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In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
In 2005, J.C. Hallman came across a scientific paper about "Pleistocene Rewilding," a peculiar idea from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered "megafauna." The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked the idea as much as the scientists did—perhaps because he had grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a master-planned community in Southern California. Pleistocene Rewilding rekindled in him a longstanding fascination with utopian ideas, and he went on to spend three weeks at the world's oldest "intentional community," sail on the first ship where it's possible to own "real estate," train at the world's largest civilian combat-school, and tour a $30 billion megacity built from scratch on an artificial island off the coast of Korea. In Utopia explores the history of utopian literature and thought in the narrative context of the real-life fruits of that history.
- GenresNonfictionPhilosophy
288 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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141 people want to read
About the author
J.C. Hallman
11 books70 followersI'm the author of seven books, most recently SAY ANARCHA: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women's Health.
I enjoy talking to readers, for book clubs and 1:1s. Find me at https://www.skolay.com/writers/jc-hal...
I enjoy talking to readers, for book clubs and 1:1s. Find me at https://www.skolay.com/writers/jc-hal...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 6, 2010
"Utopia is in a bad way," this book starts, then follows with this definition: "Utopia can be broadly defined as any exuberant plan or philosophy intended to perfect life lived collectively" (3). Not many pages later, Hallman lets us know where he stands, which is in favor of this exuberance: "the utopian flame should not be snuffed—it should be stoked anew," he says (13). He goes on to explore, as the subtitle puts it, "six kinds of Eden and the search for a better paradise": Hallman examines different utopian ideals/settings, in part by talking about their history, and in part by experiencing them firsthand, and by talking to others who have tried to create a certain kind of utopia. For starters, there's wilderness: Hallman goes to the forest and talks with advocates and critics of Pleistocene Rewilding. Then comes community: Hallman goes on a three-week visit to Twin Oaks, and talks to residents, visitors, and a co-founder. And then there's utopia-as-ship: Hallman visits a luxury boat called The World, and talks with Knut Kloster Jr., "the father of the modern cruise industry" and "the man who had coaxed utopian ships off the drawing board" (104). Hallman's next kind of utopia is "a meal," or more properly, food: this chapter talks about Marinetti and The Futurist Cookbook before moving on to Slow Food. We also have utopia-as-city (New Songdo, plus bits on King Gillette, Le Corbusier, and Lewis Mumford, among others) and a utopia-of-guns (Front Sight), though Hallman finds this last one to be dystopian.
I wasn't always enamored of the tone of this book (lots of eye-roll-inducing/trying-too-hard-for-humor phrases, e.g. calling Horace Fletcher a "chew guru" (140)), but I did like the way that Hallman approached his study of utopias by making it personal: it was much more fun to read his experiences with the different utopian ideals than it would've been to read a straight history of them. Sometimes Hallman seemed too present as a narrator/character, but mostly, his presence is a good thing, making you aware that people—not just the dead guys who wrote Utopia and Looking Backward and so forth, and also not just kooks or crackpots—feel a draw toward utopian ideals, toward thinking of radically different ways to structure the world to improve it—even as Hallman also emphasizes, throughout the book, the idea of utopia-as-joke (and a joke that people don't get, or "un-get,"), the tension between what's comical and what's in earnest.
I wasn't always enamored of the tone of this book (lots of eye-roll-inducing/trying-too-hard-for-humor phrases, e.g. calling Horace Fletcher a "chew guru" (140)), but I did like the way that Hallman approached his study of utopias by making it personal: it was much more fun to read his experiences with the different utopian ideals than it would've been to read a straight history of them. Sometimes Hallman seemed too present as a narrator/character, but mostly, his presence is a good thing, making you aware that people—not just the dead guys who wrote Utopia and Looking Backward and so forth, and also not just kooks or crackpots—feel a draw toward utopian ideals, toward thinking of radically different ways to structure the world to improve it—even as Hallman also emphasizes, throughout the book, the idea of utopia-as-joke (and a joke that people don't get, or "un-get,"), the tension between what's comical and what's in earnest.
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August 26, 2010I've been having a hard time lately getting into novels. I've tried realist and absurdist, whimsical and heavy, and every time period from the Renaissance to the 21st century—nothing seems to fit my mood. Even A.S. Byatt's Possession, which I can tell would normally be un-put-downable for me, is proving only moderately enthralling in my current fiction funk. Luckily, I finally figured out what I AM in the mood for: nonfiction! Not just any nonfiction, but the kind of smoothly-written, thoroughly-researched book that inspires me to utter exclamations like "Really!" and "No way!" and read passages out loud to whomever might be present. All of which description J.C. Hallman's In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise fulfills perfectly. What a relief to pick up a book and be immediately engaged, rather than wondering what's wrong with me for not connecting with it.
