Nowhere

The appeal of socialism is that it is a kind of Utopia, where everyone gets along, and everyone is guaranteed a certain minimum of, say, comfort, security, or wealth. But like any Utopia, it only works when you leave something out. That something could be greed, it could be sex, it could be fossil fuels, it could be work.

The US Utopia worked pretty well early on because we left out labor, delegating that to a permanent underclass. The British and Europeans did a similar thing with their colonies. So while the Brits themselves were fairly comfortable, secure, and wealthy, those luxuries were built on the backs of those who were "left out."

In most of the Christian world, "greed" and therefore finance were left out of their Utopian visions and their high regard for themselves. They therefore required others - mostly Jews - to do their dirty work for them so they could maintain the benefits of borrowed money without the personal indignity of lending it.

Monks also live extraordinarily harmonious lives. They have everything you and I have except. . .wait a minute. . .oh yes! Sex! You leave that "one thing" out and everything else works smoothly. Fortunately, you have no shortage of inferiors to condescend to when you're in this exalted state. A permanent underclass of breeders allows you to maintain your enlightened condition while the population replenishes without you.

Some Utopian communes would like to exist without violence, some without fossil fuels. But violence remains the force that protects these hippies from having their land seized by enterprising Vikings, Turks, or even Poles who have none of the same distaste for violence. So a permanent underclass of soldiers must exist - somewhere out of sight of the "pure."

And as for fossil fuels, I always wondered if the hippies knew how their copies of Chomsky got onto their book shelves in the first place. Did these books grow on locally produced trees? Did the fall out of the sky? How would one know how to form a commune without reading the great ideas that inspired communes in the first place? Well these booksellers were reliant on a permanent underclass of truckers, motels, gas station attendants, and fast food chains to get those books from the printers to their shelves. And the energy for these operations was - fossil fuels. So the hippies were in collusion with Exxon-Mobile, only in ways that were hidden from plain sight.

So my anti-Utopianism comes from a sense of deep ecology. That the systems we live in are Whole, not fragmented. To leave something - anything - out is to engage in willful blindness to our own needs, even if they are locked in our own shadows. People have lived in communes successfully for millenia - they were called tribes. But at some point, the "one missing thing" came home to roost, and that was usually experienced as a war, or in the 20th century, as genocide.

Ecological systems which are inherently whole desire to remain so and do not take kindly to human meddling in an attempt to "perfect" them. Therefore, the missing part will always seek reintegration with the rest. This can be as innocuous as needing to do something for yourself, as in the ante-bellum US. It could be a nagging horniness in the case of the monk, or simply a need to get somewhere in the case of the hippie. It turns out, then, that these "bad" things that must be gotten rid of are actually pretty useful, even if our local cultural values tell us that they are "evil."

Money lending, is of course, evil in the Christianist worldview. But it sure is helpful if you want to buy a house, start a business, or send your kids to college. Sex is also considered evil by many, but it is certainly an effective means for replacing and growing the population- to say nothing of achieving the joy and enlightenment that monks seek through abstinence (odd, really). Fossil fuels, as polluting and hazardous as they are, are nonetheless the best way we have on hand to power the bus that took you out of your hick town and brought you to Humbolt County. Not such a bad thing, really.

The paradox is that if we want to "improve" these things that are "bad" - i.e. make sex about more than lust, make finance more about development than loan sharking, make driving more about freedom than about pollution - we need to engage these missing pieces, not reject them. We need to be less Utopian and more imperfect - or rather acknowledge openly the pre-existing imperfections that were there anyway.

In this way, the monk can learn tantra and satisfy his cravings for God and Flesh at the same time. The hippie can learn about distribution systems and lobbying that have been so effective in transporting gasoline (but not bio diesel) around the world. The Christian can learn about thrift and investment so that he won't have to get a loan to send his kid to college, but can pay outright. And the US slave owner can learn how to get his own hands dirty and realize the pleasures of working the soil and helping things grow. But none of this is possible in the socialist Utopia. Too many things are left out.

And this realization is where the Capitalist conversion usually happens for people. For Smith it was "greed" that was the great taboo to be overcome - the one missing piece in the Christianist world view from which he emerged.

But really there are so many others. Eating horse meat, for example, in France. "Underage" sex in the Levant (or in France). Polygamy in Utah. All manner of artistic expressions in every culture. Intergenerational mores - rejection of the old, of the young, or the ill. Whatever the case, capitalism and economics show us that the integration of the "one missing thing" enriches us all (both monetarily and culturally), and so the courage to face our own personal/collective shadows becomes imperative for our own fulfillment.

This puts us well on the way to our vision of the New Man, the Man unencumbered by cultural, religious, or traditional biases and arbitrary dogmas. Facing one's blinds spots - either internally or externally - brings us closer to the vision that we are All One race - transcending the peculiarities and temporalities of specific cultures and tribes. This is the true Utopia - the one we are living in right now with all of our fellow brothers on earth - the one which surrounds us at all times and yet which we do not rightly see.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is said to have pronounced that "the Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon this earth, but men do not see it." The same could be said for the brotherhood of man, so earnestly sought by civilizations throughout history. By seeing into our own blind spots - our own missing pieces - we can begin to see in our brother - in our enemies as well - our truer selves, our truer community, our truer collective.* And in that moment, Utopia will cease to be "nowhere" but will be right here - and everywhere.



*The connection to Jesus's other injunction to remove the log from your own eye should be obvious. Looking at what one is blocking in one's own sight is the key to recognizing one's neighbor's perfection. That we are all living in perfection right now is simply a matter of perceiving it.

By turning our "speck-eyed" neighbor into that one missing thing, that scapegoat, we persist in keeping our own selves in darkness. Therefore the communities which strive so fervently to remain in the light by expelling the "evil" only bind themselves deeper and deeper in the darkness they are struggling to emerge from.

This also is a clue to Jesus's meekness and unwillingness to fight evil. Turning the other cheek is the ultimate expression of this. Defusing rejection through acceptance is the only cure for our troubles. And finally, Jesus must have asked himself, what attitude did I hold to bring down such hatred from my brother? For surely he and I are of one flesh and the violence perpetrated "against me" by my own self must be also of my own doing. Why then would I resist my own self? How else am I to know me, then? This is the deep ecology of the religious - that I and my brother are one - that we are parts of one ecological system from which neither can be truly extracted.