The Problem of Sameness, Part II, Culture

The problem of sameness occurs in other utopias. Thomas More's Utopia promotes cities that are all "exactly alike" in layout. Plato likewise argues that the elite members of his Republic will share "common houses and meet at common meals." (Gilman was not a fan of communal living and allows for more "me" time and space in her utopia.)

The similarity in architecture and habits extends to an acceptance of established norms (ironically, since utopias are often formed in protest of standing norms). James Hilton's Shangri-la, for instance, though somewhat more hands-off than Plato and More's utopias, is based around the entirely unbelievable assumption that two people in a dispute--over a woman, for instance--will settle it peacefully because one person will let the matter go out of sheer "que sera sera" whateverness (as if an entire culture was run by Bingleys rather than Darcys). 

Hilton has his main character, Conway (who is something of a que sera sera guy himself) question the ability to get people to let things go. As with More and Plato, stigma (or "shame") is the operating factor, the inculcation that certain things are simply "not done." 

Gilman plays with the idea of accepted norms but is less willing to explain precisely where so much harmony starts from. She promotes individuality and an unnerving degree of cultural sameness at the same time. That is, she wants the easygoing "that's just the way things are" attitude of Shangri-la (More and Plato are more willing to punish people). Unlike Hilton, however, she doesn't have an entire tradition of cultural mores to back her approach. 

Shangri-la is based within a Tibetan high-context culture that promotes profound cultural convergence. Gilman wants to force an American/European culture towards the same end while retaining the low-context aspects of that American/European culture. 

In sum--

Herland combines intense individuality where one gets to do one's own thing and talk back to superiors and strike out on one's own path  paired with cultural harmony in which one subordinates oneself, at least in public, to the common good and acquiesces to that public's customs. And every leader is perfect, so they are admired, but if they weren't, they wouldn't be.

Yeah, right. 

An inability to recognize the inherent tension between the above positions is one of the most annoying aspects of people who praise about utopias. Many countries with greater cultural convergence than America/Europe also have far stricter immigration laws. Many countries with greater cultural convergence include far more stigmas about behaviors, even placing those behavior into the category of mental illness. Many countries with greater cultural convergence exhibit far more deference to older people, so that in the BL that I watch/read, achieving the parents' consent or, at least, the parents' lack of disapprobation is considered a primary goal. (So is going to school, getting good grades, working hard, and not causing unnecessary furor in public settings.) Pluralism takes a back seat to not rocking the boat.

The response to these obvious observations is to hack up cultures and people to create imaginary results. Preachers of "it's so much better over there" ignore that most other cultures are as complicated and multi-faceted as their own. Instead, they (1) present those cultures as monolithic entities; (2) "translate" those cultures to fit their needs and views.

In Chapter 5 of His in Herland, Terry complains about his companions' willingness to define the new world they are in as an extension of their own assumptions:

One payoff of our failed escape was I found a kind of refuge, a place to go when the demands of propriety became too much. I went alone. Jeff and Van were convinced that another attempt to escape would—who knows? Our imprisonment hadn’t changed substantially after our first attempt except for an increase in guards. I think Jeff and Van were afraid that another attempt to flee would be “offensive,” like showing up to a house party without a gift.

Chapter 5

His in Herland: Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of Work: Nobody Does the Yucky Jobs, Part I

At one point, idealistic Jeff praises the

women for cooperating like "bees." My Terry

points out that a queen bee kills other queens.

Pollyanna with attitude.

One of the major problems with utopias is that they are invented by people who don't understand grunt work or specialization. 

Like many utopia builders, Charlotte Perkins Gilman resided in the class that could be termed "white collar." 

She wasn't as wealthy as her relations, the Beechers. She wasn't as poor as the Alcotts. And she did her own share of grunt work to pay the bills. But she never entirely understood it. 

Many utopia builders don't. 

Grunt Work

Gilman did work hard as a writer and lecturer. She wrote constantly. She traveled constantly. And the work was exhausting. 

