In “Pluribus,” Utopia Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

24:57Hmm. You know? In Sir Thomas More's utopia, you know, you can worship the moon, you can worship the sun. It's a wild act of imagination that because it's so many hundreds of years old, we all sort of take for granted. But this is why I admiringly call him a freak, at least Sir Thomas More of writing utopia. It's like he really just imagined all of that, including two slaves for every household. You know, that was part of his utopia. But they could work their way out of slavery. You win some, you lose some. Exactly. Can't be right all the time. All right. Getting more serious. One genre of utopia that fascinates me and that I have found myself drawn to is the whole feminist utopia idea of what if life weren't terrible for women?

25:39Just let's start with that idea. What if we weren't— Imagine that. What if we weren't the oppressed class worldwide and our lives weren't controlled by men? Wouldn't that be great? And usually in these utopias, it requires the absence of men. One of my favorites, which I definitely read in like a gender studies class in college, was The Guerriere by Monique Vitigue. Nomi, does this say anything to you? I remember Monique Vitigue, a French philosopher and feminist, but I don't remember that particular text. It's like in little bursts, you get these Amazonian women training for war against the men.

26:18And there are even some young men who are won over to their cause. Thank you, male feminists. We see you. We salute you. And then they triumph. Hooray. And that's pretty much that. Like, this is where I feel a little bit conflicted. I definitely got a thrill out of reading this in college. it's very thrilling to imagine all these women, the warrior women, the peasant warrior women, training and going after the men and all these. But I do find imaginatively, you then get a little bit boxed into a corner with all this. That's why a great utopia kind of needs, it needs the dissenter. It needs the individual.

26:56This is what I mean about the individual versus the collective. Can any true collective situation be a utopia for people like us who value the needs and wants and frankly wrinkles of being a person? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think one text that I kept thinking about when I was watching Pluribus is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Steven Spielberg movie with Richard Dreyfuss from 1977, in which much like in Pluribus, there is a signal that is delivered from the stars. And in this case, Dreyfus is one of the chosen, one of the few chosen, who is called by the signal and kind of is inexplicably drawn to something that these aliens are trying to tell him.

27:51And he kind of the whole movie is about his search to join another society. Essentially, he is unhappy as an individual in the society that is his natural habitat. This is a movie that kind of ends with the creation, at least potentially, or what we are made to believe will be a utopian experience for him. And it's incredibly moving. It's one of my favorite movies because you get the sense that he is finally home and that things will be good for him. Finally. um you guys we've talked about some fictional examples of utopia um what about real life i mean god there's been plenty of examples of people trying to create god's own country right here on earth i mean not god necessarily but a sense of like we can live a utopia right here right now another world is possible.

28:55What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, I mean, there's nothing more human than the impulse to constantly try to perfect humanity and to solve humanity's problems by shaving off the unfortunate, the human bumps that keep us all in friction with each other all the time. There's so many different examples. One I'm thinking of right now, because I'm excited for the new Mona Fastfeld movie, The Testament of Anne Lee, is the shakers, this religious group of people who shared something in common. You know, I think sex as a very anarchic part of the human experience is something that comes up again and again in utopian societies, both imagined and real.

29:34Like in some, the whole thing is not controlling sex. Let it go. Do whatever you want. Sex with everyone. And in others, I would say probably most others, sex becomes something that very much has to be controlled. And of course, the Shakers did not believe in reproducing. They did believe in making beautiful, simple wooden furniture and little jewelry boxes. Yeah. I mean, you know, on the upside, pleasant round barn. On the downside, no sex and no continuation of the Shaker line. You know, you win some, you lose some. And the same is true of the Israeli kibbutz. Yeah. Zionist socialist notion of coming to Palestine and establishing these communal living situations called kibbutzes where everything is shared and everything is equal.

30:23Sharing food, like sharing resources, sharing the tasks. You know, it's usually, you know, there was some sort of agricultural concern. And, you know, my very own husband was born in a kibbutz and spent his first two years of his life there. And he, for those two years as a baby, he lived in a children's house. Oh, wow. He did not live with his parents. And how did that work out for him? Probably not great, you know, but that was the way. I mean, later on, there are still kibbutzes. Most of them have become, you know, not really socialist. But at the time, this was the late 60s, the mother would come and like nurse her baby, but would go back to her house.

