Everyday Utopia

by Raven

I’ve always been interested in utopias, in new ways that we can build better. So when I saw a book called Everyday Utopia referenced, I decided to get it out from the library–and it was even better than I expected.

The Author’s Note at the very beginning of the book starts by talking about a commune that Pythagoras (the Greek philosopher and mathematician) started in Kroton (in what is now Italy) over two thousand years ago where (according to a third century biographer of Pythagoras) “…all things were common and the same to all, and no one possessed anything private.”  Now there’s a bit of communal history that I didn’t know about.

Pythagoras teaching at Kroton

The subtitle of this book is “What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life”.  The book talks about Plato’s Republic and Thomas More’s Utopia, “Why Martin Luther King Jr. Loved Star Trek”, kibbutzim, the neolithic village of Çatalhöyük, monastic communities, the utopian socialists, Soviet architecture, cohousing villages, and Kropotkin’s ideas on housing–and that just summarizes the first two chapters!

The author, Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a strong feminist (her previous book was Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism) and much of the book is devoted to how these “Wild Experiments” have improved things for women.  She talks a lot about creating new structures for relationships and families–and the raising of children.

What about income sharing communities?  A whole chapter is entitled “Imagine No Possessions, I Wonder Why We Can’t” (subtitle: ‘How Sharing Our Things Can Open Our Hearts’) and includes a subsection on Twin Oaks where she quotes from their Labor Policy and Property Code as well as from an email she received from Twin Oaks member Kelpie.

Kristin Ghodsee ends Everyday Utopia with a chapter entitled “The Star Trek Game Plan: How Radical Hope Defeats Dystopian Despair” where she talks about the seductiveness of dystopias and how they encourage hopelessness and how Star Trek is based on the idea of a post-scarcity world.  She talks about the Star Trek series Discovery in which the crew travel into their far future and the inhabitants of that time marvel that the crew “grew up in a world that believes anything is possible.”   She wants us to fight “the steady diet of doom, gloom, and the impending apocalypse” by “allowing ourselves to dream”.  She goes on to claim that “Hope is a muscle we must use.”  And “the stories we tell ourselves about the past determine the possibilities for the future.”  The book’s ending lines are: “Radical hope is the most powerful weapon we have.  It’s time we use it.”

My hope is that Commune Life is a place where lots of possibilities are explored.  What I try to create here is a place for ‘radical hope’.