Problems with Utopias: Introduction

 Over the past few years, I have attempted several retellings of the classic Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. On the one hand, I consider the book to be one of the more interesting and substantive "modern" (1915) utopia novels. On the other hand, like with all utopia novels, it suffers from the burden of its own premise. 

The posts here address problems with utopias. Each post is connected to one or more chapters in my tribute/critique of Herland, His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding.

First, however, I had to face the issue that it may not be possible to argue with the utopia-mindset at all: 

The best explanation of this issue comes in a mystery novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Documents in the Case. The story is told through letters, reports, newspaper articles. One of the reports, written by the murderer's flatmate, John Munting, contains this insightful passage:

 [Lathom] is a real creator--narrow, eager, headlong, and loathing introspection and compromise. He questions nothing; I question everything...I cannot settle and dismiss questions, as he does, in one burst of inspired insight or equally inspired contempt...It was my fault that I did not help Lathom more, for, just because of my uneasy sensitiveness, I understood him far better than he ever understood me. It would have suited him better if I had violently disagreed with him. But I had the fatal knack of seeing his point and cautiously advancing counter-arguments, and that satisfied neither of us.

I have encountered a similar problem when faced with "no, no, Kate, this is the way life is" seamless narratives/theories from people on both the right and the left. 

I cannot agree with them, but I also fail to argue adequately because the response, "But life is more complicated than that--if you research any given time period, you will discover that your theory loses credence and even falls to pieces, especially when you look at history through the experiences of the individuals who actually created it"...comes across as waffling. 

Granted, I am personally drawn to pundits and thinkers who allow for nuance and variety. And I like to think that those pundits and thinkers win in the long-run.

But can one really argue, in the short run, with the "life is this an unarguable seamless theory" mindset?

In my master's program, one of my fellow students would make "life is seamless" arguments, usually by utilizing a shallow version of Marxism that seemed mostly comprised of blame and Marxist terminology. (Not that Marxism offers much--but her narrative was trite, even by Marxist standards.) 

Nowadays, the student would likely wield a trickle-down version of CRT. And, unfortunately, these days, the student might be given more credence than when I attended classes over a decade ago. When I attended classes, the proclamation, "Those workers only said those things because they were brainwashed by the authoritarian establishment" was met with a kind of awful silence. The rest of the students--most of whom were quite leftist--would then move the conversation back to more intelligent ground: let's listen to the workers rather than reducing them to a "poor" group to be pitied, labeled, and disposed of.

I could never figure out whether I should argue with the "I have life all figured out and under my thumb because I have a theory" student or not. It seemed to me that the only person who could argue with her was a right-wing pundit. The two could batter each other with conspiracy theories disconnected from individuality. Everybody in the past was... They could toss labels and derisive comments at each other. 

(I came to the above conclusion about noisy arguers in 2004--it seems a trifle prescient now!)

 

As Kristin says in Last Man Standing (after Mike and Ryan start tossing "Bills" at each other), "Everyone has their own set of facts and a cable channel to back up the opinion that he already has."

In any case, my retelling/reimagining of Herland is an attempt to add nuance and complication to a utopia. And maybe that can't be done! No reason not to try. 

Chapter 1

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of Isolation

It is typical of utopia novels/tracts to start with "I met a man who told me about..." similar to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

More's Utopia, for instance, is described by a traveler, Raphael, who claims the island was already populated when a group of Romans and Egyptians arrived there in a shipwreck. The resulting perfection is a combination of those cultures. James Hilton's Shangri-la is described by one man to another man based on the first man's encounter with Conway (the Ronald Colman character in the 1937 movie). Shangri-la is in the mountains and only reached by Conway and his companions when their plane is hijacked. 

All versions of His in Herland have struggled with this problem. In one version, I created trade between Herland, an island, and the mainland over a bridge. 

In the current version, I place Herland in a far more isolated position, even more isolated than in Gilman's book. In the book, the young men hear stories about the country (about the size of Holland) from guides plus they discover woven cloth in a river. Stuff leaks out.

The problem, of course, is that in reality, people also tend to leak out. Why wouldn't Utopia's fisherman keep going? Why wouldn't Herland's citizens up and leave? George Mallory isn't the only one who wanted to climb a mountain because it was there.

