In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [34]
Along with the literary utopias, the nineteenth century spawned hundreds of actual ones—groups of people who set up new communities—from the socialist Finnish colonies on the west coast of Canada, to the Esperanto-speakers who thought that a universal language might result in world peace, to the Oneida Community that practised an intricate form of polygamy and morphed into a flatware company. These had as their ancestors a large number of utopian religious communities, ranging from the Quakers, a disruptive cult that would sometimes streak church gatherings before it settled down into the more sober-sided version that went in for oatmeal and prison reform, to the Shakers (who did away with sex—oddly enough, they have died out), to the Mennonites and Amish.
The seventeenth-century Puritan New Englanders began, too, as utopianists. The phrase “a city upon a hill, a light to all nations” may sound familiar, since it was used recently by an American president, but it was first attached to America in the seventeenth century by John Winthrop, and comes from the inspiring utopian prophecy in the Book of Isaiah crossed with a sermon by Jesus. The New England Colony saw itself as the City of God in action—like so many utopias, it was going to start again and do things right this time. However, as Hawthorne pointed out, the first public-works items the colony built were a prison and a scaffold—acknowledgements of its own dystopic underbelly.
The nineteenth-century literary utopias concentrated less on religious structures and more on material improvements, but the lustre of both physical and spiritual utopian light dimmed considerably in the twentieth century. Despite this dimming, in the burst of Edwardian splendour that preceded the First World War there were brilliant upflarings of utopianism in the world of art, now dubbed, collectively, “utopian modernism.” These European art movements wished not merely to reflect the world but to change it. Under this heading we find everything from Italian Futurism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Russian Constructivism: all wanted to overthrow established ideas and conventions and set up their own new and improved versions.
Though utopian from their own point of view, some of these movements are dystopian from ours; indeed, in their frequent celebration of violence, they point to a recurring motif in literary as well as in political utopian thinking: the brave new order often comes about as the result of war and chaos.
Then along came the real war—the Great War—which did change the world but at horrifying cost. And then, in this changed but not improved postwar world, several societies had a chance to practise utopian social engineering on a large scale. Most noteworthy were the U.S.S.R. under Lenin and Stalin and Germany under Hitler. The result, in each case, was unprecedented bloodshed and the ultimate collapse of the supposedly utopian system.
Lest we assume that communists and fascists were the only sorts of thinkers to go in for this sort of thing, there are many lesser-known entries in the list of failed utopias, including a capitalist-and-workers’ paradise set up by Henry Ford in the 1920s and 1930s. It was called “Fordlandia,” after its founder, and has recently been the subject of two books, both of them called Fordlandia: a factual account by Greg Grandin and a novel by Eduardo Sguiglia. Fordlandia was situated in the backwoods of Brazil, where the happy workers were supposed to grow rubber trees to make tires for Henry Ford’s Fords; but despite urban planning, and swimming pools for management, and despite or perhaps because of Ford’s efforts to regiment all employees and turn them into teetotallers like himself, the community soon fell apart in a welter of corruption, waste, vice, snakebites, tropical diseases, violence, and rebellion.
Why is it that when we grab for heaven—socialist or capitalist