What is Eutopian Thinking?
One of my favorite memes from a few years ago was a woman standing with a sign reading “Rethink everything.”
If this idea of a big rethink once sounded fanciful, I think the multiple crises still cascading since 2020 have made it close to obligatory. Now, if ever, is our chance.
But first let us agree on one thing: the ideas which got us here, especially those utopian visions of late capitalism and neoliberalism, cannot help us find our way out of the crisis. One way to understand this idea is in the popular saying coined by Black feminist author Audre Lourde, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
This is the sense in which the Covid-19 shutdown could be termed apocalyptic, in the root sense of “unveiling” something. We now see clearly how certain dystopian ideas (less taxes will mean better government! wealth will trickle down! etc.) left so many vulnerable to any slowdown in our economic perpetual-motion machine, much less something close to the emergency-cord full stop that happened in 2020.
And one more unveiling: that moment when we recognized how privatized our own imaginations have become.
Resisting the temptation to exchange one ideology for another (ideological thinking was the root of the problem in the first place), we need to re-think everything by creating new mental tools, new frameworks for understanding and changing the world.
And those frameworks should help us to think in the manner of Eutopians, which does not mean in a manner either ideological (the New Soviet Man) or fantastic (the return to the Shire, etc.). Then how exactly do Eutopians think?
The word Eutopia means “a place of ideal well-being, as a practical aspiration (compared with utopia as an impossible concept).” (Oxford English Dictionary.)
If Yogi Berra was correct to say that you can observe a lot by looking, then we can quickly recognize fellow Eutopians — and we should be looking for them everywhere in these times — because their thinking is apparent in their manner and actions. Eutopians embody some combination of the following characteristics:
A lack of fearfulness
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, we North Americans have lived submerged beneath a cultural ocean of fear. While terror attacks by non-U.S. citizens since then have been dramatically fewer than those carried out by our own citizens, it seems clear that Osama Bin Laden succeeded. To a greater degree than the terrorist (his occupation, as it were) might have ever hoped, he and his accomplices succeeded in sowing terror on such a scale that we now see its fruits: division, distrust, disunity to a crippling degree.
Adding to the latter anxieties, the threats from climate disasters — including floods and fires — along with the several Covid-19 virus strains seeping through the population, and you have a perfect storm of nation-scale frightened, defensive thinking.
As a result, we’ve spent two decades creating the fear industry in order to sell millions of home surveillance cameras behind which we can cower in virtually “gated” places. (In these times, the purely human instinct to know our own neighbors is made to seem an inadequate or even risky “solution” — especially because there’s no money to be made in it, of course.)
Eutopians do not ignore what is legitimate in these dangers: instead they turn them around to become motivations for building up community and critically-depleted social capital. They do not buy guns (or, as is often the case in America, even more guns). In fact, they don’t assume the first response to a problem is to buy anything.
Relational/inclusive
Eutopians are not highly individualistic in their philosophical outlook. On the contrary, they are broadly communitarian.
Many are also something like personalists, as was (for example) the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as Thomas Merton, Rene Girard, Dorothy Day, and G.E.M. Anscombe. Personalism is a school of modern philosophy which emphasizes the importance of human persons and their unique status as relational beings. For the sake of simple consistency, a personalist will also be anti-racist and pro-woman. Eutopians thus basically believe “there are no Others.” They are eager to connect with people of all backgrounds and capable of empathy for them.
Commons-oriented
A person who is commons-oriented might be termed a “commoner”, meaning here not a lower-class person but rather someone supportive of the concept of the commons and engaged in conserving it. The term includes the physical commons (water, air, open land), the civic commons (public space, public transportation), and the knowledge commons (e.g., works in the public domain).
More about the importance of recovering the commons in the next chapter.
Systems-oriented
Broadly speaking, Eutopians favor the kind of analysis which attempts to go beyond linear thinking to incorporate multiple dimensions, often including the approach called systems theory. The particular version of the latter most familiar here is probably that popularized by Donella Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems. Applied especially to environmental issues, it aims to avoid the classical problem of the blind men and the elephant, i.e., mistaking the part for the whole.