In fairness, Gilman's women are infinitely practical, which is a welcome change from rampaging idealism, but human nature is not infinitely practical, male or female. Road trips and rituals like Rumspringa exist for a reason. Good grief, Gilman got a divorce and hauled herself and a child all the way across the country to California--why wouldn't her women do the same? For that matter, at age 25, I drove cross-country in a non-air-conditioned Dodge Colt (stick shift) in the summer with a cat by myself. I would never do that now! (People get more risk-adverse as they age.) 

Even during Japan's most extreme isolationist period, people still knew it was there and eventually showed up in a "here we are; what are you going to do now?" way. (And, yes, people did leave, even if they did so partly unintentionally. Courtesy of Eugene, see John Manjiro, "whose biography would barely be believable as fiction.")

In addition, one of the most fascinating revelations of archeological digs is how much people in the past got around. Goods from Asia show up in medieval England. Folks from England show up in the Mediterranean world.

Not to forget, during the nineteenth century, that time of no-holds-barred nationalism, the attempt by antiquarians to discover the "pure" past of a nation ended in failure. German fairy tales weren't German--for one, a lot of them were French. 

And so on.

Isolation is necessary to utopias. Mobile people undermine utopias since (1) restless people indicate that people care about more than "needs" (sorry, Marx); (2) if mobile people can leave, other mobile people can arrive, and there goes the perfectly structured society. 

Star Trek tackled this problem in several ways (setting aside the utopian ideals of the show itself). TOS tackled it philosophically: How can you thrive if you are too happy? TNG tackled it, to my mind, somewhat more realistically. In "Masterpiece Society," the engineers on the planet are too excited about Enterprise technology to give it up. Now we see the cost of not being part of a space-faring community! No, thanks!

Welcome to human nature. 

To avoid the plot issues created by constantly mobile people (hard to write a critique of a utopia if the upshot is, "Yeah, well, it lasted about ten minutes"), the current version of His in Herland is extremely isolated--though Terry suggests that even this state of affairs can't last. 

People are always going to come.

Chapter 2

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding 

The Problem of Bullying

Many utopias purport not to need a police or other type of civil force. Citizens are described as complying with the society's blueprint. Something as basic as More's city-dwellers NOT agreeing to move to the countryside for 2 years is never addressed (or even contemplated). Goods NOT being automatically distributed as expected is also never addressed. 

The non-compliant behaviors aren't crimes, not by any credible moral standard. Suppose a city-dweller decides to leave the countryside before the 2 years of required labor are up? Suppose a city-dweller doesn't agree to give up a garden plot after the allotted time? Or an artisan doesn't want to leave one family to live with another as expected? 

The narrator claims that there are few private disputes in Utopia, which "observation" doesn't correspond to any human society that has ever existed in the course of history. 

Granted, More's Utopia is partly a thought experiment--but one imagines that a thought experiment would include some way to enforce the expected social customs/structure. Faced with how often human beings would fall short in More's Utopia, how could it possibly be kept going as described?

There are only two ways: totalitarianism or stigma/condemnation. 

More falls back on a combination. The ultimate punishment is in fact death--first, the malefactor (breaker of customs) is placed into slavery (from which the malefactor can be pardoned), but if the prisoner/slave continues to rebel, the slave is killed. (How slaves are monitored is bypassed: the necessary number of guards is never addressed.)

The section on Punishments and Rewards, however, focuses more on condemning bad behavior (what must not happen) than on establishing laws. The virtuous are rewarded with accolades while the threat of possible stigma lurks around every corner (social media, anyone?). Citizens, for instance, can eat at home rather than in communal cafeterias but "no one does it willingly because it is not thought proper...besides, it would be stupid." 

Guess all us homebodies will have to go live in one of the colonies (thank goodness!). 

Many utopias disguise this inherent bullying with assumptions of compliance. They then rave about harmony and beautiful vistas, rather like small-minded American idealists being ushered about by bored Soviet hospitality managers. Oh, my, everything looks so nice--how can Reagan be so critical of the USSR?! (See PJ O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell.)

In Chapter 3 of His in Herland, I have Terry make the following point: 

"To be held inside walls without consent is imprisonment, however beautiful the walls or pleasant the food." 

In Gilman's Herland, the three men are taken captive by a cohort of tough, athletic women, about forty in number. Terry is carrying a gun but shoots over the women's heads. Interestingly (and I think correctly), Gilman has Terry balk at shooting the women directly. He is a product of his nineteenth-century upper-class culture. "Women and children first" was not quite as common as popular culture likes to argue (on the Titanic, most of the crew simply wanted passengers, any passengers, to get in the lifeboats). But the concept existed. Terry, for all his faults, is a man's man. He won't shoot women. He won't shoot anyone in the back. 

