Seeking and Commitment

Just a quick posting about a paper from the current issue of the Review of Religious Research that caught my eye. The title, "Why Do Small Religious Groups Have More Committed Members?," poses a question that might be useful for Ecotopia Revisited. Do members of small communities demonstrate more intense bonds with the places and people that form their community than do members of larger communities? In other words, do members of intentional communities identify with their community more than do citizens of non-intentional or urban communities? We cannot answer that kind of a question until we get some data, but the reasoning provided by Daniel Olsen is intriguing (49:4, June 2008, pp. 353-378).

Olsen argues that among religious organizations, small groups have both the highest levels of commitment and the highest rates of leaving and joining. He links the two tendencies, suggesting that both leaving and joining tend to reinforce commitment (those with low levels of commitment leave and those with the highest levels join). Although this argument emerges from the theoretical paradigm of religious economies (which frightens me with its cold, reductive logic), Olsen points to a possibility that I think speaks to our study.

High rates of leaving and joining could also be called seeking, with lots of individuals coming and going according to whether or not a religious organization facilitates their worldview (again with the religious economies model). High levels of commitment to a particular religious community could also be called dwelling, with individuals "buying in fully" to a particular model or worldview. If this is true, then can Olsen's thesis be translated as "communities fed by intensely seeker-oriented processes strengthen the dweller-character of those communities"? Just a playful thought...

Extracting liquid modernity (from a solid state?)

Jonathan Swift had little patience for the extraordinary claims made by some of the more adventurous travel writers of his era. As the Age of Exploration drew to a close, Gulliver’s Travels already signaled the incredulity of imposing abstracted social systems. Among the most hilariously convincing of all Swift’s characters are the professors at the University of Laputa, among whom one has spend the last eight years attempting to “extract sunbeams from cucumbers.”

Given that sunbeams go into the making of cucumbers, should not we scholars be able to retrieve them, if even analytically? My foray into a (satirical) utopian novel demonstrates some of the conceptual difficulties we face: utopianism is clearly a key ingredient in the cultural matrix around intentional communities, destination resorts, and small town Americana, but how can we extract this ingredient? I would contend that social systems cannot be reverse engineered; hence we need to be rigorously self-critical about how we attempt to theoretically dissect the objects of our study.

One of the most troubling problems of this research project is the widespread profusion of the term ‘utopia’ in popular culture, literature, and academic theory. Beyond the classical antinomy built into More’s coinage (by definition, can perfection exist?), utopia works as a descriptor for places that are nice to live, a comforting false consciousness, a kind of dreaming constitutive of the modern age, a kind of critical imaginary exercise, and a branch of literature that engages with fundamental questions of social and natural organization.

Because the people and communities we are researching do not necessarily pursue explicitly utopian visions (i.e. they are not necessarily carrying out a coherent project as were followers of Bellamy, Fourier, Skinner, etc.), we should not use the word “utopia” to indicate what Russell Jacoby calls “blueprint utopianism.” From the religious and educational reforms proposed by More and Bacon to the social and economic restructuring advocated by Fourier and Bellamy, the social incarnation of utopia can be understood as a bringing to fruition of a imaginary society, a kind of project that is at once critical and generative. Perhaps Jacoby’s alternative classification, “iconoclastic utopianism,” can help us resist the temptation to reduce the communities of Ecotopia to recapitulations of utopianism from earlier moments of the modern age.

What challenges this research aspiration, however, is the fact that by recognizing that we cannot oversimplify modern environmental utopianism as a coherent social engineering project a la Marxism, we risk sinking in the quicksand that is (post)modernity. If the modern age as we inhabit it today can be characterized as “liquid,” then it is worthwhile to think through what it means for people to engage in utopianism fluidly. ‘The ideal’ is no longer an economic structure or a social mechanism; rather ‘the ideal’ itself comes under constant scrutiny. It is always produced, and thus consumed—and the consumers are often aware of the processes of fabrication. So as not to collapse into pure cynicism, our study of the salience of utopianism amongst the communities of Ecotopia requires two things; first, humility in the face of the impossible task of extracting certainty about ‘the ideal’ society in an age of radical uncertainty; and second, an insistence that dreaming and hoping remain important ingredients of modern life, even if those dreams and hopes can no longer be discretely tied to particular, visceral imaginary worlds.

Quick Note

Just a quick note on websites: Most websites for businesses and the city of Cannon Beach contain panoramic images of the Oregon Coast. The descriptions of Cannon Beach on the websites seem to primarily concern the natural beauty of the coast. The real estate site describes where each site is in relation to the beach/town. While this isn't exactly a clear representation of utopia, I think that it hints at the sort of Cascadia as special/more beautiful attitude held by Cascadians.

Dystopias - Not Explicity Produced...?

I just ran across a interesting factoid about The Dalles. In 1984, it was the site of the first bio-terrorism incident in the US (http://www.wbur.org/special/specialcoverage/feature_bio.asp). These sort of politically and culturally dystopic events are not readily discussed in city websites. While I might just be stating the obvious, I think considering the dystopias hidden (i.e. historical events found through research) can be an interesting way to evaluate dystopias and utopias. Another well known event that took place at The Dalles was the flooding of Celilo Falls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celilo_Falls) and a neighboring settlement in 1957 with the construction of The Dalles Dam. The falls are a cultural and historical site in that they are home to thousands of pictographs and petroglyphs (now covered in water) and to an abundance of salmon (stocks now depleted). Native Americans once fished on platforms above the falls, rich with salmon. Interestingly enough, the US Army Corps of Engineers picked a select few pictographs and petroglyphs to save from dammed water, including "She Who Watches," that can now be seen at Horsetheif Lake State Park.
Like Evan said, there is some discussion of the hydropower and commerce that the dam brings to The Dalles (and Lewis and Clark), but as far as I can see, there is no apparent discussion/production of Celilo Falls history or other dystopic events on The Dalles' websites. While there is Horsetheif Lake, I think you have to dig deeper into public discourse to find The Dalles' more dystopic past. It seems that there is a selective public memory of historical events, and that within Cascadia, there is a greater focus on certain visions of utopias.

processing utopia and dystopia, and perhaps a rejection of "place"

Wikipedia says that "dystopia" is a place of human misery, poverty, oppression, etc, that does not pretend to be anything but what it is. It goes on to say that "anti-utopia" is a place that portrays itself as a utopia, but in reality is quite the opposite. It's easy to call utopia and dystopia opposites, but as we've discussed here and there, that doesn't quite seem to cover the subject. In this post, I'm trying to sift through what these terms can mean in relation to our study, and see where that takes me. I find that I haven't actually gone through the process of asking myself the questions in our interview, and I realize that could be quite helpful in digging a bit further into this study.

Let's start broad-brush and cursory first. There's the actual, physical reality of a utopia or dystopia. That is, someplace that is environmentally and socially smooth and positive, vs someplace of degredation, oppression, the like. It seems much easier to picture a dystopia that actually exists, as opposed to a utopia. Easy answer - some places in Africa we've seen on the news. Environmental degredation exaccerbates power tensions, rivals flare up, violence is the law, and the people don't have adequate means to meet their needs. Right? And if I had to actually admit to some idea of utopia as existing, mightn't I say the PacNW is pretty darn close? I appreciate what I think Jenn said from our interview - the abundance here is quite striking of paradise. I also imagine certain places abroad, perhaps in some small area in Switzerland. Or I can imagine happy, content small villages across the world, but my gut reaction seems to be skeptical that such a small scale utopia isn't just fortunate enough to be ignorant of larger scale dystopias it's embedded in.

Indeed, concrete ideas of utopia/dystopia rapidly begin to crumble... as soon as I zoom in even a little to the ideas presented above, it's not so accurate to label a place one way or the other. In the dystopia scenario, is everything absolutely hopeless? Do familial relations in some positive way or other still exist? Are individuals able to have some sort of light within themselves? The stories paint pictures that strike me as a complete and total hell... but at what scale is one willing to zoom in/out to in order to find traces of utopia in dys, or dys in utop? One need only to inquire as to the people in the PacNW for which abundance is not readily available to see the fissures in this paradise.

