Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Dystopia Week Part 4)

What a fine film — and what a charismatic being Tina Turner is. She’s so good here as the deadly but visionary creator and leader of Bartertown that you can’t help wishing she’d been in far more films in those days. She also performs my (unusual) pick for best Tina Turner song for the opening credits: the menacing “One of the Living.”

(You’ll note I did not pick the song she did with the Fixx, “Be Good to Me,” nor the movie’s far better-known song, “We Don’t Need Another Hero” — a song that Christine Ames rightly points out is probably made just a tad less romantic and moving, or at least less universal in its meaning, by the inclusion of the line “All we want is life beyond the Thunderdome.”)

The Mad Max movies, in their simple way, really do have a logical arc to them in retrospect: first we see the doomed civilization in which we almost live, then humanity after the war reduced to mere scavengers, and in this final film, for all Aunty Entity’s flaws, the believable reassertion of civilization in crude form. Tina wrote the law, as she memorably reminds us, and old-fashioned as it may sound, it is at least a step forward over the chaos of the second film: If two men have an unresolvable dispute, into the Thunderdome arena they go: “Two men enter, one man leaves.” I know of a frat at Dartmouth that had a similar policy. I don’t think they observed the “Break a deal, face the wheel” law, though.

It’s too bad the telepathic talking dog from A Boy and His Dog (noted on Monday) wasn’t around to assist the people of Bartertown with rebuilding civilization, since, as libertarian economist David Friedman has noted, dogs likely played an important role in the early establishment of property rights, being territorial and inclined to guard their own human families, a natural alarm system.

Less welcome — and I recall this bothering me back when I first saw the movie — is actor Bruce Spence, apparently playing a character who is very nearly — but not quite — the same character he played in the first film (there a gyrocopter pilot, here an airplane pilot), which is simply confusing and off-putting, not to mention a weird throwback to the days when, say, Groucho was almost but not quite the same character in each film.

At 6’7”, though, who’s going to tell him he can’t be in the film (or in the extended edition of Return of the King as the Mouth of Sauron, for that matter)? Under Australian law, his height automatically makes him more powerful than Peter Garrett, the green, bald 6’4” lead singer of Midnight Oil. It’s a primitive law code, admittedly, but one can see in it hope for gradually rebuilding society in the sandy wasteland.

Road Warrior plus NYC and East St. Louis (Dystopia Week Part 3)

The second Mad Max movie, Road Warrior, holds up incredibly well twenty-eight years later, each character fighting for survival in the post-apocalyptic Outback having his own little arc or moment to shine, even with dialogue as minimal as the luxuries in their tattered world.

The film is also oddly gay, a reminder that there was a period, especially in English-language but non-U.S. sci-fi, when writers liked toying with this relatively new thing that was the publicly, visibly gay subculture but weren’t quite ready to make the good guy characters gay and thus had a lot of decadent gay villains (there’s a lot of this in Michael Moorcock as well, even though he, too, is no doubt very pro-gay). Most striking in this regard may be the moment when the hockey-masked, superhumanly-bemuscled evil leader called Humongous physically restrains his gay, mohawked henchman after the henchman’s boyish companion is slain, murmuring reassurances.

All that went over my head when I was twelve, but the film affected my psyche in one important way: It helped me delusionally ignore the constant threat of nuclear annihilation in the waning years of the Cold War. Dad always assured me, with no noticeable alarm, that we in Norwich, CT would be among the first incinerated due to our proximity to the Groton sub-building facilities (prominent in Dad’s mind, as an ex-Navy man).

But should we survive, maybe things would look just a little like Road Warrior — and would that be so bad? My friend Ali Kokmen still fantasizes about living as an archer at times, and Scott Nybakken and I, just a few years ago, jokingly agreed that if civilization in New York ever collapses, all we really need is, as I said, “a crossbow, a go-cart covered with spikes,” and, as Scott added, “a star to steer by.”

