The US has experienced two great waves of utopian experimentation—from approximately 1820–1850 and 1960–1980. While the first was more explicitly religious in character, both waves combined a commitment to social reform with the quest for a perfect society, an exceptional American heaven on earth. The parallels between the two have a lot to teach us about the America syndrome.
The word “utopia” was first coined by Sir Thomas More in 1516 in his book by that name. One of Henry VIII’s closest advisors, who rose to be Chancellor of England in 1529, More was beheaded six years later for opposing the Reformation. More derived the word utopia from the Greek prefix ou, meaning “no,” and topos, meaning “place.” Utopia was no place. He may have intended it as a pun, since ou also sounds like eu, meaning good. Utopia is thus the good place that is no place. Set on an island off the coast of the New World, More’s utopia is a vision of highly regulated communal life with an efficient balance between town and country and a representative government. Its labor system also includes slavery.
Utopian visions are powerful precisely because, being nowhere, they aren’t constrained by present reality but rather point the way to a desirable future. “Utopia’s ‘nowhereness’ incites the search for it,” writes scholar Krishan Kumar. “Utopia describes a state of impossible perfection which nevertheless is in some genuine sense not beyond the reach of humanity. It is here if not now.”124
It is the promise of the millennium that joins utopia and apocalypse together. In the Book of Revelation, the millennium is the thousand golden, peaceful, and prosperous years, a Heaven on Earth, when Christ reigns before the final Judgment Day. Other biblical passages also speak of Jesus’s return to build a kingdom on Earth.125 Christians differ as to whether the Second Coming ushers in the millennium or marks its conclusion (“premillennialism” vs. “postmillennialism”) and whether Christ’s epic battle with the Antichrist will occur before or after the Second Coming. Dispensational premillennialism, first prophesized by 19th-century British theologian John Nelson Darby, preaches that the present age (dispensation) will end in the Rapture, with the true believers taking to the sky, and the sinners left on Earth to suffer miserably through the seven year rule of the Antichrist. After that, Christ and his raptured armies will return to Earth to battle the Antichrist and usher in the millennium.126
These differences in timing can have a profound impact on one’s world view. The belief that the dreadful battle will occur before Christ returns can lead to the acceptance, or even welcoming, of current wars, plagues, and disasters as harbingers of the Messiah’s imminent arrival. By contrast, a more hopeful version of millennialism urges believers to prepare for Christ’s rule by creating a more just and equal society. This view helped stoke the fires of the American anti-slavery movement and other social reform movements in the 19th century.
Millennialism extends well beyond scripture, deeply affecting Western secular thought. The roots of modern ideas of progress reach back to the early 17th-century English revival of millennial theory. As the scientific revolution progressed, religious scholars began to frame a redemptive view of history congruent with both natural and biblical laws. The radically new concept of nature allowed for a more optimistic reading of the future human prospect. The universe was not irrevocably evil, but instead was the source of hidden wonders that would ultimately help, not hinder, human progress. The great earthquakes and other cataclysms that lay ahead would cleanse the Earth, preparing the ground, literally and figuratively, for the promised millennium. “The notion of history as a process generally moving upwards by a series of majestic stages, culminating inevitably in some great, transforming event which is to solve the dilemmas of society—that is the concept destined to dominate ‘modern’ thought,” writes historian Ernest Tuveson.127 Seventeenth-century apocalyptic theorists were in this sense the forbears of nineteenth-century progressive philosophers, whether of the Hegelian, Marxist, or positivist variety.
While the millennium provides the big picture, utopias fill out the smaller picture of what a heaven on Earth would look like. You can have one without the other (in the Book of Revelation, John offered very little in the way of a utopian blueprint for the New Jerusalem), but the millennium and utopia often exist in dynamic relationship with each other, sharing in particular an obsession with perfection.128 The Puritans’ conception of America as the city on the hill, as well as later versions of American exceptionalism, were deeply informed by millennial expectations of progress toward perfection—“manifest perfectionism.”129 Belief in the perfectibility of mankind is in turn the foundation upon which utopias are constructed, and along with it a yearning for physical and ideological purity, efficiency, and order.
Utopias enshrine perfection into the quest for a better world. But as the old saying goes, the perfect can be the enemy of the good, as evidenced in many utopian experiments and movements gone awry. Does that mean the search for utopia has no value? Utopian thinkers from Thomas More onwards have challenged us to think beyond the status quo and imagine new forms of living and relations between individual and community, man and woman, rich and poor, town and country, humanity and nature. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “for it leaves out the country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.”130
The New World held a powerful allure for utopian thinkers and practitioners. The (fictive) narrator, Raphael Hythloday, of More’s utopia accompanies the (real) Italian mariner Amerigo Vespucci on his exploration of the New World at the turn of the 15th century. Vespucci, not Columbus, was the first European explorer to realize he had encountered a new continent, and “America” is derived from the Latin version of his first name. Hythloday stays on and happens upon the island of Utopia after Vespucci returns to Europe. More’s tale may draw on Vespucci’s accounts of the communal customs of the Natives he encountered, but in the end the utopian appeal of the New World wasn’t so much its original inhabitants as their land, taken by the Europeans through disease, depopulation, and dispossession.131
A century after More’s book, a small band of Pilgrims landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, searching for a place to create a closed, religious community in the service of an apocalyptic vision. This became a recurrent theme in the settlement of colonial America as other Christian sects sought the freedom and empty land to realize their ideal societies, under God’s guiding hand. William Penn encouraged millennial sects from northern Europe to immigrate to Pennsylvania.132 Many of these newcomers practiced communal ownership of property. In the case of the Plymouth Pilgrims, who did so for their first three years, that arrangement was necessary for survival. Other sects were driven by their desire to recreate the faith and lifestyle of early Christian communities, inspired by the biblical passage from Acts 2:44–45: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need.”133
Thus from the very start utopia, apocalypse, millennialism, and communalism were intertwined in the search for heaven on Earth in colonial America. In 1774, on the eve of the American Revolution, the founding members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing set sail from Liverpool, bound for New York. Better known as the Shakers, they would become America’s longest-lasting utopian sect.
