![]() Even the dogs are put to work carrying goods through the capital city of Icar. There he wrote Journey to Icaria (1840), about an imaginary nation where the food is prepared by the committee on nutrition, the clothes sewn by the committee on clothing, the labor each citizen does decided by the committee on labor. Then there’s Étienne Cabet, a left-wing legislator from Dijon under the July Monarchy who was banished to England for his political views. This summary is immediately sent to the press and then it is distributed to neighbouring communities by a dog who carries it around his neck.” “When a session of the Exchange is over,” Fourier writes, “everyone writes down a list of the meetings which he has agreed to attend, and the negotiators and directors draw up a summary of all the transactions. There is no central authority instead, the members negotiate their work, their meals, and their sexual arrangements on a kind of stock exchange. All the types get up early: At 5:00 AM there’s a parade of workers singing and playing instruments as they march into the fields. In practice, this meant the organization of people into “phalanxes” of 1,620 members, one male and one female representative of each of the 810 types of human character. Charles Fourier, a traveling salesman who lost his money in the French Revolution, believed that he had discovered the “analytic and synthetic calculus of passionate attraction,” a science by which human desire might be channeled to harmonious and productive ends. ![]() The ideal communities of the French socialists who took up the idea of utopia three centuries later are just as bad. There be neither wine-taverns, nor ale-houses, nor stews, nor any occasion of vice or wickedness, no lurking corners, no places of wicked councils or unlawful assemblies.” For fun they play an educational game “not much unlike the chess,” where virtues do battle with vices: It’s the only place in Utopia where the vices sometimes win. “Now you see,” More says, “how little liberty have to loiter, how they can have no cloak or pretence to idleness. True, Utopia’s slaves are shackled with chains of gold, but since gold has no value in Utopia, the main thing the slaves must note is the weight. In More’s ideal state the day begins with an early-morning lecture, then three hours of compulsory labor, lunch, three more hours of work, an hour of recreation, then a dinner at which the old and the young sit side by side so that “the sage gravity and reverence of the elders should keep the youngers from wanton license of words and behaviour.” No one in Utopia travels without a permit merely for a man to take a walk in the woods outside town, he must obtain “the goodwill of his father and the consent of his wife.” Those who break the rules are punished with slavery. I can report to you that despite the short working hours and the attractive women (not a feature of More’s book, but of nearly every utopian fiction written thereafter: almost all of them, incidentally, written by men), utopia is not a place I’d want to live. I hadn’t read More when I walked past Petopia I have read him now, and several other utopian writers besides. ![]() But the question lingers: Apart from its questionable value as a marketing strategy, what is utopia good for? Most of those hopes ended as Petopia did: furniture sold at auction office space going cheap. You can sell things on the strength of it, or so it must have seemed to the founders of Petopia, all the way back in San Francisco in the 1990s, when many people were entertaining utopian hopes for the Internet, that literally placeless, or u-topian, region. Even people who haven’t read Sir Thomas More’s 1516 Utopia, or any of the other books in the utopian tradition-which is to say, most people-recognize utopia as a desirable parcel of real estate. It crops up in all kinds of places this was one of them. I don’t mean to be flip or to equate the company’s marketing strategy with any genuine utopian impulse, but it did occur to me that the idea of utopia is strangely persistent. A huge white banner hung over his head, with red letters five feet high, spelling out THIS IS PETOPIA. ![]() It was midnight when I passed its brilliantly lit atrium, void of humans and furniture, except for a single desk where a night watchman sat looking dejectedly at the street. More than a few years ago now, when I was living in San Francisco, I happened to walk by the office of a dot-com, a competitor in the online-pet-supply business, that had gone bust. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |