Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

2024; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/utopianstudies.35.1.0285

2154-9648

Mark Allison,

American Environmental and Regional History

Kristen R. Ghodsee has written a wide-ranging, highly readable, and commendably radical vindication of utopian thought and experimentation. Everyday Utopia is aimed at the educated lay reader—itself, perhaps, a utopian projection—rather than specialists. Nevertheless, all but the most erudite and cosmopolitan of scholars will encounter unfamiliar and compelling utopiana within its pages. While her earlier book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (2018), concentrated on "state-sponsored solutions" to the deprivations of capitalism and patriarchy, the present volume sets its sights squarely on the private sphere, and utopian visions "for rearranging our domestic lives" (17).Ghodsee situates this turn to the domestic in two contexts. The first is the COVID-19 pandemic, which revealed the frangibility of the international commitment to gender equality. "Women around the globe woke up and realized that decades of feminism had done little to reverse the social expectation that mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters should provide care for young children, elderly parents, and sick relatives, as well as perform the emotional labors that hold families together in times of crisis," she laments (xii). Everyday Utopia's second context is the spate of recent works of "popular neo-utopianism," including Rutger Bregman's Utopia for Realists (2017), Aaron Bastani's Fully Automated Luxury Communism (2019), and Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler's Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think (2012) (14). What Ghodsee finds wanting in this discourse is its myopic focus on the public sphere, and its unspoken presupposition that our private and domestic lives have no such need of utopian renovation. But it is just this presupposition that the COVID-19 lockdown discredited, although many other indicators (runaway housing and childcare costs, the environmental crisis, the epidemic of loneliness) already suggested as much. Ghodsee rightly insists that "where we reside, how we raise and educate our children, our personal relationship to things, and the quality of our connections to friends, families, and partners impact us as much as tax policies, the price of energy, or the way we organize formal employment" (14). As utopian thinkers from Plato forward have understood, moreover, it is short-sighted to suppose that sweeping economic and political transformations are possible without a concomitant rethinking of the "intimate worlds" that subtend these public domains (15).Accordingly, Everyday Utopia devotes its succeeding chapters to examining alternatives to the dominant institutions of the contemporary private sphere, including the single-family household, the monogamous couple paradigm of childrearing and mating, and the institution of private property. In each case, Ghodsee plumbs the past and limns the present to highlight utopian alternatives to contemporary norms. Among this book's greatest strengths is its consistently international range of examples and admirably sustained commitment to feature "experiments that have received relatively less attention" in the extant literature (xv).Take, for example, the chapter on communal alternatives to single-family homes. Ghodsee includes many of the usual (and eminently worthy) suspects: Buddhist and Christian cenobite monasteries, Fourierist phalansteries, Israeli kibbutzim, and the Corbusier-inspired "microdistricts" of the former Eastern bloc (47). But we also learn of less canonical phenomena, such as the Neolithic proto-city of Çatalhöyük, "one of the first major settlements in the world," where as many as eight thousand people lived in an essentially contiguous structure, in highly egalitarian and likely non-consanguineous households (32). Or consider the Beguine nuns, a lay order founded in 1190 that survived, albeit in attenuated form, into the twentieth century. The Beguine lived communally in urban areas, enjoying liberties unthinkable not only to their cloistered counterparts, but to virtually all their female contemporaries: they brewed beer, made lace, taught school—and traversed the streets unchaperoned. The chapter concludes with a discussion of contemporary cohousing. In Denmark, roughly one percent of the population was living in co-housing communities, many of them multigenerational, by 2017 (56). In Berlin, Baugruppen (building groups), in which families pool their resources to erect multifamily dwellings, proliferate. "It is silly to be dismissive of radical social dreams when there are so many people already showing us how to turn these dreams into practical realities," Ghodsee opines at the outset of Everyday Utopia (xiv). This assertion rings truer with each subsequent page, as the extraordinary range of examples that Ghodsee has marshaled accumulates.The chapters' divisions, it must be said, are more an organizational convenience than strict analytical demarcations; some themes and examples reoccur in multiple chapters (albeit from different angles). Even the book's stated intention to focus on the private sphere is more of a heuristic than a rule. (And a good thing, too, since Ghodsee, a scholar of Russia and East Europe, offers, among other gems, a fascinating capsule study of Alexandra Kollentai, the first Soviet Commissar of Social Welfare, who designed "a state-funded system of universal early childcare combined with job-protected, fully paid maternity leaves" that would eventually find institutional form in East Germany [95]).1 Notwithstanding this capaciousness and relatively relaxed structure, Everyday Utopia does possess, if not quite unity, a definite thematic center of gravity; namely, it explores utopian alternatives to the patriarchal nuclear family.The patriarchal nuclear family is, of course, a supremely