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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
I have to admit that the subject of utopian communities holds more than a certain morbid fascination for me. Coleridge and Southey once proposed to build such a community to further the ideals of the French Revoluton without drawback of the Terror. Entitled pantisocracy it was to be founded in the New World, by the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, on land bought by the radical Joseph Priestley after his exile from England. Fourier had devised a similar concept, a self-contained community called a phalanstery (as at Brook Farm), several of which were founded in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, figures like Ruskin experimented with such communities (in his case, the ill-fated Guild of St George set out to create agrarian communities were the dignity of labour need not resort ot mechanised techniques), but the advent of such social experiments as communism and fascism has tended, with the exception of some projects like Christiania or the Kibbutzim, to reduce the enthusiasm for such projects. So I was interested to come across this:"From this flowered Evans’s belief that humans were no longer living in the kind of society that suited them: “We evolved over three million years — we spent 99.9 per cent of that time living in small hunter-gatherer bands with minimal technology, such as bows and arrows.”
Then, 10,000 years ago, came farming and an explosion in food production, which could suddenly sustain huge populations and fuel progress: “The dominant view is that our current lifestyle is indisputably better,” Evans says. “I’m beginning to think it’s not indisputable — in fact, our modern lifestyle is something we’re extremely badly adapted to. No society has more leisure time than the hunter gatherers. On average they spend two hours a day gathering, preparing and cooking food. The rest of the time they sleep a lot, play a lot, make love, and tell stories. The concept of working to survive is unknown, as is the concept of hierarchy.” Primitive cultures, he says, report lower rates of mental disorders, and have more control over their lives.
Evans compares human beings to animals that have been taken out of their natural habitat and reared in captivity. The result is high rates of stress, disease and psychological suffering. “I think of this (the Utopia experiment) as gradually ‘re-wilding’ people,” he laughs. "
I should confess immediately that my morbid interest in such experiments notwithstanding, my instinctive reaction is to presume that this experiment will go the same way as phlansteries and pantisocracies (particularly since much of this experiment in primitivism appears to use solar power, the Internet, modern medicine and sundry other accoutrements of a technological civilisation). The obvious criticism remains that primitivism leads to an existence that can be best described as 'nasty, brutish and short.' Nor does it help that Evans himself compares his project to Alex Garland's The Beach, which rather does the work of satirising his project without any external assistance being required. Finally, the desire to remove modern technological and social progress can easily be viewed as conservative rather than counter-cultural, in the same spirit as my previous post on Luddism and futurism.
Nonetheless, it does seem to me that such experiments can be important and worthwhile (particularly since more modest experiments like New Lanark and Port Sunlight arguably did achieve much in reshaping society for the better). I might not have high expectations for such projects and am certainly not going to take part but I'm nonetheless rather glad that they still exist. Finally, having noted this story through Butterflies and Wheels, I have to make a final admission, namely that this does confirm many of my prejudices regarding certain strains of conservative thought within evolutionary psychology. Certainly, the above dislike for all technoligical and social experimentation doesn't strike me as being all that far removed from Steven Pinker's abhorrence for artistic experimentation.
posted by Richard 12:47 pm
