Nehaveigur

Is the way we organize our society – capitalism, the nation state, individualism – the only way to set up a modern society, or could there be others?

Paradise Now by Chris Jennings describes some high-profile examples of 19th century experimentation with alternative ways of living together, including the Shakers, Fourierism, Brook Farm and the Oneida commune.

Probably because of Jenning’s interests, these experiments have in common that they shared resources to some degree, with some explicitly embracing communism. Something else they have in common is that they failed, often for economic reasons. I wonder to what degree this is because of the opposite of survivor’s bias: If a utopian experiment succeeds, we stop calling it a utopian experiment. For example, Mormonism has many of the characteristics of the faith-based communities in Paradise Now, such as some resource sharing (tithing) and some aspects of communal living. Yet nobody calls the LSD church a utopian community since the faith is thriving.

Many people today miss a sense of community in their lives, but little energy is spent on creating experimental communities compared to the high-profile experimentation of the 19th century described in Paradise Now or the communes of the 1960s associated with the hippie movement. Is it because we are more cynical, or maybe more clear-eyed about planned communities being unlikely to work?

Paradise Now reminded of the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which describes the development of a utopia on Mars. Like other optimistic science fiction novels, the assumption is that a better society can only flourish apart from the rest of humanity, whether on a new planet or in an isolated community. This isolation may also be the reason they ultimately fail.

That’s the heart of Voltaire’s Enlightenment vision of cultivating one’s garden: that this is not a way of escaping from the world; rather, each garden seeds the one next door. No garden is an island.

Adam Gopnik