Even with all the doomsday stuff, films like this were conservative in another important way: After the cultural disaster that was the 1970s, they were essentially saying “We’re not going to take the collapse of civilization lying down — if it comes to it, we’re prepared to fight back, with guns, against the criminals and the mutants,” which is all I really ask of Americans. Films like this were the sci-fi equivalent of Dirty Harry, really — no-nonsense cynicism combined with rugged individualism. You know, the way sane people are.

And it ends with what is still, for my money, the best car chase in film history.

Around the same time, the world got a glimpse of barbarous apocalypse already upon us, in the form of New York City at its most crime-filled, in the movie The Warriors, which girlfriend Helen (she’s back, but more about that in two weeks — sorry about all the drama) and I saw recently at Coney Island, where the film concludes and where it’s now being shown annually, after being part of the nationwide Netflix series of film screenings a few years ago that showed movies in the cities where they took place (I saw Clerks in Red Bank, NJ, with Kevin Smith answering questions and lamenting that the then-recent Superman Returns was even lamer than the aborted 1990s Superman film he was involved with).

Combine Road Warrior and Warriors, and you basically get another film from about the same time: Escape from New York. But here’s the ugly, apocalyptic truth: It was filmed not in decrepit circa-1980 Manhattan but in permanently-awful East St. Louis.

Fun facts about East St. Louis from Wiki.:

•has lost half its population since 1950

•has approx. the highest crime rate in America (with something like 1 in a 1,000 residents murdered in 2006)

•and has had the following impact on film, quoth Wiki.:

In the 1981 science fiction/action film Escape from New York, director John Carpenter used East St. Louis to represent a decaying, semi-destroyed future version of New York City. At that time, East St. Louis had entire neighborhoods burned out in 1976 during a massive urban fire, which suited the director’s vision of a Manhattan Island that has been turned into a maximum security prison.

In the 1983 comedy National Lampoon’s Vacation, the Griswolds accidentally drive through East St. Louis and get their car stripped while asking for directions.

And speaking of people who were in Vacation, maybe a little East St. Louis criminality rubbed off on Randy Quaid, recently arrested along with his wife for skipping out on a $10,000 hotel bill — money that he could perhaps have put into the charitable medical causes for which he’s often pleading. Ah, well, he’ll have whole hotels to himself after the Great Conflagration leaves behind only him, the mutants, and a few thousand of the rest of us. Man, it’s gonna be awesome.

Roberts vs. Keynes, on Lehrer (UPDATED)

In a world of mushy moderates where even some supposed free-marketeers have lately been talking — or simply acting — as though they respect Keynes, it’s good to hear that George Mason University’s Russ Roberts will explain why Keynes is dangerously wrong, tonight at 7 Eastern on PBS’s Newshour. It’s the antidote to people telling you “Well, we have to do something [that involves passing legislation, even if that legislation is destructive].” UPDATE: Nope, I was misinformed — he’ll be on some later date.

Sci-Fi Affects Your Dreams

I dreamt this morning I was lost on the subway and ended up at an underground kids’ museum, seeing a guy in a thick cardboard Thing costume fighting a guy in a thick cardboard triceratops costume, the latter finally being dispatched in a slo-mo kung fu attack by a guy in a furry fly costume, who mock-decapitated the triceratops (with fake blood) to the sound of disco music.

A Boy and His Dog (Dystopia Week Part 2)

If Things to Come, discussed yesterday, was the film that created the sci-fi model for what a ruined post-apocalyptic civilization is supposed to look like, A Boy and His Dog, a 1975 film featuring a young Don Johnson and his shaggy telepathically-talking dog companion, was likely the transmitter of that vision to the directors of some later, better-known works.

As in Road Warrior, here we see a pieced-together simulacrum of a functioning civilization, clothes in tatters, machinery in disrepair, and — crucially — the survivors struggling to survive in the Australian Outback. As in two Duran Duran videos, we see an elevator carry our protagonist down into a vast subterranean civilization that is at the same time more high-tech and more terrifying than the surface world.

Unfortunately, once Don Johnson descends from the post-nuclear wasteland into that subterranean world, the shabby appeal of the post-apocalyptic, barbarous world is lost. The underground looks like a hyper-suburban, brightly-lit world born of 1950s sitcoms, and that’s just not as much fun. Worse, Johnson leaves his adorable, scruffy talking dog on the surface when he travels below, so half the film’s fun — and half the title — is irrelevant for a long stretch. It’s just as well that George Miller came along and mined the best elements of the film for use in the Mad Max films, since A Boy and His Dog doesn’t quite deliver on its promise.

A simple rule for all aspiring filmmakers: Don’t introduce us to a lovable talking dog and then take him away for half the film. Virtually all good-hearted people love dogs — talking ones even more so — and the thought of one sitting out half the film in a sandswept post-nuclear wasteland is just sad.

But speaking of boys and magical animals, now I must dash, since I see that Dave Barry is talking about his Peter Pan books at a Barnes & Noble in my neighborhood. It is my duty as a mature adult to hear what this influential writer has to say.

Things to Come (Dystopia Week Part 1)

H.G. Wells was a complete jerk.  As noted in Jonah Goldberg’s recent book, Wells coined the term “liberal fascism,” and he meant it as a good thing, a long-term plan to give socialism the panache and glamour of Naziism and a veneer of palatable old-fashioned liberalism (he seems to be winning, alas).

Wells was also an arrogant, totalitarian monster (and thus right at home with George Bernard Shaw and other respectable British intellectuals in the Fabian Society of a century ago).  His stories included ones in which he openly dreamt of humanity simply waking up much smarter one day and, as a result, burning the old books and paintings of the bourgeois era in massive bonfires so that people can set about building a new world without markets or sexual jealousy.

If Wells hadn’t imagined some Martians, giant ants, and time machines along the way, he’d rightly be regarded today as an insufferable asshole.

Poised somewhere between the two aspects of his persona lies the 1936 film that he wrote, the truly impressive Things to Come (fusing a similarly-titled novel he wrote and a widely-acclaimed sociological tract that he likely plagiarized).  On the brink of the real Second World War, Wells depicted a global conflict that would cast civilization in ruin but would also afford the opportunity for big-brained socialists (specifically, giant-helmeted “Masons” with the world’s only remaining tech knowledge) to rebuild — and this time get things right.

The most surprising — yet familiar — sequence of this whole century-spanning tale, though, to the modern viewer, is the almost farcical (in a good way) sequence in the middle of the film depicting humanity living in squalor amidst the ruins.  For, as surely as I am a geek, it was this sequence that inspired (directly or indirectly) most of the other dystopian works we’ll be looking at this week, including Road Warrior.  It’s all here: the patched-together clothing, the ramshackle vehicles, the primitivist reversion to tribal ways and leadership by chieftans, even the silly hats.

He wanted utopia, but for this Week of Dystopia, we are deeply indebted to H.G. Wells.

Mondo Magic vs. Hawaii Five-O

As we begin Columbus Day weekend, it’s worth remembering the ways Western Civilization has tromped on the locals around the globe — but also worth pausing to remember how much better Western Civilization is than its rivals, even today.

That point was driven home for me — and for my friends Chuck Blake and Paul Taylor when we were teens — by the trashy documentary Mondo Magic, which had come out in 1975, about a decade and a half before we saw it. Under the pretense of surveying local, traditional cultures the world over, Mondo Magic’s numerous vignettes work as a sort of reverse-tourism-ad, reminding you that (at least as of 1975), it’s still a world full of poverty, superstition, and barbarism.

You get to see a girl from the Middle East have her tonsils ritually removed — and ritually stapled to her forehead. You get to see a witch doctor “cure” a headache (or at least seriously distract the sufferer from the pain) — by cutting off a finger. You see Bushmen (reasonably enough) using a simple means of warding off potentially deadly mosquitoes — letting cows urinate all over them in order to disguise the odors of their bodies.