My late-summer malaise aside, Hallman's book is fascinating and unerringly entertaining. In it he interrogates the idea and cultural history of the utopia—from Thomas More through Charles Fourier and beyond. He discusses the fundamentally literary, and often non-literal origins of the idea: most actual utopian schemes that real people have attempted to put into practice have owed a debt to utopian novels—in many cases, including More's novels that were not intended to be taken seriously in the first place. Having studied Utopia in my senior seminar in college, and spent quite a while with More, I very much enjoyed revisiting his difficult-to-pin-down philosophical style. As Hallman writes early in his book, "the history of the world since 1516 is a protracted history of not getting the joke of Utopia. Even scholars disagree about the extent to which More was kidding when he penned his faux travelogue-treatise—it's plain that certain parts are jokes, and plain that other parts are more or less serious, but much of the book falls into the no-man's-land between those two extremes. Its history, though, is one of being taken completely seriously by many of its readers, even to the point where Spanish missionaries in the New World attempted to replicate its supposedly ideal society among the Native Americans, interpreting More's jokes as the direct voice of God. I thought Hallman was particularly insightful in speculating about WHY Utopia was often taken so seriously, particularly in Italy:
All of which brings me back very pleasantly to college, reading Jacob Burckhardt's chapters on Florence and Venice from his famous The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy against Utopia—and it now occurs to me, somewhat belatedly, that Burckhardt's depictions of Venice could actually be subtly influenced by More's Utopia, even as More was quite probably inspired to create Utopia in the first place by the reality of Renaissance Venice. The whole broad utopian project is scattered with this kind of double-reverse: at one point, Hallman discusses a utopian novel inspired by a real-world utopian settlement, which was in turn inspired by an earlier utopian novel.
But, as fun as these metatextual discoveries are, they do not make up the bulk of Hallman's book. As his title suggests, he instead gives us six main chapters, each taking on a different modern-day utopian experiment. In the process, he makes the point that "utopia" need not be a place: true, it could be a return to an edenic wilderness like that envisioned by the advocates of "Pleistocene Rewilding" (Chapter 2), a long-lived hippie commune (Chapter 3), or an uber-modern techno-city built by a contracting firm on land back-filled by the Koren government (Chapter 6) but it could just as easily be the act of journeying aboard a massive cruise ship that becomes home to its inhabitants (Chapter 4) or even a gustatory philosophy like the Slow Food movement (Chapter 5). Hallman immerses himself in each of his six subjects, traveling around the world and linking these modern-day phenomena into an ongoing history of the many stages and facets of utopian thought.
One of the techniques I found particularly effective in his book was the simultaneous integration of historical backgrounds with contemporary case examples: Hallman uses each chapter to explore a different aspect of the history of utopias, so there's no big information dump at the beginning of the book before getting into specifics. Not that historical backgrounds are necessarily dull (far from it!), but Hallman does a great job at weaving the past and present together into an ongoing discussion of the pros and cons of utopianism, and why it's both ridiculous and necessary. After all, he points out, as wacky as it is to look back on many utopian notions of the past—and it's often VERY wacky, as in the excellent late Futurist exhortation
—there are also many things we now consider "normal" that were once viewed as crazy utopian schemes, such as free public school systems and a bicameral legislature. Hallman argues that while too many failed experiments and abuses of power perpetrated in the supposed service of the "greater good" have caused the very idea of utopianism to fall out of favor, it actually represents something on which he doesn't want to give up: the hope that human society has the capacity to improve itself.