I took the guns away since my Terry is somewhat more cool-headed and slightly more ruthless--and is perfectly aware that women can be soldiers.

However, I also have my Terry "pull his punches" in the confrontation with the women. The men have arrived on the island/in the country, imagining they are tourists who will be shown the nearest hostelry. The women see them as invaders and behave accordingly. Terry doesn't want to start an international incident.

Gilman gives the women a bland, remorseless demeanor, but she also tries to present them as non-violent. It isn't...force! Oh, no! It's a kind of...herding...

Gilman is a good writer--a point I will refer back to later--and I want to give her her dues. But Terry is my truthsayer and the truth is...Taking people captive is taking people captive. 

Bullying is bullying.

One of the worst aspects of modern-day bullying is when people argue that their "niceness" or "good intentions" or "high-mindedness" or "identity" or, for that matter, other people's bad behavior/thoughts somehow wipes out the fact that they are using underhanded and cruel techniques to accomplish actually nasty things: take away people's jobs, smear their reputations, steal their life's work, commit violence against them, and attempt through various venues to cow them into submission. 

It's jealousy and small-mindedness under a veneer of benevolent righteousness. 

Likewise, taking people captive--while it might be justified--doesn't transform into something else simply because it is labeled something else. Violent or not, justified or not, the women ignore the men's human rights and put them in the equivalent of prison. 

In Herland, Van, the social scientist, tries to to explain everything (away); Jeff, the chivalrous, well, boob, thinks the women are pure and noble simply for being women. Both try to excuse the women's behavior by labeling it something else. Only Terry sees it for what it is--and he respects it. 

Elizabeth Bathory

To her credit, while keeping Terry somewhat more obnoxious than even I can stomach (but appropriate to his time frame), Gilman allows that Jeff, at least, is off-base. 

As my Terry states in the next chapter:

"Hopefully, the women’s agenda wouldn’t entail screwing us before chopping off our entrails or sending us on suicidal missions against a prowling enemy or playing games with our disemboweled guts or mounting our decapitated heads on spikes." 

My Terry knows more history that Gilman's Terry. Everybody has the capacity to be nasty. Someone doesn't instantly stop being a bully because that someone is female or the upholder of a utopia or because the behavior is labeled something else.   

Chapter 3

His in Herland or 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 Chronocentrism: Part II, Old Games

Utopias often insist 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? Because--

Awfulness must exist to justify the utopia builders.  

People can honestly believe that something is wrong with a government or educational institution or town or family or themselves. They can honestly wish to fix what is wrong. 

However, utopias, to a great extent, rest not on grunt work (making something better one difficult task at a time) but on revamping the system based on a bunch of ideas. And those ideas often directly correspond to the self-perception of the utopia builders. 

They don't want to acknowledge the awfulness--or fix the awfulness--as much as they want to be congratulated for calling attention to the awfulness. Their egos (sometimes their reputations) are on the line.   

In my fan fiction, I often use the common trope of an after life where people can move between heavens. Yet one character insists on staying in a heaven that makes her unhappy. When she was alive, she associated with the same people. Back then, her sophisticated and dispassionate worldview made her special: she was enough like the people in her clique to speak their language but enough unlike them to be "cool" (though she would never describe herself in that way). 

She could transfer to a heaven that actually agrees with her worldview, but if she did, she would no longer have the cache, the zing, of being more worldly-wise and clever and say-it-like-it-is than others.

She is only unique and unusual and above-it-all if she can stick around the people she used to stick around. Except they care less, now that they have other heavens they can run off to. So she is increasingly unhappy, waiting endlessly to be admired once again. 

In her book, Morning After the Revolution, Nellie Bowles makes a similar observation about cancel culture--that the mutual act of canceling creates warm and fuzzy feelings among the cancelers. But then, one has to have someone to cancel in order to be achieve those warm and fuzzy feelings. And people mustn't get bored with the canceling and go do something else (if they do, they are traitors). 

In sum, utopias and utopian thinkers depend to a degree on having something to correct or criticize or dislike or triumph over. Achieving tasks is less important than putting someone or something in that someone or something's place (the world has been temporarily well-ordered: ahhhh--and I do believe there is a kind of accompanying endorphin rush).

Again, utopias, especially in nineteenth-century America, were often honest reactions to troubling and unfair conditions. The problem, of course, is that the initial upwelling of fellow feeling so often descended into monolithic pictures of awfulness followed by attacks on the "other side" followed by an insistence that everyone follow the current rules...and the utopia became a dystopia (see the French Revolution). 