31:16And there were nurses that shared taking care of them. and that was the way and of course the idea this stemmed from that everybody would share and women also wouldn't be burdened in the same way by the labor you had to perform as a mother and wouldn't instead do other things in some ways i obviously understand the imperative and it was kind of a good thoughts in some way, but in other ways, I don't think it was that great for a lot of people, the children and the parents both. It's funny you mention how utopia often manifests itself in terms of national projects, because I was thinking about the founding of Liberia.

32:03Okay. Starting in the early 19th century, a movement to repatriate. Return, yes. You could call it a mythical repatriation, whatever, mostly African Americans, also many black Caribbeans, to form a nation in Africa under the idea that in order to finally get true, not only recognition, but freedom, black people who had been the subjects of the transatlantic slave trade would have a better chance at freedom in Africa than in the West. And a nation was, in fact, founded. And I mean, talk about often utopia when it sort of encroaches into real life and people convince themselves that it is worth actually materially pursuing.

32:52What an undertaking. People crossing oceans, changing their whole lives and truly forming a nation which, you know, was the first free African nation. Only Ethiopia also wasn't colonized, but they had a sort of – there was an occupation by the Italians, whatever. But, of course, there was later on a coup. There was a Liberian civil war. Or, you know, nations, the nation state, whatever, its promises of protection, communal living, sharing freedom often devolve into resembling the nations from which their peoples are sort of plucked out. And so that has always stood for me as a sort of tragic, but also in a certain way, impressive example of how utopia can really be pursued.

33:42But then also like what this what the aftershocks of that really are. Sure. I mean. And I think the question, all the examples that we shared obviously had a lot of blind spots and downfalls. Why do we think it is that utopias generally fall short? Well, I mean, the examples both of you brought are so interesting as corollaries because, of course, they both – and to some extent, the Shaker example as well depends on this idea of a paradise lost, an idea that once upon a time there was perfection. There was happiness. There was a sense of connection. There was unity. There was nationhood. Then catastrophe happened.

34:20Exile happened. Enslavement happened. But we can get back. We can find a way back to paradise. And I think that initial burst of energy to try to restore what has been lost is one of the most beautiful human impulses, maybe. A kind of collective endeavor that is about more than the individual. and, you know, a phrase, just a little phrase comes to mind from each according to his ability to each according to his need. It's that. It's a form of Marxism. We're going to form a society in which everybody has a purpose and the ultimate goal is a collective one, but we can honor the individual and value the individual and their abilities as well.

34:59Like that's utopia. I think they fall apart because the balance is very hard to sustain. And then, as we may have seen in history and here and there, an increasingly repressive form of enforcement is necessary to keep all these pieces of delicate balance in play.

35:23In a minute, utopias may usually fall short, but is there value in the optimism they represent? This is Critics at Large from The New Yorker.

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36:38We've been talking about utopia. I don't know why this is making me feel so, like, dark. I mean, I am not the most optimistic person, right? I'm the kind of person who's like, this is probably like a false promise if we're hoping towards, you know, any type of utopian thinking. But I'm also thinking if you're like stuck in pessimistic dystopic thinking, are you foreclosing on kind of like greater promise or greater potential of imagination? Like, why am I such a, you know, sad sack about this? You know who you remind me of? Carol. Oh, no. Oh, yes, Nomi. No. Oh, yes. Carol is— There was a reason you didn't like her.

37:21She hid too close to home. Oh, no. I'm getting. I'm getting. I'm getting. Oh, God. Okay. So, yeah. How should we approach the idea of utopia? Like, I mean, are there benefits to having a little bit of hope to, you know, looking ahead with stars in our eyes or maybe it's a fool's errand? Yeah, I mean, when we get into this topic, especially vis-a-vis utopia and perhaps thinking about political projects, I think about the Italian anti-fascist intellectual Antonio Gramsci, who talked about pessimism of the intellect. I know what the world is like, but optimism of the will, the will to imagine better futures, better possibilities, better outcomes, and letting that sort of seesaw, that discomforting balance guide your interactions with the world.

38:13Never expecting to arrive at total utopia, acknowledging the flawed nature of human beings and the fucked nature of our systems, etc., but still leaving some spark of optimism kind of of the heart and will, which is very hard to do. Yeah. And it's strangely countercultural. Right. Because there's a thin line between responsibly saying someone who's offering me perfection might be actually a malign actor, which is fair enough. But also that can often be turned to political ends that say better is not possible. And it takes a fine balance of discernment to acknowledge the former, but to kind of reject the latter and say, no, no, no, better is possible.

