Bringing Heaven to Earth

WIE: Is there a point at which the nature of utopia shifts and is no longer primarily about escaping to another world?

MANUEL: The sense that you could create utopia here in this world starts with the work of Thomas More in the early sixteenth century. You don’t get that earlier on. Even a hundred years earlier, utopia was much more otherworldly. But with Thomas More, man rather than God is now conjuring life on earth. The idea of utopia is More’s invention, and it’s very much linked to the life he’s actually living in the sixteenth century. It takes off from there. He doesn’t think that his utopia will take place after you die and get resurrected. It becomes concentrated on this world.

More thinks in terms of a whole society with nice proper gardens and decent relationships, which he describes in detail. He thinks it through. And he’s laughing; he’s enjoying it, but he’s serious, too, because he is well aware of the faults of the society in which he lives. He is critiquing the Tudor monarchy of King Henry VIII, and it is a very shaky monarchy. All sorts of things are happening, and More is very much a man of ideals, principles, and faith. After all, he gets beheaded because he upholds his allegiance to the Catholic Church and breaks with the king, which is ultimately recognized; and eventually he is canonized as a saint. He was a brilliant man, a very well educated man, a man who not only thinks ahead but acts on it. For example, he has his daughters educated. He stands out in his world. Thomas More was a different kind of dreamer.

WIE: You said earlier that the nature of utopia changes as culture changes. What was it about More’s time and culture that gave rise to such a dramatic change in utopian thinking?

MANUEL: People were beginning to explore the life of the mind and the riches that were around them, not in terms of gold and jewelry but the riches of scholarship, of thought. They were interested in whatever they could find in history, and this went along with opening up the New World, with finding out about other races. They were finding civilizations in both North and South America that they didn’t know existed. Columbus discovers the New World at the end of the fifteenth century, and very shortly after that, Thomas More writes Utopia. So there’s a confluence of a lot of things—the artistic world, the literary world, the geographic world. An enrichment takes place, and that gives birth to a new thinking, a new dreaming. This is the birth of humanism, and of course, the religious world starts getting hacked away.

WIE: From what you’re describing, it’s clear why the sixteenth century set the stage for the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment periods that follow—a pivotal time when science, human reason, and discovery overshadowed institutionalized religion. Did the notion of utopia change during this next period, and if so, how?

MANUEL: The seventeenth-century utopians, such as Sir Francis Bacon, were imbued with a different spirit. Virtually all of them were men of action who believed that their plans could and would be crowned with success within a foreseeable, not a distant, future. The New Atlantis, which Francis Bacon wrote in 1626, is hardly a popular utopia of social regeneration, as was Thomas More’s. Its purpose lies elsewhere. In The New Atlantis, Bacon introduced science into human thinking, and he had a very clear and interesting conception of how science should be employed. Of course, you had scientists before Bacon—Copernicus, for example. But Francis Bacon is the father of scientific thinking. He was setting things forth, using his imagination and then checking on that imagination, measuring, changing, and testing. Bacon wasn’t just dreaming; he was working things out scientifically. He was developing a practical way to arrive at conclusions, so he used The New Atlantis to help introduce the scientific method into society, to alter the thinking of the time. And he was obviously an imaginative, brilliant man.

Creating a new society

WIE: Were the imaginary utopian worlds of Thomas More and Francis Bacon actually enacted by people? And were they even intended to be?

MANUEL: For utopian visions to take root and influence the course of history, you had to have a population—more than a few philosophes—that could enact them. Utopia had to be more than someone’s reverie. A utopian thinker in the seventeenth century, for example, had nobody on whom to pin his thinking. He was isolated, not from his fellow philosophes but from the great masses of people who were barely making a living and were thus unaware of what he was envisioning.

That begins to change with the Industrial Revolution and the shifting economic and world systems. You begin to have a population that can think. People begin to find their voices. They begin to become aware of themselves, to know who they are. Working people of the period come closer to philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was articulating utopian visions. As a result, these thinkers begin to stir things up in a way that hadn’t happened before. The French Revolution led to emancipation and the rise of a middle class. And it was happening in the American colonies as well—the Declaration of Independence is a utopian document. It wasn’t just somebody’s dream—you have a mass uprising and different classes of people begin to have authority. These people become part of a utopian vision of the future, and utopian ideals actually begin to take flesh. That’s when you see a change in the thinking, the wishing, and ultimately the working of utopian thinkers.

WIE: If large numbers of people can now engage directly with utopian thinking and act upon these visions, how does that change the nature of utopianism?

MANUEL: In the nineteenth century, a much broader utopian thinking emerges that concentrates on creating a whole new society. Important utopian thinkers from the period included Charles Fourier and Henri Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in England. Their visions were not merely dreams of the future. They were meant to be adopted by groups, by cells, by societies—and they were.

Fourier and Owen were the two major early-nineteenth-century apostles of the small-community movement. They had confidence that a single successful experiment based on their principles of organization would provide an example so compelling that it would persuade the rest of humankind to adopt their systems. On the other hand, the main thrust of the Saint-Simon movement was not directed toward establishing small communities but was rather a total reorganization of the whole scientific-technological society. He began to think in much bigger terms and also in very specific terms, down to the kind of roadways he wanted to see. To join the Saint-Simon movement was an act of commitment to the future progress of man—a world of order and limitless progress in the flowering of all capacities, a world virtually without pain, a world of love and cohesiveness. The movement, the religion, was the new world in miniature.

WIE: We often believe that gender equality and civil rights emerged largely in Western culture during the 1960s. But I was surprised to discover how progressive the nineteenth-century utopian thinkers were. They really were pioneers in terms of human rights, sexual freedom, and equal opportunity.

MANUEL: Oh yes. They concerned themselves with work and labor arrangements and with love too. Even prior to the nineteenth century, utopians wanted to see changes in sexual mores. It’s also true for the rights of women; the early feminists had to be utopians in the dreamiest sense because it was really, really tough for women back then.

WIE: We think of the “radical sixties” as a time of cultural upheaval and change, with many younger people pursuing alternative lifestyles. However, you point out in your book that these counterculture experiments were often not as novel or “utopian” as the communities that emerged over a century earlier.

MANUEL: Yes, I think that’s true. There were many groups that got together in the sixties, but I didn’t think of them as utopian. We were living in New York in Greenwich Village at the time, and they were protesting against the Vietnam War. But from what I could tell, they didn’t seem interested in truly creating a better world. Some of them got on relief rolls in New York, and I thought, “This is wrong. Those relief rolls should be serving the poor people who need help.” And very often these kids came from wealthy families and took money from their parents as well, so I was suspicious of them.

In one respect, these groups were similar to the communities of the mid-nineteenth century—they tried to live lives that were very different from the society around them. But I think the nineteenth-century communities had different ideals. They wanted freedom, but not drug-induced freedom or freedom derived from being irresponsible. And they didn’t place themselves in direct opposition to the society at large. There was isolation and separation, but not attack, as there was in the 1960s. The nineteenth-century groups were trying to reform society, not reject it. That’s a generalization, but I think there’s some validity to it. I don’t remember any reforming zeal in the 1960s. They were thumbing their noses at society at the same time that they were using the luxuries of the world they were criticizing. That doesn’t go for everyone, but it goes for many. The flower kids were also organizing communities on the West Coast, and they obviously wanted individual freedoms that my generation didn’t have. I suspect they were thinking about society as a whole, but I was curious to know if these groups were merely seeking refuge from a society that seemed cold and headed in the wrong direction or if they really wanted to change this world.