Angela Pennington

8 March 2019

Part I: Isolation in Utopian Society: Is it Necessary? Is it Practical?

          In Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland and Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 novel Ecotopia, three utopian societies are portrayed which all share a similar trait: partial or complete isolation from the outside world. However, it is not immediately clear why so many utopias, both literary and historical, isolate themselves from their surrounding neighbors. It could simply be an unwillingness to acknowledge groups of people that the utopian community members view as living less ideal lifestyles than their own; however, this would paint utopian citizens unfavorably as merely like-minded snobs. To understand the desire for isolation and the truths about its real-world practice in utopian communities, I investigated three research posts and one midterm exam which addressed the topic of utopic isolation.

In her 2015 research post “Called to be a Utopia?”, Jessica Myers claims that a “separateness from the ‘world,’” is “clearly necessary for a utopian society to work.” While isolation of the utopian societies from the outer world has been prevalent in the utopian literature that we have read, the practice must be further investigated. Why would it be problematic for a utopian society to have regular communication with the outside world? One answer may be found in Marisela Caylor’s 2013 research post, “’Holy Land:’ An Examination of Lakewood as Suburban Utopia.” On the topic of isolated suburban communities, Caylor writes, “These ideal communities provide a space for limited individuality within the safety of a planned community.” In her 2015 midterm titled “Living in Balance: The Common Good Verses Individualism,” however, Ashley Wrenn argues that “Societies will always have people who differ in opinion.” Wrenn notes that “what matters is how society is able to ensure that all people have the opportunity to experience their idea of a perfect society.”

          Following this line of reasoning; a non-isolated utopian society will always be at risk to fall prey  to the corruption of influence of its non-utopic neighbors. Myers addresses this very dilemma in modern Christian churches, noting that “the present day church looks nothing like the example described” in the idyllic Apostolic communities in Acts because they have succumbed to the values of materialistic societies that they are actively participating in. Myers points to the Pauline Epistles, wherein followers of Christ are instructed to disassociate themselves with anyone who is actively indulging in sin, adding that this intentional severance of social bonds “is similar to what we read in [Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s] Herland, where those women who could not comply with the community’s expectations were not allowed to become mothers, or in [Sir Thomas More’s] Utopia, when community members were banished for breaking rules.” In all cases, there is an intentional distancing by the members of a utopic community from those who do not conform to their values.

          Is complete isolation necessary to a utopian society, then? Ruthi McDonald’s 2013 research post, “Utopian Ideals in the Community” surveys several real-life utopian communities. McDonald writes that while “citizens at Twin Oaks made a choice to live in a communal way … the outside society is still there. The actions of the community do affect the larger society and vice versa … monks that I looked into at Plum Village and Magnolia Grove monasteries live in the same way: apart but open to the larger community.” This aligns with Myers’ argument that “it is difficult for the church to fight off the influences of the world because it cannot escape the world”; whereas Myers views the church’s inability to isolate itself from the world as a threat, however, McDonald examines the opportunities that open communication with the outside world may permit: “Places like this where a group of people have chosen to live in a way that is very different from the surrounding larger community often open themselves up for tours, workshops, or even retreats. This allows people to experience their way of living temporarily and then take what they learn back into their home lives.” Ideally, then, more individuals or even entire surrounding communities may choose to join the utopian society.

Various literary and real-world utopian societies have valued, if not perfected in practice, isolation from the outside world. Comfort within a like-minded community and protecting the utopian community members’ ideals from outside corruption are two of the main arguments for isolation. However, many utopian societies believe in active and open interaction with the outside world, as it can lead to a spread of their values and practices. Interaction with the outer world may also prevent some of the “negatives that spurred from a need for the familiar” which Caylor acknowledges that there are a host of in a like-minded community that is cultivated and isolated; even the pseudo-isolated space of the suburbs suffers from these negatives, Caylor states, including a return to “segregation between the races in the early suburbs” of America. Even in the realm of literary utopias, Wrenn argues that the mother-centric utopian society of Herland “may easily become a dystopia for women who do not want to become mothers and surely would be a dystopia for men.” Because real-world utopian communities are typically “Unlike the Utopia where they live on an island that is impossible to penetrate unless you know exactly where to sail, or Herland where the people are literally trapped in a mountain valley with no way in or out, and therefore, [are subject to] no influences from the outside world” due to natural topography (Myers), then, they should perhaps embrace contact with the outer world.

Part II: Utopias in Practice and How to Avoid a Dystopian Society

          Coming into this course, my knowledge of utopias was limited to the “castle in the sky” societies that are pointed to in objective three. When thinking of a utopian society, I thought of a perfect, futuristic community, unplagued by war, sickness, toil, and civil unrest, with technology far advanced from our own likely solving all those problems which our society would find unachievable to solve otherwise—something like the world of The Jetsons. Alternatively, there would be the philosopher’s utopia, something like that described in Plato’s Republic, which I believed was simply one person’s vision of perfect society that no one else could or would strive toward. Another belief I held was that a utopian society could somehow not exist in the same universe as our own, that if a “perfect” society existed, all people would recognize its superiority and wish to join it; the only exception would be if the society had some intentional isolation or exclusivity which barred the outside world’s interaction with it.

However, through reading about both the literary utopias described in Thomas More’s Utopia, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia and the dystopia described in Ayn Rand’s Anthem, I realized that a utopia needs not to have already solved every problem we face in human society today, and utopian societies can have contact with the outside world. In studying historical attempts at utopias, I have come to understand that all that is necessary for a utopian community is a group of like-minded people with a shared vision for a perfect society making an active attempt to achieve that vision.

          The first challenge to my opinion of utopias as perfect and unachievable societies was in reading Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia. Utopia is divided into two books; in the first, More’s fictional counterpart relates a conversation between himself and a few other people, including philosophizing traveler named Raphael Hythloday with a vision for a better future, whereas in the second book, Hythloday relates to More the details of a fictional, idealistic society called Utopia. When More tells Hythloday that he should advise monarchs in court, Hythloday protests, responding that “there is no room for philosophy in the courts of princes” (More I.13b), thus acknowledging the common dismissal of those utopic visions of philosophers such as Plato. More responds, however, that rulers and their advisors need only to “manage things with all the dexterity in your power, so that, if you are not able to make them go well, they may be as little ill as possible; for, except all men were good, everything cannot be right, and that is a blessing that I do not at present hope to see” (More I.13c). More is acknowledging, then, that the reality of a utopia may in fact be true to its name—the Greek prefix “ou-” meaning not, and topos meaning “place” literally translating the country’s name to “nowhere”—but that this need not discourage attempts to improve one’s society toward an idealistic vision. Even if that ideal is unachievable, More argues, in striving toward it we as a society will improve significantly.

          The belief that striving toward an ideal state is more important than achieving the ideal state itself is carried over to the 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. In the utopian literary tradition of those before him, Callenbach’s narrator, William Weston, acts as a vehicle to the reader understanding the fictional utopian society of Ecotopia: explaining in minute details its social, institutional, and economic practices through the lens of a foreigner visiting the nation. The novel takes a non-standard approach, however, in that it balances the more typical, structured sections explaining the Ecotopian society’s formal practices with Weston’s journal entries and thoughts on the informal social practices of the Ecotopians. One such social practice, “cooperative criticism,” is described through the story of a customer’s complaint in an Ecotopian restaurant about overcooked eggs: the customer makes a complaint, the cook disagrees, and the fellow restaurant-goers chime in, work collectively to evaluate the situation, and determine that the eggs are indeed overcooked, spurring an apology from the cook and a restaurant-wide brainstorming session on how to prevent this issue in the future (Callenbach 45-46). The Ecotopians are all agreed that the cook should not be overworked and yet customers should not have overcooked eggs (Callenbach 46). In coming to this agreement, the Ecotopians express a unified ideal vision of the restaurant in which everyone gets what they want: they had not heretofore reached that goal, and so they recognize that they must enact some change.

This restaurant is a microcosm of the Ecotopian society at large. After witnessing many of the changes that the Ecotopian society has enacted over time to solve the environmental crisis, Weston notes that Ecotopians “seem adept at using moderate and gradual changeovers to reach extreme goals” (Callenbach 95). The Ecotopians are living in a utopian society not because they have reached the perfect ideal, but because, as More encourages, they have identified their values and they strive toward them as a collective society. This practice of conscious, continual improvement can also be observed in the female utopia depicted in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland. The narrator of Herland, an American sociology student named Vandyck "Van" Jennings, notes about his experience reading through the history of Herland, “When I dug into the records to follow out any line of development, that was the most astonishing thing—the conscious effort to make it better” (Perkins Gilman 7.34). Jennings goes on to specify the practices of Herland’s inhabitants that make this effort explicit:

They had early observed the value of certain improvements, had easily inferred that there was room for more, and took the greatest pains to develop two kinds of minds—the critic and inventor. Those who showed an early tendency to observe, to discriminate, to suggest, were given special training for that function; and some of their highest officials spent their time in the most careful study of one or another branch of work, with a view to its further improvement. (Gilman 7.35)

Though the inhabitants of Herland differ in their practice from the method of a philosopher advising a monarch described by More, or the cooperative criticism depicted by Callenbach in Ecotopia, the guiding principle is the same. It seems, then, that the only requirement for a utopian society is to have a group of like-minded individuals who not only have shared values that they strive toward, but who are constantly questioning those values as a society. Working together to continually improve the society completely bypasses the idea of a truly perfect community in practice—it acknowledges that a “true” or “perfect” utopia is in fact nowhere, and yet, a practical utopia will always question, improve, and progress.

          Consider the contrasting example provided in Ayn Rand’s 1938 dystopian novella Anthem. The narrator of Anthem, Equality 7-2521, lives in a dystopic future wherein individualism is suppressed by a government institution called the World Council. Equality 7-2521 relays the words of the Word Council which govern this suppression of individuality, saying they “were cut long ago” and “are the truth, for they are written on the Palace of the World Council, and the World Council is the body of all truth” (Rand 1.9). In this society, governing law is not examined or questioned, but rather accepted as absolute truth. Equality continues, “We think that there are mysteries in the sky and under the water and in the plants which grow. But the Council of Scholars has said that there are no mysteries, and the Council of Scholars knows all things” (Rand 1.21). Not only is the law unquestionable, then, but so is scientific knowledge. Only a select few out of the entire society depicted in Anthem are allowed to partake in scientific discovery, and even in doing so, they are highly inefficient, such as “the twenty illustrious men who had invented the candle” (Rand 7.3). Rand uses irony in having Equality call the men illustrious to indicate to the reader that a technology so simple as a candle would require twenty of this society’s most brilliant scholars to “invent” it. Even the term invent is ironic as Equality earlier speaks of the “Unmentionable Times” preceding the “Great Rebirth,” wherein “the lights which burned without flame,” and so man had discovered electricity (Rand 1.10). The Great Rebirth described by Equality is another convention of the utopian genre, an origin story that results due to some great war, catastrophic event, or apocalypse. The destruction of society during this time then becomes the opportunity for a new, more perfect society to be created from a blank slate. Rand is suggesting, however, that the society ruled by the World Council is extremely resistant to progress, and therefore deeply flawed. As with the utopian societies of Ecotopia, Herland, and Utopia, the society depicted in Anthem encourages collective ideals and values, but it differs in that these values cannot be questioned.

          A refusal to continually question and progress is a common failure of historical attempts at utopias. My personal interest in this course was learning more about the utopia in practice: if one person’s ideal state looks different than another’s, who do we listen to? How do we get to the bottom of achieving a truly utopic society? The utopian fiction we have read so far seems to encourage an open and continual dialogue within utopian societies; however, many historical attempts at utopian societies have been in response to religious texts. These texts are static, unmoving, and so the only debate there is to be had is with interpretation. In my first research post, for example, I investigated Fundamentalist Mormon intentional communities, which were trying to recreate the utopic nation of Israel described in the Bible. Fundamentalist Mormons continue practices that the larger Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has questioned and subsequently progressed from. The ideals of the Fundamentalist Mormons are the same as those of the modern LDS church, however, the former group refused to question how they strive to achieve those ideals in practice. Comparatively, members of the modern LDS church suffer much less scrutiny from the American government and society that they live within as they do not subscribe to these older practices.

          The only requirement for a society to be utopian is to be filled with like-minded, though necessarily unique and individual, persons who hold shared values and strive toward those values together as a community. What separates a utopia from a dystopia, perhaps, is the ability to question how ideals are being enacted in practice. In the literary genre of utopian fiction, there are certain standard practices: a narrator that is alien to the utopian society experiencing it and explaining it in a way that would be understandable to the reader audience, a systematic description of social, economic, and institutional practices, usually through long dialogues that may or may not compare the narrator’s real-world society to the utopian one, and a much deeper focus on the setting of the utopia than any characterization or conflict that may occur over the course of the text. My interest in historical attempts at utopias causes me to wonder if there are any works of nonfiction in the genre of travel literature that conform to the genre conventions of utopian literature whilst exploring an intentional community, commune, or cult as described in objective three.