On it goes, until you’re truly grateful in your very bones — maybe for the first time in your life — that you live in a modern, industrial, capitalist society. That must be how young Barack Obama felt upon coming to the U.S. for the first time after being born in Kenya — just kidding! According to the unopposed vote of nearly all the listeners at Lolita Bar this past Wednesday, Obama is really a natural-born U.S. citizen (there were one or two abstentions), though both debaters did a fine job. The consensus, then, is that he is a Hawaiian constitutionally eligible to be president — though, like the rest of the world, we did not anticipate this automatically making him eligible for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Speaking of politics, it’s worth remembering that Mondo Magic was a valuable antidote to the then-growing fashion in its day, spurred by anthropologists, of taking a completely relativist approach to cross-cultural comparisons, as though starvation and ignorance are only “failed” outcomes from a Western perspective. That brand of relativism lives on in watered-down form in the mushy minds of professors across North America, the sorts who survey the heated political conflicts of our day — over things like the size of government — and have nothing more useful to offer than praise of “multiculturalism” and cries that “pluralism!” is what we need — as though anyone cares enough about such vague principles even to bother arguing with them.

One admitted downside of our high-tech culture, though: annoying hackers.  I apologize to anyone (especially Google Reader users) inconvenienced by some problems along those lines with this blog’s recent output — a problem I think my able webmaster has remedied. (My thanks again to Eric Hanneken for noticing the problem — and by all means let me know, readers, if you notice other such glitches, even if we don’t immediately get a chance to fix them.)

Even a high-tech society dreams of escaping to a low-tech paradise sometimes, and in our case that often means Hawaii. As it happens, I see that Orci and Kurtzman, the writer pair who have recently helped give cinematic new life to Star Trek, Watchmen, Mission Impossible, and Transformers (not to mention TV life to Alias and Fringe), are taking on the logical next assignment: a TV series relaunch of Hawaii Five-O. They will reportedly keep the phrase “Book ’em, Danno,” even though the lead character will be the son of the Jack Lord character, not the same man, backed by a new generation of detectives.

The real question is whether they will screw up the wave/Ventures opening in some unexpected way, though, one of TV’s best ever. Sadly, Ventures lead guitarist Bob Bogle died four months ago and can’t help out.

And on another less-than-paradisiacal note: starting tomorrow, let’s spend all week looking at dystopias, in the form of six films and one pivotal collection of rock videos.

Book Selection: "City of the Sun" (sci-fi version)

Watching Obama’s continued mesmeric effect upon the world, I was reminded of another utopia-related book I want to mention during my “Month of Utopia”: City of the Sun — not the original utopian novel of four hundred years ago by Tommaso Campanella mentioned on this blog earlier this week (nor last year’s crime thriller by the same name), but the 1970s sci-fi novel by Brian Stableford.

Stableford asks what it would take to really create a unanimous, collectively-acting city-state, and his somewhat disturbing answer is: a parasitic brain fungus that turns all the city’s inhabitants into a single colony-organism.  The big dilemma for our astronaut-explorer heroes (the crew of the intrepid Daedalus used in multiple Stableford novels) is that they can’t decide whether this fungus/human arrangement, now generations old, constitutes an emergency or simply a new, respectable form of life.

It’s very much the dilemma that anthropologists confront about whether to judge societies by external or internal criteria — though in this case the answer could determine whether the society survives or gets nuked by forces from Earth.

(Speaking of anthropological criteria for judgment, tomorrow I’ll take a look at a movie that influenced my thinking as a teen precisely by treating anthropological observation as a tour of foreign horrors: Mondo Magic.)

I happened to spot this City of the Sun on my childhood bookshelf on a visit home several months ago, not long after deciding to read the Campanella original and without, as far as I recall, ever having read the Stableford book back when I was a kid.  I went on to read it while sitting in Battery Park, with the Statue of Liberty and a man in a Spider-Man costume within view, in between a bar gathering of conservatives and a Village party of leftists fond of substances other than alcohol.  It was an odd day.