I'll take a brief interlude into my experience of Auroville. If you recall, I sent out a video report from the BBC on alleged sexual child abuse in the village. I did a little follow up from the Auroville site, and the report received strong opposition for being carried out in a very poor journalistic way. Still, the accusations highlight the thin veil between utopia and dystopia - or, according to wikipedia, anti-utopia. Auroville portrays itself to be a utopia, if I ever heard one. The stated "purpose of Auroville is to realise human untiy". To live in Auroville, one "must be a willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness" (check out the website to find these references). Brings up ready questions of what that actually means, and how one is supposed to figure out if potential Aurovillians are indeed such "servitors". While I was there, as I may have shared, our group of students was sent on an initial tour of AV, during which we met with several different Aurovillians who lauded and praised the community for its unique and indeed utopic accomplishments. Towards the end of this introduction, we met a man who expressed quite the opposite sentiments of the community, which left many of us feeling betrayed. We came to AV expecting a paradise - a vision that was strongly described in various pamphlets and info we were given before arriving. This one man, even in the midst of the many others who at least told us of their satisfaction and awe of the village, dashed so many of our hopes; and I found just how fragile the glass city of "utopia" we had all constructed in our heads actually is.

That one encounter turned a lot of the students off to AV. Of course they were going to enjoy their time there, but AV was sort of permanently set aside as a joke, or a deranged sort of playground. For myself, I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could fully understand this place; that certainly there were disturbing and negative aspects of it, but there were also beautiful, positive aspects. Even more importantly (I believed then, and it would be an interesting subject to explore again), the core of this place was not physical, but rather constructed around an ideal - a realm of being that existed more in the spiritual lives of the people there than the physical. I also understood that communities cannot be accurately assessed from the outside, which, even as a temporary resident for four months, I certainly was. So, I decided to not write AV off or view it as paradise, but rather accept it as the most I could understand it to be - a complex and open experiment.

Indeed, it seems common that every concept of a physical manifestation of either utop or dystop is taken on somewhat uncomfortably.... one can't help but be skeptical of even one's own construction of what "the ideal" would actually look like. And if we accept that utop can exist in dystop and vice versa, even just in the glimpse of a personal happiness and satisfaction within a very different environment, then the terms seem unhelpful in dilineating anything other than that - happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, joy, or pain, discontent, suffering.

So what can they dilineate? In what sense is it meaningful to even use these terms anymore? "Anymore," because as Jacoby and Harvey write about, utopia seemed to be more viable as a physical reality in earlier times. For a variety of reasons, skepticism has grown around the term. I chalk it up loosely to a widening of perspective - which I believe is also something Jenn mentioned. With the communication and tech we have now, we are hyper-aware of the multitude of realities out there, leaving little room to believe that a true manifestation of the "ideal" is possible. And yet, there is something there, something compelling or salient in utopia...

It's the dream. And it's the nightmare. Maybe utopia and dystopia should just never be used to describe actual place - ironic, considering the meaning of the words, the outright claim that they are concepts tied down inherently to place. What's the equivalent for "space," instead? "Good" or "bad" "space," meaning these terms are meant to be used in the realm of dreaming. They are meant to allow space for one to explore one's dreams and nightmares, and from that space, move into physical place.

All the above processing I think means that I would just rather put to rest the association that people have (traditionally?) between "utopia" and "place". Funny... here we are trying to tie it back down to place. Or maybe just explore the relationship? I guess I'm saying that I would rather acknoweldge my "utopia" only as my own dreams. What makes me happy, and what makes me unhappy. And in a community... if it's "utopic," I would say that the people have common dreams, common ideas of what makes them happy. But the difference, I suppose, between good space and good place is that with space, one (or the comm'ty) acknowledges that the shared dreams are not necessarily shared realities. And so a healthy "utopic" comm'ty to me would be one in which we have common dreams of what makes us happy, but a pluralism of what that looks like in the physical reality. ... And I'm not sure what that looks like, either.

Perhaps I have just processed through a lot of obvious detail, and reached a similarly obvious outcome. But you know how processing goes. I feel at least a little more secure of my own ideas of utopia.... and I think I'm getting a more detailed scope of some of the concepts in this study. More to do...

