#utopian communities

One of my favourite Elseworld stories, now collected and avaliable at Comixology, is the story JLA: Age of Wonder, which despite initially covering some of the same ground as several over 19th century based Elseworld stories, actually explores the setting in several interesting ways.

Basic Plot: During the Gilded Age, Clark and other DC superscientists use information from Krypton to try and use technology to create an utopian society... And then everything goes wrong.

See, the story starts with the standard steampunk, Jules Verne “isn’t science as a force of progress awesome“, reflecting the numerous attempted utopian movements in the 19th century (a subject covered in the excellent book The Red Virgin and The Vision of Utopia). But what differentiates this from most other stories in the sub-genre is how sometimes... good intentions aren’t always enough, and you NEED to pay attenton to the big picture, or things will lead to unexpected tragedy.

Such as riots breaking out over the lack of supply when Superman’s group attempt to hand out free electric lights...

...How introducing automated industries without any means of support for the former workers leads to resentment, unemployment and generally accidentally making the lives of the people they were trying to help a whole lot worse...

...Or how unchecked technological advancement + imperialism + capitalism = BAD TIMES.

Despite the wavering towards the cynical side of the spectrum in places, the story is one about idealism, however, about how it’s not only good but necessary, as it’s about aspiring to utopia even when the forces of capitalism and militarisation try to drag you down. It incorporates the economics and politics of era in an interesting way, being political in a way which is still bizarrely relevant in places.

“Fest gebaut Gott vertraut,” Inscription Over Entrance to Moravian Meeting House, Old Salem, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 2017.

In Batman: the Animated Series’ episode Deep Freeze, it contained the villainous Grant Walker, a theme park creator who creates a domed city with the intention of freezing the outside world so his perfectly order “utopia“ can survive on his terms.

Unsurprisingly, Walker is an homage to Walt Disney, and more more ways than his being a futurist who built theme parks with a link to cryogenics (although in that regard, the story of Walt’s frozen head may be an urban myth).

In actuality, the whole domed, model city thing is actually something Walt had an active interest in, with the original scheme with what became the Epcot Centre (EPCOT standing for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow) originally intending to be a self-contained, self-sustained city for the future which acts as a blueprint for other structures around the country.

By Erik Reece, The Atlantic, Aug. 8, 2016

When I told a colleague at a dinner party about my summer travel plans, he replied, “Utopian communities? Are there any still around?”

Actually, there are, though these days they prefer to call themselves “egalitarian” or “intended” communities. The Fellowship for Intentional Community lists more than 300 such examples of communal living in the United States and thousands worldwide. Only seven of those American sites qualify for recognition by the Federation of Egalitarian Communities (FEC). To achieve that rarefied status, a commune must hold land, labor, and income in common, advocate nonviolence and ecological sustainability, and practice some form of direct decision making. Of the FEC’s seven member communities, three reside in Louisa County, Virginia. The reason for their choosing Louisa County is simple: lax zoning laws and modest real-estate prices. If 100 counterculture types want to plop down on some cheap farmland and not get harassed by the locals, Louisa has historically been the place.

That’s where I’ve decided to visit. I cut over the Blue Ridge Mountains and make the quick descent to Charlottesville, passing by the white dome of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. It’s another half hour to Louisa County, where at dusk I travel back roads through farmland and woodlots until I pull up to the oldest egalitarian community in the country, Twin Oaks. Farther off, an orchard surrounds a pasture for the Twin Oaks milking herd and a large chicken pen. A henhouse is built on the back of a long two-wheel trailer, and a low array of solar panels runs across the middle of the farm.

Adder, a pale young man with long blond hair, meets me in the garden. He is the designated host for my visit to Twin Oaks. He apologizes for having childcare responsibilities tonight, but promises to show me around in the morning. For now, Adder points me to a small guesthouse, where I find my name on a card taped to the door of one of four rooms. Each room, like each of the buildings at Twin Oaks, is named after a former utopian community. My door reads “Walden Two.”

The sparsely furnished room, like the food I will eat at Twin Oaks, is free--I have been asked only to do a little work during my stay as recompense for the hospitality. There’s a set of bunk beds, a small table, and a chest of drawers in the room. I settle into the lower bunk and pull from my suitcase a copy of B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel, Walden Two. In 1967, eight friends, mostly graduate students, read this book by the founder of behavioral psychology and decided to bring that fiction to life. Altogether, their assets added up to $2,000; they had a benefactor who was willing to lease them 123 acres of forest and farmland in Louisa and a parent willing to float them a loan for the mortgage. The small group moved into the lot’s only structure, a small farmhouse, and began planting a garden.

