Travels in Utopia

Shortly after leaving university, I went to live in an experimental Christian community that was a mite dysfunctional. In my bewilderment, I was downloading at Donald Reeves, then Rector of St. James' Picadilly who suggested there were two forms a successful religious community could take. The first was to be rooted in a clear set of rules, a sanctioned hierarchy, and an evolving tradition. His example of such a community was a Benedictine monastery (in which, in passing, Thomas Merton thought the only place in which one could practice communism). The second type was where the processes of life were a continuing negotiation rooted in shared practices of dialogue that allowed for a flatter structure and enabled frissons to be (endlessly) negotiated. His example of such a community was the then relatively newly formed Findhorn in Scotland. Do not, he suggested, fall between these two stools - as evidently where I was living did!

I was reminded of this sage advice when reading Anna Neima's excellent account of six post-First World War utopian experiments. All but one of which did fall between these stools and either significantly changed institutional form to survive or faded away. All six had charismatic founders many of whom found it difficult to navigate betwixt wanting to establish more democratic forms of life and yet supervise their vision's realization. All of them, also, had very different abilities (or willingness) either to practically manage their visions or allow other people to aid them in doing so. Most of them too were faced with the complexities of negotiating their 'higher' class origin with the diversity of folk who wanted to join their enterprises.

But why try at all? Neima rightly suggests, I think, that utopian experiment, whilst always with us, do ebb and flow, and what encourages it most strongly are times of social crisis when people's values and patterns of life begin to be seen as inadequate to guide either a good individual life or a meaningful social contract. Such a time was the immediate post First World War period - a cataclysmic conflict, an international pandemic, and a political class inadequate to the task of building anything proximate to a land fit for heroes (let alone heroines) - pushed certain people into wanting to think and, more importantly, act differently.

In compact, well-structured and informative chapters, Neima explores six examples of such experiments exploring sympathetically their founders, foundation, achievements, disappointments, and briefly their legacy. From Tagore's Santiniketan, we go to the linked experiment of the Elmhirst's Dartington Hall to Mushanokoji Saneatsu's Atarashiki Mura in Japan, drop-in on Gurdjieff at Fontainebleu, meet the Arnold's Bruderhof before ending in 1940s California and Gerald Heard's Trabuco College. The only one of these I was not familiar with before was Saneatsu's Japanese experiment in rural simplicity and have visited all three of the examples that survive in some meaningful form as institutions.

In reading across these six examples as well as being reliably introduced to them, you can notice the patterns of similarity and difference and come away in all six cases of thinking even if as ''utopias" they might be seen as 'failures' maybe that is not their point. Though some were aimed at establishing a permanent way of life, many found greater value in being short-lived yet intense experiments whose positive consequences continue to unfold in patterns of influence. Trabuco College may not have formed a new elite of contemplative leaders but it did inspire strands of the 60s counter-culture including the Esalen Institute's founders. Santiniketan did become a more conventional university but in its first incarnation nurtured such luminaries as the filmmaker, Satyajit Ray, and the Noble Prize-winning economist, Amrita Sen.

If I have a quibble, it would be with the inclusion of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man because, though you never know with the mercurial Gurdjieff, I doubt whether its intention was ever permanency and the new form of life that Gurdjieff envisaged was a highly individualized freedom. This no doubt would have its social consequences if achieved but was not a primary intention. Nor do I think that Neima's reading of Gurdjieff, though more sympathetic than many, capture precisely what so many remarkable individuals in their own right saw in him - and learned from him. It is, as Neima observes, perfectly true that the Gurdjieff legacy gave rise to a diversity of often competing, small (and acerbic) groups - but that would be true of many influential people sixty years after their death - Jesus comes naughtily to mind! I think Gurdjieff is better framed as the founder of an 'esoteric grouping' rather than a (failed) experiment in utopia.

Meanwhile, only one group remains, whilst developing, fully on course with their founder's vision namely the Bruderhof - and as another reviewer noted, this is the only group that was anchored in a known, coherent religious tradition (rather than spiritual intuitions or longings). That returns us happily to my starting point - in Donald Reeves' terms - it had managed to find one of the two principal recipes for the successful community - a pattern of rules, a consensual emergent hierarchy, rooted in an evolving tradition, wider than itself.

Meanwhile, what future utopian experiment? If Neima is right, then buckle up for the next wave as we find ourselves in social and environmental crises that are prompting arcs of reflection on our values and ways of life and to which our political leadership seems less than adequate in their response. Utopian experiment anyone?