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In early November I headed off to find Utopia. Or, more specifically, New Harmony, Indiana. I had just flown in from Chicago, where I had spent three days researching the history of social psychiatry in that fine city, and was ready for a change of pace.
Of course, as many others have discovered, Utopia is often hard to find. Getting out of Evansville Airport, predictably, was not too difficult, but getting my rental car to start was. It seems car keys are not actually keys anymore. After setting the car alarm off a few times, I flagged down a more tech-savvy passerby who showed me which buttons to push on both key and car and I was on my way. And then I wasn't. Although I tend to print off a few hundred google maps prior to any trip, I lacked any for Evansville or New Harmony and had no idea of where to go after I left the airport, apart from a vaguely westerly direction.
I headed off in what seemed like a sensible direction and then soon gave up and bought a map of southwestern Indiana in a gas station, along with some pumpkin seeds and V-8 juice, delicacies not normally found in Scotland. I located myself on the map and headed off again, choosing to take the scenic route, rather than the highway. This, as you have probably guessed, wasn't the wisest choice and soon I was lost again, having locaed the most serpentine road in the midwest and finding myself on the border with Kentucky. I gave up - again - and located the highway, and arrived at my rooming house (for that is what it was) in about 20 minutes, announcing my arrival in sedate, quaint New Harmony by setting the car alarm off yet again.
So, why had I embarked upon my journey to Utopia? Well, like most academics away from home, I was going to a conference, organized by the University of Southern Indiana's Center for Communal Studies and celebrating the 200th anniversary of New Harmony, a fascinating town on the Wabash River, nestled snugly into the extreme southwest corner of the state. Although I know next to nothing about communalism, I wanted to test some of my ideas about social psychiatry on experts on socialism.
The other reason I wanted to go, however, was the connection to New Lanark in Scotland, to which I visit regularly. New Lanark was founded (or at least re-founded) by Robert Owen (1771-1858), an industrialist and social reformer who wanted to create a better system for the working class. Owen arranged for wealthy investors (including the philosopher Jeremy Bentham) to purchase the cotton mills situated deep in the Clyde Valley with his reforms in mind, and then set out to transform them to be a more humane workplace than those existing elsewhere in Britain. Children were the primary beneficiaries. Owne reduced their working hours, raising the age at which children could work and provided education. Although a landmark in improving child labour, New Lanark wasn't a complete success, and soon the peripatetic Owen was looking west for a new opportunity.
He ended up in Indiana in 1826 where the German millenialist George Rapp (1757-1857) had established New Harmony in 1814, having previously set up Harmony, Pennsylvania. Owen's New Harmony project was even more of a struggle than New Lanark. Believing that people could simply get along if they were all working for the common good (along with some profit for himself), Owen invited anyone to take part in the experiment. Soon, everyone from Pennsylvania scientists to local freeloaders were arriving and chaos generally ensued. Owen soon sold up and moved back to Britain, but his sons became prominent figures in the Indiana and American educational and scientific establishment.
Although my paper on social psychiatry was the only one to deal explicitly with mental health, issues about mental health were never too far from the surface at the conference. After all, many might think that setting up or joining a utopian community is a wee bit unbalanced. If you are the founder, you may be so stressed out from life that you just want to get away from it all (this was partly the case with Rapp, whose religious sect was persecuted in Germany; let's not focus on his idea that the end of the world was nigh, there's context to consider after all...), Or, you might be more like Owen, deluded into thinking that you had the insight to design a utopian community and the power to spread it across the globe (we'll leave the sanity of travelling to southwestern Indiana in the early nineteenth century aside as well). Those who join utopian communities might be said by some to suffer from similar slightly, or sometimes not so slightly, delusional ideas.
Another way of looking at it, however, is that maybe it's the rest of us who are crazy, embodying Einstein's definition of madness as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. In other words, maybe those of us who find the world a wearying, depressing place and yet do nothing to change it, casting scorn upon those who come up with alternative was of doing things are the ones who need our heads checked.
An example of this came during a keynote by University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Erik Olin Wright. During the course of his talk, Professor Wright presented about a dozen examples of alternative economies, ranging from free public transportation and communal gardens to micro banks and a guaranteed minimum income, that were not based on capitalism and had communalism at their heart. During questions, Wright, a former president of the American Sociological Association, predicted that capitalism will be replaced in about 20 years. Crazy? Maybe. But so, too, would be to ignore the positive benefits of many of these alternative economies and keep doing the same thing again and again. Seeking utopia might be fruitless, but not doing so is certainly hopeless. Which is worse?
I managed to find my way back to Evansville Airport without any hitches. I stuck to the highway, the trusted path, got to the airport on time, and then found out that my flight was delayed. I missed my connecting flight back from Chicago to the Heathrow. Perhaps I shouldn't have been in such a rush to leave New Harmony.
