Two recent books―one a softcover version of a hit last year―mull the meaning and power of Utopia, its meaning in Western culture and what happens when attempts are made to make utopian visions a reality.
In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden and the Search for a Better Paradise
By J.C. Hallman
St. Martin's Press: New York
Hardcover, 320 pages, $25.99
August 2010
Money quote:
Utopias suffer from understanding lag. Historically, utopias have failed because they do not fully account for the world's variety or complexity. Not surprisingly, then, a tendency to deny one's own utopianism is characteristic of utopians, and even today earnest utopians are not keen on being branded with the word.
Author: A writer raised in Southern California, creative writing instructor and (most importantly, of course) a Kossack. Editor of The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature; author of The Hospital for Bad Poets: Stories, The Devil Is a Gentleman: Exploring America's Religious Fringe and The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World's Oldest Game.
Basic premise: Author Hallman decides to take his lifelong fascination with utopian projects and thoughts on the road, to experience directly current versions of Paradise around the world. He samples the life of an intentional community in rural Virginia, pilgrimage spots for the Slow Food movement in Italy, a residential Eden aboard a ship that endlessly sails the world, a military-style bootcamp for gun-toting individualist/defenders of the American way, an eco-refuge for planned reintroduction of Pleistocene creatures and plants to the world, and a tour of a lavish city being built on an artificial island off of Korea. Throughout, the author weaves philosophy behind the utopian thought with historical attempts to re-create paradise throughout the ages.
Readability/quality: Discursive, lyrical, thoughtful and at times playful, Hallman’s writing is easy to follow and a delight to read. With a wide-ranging, easy-going charm, the reader ends up following him from place to place―and idea to idea―in a leisurely walk through the ages. Voice is predominant, and it’s a pleasant voice to spend time with indeed.
Who should read it: Dreamers, futurists, amateur historians, anyone with a curiosity about living your ideals.
Bonus quote:
The stigma now attached to utopia not only fails to get the joke, it blames hopefulness for hope's failures. Utopia critiques crisis. It acts. To crush the utopian spirit world be to extinguish the campfire just as its warmth is needed most.
Hallman’s aims to reclaim the idea of utopia from the world of cranks and charlatans, an admirable undertaking. There is a respectable history of serious people trying to work out ways we can live together, with stated values and shared goals, in a world quite a few steps away from the notion that life is, through and through, nasty, brutish and short.
***
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
By Greg Grandin
Picador: New York
Softcover release of 2009 hardcover, 416 page, $16.00
May 2010
Money quote:
In his more utopian moments, he envisioned a world in which industry and agriculture could exist in harmony, with factories providing season labor for farmers and industrial markets for agricultural products like soybeans. It's an easy vision to mock, especially considering the brutality and dehumanizing discipline that reigned at the River Rouge [Ford plant in Michigan]. Yet actual Fordism at its most vigorous albeit short-lived stage did result in a kind of holism, where the extraction and processing of raw materials, integrated assembly lines, working-class populations, and consumer markets created vibrant economies and robust middle classes. Anchoring it all was a belief that decent pay would lead to increased sales. Yet even as Ford was preaching his gospel of "high wages to create large markets," Fordism as an industrial method was making the balanced, whole world Ford longed for impossible to achieve.
Author: Grandin, author of Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, made it big with Fordlandia when it first was released in hardback in 2009. The book was Amazon’s #1 History Book of the Year, a National Book Award Finalist, a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and was named to numerous “best books” lists in its year of initial release. Grandin is a Guggenheim fellow who teachers Latin American history at New York University.
Basic premise: With the 1927 purchase of a tract of land in the Amazon twice the size of Delaware, Henry Ford quikcly moved beyond his original intent of cultivating his own rubber plantation to supply his cars with tires, and moved into the realm of pure utopianism. As the project evolved, Ford dreamed (Disney-like before there was Disneyland or Celebration, Florida) of creating the ideal American town―complete with ice cream parlors and and golf courses―in the midst of one of the world’s most inhospitable climes for his very rigid interpretation of what makes America “America.” Native riots, disgruntled displaced managers from Michigan, sickened wives and a stubborn man with a warped view of the possible all collide in this endlessly fascinating account.
Bonus quote:
Ford, the man who in the early 1910s helped unleash the power of industrialism to revolutionize human relations, spent most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle, to contain the disruption he himself let loose, only to be continually, inevitably thwarted. Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and by extension Americanism. It reveals the faith that a drive toward greater efficiency could be controlled and managed in such a way as to bring balance to the world and that technology itself, without the need for government planning, could solve whatever social problems arose from progress's advance. Fordlandia is indeed a parable of arrogance. The arrogance, though, is not that Henry Ford thought he could tame the Amazon but that he believed that the forces of capitalism, once released, could still be contained.
Fordlandia is more than a book about one man’s stubborn folly―it’s a reflection of America on the rise in an era in which limits (of human endurance, of nature and geography, of aspirations) were discarded in a heady environment of American exceptionalism. That Ford even got as far as he did in building his outlandish town is a testimony to his perseverance and willingness to lose money hand over fist. Fordlandia did indeed rise, inch by excruciating inch, with schools, broad and leafy streets reminiscent of the Midwest, churches and community halls. Running through the book too is a teaser theme of what characteristics of a place are truly “American,” what ideals we export (church-going, a narrow morality) and what we don’t (quashing of labor rights was a must in Fordlandia).