But it was work she liked, not work she loathed--namely, it wasn't the boring, niggling, not so interesting stuff that must get done at some point. When people "helpfully" suggest ways for me to care for my elderly parents, I usually roll my eyes. Like utopia builders, their ideas are full of sweetness and light. In truth, 60% of caring for my elderly parents isn't coming up with clever ideas. It's sitting on the phone, waiting to badger someone. And filling out paperwork. And cleaning up messes. 

When More argues that members of his Utopia only have to work 6 hours a day (aside from the two years when they go off to be farmers), he is ignoring that daily grind--the reality that nothing in an urban environment can be sustained without someone filling the potholes and shoveling up the horse droppings. In Lost Horizon, Shangri-la is presented as entirely beautiful and modern--the baths are from Ohio (seriously)--while the well-paid "porters" are credited for the items' arrival. Nobody explains how exactly heavy-duty construction materials, such as pipes, and other items could be carted in over the treacherous passes without (1) numerous porters dying; (2) a major commercial interest noticing. 

And who is putting in all the stuff when it arrives? Are those workers doing the grinding, dusty, dirty work for the good of the other residents? Because they (conveniently) enjoy grinding, dusty, dirty work? They actually might. But it's not the kind of work that can be started and then stopped (only 6 hours a day!) or performed at a leisurely pace (not without causing more problems--see issues in pouring cement). Which means, a group of somebodies is working quite hard behind the façade of delightful and restful beauty.

Roman roads are honored for a reason. Michelangelo's attempt to create decent access to a marble quarry was made for a reason. 

As Terry remarks about the roads in Herland:

“This is no sanctuary of females. There have to be men here,” I kept insisting because frankly, laying asphalt is back-breaking work that requires substantial physical endurance. 

Van argued later that the women used powered machines. A manufacturing site exists on the western edge of the country (we never got to see it). I doubt the possibility of hard work occurred to Jeff. He certainly didn’t seem troubled by the idea that any group of people, including women, spent arduous hours keeping the road he was praising smooth. In Jeff’s mind, hard labor will never be synonymous with the kind of people Jeff personally knows. 

So we walked along the road that Van saw as abstractly detrimental [for environmental reasons], and Jeff saw as wholly beautiful, and I saw as toil.

Someone, Terry points out again and again, is doing a lot of hard work to keep the country clean and functional: 

And there were the assumptions [the mentors] presented as givens, ideas to be accepted without skepticism. Such as, We have no aristocracy.

What does one call a group of people who teach and discuss “national matters” in a well-tended hotel with good food and constant service while others are shoveling tar, scrubbing fountains, cleaning up garbage and refuse, maintaining vehicles, cutting down trees, hunting for plant-threatening insects (Alim’s job) and larger predators, building walls, weeding gardens?

Merely because people aren’t being “paid,” doesn’t mean they aren’t accruing more privileges, more ease than others.

Van argues that the mentors also cleaned and scrubbed. But then Van has no real idea how long it takes to unclog a toilet. Someone else does it for him, just as a whole host of someone elses were maintaining the country’s day-to-day infrastructures while the mentors conversed with us in airy, hygienically clean rooms.

In fairness, Gilman saw grunt work as a specialty. If she had the money (she didn't), she would have willingly paid manual laborers large sums of cash.  

Unfortunately, she didn't understand specialization as a lifestyle. 

To be continued...

Chapter 6

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of Work: Yucky Jobs, Part II

Specialization

Gilman is an exception to many utopia builders because she did notice grunt work (she'd had to do it) and she did think it should be fairly compensated. 

In fairness to Gilman, at Fruitlands,

the women did much of the work.

In comparison, one of the more irritating aspects of Plato, More, and many nineteenth century transcendentalists is their conviction that agriculture isn't THAT hard. It is just, you know, work. But anyone can do it. 

More's Utopia sends people to the fields for 2 years after which they can come back (unless, of course, they--wink, wink--WANT to stay). The system utterly ignores the issue of specialization. All the education in the world can't replace hands-on experience. Every 2 years means that every 2 years, an entirely new group of farmers would have to be retrained on how to breed cattle and how/when to plant and how to get the best yields. How to butcher. How to harvest. How to help domesticated animals give birth... 

It's hard to believe that More was this stupid, and C.S. Lewis is likely correct that More was being extremely ironic in a very English "can't you tell I'm joking?" way. 

