Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time America. - Review - book reviews

Reason, Dec, 1999 by Jesse Walker

by Alex Heard, New York: W.W. Norton, 360 pages, $24.95

Autopia is, by definition, a fantasy: The word literally means "no place," and the classical utopias existed only in the imagination. Sometimes, they were enchanting literature. Political scientists may sneer at the French socialist Charles Fourier, in whose utopia the planets copulate and the oceans turn to lemonade, but the surrealists loved him.

Their enthusiasm certainly makes more sense than that of those 19th-century Americans who actually tried to found Fourierist "phalanxes." There's a reason why most utopias remain placeless, as Fourier's fans and the other utopian colonists of the era quickly discovered: It's pretty hard to design any community from scratch, let alone one that overturns dozens of social conventions. Even the colonies that succeeded for a sustained period of time - the towns founded by the American anarchist Josiah Warren, for instance - were soon either absorbed into the society around them or destroyed by the sort of outside forces that could erase any community, whether or not it was baptized by idealists.

America still has hundreds of intentional communities, some more successful than others, along with elaborate plans for even larger colonies - the "new country" fantasies that periodically flicker in the libertarian press, for example. But most new settlements today are commercial developments, not utopian communes; they're governed by condo boards and CC&Rs, not socialist or religious visionaries. The dream of a world without exploitation has persisted, but the smart money is invested in worlds without pets.

Literary utopias, on the other hand, have flourished, especially if you include the sort of writing that is concerned less with designing a new order than with simply imagining how - to borrow historian Russell Jacoby's definition of utopia - "the future could fundamentally surpass the present." Modern utopianism includes virtually every tract about the alleged New Age, every Luddite proposal to erase the last two centuries, every call for a religious reawakening, every manifesto on the transformative powers of cyberspace. It includes Web sites, science fiction novels, and essays in xeroxed zines.

Even conspiracy theories can be utopian, since a dystopia is also a kind of utopia. I'm not talking about allegations of crimes in high places (many of which, we've learned, turn out to be true); I mean the wild stuff, the tales of alien implants and Masonic mind control, of cabals always just poised on completing their long march toward global rule. From Swift to Orwell, dystopian writers have exaggerated social trends they dislike, forging those artful distortions into satires. Conspiracy folklore does the same thing for the same reason, except that most of these dystopians actually believe in the worlds they've invented.

Given all this, it's amazing to hear Jacoby claim that utopianism is "stone dead." But in The End of Utopia, he does just that.

Jacoby is a leftist intellectual with a reputation for bashing other leftist intellectuals. He's good at it: His last book, Dogmatic Wisdom, made a strong case that the left, far from "subverting" the academy, has actually been absorbed by it. The End of Utopia continues the thought. With the left reduced to a socially irrelevant faction of the professoriate, Jacoby argues, it has become less interested in transforming society than in tinkering with it. It has stopped dreaming of different, better worlds and, without those utopian fancies to fortify it, has lost its spine. "Can liberalism with a backbone exist if its backbone turns mushy?" Jacoby asks. "Does radicalism persist if reduced to means and methods?"

Apparently not, as far as at least some leftists are concerned. The good parts of Jacoby's book describe the sort of material those erstwhile radicals have been reduced to producing. My favorite is the semiotician who managed to draw out an analysis of The Cosby Show's opening sequence for seven pages. Her conclusion: "The syntagmatic structure of the opening credits might be described as a theme and variations, where Cosby is the theme and each child - and his wife - appear as variations." (And you thought the show was dull.)

But it's a long jump from the decline of the left to the death of utopia, not least because leftists are hardly the only utopians in the world. Jacoby seems unaware of this. He even drafts F.A. Hayek into the anti-utopian camp, citing the economist's sardonic reference to socialist and fascist totalitarianism as "the great utopia." But it was Hayek who called for "a liberal Utopia, a programme which seems neither a mere defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism that does not spare the susceptibility of the mighty." This is precisely the defense of utopia that Jacoby offers, but Hayek's status as a free-marketeer apparently puts him beyond the pale.

Only in his last chapter does Jacoby cite some nonsocialist brands of utopian thought, and he doesn't have much of interest to say about them. Consider, for example, his sole reference - brief, dismissive, and trite - to cyberspace. "The belief a new media [sic] will transform the cultural terrain is trotted out every generation," he writes. "Yet each new medium - radio, film or television - quickly gets integrated into the culture."