In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
288
In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
288eBook
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Overview
In 2005, J.C. Hallman came across a scientific paper about "Pleistocene Rewilding," a peculiar idea from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered "megafauna." The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked the idea as much as the scientists did—perhaps because he had grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a master-planned community in Southern California. Pleistocene Rewilding rekindled in him a longstanding fascination with utopian ideas, and he went on to spend three weeks at the world's oldest "intentional community," sail on the first ship where it's possible to own "real estate," train at the world's largest civilian combat-school, and tour a $30 billion megacity built from scratch on an artificial island off the coast of Korea. In Utopia explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466873025 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/10/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
J.C. HALLMAN grew up in Southern California. He is the author of The Chess Artist, The Devil is a Gentleman, and the collection of short stories, The Hospital for Bad Poets.
J. C. Hallman is the author of five previous works of nonfiction and a book of short stories. His previous work on Anarcha has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the Forum (of the African American Policy Forum), the Baffler, Montgomery Advertiser, and Urology. He had been a recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in the general nonfiction category.
Read an Excerpt
In Utopia
Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
By J. C. Hallman
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2010 J. C. HallmanAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7302-5
CHAPTER 1
A JOKE
Only in us does this light still burn, and we are beginning a fantastic journey toward it, a journey toward the interpretation of our waking dream, toward the implementation of the central concept of utopia. To find it, to find the right thing, for which it is worthy to live, to be organized, and to have time: that is why we go, why we cut new, metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, and build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears — incipit vita nova.
— ERNST BLOCH, The Spirit of Utopia
1
Utopia is in a bad way.
2
Utopian thought can be broadly defined as any exuberant plan or philosophy intended to perfect life lived collectively.
As Ernst Bloch suggested, the historical drive toward utopia is best understood as a kind of light, or fire. Utopian thought sparked in antiquity with descriptions of fancifully perfect countries in Plato and Aristotle, smoldered like a coal mine fire through the Middle Ages with early monasticism and portraits of Eden and Heaven, burst into eponymous conflagration with Sir Thomas More's Utopia in 1516, caught and spread across Europe with religious fervor for 150 years, tacked for a century and turned secular, flared anew with the American Revolution and the French Revolution, burned like wildfire through the nineteenth century, and forged at last the ideologies that squared off in the twentieth century for what Thomas Mann called "a worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that enflames the rainy evening sky all round." Utopian thought bears its share of responsibility for that scorching of the face of the earth. As a word, it had already acquired a pejorative connotation, but after World War II "utopia" was no longer just a synonym for naïveté. It was dangerous. Now, decades further on, in a new century and a new millennium, earnest utopian thought and earnest utopians are a glowing ember at best, and utopia's legion failures seem to suggest that the best course of action would be to crush it — to snuff it for good.
By any rational measure, I should suggest this myself. But I won't.
3
This is a photo of my brother, Peter, and me in the backyard of our home in a master-planned southern California community in 1972. For six years we lived on a street called Utopia Road.
I'm there on the left, looking a bit too proud of those pants. The hopefulness of Utopia Road is apparent in the staked landscaping, but the dirt on the ground reveals the place isn't even finished yet. I like it that the bike's wheels sit right on the edge of the photograph. I'm perched on the rim of the picture's contained little world.
As a rule, utopias slip. They slip in the transition from conception to implementation; they slip as a result of financial expedience or frail psychology. Utopia Road had slipped from the ambitions of the likes of Frederick Law Olmsted and Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement. By the time it filtered down to us the promise of a better life through better suburbs was hogwash. Considering for a moment only its internal effects, the vast shelter of Utopia Road, its informal biosphere, left its children safe but stunted, pure but uncertain. We were innocent, but in for a fall. Utopia Road housed us, but did not raise us.
There are a number of dichotomies in the image of my brother and me. The contrasts of our hair and our shirts, for example. I don't want to foist an agenda on a simple effort at documentation (the angle of the shot suggests the photographer was my sister, Amy, age ten), but various features of the picture's subjects do appear to offer commentary on their context. Peter's erect stance and his hands lodged firm in his pockets suggest the certitude and resolve of a homesteader, whereas my looser pose and my foot ready to crank down on the bike's pedal fairly screams out for abandoning a utopia already turned dystopian. The fashions of the image — the fifties fins on my Schwin, our sixties hair and seventies clothes — straddle a cultural revolution characterized by a rekindled, albeit narrowly focused, utopian spirit (i.e., free-love communes). Finally, my brother's annoyed squint and my goofy grin offer contrasting critiques: Peter intends to stick it through the hard times to make utopia work, while I'm ready to zip out of the frame even with training wheels and an untied shoe.