important node in the social structure. Here, the activities of mating, childrearing, and property management (including resource sharing and inheritance) are condensed; moreover, it serves, in the bourgeois social imaginary, as the atomic unit of civil society. Drawing on classic feminist and Marxist critiques, Ghodsee points out that the patriarchal nuclear family coerces men into the role of provider and saddles women with an unending round of domestic and care work. To this familiar analysis, she adds several fresher charges: the patriarchal nuclear family is environmentally wasteful (think of the long blocks of suburban homes, each outfitted with a full complement of soon-to-be obsolete and landfill-bound appliances); suboptimal for children, who, she convincingly documents, flourish when their primary caregivers are supplemented by alloparents; and increasingly outdated, given the proliferation of alternatives from the "chosen family" category pioneered in the LGBTQIA+ community to platonic parents and polyamorous configurations. Against the hegemony of the patriarchal nuclear family, Ghodsee advocates "family expansionism," a state of affairs that would "allow us to each arrange our domestic lives free from the meddling of state or religious authorities" (180). In addition to improving our everyday existence, such domestic flexibility can quietly sap the foundations of the capitalist order. "The way we arrange our family lives has profound political consequences," Ghodsee avers, "and one way to challenge a particular political system is to reimagine the fundamental institutions that underpin it" (218).But what about the patriarchal nuclear family's reputation, particularly in conservative political and religious discourse, as a natural, even sacred institution? The latter claim is easily dispatched: as Ghodsee demonstrates, many religious communities have employed alternative family paradigms. And the idea that the patriarchal nuclear family is natural (and, by fallacious extension, morally good) is subject to a harrowing critique. In the most effecting of the personal anecdotes with which each chapter begins, Ghodsee describes the chronic spousal abuse that her father inflicted on her mother, Josephine; on one occasion, the fortuitous presence of Ghodsee's maternal grandmother is all that saves Josephine from death at the hands of her own husband. Even before the pandemic quarantine, which precipitated a horrific upsurge in domestic abuse, The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women estimated that one-third of women globally suffer intimate partner violence in their lifetimes (176).In short, Ghodsee will not let sanctimonious or sentimentalized conceptions of the family stand, nor will she let its putatively "natural" status go unchallenged. "Within the scholarly worlds of history, anthropology, archaeogenetics, psychology, and evolutionary biology, a broad consensus suggests that there is nothing inevitable about the traditional picture of the nuclear family consisting of a monogamous pair who provides virtually all of the care and resources for their biological offspring," she reports (180). In this regard, Ghodsee's advocacy of family expansionism is not merely a utopian demand but an effort to reclaim the full spectrum of mating, childrearing, and family practices that have "allowed humans to adapt and change over our evolutionary history" (186). "Family expansionism," she elaborates, "allows us to live closer to our long history of cooperative breeding. We can embrace a diversity of ways to forge lateral platonic relationships, to nurture romantic and sexual ties, and to bear and care for the next generation. Although these can be linked together, there is no reason they have to be" (228, emphasis added).Such calmly stated and elegantly reasoned pronouncements belie their own radicalism. Ghodsee is not offering a sanitized or watered-down utopianism in these pages but an exhilaratingly full-strength draught.In a book that ranges so adventurously, occasional factual mistakes are all but inevitable. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's anarchism was not influenced by William Godwin's (146); the Saint-Simonians advocated abolishing inheritance to rectify the misery of the proletariat, not "to liberate people from . . . the constraints of bourgeois marriage" (although the group eventually took aim at matrimony as well) (208); Charles Fourier's "private fortune" was not sufficient to bankroll the phalanstery he projected—or even to spare him from his detested job as a commercial traveler for very long (253). But minor errors of this kind are a small price to pay for a text that exhibits a well-nigh Blochean appetite for utopian phenomena in all their manifold forms.A more serious objection might be leveled at Everyday Utopia's tendency to downplay the persistence of patriarchal, genocratic, and even autocratic assumptions in much utopian thought, literature, and experimentation. My students are always quick to spot such vestiges in Thomas More's genre-founding Utopia: women retain responsibility for cooking and cleaning; wives are subject to the authority of their husbands; the eldest enjoys authority in the household. Even intentional communities and formations that were astonishingly progressive in their approaches to gender, sexuality, and the family often rested upon such dubious foundations. For example, Ghodsee rightly spotlights the Oneida for their commitment to gender equality, female sexual pleasure, and collective child-rearing. But these practices depended on the charismatic, patriarchal authority of John Humphrey Noyes for their viability.These cavils notwithstanding, Everyday Utopia is a thoroughly commendable work. It is a perfect book to give to sympathetic but uncomprehending friends and relatives; to assign, in excerpted form, to students; and to quarry for utopian formations to research in greater depth. Ghodsee deserves praise for so ably and fearlessly hoisting the utopian standard.