But perhaps the strangest state of mind in which I’ve found myself this week occurred Wednesday morning, when I dreamt — without any assistance from alien mushroom spores — of a creepy, quite poignant situation that, when you think about it, will likely confront all humans someday: In the dream, I was immersed in a convincing 3D playback of a conversation with a deceased friend — in this case, a cute female one closely resembling a young Lea Thompson in Back to the Future (I didn’t quite peg her as such during the dream, but long after waking it struck me as sort of fitting).

At one point, the female figure even said something about feeling weird at the thought that this 3D simulation might someday be played back when she’s dead — to which I said, joking but heartbroken, “How do you think I feel?”  I woke up vaguely sad — but not nearly as sad as we’ll all be when, in all likelihood, we experience this sort of thing for real in the near future.  The dead aren’t really with us as part of an undying collective organism, but it will increasingly seem so if we want it to feel that way.

A Well-Deserved Prize for Radically Improving Teh World

I think the big prize went to the right man. No, I don’t mean the ludicrous, discredited — and increasingly heavy-handedly leftist — Nobel committee giving a Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, apparently for continuing essentially unchanged the foreign policy and national security policies (even at Gitmo) of George W. Bush, whose policies they so despised that it likely influenced their decisions to give Nobels to people like the anti-scientist Al Gore and the irrelevant but frothing Harold Pinter.

I mean that Popular Mechanics gave its Leadership Award for inspirational technical innovation last night to Dean Kamen, whose mobility-enhancing devices (including the Segway) have improved life for many people with medical problems. I heard Kamen give a long speech chastising America for not putting a high enough priority on valorizing and glamorizing science and technology, making them as attractive to the young as we do sports and Hollywood through frivolous media glitz that could in theory be applied elsewhere.

He also took the trouble, I was pleased to see, to note that the solution isn’t simply throwing public sector money at the problem, since in absolute terms the U.S. spends more on education than most of the rest of the world combined. He sees it as a problem of cultural priorities and resultant psychological cues. And anyone in New Jersey, specifically, who thinks public education is the solution badly needs to go see this documentary, The Cartel, as it opens tonight in several locations in that state, exposing the absurdities of the government’s education near-monopoly.

I have to admit, though, that I ducked out of the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough Awards briefly — much as I might share Kamen’s worries — to see a talk at the nearby Columbus Circle Borders bookstore by Ben Huh, the guy who owns the funny-cats website ICanHasCheezburger.com, which had one this week that I think we can all agree was historically significant and another that simply reminded me of the late Seavey family cat Oscar when he used to sit in our birdfeeder (and later in life, the much lower faux-birdfeeder that my father built especially for Oscar, since my parents are nice that way). Huh described his company’s low-hurdle but important mission statement goal of “making people happier for five minutes a day.” That’s more than Obama’s done so far.

Book Selection: John Reed vs. Hernando de Soto

I love the bourgeoisie, responsible for most of the good things in this broken, miserable world — but one bourgeois tendency I try to resist is the novelistic temptation to think that a likable, well-meaning protagonist must necessarily be working for the right cause. Nice people can be very wrong.

Take John Reed, best known for Ten Days That Shook the World but also for the essays collected in a volume I recently read, Shaking the World: The Revolutionary Journalism of John Reed. An honest-to-gosh unrepentant Bolshevik of the early twentieth century, Reed may be most interesting now for providing reminders of how a decent person could have ended up rooting for the USSR, one of the most murderous regimes in history (not that he’s close to alone, as surveys of leftist American college professors reveal).

One always-reliable means of getting people to hunker down and defend evil is to give them an enemy to fight that seems even worse, and history obliged Reed (as the essays here attest) with U.S. imperialist adventures in Mexico, machine-gun-wielding corporate security goons massacring labor union strikers, and the dispiriting (to Reed) capture of the Progressive movement — and even the labor movement — by corporate-friendly, non-revolutionary forces. Further, there are only so many times you can expect a man to get arrested for his beliefs before he turns ornery.

Through it all, his beloved strikers, such as the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies, who dreamt of “one big union” instead of separate trades), kept him hoping:

In the very forefront of labor’s struggle against this overwhelming evil power the IWW fights a guerilla warfare with all weapons, from guns to sabotage, propaganda, strikes, and open battles — outlaws and heroes, murdered and imprisoned by the hundreds, indestructible, singing their defiant, ironical songs.

As I’ll discuss later in the month in looking at the book The Democratic Wish, it’s really quite remarkable how recently — and how suddenly — the violent fight between labor and management was tamed (in what can be seen as a very conservative way, despite the institutionalized statism) by the New Deal, without which we might still settle such issues with blood in the streets, something worth remembering if one is ever tempted, as a free-marketeer, to say that nothing could be worse than the current regime (or for that matter that the press could be no farther left than it is in its current, Obamaphilic form). The extent to which corporations made violent, coercive use of the law against their working-class foes a century ago is quite shocking and easily forgotten — much less subtle than the ways they manipulate the law today.

Reed can’t stop at defending a largely-immigrant army of American strikers and their plucky union songs, though, going on to report from newly-Bolshevik Russia that he sees few people there imprisoned for their beliefs, admires that land’s revolution more than the U.S.’s own rich-elitist Founding (and the twentieth century’s ostensibly Republican-enslaved Supreme Court). He even defends the conscription of nigh-ineducable Russian peasants — with their stubborn “petty bourgeois” clinging to private property — into Labor Armies. Eventually, he would die after a harrowing spell in a White Russian prison.

•••

Lest we think that there are no heroic writers traveling the world, aiding the poor, and reaching economic conclusions diametrically opposite to Reed’s, though, I strongly urge everyone reading this to watch Power of the Poor tonight (Oct. 8) at 10pm Eastern on PBS [UPDATE: and in the New York area, it'll be Sunday night, Oct. 11, at 10:30pm -- only on the secondary PBS station Channel 21], featuring Hernando de Soto, who has traveled the world spreading the bare-bones libertarian message that until the poor of the developing world have clearly-defined, legally-enforceable property rights, they cannot easily invest, trade, take out mortgages, enter into complex contracts, and all the other things that make complex modern economies possible. This is a very different message from that favored by leftists, aid agencies, the ignorant NGOs of the world — but it’s the right one.

•••

And speaking of libertarian writers and Russian revolutions: I’ll also have much more to say soon about the already-available “November” issue of Reason, which features not only my defense of the centrality of property rights to libertarian thinking but also two pieces looking back at the 1989 collapse of Communism, on the verge of that glorious and under-celebrated event’s twentieth anniversary.

Twenty years — yet the blink of an eye in the grand historical scheme of things. Not that much time has really passed during our most familiar and contentious philosophical battles, as I’ve said before. If you’d said, back when agricultural civilization began 10,000 years ago, that it’d take thousands of years to work out the best social system, you’d have been quite reasonable and correct. Yet now people draw sweeping, radically-opposed conclusions by comparing, say, 1974 to 1983 or some other such minuscule pair of time slices. Some things are just now being worked out for the first time — industrial civilization, with all its growing pains and different organizational schemes, among them.

Liberalism Disarms, Husband Kills, Soccer Mom

A note from the decidedly non-utopian real world we inhabit: I’m sure the leftward spin on this tragic story will be that a gun-toting soccer mom died by means of the same sort of weaponry she favored packing, live by the sword, die by the sword (though that expression should perhaps be reserved for stories like this one).  The sanity-ward spin, though, should be that a sheriff, by revoking her carry permit, left her disarmed, allowing her violent husband to murder her (and then, to the world’s relief, to kill himself).  Every liberal who would disarm potential victims bears some guilt in allowing such things to happen.

