Where is Utopia?
When you think of America, a capitalist superpower whose politics is now characterised by a relatively narrow spectrum of ideology, I doubt radical utopianism comes to your mind.
However, only a few generations ago, during the 19th Century, a young United States was home to some of the most radical, ambitious and influential experiments in building new, utopian social orders ever seen*.
In this heyday, utopianism was characterised by the belief that a small community could become a model for the world and trigger an ever-perfected existence globally. By the 19th century, nobody reasonably dreamed of stumbling across a new exotic place that already is a perfect utopia, like the Shangri-La’s or El Dorado’s found in old European literature and myth. Rather, the idea of utopia had morphed so to instead focus on time, an immanent future epoch of peace, equality and abundance.
This shift in utopian thinking from place to time was key to inspiring the writing of idealistic socialists such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. The question ‘what should the future look like?’ became filled with utopian potential, buoyed by Enlightenment ideals and technological advancements. The ideal society became something within reach, something that people had the means to move towards together. A newly independent America — the ‘New World’ -seemed to European utopianists the blank canvas on which to build an inspirational model society that would lead to global salvation.
The 5 most prominent examples of this era of American utopianism were the Shakers, New Harmony, the Fourierist Phalanxes, Oneida and Icaria. Although the visions of what utopia was in each of these movements varied, all the different utopian experiments of 19th Century America shared a belief that a specific, ideal social order exists.
It is astonishing just how far ahead of their time these communities were when one takes into account how deeply religious and conservative American society was at that time. In many utopian communities, women were truly equal to men. There was universal public education. Some communities were avowedly secular or atheistic. Many abolished property completely and some communities lived communally in one large complex. Perhaps most famously, the perfectionists of the Onieda community maintained a functioning system of ‘complex marriage’ (i.e. free love) for 33 years.
These experiments in creating communalistic, anti-capitalist utopias in the 19th Century are so fascinating because there is nothing resembling it in the West today. A utopian ‘horizon’, a vision of society that people aim for and move towards seems to have been lost from view. Instead, the mainstream ideals and visions of a possible future we have today, such as the ‘American dream’, are nearly always deeply individualistic in their scope, centred on achieving self-fufillment and self-improvement, rather than a perfect social whole.
The urges to realise an ideal community still exist, but only in isolated, temporary fragments scattered across society. These fragments are the result of grand social narratives and ambitions to transform the entire globe smashing into tiny pieces. Burning Man festival and the ‘regional burns’ it inspires, as well as the isolated intentional communities found around the world seem good examples. Having experienced both to a degree, these ‘fragments’ of idealism demonstrate that people can put theory into practice to create spaces that are more equal, cooperative and just in an attempt widen peoples ‘consciousness’. However, they are willingly isolated and lack the desire to transform the social whole that characterises utopian thinking.
So where is utopianism today?
Perhaps it is hiding under the weight of history. The 20th Century was scarred by attempts to build new societies that led to unspeakable horrors such as the Nazi Holocaust and Cambodia’s Killing Fields. Such atrocities in our collective memory undermine idealism and stoke conservatism, making utopian thinking seem naïve and ill-guided. In a similar way, it was the historical memory of the horrifically brutal American Civil War in the 1860s that killed the national mood of possibility that drove the creation of utopias in the 19th century US. For many, society is too well informed about the inhumanity people are capable of and the limits of what they define as an innate ‘human nature’ to indulge in thinking about a perfectible society.
Whatever way you reason the ‘why’, utopian thinking and the idealism that animates it are almost non-existent in mainstream societal discourse. Rarely do public figures put forward a compelling, radical ‘ideal horizon’ of what a future society might be. As an alternative, society lurches into the future without clear collective aim and direction through an almost random process of technological innovation, directed only by the capitalist imperative to grow our economy and sate consumer desires.
Even if you think realising utopia is impossibly constrained by human nature, this is surely a deeply troubling state of affairs. Our cynicism about even thinking idealistically has led to a deficit of imagination that obstructs the possibility of escaping our pessimism. Without a utopian horizon, humanity is trapped in an ideological morass, unable to progress due to the lack of a fantasy that could create the solidarity and enthusiasm necessary to begin changing things.
Have we become too cynical? No, because deep cynicism in fact represents an opportunity for utopian thinking. Although the pre-cursor to utopian thought is generally assumed to be an excessive optimism, it has to instead start with cynicism about the world as it is. One must find the world deeply problematic to sketch out the ideal society and try to realise it. In the 19th century, utopian thinking was in part inspired by the dystopic reality of first wave of industrialisation. Today, we must do the same, taking a paradoxical inspiration from looming ecological catastrophe and the injustices that mar planet earth.
It is crucial to once again think about utopias because it forces us to analyse the problems in our deeply imperfect civilization and propose imaginative solutions to those problems. Creating idealised futures and trying to move towards them is the praxis that can accompany a critique of the social, a necessary pre-cursor to any successful attempt to make society better.
* Reading Chris Jennings enjoyable account of American utopianism in the 19th Century inspired writing this post and I recommend reading it.