Another aspect of Hallman's book I appreciated was that he frankly acknowledges his own reactions to each of the modern-day utopias he visits. This was welcome, not only as an acknowledgment that all authors have some bias, but as an example of the point that one person's utopia is another's dystopia. Hallman explores this idea explicitly in the final chapter (which deals with a nascent town of gun-enthusiasts out in the Nevada desert), but long before then I had started thinking about it. When Hallman writes about his growing (and then waning) enthusiasm for the Twin Oaks community, for example, for the freedom of abandoning regular showers and monogamy, living in 100 square feet of personal space and sunbathing naked while topless women worked in the vegetable garden, it makes me think about what my own utopia might look like—because that is most definitely not it. Twin Oaks was founded in Virginia in 1967, and I couldn't help but wonder if the fact that I live in the millennial Pacific Northwest might contribute to my lack of enthusiasm for the freedoms of Twin Oaks—it's totally legal to walk around naked in Portland if you want to, and people do it fairly frequently. Similarly, I know plenty of folks in non-traditional, non-monogamous romantic relationships; if that kind of thing appealed to me (which it doesn't), I would hardly need to give up my personal space and private property in order to follow my dreams. Which, of course, marks the difference between me and the Twin Oaks people, for whom the lack of private property and the emphasis on community-wide decision-making is presumably a check in the plus column, rather than a horrible nightmare. It was interesting to read an account from an outsider to whom the whole idea appealed much more than it would to me, and good to be reminded that different people have very different notions of how an "ideal society" would look and feel.
My late-summer malaise aside, Hallman's book is fascinating and unerringly entertaining. In it he interrogates the idea and cultural history of the utopia—from Thomas More through Charles Fourier and beyond. He discusses the fundamentally literary, and often non-literal origins of the idea: most actual utopian schemes that real people have attempted to put into practice have owed a debt to utopian novels—in many cases, including More's novels that were not intended to be taken seriously in the first place. Having studied Utopia in my senior seminar in college, and spent quite a while with More, I very much enjoyed revisiting his difficult-to-pin-down philosophical style. As Hallman writes early in his book, "the history of the world since 1516 is a protracted history of not getting the joke of Utopia. Even scholars disagree about the extent to which More was kidding when he penned his faux travelogue-treatise—it's plain that certain parts are jokes, and plain that other parts are more or less serious, but much of the book falls into the no-man's-land between those two extremes. Its history, though, is one of being taken completely seriously by many of its readers, even to the point where Spanish missionaries in the New World attempted to replicate its supposedly ideal society among the Native Americans, interpreting More's jokes as the direct voice of God. I thought Hallman was particularly insightful in speculating about WHY Utopia was often taken so seriously, particularly in Italy:
A compilation from 1561 demonstrated clearly that the joke had been lost: Utopia was listed alongside seventeen other societal systems, a few of which happened to be real. More's perfect commonwealth tickled no Italian funny bone because it was just another layer set atop a utopian spirit already well established in Italy. For years Florence had been thought a perfect system, and by the 1500s Venice had been an ongoing republic for eleven centuries, without internal strife and without ever falling to foreign rule. Now, borrowing More's template, utopias were written starring Venice as unironic protagonist.
All of which brings me back very pleasantly to college, reading Jacob Burckhardt's chapters on Florence and Venice from his famous The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy against Utopia—and it now occurs to me, somewhat belatedly, that Burckhardt's depictions of Venice could actually be subtly influenced by More's Utopia, even as More was quite probably inspired to create Utopia in the first place by the reality of Renaissance Venice. The whole broad utopian project is scattered with this kind of double-reverse: at one point, Hallman discusses a utopian novel inspired by a real-world utopian settlement, which was in turn inspired by an earlier utopian novel.
But, as fun as these metatextual discoveries are, they do not make up the bulk of Hallman's book. As his title suggests, he instead gives us six main chapters, each taking on a different modern-day utopian experiment. In the process, he makes the point that "utopia" need not be a place: true, it could be a return to an edenic wilderness like that envisioned by the advocates of "Pleistocene Rewilding" (Chapter 2), a long-lived hippie commune (Chapter 3), or an uber-modern techno-city built by a contracting firm on land back-filled by the Koren government (Chapter 6) but it could just as easily be the act of journeying aboard a massive cruise ship that becomes home to its inhabitants (Chapter 4) or even a gustatory philosophy like the Slow Food movement (Chapter 5). Hallman immerses himself in each of his six subjects, traveling around the world and linking these modern-day phenomena into an ongoing history of the many stages and facets of utopian thought.
One of the techniques I found particularly effective in his book was the simultaneous integration of historical backgrounds with contemporary case examples: Hallman uses each chapter to explore a different aspect of the history of utopias, so there's no big information dump at the beginning of the book before getting into specifics. Not that historical backgrounds are necessarily dull (far from it!), but Hallman does a great job at weaving the past and present together into an ongoing discussion of the pros and cons of utopianism, and why it's both ridiculous and necessary. After all, he points out, as wacky as it is to look back on many utopian notions of the past—and it's often VERY wacky, as in the excellent late Futurist exhortation
To work, my aeropainters and aerosculptors! My aeropoetry will ventilate your brains like whirring propellers!