Utopia, Apocalypse and Experimental Communities

I just had an invigorating and equally complex conversation about utopia, apocalypse, and temporary experimental communities. My friend Eric is very much involved with Burning Man (BM) and its many offshoots, and is currently a co-owner of a community-esque project built around an art studio in the SE. We started by talking about BM and what kind of community that is. In his words, it's "hyper-focused and hyper-real," happening so intensely and so quickly thanks in large part to the internet. BM the festival is only one aspect of something that's really largely about the disparate communities that are formed through participation in the festival (as there are no spectators allowed!), and that are involved with each other and their own projects throughout the year. People with some kind of similar ethos are able to come together and build community, despite huge geographical differences. Although, he hastened to add, there is absolutely no stereotype appropriate to Burners - they come literally from every swath of life, and perhaps the only thing they have in common is an interest in these experimental temporary communities. But even that does not apply to everyone, and everyone's comm'ty looks different.

And what does it mean to be an "experimental temporary community"? These are communities established temporarily - although many of them continue to exist in some form or another outside of the festival - to parallel the current society. In other words, they are attempts at new kinds of communities to remodel and replace the current society. We talked about what the difference is between a utopian community and an apocalyptic community. An apocalyptic comm'ty is the exeperiment in new cultures in the event of a collapse of the current culture. Apocs create new worlds, expecting this one to fall apart. That there is some collapse coming that must be survived, and on the other side is room for the new world. To Eric, utopians build community with an ideal in mind, and think that this world will be ok (that it can be changed to the ideal, without a collapse). Like some of our interviewees, he sees utops to believe in some ultimate future stasis, that the ideal world can actually be built and realized. In contrast, he and other apocs believe that the cycle of chaos/order or creation/destruction requires that a collapse come before a new world.

This kind of talk gets me really excited, because these temp experimental comm'ties are exactly what I see in VBC, DreamTime, BM, and OR Country Fair. Perhaps the biggest differences between these different festivals (all of which can be expanded to reveal a much larger movement of preparation and breakdown that lasts all year and involves whole other communities of people) is whether they identify more with utopian or dystopian perspectives. I believe this similar mentality of experimental community is present in the seeker-traveller types I've mentioned before, as well as in the intentional comm'ties we'll be interviewing, to various degrees. So in our interviews, I wonder how best to probe this point? In the global section of our interview, we ask if interviews think the world is getting better or worse in the future. Essentially, we are asking if they believe in some kind of apocalypse or not. Later, in one of our concluding questions, we ask what role they see their own comm'ties to play in the larger state of the world. I wonder if we might better find the connection between these two points if we asked the role question as an immediate follow up to the state of the world question? Or is that something we want to more subtely probe? I guess I'm wondering how big a factor we are anticipating some idea of apocalypse to play in the role of comm'ties, and how to get the most/best discussion around that idea.

Then Eric and I realized that we weren't really talking about "ecotopia" anymore, and that really there is very little apparent connection between Callenbach's book and comm'ties like BM. The very title of our study, "Ecotopia Revisited," implies that we are using Ecotopia as the model in question - looking for ecotopia tendencies in these comm'ties. Ie, what role does nature as sacred, as a spirituality, play in them, right? How much are they based around some idea of environmental sustainability? In that sense, BM is far from utopia! But, I argued, things like BM are experiments in the social, the human element of "sustainability" - because certainly all these comm'ties are trying to figure out how we can all just get along in different ways! And, they are a larger cosmo of the individual seeker. How linked are we to Ecotopia the book? Are we just borrowing the idea of separatist utopia? Or looking for specific eco stuff?

How can insights into these temp comm'ties further inform our work?

Cascadia - Amtrak

On page 10 of Cascadia Elusive Utopia, the authors mention the importance of expanding high-speed train and trade connections within Cascadia. A quick note, Amtrak has a commuter route that travels North-South from Oregon to Vancouver, BC, stopping in Eugene, Salem, Portland, Vancouver, WA, Tacoma, Seattle, Bellingham, and Vancouver, BC, and all other intermediate locations. The name of this train is Amtrak Cascades and runs several times a day. So, I believe this would be one example of the sort of connections within Cascadia. Also, the sort of advertising and labels (for individual cars) for this train consists of images of the Northwest (Mt Rainier, Mt Baker, etc). The train snack car also features food products from various Northwest suppliers (independent breweries from Portland and Seattle and bake goods from Seattle, etc). Just thought this was an interesting example.