Like the picture, the history of utopian thought and literature refracts a broad range of dichotomies: rich versus poor, rural versus urban, past versus future, war versus peace, wilderness versus civilization, high-tech versus low-tech. Even the name is half a duality. In the preface to Utopia, More explained that utopia, Greek for "no place," would become eutopia, or "good place," whenever some earnest visionary proved able to realize its dream.
There was no earnest visionary responsible for Utopia Road. It wasn't ever meant as a good place; it was a scheme to make a buck. The name Utopia Road was some real estate developer's idea of a joke.
4
The idea of a joke is central to the history of utopia — or at least to my version of it.
More borrowed from a broad range of classical and contemporary sources in the creation of Utopia, striking them together as flint stones to ignite the utopian blaze. But just how seriously he meant the exercise to be taken has long been a matter of conjecture. The influence of Utopia is undeniable. No quixotic adventure, no bureaucratic catch-22, no charming Casanova, nor even any odyssey home is as universally recognized as the name of the perfect world we forever chase, the bittersweet flavor of hope. Among words that have leaped from fiction to reality, advanced from noun to adjective, it stands alone. But what did More mean by it? Theories characterize the age in which they are professed better than they characterize More or the book. Yet it's not going out on a limb to suggest that the history of the world since 1516 is a protracted history of not getting the joke of Utopia.
An inability to tell whether he was just kidding describes Thomas More's personal life as readily as it describes his book. Famous for his wit, More's friends were quick to note that a taciturn air made perceiving his humor no simple task. He apparently enjoyed this. More's arid nature is palpable today. Does the poker-faced expression of Hans Holbein's famous portrait of More disguise a nut flush or a lowly pair? Does More have you beat, or is he bluffing?
Holbein had been recommended to More by the famous humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus. Erasmus described More's humor as prodigious. As a boy, Erasmus wrote, More was so delighted with puns he seemed "born for them alone." Erasmus served as More's confidant during the writing of Utopia; the two were lifetime friends. The inspiration for Erasmus's In Praise of Folly (1509) — a play on More's name, morus means "fool" in Latin — arrived while Erasmus was on horseback on his way to visit his friend. The book, a joking treatise on the stoicism of the age, was written in seven days once he was installed in More's home.
Utopia borrows from In Praise of Folly as surely as it borrows from Plato. Like the entire genre of literature that would follow in its footsteps, Utopia is episodic and didactic, shifting freely between discourse and description. The book's structure is itself a dichotomy. Part one is treatise in the form of Platonic dialogue. Part two is travelogue in the spirit of the diaries of Amerigo Vespucci, published eight years before More set to work.
5
Utopia is set in the New World. A handsome island nation with fifty-four towns that suspiciously match the fifty-four counties of England, the country had made of itself a vibrant society despite an absence of natural resources and a pagan worldview. Utopians are happy, safe, fulfilled, and ready for the Christian message once it arrives in the form of traveler Raphael Hythloday, who spends five years in the country. A grizzled sea captain, Hythloday later returns to England where, one day, he falls into conversation with fictionalized versions of More and his group of friends. For a time they debate the nature of the best possible commonwealth — private property or no — and discuss whether good-intentioned souls should willingly become counselors to their kings. More and his friends insist there is no state better governed than England; Hythloday disagrees. They challenge him to offer one better.
After a recess for lunch, Hythloday describes the island of Utopia — from the broad strokes of its geography to the details of its governance. At the end, the fictional More is hardly convinced that Hythloday has won the point. He dismisses a variety of Utopian laws and customs as "really absurd," yet concludes the book with a statement that seems designed to enhance its ambiguity:
Meantime, while I can hardly agree with everything [Hythloday] said ... I freely confess that in the Utopian commonwealth there are very many features that in our own society I would wish rather than expect to see.
6
The bulk of Utopia was written as a way to kill time during stalled trade negotiations More was conducting in Bruges and Antwerp. Part one — the discussion of service to one's king — surely reflects the fact that during the writing of the book More was offered an annuity to join the royal service permanently under Henry VIII. It wasn't an easy decision. More was a successful lawyer; the job would be a pay cut. More important, service to anything was a sacrifice of autonomy, and how could he be sure that as a counselor to the king he would amount to anything more than a court jester?
Utopia amounts to a duel among jesters. The book is replete with Greek and Latin puns that would have stood out as though embossed on the page to its humanist-schooled intended audience. "Utopia" is the most obvious of these, but "Raphael Hythloday" runs a close second: The name, in degrees of free adaptation, translates as "nonsense speaker" and "bullshit artist." Hythloday's seagoing caricature was a hint that his character should be understood, as one commentator noted, as "the Jester's part in the comedy of Utopia." The fictional More — morus, the fool — was another. Utopia is a dichotomy of jokers.