—there are also many things we now consider "normal" that were once viewed as crazy utopian schemes, such as free public school systems and a bicameral legislature. Hallman argues that while too many failed experiments and abuses of power perpetrated in the supposed service of the "greater good" have caused the very idea of utopianism to fall out of favor, it actually represents something on which he doesn't want to give up: the hope that human society has the capacity to improve itself.
Another aspect of Hallman's book I appreciated was that he frankly acknowledges his own reactions to each of the modern-day utopias he visits. This was welcome, not only as an acknowledgment that all authors have some bias, but as an example of the point that one person's utopia is another's dystopia. Hallman explores this idea explicitly in the final chapter (which deals with a nascent town of gun-enthusiasts out in the Nevada desert), but long before then I had started thinking about it. When Hallman writes about his growing (and then waning) enthusiasm for the Twin Oaks community, for example, for the freedom of abandoning regular showers and monogamy, living in 100 square feet of personal space and sunbathing naked while topless women worked in the vegetable garden, it makes me think about what my own utopia might look like—because that is most definitely not it. Twin Oaks was founded in Virginia in 1967, and I couldn't help but wonder if the fact that I live in the millennial Pacific Northwest might contribute to my lack of enthusiasm for the freedoms of Twin Oaks—it's totally legal to walk around naked in Portland if you want to, and people do it fairly frequently. Similarly, I know plenty of folks in non-traditional, non-monogamous romantic relationships; if that kind of thing appealed to me (which it doesn't), I would hardly need to give up my personal space and private property in order to follow my dreams. Which, of course, marks the difference between me and the Twin Oaks people, for whom the lack of private property and the emphasis on community-wide decision-making is presumably a check in the plus column, rather than a horrible nightmare. It was interesting to read an account from an outsider to whom the whole idea appealed much more than it would to me, and good to be reminded that different people have very different notions of how an "ideal society" would look and feel.
May 27, 2022
I really enjoyed this! Casual and challenging. Hallman is very personable and it was fun to follow this intellectual adventure.
November 24, 2010
This book is part journalism, part history, part travelogue. The author gets a hair up his ass when he hears about Pleistocene Rewilding, supports the idea, and goes on an adventure to explore utopias and utopian ideas throughout history. Hallman starts with More's Utopia and how a lot of people essentially missed the point of the satire, using the book instead as a guideline.
The author moves on to visit modern utopias in different forms and explore their roots in the philosophical (and quite often fictional) universes, including a cruise liner, owned by its millionaire inhabitants, that sails the world; A man-made island off the coast of South Korea, a community called Twin Oaks that began based on a novel by behaviorist B.F. Skinner, and others.
At times I found Hallman's style irritating. He has a really goofy, post-modern phrase replacing girlfriend, and tends to take himself pretty seriously. I enjoyed the book and learned a lot, but the narrator was kind of a douche.
The author moves on to visit modern utopias in different forms and explore their roots in the philosophical (and quite often fictional) universes, including a cruise liner, owned by its millionaire inhabitants, that sails the world; A man-made island off the coast of South Korea, a community called Twin Oaks that began based on a novel by behaviorist B.F. Skinner, and others.
At times I found Hallman's style irritating. He has a really goofy, post-modern phrase replacing girlfriend, and tends to take himself pretty seriously. I enjoyed the book and learned a lot, but the narrator was kind of a douche.
March 1, 2018
While I enjoyed the author's voice, I wished for a bit more history of utopia and utopian thought. Hallman covered a wide range of moments but never really expands enough on a particular utopia idea. It reads more like a travel book than anything else. There were some fascinating moments, but it did not deliver what I had been hoping for. This book did, however, give me some other suggestion to look into and read to really get into Utopian writing. Overall, it was a well written book that fell short of what it implies to advertise.
January 2, 2012
Author takes a tour of places and things related to the ever-present drive for, and discusses the needs and the drives for, the desires for Utopia. Overlooked apparently is any deep appreciation for the likes of Huxley's Island, other than to briefly compare it to militaristic Utopias, mainly the only ones he seems to take seriously.
February 25, 2011
An intriguing look both at the historical concept of Utopia, and at various modern attempts to create it - everything from the Pleistocene Rewilding project to Twin Oaks (a venerable intentional community.)
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews