward fairness, mutual respect, and communal harmony.
Relevance to Communitarian Principles and Practices:
- Centers conscience and moral evolution as essential drivers of social transformation.
- Reinforces the communitarian belief that progress depends on the quality of relationships and shared ethical commitments, not merely technological or economic gain.
- Emphasizes voluntary alignment with higher values, aligning with Union practices of daily observance, non-coercion, and Right Livelihood.
- Encourages communities to become laboratories of ethical experimentation, where people learn to live more humanely, generously, and cooperatively.
This work provides a strong philosophical bridge between inner development and outer action, making it a highly suitable second foundational study for participants in the Eco-Social Learning Network. It lays the groundwork for embracing ethical responsibility, slow and steady change, and the collective shaping of a more humane world which are core tenets of the Communitarian Union movement.
The Spirit of Democracy (1906): In The Spirit of Democracy, Dole articulates democracy not merely as a system of government but as an ethical way of life. He proposes that democracy thrives when individuals recognize their mutual responsibilities, act with integrity, and engage in social cooperation for the common good.
Relevance to Communitarian Principles and Practices:
- Champions mutual obligation as the core of democratic community life.
- Reinforces collective moral development as the purpose of society.
- Encourages active, values-based participation over passive citizenship.
This work affirms Communitarian Unions’ emphasis on shared leadership, collaborative decision-making, and the cultivation of ethical culture through daily practice.
The Coming Religion (1899): Rather than proposing a new dogma, Dole’s The Coming Religion outlines a spiritual orientation grounded in love, truthfulness, and service to humanity. He envisions a moral culture where compassionate action takes precedence over belief, ritual, or creed.
Relevance to Communitarian Principles and Practices: Embodies the Unions’ commitment to non-dogmatic moral observances, supports the cultivation of love-in-action through simple, shared living and offers a vision of everyday ethics rooted in fellowship and mutual aid
This work is especially relevant for shaping the Unions’ Ethical Observances Framework, encouraging cruelty-free living, generous hospitality, and relational integrity without religious exclusivity.
The Citizen and the Neighbor (1884): This early work by Dole serves as a moral manual for civic life, focusing on the everyday conduct of individuals and their relationship to community. It argues that good neighbors make good citizens, and that personal virtues such as honesty, empathy, and fairness are foundational to social well-being.
Relevance to Communitarian Principles and Practices: Establishes the importance of small-scale relational ethics, frames the everyday acts of kindness, trust, and justice as building blocks of a humane society and encourages a bottom-up approach to community transformation.
This book offers rich guidance for Communitarian Union practices like reciprocal exchange, conflict transformation, and living by example, especially in smaller collectives or intentional communities.
The American Citizen (1891): Written as a civics textbook for youth, The American Citizen blends political philosophy with moral education, teaching that citizenship requires more than knowledge of laws, demanding ethical engagement with society. It instils in the reader a sense of duty to the common good, emphasizing justice, cooperation, and character.
Relevance to Communitarian Principles and Practices: Provides a model for intergenerational transmission of communitarian values, highlights justice, responsibility, and stewardship as core civic virtues, and supports values-based education and capacity-building in youth.
This work is particularly relevant to the Communitarian Unions’ education pathways, contributing to curricula for youth engagement, Right Livelihood apprenticeships, and community mentorship.
The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State (1885): In this philosophically daring text, Dole explores the limits of state authority and questions the morality of using force—even for ostensibly good ends. He suggests that voluntary cooperation, moral suasion, and ethical leadership are more sustainable and just foundations for social order than coercion or punishment.
Relevance to Communitarian Principles and Practices: Underscores the Union principle of voluntary association and non-coercive governance, validates decentralized, horizontal decision-making structures, and warns against authoritarian drift in social movements and governments.
This work provides philosophical grounding for the Communitarian Unions’ commitment to freedom-with-responsibility, consensus-building, and gentle leadership models that cultivate unity without domination.
Taken Together: Dole’s Expansive Communitarian Ethos
Across these six works, Charles F. Dole cultivates a consistent communitarian ethic rooted in: Voluntary cooperation instead of compulsion, Shared moral culture instead of rigid institutionalism, Practical love and justice instead of abstraction, and the daily dignity of humane, ethical living.
Together with The Coming People, these writings position Dole as a foundational figure in communitarian thought and practice, whose legacy offers timeless guidance for those seeking to build cooperative societies from the ground up.
The Theory and The Practice by which Civilization Proceeds
In The Ethics of Progress, Charles F. Dole redefines true progress as a moral and cooperative journey rather than a material or political conquest. He urges individuals and communities to align with justice, truth, and goodwill as the foundation for lasting social change. This concise yet practically grounded work offers guiding principles for those committed to ethical, non-coercive transformation.
Legacy & Enduring Relevance
It is important for communitarian associates studying Eco-social Principles and Practices to understand that Dole did not offer a blueprint for utopia, instead he offered an invitation to become the kind of people who could make one possible. Even in this day and age, Dole’s call remains radical: to become gentle, truthful, and just in all we do, and to organize the communal unions accordingly.
In this light, Communitarian Unions do not merely inherit Dole’s ideals – they enact them. Every cruelty-free meal, every organic food garden, every cooperative endeavor, every space of listening and sharing is a quiet revolution. It is the gentle inheriting the earth, not by force, but by fitting themselves to dwell within it – tenderly, wisely, and together.
