{"id":24951,"date":"2017-07-31T01:06:25","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T05:06:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/?p=24951"},"modified":"2017-07-30T17:01:20","modified_gmt":"2017-07-30T21:01:20","slug":"whats-wrong-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2017\/07\/whats-wrong-america\/","title":{"rendered":"What to do about what’s wrong with America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

One of the happy characteristics of America, mythical or actual, is its hospitality to those who want to begin the world anew, whether by building a purified church, crafting a commonwealth\u2014whose very name suggests there is such thing as a recognizable public good\u2014or establishing a new order of the ages. For centuries space remained between Atlantic and Pacific for those anxious to try again to get things right. The United States, especially in the nineteenth century, was sprinkled liberally with utopian experiments. (Of course not everybody got space and freedom\u00a0for building their utopias, Mormons<\/a> among those notoriously persecuted in their efforts.) Many of these ideal communities fell short, remembered now only in traces or ruins. Religious conviction established some of these. Others tried economic programs, equality of labor and capital, equality of sexes or races.<\/p>\n

New attention has been paid to American utopias this past year through publication of books about them and their founders. Chris Jennings\u2019s Paradise Now<\/a> surveys a number of them. Erik Reece\u2019s Utopia Drive<\/a> treats us to a road trip among them. Some books focus on one group or community, like Ellen Wayland-Smith\u2019s Oneida<\/a>, which retells the making of John Humphrey Noyes\u2019s upstate New York settlement that rejected traditional marriage and ended up famous for the flatware it sold to brides. Philip Gura\u2019s book<\/a> looks at some of these planned communities alongside visionaries who channeled their reform efforts elsewhere, from George Ripley\u2019s Brook Farm and Orson Fowler\u2019s phrenology to John Brown\u2019s violent antislavery.<\/p>\n

In his recent First Things<\/em> review<\/a> of some of these books, <\/em>Michael J. Lewis observes that \u201cThe philosophical underpinning of these communal societies, even the militantly secular ones, was the communism of the early Christian Church as described in the Acts of the Apostles and by church tradition.\u201d Lewis traces American utopian impulses not only to the Bible but back to the very author of Utopia<\/a><\/em>, Thomas More (1477-1535). More\u2019s idealized island community lacked private property, got rid of idle aristocrats, tolerated religious beliefs, and made childrearing and dining communal activities. Lewis discovers that \u201c[v]irtually all of these aspects of Utopia<\/em> were revisited in one or another of America\u2019s communal societies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Maybe utopias are always interesting, even when they fail. Utopian communities are a kind of protest incarnate. The way one devises a utopian experiment flows, at least in part, from what one perceives as what is wrong with society. Their utility for onlookers is partly in diagnosing what is amiss with a time and place. Times are bad; there must be a better way, right here, without moving to Canada. Perhaps that helps explain these books\u2019 currency at present. The reformers in Gura\u2019s book were reacting to the Panic of 1837, the economic downturn that sapped faith in America\u2019s promise of economic opportunity and political equality.\u00a0 The range of responses reformers advanced\u2014from \u201cmutual\u201d banks and labor, to vegetarian diets, to shared quarters and wives\u2014indicates the difficulty of diagnosing the one thing chiefly thing wrong with us and prescribing what will restore social health. As the wife of author Reece quips, \u201cSo if a woman starts the utopia\u2026they have no sex, and if a man starts it they can have all the sex they want.\u201d Gura\u2019s critique of the men and women he profiles is that they vested too much confidence in individuals, assuming that the change of heart and self-discipline of each could fix the whole. Most of us may have less confidence than nineteenth-century romantics that self-improvement could leaven the whole lump. We may be little drawn to a community like that of the Shakers, a celibate bunch that rigorously separated the sexes, or Fruitlands, the Massachusetts settlement insisting on cold baths and farmwork by hand. But we would be wooden not to feel the pull of this desire to do better than what American social life now seems to afford, to want elevation of talk and manners, of work and civic engagement.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the happy characteristics of America, mythical or actual, is its hospitality to those who want to begin the world anew, whether by building a purified church, crafting a commonwealth\u2014whose very name suggests there is such thing as a recognizable public good\u2014or establishing a new order of the ages. For centuries space remained between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1190,"featured_media":24954,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[306,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-agnes-howard","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat to do about what's wrong with America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"One of the happy characteristics of America, mythical or actual, is its hospitality to those who want to begin the world anew, whether by building a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/anxiousbench\/2017\/07\/whats-wrong-america\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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