Bronson Alcott was a sweet man whom 

everyone loved--and he was daft. 

The transcendentalists who started farms and then were shocked--shocked!--when they didn't have time to philosophize in the evenings were, in fact, that stupid. 

As mentioned, Gilman understood the theoretical idea of specialization--especially with people who would care for children--but she never grasped it as a reality. Her main female characters in Herland are supposedly specialists--nature girls who roam about checking trees for bugs and so on (forest rangers, basically)--yet they never seem to be in the woods since they are always sitting around with their boyfriends and attending lectures on the meaning of life. 

That is, Gilman utterly fails to grasp what it means to be devoted to a specialty, especially by someone who is not a "meaning of life"  philosopher. If the young women truly love what they do (which Gilman claims), they would either...

(1) Roam all over the country, examining trees and noting issues with bugs and growth; they would compile reports; they would give lectures on THEIR specialty; they would get all nerdy with other forest rangers. 

(2) Pull a Gerald Durrell and spend hours examining a particular patch of earth. 

The remarkable aspect of the young Gerald Durrell is that he did both of the above. When his family arrived on Corfu, he roamed all over the island, learning the language and collecting animals. He also had the capacity to sit for hours noting the behavior of the insects on the wall near one of the family's homes. 

Watch a prepubescent child who is engrossed in a valued (by the child) activity. That combination of energy and obsession is very normal. One minute acting like a dinosaur. The next, learning every single name of every single dinosaur. 

Alim reports a conversation with Terry about his childhood. The child Alim behaved very much like a creature who combines roaming/wildness with obsession:

  One day early on, I decided to drop eggs from a rooftop. After the third egg, a mentor rushed up the side stairs, several youngsters at her heels.
  The mentor, Novine, watched me set an egg rolling until it tipped over the edge. It turned and turned and turned before splattering on the road below. The youngsters giggled. Novine sat beside me. She watched another egg tip and turn and splat.
  “What are you doing, Alima?” she said finally. “Is this an experiment?”
  “No.”
  “You’re learning a great deal about eggs and air and the way things move.”
  Juste would have told me I was wasting eggs. Maddy would have told me to clean it all up. And she would have swatted me. Maddy was the kind of mother the mentors had decided shouldn’t be a mother, which was probably why she moved to the mountains and why she took over my care when I showed up. I adored Maddy. I still miss her.
  “No,” I told Novine, which was the truth.
  I was aiming for the tip and the tilt and the oh-so-satisfying SPLAT at the end. I’d begun to wonder if something bigger might make a more satisfying splat. Two eggs together maybe. Or—
  “But you are discovering something,” Novine prodded. “You are uncovering your potential, your interests—”
  I suppose I was discovering that I liked to drop things. I wondered what might happen if I filled a container with water and dropped it. The sound would be more crash than splat. The water would push outward in the satisfying way it did when I hit the surface of a pool. I could hurl the egg, not merely drop it, and it would disintegrate faster, make a louder noise—

Creative-for-the-hell-of-it experiments.

[Terry asks,] "When did you stop throwing things off rooftops?”
  “About the same time I got in trouble for trying to light things on fire, sunlight through glass, you know.”
  He snorted. “Boy’s antics.”
  I stretched at that, practically purred like the silliest cat. Terry’s tone was proud, fond, impressed.
  “Were you punished?” he said.
  “When I caught twigs on fire, Tyra suggested I tend braziers in the temple. I—”
  Panicked, but I didn’t want to admit that to Terry.
  “I didn’t want to work in a temple,” I said with the same sullen tone I used when I responded to Tyra.
  “You wanted to be outside,” Terry said sympathetically. “Moving. Your hands on something. I know the feeling. Lots of rules you have here.”
  “The mentors encourage experiments.”
  “Sure. But the outcome is always the same, isn’t it? Improvement. Advancement. There are conventions to maintain.”
  “That isn’t true where you live?”
  “Yeah.” He sighed. “You’d think not. We have so many opportunities, you’d think people could just leave each other be. But every society produces its humorless dictators. Creative-for-the-hell-of-it action gets short shrift.”