39:04And I don't want my continuing apprehension of how rough the world is to dull me to reasonable alternatives that can make our lives better. Right. And so that balance is hard to maintain. And that's why I think it makes us feel really seasick inside. I feel it, too. I know exactly what you're talking about. And I think for me, there's also the kind of fear of like, whose version of utopia? Obviously, I know what I think like a better world looks like. Yeah, I want everyone to have free health care, for instance, or I want resources to be more equally distributed, et cetera, et cetera. But then for some people, I mean, what is Make America Great Again, if not a call to a different kind of utopia?

39:52One that like is reactive, you know, looks make great again, you know, like we used to be great. But what does that mean? You know, like we used to be more white. We used to be more traditional, you know, gender, sexuality, you know, all of those metrics, like everybody knew their place vibes. Right. That's right. And so it's like, who is determining what this utopia looks like, what the values are that kind of animate this project? And certainly a lot of people believe in the utopia that Donald Trump has been promising for the last decade. That makes me think of, I don't know if we've discussed this on this podcast, the absolutely insane post by the Department of Homeland Security on platforms like Instagram and X of Thomas Kinkade painting called Morning Pledge.

40:49These very painter of light. Yeah. The painter of light. These glowing houses on perfect streets with a United States flag. The sort of aesthetics of I don't know if this is how Kinkade meant them. I don't know his politics or his disposition, but of a sort of white utopia where there's no crime and everybody said the Pledge of Allegiance. You know, the world that MAGA promises has aesthetics, has its own notions of perfection. Absolutely. Oh, definitely. That exclude certainly everybody in this room and many more. Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The question is who you're including and how many you're including.

41:31And there are collective visions that include all, and there are very selective visions that include very few. You can talk about MAGA. You can talk about the Hunger Games. Like, same difference maybe. But I think some of it is about framing. I think actually there is some power here. We don't have to just give in to the dystopian vision. For instance, there is this Dutch guy I've become aware of who I kind of like. His name is Rucker Bregman. He's written a few popular books that are kind of along this vein. And one of them is called Utopia for Realists, which got me interested for this episode.

42:05The sub-petal is how we can build the ideal world. And part of what he's talking about is the fact that society seen from the vantage point of the past, current society in the West already looks quite a lot better. People are living longer. The 40-hour work week became a thing. You know, infant mortality went down. And all the things that we take for granted and we want to build on, actually, it took quite a lot of work and quite a lot of political will and collective will to get us and fight to get us to the place where we are today. And so he's pushing for further ideas that seem perhaps utopian.

42:40But he says, why the 15-hour workweek? Why should it be impossible? We have the ability to, you know, create such productivity that there is no need to be working around the clock, et cetera, et cetera. So there are reasons to be optimistic and to kind of reject, I think, a fearful framing. I do think that part of the pessimism, apart from the fact that the world, you know, a lot of bad things are happening in the world right now. So it's hard to keep kind of like an optimistic viewpoint about things is that certain ideas of utopia right now are attached often to individuals who I think we all probably find suspect, you know, the sort of idea of techno utopia, you know, whether it's like Sam Altman and like OpenAI or like Elon Musk, who, you know, is like the idea of an electric car is a great thing.

43:37but it's like go to mars yeah the idea of like space sure i mean bring it on it's fine it's just like all of these things these techno utopianists these titans of industry certainly don't seem to be for the most part acting for the public good chad gpt it'll just be like you know a repository of all knowledge and you can just like instead of like interacting with other individuals in like you know a humanistic equitable way you're just gonna like sit in your pod and talk to this little bot you know that's kind of the vision of the world that we're getting yeah i think um first of all i want to say just about chat gpt that that was another element that i think the show Pluribus got right, where the way that the pod people, the way that the us speaks to Carol is very ChatGPT.

44:37First of all, there is a hive mind, much like ChatGPT, drawing on all the knowledge. Again, and Carol's big on saying, did they consent to this? Did they give their consent? In the same way that we know so many people did not give their consent, certainly not, to have their ideas, their writings, their work fed into the hive mind of ChatGPT and then regurgitated accurately or inaccurately, as the case very often is. back to anyone who asks. And also, to me, the most chilling quality of both that, ChatGPT itself, and the show is the obsequiousness, the kind of, How can I help you? Yes, we're here to give you what you want, because wanting is the most important thing, and you should be pleased at all times.

45:11But Nomi, in response to what you're saying, I think there's a difference between a top-down and a bottom-up utopia. When someone is creating a vision of utopia to justify a product that they stand to gain quite substantially from, such as Mark Zuckerberg saying, we think that connectivity will make the world a better place. They just happen to have created this thing called Facebook. And guess what? It's going to connect everyone and it's going to be great. Facebook is the Tower of Babel. Everyone's going to be able to talk about everything, only good things, of course. OK, contrast this with an Emma Goldman, you know, and Goldman in her running around the Lower East Side and slash Lincoln Center, if you go to see Ragtime.

45:50Shout out to you, Shana Taub, doing Emma Goldman right. An anarchist, feminist, for the workers, for, I think, again— A Jewish woman with glasses. Represent. It all comes down to who you want to be in your collective. The more, the merrier, dare I say it. I think that's the true, that's the true question. Right. And a top-down utopia is not a utopia for the people, for the more. Yeah. I think one of the reasons that Carol rails against the we is that it is creepy because what we like, what we struggle with often, but what we also like about other humans is that there's friction, right? There are different ideas.

46:41There's disagreement. There's like passion that comes from these elements, right? Whereas the idea of kind of like frictionless, robotic, complete unity of thought and opinion is not something that appeals. Or does it? I mean, I was just thinking about this factoid that regularly makes the rounds about how Finland is the happiest place on Earth and how the Finns, whenever this is cited, love to say, yeah, because we define happiness differently than you guys. You know, we're not a hedonic people. Right. We're not after pleasure all the time. We're just basically wanting everything to be fine. And so our happiness levels are higher.

47:24You know, is that a utopia that would be acceptable? Probably not to most Americans. This is very un-American. Yeah, we're wanting, striving people. And I've been struck in our own conversation by how the three of us are all coming out as advocates for individuality. I dare say not at the expense of the collective good. You know, I think some of us would like to see some universal health care, universal child care, these kinds of basic things. But still, you know, we, it's, yeah. I know it's interesting, right? A little. Because it's like there are things about this American mindset of ambition, individuality, striving, like me, me, me at all costs, which I absolutely hate.

48:08But I am very important to myself. My thoughts are important to myself. I'm a fucking, I'm a writer. Yeah. Like I transmit my opinion. You presume that your thoughts are important to others. I sort of have ended up presuming, I guess, that my thoughts are important to others, even though it kind of goes against like my my base feelings. But in general, yes. So it's it's it's interesting to think about. Yeah. And this is the moral dimension of the cliche that all writers should be readers because it's like, yeah, I am a reader. And it's true. It's true. Yeah. My thoughts are important to me precisely because the thoughts of so many others have been important.

48:46to me you know what i mean and i think this is the difference between like the top down and bottom up is that like yeah we can have a unanimity of purpose a unanimity of goodwill which does not equate to a unanimity of affect you know it's like if you think about the title of the show pluribus it's like yeah out of many one uh but also when you think of pluralism that great ideal its promise is precisely that we can be very different and live in different neighborhoods and have different practices and different ideas of what a good mood is, ideas of happiness. And maybe even this is impossible.

49:24I don't know. But and yet still do no harm. That's what we want. We want it all. We want it all. Can we have it all? I don't know. Can we have it all? Question mark? Stay tuned. Before we go today, we want to take a quick moment to praise our producer for the last six months, Ms. Michelle O 'Brien. I mean, Michelle has guided us and prepared us to do this podcast. Do you think LaBubo's come out of nowhere? She went somewhere to get that for us. She's got just an amazing sense of professionalism and artistic form, but also an incredible sense of humor and of fun. She has made working on the show a utopia.

50:16I'm not even kidding. Collaboration. That's what it's all about. So, Michelle, from all of us, we love you. It's been a joy to work with you, and we cannot thank you enough. This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. This episode was produced by Michelle O 'Brien, and our senior producer, whom we're very excited to have back, is Rhiannon Corby. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Condonat's head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music. And we had engineering help today from James Yost with mixing by Mike Kutchman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at newyorker.com slash critics.

50:55and listeners. Next week is Thanksgiving, but we'll be back in December with an episode about the newest installment of the Knives Out series and why we love a whodunit. We'll see you then.

51:24This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

52:02From PRX. Thank you.