Utopia

"The word means ‘no place,’ a place that does not exist. So ‘utopia’, from Thomas More’s time onwards, is a place that is predicated on invention. Thomas More’s Utopia shows you cannot have a utopia without commonality of property. More was building on older ideas about an earlier age, an Edenic state, when private property didn’t exist. He talks about how there are no locks on the doors in Utopia, because if you don’t own anything you do not have to protect against theft. He talks about how there is no private interior in Utopia. “The word means ‘no place,’ a place that does not exist.” The Oneida community abolished property, like the utopia More envisioned. But as More surely realized and as soon became apparent in Oneida, you can’t abolish privacy. You can say there is no such thing as private property. But the notion of personal privacy, even intellectual or spiritual privacy, soon creeps back in. More anticipates this when he talks about how there will be little crime in utopia because everything is public business. In my study of utopias, this is often the sticking point. A lot of utopias had a notion of a common good that includes property held in common. The tricky part is how you prevent that from becoming oppressive in a Panopticon-like way, which insists that all private business is public. Some say it underscores the ridiculousness of the utopian project. Marxists have read it as a precursor of socialism. There is an ambiguity in tone that people wrestle with. Originally Oneida entailed not only shared property but also shared persons. Noyes wanted to create one ‘glowing sphere of God,’ as he called it. So the idea was not only to share property but also to share people. Possessive feelings about a wife or a child or a friend, like attachment to personal property, were seen as inimical to a state of holy fusion. They tried to excise ‘stickiness,’ which is what they called attachment. But they found personal attachment, sexual attachment particularly, hard to root out of the human soul. They tried to discipline people out of monogamy. When Oneida dissolved as a religious community and became an economic entity producing silverware, they retained the social egalitarianism from the old days. They tried to practise an enlightened social capitalism, where there was relative equality between the workers and the management. But they reverted to monogamy, to stickiness. Not only did they revert to monogamy but they also started to market the silverware they sold by appealing to the traditional monogamous instincts of the America public. Their most famous campaign, during World War II, was called “Back Home for Keeps.” It showed a beautiful woman embracing a returning solider. So the Oneida community financed some of the original goals of its community – social and economic egalitarianism – by reversing their efforts to uproot domesticity."