Sailing to Eutopia; FPR's Jeff Bilbro; Voices of Decentralism
Sailing to Eutopia; FPR's Jeff Bilbro; Voices of Decentralism
It's all about getting the scale of things right...
Great news! I’m sailing to Eutopia (which, please note, is a different destination than Utopia)
I’m very interested in how we can relearn the practice of “forward dreaming” again. It will require unlearning, of course
After all, even our imaginations have been privatized, as I plan to argue in this new maybe-a-book project I’m calling “A Field Guide to Eutopia.”
Thanks to the lingering after-effects of Cold War rhetoric, the word utopia, which literally means “no place”, has a suggestion of something unreal, unrealistic or even totalitarian. (“The first step toward the Gulag!” used to be one way to quash public-minded idea.)
The word Eutopia, on the other hand, means:
a place of ideal well-being, as a practical aspiration (compared with utopia as an impossible concept)
—Oxford English Dictionary
As the world darkens, it’s imperative we recover our social imaginations in order to liberate them from their condition of privatization, and once again (as we did in earlier times) learn to think in a Eutopian way. What would that mean?
In my notion of things, you can spot a true Eutopian in someone exhibiting the following qualities:
a lack of ideology;
a lack of fearfulness;
friendly/relational/inclusive;
commons- and community-oriented.
But there’s more. I want to explore the idea of Eutopia as a method — a framework for “imagining communities that do not exist”, as British sociologist Ruth Levitas puts it. (Or do not yet exist.) In order to explore the structural limits of what is thinkable. And to get a better sense of what it is about the future that we are unable or even unwilling to imagine.
One role of Eutopian thinking is estrangement, the “making strange” of structures we’ve always taken for granted or assumed to be permanent. We want to educate our desire through a kind of forward dreaming — which can, surprisingly enough, be a form of knowledge, another idea I want to explore.
Glimpses of New Social Landscapes
As a playful experiment in Eutopian methods, I’m inviting a group of friends to each find a quiet space and do some forward dreaming. I’m asking them to imagine a scene — any scene — in their own future Eutopia. And then to write down what they saw in 150 words or less so that we can share it here.
I suspect that this will not be an easy thing for most of us to do. We’ll be tempted to imagine some cheesy sci-fi scene with jet backpacks. But we’re not interested in Technopia here — we want a human landscape and human society. Which will likely appear futuristic, even if not exactly like sci-fi.
More like a way of imagining what “ideal well-being” could look like.
Thanks to all in advance!
The View from the Porch
Over the last decade, I’ve been an occasional contributor to Front Porch Republic, a wonderfully literate collection of voices who attempt to defend the small places. And who share a passion for reading and talking about the work of Wendell Berry.
A sometimes cranky but readable bunch of agrarians, you might call them, mixed with a few English professors great at standup comedy. (To get the full flavor of FPR, you need to attend one of their annual conferences in person. At the last one I caught, I found myself chatting away happily with a socialist and a paleoconservative. Where else you gonna find that?)
So until you can get to a conference, here’s a conversation with Jeff Bilbro, an editor and the website manager at FPR, in which we talk about (of course) Wendell Berry, localism, kairos time versus chronos time, Dante, submerged grief, and A.J. Heschel’s ideas about the Sabbath.
What Can Happen When Localism Gets Political
What’s the best political program for us localists? One very interesting option is that of municipalism. Here’s the way one group describes the movement:
New municipalism is a political strategy that differs from others in the fact that it not only pursues building power from a specific place (the local level) but also in its approach towards politics:
It does not only aim at implementing progressive policies, but at radically changing the way politics is done. It aims at departing from representative democracy and to implement participatory, open and horizontal decision-making mechanisms that truly distribute power.
It aims at working both within and outside formal institutions. The emphasis on one or the other varies, depending on the place, but municipalism aims at articulating the “inside” with the “outside” and to blur the borders between the two.
Instead of building power by scaling up local initiatives vertically, it aims at combining local action with networked distributed and cooperative power trans-locally. From the municipality to the globe.
It has a feminist approach towards politics: care ethics, care work, relationships, interdependence and the challenge of privileges are at the center of the agenda.
One excellent and related resource from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics: their new Decentralism File, a compilation of over 100 selections from decentralist thought.
“The purpose of the Decentralism File is to bring to the modern reader a selection from the writings of advocates in the decentralist tradition, beginning in Lao-Tzu’s China of 550 BC, and continuing through a wide range of cultures and eras into the present day.”
You’ll find articles and selections from Wendell Berry, Gar Alperovitz, Jane Jacobs, Normal Mailer, Rosa Luxembourg, Joseph Tainter, Michael Shuman, James Madison, Aldous Huxley, and Vaclav Havel, among many others.
See you next time—peace.