Utopianism

By Albert Bates

From the Encyclopedia of Community

For as long as there have been humans, we have imagined and created our images of ideal societies. Our utopian dreams are ways we conceive corrective measures for the problems in the world we have built for ourselves. The process is no different for environmental problems than for social ills--utopias are tools we use to describe and experiment with both the logical consequences of proceeding heedlessly and the many possible alternative paths we might choose from.

Utopian dreaming came by its name through the writings of Sir Thomas More, whose 1515 account of a visit to a fictional country, Utopia, initiated the literary genre. In More's classless agrarian society, everyone worked equal hours at whatever they did best and enjoyed equal rights and rewards. Clothing was plain, simple and practical, not unlike today's Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites who began building utopian communities in Moriavia in 1528. More's Utopians exchanged homes every few years (as do some traditional Mormon towns in Utah and Arizona) and ate in common dining halls (as do Kibbutzim in Israel and co-housing settlements in North America and Scandinavia). Hereditary distinctions were unknown, and children lived within whatever household they chose. Consumerism was discouraged. If an excessive surplus was produced, a holiday was declared.

Utopia has most often been viewed through a social lens, but More's vision was also ecological.

[River water] is carried in earthen pipes to the lower streets; and for those places of the town to which the water of that shall river cannot be conveyed, they have great cisterns for receiving the rainwater, which supplies the want of the other. They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have vines, fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered, and so finely kept, that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so fruitful and so beautiful as theirs. (More 1516, Book II)

More's fictional visit compares remarkably to a vision for Melbourne which the Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Society sketched in 1990: an urban village surrounded by forest and wetland, its human population harmlessly integrated with native species of plants and animals. In this future Melbourne, residents generate their own energy from sunlight and buildings are designed to heat and cool themselves passively. (Toyne 1991, 8)

The utopian tradition may have originated with Plato (427-347 B.C.) and his The Republic, which provided a detailed model for an ideal society as a way of elucidating the shortcomings of contemporary culture. After More in the 16^th Century, prominent eco-utopias include Tommasso Campanella's Citta del Sole (1602), Frances Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Robert Owen's A New Vision of Society (1812), Henri de Saint-imon's Catechisme Politique de Industriels (1824), Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), William Hudson's A Crystal Age (1877), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), Peter Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (1892) and Fields, Factories and Workshops (1904), Ebenezer Howard's Golden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), B.F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948), Aldous Huxley's Island (1962), Ernest Callenbach's Ecotopia (1975), Marge Pearcy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), and Murray Bookchin's The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Remaking Society (1990). There is also a genre of frightening anti-utopia or "dystopian" novels embodied in works such as Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), Jevgenii Zamjatin's We (1923), Huxley's Brave New World (1932), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1972). If beneficial utopias can be carried to their most paradisical extremes, the dangerous consequences of a utopia turning against itself can also be imagined.

The revolutions of the late eighteenth century introduced the possibility that utopian thought could intervene in human affairs. Thomas Jefferson in his Declaration of Independence (1776), Niquet le Jeune in the Declaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1786), and other revolutionaries moved utopian idealism into national government charters.

The nineteenth century saw the proliferation of utopian communities, both religious and secular. In 1799, Robert Owen purchased the cotton spinning mills of New Lanark, Scotland, reduced the workday and gave his employees low-rent housing, free medical care, low-cost education, reduced prices on food and other household supplies, and free access to social and recreational facilities, gardens, and parks. While Owen's experiment at New Lanark was a success on many levels, he did not believe it was the ideal community in which to establish his "New Moral World." In 1824, he purchased the community of Harmony, Indiana, and 900 of his followers moved there to start over as New Harmony.

After a failed experimental settlement in Texas, the French socialist Etienne Cabet relocated 275 of his followers to the town of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1849, and there built an Icarian Society that practiced a communal economy. Members of the community received free schooling from age four until adulthood.

At the same time, the Shakers (United Society of Believers in ChristÕs Second Appearing) believed that they could set an example of the perfect life and established several model settlements in the Eastern United States. Their requirement of celibacy dwindled their numbers but the perfection in their designs for furniture, buildings, villages and music endures.