"[Happens] more often than you'd think," Howard

says about Sheldon and Leonard's science fight.

Gilman does not seem to comprehend that any true specialist--educated or not--will behave in similar fashion to Alim, male or female. The behavior is not dictated by theory. In fact, it often overrides its so-called "purpose." Specialists don't stop being specialists when their specialty gets in the way of propriety. Or the State's objectives.

Like many utopia builders, Gilman didn't observe the world. She explained it.

To be continued...

Chapter 7

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

 

The Problem of Chronocentrism: Part I, The Past is Entirely Awful

Chronocentrism has two aspects. Nobody captured both aspects better than Charles Dickens:

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. 

Utopias tend to present this classic reflection as follows:

It was the worst of times but it produced us, the best of times, to fix everything. 

In sum, utopian chronocentrism determines that thousands and thousands of years of human experience have culminated in a bunch of people who define the universe as being entirely about themselves.

Trickle-down CRT is enormously distasteful precisely for this reason. If you are confused why any group of people would voluntarily agree to be absolute enemies in someone else's narrative (rather like acquiescing to an emotionally abusive relationship), the explanation here is ready-made: 

It puts that villainous group at the center of everything.

And since the bad behavior on the table is entirely theoretical (and uncontrollable), it places the real pain and horror--as well as any real responsibility--at a distance. People actually believe that adopting the right terminology is the equivalent of "doing something."

It isn't.

Chronocentrism is one reason my church lost its cultural hold on me fairly early. I couldn't buy into the idea that I was a member of a "special" generation. I didn't want to be. And the more I learned about history, the less I thought I was. Moreover, there are few things as distasteful as sitting in an air-conditioned (if slightly smelly) or heated (slightly smelly) church building with scores of paid-for cars outside in the parking lot while well-fed people who live in houses and apartment buildings, some on assistance, some not, complain about the evil world in which they live and how bad everything has gotten. We live in the end of times! Everything was waiting for US to come along and point it out!

The idea that all life has been leading up to "now" is a patent, egocentric falsehood. 

First, the Worst of Times

True, history is full of bad stuff. In pre-written-history, a single skirmish led to the elimination of an entire clan. The child mortality rate was incredibly high. For most of history, healthcare, for all people, was more or less a crapshoot--though people were trying. Medical conditions, ones that appall us now, like dying from rabies, dysentery, and blood poisoning, were commonplace. Plagues/pandemics didn't just shut down businesses for a year. They wiped out 2/3rds of the population and changed the economic and often the political landscape forever (such changes are, to an extent, still true: that is, disease and volcanoes do more than theory to alter social orders). 

Few people, men, women, minorities, non-minorities, had rights. Most people worked on farms/the land, which doesn't mean they didn't have individual problems and romances and ideas. But we don't know because most of them didn't write stuff down. They couldn't write. For most of history, most people couldn't write and most of them couldn't read, and that statement includes royalty. 

Children worked and the ones who didn't were treated like pawns to be moved around a chessboard. Conscription was a regular occurrence. Debtors' prisons were a reality. Slavery existed on every continent--and for most of history, it included most populations. It varied in practice. It was still a given.

The variety of food in our current culture simply didn't exist. People ate so they wouldn't die, not for the sake of a "balanced" diet. Many leaders deliberately starved members of their countries up to and beyond Stalin's Russia. Destroying a country's agriculture--salting the earth--in battle was considered a norm.

Death by hanging was commonplace and issued for multiple infractions, most of which we would consider minor. Death by guillotine was considered kinder. Torture was considered a legitimate investigatory device, not something to be debated or prevented.

There was no such thing as a free press. The left and right's use of "news" for political ends was commonplace. The world was Twitter--only slower on the dissemination end. Sex in office, fraud in office was business-as-usual.

And I could keep going... 

Despite all the negativity, in all time periods, people have...well, okay, yes, a lot of people thought they were living at the end of everything. But they weren't. And a lot of them simply kept going. Moreover, they defined the world about them in terms of THEIR standards, not in terms of ours (just as we do, as a matter of fact). 

