Robert Owen

I seem to be past the point when I was interested in finding a better place to live. After I graduated from college in 1972, I stayed temporarily with my family in Connecticut but wasn't sure what I wanted to do or where I might go. For a time, I considered moving to New Zealand, but then I ended up moving in with my girlfriend, who was living in Columbus, Ohio, not exactly a utopia. I unenthusiastically got married, and, after an exploratory trip to parts of the U.S. and Canada, moved to Eugene, Oregon for a year, during which I lost enthusiasm for that part of the country. After moving to Indiana, having children and getting divorced, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky for a couple of years and then, with job changes, lived in northern Illinois for about twenty-four years until after I retired. Then I decided on Vermont and moved here in 2011. While I don't usually get very socially engaged with the locals wherever I live, I find west-central Vermont appealing for a number of reasons. Besides the low population and pleasant scenery, there are still hints of utopianism here. The U.S. became a testing ground for a wide swath of utopian ideas early in its history, but nearly all of them had some level of religious motivation. The more interesting ones to me are less religious and are related to optimal social structures, and those didn't become popular until the early 19th century. 

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh textile manufacturer of humble origins who operated a highly successful plant in New Lanark, Scotland. He had worked in Manchester and hated the miserable living conditions created there by the Industrial Revolution and used New Lanark as a testing ground for some of his theories. His main goals at the time were to improve working conditions for his employees and provide them with better educations. 

When I lived in Indiana, I was not far from New Harmony, which I mentioned in an earlier post. At that time it was a tourist attraction, and I visited it. It was a town built by a religious German group called the Rappites, who were productive and successful, but they eventually ceased to exist because they didn't believe in sex or reproduction. It may be that they had expected Armageddon to occur, and when it didn't, they had no Plan B. They had purchased the Indiana land, which was wilderness at the time, in 1814, developed it considerably, and then moved away to Pennsylvania in 1824. Robert Owen purchased the town and surrounding acreage in 1825 with the goal of setting up an experimental utopian community. Owen became a notable social reformer and later influenced Marx and Engels. To some extent I agree with his main ideas, because he opposed religion, private property and marriage. However, his idea of integrating those ideas into a workable society in the early 19th century was unrealistic, to put it mildly. After he bought the property, he arrived in the East Coast to much fanfare and met John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He also gave a three-hour speech to the three branches of government, telling them that he hoped to eradicate every social evil.

Obviously, Owen was completely unrealistic, but it would have been less apparent at the time, since human nature was not well understood then. While he objected to religion, he seems to have been unaware that religion serves a social function – it was religion that supplied the cohesion that allowed America's early settlers to survive collectively. As it was, he recruited a wide range of people to live in New Harmony without paying much attention to how compatible they would be. He seems to have attracted a few scientific people, along with more general intellectuals and artists, and a slew of farmers and tradespeople. They came from different backgrounds and geographic locations. From what I've read, it does not appear that Owen gave much thought to how they would be organized. With his faith in reason, he thought that they would follow a democratic process and figure it out on their own. They couldn't, and the community hemorrhaged money until Owen and his financial partner, William Maclure, abandoned the project in 1827. Some of the residents remained there and did productive work, but Owen's original plan completely failed. Unfortunately, I don't think that any social models much better than Owen's have emerged since then. A good start would be recognizing that people are not fundamentally rational.

Vermont, as I wrote earlier, was once a Congregational theocracy to some extent. That did provide cohesion originally, but has little to do with why I find the state appealing now. Because it never industrialized much and the population remained low, the groups that have lived here haven't been at each other's throats as much as in some other states. There are wealthy outsiders who have moved here and locals with reduced economic conditions that don't see eye to eye with them, but the wealth contrasts are less conspicuous here than elsewhere. And some of the liberals who moved here are similar to Bernie Sanders and emphasize equality as more than a talking point. Under these conditions, people tend to be more cooperative. The local newspapers also have a positive impact by covering all aspects involving the local population, which is more conducive to creating a cohesive environment than national news outlets or the internet in general. So, in my case, even though there are aspects of European culture that I prefer, which are absent here, I am resigned to remaining in Vermont, because I am better adapted to living here than anywhere else.