The descent from utopia to dystopia doesn't appear to come about due to a desire for change or due to that fellow-feeling upwelling. It appears to come about because the utopia builders--like my fan fiction character--can't stop thinking about their status and reputations. They can't stop setting up hoops for others to jump through to prove how far the utopia builders have risen: "I'm more saved than you" social posturing.  

In Herland, for instance, the mentors query Van if the old games in his culture "develop the faculties you wish to encourage."  Under the pressure of weighty expectations, despite his lack of actual experience and direct knowledge, Van tells the mentors--leaders of an elite group--what they want to hear; he determines that most children are bored by old games; one child always has to initiate play to get the duller children moving; in addition, "unoccupied children" commit "foolish, destructive, sometimes evil things."

No Calvin & Hobbes in Herland! 

But then, Gilman was far less observant about children than the Opies.

In His in Herland, Terry remarks on the mentors' criticism of "old games": 

I grinned at the image of irrepressible Alim as a correct and deferential tour guide. And I’d already corrupted him. He knew I was teasing with the word “proper” and glared at me. 

“And she knows excellent games,” I added.
 

“Yes, well, Alima prefers the old games,” Tyra [a mentor] said. 
 

And that’s how I got the low-down on Tyra.
 

Maud, Somel, and Zava were more direct in their observations. Tyra is the type of bully, male or female, who insults through “code.” Troas citizens are supposed to prefer new games, the ones carefully crafted to help students discover their potential. No doubt the old games involve dirty limericks, scuffles in the dirt, and “unhealthy” competition alongside Calvin & Hobbes incomprehensible rules, the kind of rules that don’t improve anything or go anywhere. 

Alim played a game from the mountains of rushing a line of peers with linked hands. No doubt, like most playground games, he learned it from older peers who learned it when they were younger. At some point, the parents played it too. Wasn’t honoring parental role models a virtue? 

But Troas claimed not to practice “ancestor worship.”

Chapter 8

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

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

The Problem of Babies and Bathwater

Many utopias are closed environments that aim to preserve the benefits of a supposedly harmonious culture: neighbors who care; a meeting of the minds regarding philosophy and dress and upbringing; easy communication, which--as Sapiens points out--gets more difficult in communities larger than 100-150 people. 

The utopians don't want any of the attendant negatives.

Basically, utopias want small-towns, villages, without all the yucky stuff, such as lack of diversity and, oh, witch trials. 

Because, yes, witch trials are more likely to come about in closed, insular environments than in open, cosmopolitan ones. 

One of the irritating aspects of both "it takes a village" leftism and "once upon a time, people were respectful and knew the difference between right and wrong!" right-Pollyanna-ism is the failure to allow that good thoughts by themselves do not produce well-working societies. There is a need for infrastructures. 

Diversity AND harmony don't come about by magic. They don't marvelously materialize because people who really, really want them run around saying so. In fact, diversity and harmony are naturally at odds, which is why dictatorships always revolve around removing choice.

As my Terry states, 

"True unlikeness bothers people. Pluralism pushes people’s buttons, which is why they always want something easier to manage. Diversity won’t stay put, different only to a point. Besides, no matter how many people are satisfied, any system will leave someone out. And that someone will complain."

Gilman, to her credit, attempted to create a fully diverse society with Herland. In fact, it is implied in several places that it is somewhat more diverse than even Gilman admits to her upper-class audience. 

The problem? As my Terry suggests, Herland wants the diversity to stay put, controlled, different only to a point. Not so diverse that the citizens will actually passionately disagree about, oh, abortion or vaccinations or individual rights or Motherhood or government or crime or punishment or religion...

Enough diversity to be admirable. Enough to show that the system works. But not enough to actually put anything or anyone at risk, to result in, say, witch trials or a turnover in leadership. Gilman, like many utopians, wants to split the good stuff from the bad without allowing for underlying principles--the very things that create the good stuff may lead to outcomes she doesn't want. 

So, for instance, Gilman presents education as exploration. For Anne of Green Gables lovers, Miss Muriel Stacy, the new teacher who inspires Anne to sit for her boards, is a great example of what Gilman argues for in Herland. Even Terry admits that allowing children to explore is better than having them learn by rout. And Alim confesses that although Terry's world attracts him, "his description of public and private schools, despite the sports, made my skin crawl." Gilman gives her young women comfortable clothes, a right to self-knowledge and individual person-hood. 