Which must have made it frustrating for its author when readers began to ignore the obvious signposts and take Utopia literally. The deluge of imitators — the genre now counts hundreds of novels that borrow the book's template but ignore its irony — would not begin for a few years, but it became apparent almost at once that some had failed to get the joke. More publicly offered a gentle suggestion that certain readers might consider revisiting the text to more fully evaluate its myriad details. Privately, he lashed out at those who remained cold to the book's searing humor: "This fellow is so grim that he will not hear of a joke; that fellow is so insipid that he cannot endure wit."
This last was a real problem. For literature, More claimed, was by far the most effective way to achieve "a good mother wit." And wit was "the one thing without which all learning is half lame."
More's later history would make little difference in how the book came to be perceived. He spoke out against the communism that Utopia seems to endorse (as undersheriff of the city of London he was more Sheriff of Nottingham than Robin Hood, though he did have a reputation for fairness). He participated in Lutheran-burning even though Utopians practice religious tolerance. And he was eventually executed for refusing to sanction Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, even though divorce is permitted in his perfect world (H. G. Wells, an earnest utopian himself, later characterized this refusal as "reluctance to play the part of informal table jester to his king"). But More lost control of his creation long before he lost his head, and the very innovations that caused certain readers to mistake Utopia for a plan were precisely the things he had wanted to mock or indict. In his later years, he explicitly distanced himself from the book. After Thomas Müntzer quoted Utopia during the Peasant War to justify communal property More suggested that both Utopia and In Praise of Folly be burned.
Yet at the same time it must be noted that More seemed to enjoy the nighttime dreams he had during the book's production — dreams of himself as King Utopus. His regal self was taller, he wrote to Erasmus, and he was quite satisfied manning the helm of the Utopian ship of state. He held his head high. He marched down the street in a diadem of wheat and with a scepter of corn, and was accompanied by his nobility in the task of meeting ambassadors and princes of other nations — all poor creatures by comparison.
7
So was Utopia criticism of the England it resembled? Was More applauding an imaginary nation that employs shrewd statecraft and common sense to defend itself with the least harm to others? Or was he criticizing a misread of Machiavelli just as The Prince was being published, and calling for a government that would compensate for human fallibility with divine inspiration?
No one really knows.
Excepting perhaps the Bible, there is no work that is simultaneously so influential and yet so difficult to pin down as to its precise purpose, or even its nature. This work does not aspire to solve the riddle of Utopia. I am not a utopologist (and there are such things), nor can I say that I am utopian in any specific sense of the term. But I was weaned on utopia, and after it became for me more than a word on a street sign, utopian novels began to crowd my bookshelves. To write a book that emulates Utopia's toggle between analysis and what scholars call its "speaking pictures" — in other words, to borrow the episodic strategy of the genre — is, for me, on one level, an attempt to produce a definition of myself. On another it's an investigation of wit. More's wit, it has been suggested, was intended to "correct, chastise, wound." But to what end? Wit is a straight line without a finisher, without a punch line. You, reader, supply your own. For five hundred years the world has stood dumb before the wit of Utopia. In the picture of my brother and me on Utopia Road, it seems as though I've gotten the joke, as though I've got a punch line in mind. My boy's good humor is already attuned to More's irony:
Which makes me, perhaps, an unlikely vehicle for the message of this book: the utopian flame should not be snuffed — it should be stoked anew. The history of utopian thought sheds a light on civilization that both illuminates and scalds: Civilization triggers utopia, embraces it — then indicts it. The stigma now attached to utopia not only fails to get the joke, it blames hopefulness for hope's failures. Utopia critiques crisis. It acts. To crush the utopian spirit would be to extinguish the campfire just as its warmth is needed most.
Winter closes in: Is being saved worth the risk of being singed?
A WILDERNESS
It is impossible to understand history without utopia, for neither historical consciousness nor action can be meaningful unless utopia is envisaged at both the beginning and end of history.
— PAUL TILLICH, "Critique and Justification of Utopia."
For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world.
— RALPH WALDO EMERSON, "Nature," Essays: Second Series
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In Utopia by J. C. Hallman. Copyright © 2010 J. C. Hallman. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Acknowledgments,
A Joke,
A Wilderness,
A Community,
A Ship,
A Meal,
A City,
A Gun,
A Home,
Image Credits,
Also by J. C. Hallman,
Copyright,