“Some of us were happy,” one of them, Kat Kinkade, remembered 26 years later in her history of Twin Oaks, Is It Utopia Yet? “Central to my own happiness was my conviction that there was no task on earth more important, or certainly more interesting, than the building of an egalitarian community.” While Kinkade left Twin Oaks at times to visit or help create other intentional communities, she always returned to the region, and after succumbing to bone cancer in 2008, she was buried in the small cemetery at Twin Oaks, beneath a circle of quartz stones.

Twin Oaks hardly ever dips below or swells above 100 members: Right now there are 93 adults and seven children. Each permanent member is voted in after a six-month trial period. With community feedback, a team of three men and three women makes the final decision for acceptance.

The one thing Twin Oaks has retained from Walden Two is what the novel calls a planner-manager form of governing. The three planners serve a limited term and are responsible for the community’s long-range decision making. The managers are those in charge of specific areas of work, from the farm to the kitchen to the various manufacturing operations at Twin Oaks. They oversee all daily decisions, and are responsible for decisions that affect the whole community.

To an outsider, it might seem that the planners wield considerable power in a community that espouses complete egalitarianism. The reality, says Adder, a planner himself right now, is that most members take on the role rather hesitantly. (In fact, there are currently only two planners because no one has come forward to be the third.) Something like Plato’s reluctant philosopher-kings, the planners don’t really want power--there is, after all, really nothing to be gained from it at Twin Oaks--and are serving only at the request of the community. Once a planner is nominated, members offer input about the candidate for 10 days, and then a “veto box” is set out. If less than 20 percent of the community votes no (which I sense is almost always the case), a new planner is elected.

The main job of the planner is to respond to an “Opinions and Ideas” board, and act on the wishes of the majority. “You don’t want to trample over the minority,” Adder says over tea--the community has determined that coffee is too expensive--in the main dining room. “At the same time, if the minority can stop the majority from doing what they want, there’s a similar power imbalance. More than anything, my job is to figure out what other people want.” The planner-manager system has been working for 46 years in part because almost everyone is a manager of some aspect of the community, so individuals are constantly rotating in and out of various work teams. If there arise any grievances with the managers or planners, then a “Council of Intermediaries” steps in to allay the community’s concerns.

Adder and I walk down toward the main courtyard, past a crew working and joking in the vegetable garden, and up to the second floor of the residence called Harmony. Everyone at Twin Oaks can own as much as each individual can fit in his or her private room. Everything else is communal. And there is no money at Twin Oaks. After performing a week’s worth of labor, all life’s essentials (food, housing, health care) are free. “I never have to worry about paying rent or having enough to eat,” Adder tells me. However, each member is paid a fluctuating monthly stipend, based on community profits--right now it is at a record-high $90--for the things one can’t find at Twin Oaks (coffee, for example). I ask Adder what most people spend their stipend on, and he says, “Treats and vices.” Besides the coffee, it’s mostly things such as beer, juice, cigarettes, a movie ticket. “Last month,” Adder says, “I bought a yo-yo.”

Everyone at Twin Oaks works 42 hours a week, doing pretty much whatever they choose. Each Sunday, the communitarians fill out a labor sheet declaring where and when they want to work; then labor assigners do their best to pair desired labor with seasonally crucial labor: cutting wood in the winter, harvesting vegetables in the summer. Two and a half hours of vacation are credited to each member each week, which adds up to two and a half weeks annually. Residents can pile up overtime and bank it toward more vacation days. (Twin Oaks tries to maintain wage egalitarianism within its boundaries, but members are allowed to accept gifts from friends and family, and to have family members pay for their vacations outside Twin Oaks.)

The community is small enough to ensure accountability: No one can cheat on his or her hours for long and have it go unnoticed. Yet Twin Oaks doesn’t tend to attract people who would want to game the system. “The work gets done not because people need labor hours,” Adder explains. “There are people who have vacation balances of thousands of hours that they are never going to spend. And they do the work because this is their home and this is the work that needs to get done.”

Before I set off on my utopian travels, my wife repeatedly voiced a half-serious concern that I would not return, that I would find a group of like-minded people and disappear into my own world-mending reveries. But there was really never any chance of that. Thoreau said, quoting Diogenes, I think, that a man who owns a lion is in fact owned by the lion. I suspect I could be shed of my symbolic lions (my truck payment, my mortgage), but I realize in my short time at Twin Oaks that I could never live these collectivist dreams. I’m too much of an introvert, too ill-suited for the relentless socialness of these admirable communities.

What’s more, I suspect I am too much one of the restless Americans whom Alexis de Tocqueville observed. I don’t know that I would be content to settle down on this farm for years and years. I would miss the speed of driving backroads in the summer with the windows rolled down and the radio blasting. I would miss knowing that if I wanted to get up and go, my keys would be by the door. Such impulses, I know, are inconsistent with my higher values that say, “Leave a smaller carbon footprint, be part of something larger than yourself.” But I can’t help it.

I tell my host as much, and she sweetly lets me off the hook. “This way of life isn’t for everyone,” she says. “It’s actually for the very, very few.” Reluctantly, I agree. In the morning, I have to be out of my Walden Two room so another guest can move in. In truth, I’ll be ready to go.

Incongruous though it may seem, this strange mystical sect also pioneered rather modern-sounding ideas of globalization and technological progress. The Saint-Simonians had emerged from post-Revolutionary Paris to proclaim a new philosophy of humanity: a religion of brotherhood ruled by a new technocratic class, the spiritual leaders of a global future that would merge industry, banking, and technology. Disciples of Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, the well-known early socialist and ardent positivist, and the proponent of a “New Christianity,” these visionaries took the philosophy of their master into uncharted territory.

After the trials, Père Enfantin and his followers embarked on a voyage across the Mediterranean, going first to Egypt and then to Algeria, to realize their utopia in the Mediterranean basin. It was there that they executed a number of their first large-­scale engineering projects, including several Nile barrages, canals, and polytechnics. Much like the globalization gurus of today, the Saint-Simonians called for greater cross-border transactions, more rapid international capital flow, and the diffusion of technology and tech­nological expertise. They helped finance and build railways and canals, constructed global communications and financial networks, and contributed crucially to the growing nineteenth century fascination with technological progress. And, as we shall see, they offer those who look to history a lesson in the unexpected consequences of technological utopianism.

The Saint-Simonians’ stay in Egypt was short-lived. Disease and the failure to find his female messiah led Enfantin back to Paris in 1836, after just three years. Nevertheless, he and his followers — including Ismaïl Urbain, a convert to Islam, and Suzanne Volquin, a journalist and early French feminist, had been instrumental in realizing a number of significant works in engineering and public in­struction. Their example equally inspired Mehmet Ali, the Albanian-born viceroy of Egypt under the Ottomans (often considered the founder of modern Egypt); he eventually constructed large-scale public works and generated a body of newly educated technocrats to man the extraordinary modernization of the state.

The Saint-Simonians had had high hopes for their collaboration with Mehmet Ali, whom they termed the Pacha industriel. Yet they failed to convince him of the viability or virtues of their pet project — a canal at Suez. It was not until a generation later that Ferdinand de Lesseps would manage to convince first Mummad Said Pasha and then Khedive Isma’il to undertake the scheme. Mehmet Ali had been much more concerned with constructing a system of barrages along the Nile, a task several Saint-Simonian engineers began in 1834. Others went on to found various schools and polytechnics, including an infantry school in Damiette, an artillery school in Thoura, and a cavalry school in Giza.

Enfantin returned to Paris in 1836. Some of his followers remained in Egypt; others traveled to Greece, Turkey, East Africa, and Mexico. They conducted scientific and geographical expeditions, aided in the financing of railroads, and oversaw a number of public works, including hospitals and schools. A few years later Enfantin was invited to join the Scientific Commission for the Colonization of Algeria and left for Algiers in December of 1839. Enfantin’s later published study — La colonisation de l’Algérie — was a curious blend of technocratic idealism, racial social science, and economic, industrial, and urban planning proposals. In it, he argued that a rational and centrally managed economic structure — his appeal here was largely to bankers and not to landowners — needed to be put in place in order to serve the goals of a mutually beneficial colonial “association” between France and Algeria — greater indus­trialization, social reform, and the migration of peoples and goods and skills and services.

Here are some photos from the real life La Colônia Cecília - an Italian-originated "experiment in anarchist communism and free love [that] lasted for about five years" in rural Brazil in the 1890s. Starting with only 5 people, it grew to have about 250 members at its peak. On the bottom right is community founder Giovanni Rosi.

See Brian Dewan's filmstrip to learn more: