An essay about a better (mini-)society by Luc Sala (with Wikipedia)
Why is the
concept of Utopia relevant to community living or intentional communities? One could
easily discard the whole notion of an Utopian society
as a unrealistic, non dynamic dream of some writers, do-gooders or religious
leaders, who believe that an ideal state or society could work but assume ideal
people. It is easy to point out how the human limitations like ego and material
greed would make such a society a pipe-dream, a fata-morgana,
an illusion that could never work. And yet, most of us strive to improve our
lives and our part of the world, from a selfish or social point of view, we vote
for those who promise us those improvements and in most political movements
there is a distinct utopian flavour. In thinking about communities that at
least in some respect should be better, more humane, more ecological we can
therefore learn from the utopists, those who made
intellectual or artistic constructs and those who actually tried to create an utopian or eutopian
(mini-)society.
We all have
dreams about a world that would be more perfect, better organised, less greedy,
more humane that what we experience in our daily life. And even those who
believe that there is sense and direction in what we perceive as reality, that
our world is a great school with a perfect curriculum at times are tempted to
change that a bit, make it a better place for all of us. These dreams, all
through history, have been laid down in books or verse, painted or sculpted in
art and appear in the various interpretations of heaven, paradise. Many times
these ideas or dreams were tested in reality, in communities, ashrams, monasteries,
cults, in whole countries but alas, without much lasting success. Only
monasteries and religious communities seem to have staying power and a
sustainable model, but even there many were short-lived.
As we are
planning an intentional work/live/create community it does make sense to study
the historical and conceptual aspects of the virtual and real utopia’s. Our community will never be a real utopia, as we
don’t intend to separate from the rest of the world and have no ambition to be
more that an a little seed in the sea of awareness. The Utopian concepts do
have value for us, as their usually deal with one or more of the aspects of
scarcity, be it material or the less defined needs for happiness or security.
One gets
the impression, that the various utopist writers have
usually projected some part of their own personality into their utopian
worldview at the expense of a more balanced approach. Often aspects like where
the material affluences, overcoming the need to worry about food, comes from
are neglected and just stated as a given. Or like in Plato’s or Skinner’s
(Walden 2) ideal societies there are kings/philosophers or very gifted
planner/executives who in fact establish a kind of totalitarian regime. The
question who is controlling the controllers, who is
planning the planners, the feedback mechanism we assume works (somewhat) in
democracy is missing. They assume an ideal state based on ideal people, the
same as Rousseau who was realistic enough to admit that this is fictional, real
people have real human shortcomings.
Another
aspect that is missing in many utopia’s is the development of the individual,
how to deal with frustrations, criminal intent, depressions etc. Again a the ideal human doesn’t have these problems so they are
ignored or treated as a residue of the non-ideal past. But an
real community does have to deal with this and organising war games as in Ecotopia is a kind of drastic solution. The inner
development of the partners and guest of the community is, in my view, the most
important, it really should be school for life, a
place for growth, not a kind of material paradise where everybody lives long,
happily but without change or development. This is missing in most utopian
concepts.
So these
are relevant questions:
· Is utopia possible?
· Are utopian ideas meant to be acted on?
· If not, what other purposes do they serve?
· What practical lessons can we learn?
· Is there a theoretical model that classifies utopian concepts?
· Are we able to imagine ourselves living in these worlds? What about individual will and desire?
· Are totalitarian and even fascist societies utopian?
We can find the origins of utopian ideas in
images of perfection and imagined ideal societies from classical and biblical
literature. A tension between the ideal and the real can be felt in nearly all of the source. Many of these worlds are set outside
history in a golden age, before time began or in a mythical time governed by
its own rules. The idea of a Garden of Eden is a kind of utopian concept. The
Genesis story of creation, told in the opening chapter of the Bible, is one of
the earliest descriptions of paradise. The image of the Garden of Eden is a
powerful one. The creation myth and the Garden of Eden represent the beginning
of human time and experience, and therefore can conjure powerful images of a
pure time and place, unmarked by history. In common with other early myths, it
is set outside time and marks an ideal or Golden Age before things went wrong
in the world.
The Genesis myth was set in
Plato was a
Greek philosopher who lived between 427 and 347 BC. Plato argues, notably in
The Republic, that wisdom based on truth and reason is at the heart of the just
person and the just society. One of the passages describes prisoners trapped in
a cave, watching shadows of life outside cast on the wall by the light of a
fire. After a while they will think of the shadows as reality. But in truth
reality is different and can only be known by those outside the cave who live
in the light of the sun. Plato describes his statesmen (guardians) as people
who have struggled to the sunlight of reason and learnt the truth about the
material world (physics) and the moral and spiritual world (metaphysics.) Only
such philosophers can be trusted to rule the state. The Republic (Greek: Πολιτεία
/ Politeía, meaning "political system;"
Latin: Res Publica, meaning "public business") is a
Socratic dialogue, written in approximately 360 BC. It is one of the most
influential works of philosophy and political theory, and arguably Plato's best
known work. In it, Socrates and various other Athenians and foreigners discuss
the meaning of justice and whether the just man is happier than the unjust man
by constructing an imaginary city ruled by philosopher-kings. The dialogue also
discusses the nature of the philosopher, Plato's Theory
of Forms, the conflict between philosophy and poetry, and the immortality
of the soul.
Aristotle's Politics
(Greek Πολιτικά)
about how a city (polis) is to be organized is a work of political philosophy
and kind of models many of Plato’s notions, sometimes with a
different conclusions.
Virgil was a Roman poet (70-19 BC). Unlike the earlier writers who often described the Golden Age as outside time or virtual, Virgil's Eclogue suggests that human progress might lead to a more affluent and leisured world in the foreseeable future. His fourth Eclogue, the Messianic Eclogue, is the clearest example of the shift from a timeless to a more historical view of a perfect world. An eclogue is a 'pastoral' poem that idealizes rural life. The term messianic suggests the promise of rescue or relief.
The Amphictyons by Telecleides, a Greek comic poet of the 5th century BC, is quoted by Athenaus. Telecleides presents in The Deipnosophists a Golden Age of impossibly effortless plenty. He plays on his audience's understanding that this ideal era never truly existed and never would. By presenting one extreme satirically he implies a belief in the opposite idea - that prosperity is the result of hard work.
Utopia is a name for an ideal society, taken
from the title of a book written in 1516 by Sir
Thomas More describing a fictional island in the
The word comes from Greek: οὐ,
"not", and τόπος,
"place", indicating that More was utilizing the concept as allegory
and did not consider such an ideal place to be realistically possible. It is
worth noting that the homophone Eutopia,
derived from the Greek εὖ,
"good" or "well", and τόπος,
"place", signifies a double meaning that was almost certainly
intended. Despite this, most modern usage of the term "Utopia"
assumes the latter meaning, that of a place of perfection rather than
nonexistence. Some questions have arisen about the fact that writers and people
in history have used utopia to define a perfect place. Utopia is a
perfect but unreal place. A proper definition of a perfect and real place is eutopia.
More's utopia is largely based on Plato's Republic.
It is a perfect version of Republic wherein the beauties of society
reign (eg: equality and a general pacifist attitude),
although its citizens are all ready to fight if need be. The evils of society, eg: poverty and misery, are all
removed. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, but hires
mercenaries from among its war-prone neighbors (these mercenaries were
deliberately sent into dangerous situations in the hope that the more warlike
populations of all surrounding countries will be weeded out, leaving peaceful
peoples). The society encourages tolerance of all religions. Some readers have
chosen to accept this imaginary society as the realistic blueprint for a
working nation, while others have postulated More
intended nothing of the sort. Some maintain the position that More's Utopia functions only on the level of a
satire, a work intended to reveal more about the
These utopias are based on
economics. Most intentional communities attempting to create
an economic utopia were formed in response to the harsh economic conditions of
the 19th century.
Particularly in the early
nineteenth century, several utopian ideas arose, often in response to the
social disruption created by the development of commercialism
and capitalism.
These are often grouped in a greater "utopian
socialist" movement, due to their shared characteristics: an egalitarian
distribution of goods, frequently with the total abolition of money, and citizens
only doing work which they enjoy and which is for the common good,
leaving them with ample time for the cultivation of the arts and sciences. One
classic example of such a utopia was Edward
Bellamy's Looking Backward. Another socialist utopia is William
Morris' News from Nowhere, written partially in
response to the top-down (bureaucratic) nature of Bellamy's utopia, which Morris
criticized. However, as the socialist movement developed it moved away from
utopianism; Marx in
particular became a harsh critic of earlier socialism he described as utopian.
(For more information see the History of Socialism article.) Also consider Eric Frank Russell's book The Great Explosion (1963) whose last
section details an economic and social utopia. This forms the first mention of
the idea of Local Exchange Trading Systems
(LETS).
Utopias have also been imagined
by the opposite side of the political spectrum. For example, Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
portrays an individualistic and libertarian
utopia. Capitalist
utopias of this sort are generally based on free market
economies, in which the presupposition is that private enterprise and personal
initiative without an institution of coercion, government,
provides the greatest opportunity for achievement and progress of both the
individual and society as a whole.
There is another view that
capitalist utopias do not address the issue of market
failure, any more than socialist utopias address the issue of planning
failure. Thus a blend of socialism and capitalism
is seen by some as the type of economy in a utopia. It talks about the idea of small,
community-owned enterprises working under the capitalist model of economy.
Political utopias are ones in
which the government establishes a society that is striving toward perfection.
Rational thinking and a morality that was assumed should bring happines to all. They tend to be static, totalitarian and
lack a balance of power, the good comes from above and
cannot be criticized. But who controls the controllers, as ideal or even holy
leaders are rare. A global utopia of world peace is often seen as one of the
possible inevitable endings of history.
Many utopias are isolated societies, set on remote islands or planets, and discovered by outsiders.
Thomas Campanella
imagined a perfect society in which religion and reason work in total harmony.
His La città
H G Wells described a parallel earth upon which the rational and scientific are perfectly reconciled with spiritual discipline and belief. Wells' Modern Utopia was first published in 1905. It set the scene for many modern, scientific utopias and dystopias. The story is set on a planet very like earth. The Utopian Planet differs from earth in that the inhabitants have created a perfect society. Two men, the narrator and his colleague (a botanist), visit this parallel planet and argue over its merits and defects.
Utopia is a world in which the problems of humanity have been solved. People live healthy, happy lives in cities where all human needs are met. Science and technology frees people from toil and enables them to enjoy security and innovation. Wells' utopia is neither democratic nor equal. He draws on the utopias of Plato, More, and Bacon. He advocates a scientific kind of socialism, rooted in the idea that the world is orderly, knowable and controllable.
The state is ruled by the Samurai. Like Plato's Guardians, the Samurai are a moral and spiritual ruling class. They lead an ascetic (disciplined and morally strict) life, governed by the Rule. The Samurai carry out their government duties but their main business is the development of science and philosophy. Anybody that proves themselves to be able to follow the Rule is allowed to become one of the Samurai.
In 1719 Daniel Defoe's story Robinson Crusoe explored the possibility of a solitary utopia.
Seven years later the poet, clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) published Gulliver's Travels - a satire on the society of the day and a warning about human folly.
Gulliver's Travels comprises four books. In each Lemuel Gulliver embarks on a voyage and is cast upon a strange land.
In the first book he becomes the giant prisoner of the six inch high Lilliputians. In the second he arrives in Brobdingnag -a land of giants. Book three takes Gulliver to Laputa, a floating island whose inhabitants are so preoccupied with higher speculations that they are in constant danger of collision.
In book four, Gulliver travels to the utopian island of the Houyhnhnms; grave and rational horses devoid of any passion, even sexual desire. The island is also inhabited by Yahoos - vicious and repulsive creatures used by the Houyhnhnms for menial work. Gulliver initially pretends not to recognize the Yahoos, but eventually admits that they are human beings.
Gulliver himself, and each of the populations encountered by him, can be identified with distinct aspects of contemporary society and human nature. Through encounters with a series of very different worlds, some of them the exact inverse of the other, Jonathan Swift exposes in Gulliver’s travels the inevitable prejudice and conflict within societies and between them.
Francis Bacon describes a remote utopian
island governed entirely by reason and science. Bacon's utopia, 'The New
Atlantis' was not published until after his death in 1627. He tells of the
discovery of the New Atlantis, a utopian island set beyond both the
Aldous Huxley in
Rational or economic
concept are one way to get to a better world, but many utopias are based on religious ideals, and are to date those most commonly
found in human society. Their members are usually required to follow and
believe in the particular religious tradition that established the utopia. Some
permit non-believers or non-adherents to take up residence within them; others
(such as the Community at Qumran) do not. There have been many religious
communities with Utopian tendencies, from the Essenes
to the Osho communes.
New Harmony, a utopian attempt; formerly named
Harmony, was founded by the Harmony
Society, headed by George Rapp (also known as Johann Georg(e)
Rapp) in 1814. This was the second of three towns built by the pietist, communal German religious group, known as
Harmonists, Harmonites or Rappites.
The other two towns founded by the Harmonites were
Harmony, Pennsylvania (their first town), and Economy, Pennsylvania (now called
Ambridge, Pennsylvania) When the society decided to move back to Pennsylvania
around 1824, they sold the
Luddites (and neo-luddites)
are like the Amish, but more violent, they reject new technology and machines
and actually try to destroy it. The Luddites
were a social movement of British textile
artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested – often by destroying
mechanized looms – against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution,
which they felt threatened their livelihood. This
English historical movement has to be seen in its context of the harsh economic
climate due to the Napoleonic Wars; but since then, the term Luddite has been used to describe anyone opposed to
technological progress and technological change. The Luddite
movement, which began in 1811, took its name from the fictive Ned Ludd. For a short time the movement was so strong that
it clashed in battles with the British Army. Measures taken by the government
included a mass trial at York in 1812 that resulted in many executions and penal transportation.
The principal objection was the introduction of new wide-framed looms that
could be operated by cheap, relatively unskilled labour,
resulting in the loss of jobs for many textile workers.
Neo-Luddism is a modern movement of opposition to specific
or general technological development. Few people describe themselves as neo-Luddites (though it is common, certainly in the UK, for
people to self-deprecatingly describe themselves as Luddites
if they dislike or have difficulty using modern technology); the term
"neo-Luddite" is most often deployed by
advocates of technology to describe persons or organizations that resist
technological advances. Neo-Luddite thinkers usually
reject the popular claim that technology is essentially "value free"
or "amoral", that it is merely a set of tools which can be used for
either good or evil. Instead, they argue that certain technologies have an
inherent tendency to reinforce or undermine particular values. In particular,
they argue that some technologies foster social/class alienation, environmental
degradation, and spiritual dissipation, though they are always marketed as
uniformly positive by the companies that make them. Neo-Luddites
claim that technology is a force that may do any or all of the following: dehumanise and alienate people; destroy traditional
cultures, societies, and family structure; pollute languages; reduce the need
for person-to-person contact; alter the very definition of what it means to be
human; or damage the evolved life-support systems of the Earth's entire
biosphere so gravely as to cause human extinction.
The Islamic, Jewish, and Christian
ideas of the Garden of Eden and Heaven may be
interpreted as forms of utopianism, especially in their folk-religious
forms. Such religious "utopias" are often described as "gardens
of delight", implying an existence free from worry in a state of bliss or
enlightenment. They postulate existences free from sin, pain, poverty and
death, and often assume communion with beings such as angels or the houri.
In a similar sense the Hindu concept of Moksha
and the Buddhist
concept of Nirvana
may be thought of as a kind of utopia. In Hinduism or Buddhism, however, utopia
is not a place but a state of mind. A belief that if we are
able to practice meditation without continuous stream of thoughts, we are able
to reach enlightenment. This enlightenment promises exit from the cycle
of life and death, relating back to the concept of utopia.
However, the usual idea of
Utopia, which is normally created by human effort, is more clearly evident in
the use of these ideas as the bases for religious utopias, as members
attempt to establish/reestablish on Earth a society which reflects the virtues
and values they believe have been lost or which await them in the Afterlife.
In the United States and Europe during the Second
Great Awakening of
the nineteenth century and thereafter, many radical religious groups formed eutopian societies. They sought to form communities where all
aspects of people's lives could be governed by their faith. Among the
best-known of these eutopian societies was the Shaker movement, which originated in
See also: End of the world (religion), Eschatology, and Millennialism
The adjective utopian has come into some disrepute and is frequently
used contemptuously to mean impractical or impossibly visionary. The device of
describing a utopia in satire or for the exercise of wit is almost as old as
the serious utopia. The
satiric device goes back to such comic utopias as that of Aristophanes in The Birds.
18th & 19th Century Methods for change
In the 18th-century
Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau and others gave impetus to the belief that
an ideal society—a Golden Age—had existed in the primitive days of European
society before the development of civilization corrupted it. This faith in natural
order and the innate goodness of humanity had a strong influence on the growth
of visionary or utopian socialism. The end in view of these thinkers was
usually an idealistic communism based on economic self-sufficiency or on the
interaction of ideal communities. Saint-Simon, Étienne Cabet, Charles Fourier,
and Pierre Joseph Proudhon in
The rationalists of the Enlightenment who
helped prepare the way for the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 did not produce any
recognized utopian classics. There were, however, utopian elements in variousworks, suchas Fénelon's Adventures of Telemachus
(1699), Montesquieu's
Persian Letters (1721), the sketch of
Rationalism did bring a new view on utopia as a logical result of science and progress, somewhat like Virgil did. The change, that came about through the scientific revolution, has it counterpart in society. Revolution may be a movement of dramatic change, but it requires organisation. Change can also happen via diplomacy, dissent, representation, reform, petition and manifesto. In order to overturn or effect the existing order it is necessary to work to some degree within or upon the institutions and systems of that order.
The founding fathers of
In 1766
19th century Earthly Utopias
In the 19th century, at a time of massive
industrial growth, Robert Owen and Titus Salt, both industrialists and
reformers, set up model communities to house the workers at their textile
mills. These experimental communities are often referred to as socialist
utopias. Owen's New Lanark, in central
The backdrop to these small-scale social experiments was a growing emphasis on human rights, equality and democracy. The commentator Henry MacNab visited the Scottish Mill community of New Lanark and wrote a full account of Robert Owen's pioneering work on social welfare and community living in his book 'The New Views of Mr Owen of Lanark' (1819). He was particularly interested in Robert Owen's strict, but reformist approach to discipline. Owen adopted a carrot and stick approach. Employees could, for example, be dismissed for failing to turn up to work or for other offences which today would warrant a lesser punishment. His intention was to reward honesty and hard work as well as punish wrong doing. Drunkenness and deceitful behaviour were not tolerated.
Scientific and technological utopia
Utopian flying machines of the previous century, France, 1890-1900
(chromolithograph trading card).
Opposing this optimism is the prediction that advanced science and technology will, through deliberate misuse or accident, cause environmental damage or even humanity's extinction. Critics advocate precautions against the premature embrace of new technologies.
In France (neglecting an
isolated effort in 1616, the anonymous Huguenot Royaume
d'Antangil), a tradition of Utopian fiction
developed during the early Enlightenment.