In the early 1870s John Humphrey Noyes led his Oneida community to found successful enterprises in the production of steel traps, silk thread, and fruit preserves, and later the manufacture of silver and stainless steel dinnerware. By 1881, disagreements over leadership and widespread criticism from the outside world over the practice of a form of free love in which all members were married to each other led to the dissolution of the community and the formation of a joint business corporation which survives today.

Many of these communities believed they had found the answer to all human ills, and they presented themselves as exemplars to the rest of the world. But far more influential were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose Communist Manifesto in 1848 retold history as a series of class struggles. The 'Paris Commune' revolt in March, 1871 established a worker state in Paris, with a Revolutionary calendar, a ban on religion, and better working conditions. After 2 months, government troops attacked the barricades around Paris, killing 20,000, arresting 38,000 and deporting 7,000, yet Marx's doctrine would soon find even larger followings in Russia and China. There are more people living in communist societies today than there were people on Earth when Marx put pen to paper.

In 1892, William Morris wrote News from Nowhere; or, An Epoch of Rest. Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Morris's protaganist, William Guest, awakens one morning after a troubled sleep to find himself in a place completely unlike his own Victorian London. He discovers instead a society of youthful people who are happy, energetic, free from want, and, most important, engaged in work for the pure pleasure of serving others and expressing their own creativity. Morris's "Nowhere" was a utopia devoid of class, governmental structures, money, poverty, crime, and industrial pollution.

The first decade of the 20^th Century witnessed the birth of futurism, an attempt to foresee the future, not as it should be, but as it likely will be. The Italian writer Filippo Marinetti, in his "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura Futurista" [Technical Manifesto on Futurist Literature] of 1912, declared the liberation of words from traditional grammar and syntax. His futurist magazine, Zang tumb tuuum, substituted typographical devices, including a "synchronic map of sounds, noises, colors, images, odors, hopes, desires, energies, nostalgias..."

The word "robot," derived from the Czech word robota, meaning drudgery or forced labor, was used for the first time in a play by Karel Capek in 1921, R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Set on an island where labor-emancipating robots are manufactured on assembly lines, the play provided a critical look at the use of machines to replace humans and presciently gave a warning against genetic manipulation.

The history of utopias is a history of extremes. In the 20^th Century the world witnessed large-scale attempts to improve society, and, when some of those experiments failed, devastating consequences. Most such experiments are carried out in the name of progress, liberation, justice, and equality. Every aspect of human life and societyÑhuman genes, food supply, families, communications, settlement patterns, weather, exploration of outer spaceÑhave now been pushed to new limits in the name of social virtue. And while many benefits were in fact achieved, no element or aspect has been left entirely unattended by unexpected and negative results.

If there is today one preeminent hotbed for utopian experiments, it is surely in the USA. Since the earliest experiments at Plymouth Colony, Bohemia Manor and Ephrata Cloister, North America has never been without communal utopias. At times concurrent experiments have numbered more than 5,000 in the United States. Many have been ecotopian in their outlook, attempting, like More's Utopians, to balance human needs with the renewable capital nature provides. Fruitlands, Fellowship Farms, Little Landers, School of Living, Camphill, Emissaries, The Farm, Tolstoy Farm, Drop City, Twin Oaks and Arcosante were among the more notable efforts to get back to the land in an ecological way. The shared intention was to reconstruct society from a simple egalitarian social contract and, in some cases, to expand into futuristic ecolopoli.

Some of these experiments were strongly influenced by utopian fiction; e.g.: Twin Oaks by Skinner's Walden Two, The Farm by Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, New Harmony by Owen's A New Vision of Society. Others sprang from parallel wellsprings, but without any explicit literary inspiration.

North America does not have a monopoly on such communities, however. The Kibbutz movement that re-greened the deserts of Palestine in the 20^th century was Zionist in outlook at inception, but developing a restorative ecology rationale at the end of the century, with the Green Kibbutz Network leading the young towards a new set of goals. In Germany, the Okodorf movement began in the early 1980s and quickly picked up adherents among Eurotopian dreamers in the aftermath of German reunification. At the same time, permaculture communities in Australia (e.g.: Crystal Waters, Kookaburra Park, and Jarlanbah) pioneered easy paths to more environmentally sensitive lifestyles for the middle class. In Scandinavia, co-housing, which sprang from social and economic objectives, gave birth to ecovillages, which added a filter of energy and materials choices to new settlement design. The Eco-Village Network of Denmark (Landsforeningen for Okosamfund, or LOS) was among the first to create a coalition of ecovillages, but it was soon followed by the Ecovillage Network of the Americas and the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN). By the end of the century GEN claimed more than 15,000 utopian communities as members, on six continents.

