“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.
Leave a Reply