The pattern was fixed in the 1670s by the inventions of Foigny and Veiras, both set in the as-yet unexplored southern
continent. Tyssot de
Patot's ‘
More influential were works not strictly speaking Utopian, but containing
Utopian episodes, above all Fénelon's Télémaque, imitated by his disciple Ramsay (Voyages de Cyrus) and by Terrasson (Séthos). Montesquieu's regenerated Troglodytes, in the Lettres persanes, and perhaps even the Eldoradans of Candide, are also Fénelonian.
The critical potential of Utopia was also exploited: vigorously in La Hontan's idealized, anti-European Native
American society, more mildly in Marivaux's stage Utopia L' Île des
esclaves, and with humour, as regards religion and sex,
in Diderot's Tahiti ( Supplément
au Voyage de Bougainville).
After 1750, as freedom of publication increased, political idealism was
expressed more overtly, in treatises rather than fiction. Morelly's Utopian epic,
Communism is the idea of a free society with no division or alienation, where mankind is free from oppression and scarcity. A communist society would have no governments, countries, or class divisions. In Marxism-Leninism, Socialism is the intermediate system between capitalism and communism, when the government is in the process of changing the means of ownership from privatism, to collective ownership. According to the Marxist argument for communism, the main characteristic of human life in class society is alienation; and communism is desirable because it entails the full realization of human freedom. Marx here follows Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in conceiving freedom not merely as an absence of restraints but as action with content. In the popular slogan that was adopted by the communist movement, communism was a world in which each gave according to their abilities, and received according to their needs. The German Ideology (1845) was one of Marx's few writings to elaborate on the communist future:
"In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic."
Following the proletariats' defeat of capitalism, a new classless society would emerge based on the idea: 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs'. In such a society, land, industry, labour and wealth would be shared between all people. All people would have the right to an education, and class structures would disappear. Harmony would reign, and the state would simply 'wither away'.
Or just Utopia is a
movement newly formed in
1. We must do away with all
form of monetary funds; we are just supplying a service.
2. We must do away with
competition. Company A and Company B are making the
same thing. There is simply no point.
3. The issue of a practical
energy source. We need to develop other sources of energy in lieu of eventually
getting of this planet.
4. We should initially
refurbish housing of all to pleasing and acceptable
standards then for every family unit to inhabit equitable residences.
5. We develop a free
universal health care system.
6. The issue of the penal
system. Prisons need to be less cruel and inhumane.
7. Education is free.
8. Our world governments
shall dissolve under the above system concentrating a great extent on space
exploration in lieu of the fact that Earth will not last forever.
9. The above steps will
allow for an alleviated workload on ourselves meaning our times of labor will be cut in half if we wish.
10. Lastly not least, the
above will allow us for more time to create a world of art.
All these myths also
express some hope that the idyllic state of affairs they describe is
not irretrievably and irrevocably lost to mankind, that it can be regained in
some way or other.
One way would be to look
for the earthly paradise -- for a place like Shangri-La, hidden in the Tibetan mountains and described by James Hilton in his Utopian novel Lost Horizon (1933). Such paradise on earth must
be somewhere if only man were able to find it. Christopher Columbus followed directly in this tradition
in his belief that he had found the Garden of Eden when, towards the end of the 15th century, he
first encountered the New World and its peoples.
Another way of regaining
the lost paradise (or Paradise Lost, as 17th century English poet John Milton calls it) would be to wait for the future, for
the return of the Golden Age. According to Christian theology, man's Fall from Paradise, caused
by man alone when he disobeyed God ("but of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it"), has
resulted in the wickedness of character that all human beings have been born
with since ("Original
Sin") such as Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four became the primary method of
Utopian expression and rejection. (Kumar 1987)
Still, post-war era also
found some Utopianist fiction for some future
harmonic state of humanity (e.g. Demolition Man (film)).
In a scientific approach to
finding utopia, The Global scenario group, an international group of
scientists founded by Paul Raskin, used scenario
analysis and backcasting to map out a path to an
environmentally sustainable and socially equitable future. Its findings suggest
that a global citizens movement is necessary to steer
political, economic, and corporate entities toward this new sustainability
paradigm.
See also utopian and dystopian fiction