And yet, many utopias maintain that nothing has gotten better and/or nothing has ever been as awful as it is now and/or nobody recognized the awfulness of the world until now. 

Why? 

To be continued... 

The Problem of Obsolescence

Anne Morrow Lindbergh was also a decent woman

who said really dumb things.

Gilman tackles her utopia from the viewpoint of nineteenth-century Progressivism. Some of her ideas have substance. Some are shallow beyond belief. And some...

Are deeply troubling.

Occasional Gilman defenders try to argue that Gilman's more distasteful attitudes arose later in life, after she said all the stuff the defenders approve of. In truth, a great many of the not-so-palatable ideas show up in Herland's sequel, which was begun in 1916. And they creep through Herland.

However, I believe in being fair to historical figures, just as I would want future people to be fair to me. 

Gilman is writing pre-World War I and World War II. Elements of nineteenth-century Progressivism that strike one, now, as tainted by mid-twentieth century events, were not (necessarily) then. 

Such as, just for example, eugenics. 

Gilman is completely on-board with genetic modification. Everything from grain to cats to humans is "bred" to help produce an advanced society. "Bad" citizens--a concept Terry lambasts several times in both Gilman's version and in mine--are encouraged to not produce offspring (a kind of "hold it in" form of birth control), all for the sake of the race. There are no criminals--though there are guards and a fortress--since that tendency was bred out, just as the poor cats were bred not to kill song birds.

The skin does indeed crawl--and Gilman's sequel is worse. She practically argues that war (World War I) is okay because it will wipe out the degenerates--and put those uncomfortably clannish Jews in their place (yup! the left has always been far more antisemitic than it pretends)--so the world can do better the next time. 

Gilman was truly not this awful, any more than Anne Morrow Lindbergh (see above) was (Charles Lindbergh kind of was, but that was his personality, which rested on the premise "I am the cleverest man in the universe"). 

Like Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gilman had not yet seen where such theories lead. The Holocaust was not yet part of history. 

Now that I've let Gilman off the hook, I'm going to put her back on it. Although eugenics was considered acceptable in the early 20th century and plenty of people on both the left and the right promoted ideas connected to eugenics, there were people and groups who did not, including civil libertarians and Roman Catholics. 

And guess what? They were mocked as backwards and reactionary and not on the "right" side of history!

But again, Gilman had plenty of company--and, again (to be fair), she propounded a non-violent, non-aggressive approach that would take multiple generations to accomplish.

Still, the argument is distasteful. As Terry points out, Van and Jeff go along with the mentors because although genetic determinism is tainted, both men adhere to populist ideas about environmental determinism, i.e. social structuring through language and name-calling. 

Same argument. Different skins. 

"If sports is a childish substitute, I can live with that."

Another of Gilman's arguments, though less distasteful, runs down the same rabbit-hole. Like many nineteenth-century socialists who yet despised the communal aspects of communism, she wanted the competition of capitalism to produce big brother firms that would care for individuals. She was pro-competition as far as it sustained an economy but not so far as it was generated by the individual. 

In Chapter 9, Alim attempts to defend team sports. Gilman wasn't necessarily opposed to athletics. The women in Herland freely climb trees and exercise. However, she fails to appreciate that the "non-nice" aspects of competition are not something that can be excised, the "nice" parts left standing. 

Get the trains to run on time by all means--but those who defend utopias want to do it without the more unpleasant aspects of competition (firings and bankruptcy). Of course, eliminating the unpleasant competitive side often means forcing people to work for free or under threat. 

Lots of utopians fail to grasp this babies and bathwater point. As my Terry states in frustration:

Van argues that Troas sustains the individual--while eliminating the "unhealthy" aspects of individualism: excessive competition, excessive consumption. But the argument rests on the presumption that one can carefully select on the one hand without damaging on the other. Breed citizens for greatness--surgically remove their unlikable parts--without violating their individuality and denying their biology. 

When a country rests on such circular logic, can anyone get out?

In any case, Herland is a cautionary tale to utopian builders. Every utopia risks looking reactionary within a few decades since any social order that claims to "fix" human nature (piecemeal or otherwise) will be disproved in time--sometimes very, very violently. 

Chapter 9

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding