CONCLUSION
The Future Ain’t What It Used to Be
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
—JACK GILBERT, “FAILING AND FLYING”
Glaucon: I understand. You mean that [the just person will] be willing to take part in the politics of the city we were founding and describing, the one that exists in theory, for I don’t think it exists anywhere on earth.
Socrates: But perhaps…there is a model of it in heaven, for anyone who wants to look at it and to make himself a citizen on the strength of what he sees. It makes no difference whether it is or ever will be somewhere, for he would take part in the practical affairs of that city and no other.
—PLATO, REPUBLIC
The Civil War impinged less on the lives of the communal utopians than it did on most other Americans, but it did impinge. At the teetering breakaway Icaria near St. Louis, the promise of Union army wages drew away most of the able-bodied young men. In other communities, particularly the religious sects, there was no question about taking part in the fighting. Nonviolence and nonparticipation were long established articles of faith. At the United Society’s two villages in Kentucky, Union and secessionist troops helped themselves to Shaker cattle and roasted them over thousands of pilfered Shaker fence rails. Elder Frederick Evans went to Washington to petition Lincoln to exempt Shaker brothers from the draft. The president granted the exemption, reportedly telling Evans, “You ought to be made to fight. We need regiments of just such men as you.” At Oneida, a clerical error saved the Perfectionist men from conscription. (There was confusion over which county the Mansion House occupied.) In general, those communities that were still standing by the 1860s had retreated somewhat from their global ambitions, opting instead for a quiet internal exile from the ugly dramas of the Republic.
Two Shaker sisters with saxophones, Canterbury Village, New Hampshire.
Canterbury Shaker Village Archives, Canterbury, N.H.
The war’s real effect on American utopianism was indirect. The communitarian movements of the early and middle nineteenth century had been fueled by a widely held belief in the imminence of a new golden age. That faith could not survive forty-nine months of wholesale butchery in familiar cow pastures. The thrum of millenarian optimism that had set so many Americans on the road to utopia went quiet. For those still inclined to regard their days as the end of days, the war replaced John Noyes’s garden party millennium with the “fateful lightning” of John Brown’s bloody-saber Apocalypse.
While the Shakers, Owenites, Fourierists, Icarians, and Perfectionists had different visions of the coming paradise, they all shared the belief that some specific, ideal social order exists. Whether or not they saw God or Reason or Passion as the author of that ideal order, they proceeded from the assumption that humankind is somehow meant to live in utopia. Beneath this assumption was the conviction, born out of the intellectual advances of the Enlightenment, that there exists some knowable, universal “science” of human relations. “It is our Father’s beautiful garden in which we are,” wrote John Codman after leaving Brook Farm. “I have learned that all is intended for order and beauty, but as children we cannot yet walk so as not to stumble. Natural science has explained a thousand mysteries. Social science—understand the word; not schemes, plans or guessing, but genuine science, as far from guess or scheme as astronomy or chemistry is—will reveal to us as many truths and beauties as ever any other science has done. I now see clearly! Blessed be God for the light!” The utopians had assumed that the arc of history was short and that it would soon bend toward perfection. The chaotic war years, during which all human ingenuity seemed turned to murder, had a predictable impact on that sort of thinking. Such ceremonies of innocence were no longer possible.
In a more practical sense, the Civil War changed the way that most Americans thought about progress. At the start of the nineteenth century, few citizens regarded their remote, anemic government as an especially potent mechanism for social reform. The war and its aftermath changed that, ushering federal and state authority into the daily lives of ordinary people. In the new, battle-born Republic, reformist causes went into politics, often becoming less radical in the process. Abolitionism, formerly the ultraist fringe of the antislavery movement, became federal policy. The moral crusade for temperance became the political cause of Prohibition. And utopian socialism, once indifferent to the councils of government, gave way to political Progressivism and various schools of party socialism.*1
Ultimately, the decline of American communal utopianism was less about the defeat of one idea than it was about the triumph of another. As the Republic surged westward, the dream of a transformed, egalitarian social order burned off like mist under the hot rising sun of American prosperity. For some, the rapidly opening West, or at least their idea of the West, became a replacement for utopia—a blankness upon which new futures might be imagined. Despite a few notable exceptions, those imagined futures were very different places from the Shaker Zion, Owen’s New Moral World, Fourier’s Harmony, Cabet’s Icaria, or the Perfectionists’ Kingdom of Heaven on earth.
Long before the war, in the young, makeshift Republic where those would-be utopias were planted, the future had seemed up for grabs. People on both sides of the Atlantic expected the final chapter of human history to unfold in North America, but nobody knew with much certainty what exactly it would look like. This hopeful uncertainty loosened the grip of old ideas about how the world works. Society seemed like something to be invented, rather than merely endured.
Toward the end of the century, as buffalo leather was tanned into machine belts for eastern manufactories, dreams of private fortune and the American mythology of heroic individualism were in the ascendant. “The nineteenth century,” wrote the critic Greil Marcus, “was when America discovered itself.” The United States as an idea had narrowed and stabilized. By the time John Humphrey Noyes was buried behind the Mansion House in 1886, a constellation of distinctly American ideals shone above the Republic. Having assumed that vaunted position, they came to appear fixed, inevitable.
“The American Dream” has never referred to a national destiny: some swell place we are all going together. Rather, it is the distinctly private dream of giving your children more options. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ordinary rate of progress—the erratic, lopsided spread of free market prosperity and the slowly dilating circle of justice and citizenship—seemed like all that most people could hope for. The notion of collectively storming the future was drowned out by the separate ambitions of millions of separate (the utopians would have said “isolated”) families. The future would come at its own pace. The busy weekly business of the present was enough.
The next flood tide of American communalism came a century later.*2 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after the scene went sour in the East Village, the Haight, and other such places, middle-class youths flocked to the rural counties of Vermont and California, Tennessee and Oregon, New Mexico and Michigan. Like the nineteenth-century utopians, the long-haired communards of the sixties and seventies rejected the prevailing values of their day as morally corrupt and expressed that rejection through the total reconfiguration of their own daily lives.
Despite a great deal of material similarity between the two cohorts, the aspirations of the hippie communards were categorically different from those of their utopian forebears. Although the communalists of the sixties and seventies tried (and often succeeded) to build strongholds of cooperation, pleasure, and consciousness amid the mercantile bustle of American life, they seldom described their communities as levers of millenarian transformation. Unlike Charles Dana, who left Harvard for Brook Farm, the young men and women who drove north to Humboldt and south to Taos did not claim that their chore wheels and whole grains would somehow trigger the “conversion of this globe, now exhaling pestilential vapors and possessed by unnatural climates, into the abode of beauty and health.” Nor did they imagine that their free loving and home birthing would vanquish the “isolated household,” let alone establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In general, the twentieth-century communes expressed a secessionist impulse—a leave-taking from the World—not the opening gambit of a new global dispensation.*3 Their revolution was more personal and, ultimately, far less utopian. The buildings tell the story. The sprawling, Versailles-like fantasies of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier were replaced with the tepees of New Buffalo, the jerry-rigged zomes of Drop City, and the yurts and chicken coops of a thousand small enclaves. The dream of a world-salvific New Jerusalem gave way to an older vision of paradise: a garden of naked innocence, walled off from the fallen world.
A history of utopian experimentation is, by definition, an inner history—less an accounting of what people did than what they had in their heads. What most unites the nineteenth- and twentieth-century communalists was their acute dissatisfaction. Nobody risks inventing a new world if they like the one in which they live. The remnants of nineteenth-century utopianism—letters, dinner menus, moth-chewed bloomers, and tumbledown dormitories—add up to a testament of American longing and American discontent. The utopians were driven together by a moral refusal to accept the world as they found it. They believed that human association could offer far more than what they experienced in the villages and cities where they lived. They demanded more fellowship, more pleasure, more learning, more time, more dignity, and more equality. “There is a small number,” wrote Horace Greeley, “to whom the old ways, the old purposes of life have become impossible of pursuit—who must breathe freely or be stifled—who cannot live longer to merely personal ends—who will readily dig ditches, if that be the most useful employment which solicits them, but who must do even this heroically, not sordidly, or not at all. They are ready to welcome drudgery, privation, obscurity, but not willing that the covering and cherishing of their own bodies shall be the purpose of their life-long struggle.”
This refusal to chase “the old purposes” would be paralyzing without an attendant belief in the human capacity for transformation and a vision of new, better purposes. Traveling around the United States in the period between Robert Owen’s retreat to the United Kingdom and Albert Brisbane’s triumphal homecoming from Paris, Tocqueville marveled at what he saw as the uniquely American faith in “man’s infinite perfectibility.” As always, Tocqueville had an explanation: “When citizens are classed by rank, profession, or birth and everyone is forced to follow the path chosen for him by chance, each individual thinks that the limits of human potential are not far off from wherever he happens to find himself….They imagine the condition of the societies of the future as better but not different. And while they acknowledge that humanity has made great progress and may still make more, they believe that certain unsurpassable limits are laid down in advance.” By contrast, in the United States, “as castes disappear; as classes come together, and change is evident in men subjected to tumultuous mixing as well as in usages, customs, and laws…the image of an ideal and always fleeting perfection presents itself to the human mind.” In short, while jostling through a society of (seemingly) limitless possibility, Americans came to believe that “man in general is endowed with an infinite capacity to perfect himself.”
Tocqueville doesn’t say it, but the present age suggests that this effect works in reverse. As social fluidity coagulates and individuals cease to imagine their own circumstances changing very much, they are less likely to imagine a dramatically improved future for society in general. The future, as an organizing principle for both hope and critique, ceases to exert much pull on the present. The forms of human association come to seem more or less fixed, subject only to incremental improvement or decay.
The aspirations of the nineteenth-century utopians underscore the extent to which we have fallen out of the habit of contemplating that “fleeting perfection.” Today, rather than considering idealized futures, we are more likely to look longingly (and selectively) over our shoulder. Americans in particular have made our brief past the repository of all value and virtue—a Kodachrome fantasy of thrift, fresh air, honest labor, and various greatest generations. Instead of articulating extravagant dreams about the future, let alone experimenting with those dreams, we have made our history into a sort of utopia: a high white wall onto which we project our collective longings and anxieties. Even when we talk about the future, we think of the past. The largest super PAC supporting Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign rallied under the koanlike banner “Restore Our Future.” Don’t just bring back yesterday, bring back yesterday’s tomorrow, too.*4
When we can be bothered to speculate about the future, our assessments are almost universally grim. Ahead lie swelling debts, moral decay, soaring inequality, peak oil, cultural bankruptcy, dry aquifers, resource-gobbling geriatrics, gnatlike attention spans, a despoiled landscape, and rusting infrastructure. Thanks to anthropogenic climate change, even the weather forecast is bleak. In a century and a half, the prevailing outlook has shifted from jubilantly millenarian to tepidly apocalyptic. None of these predictions are necessarily wrong, but compared with the unmeasured, action-inspiring optimism of the nineteenth-century utopians, it appears that we are experiencing a deficit of imagination.
Without fantasies about the shape of things to come, we are as likely to be led into the future by the almost random process of technological innovation as anything else. Invention mothers necessity, and material progress lurches rudderless, indifferent to anything higher than convenience or the restless appetite for quick satisfactions. As Emerson famously put it in an ode to the Fourierist minister William Henry Channing: “Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind.”
Our present material abundance exceeds even the most fantastical daydreams of the nineteenth-century utopians. A working-class American suburb offers comforts that would stupefy any citizen of the fictional Icaria. But who would call that suburb paradise? “While we are pouring ever increasing intellectual efforts into improving our means, we seem to have given no thought to the ends we serve,” wrote the French philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel. “Every year we are better armed to achieve what we want. But what do we want?”
Uncoupled from utopian ends, even the most incisive social critique falls short. Imagining idealized futures, unburdened by worldly cynicism, begins as a way to catalog social ills and to sift out those values that matter most. But unlike other modes of critique, utopian thinking and experimentation goes further, inevitably generating its own solidarity and enthusiasm, thereby stimulating the numberless private exertions that add up to social progress. The nineteenth-century utopias, “starveling picnics” though many of them were, demonstrate how a thoroughly elaborated vision of a better world can move a diverse group of people in a single direction.
Myths and stories about the past give coherence and energy to a polity. A story about the future—a plot to be fulfilled—can do the same. When the citizens of New Harmony or Icaria believed that utopia was on the horizon, they labored together with remarkable energy, channeling their separate ambitions into a shared vision. “We all work with tireless zeal,” wrote a young Icarian named Pech who was assigned to the laundry. “We are doing everything for the love of humanity…rather than the love of money, there is no limit to our desire to work.” Once the collective vision began to fade, its power became obvious. Suddenly the work was heavier; the soup tasted thinner; and the annoyances were more annoying.
As Socrates suggests toward the end of the Republic, the mere contemplation of an ideal polis (“the city we were founding and describing”) is a civic act—a means of accessing social and moral truths that might otherwise be obscured by the overwhelming material reality of the world around us. Some of the things that the nineteenth-century utopians got right decades in advance of their fellow citizens—the equality of women, the importance of public education in a democratic society, the need for a social safety net, the edifying vitality of a diverse society, the hazards of unchecked markets—show the social dividends of contemplating idealized futures with a relatively soft commitment to the present state of affairs.
The nineteenth-century utopians did not carry the day. They thought that the world was on the cusp of renewal. They were wrong. The big wooden dormitories were boarded up. The collective gardens went to seed. The loud, merry dining rooms sank into silence. And the sea, despite Fourier’s harmonic arithmetic, does not yet taste like lemonade. Their disregard for the world as it is guaranteed that they didn’t survive long. Our disregard for the world as it might be could prove just as grave.
*1 Some of the communal utopians’ most utopian initiatives—providing universal education, sheltering the destitute, maintaining free libraries—eventually came to be considered the purview of the state.
*2 There was, of course, plenty of communal experimentation in the century between 1870 and 1970.
*3 Obviously, the 1960s produced plenty of talk about global revolution. The difference was that it generally came from cities and college campuses, not backwoods communes. What’s more, the mechanisms of that imagined revolution were more familiar—marches, political campaigns, propaganda, insurrection, the occasional bank heist. Perhaps the closest analogue to the nineteenth-century utopians were the lysergic cheerleaders at the vanguard of the psychedelic revolution. Some of their high-flown rhetoric echoed the millenarian prophecies of the nineteenth-century utopians. Discussing Fourier’s writings in 1842, Albert Brisbane wrote, “An ocean of Social Error Flows over Humanity, but so mighty is Truth, that one drop cast into it will purify and give life to its dead waters.” The most hopeful acid boosters spoke in similar terms about the messianic potential of synthetically revitalized consciousness. Their “drop” of Truth was soaked into sheets of paper, not printed upon them, but the general idea was the same: the only thing keeping us from paradise is a thin veil of ignorance. A metric ton of LSD could do the trick: turn on the whole earth and inaugurate the Aquarian millennium.
*4 Yes, there is stark irony in the suggestion that we look to the 1840s to learn how to stop romanticizing our past and start romanticizing our future.