By Sheldon Greaves
On the recommendation of a friend, I recently read Erik Reece’s 2016 travelogue/history, Utopia Drive: Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea. In it, Reece recounts a drive through New England to visit a selection of utopian communities, past and present in order to see how they worked, and what eventually became of those that did not survive. Along the way, he recounts a brief, well-summarized history of each community along with a description of the people in them.
Our word “utopia” allows derivations from two different words, both Greek. The first, “outopia”, could literally be translated “nowhere”; it is a place that doesn’t exist. The other word is “eutopia”, which would be a “good place.” Obviously both can apply depending, perhaps, on one’s level of cynicism about the idea that humans can live together in ways that are better than the rest of the world.
Utopia Then…
Starting withe Shakers, Reece covers their remarkable and remarkably successful run of a communal life that lasted over 100 years. One thing I noticed about this book is that several of these communes–today we call them “intentional communities”–were unexpectedly durable. Most of these lasted a few decades, but compare that with the average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company, which is about 20 years today, down considerably from about 60 years back in the 1950s.
Along with the Shakers, we meet the present-day monks of Abby of Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery, where Thomas Merton spent much of his life, and then move back into the past to explore the New Harmony Experiment started by Robert Owen. Along with other utopian communities that sprang up in the wake of the Second Great Awakening.
One very important contribution of this book is the work of Josiah Warren, whom you’ve likely never heard of. He conceived and founded a town called Modern Times that proved to be one of the more successful experiments in utopian anarchy, creating a marvelous balance between individual liberty and fairness within the community. His thoughts on community and small-scale economies anticipated by at least a century those of later thinkers like Jane Jacobs, E. F. Shumacher, and Wendell Berry.
Reece also has a wonderful chapter on that one-man utopia, Henry David Thoreau at Walden Pond. Most people think of Walden as an experiment in solitude rather than economics, but Walden is quite clear on this point. The very first chapter is titled “Economics.” Reece’s historical profile of Thoreau and his analysis of Walden, though brief, is one of the best I have encountered. I am an unabashed fan of Thoreau, that chapter was worth the price of the book.
Utopia Now
Two modern-day utopian communities, Twin Oaks and Acorn, which are more in line with the hippie communes that grew up starting in the 60s. Such communes are thought to be as passe as 8-tracks, but in fact over 300 intentional communities exist in the United States. Some of them harken back to the hippies, others are based on religious communities. These communities, Reece hastens to point out, do not represent the full range of such communities, and he explores several others in his travels. But along the way, one finds that there are other ways to live and work, many of them without the problems and hangups that all but define our current economy. Moreover, one doesn’t have to take monastic vows or the equivalent in order to enjoy the advantages of a more equitable economy.
Utopia Tomorrow?
There is a lot of smart money warning us that another recession is on the way. They are a periodic feature of our system, so that’s not a surprise. The hard part is that like other emergent phenomena, predicting when they will happen is fiendishly difficult. But what is coming clear is that Americans are in no shape to withstand another financial onslaught like that of 2007-2008. Seven million Americans are at least 90 days behind on their car loans. 40% of Americans are one paycheck away from poverty. We’ve seen results elsewhere when economies falter and the financial masters of the universe call for austerity (for the rest of us, anyway). The question of the book is a question for us all, “How then shall we live?”
Reece closes the book with some thoughtful ideas drawn from these examples, lessons both explanatory and cautionary. But one can’t help but be bouyed by Reece’s optimism that there are ways to craft a better life on the local level, if we can as communities move past the tired ways of exploitive economics.