Today there are only three remaining Shakers left who live in a community in Maine. But over the group’s 200-plus year history, an estimated 20,000 Americans kept the faith. Shaker Villages, now museums, can be found from New England to Ohio to Kentucky. One is located in the western Massachusetts town of Hancock. Its impressive site, showcasing the Shakers’ considerable talent for architecture and design, includes a massive, three-floor Round Stone Barn.
The barn is a model of efficiency. On its top level, wagons delivered hay. They dropped their loads into the central haymow on the ground floor and then circled to exit from the same door they entered, eliminating the need to back awkwardly out of the barn. Dairy cows were housed on the ground floor, facing toward the hay to make it easy to feed them. Their manure was shoveled through trapdoors to the cellar where it was stored for use as fertilizer. The barn’s stonework, cupola, and Shaker windows make it a work of striking beauty.134
Today, to make ends meet, the Hancock Shaker Village, like many museums, rents its facilities to wedding parties. Its website features a photo of a bride and groom kissing with the barn in the background. Since abstinence was one of the Shakers’ central tenets, this image would probably be enough to make their founder, Mother Ann Lee, roll over in her grave.
Mother Ann Lee was a rarity: one of the few women to lead a utopian religious movement in the United States. Born into a poor family in Manchester, England in 1736, she broke with the Anglican Church at a young age to join a sect that was scornfully called the “Shaking Quakers” for their unusual mode of worship, which included speaking in tongues, shaking, and shouting as the spirit moved them. They believed that the end of the world was near, and that Christ was on his way. Ann married and bore four children, none of whom survived infancy. The experience of her children’s deaths, coupled with an abhorrence of sex, led her to embrace celibacy. While imprisoned in a Manchester jail in 1770 for heresy, she had a vision of Christ, who revealed to her that the root of all human depravity lay in the coupling of Adam and Eve. Exalted now as the Mother in Christ and Bride of the Lamb, she became the sect’s leader, admonishing all followers to live a celibate life. She decided that the Millennium had begun, and received another revelation that she should emigrate to America to establish the Church of Christ’s Second Appearing. That goal she accomplished in the town of Niskayuna, called Watervliet by the descendants of the Dutch settlers and now known as the Town of Colonie, in upstate New York in 1776. From there, the Shaker faith spread through the region.
To achieve their kingdom of peace and perfection, the Shakers adopted four core principles: communalism, celibacy (men and women slept in different quarters), confession of sin, and detachment from the outside world. They believed in the spiritual equality of men and women, though they maintained a strict gendered division of labor, with women focused more on domestic tasks like cooking and cleaning and men on heavier agricultural work. They welcomed Jews and blacks into their settlements, making them one of the more radical groups of their time. As pacifists, they suffered persecution during the Revolutionary War.135
When a family joined a Shaker community, parents legally relinquished care of their children to the community. If parents decided to leave, the community had the right to keep the children until they reached adulthood. This led to custody battles, lawsuits, and kidnappings, as happened in Hancock in the mid-1840s when a father made multiple attempts to kidnap his sons.136 The Shaker effort to break the parent-child bond presaged later conflicts over family structures in other utopian communities. All was not simple and all was not free, despite the lyrics of the Shaker dancing song, “Simple Gifts,” made famous by composer Aaron Copland in his orchestral suite, Appalachian Spring.
Neither were the Shakers completely detached from the outside world. Their business enterprises networked them into the wider community, where they were exemplars of the self-sufficient, communal ideal. Shaker texts influenced the British utopian socialist Robert Owen’s model communities set up in New Lanark, Scotland and later in New Harmony, Indiana.137 Visitors were common in Shaker villages. Authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville reportedly ran a foot race in the round stone barn when they visited the Hancock community.138
By the middle of the 19th century, the Shakers had attracted about 4000 adherents. Their success can’t be separated from the larger wave of utopian experimentation in the US that peaked in the years 1820–1850. Many of the experiments were explicitly religious. A Second Great Awakening, beginning at the turn of the 18th century, drew many converts to evangelical Protestantism and marked a definitive break with Calvinism. Through God’s love and religious faith, sinners could be saved. All were eligible for God’s grace, not just a predestined few.
The Second Great Awakening stoked postmillennialism to fever pitch. To prepare the ground for Christ’s Second Coming, society had to be cleansed of sin. This fervor to usher in the new millennial age also galvanized social reformers, utopian socialists, and transcendentalists. As before, the line between secular and religious was ill-defined—for all manner of communities, America was considered the Promised Land. It’s impossible to do justice here to the wide diversity of experiments in those times, so my focus is on the ones with clear relevance to the second utopian wave of the 1960s.
The German philosopher Hegel wrote that America “is the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself . . . It is a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe.”139 Yet out of that lumber-room came ideas that galvanized utopians in the United States. Count Henri de Saint-Simon, a French aristocrat who fought in the American Revolution, proposed a benevolent society in which industry and science would be harnessed for the good of the greatest number of people. Even more influential were the ideas of another Frenchman, Charles Fourier (1772–1837), who foresaw a 35,000-year millennial era during which society would be organized into self-sufficient cooperatives called “phalanxes,” the Greek word for a rectangular military formation. Each phalanx would ideally contain around 1620–1800 people. According to Fourier, 2,985,984 phalanxes would ultimately cover the globe, and Earth would be transformed into a paradise with the climate of the Garden of Eden. The oceans would turn into lemonade.
In Fourier’s division of labor, agriculture and industry would complement each other and the workday would be short, allowing plenty of time for leisurely pursuits. At the end of the year, profits would be apportioned five-twelfths to labor, four-twelfths to capital, and three-twelfths to skill and talent, but there would be no cause for jealousy because people could freely change roles and become capitalists if they so desired. Children would join scavenger groups, called “the Little Hordes,” to clean refuse and excrement since they delighted in playing in the dirt. Everything, in fact, was supposed to be delightful. Fourier’s elaborate architectural plans for the phalanx included a central Phalanstery with amenities such as a ballroom and a sanatorium.
