Utopia: It’s Not the Life, It’s the People You’re Living With

The six communities in Anna Neima’s The Utopians all tried to create a better way to live. That might seem like the right way to approach creating a community from the ground up, but I don’t think it is. How should I live turns out to be the wrong question for a community. It’s a great question — maybe THE question for any one person. It’s a question we all answer, too, even if we never give it a thought. A community, though, has lots of people all of whom need to find their own answer to that question. A community that starts with a single answer about how to live will be crushingly dull or just crushing.

I ended my previous post on the The Utopians by arguing that it makes more sense to ask what kind of people we want to live with. People are the essence of what makes a community and it’s hard to imagine anything could be more important. If we don’t like the people, we won’t like the community. If we do, we will. It really is that simple. But deciding what kind of people you’d want in your utopia turns out to be trickier than you might think.

Or maybe it seems tricky right from the get-go.

It’s surprising that so few utopians and even fewer social ideologies have much to say about this question. Of Neima’s communities, only one had much of an answer (The Bruderhof) and that’s because it…