Influenced by philosophers such as Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Rudolf Steiner, Arne Naess, Bill Mollison, John Seed, and Ralph Borsodi, Helen and Scott Nearing, and J.R. Rodale, ecovillagers endeavor to address the social, environmental and economic dimensions of sustainability in an integrated way, with human communities as part of, not apart from, balanced ecologies. As environmental scientist William J. Metcalf first observed, any real solutions to the global environmental crises of the present era begin with changes in lifestyle (Metcalf, 1977).

People have imagined ideal societies existing in the real world, the imaginary world, and most recently, cyberspace. All too often, however, these dreams are grandiose and impractical. While proclaiming themselves as formulas for a better world, they often contain the seeds of their own undoing. As Professor Benjamin Barber has written, 'Plato's Republic is in certain ways the most frightening dystopia because it is conceived as a utopia. A society in which abstract reason (or those who claim to possess it) can command the rest locks up freedom in the prison of rationality and invites the "brightest and the best" (Halberstam's description of the rationalists who conducted the war in Vietnam) to displace democratic pragmatism with five year plans and thousand year Reichs.' The environmental consequences of Marx's revolutionary ideas in actual practice in Russia and China are plain to anyone who visits the Aral Sea, Chernobyl, the Three Gorges Dam, or Llasa.

Perhaps utopianism is best realized in small increments, with damages fully assessed before moving along to the next scale of effects. The environmental lessons of nuclear energy, chemical farming, biotechnology, nanotechnology, and climate-altering energy systems are still to be widely accepted, but the scale of their industrial adoption has assured that the consequences will be neither benign nor easily ignored.

We are what we have dreamt we would be. Sometimes we are even a little more. The Aboriginal saying is, 'Ngaantatja apu wiya, ngayuku tjamu' - This is not a rock, it is my grandfather. This is the place where the dreaming comes up.' Modern civilization is the product of the dreams of ten thousand generations. A Nubian slave dreamt that his children would have the wealth of the pharoahs. Perhaps not all of his children yet do, but more people have greater wealth today than the pharaohs could have imagined, and more have attained pharaoh-like wealth than there were people on the Earth when the pyramids were raised. That this level of profligate consumption is based upon, and may already have exceeded, the capacity of Earths regenerative abilities, has yet to sink in

What comes tomorrow will depend on what we dream today.

Albert Bates

Further Reading

Bellamy, Edward, Looking Backward 2000-1887. New York: Penguin Putnam (1888, 2000).

DeGues, Marius, 'Ecological Utopias as navigational compasses, ' in Poldevaart, et al., eds., Contemporary Utopian Struggles, Amsterdam: Askant (2001).

_______, Ecological Utopias: Envisioning the Sustainable Society. Utrecht, The Netherlands: International Books (1999).

Fogarty, Robert, All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements 1860-1914. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press (1990).

Jackson, J.T. Ross, And We Are Doing It: Building An Ecovillage Future. San Francisco: Reed Publishers (2000).

Metcalf, William J., The Environmental Crisis: A Systems Approach. St. Lucia, Qld. Austrralia: Univ. of Queensland Press (1977).

Miller, Timothy, The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth Century America, Volume I: 1900-1960. Syracuse NY: Syracuse Univ. Press (1998).

More, Thomas, Utopia. New York: Ideal Commonwealths. P.F. Collier & Son. The

Colonial Press (1901).

Oved, Yaacov, Two Hundred Years of American Communes. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction (1988).

Pitzer, Donald E., AmericaÕs Communal Utopias. Chapel Hill NC: The University of North Carolina Press (1997).

Sargent, Lyman Tower, British and American Utopian Literature, 1516-1985: An Annotated, Chronological Bibliography (1988).

Toyne, Phillip, 'Creating an Ecologically Sustainable Australia for 2001,' Social Alternatives 10:2 (1991).