Fourier’s ideas came to America through Albert Brisbane, who as a young man studied social philosophy in Europe. On return to the US, Brisbane published a book called Social Destiny of Man in 1840 that summarized the more practical elements of Fourier’s design while omitting some of the more outlandish fantasies. The book won converts in the highest echelons of American intellectual society, among them Horace Greeley, the editor of the New-Yorker. When Greeley became editor of the New-York Tribune, he let Brisbane write a regular column.140 Between 1843 and 1858, 28 phalanxes were established in both rural and urban areas of the US, drawing in an estimated 15,000 Americans. The philosophy influenced other utopian endeavors as well, such as the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, where radical social reformers, including the well-known African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth, came together to form a communally-owned and -operated silk mill in the mid-1840s.141
While Fourier himself never had the means or opportunity to put his theories into practice, Robert Owen had both. The industrial and educational improvements he introduced in the early 1800s at the New Lanark mills in Scotland, where he was part-owner, established his reputation as one of the most important social reformers of his time. As Owen’s ideas grew more radical, and more grandiose, he turned toward America. “I am come to this country,” he declared in 1825, “to introduce an entire new state of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all causes for contest between individuals.”142 Eight years later he announced, with messianic zeal, “I therefore now proclaim to the world the commencement, on this day, of the promised millennium, founded on rational principles and consistent practice.” He compared his utopian philosophy to the second coming of Christ, because “Truth and Christ are one and the same.”143
Like Saint-Simon and Fourier, Owen saw people as the products of their environment. Dramatically transform their environment and humankind would become generous, cooperative, and compliant within a few short years. Malleability and perfectibility went hand in hand. In 1825 Owen and a Scottish colleague, William Maclure, purchased land and buildings that had been used by an earlier utopian community, the German Rappites, in southwestern Indiana. They invited “the industrious and well-disposed of all nations” to join this socialist community, which they named New Harmony.144 Over 800 people from all walks of life answered the call, including educators, scientists, laborers, and artisans, as well as some people looking for a free ride. The community soon divided along class and factional lines, and Owen and Maclure had a falling out. Life turned out to be anything but harmonious, and the New Harmony community dissolved in a few short years, as did other Owenite experiments in the US and England. However, some of the reformers, including Maclure, stayed in New Harmony, and left an impressive legacy. Maclure founded the nation’s first comprehensive co-educational public school system and one of its first free public libraries. Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, went on to become a champion of universal education and women’s rights. Another son, David, established the early headquarters of the US Geological Survey in New Harmony.145
Transcendentalism also offered blueprints for perfection, though of a more individualized variety. From 1835–1880, the philosophy held great sway in American intellectual, political, and artistic circles, especially in New England. Among its illustrious proponents were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcott family. It became a powerful frame of reference for believers and skeptics alike. Drawing from Western and Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and German and English romanticism, transcendentalism is notoriously hard to define. In his allegorical short story “The Celestial Railroad,” Nathaniel Hawthorne caricatures transcendentalism as a horrible giant who
makes it his business to seize upon honest travelers and fatten them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust. He is German by birth . . . but as to form, his features, his substance, and his nature generally, it is the chief peculiarity of this huge miscreant that neither he for himself, nor anybody for him, has ever been able to describe them.146
This vagueness was also transcendentalism’s strength. It allowed for a freer range of thought, an unapologetic mingling of reason, sensation, intuition, and spirituality as a way to explore the human condition and its relation to the miraculous patterns and series found in nature. The simplest natural object was worthy of serious contemplation. For both Emerson and Thoreau, the structure of a leaf had much to say about the structure of the entire universe. The whole was not merely the sum of its parts; each part contained within it the whole. In its celebration of connectedness, of the unity of all things, transcendentalism positioned the individual self and soul as the vehicle of enlightenment.
Transcendentalism departed from the mainstream religions of its day, but the work of Emerson in particular bore the imprint of Christian apocalyptic thinking. “No American writer since Jonathan Edwards is more thoroughly steeped in the Christian Bible than Ralph Waldo Emerson,” writes scholar Alan Hodder.147 Like Edwards, Emerson also experienced intense spiritual insights into the other world through his contemplation of nature.
Yet Emerson’s apocalypse is not the same as Edwards’s Puritan one. For Emerson, Nature, not Christ, is the messiah, and the ultimate consummation isn’t the marriage between Christ and his church, but instead between Nature and Mind. And it is through the mind that one achieves revelation, an interior process that ultimately leads to perfect vision. The process is arduous, requiring sacrifice, purification, and emptying the mind of ego in order to achieve an apocalypse of the self. “All mean egotism vanishes,” Emerson writes of that moment. “I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”148
It might seem that such a philosophy would lead one away from engagement with the world in the spirit of a lone yogi meditating in a dark cave or on a high mountaintop. However, Emerson and many of his fellow transcendentalists were social reformers who believed in the need for a moral law. If a fierce Christian God no longer sat in judgment of their deeds, then the God within them did. “Build, therefore, your own world,” Emerson exhorted his readers at the end of his essay Nature. “As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit . . . until evil is no more seen.”149 Not all transcendentalists were utopians, but this urge to build one’s own world inspired the more experimental among them to do just that, by heading back to the land.
In 1873, Louisa May Alcott, author of the American classic Little Women, penned a parody of Fruitlands, a short-lived rural utopian experiment that was led by her father, the innovative educator Bronson Alcott, and the English transcendentalist, Charles Lane. “Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from an Unwritten Romance” peels the romance off the adventure to depict the tensions that ultimately caused Fruitlands, like so many other utopian projects, to fall apart.
Louisa was ten years old when her family moved from the genteel town of Concord to the old wooden farmhouse that was to become a communal home in Harvard, Massachusetts, 20 miles to the west. Today it’s a quick ride between the two towns, but back then the Alcotts travelled by horse and wagon over muddy dirt tracks, “with the pleasing accompaniments of wind, rain, and hail” as recounted in the parody. Despite inclement weather, “these modern pilgrims journeyed hopefully out of the old world, to found a new one in the wilderness.” Louisa cast a reproachful but loving eye on the New Eden fantasies of her father, reserving her more stinging criticism for Charles Lane, aka Timon Lion, depicted as the stern, Spartan fanatic behind the enterprise. He “intended to found a colony of Latter Day Saints,” she wrote, “who, under his patriarchal sway, should regenerate the world and glorify his name for ever.”150
Today the farmhouse is part of a museum complex of other historical buildings, including a Shaker office that was relocated there. At the entrance, a panoramic view of the hills and mountains of central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire greets the visitor. The Fruitlands farmhouse is on low land near a river, without the view. It’s painted red, as it was back then, with furnishings representative of the period. It seems comfortable, quaint, even charming, belying the austere order that was once imposed there for seven short months that must have seemed much longer to its occupants.
An impecunious idealist, Bronson Alcott was often short on funds, and his family had to struggle to make ends meet. He relied on the generosity of others, including his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, to feed his family and carry on his work. Until he met Charles Lane, his austerity wasn’t so much a philosophical choice as a practical necessity. In his teaching practice, Bronson is credited with making important pedagogical reforms in children’s education, moving away from rote learning to creative expression. In 1842 he crossed the Atlantic to England where a progressive school called Alcott House had been founded in his name in Surrey. By that time his own school in Boston had collapsed, in part because he had had the temerity to admit the daughter of a fugitive slave. In England he met Charles Lane, businessman and reformer, and the two hit it off so well that they decided to return to Massachusetts together to establish a community founded on their shared principles. In June 1843 they arrived in Fruitlands, accompanied by Bronson’s wife Abigail, their four children, Charles’s son William, and a few other brave and eccentric souls. Soon they were joined by an English nudist, a hired hand, a refugee from another utopian farm, and a woman named Anna Page—until she was banished for the sin of eating fish at a neighbor’s house.
Sin it was to stray from the path of abstemious righteousness set out by Charles and Bronson. The entrance to Paradise is “through the strait gate and narrow way of self-denial,” Bronson wrote.151 Their ascetic code included the refusal of any products that depended on “the degradations of shipping and trade.”152 In an early form of veganism, no animal products were allowed in their diet. They subsisted on raw fruits and nuts, grain, porridge, and unleavened bread. The pleasures of coffee, tea, and alcohol were eschewed in favor of plain water. Clothes were stitched from rough linen, and at first no draught animals were used in farming. Only cold baths were taken, even in freezing weather. After bathing, Bronson followed up by flaying his body with a brush to experience the spiritual ecstasies of mortification of the flesh. Convinced like the Shakers that individual family life needed to cease, Lane espoused sexual abstinence, straining the relationship between Bronson and his wife Abigail to the breaking point.
When it came to travel, however, Bronson and Charles were far from abstemious. At the height of harvest season, they wandered off to preach their gospel along the eastern seaboard. This month-long excursion was ill-timed.153 “Some call of the Oversoul wafted all the men away,” Louisa recounts in her parody, leaving her mother, her sisters, and Charles’s son to make a desperate effort to gather the grain crop before a storm.154
Inside the house, Abigail was responsible for all the cooking and cleaning, not only for the residents but also for the many visitors who came to see the project. In letters and diaries, she left her own record behind of the bitter fruits of Fruitlands. “They spare the cattle,” she wrote to her nephew, “but they forget the women and children.”155 She was acutely aware of her situation and of the inferior position of women in the society at large. After visiting a nearby Shaker community, Abigail wrote in her journal that the women were servile and reserved, while the men were “fat, sleek, comfortable . . .” She went on:
Wherever I turn, I see the yoke on women in some form or other . . . A woman may perform the most disinterested duties. She may “die daily” in the cause of truth and righteousness. She lives neglected, dies forgotten. But a man who never performed in his whole life one self-denying act, but who has accidental gifts of genius, is celebrated by his contemporaries, while his name and his works live on, from age to age. He is crowned with laurel, while scarce a “stone may tell where she lies.”156
Ultimately, it was Abigail who ended the Fruitlands experiment. She encouraged her brother to withdraw his financial support, which then put the farm into foreclosure. After a brutally cold and snowy December, she removed herself and her children to the home of a neighbor in January 1844. Bronson soon rejoined his biological family, while Charles joined the Shakers. There, ironically, he had a change of heart about the importance of family bonds. When he decided to leave the Shaker community in August 1845, they refused to let him take his son. It took three painful years to secure his son’s release, during which time he returned to England, where he married and had five more children.157 Today Fruitlands, like the Hancock Shaker Village, is a venue for rustic weddings, a place to celebrate the nuclear family.
Not far from Fruitlands, a longer-lasting utopian experiment unfolded at Brook Farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, about eight miles from Boston. Founded in 1841 by a transcendentalist former Unitarian minister, George Ripley, Brook Farm was to be an egalitarian and self-sufficient community, with no distinction between intellectual and manual work, no hired labor, and a healthy balance between work and leisure. Certainly more fun was had at Brook Farm than at Fruitlands. Its members partook in picnics, plays, masquerades, and boating parties on the nearby Charles River.
At its peak, Brook Farm had more than 70 members. For all the fun, they worked hard, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to make ends meet. They sold farm produce and handmade clothes, charged a fee to visitors, and ran a boarding school that was one of the best known of its day. Ripley tried and failed to woo Emerson to Brook Farm. He had more luck with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who joined Brook Farm during its first year not so much from utopian conviction as with the intention of living cheaply and saving money to marry his fiancée, the transcendentalist Sophia Peabody. Hawthorne soon found the manual labor required in farming was more than he’d bargained for—he was put in charge of shoveling manure—leaving him with little time to write. He wrote to Sophia, “Oh; belovedest, labor is the curse of this world, and nobody can meddle with it, without becoming proportionately brutified. Dost though think it is a praiseworthy matter, that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? Dearest, it is not so. Thank God, my soul is not utterly buried under a dung heap.”158 Hawthorne left the farm, and later based his caustic novel The Blithedale Romance on his experience.
In 1844, Ripley was swayed by the editor Horace Greeley, a frequent visitor to the farm, and other Fourierist friends, to make Brook Farm into a phalanx. More artisans joined the community, and work began on constructing a giant Phalanstery that could house a hundred members. Brook Farm emerged as the center of Fourierist thought in America, publishing the weekly Harbinger that became widely known as a source of radical social and literary criticism. But a lack of funds continued to plague Brook Farm, and in 1846 the unfinished Phalanstery burned to the ground, effectively bringing the project to an end.159 Now all that is left is the farmland, preserved as a park.
Of all the utopian experiments of the era, the Oneida Community in New York State did the most to shake up conventional sexual norms. It was the brainchild of John Humphrey Noyes, a prophet and genius to some, a megalomaniac and lecher to others. Born into a well-bred Vermont family in 1811, Noyes underwent a religious conversion in 1831 during the Second Great Awakening and entered seminary, first at Andover and then at Yale. His views proved too heretical for the mainstream church, which revoked his license to preach. He believed that the Second Coming of Christ had already happened in 70 AD when the temple was destroyed in Jerusalem and that the Kingdom of Heaven would soon be reached on Earth. He would show the way to it.
His way was Perfectionism. Inspired by the ideals of early Christianity, Noyes proposed a communal style of life and sexual relations that would bring people into a more perfect communion with Christ. Unlike the Shakers, Noyes wasn’t ready to eschew sex along with the stultifying structure of the nuclear family. While conventional marriage was taboo, intercourse most certainly was not. He set about to build a community based on what he called “complex marriage,” in which all men and women are married to each other and all property is communal. This is the way it is in the Kingdom of Heaven, he argued, and this is the way it should be on Earth. He believed that individual marriages made people selfish and got in the way of their devotion to the community and to Christ.
Noyes espoused coitus interruptus, male withdrawal before ejaculation. Not unlike Shaker leader Mother Ann Lee, he had been deeply affected by his wife losing four babies in childbirth. Separating sex from procreation had a powerful appeal. To maintain discipline and compliance, he instituted the practice of mutual criticism. Those who erred, ideologically or sexually, had to stand in silence before a committee who discussed their strengths and weaknesses for the good of their character development.
Noyes established his first community in Putney, Vermont in 1844. After being run out of town three years later for adultery, he and his followers relocated to the town of Oneida in central New York State, where the community lasted until 1881. Here he perfected the complex marriage system. Outsiders criticized Noyes for his advocacy of “free love,” but in truth love was far from free in Oneida. Access to sexual partners depended on one’s position in the spiritual hierarchy. Noyes was at the apex. Just beneath him came the most spiritual male elders, and then the most spiritual female elders. Younger people lower in the hierarchy were encouraged to sleep with their esteemed elders in the hope that some of their spiritual wisdom and sexual prowess might rub off, so to speak. The sexual initiation of teens was another privilege enjoyed by the elders. Consent to any sexual transaction had to be given by both parties, and this was arranged through an intermediary.160
Reproduction was tightly regulated, too. Noyes believed that the community should only have the number of children it could support. The elders decided who could procreate (though male continence proved imperfect). Once they were old enough to walk, babies were separated from their mothers and placed in an infant department.
Like many evangelical intellectuals of his day, Noyes took a keen interest in science. “God designs to bring science and religion together and solder them into one,” he explained.161 In 1869 he carried out one of the first eugenic experiments in the US, inspired by developments in animal breeding, Charles Darwin’s work, and Frances Galton’s Hereditary Talent and Character. At Oneida, Noyes set out to breed intellectually, spiritually, and physically superior human beings. He coined the term “stirpiculture” from the Latin root stirps—stem, root, or stock—to describe the project. Noyes and a group of elders initially chose the couples who would breed the best children. Eventually a 12-person committee was established for this purpose, headed by Noyes’s son Theodore, who became a eugenicist while studying at the Yale Medical Institution. Perpetuating the Noyes’ own bloodline appears to have been a top priority. Noyes himself sired nine of the 58 “stirpicults,” and 19 more were blood relations.162 The creepiness of this experiment is a cautionary tale of where obsession with perfection can lead.
In economic terms, the Oneida Community performed better than many others. Membership wasn’t automatic, and among those chosen were a number of affluent and well-educated followers. The community diversified from farming into a range of manufactures, including steel animal traps bought by the Hudson’s Bay Company. It wasn’t lack of money that doomed the project in the end. A leadership vacuum emerged as Noyes grew old, and the younger generation began to rebel against the sexual theocracy. The stirpiculure project, in particular, sowed the seeds of discontent. A reverend at a nearby college also launched a campaign against the community’s moral turpitude. When the Oneida Community was legally dissolved in 1881, its enterprises merged into a joint-stock company that went on to become a well-known manufacturer of silverware.163 America’s first utopian era had drawn to a close.
Fruitlands, Brook Farm, New Harmony, Oneida—these were only a few of the many communities that sprang up across the country as revivalism, millennialism, socialism, transcendentalism, and American exceptionalism swirled together in a vortex that swept bright minds, free thinkers, religious zealots, progressive reformers, and social misfits into a utopian frenzy. “The world was not ready for Utopia yet, and those who attempted to found it only got laughed at for their pains,” Louisa May Alcott reflects in “Transcendental Wild Oats.”
In other days, men could sell all and give to the poor, lead lives devoted to holiness and high thought, and, after the persecution was over, find themselves honored as saints or martyrs. But in modern times these things are out of fashion. To live for one’s principles, at all costs, is a dangerous speculation; and the failure of an ideal, no matter how humane and noble, is harder for the world to forgive and forget than bank robbery or the grand swindles of corrupt politicians.164
The world had changed by the time Louisa penned those words in 1873. The country had experienced a brutal civil war. It was more populated, more urbanized, and more industrialized than it had been three decades earlier. Land was much more expensive, and economic inequality was rising. By 1890 more than half of the nation’s wealth was in the hands of less than 1 percent of the population, a concentration with striking parallels to today.165 In a world of stark class divisions and mounting labor strife, utopianism seemed out of touch. It would soon be superseded by the socialist materialism of Marx and Engels.
In the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, Marx and Engels critiqued the utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen:
they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class . . . they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.
“Duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem” and “castles in the air” were how they described the utopian experiments of their day.166 But for all their scorn, Marx and Engels themselves were utopian and millennial in their own way. The inevitable victory of the proletariat, the dawn of a classless society, the transformation of human nature through revolution, the end of history as we know it—these Marxian precepts have more than a little of a Heaven-on-Earth edge. While they didn’t offer much of a blueprint for what communist society would look like, Marx and Engels held a quasi-religious faith in the wheels of history rolling inexorably toward a communist outcome.167
My generation of idealists and dreamers could have learned important lessons from our earlier utopian forbears had we known more about them. Instead we were mostly ignorant about the past and all about creating a new future. When my husband Jim and I set off for the green rolling hills of West Virginia in the fall of 1976, we were steeped in a heady mix of revolutionary fervor, nature nostalgia, nuclear dread, and the conviction that, with a little help from our friends, we could break the chains of traditional gender and family norms. We thought our pioneering spirit was very special indeed. “There is no adventure greater than ours,” wrote Raymond Mungo, a founder of Liberation News Service and a rural Vermont commune called Total Loss Farm. “We are the last life on the planet, it is for us to launch the New Age, to grow up to be men and women of earth, and free of the walking dead who precede us.” 168
Just about everyone who lived through the utopian experiments of the sixties and seventies has a story to tell. It usually ends sadly or badly. Once we arrived in West Virginia, it didn’t take long for our dreams to dim, like a lantern running out of kerosene. Fixing the old house enough to be able to make it through the coming winter took more time and money than anyone anticipated. The balance between work and leisure tilted off the scales: we all worked incessantly. While Jim and I built a cabin, in order to earn money the two other women took emotionally arduous jobs as social workers while the two other men worked construction. Their commutes took an hour or more each way, mostly on unpaved roads. Back on the farm, the crops needed tending. Our survivalist ethic dictated that we can or freeze enough vegetables to last through the winter ahead. The closest we came to communing with nature was bathing in the muddy stream that ran alongside the property.
Things went downhill, fast. We hayed the meadow with a mule-drawn rake, but at the end it began to rain and the haystack rotted. The relationships between the two couples we lived with turned sour. One couple was into transcendental meditation—they were trying to learn to levitate—and the other couple resented them for spending 45 minutes a day doing this instead of working on the house. The kitchen became a battleground. Tempers flared despite group meetings and self-criticism sessions. There was hollering in the holler.
Jim and I, just back from living in a Bangladesh village where people fought, made up, and fought again all the time, didn’t see the writing on the wall. We devoted ourselves to building our little cabin on the hill. With meager savings, we did everything the hard way. We dug the pole foundation by hand and used uneven rough-cut lumber for the frame. Neither of us knew anything about construction, but we read how-to books and the others shared their skills. As the weather got colder, we upped the tempo, hoping to move in before the first snowfall. But there was a glitch—the chimney pipe for our wood stove was back-ordered and still hadn’t arrived. On top of that, we hadn’t had time to lay in a supply of firewood. Ever optimistic, we moved our possessions into the cabin before heading east for Christmas and to do some work in Washington on human rights issues in Bangladesh. We would install the chimney when we got back, and at last have a place of our own to sit down and write. Hadn’t that been the idea in the first place? I wish we’d known then about Hawthorne’s time, or lack of it, at Brook Farm.
While we were gone, the mountain weather turned even nastier. The snow was two feet deep when the firewood supply ran out for the main house. Chainsaws seized up in the ice and mud. The two couples quarreled over who would go out to saw down some trees and drag the logs back with the mule. Afterwards our friends phoned to tell us they had decided to split up the farm. We only went back to pick up our things. It wasn’t the end of the world, but for us it was the end of a dream, the end of an era.
The back-to-the-land movement was losing steam by the mid-1970s, and many dreams were dying like ours. At its peak in the late 1960s, there were tens of thousands of communes throughout the country, with several hundred thousand young people living in them. No one was keeping count, and many were small, informal, and short-lived like ours, but the phenomenon was big enough to get the attention of the mainstream press. In July 1969, Life magazine ran a cover story, “The Commune Comes to America,” with glossy photos of hippies in rural Oregon frolicking in various stages of undress.169
Rural communes were only part of the scene. Communes sprouted up in America’s cities, too. While communes were “fabulously heterogeneous,” they weren’t very racially and class diverse.170 It’s become almost a cliché that the movement was predominantly white and middle class. There’s truth to this, but the characterization conceals the important role that radical politics and Black Power played in the period. The Black Panther Party created urban communes in an attempt to fold collective living into a broader vision of liberation. Communal norms, including gender equality, ended up clashing with the hierarchal, male-dominated system of party leadership. But in working to meet the needs of the surrounding black community, the collectives left behind an important legacy. In Oakland, California, the Panthers established a free health clinic and the Oakland Community School, which became a national model for community-based education.171
The utopian wave of the 1960s crested higher than its 19th century antecedent, but it broke faster, too. Today the traces it left behind are obscured by stereotypes of naked hippies, big-breasted earth mothers, and drugged-out rock stars, and the musical score has been mercilessly appropriated by corporate advertisers. But beneath the hype of shallow recollections, the experience yields many insights about how easy it is to fall into the traps of the America syndrome and how hard it is to get out.
A New World beckoned in the ’60s, but how new was it really? Most of us weren’t fully aware of the baggage we took along with us on our utopian journeys. Our backpacks were jammed full of American mythologies that ultimately weighed us down. Those who made the pilgrimage to the countryside were steeped in the Jeffersonian rural idyll, an agrarian myth that has helped to define the boundaries of American belonging. “Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue,” Thomas Jefferson professed in the early 1780s. “It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.”172
The Jeffersonian rural idyll depended on an abundance of “vacant” land for farmers to cultivate. While Jefferson himself expressed some hope that Native Americans might be assimilated into his model, the very existence of “vacant lands” depended on expropriation of their holdings. Moreover, there was little understanding among white Americans of Indians as farmers; their agricultural practices were largely neglected or misunderstood.173 Jefferson maintained that blacks, once freed, should be deported; immigrants from the wrong sorts of countries weren’t to be trusted either. As tiller of the soil and protector of civil virtue, the yeoman farmer ideal was male, Anglo-Saxon, and heterosexual.174
That the chosen people were also a chosen race had lethal consequences. President Andrew Jackson justified the Indian Removal Act of 1830 on the grounds that inferior natives should give their “unused” lands to rightful Anglo-Saxon inheritors. “What good man,” he asked, “would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic . . . ?”175 From the Trail of Tears beginning that year, when southeastern tribes were forced to move beyond the Mississippi to Indian Territory, to the campaigns of displacement and slaughter that continued throughout the century, Native American lives and livelihoods were decimated in the colonization of the western hemisphere. Mexicans were similarly perceived as a “mongrel race” that must make way for the Anglo-Saxons, an ideology which helped to rationalize the seizing of lands from Mexico in the Mexican War of 1844–48.176 In the frontier myth that became a staple of American culture, war against the savages came to be seen as redemptive and regenerative, enshrining violence as a formative part of white male American identity.177
Parts of the back to the land movement, especially in the western part of the country, drew uncritically on the frontier myth and celebrated the macho outlaw tradition of the Wild West.178 At a time when the feminist movement was gaining strength, this celebration of frontier masculinity, and docile, hard-working, homesteading femininity, served to reinforce conservative gendered divisions of labor and power.
It was only by ignoring the violent history of land appropriation and western expansion that our generation of yeoman farmers and pioneers could fully embrace the romance of our chosen people mission. As Janferie Stone, a veteran of the movement, writes, “We were North Americans out to retrace our history, ironically replicating all the impulses and misperceptions of European ancestors when they came to this land. Like them, we thought that the lands we came to homestead were ‘empty.’”179 Yet at the same time we venerated and celebrated what we thought was cool in Native American cultures, often naively appropriating their philosophies and spiritual practices in our search for alternative community and consciousness.
Our negative views of the corruptions of urban, industrial life also bore the imprint of a longer American tradition. The rural idyll coexisted uneasily in the 1800s, as it did in the 1960s, with the realities of rapid economic and technological change. The 19th century industrial revolution elicited hope in the future—Americans were special and would industrialize differently than the Europeans, turning technology to positive ends—but also nostalgia for a paradise lost. The forward march of progress inspired a new literary and artistic school, the American Sublime, celebrating regeneration through Nature. “The more rapidly, the more voraciously, the primordial forest was felled,” Perry Miller writes, “the more desperately the poets and painters—and also preachers—strove to identify the unique personality of this republic with the virtues of pristine and untarnished, of ‘romantic,’ Nature.”180 Pristine American nature was seen as the height of aesthetic perfection, an Eden from which a falling away was tragically inevitable. That inevitability was often shaded in apocalyptic hues, as it was in the 1960s, too. The American Sublime lived on in us.
For better or worse, many ’60s communes tried to break down the walls of the nuclear family, whether through non-monogamous sexual relationships or joint child-rearing. As in the 19th century, the desire to create radically new ways of living together was infused with the mythology of human malleability and perfectibility. This aspiration didn’t adequately take into account the frailties and varieties of human nature. Nor did it adequately factor in differences in upbringing and values. Sexual jealousy, envy, anger, competition, depression, hurt, and pain destroyed many communities. Communes not only attracted high-minded idealists, but also “freeloaders, cranks, and low-lifes—and often enough of the latter, unfortunately, to bring it all crashing down.”181
There were so many lessons we could have learned from the communal experiments of the 19th century, lessons that might have tempered our ridiculously high expectations of ourselves and others. We might have realized that it’s not so easy to bridge the divide between manual and mental work, or to build an egalitarian society on just one farm or commune. We might have learned that inequalities between men and women don’t evaporate overnight, and when male prophets have their heads in the clouds, it’s women like Abigail Alcott who hold up more than half the sky. We might have understood that breaking with the traditional family is no easy task and that new sexual regimes can be exploitative and explosive. We would have been warned that the quest for purity and perfection can lead in perverse directions, from the austerity imposed at Fruitlands to the sexual hierarchies and eugenics practices at Oneida.
Hawthorne’s transcendental giant cast a shadow over the ’60s communal movement, too. Though the more politically minded drew inspiration from Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond and doctrine of civil disobedience, Emerson’s transparent eyeball better fit the mood of the times. Dilating the pupils with LSD or other hallucinogens allowed a liberating disembodiment, a free-floating sense of ecstatic communion. The resulting fanciful visions also came at a high cost—not just bad trips, but lost time, and blind spots with larger and longer political repercussions.
In 1964, a band of Merry Pranksters, as they called themselves, including novelist Ken Kesey and an assemblage of counterculture icons, from the Beat generation’s Neal Cassady to Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, traveled by bus across the country, holding acid parties along the way—a journey immortalized in Tom Wolfe’s book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Two years later, Kesey joined forces with a maverick countercultural entrepreneur named Stewart Brand to organize the three-day Trips Festival in San Francisco, a multimedia psychedelic extravaganza with rock music, light shows, slide projections, and sound system experimentation, all designed to blow the mind. It was one of the first big hippie gatherings of the era. The techno-effects were provided by USCO, the US Company, which was in the business of creating “theatrical ecologies” in a collaborative and interdisciplinary work style not so different, it turns out, from that of cutting-edge Cold War research labs at places like Stanford and MIT.
At first glance, this may seem like an unlikely coupling. But “the swirling scene at the Trips Festival, and Brand’s role in it,” writes Fred Turner is his book From Counterculture to Cyberculture, “represented a coming together of the New Communalist social ideals then emerging and the ideological and technological products of cold war technocracy.”182 The stereotypical picture of the military-industrial complex as inhabited by highly regimented bureaucrats in dark suits belies the fact that in its research labs scientists had begun to cross disciplinary boundaries and put their minds together in an entrepreneurial, non-hierarchical environment to develop new technologies like the bomb, weapons delivery systems, and the computer. For the top brains, it was a free-wheeling and exciting professional existence.
Brand and his fellow New Communalists, as Turner calls them, shared a similar culture of collaborative invention. They were also linked to the Cold War technocrats by an affinity to systems theory and cybernetics, emerging fields which posited that ecological, biological, and mechanical systems were self-regulating, responding to feedback in “patterns of ordered information in a world otherwise tending to entropy and noise.”183 From the natural sciences and engineering, systems theory spread to the study of social systems. Society was thought to function along similar lines to organisms and machines, with the world as a whole seen as a giant information web.
Brand encountered systems theory as an undergraduate at Stanford, where he studied evolutionary biology with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, whom readers will meet again in Chapter Five. Another powerful influence on the New Communalists was Buckminster Fuller, best known for designing the geodesic dome, though he had previously designed shelters for the military. Fuller believed that by understanding the rules of natural systems, the “Comprehensive Designer” could deploy technology to overcome scarcity and build a well-balanced and harmonious society. He was a descendant of the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, the most influential woman in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s circle and a well-known feminist author in her own right. “When I heard that [Great] Aunt Margaret said, ‘I must start with the universe and work down to the parts, I must have an understanding of it,’ that became a great drive for me,” Fuller recalled.184 Like transcendentalism, systems theory assumed a highly patterned and interconnected universe, in which human and natural systems are analogues.
In 1968 Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog, a book that became the bible of the commune era. The outside cover featured a picture of Earth taken from space. On the inside cover was this statement of purpose:
We are as gods and might as well get good at it . . . [A] realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG.185
The tools it promoted spanned the gamut from practical “small is beautiful” technologies for rural life to the big ideas of Buckminster Fuller and other countercultural gurus, including Brand himself. The catalog was at once an ode to individualism and a node for networking. Eclectic as it was, however, the politics of the New Left and issues of gender, race, and class were conspicuously absent from the catalog. The “long hunter” and “cowboy nomad” celebrated in its pages is white, male, smart, and rather full of himself. He may be into saving the planet, but he doesn’t care all that much about saving other people.186
Turner tells the story of how the New Communalists’ interest in cybernetics eventually bloomed into the embrace of the personal computer and the capacity of the digital revolution to transform the world. In 1985 Brand and a fellow entrepreneur founded the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or The WELL, one of the first networked virtual communities. As the would-be hunters and cowboys of the ’60s moved into cyberspace to conquer the new electronic frontier, they brought with them their collaborative work style, libertarian individualism, and techno-utopian visions.
This approach resonated with sections of the ascendant New Right. Newt Gingrich and his Progress and Freedom Foundation advocated for information technology along with government downsizing and market deregulation. It also meshed well with novel corporate strategies of flexible labor and outsourcing. Less hierarchical management structures were part of the package, but for many workers, computerization, instead of liberation, brought increased exploitation.
Brand began to work with executives from corporations like Royal Dutch/Shell, Volvo, and AT&T. He launched a consulting firm, the Global Business Network (GBN), in 1987. Over time, the GBN began to consult for the US military, and the relationship between the New Communalists and the military-industrial complex came full circle. Today Brand’s techno-utopianism takes the form of advocacy for geoengineering and nuclear power as remediation for climate change. To highlight the benefits of genetic engineering, he also has launched a “de-extinction” project to recreate the passenger pigeon, a once-prolific species that was driven extinct a century ago.187
These legacies of ’60s utopianism shouldn’t blind us to other more positive ones, however. The Whole Earth Catalog may have been on the bookshelf of most rural communes, but there was plenty of other reading matter, too. Many people, after getting high on drugs or meditation, came back down to earth and put their boots on to protest the war in Vietnam, institutionalized racism, and the despoliation of the environment. “Many communards were active in organized resistance to the social order by fighting logging companies, defending family farms, building food co-ops, organizing demonstrations, assisting military resisters, or simply offering refuge or R&R to other activists,” writes Jesse Drew, a veteran of the times.188
Not far from where I live now, Sam Lovejoy, then a resident of the Liberation News Service communal farm in Montague, Massachusetts, cut down a weather tower on the site of a proposed nuclear power plant in 1974. The tower’s purpose was to test wind direction in the event of a radioactive release. His act helped to galvanize the national anti-nuclear movement.189 Women fought back against conventional gender norms. In California’s Mendocino County, a rural women’s collective produced a national magazine, Country Women, which provided advice on feminist consciousness-raising along with practical farming.190
As communes disbanded, some people stayed on in the area, becoming part of the fabric of local communities. On the farm in West Virginia, our college friends settled in, built a new house, and became active in local and state-wide organizations to support the arts and build a post-coal energy system and economy. The other couple moved away, selling their half of the land, including our cabin, to survivalists who paid in gold because they didn’t believe in paper money. They now graze goats on the hillside.
Many people regard their communal history not as a crucible but as a stepping stone. Their utopian dreams and millennial madness may have abated, but not their desire to change the world, a desire that has been passed down to their children.191 Real lessons were learned. Many of those who remained active in left politics were better able to tease apart Marxism’s profound insights about the nature of class society from its millennial promise of the victory of the proletariat and the establishment of a classless paradise. That communist utopianism can come with high costs—from the genocide under Pol Pot in Kampuchea to Maoist authoritarianism—helped spur this rethinking, too.
Today many alternative agriculture and food justice and sovereignty movements are much more attentive to connecting city and country, and more attuned to the politics of race, class, and gender in the US and overseas. Urban farms help to organize around multiple issues—a clean environment, health, jobs, education, and youth development. Their vision is both practical and hopeful.
As historian Howard Zinn put it so well, “Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”192
So where does this journey lead us? Do the risks of utopian dreams outweigh their benefits, especially when combined with millennial madness? In the pursuit of a new and better world, is it possible to escape the America syndrome so intricately connected to our quest for perfection?
People aren’t perfect. They never have been, and never will be. The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir once warned of the dangers of “moral purism” in politics, arguing that we should instead embrace the ambiguities of human existence and the inevitability of conflict and failure when people work together.193
In some circles today, ambiguity is a dirty word. Sections of the American Left have retreated into narrow identity politics, strict political correctness, and the moral purism that de Beauvoir decried. There’s more than a touch of utopianism and millennialism, not to mention exclusion, in this latest variant of perfectionism. Rather than reaching out to others in solidarity, there’s a tendency to collapse inwards, focus on personal or group victimhood, overuse the trauma diagnosis, call out and shame those who don’t conform or agree, and create “safe spaces” where everyone has to abide by a certain set of implicit and explicit rules that often amount to a kind of self- and collective-policing. The problem is not so much that people need safe places where they can feel comfortable and free of hostility—they do—but that spaces where differences of opinion and political conflict take place (the classroom, for example) are then considered unsafe, and must therefore be surveilled and policed. One wonders if there is also a touch here of the militarization of inner space.
Instead of such universal policing, the political moment calls for a practical and inclusive radical optimism like the kind expressed in the inscription on the side of Scotland’s Parliament building: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Not the worst nation, not the best nation, not the nation Donald Trump says he wants to make great again or the nation Hillary Clinton said was already great. Just a better one.
And lest one occasionally slip into an apocalyptic funk, as it’s all too easy to do, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we have survived far worse times, like the nuclear madness of the Cold War.