Going Up the Country: When the Hippies, Dreamers, Freaks, and Radicals Moved to Vermont

I found this book, by Yvonne Daley, informative regarding this period in Vermont. There isn't much analysis, and it consists mainly of vignettes of people who moved to Vermont in the 1960's and 1970's. The chapters include "The Hippie Invasion," "Life on the Commune," "Higher Education," "Food...and Revolution," "Entrepreneurship—Hippie Style," "Political Transformation," "Creativity," "Drugs," "Women's Work Reimagined" and "The Children of the Counterculture." The title comes from the Canned Heat song. In the appendix there is a list of appropriate soundtracks for each chapter. A few of the people mentioned, such as Howard Dean, Bernie Sanders, Patrick Leahy and David Dellinger, are well known. My neighbor, Jim Douglas, even makes an appearance: he was a student at Middlebury College in 1970, when they ended the semester early and canceled finals after the Kent State shootings; he was the campus Republican club president then and demanded a tuition refund. I spoke to Jim a few months ago, and, thankfully, he does not consider Donald Trump a Republican.

At the time, Middlebury was not a hotbed of antiwar activity. The hippies, radicals and artists were more closely associated with Goddard College, near Montpelier, Marlboro College, near Brattleboro and the now defunct Windham College in Putney. Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English were considered elitist even then. Besides protesting the Vietnam War, nuclear reactors in Vermont and New Hampshire were targeted; in hindsight, the protesters may have been misguided, because more nuclear plants may have meant less coal consumption and less climate change – Daley overlooks this fact. There were assorted communes all across the state, whose members varied in beliefs and activities. Some proved durable while others did not. One was quite libertine, with the leader encouraging a "ten-day-marriage" between members; in a very non-back-to-nature manner, he spent his winters in Florida and returned each spring. It sounds as if the divorce rate was about 100% for young people who moved to Vermont then. Bernie Sanders, for example, got divorced after moving here with his first wife, had an illegitimate son, Levi, with a girlfriend, and later married his current wife. Some parents handled their children irresponsibly, turning them into conservative adults. Conditions for stable households were not optimal, since the hippie men usually had little income, the women were having babies and feminism began to take off in the 1970's.

The wave of people who arrived here then were part of a broad social movement that affected the entire country. Most of the migrants to Vermont were from middle-class families in Massachusetts and New York. Many had been here before on family vacations. Some, like me, were instinctively enchanted by characteristics such as the low population density, the beautiful natural environment and the pleasant but not ingratiating people. A similar history occurred elsewhere, but did not leave as lasting a mark. I am reminded of my summer in Bloomington, Indiana in 1970. I started making homemade bread. There was pot smoking, a food co-op, popular music, and some of my friends from Pelham, New York stopped by in an old school bus on their way out west. I was staying in an apartment with a friend who had dropped out of college and was trying to become a writer. An English instructor who had married a student and left his job brought his wife and moved in with us. They arrived in a VW Microbus, and he got a temporary job at a restaurant while his wife had an affair with my friend. Others were attempting to launch careers as artists. One became a pot dealer and later got arrested; now he's an electrician. Another became homeless and eventually became a Hindu monk. One friend who had led a college protest got married and divorced and later became an architect. In Indiana, as in other states, the hippie movement and antiwar protests tended to be concentrated in the large university towns and did not have much permanent impact on the state – Indiana remained conservative.

The difference in Vermont, which Daley touches on but does not explore in detail, has to do with several factors. First, Vermont had never been an industrialized state, and the anti-establishment attitudes of the hippies had little impact on the locals, who were already used to tourists. I think the lack of factories and the harsh winters made Vermonters more independent than Hoosiers, who, living in the Rust Belt, were used to walk-in high-paying jobs and were more sensitive to anti-corporate rhetoric, which could cause plant closings. The winters also helped screen out the most frivolous of hippies, if only because surviving them required resources and planning: this is not a good place to be homeless in January. Over time, the convergence of tourism and progressive ideas led to the current Vermont brand, which itself is of economic value to the state, allowing businesses to charge premiums on the presumption that Vermont products are healthier and more sustainable than those made elsewhere. The absence of large corporations also freed the state and local governments from the influences of lobbyists, leaving the door open to more radical candidates such as Bernie Sanders. Because of the small population and corporate indifference, it was much easier for someone like Bernie to gain traction here than in other states. I think that this is probably the easiest state in which to become a U.S. senator or governor, because you can practically meet all of the voters and no one is spending millions of dollars trying to defeat you. In fact, although Bernie is often in Washington, he is seemingly omnipresent in Vermont and is likely to show up in your town regularly.

Daley's approach borders on the sentimental, as the book really is about her life and the lives of her friends and family. Conceptually, much of the minutiae that she provides doesn't add much. She tries to stick with the more positive stories without mentioning many negative ones. Drug use must have been a problem, but she devotes several pages to Paul Lawrence, a crooked undercover cop who planted drugs to get convictions. There is no mention of Robert Durst, the probable serial killer who moved to Ripton in the early 1970's, when Vermont was trendy, and opened a health food store in Middlebury. Although she does touch on the dissimilarities between the locals and the newcomers, I don't think that she underscores adequately the fact that the two groups continue to carry on independently and remain segregated. While Donald Trump is more unpopular in Vermont than in any other state, he has supporters here. Daley also says nothing about the quality of the work of the artists and writers who were part of the wave that she describes. As I've said, I don't think that the quality of American writing in general is very good, and Vermont's is probably no exception. I have seen some of the artists' works and find some of them to be above average, but others are more formulaic and suitable for the tourist trade. This is not to say that the book isn't worth reading if you are interested in the topic, which is relevant where I live.

Future Art

The archaeological record indicates that humans have always created what we now call art. From a qualitative standpoint, I don't think there has been any substantial improvement since the Chauvet cave paintings, the epic poems of Homer or the plays of Euripides. The aspects that change over time are the social function, the media, the style, the materials and the subject matter, but not the quality, though some periods do inevitably produce better art than others. As I wrote earlier, I don't think that the contemporary arts, or at least the ones that are widely known and with which I have some familiarity, are particularly good by historical standards, and I attribute this to commercialization, which is not to say that there isn't some better contemporary art that is presently inaccessible to the public for one reason or another.

Extrapolating into the future, if you assume that we won't become extinct and that we won't be replaced by an evolutionary successor to ourselves, I think art will become more important than ever as a pastime, because we simply may have nothing better to do. This scenario assumes that we will remain more or less the same as we are now, automation will obviate the need for most human labor, the political systems globally will maintain a higher level of equality than at present, and human conflict will fall to significantly lower levels. It is a rosy picture that may end up depending on dumb luck to materialize, but I think it is worth discussing if one takes an optimistic view on human destiny. The principal alternatives are gloomy if not unsettling.

Speculating this way, what is interesting to me is how good art would be if you took money out of the equation. In the current art world, the flow of money is a stand-in for quality measurement, with the art that draws the most money often becoming the de facto important art as far as the public is concerned. I don't think Damien Hirst, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg or Madonna are likely to make it into any future lists of great artists, and it would be an improvement for humanity if its members somehow managed to become more discerning. If money were removed from the calculation of quality, it seems plausible that a more meaningful form of measurement might replace it.

In a world in which people had no financial pressures and an abundance of free time, everyone could become an artist of one kind or another if they so chose, and this would change the rules of the game entirely. Idle people like me might, for example, write a blog as a form of art, take up painting or write poems. Systems might even be devised to provide recognition to those who felt that what they produced was important despite the absence of monetary ramifications. No doubt social status would somehow work its way into any reward scheme, but it most likely would be far less pernicious than what we experience under the current system of financial recompense.

Let this be a word of advice to those who produce art now under circumstances which they find unfavorable. Produce your art as you see fit, forget the present and think about a less philistine future, even if that means that you must earn a living doing something else.

Human Ecology

When my daughter was born, I used to think about creating an environment that would be beneficial for her. I had limited control over that, but her first five years seem to have been good. Then I was divorced and she lived with her mother until age ten. I retired in 2007 and spent a lot of time deciding where to live, and the thinking process was similar. You have to look at what will be a good environment in terms which may not correspond with what other people think. After living in the Midwest for about forty years I was sick of it. I didn't want to live anywhere near a city. I wanted to live in a rural area that wasn't populated by conservative Republicans and didn't have much commercial development. The location had to have cultural amenities and it had to be physically attractive. Believe it or not, these criteria rule out almost the entire United States. They more or less limit you to a rural college town in a blue state. If you eliminate the Midwest, your choices are confined pretty much to Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Maine and Western Massachusetts. I favored the East Coast because I grew up there and it has cultural attributes that I prefer to those on the West Coast.

In piecing this together, I had to take into consideration the needs of my partner. She is from Yorkshire and studied at King's College, Cambridge, where she befriended a fellow member of the working class, Tony Judt, and met her American husband-to-be. In 1979 she moved to Chicago and married, and they remained in the Chicago area, raising two children in Lake Forest. Like me, she dislikes cities and is introverted, but she is more social than I am. Her lifestyle prior to meeting me can be described as "suburban housewife." Her husband was a lawyer who worked nonstop, and they lived in a ranch-style house. She devoted all of her time and energy to her children, who are now turning out to be successful adults. I would probably be fine with a cabin in the woods, but that wouldn't suit her at all. She likes gardening and knitting and belonging to groups. I'm fine with gardening - vegetables mostly - but don't care about knitting or groups. I prefer cutting down trees with a chainsaw and hiking in the mountains. I used to be interested in Internet discussion but am finding stargazing and astronomy to be a more constructive and satisfying use of time. For all its vaunted openness, in truth the Internet is controlled by ruthless oligarchs who will delete you out of existence if they perceive you to be disturbing their agendas.

In 2011 we decided on the Middlebury area, took a road trip, found a house that we liked and bought it. Middlebury is in Addison County, which is the most agricultural county in Vermont. Once it had the highest wool production of any county in the United States, and now it has lots of cattle. There are no interstates here, which makes a difference for the better. We are far enough out in the country that it really is rural, but downtown is only a short drive away. There is a good food co-op. The college has surprisingly good musical performances for a small college and an art museum that isn't bad either. There are several good restaurants in the area that are operated by French immigrants. I recently met the owner of one that just opened in downtown Middlebury and overlooks Otter Creek, and he said that he likes it here because of the variety of people he can talk to. I also find that to be one of the best features of the area. You have local farmers who have lived here for generations, retirees like us, people from all over the world who moved here by choice, college students and professors, and no one is inaccessible or ghettoized the way they are nearly everywhere else. There are no McMansions or gated subdivisions.  Our neighbors include a farmer, a forester, a former governor and an economics professor. This is about as egalitarian as you can get in the United States. My partner belongs to a garden club, takes a tai chi class and volunteers as an usher at the Town Hall Theater.

I like it so much here that I am not inclined to travel. I haven't been on a plane in over three years. We know a couple who retired to a property near Lake Champlain because they like boating. They used to do their boating to get away from things, but since they no longer feel a need to get away, they sold their boat.

These comments are not intended as a plug for Vermont. Actually, I don't want more people moving here. The point is that it is possible to find living conditions that are nearly optimal for yourself. You may need resources that you don't have, but I think the harder part is knowing yourself.

Utopia

Since people are more motivated by positive thoughts than negative thoughts, I've decided to write something positive today. The subject is utopia. I have been intrigued by it ever since I was in college and learned about New Harmony, IN. The town was founded in 1814 by a group called the Harmonists, who were led by George Rapp. They were religious Germans skilled in the trades, and in a short period built a thriving town in the wilderness on the Wabash River and sent their goods as far away as New Orleans. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Rapp decided to move the Harmonists to the Pittsburgh area in 1824. In 1825 he sold the entire town and 20,000 acres to the Scottish industrialist, Robert Owen, who wished to establish a utopian community. Owen then invited various intellectuals to live in New Harmony, and several social experiments were attempted. However, the intellectuals were not industrious and disagreed on how to run things. In 1829 New Harmony was dissolved. Many ideas were tested there, some good, some bad. Much of the town is intact today.

During the early 19th century, utopian religious groups flourished in many parts of the U.S. When I lived in Illinois I came across the town of Bishop Hill, which was settled by Swedish Pietists in 1846. Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was born in Vermont in 1805 not far from where I live now. I sympathize with the idealism of such groups, but am unable to reconcile myself with their religious views. In short, the leaders tend to be quacks.

I am a late adopter of new technology and am sort of a Luddite. I didn't get my first computer until 2004, and I'm currently typing on my second one. I didn't have a cell phone until 2007 and I acquired my first smartphone a few days ago. Since I'm cheap, I don't have a data package and only pay about $38 per month. Still, I can use the Internet through our wireless router.

My thought for the day is that someone should write a futuristic novel describing how the world is transformed into a utopia by smartphones. Actually, you could argue that it has already started. Low-end models are becoming essential in developing countries such as Kenya, where they make life much easier for millions.

In the novel, everyone eventually owns a smartphone. Depending on the author's preferences, smartphones could, say, be integrated with the body and use holographic projections instead of screens, or, alternatively, be something like Google Glass. Eventually all transactions are done on smartphones. At this future date, there is little need for human labor in the developed world. Robots, computers and software have eliminated most jobs. Most people work part-time in government-subsidized sinecure-like positions. Yet there are still powerful corporations influencing the government to maximize their profits. There are still wars, and global warming has accelerated. After a lengthy battle in Congress, with filibusters and shutdowns, the right to vote on smartphones is passed by both houses, signed by the president and upheld by the Supreme Court against challenges. Android has become the dominant operating system on smartphones. Then, in a surprise decision, Google announces that it is purchasing Netflix and merging with Wikipedia to form a new non-profit company. One of the free services offered is Wikivote, in which the smartphone owner is guided through the voting process and then votes on his or her smartphone. A couple of election cycles later, Google-Netflix-Wikipedia announces that it has perfected software and hardware for optimizing voting choices. Using new supercomputer technology, advanced software and a gigantic database, voters have the option of filling out a questionnaire and letting this system decide their votes for them. After another protracted battle in Congress and Supreme Court challenges, computer-selected votes are approved.

This turns out to be a crucial step toward making the world a utopia. Automated voting succeeds to such a degree that voters completely lose interest in making autonomous voting decisions. Their lives are going well. As a consequence, Google-Netflix-Wikipedia becomes the de facto government in all countries that adopt its system. For-profit corporations and special interest groups lose what remaining power they had to influence political decisions. Over time, the system steers voters toward impartial, tech-savvy candidates who favor the further automation of government. Eventually, government is almost entirely automated. The Google-Netflix-Wikipedia company develops what comes to be considered the most efficient, effective and fair government system in the history of the world. Without the destructive intrusions of capitalism into government operations, wars and terrorism come to an end, global warming is reversed, and most legal issues disappear. Everyone lives happily ever after.