“Many of the rural communes that spring up in contemporary
America, Great Britain, or New Zealand tend to eschew theory altogether and
have no identifiable character. Their array of teachers and gurus have
introduced no elements that were previously unknown, beyond perhaps the use of
drugs as chemical agents heightening fraternal feelings among the members.
Without a religious base these widespread experiments have a short life
expectancy, about three years, the span of a serious love affair.
They repeat
the dismal experiences of nineteenth-century American utopian communities.
Idyllic, pastoral, anarchistic, universalistic, syncretistic
utopias may regularly possess young persons coming out into the world of
science and technology and find it wanting. Their latest creation, the utopia
of the counterculture is a potpourri of outworn conceptions – a bit of
transcendentalism, body mysticism, sexual freedom, the abolition of work, the
end of alienation.” [p. 808]
certainly I had no idea – and I suspect this was common – of
the prior history of communes, nor of the prior stories of the ideas in which
we youth were swimming in those times.
the Manuels’ apparent view of utopian thought à la Freud,
does not detract from the many insights they provide on the history of
utopia(n)s. and there are so many historical personalities in this story whose
ideas show the “escapist”, the fantastic aspect of the human mind. many – if
not most of these utopias – can not be taken seriously, but the fact that these
many “utopians”, over some 25 centuries, in many times, climes, cultures,
countries and minds, did so themselves,
and firmly believed they were serious as utopias and “utopians” (even if the word
had not yet been created, or they rejected or neglected it) is to be seriously
understood as a reflection of the human being. I prefer to believe these
dream(er)s source in some lost transcendent anthropology – but that may in fact
only be my wishful thinking.
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