Yet Gilman fails to allow that such exploration and person-hood could lead a truly passionate young woman to question her society's boundaries, no matter how supposedly fulfilling.

My Moadine acknowledges Terry's point here:   

“Small desires lead to larger ones. A young woman who likes jewelry will eventually see such trinkets in entirely positive terms. Artistry. Beauty. Decoration. Genius. She will question why she should forbear having a child, someone with potentially the same interests and desires. She might even decide to keep that child close, raise it to her expectations, carry on her vision. Others like her might gather, perhaps form a guild. They might wish to bargain their creations for more materials. And if that justifiable request isn’t fulfilled, the young woman and her friends might question the workings of a society that diminishes them, keeps them from visions of excellence, honestly pursued.”

I [Terry] stared at Moadine, my hands hanging loose.

"Yeah, that,” I said, sounding like Alim. “Change, disagreement, varying opinions—they’re all inevitable. Only crazy people think a presidential election shouldn’t split a nation.”

Moadine knew about American politics by then. Not that she admired them—but who did?

I have Moadine go on to argue that culture--not force--keeps Herland's citizens from going too far: "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." 

Moadine has a point. The problem? Powerful cultural expectations don't dovetail with the accepting, tolerant, and "roll with the punches" culture Gilman wants to create. Take into consideration, for instance, that many supposedly more "harmonious" countries than the U.S. have far stricter immigration laws. 

And Terry counters: "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." Eventually, always, inevitably, the culture changes. The noisiest, non-harmonious elements make themselves felt. 

(Thanks to Eugene for the comparison between the phrases!)

In fact, ironically enough, the search for answers (promoted by Gilman) can be part of a cultural upheaval that brings down a utopia. When that upheaval arrives, either top-down rules or in-place infrastructures prevent the whole thing going off the rails into anarchy. To avoid the use of the former (dictatorships quelling grassroots revolutions), the latter need to be in place already. Impossible to add them overnight.

Chapter 10

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of Nothing to Do

Fiction, poetry, art, even mythology pose a problem for utopians. Upholders of utopias supposedly like all that stuff (one is supposed to appreciate Art) but art has this difficult-to-monitor tendency to break out in unexpected ways. The Bible is a great example since no matter how many times people attempt to reduce it to a specific set of rules suitable to a specific social order, other people come along and said, "Hey, look! This story of Joseph--or Exodus--can be used in a completely different way."

Luther started a religious revolution and then lost his cool (which he never had much of anyway) when people said, "Oh, does that mean I can start my own religion!?" 

Consequently, many utopian so-called novels turn into polemics. Even Lost Horizon--which gets the closest to pure story--falters in the middle so Conway can reflect on the meaning of life. 

Preachiness is an aspect of the form. In fact, some utopia tracts are tracts, not novels. Even Samuel Richardson, while writing the Twilight of his day (Pamela), spent a great many chapters wittering on about social propriety and the role of servants, etc. etc. etc. 

The central chapters of Herland are almost entirely "here's how the society works" exposition as opposed to the novella's earlier action and dialog. 

I give a number of characters in His in Herland various reflections on life, religion, industry & economics, education. But I didn't want to lose sight of the narrative arc. I needed to add action! 

Terry was the action! 

Terry's disruptive influence is mentioned in the book, but Gilman restricts that influence to constant arguments between Terry and Alima. In the book, they are basically Ross & Rachel. 

The revolving door relationship actually makes sense but the lack of other avenues doesn't. It is unimaginable that the men wouldn't be put to work doing something. All those jobs Gilman pretends don't exist or, rather, pretends don't take time and grinding effort (as long as they are done by professionals), like washing dishes and changing dirty nappies. Hauling firewood or whatever fuel the country uses. Building stuff. 

Her men are products of their class and seem to take for granted that they don't have anything to do...so they hang out with their foresting girlfriends/wives all day.

Reality: nobody, male or female, agrees to be bored for that long. Victorian men going to their "clubs" without fail sounds impressively dull. Some men did do this, but many more were involved in philanthropic and scientific societies; the ones who weren't got into trouble with cards, duels, opium, and STDs. 

Van, at least, has the benefit of continuing his work as a sociologist and writer, but there is no good reason he couldn't also be put to work on printing or transcribing books. Doctor Jeff is not expected to keep regular clinic hours, and Terry--the planner and explorer (businessman)--is entirely at loose ends. 

In the central part of the novella, Gilman implies that the men are free to go where they want. There's no reason Terry couldn't simply walk away from (another) argument with Alima and start exploring the way he wants to. Yet he doesn't.

To forestall the obvious, I keep the men more monitored.

And I get Terry into trouble. In his own words, "I was getting ready to broach the subject [of Alim leaving] when I nearly blew everything by behaving like a character in a Rider Haggard novel."

Chapter 11 not only contains a scene of Terry getting into trouble, it challenges an utopian ideal, namely that removing ornamentation (jewelry, hair ribbons, makeup, sports apparel, etc. etc.) will also remove the desire to peacock. The women wear a kind of uniform (Van never notes any radical dissimilarities in dress). Herland heavily implies that the end result is more freedom of the self and equality.

Terry doesn't believe it.

Terry is (mostly) right, as an Ohio State University study discovered. And as Mrs. Pollifax notes in Mrs. Pollifax on the China Station, despite China being a supposedly classless society, demarcations of class are still noticeable: "[P]erhaps [Mr. Li's] attire wasn't modest at all, she thought, as she glanced around and compared him with the other Chinese waiting in line, for his sandals were leather, not plastic."

The individual wants to be heard.  The individual wants to do "my own thing," and should the individual get paid, the individual wants to spend that money on whatever the individual desires. 

No utopia can simply expurgate those impulses. No matter how abstract and philosophical utopians try to be, all those Rider Haggard behaviors--making the wrong things, pursuing the wrong ends, exploring the wrong places--keep throwing characters back into story. 

Thank goodness! 

Chapter 11

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding

The Problem of Sex

Every utopia falls apart on the issue of sex.

Who should have it? How often? Marriage? No marriage? Polygamy? Abstinence?

PJ O'Rourke once wrote that humans are the only animals to feel shame after coitus. Consequently, humans surround the sexual act with rules, restrictions, lore, art, mystique, warnings, excuses, labels.

In sum, society tries to label what ultimately cannot be labeled: inner perception and lifestyle choices, which are often a confluence of environmental and biological factors. What people like. Whom people like. How often they like them.

There aren't enough labels in the world.

Which doesn't stop the utopians and moralists and everybody else from trying.

Gilman postulates a kind of platonic-meets-abstinence culture. She is as direct as her class and culture permit, which means not so much (the Bohemians were more direct, but not as outspoken as people think). In the book, Jeff and Celia obviously get busy immediately after their marriage since Celia is pregnant before Ellador and Van leave Herland. Terry gets more and more riled by the lack of sex until he attempts to rape Alima. This act gets him thrown out of the country. Take into consideration: a wife claiming rape by her husband was not accepted until the mid-to-late-twentieth century, so Gilman is making a strong pro-women argument (Gilman is generally not as radical as her supporters often try to present her--she is here). 

Interestingly enough, Gilman allows Van to reflect that Terry hasn't been entirely understood or treated fairly. For one, Van castigates Gilman's version of the Alima character for playing come-hither games with Terry.

Ellador doesn't play come-hither games with Van. She doesn't want to get pregnant (the old-fashioned way) and birth control, though it existed in the nineteenth century, was not all that reliable. Consequently, Ellador and Van have a semi-platonic relationship (in my version, Terry states that Alim believes they've gone further than they admit).

The unfortunate--and rather unimaginable--outcome (says this product of willing wives within Mormon polygamy) is that Herland woman are presented as almost entirely uninterested in sex. I challenge this idea by postulating that the Northern citizens of Herland (Alim's hometown) bond and live together.

And before anyone starts shouting, there is evidence that members of societies in which there is a low count of the other sex (China, for instance, is low on women for reasons entirely connected to Mao), the majority sex will form relationships with same-sex partners, whatever an individual's personal proclivities/label. People like to bond. And people like sex. Welcome to human nature.

No utopia knows what to do about it.

Religion is often a scapegoat here. The current, near-pathological insistence on name-calling by progressives challenges that assumption--or, at least, the assumption that religion is alone in its efforts to put all that messy biological stuff in its place. 

 

Utopias, religious and otherwise, from Plato to...name someone...are doubly stymied because the very individual nature of a very individual act (as Martin says in Frasier, "Sex is between you and the person you are doing it to") often challenges the long-term vision of the state.

The consequence is that often utopian creators/leaders tie themselves into endless knots trying to resolve problems within their created systems, which systems depart considerably from the reality of those individuals and the biological, human body.

Sex is a mess. Utopias don't like mess. 

Chapter 16

His in Herland or Astyanax in Hiding