Thinking About Utopia

We are all trapped in time and place to certain kinds of life. We spend most of our big-picture energy thinking about the kind of life that’s best for us, given the world we live in. And so we should. But every now and then, a group of people decide to wipe the slate clean and fashion something new from the ground up. Sometimes they do this only with their minds and pens, but the bravest cast aside their writing tools and set out to build a new kind of community.

I’ll admit to a schizophrenic relationship to utopias.

They fascinate me and I believe in the underlying quest. People should pay far more attention than they do to how to live. But how to live is always a social question; never a purely individual one. For most of us, that means that the question of how to live is really a question about how live in our current society.

That is and will always be kind of discouraging. Our society is deeply broken. It’s hard to fashion a good life in a community that seems not to care about good lives at all. There’s tremendous appeal in the idea of learning how to live in a community purpose-built for that exploration. I also happen to believe in the practical possibilities — not of utopia but of improvement. We’d all be better off if there were more communities of exploration; more people actually trying to build a better society and fewer people just…