Anti-fragile, incremental
As I’ve suggested above, Eutopians (as contrasted with some Utopians) are not ideologues or ideologically-minded. Instead they often adopt open frameworks that allow for multiple small tests, prototyping, etc. For many, the goal of becoming anti-fragile — a concept developed and popularized in 2012 by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder — is now a key dimension in their thinking. (Among many Eutopian groups influenced by Taleb’s thought is Strong Towns, a kind of contrarian urbanist project founded by Charles Marohn.)
Another interesting and very real-world movement in this vein is that of incremental development, as practiced by the Incremental Development Alliance. This group of small-scale builders is focused on regenerating neighborhoods by training residents to become new small-scale builders, partly in order to supply what has been called “the missing middle” in housing stock.
Convivial
This term is perhaps unfamiliar in the sense meant here. It is associated with the social theorist (and Eutopian icon) Ivan Illich who used it in his Tools for Conviviality (1973) to describe “the beauty,…the creativity,…the surprising inventiveness of people” who are not enslaved to their own tools. Another definition (from author Samuel Ewell) is “freedom in interdependence.”
With this combination of seemingly heterodox qualities, a Eutopian sounds like someone with an alternative view of human nature. Let’s look closer at that possibility.
In the ongoing pandemic, the topic of disaster response — already urgent in recent years because of the fires and flooding associated with climate change — has become part of everyday conversation.
Interestingly, the field of disaster studies offers a developed sociological understanding of human behavior in these moments, as popularized brilliantly by author Rebecca Solnit in her Paradise Built in Hell. Her chapters on ordinary citizens’ responses to the San Francisco earthquake, the London Blitz in 1940–41, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and Hurricane Katrina reveal both the nature of “elite panic” and the remarkable communities of solidarity and social care that emerge from such events.
Is there such a thing, Solnit asks, as post-traumatic growth syndrome? Might it be a source of our natural resilience? It seems so, based on the historical evidence.
Despite Hollywood depictions of mass hysteria, disasters are in fact mostly lacking in looting and “every man for himself”-style mayhem. Police violence and elite over-reaction, on the other hand, can arise in the aftermath of disaster, as the grim example of New Orleans’ law enforcement response during Hurricane Katrina demonstrated.
Instead, the interruption of normal life and its usual rules generates for many people an exhilarating sense of suddenly being needed for others, of strange new openings for meaningful work and for unexpected engagement with one’s neighbors.
This Phoenix-like power of social regeneration is not some mythical imagining but a documented sociological phenomenon, still mostly misunderstood and misrepresented in popular culture. Disasters, as Solnit puts it, are “back doors into paradise,” when we “become who we hope to be, to do the work we desire,” utilizing a “brave and altruistic improvisation” which most of us didn’t realize was waiting within us.
What the research on disasters suggests is that most of us harbor a mistaken view of human nature. Despite the images we see in most Hollywood disaster movies, we are not typically a chaotic, selfish species which should be fearful of each other. On the contrary, we frequently show ourselves to be capable of “remembering” and acting upon on our humane instincts. Tragically we’ve been sold a Hobbesian suspicion of the Others and the “chaos” they represent. We now know that hundreds died after Hurricane Katrina because authorities thought them too dangerous to evacuate or even to rescue from hospitals. Rumors, as Solnit put is, are “the first rats to infest a disaster,” and caused many rescuers to regard the Katrina victims as enemies.
And yet…how did the “Cajun navy” of rescuers come together? Who ordered over 200,000 people to put up Katrina survivors in their homes? How did office workers in Manhattan’s twin towers — lacking any electronic contact with city or law enforcement officials — calmly evacuate themselves on 9/11?
Somehow the inspiration to become again, at least temporarily, our brother’s keepers occurred to thousands at the same moment.
William James’ famous essay on “The Moral Equivalent of War” describes permanent peacetime as only viable in a society devoted to something higher than pleasure: we need causes, hardships, demands, especially for our young people who hunger for meaningful effort.
Of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Dorothy Day, a young girl at the time, later wrote “While the crisis lasted, we loved each other.” We might wonder whether such emotions are a permanent part of our human psyches, simply waiting to surface when crises occur.
Our therapeutic culture has deeply influenced our politics, defining down what it means to be human. Where, Solnit asks, are the maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even ideas on them, the utopian part of the psyche, or just the soul at its most expansive?
This essay is part of a new book project of mine, A Field Guide to Eutopia. More to come on all this.