Book Selection: "Looking Backward" (and the socialist Pledge of Allegiance)

Tonight at Lolita Bar, a so-called “birther” will attempt to make the case that Obama isn’t really a natural-born citizen.  I, your host, will remain scrupulously neutral on the question during the proceedings — even while thinking Obama is something of a socialist.  But this much I can promise you: no one reading Edward Bellamy’s late-nineteenth-century socialist novel Looking Backward could possibly think that socialism itself is foreign to the American political tradition.

Looking Backward, in which a man from the benighted nineteenth century awakens in the twenty-first to find a well-run socialist society, was thoroughly rooted in the American experiences of the time — and is based on the idea that once large industrial, corporate combines arose, the natural and just progression of things would be for the whole country to fuse into a single corporate entity, ending divisions between management and labor and, ostensibly, ending deprivation, injustice, and inefficiency in the process.  It’s the usual naive century-ago socialist smugness, complete with people “realizing” that they don’t need that much variety when they shop, “realizing” that it’s irrational for their work output to be correlated to their wages, etc. — but it’s undeniably all-American.  You won’t find any arguments derived from Hegel or Marx here, nor praise of Europe.

Indeed, Looking Backward is one of the most popular American books of all time and was hailed by this nation of idiots as so insightful back in the day that hundreds of clubs arose across the land for spreading its message and its solution to the problem of industrial relations.  If an Obama — or, say, failed NYC public advocate candidate Mark Green — really wanted to impose socialism on the land without frightening people into thinking it was some alien force, Looking Backward would be as homegrown a precedent for it as Teddy Roosevelt — whose own thinking was influenced by some of the same Progressive currents inspiring Bellamy.

And speaking of nationalistic Republicans, I don’t think we of an anarchistic, individualist bent should ever stop reminding our more flag-waving, patriotic brethren that the Pledge of Allegiance they so treasure was written by Edward Bellamy’s cousin Francis Bellamy (my apologies for once referring to them as brothers in a comment on Jacob Levy’s blog).  And Francis Bellamy, far better than most of today’s conservatives, understood that cloaking the state in those sorts of ritualized, traditionalistic appeals — and aiming them at youth — was a means of fostering socialistic, collectivist servility.  That was the whole idea.

Every time you hear some nominal anti-socialist urging all the kiddies to say “…one nation, indivisible…” he might as well be urging Boy Scouts to chant “The state above all!  Communism plus a century equals tradition!  Oh, how we revere our socialist past!  Please use me as a cog in the corporatist-statist machine!”

I recommend scrapping all such statist displays amdist the current reaction against statist overreach.  The problem, after all, goes much deeper than Medicare or insurance mandates.

Book Selection: "Peaceable Kingdoms"

The 1971 utopian anthology Peaceable Kingdoms, edited by Robert L. Chianese (not a Maoist, as far as I know), defines utopianism broadly enough to include writings inspired by political utopianism but also, wisely I think, various psychologically-similar impulses.

Chianese includes Campanella’s The City of the Sun, which I described yesterday, and News from Nowhere, William Morris’s low-tech, greenish response to Edward Bellamy’s immensely popular Looking Backward (about which, more tomorrow).  But Chianese also includes the noble-savage-popularizing “Supplement to Bougainville’s ‘Voyage’” by encyclopedist and philosophe Denis Diderot, Kant’s proto-globalist “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” pacifism from Emerson, idyllic anti-rat-race thinking from Thoreau, and modern ecological doomsaying from Robert Heilbroner (complete with vintage 1970s moralizing about the threat of a human-induced ice age).

(Kant might have found this passage from Campanella about the City of the Sun’s inhabitants’ attitudes an impediment to international harmony, by the way:  “To the heroes and heroines of the republic, it is customary to give the pleasing gifts of honor, beautiful wreaths, sweet food, or splendid clothes, while they are feasting.  In the daytime, all use white garments within the city, but at night or outside the city they use red garments either of wool or silk.  They hate black as they do dung, and therefore they dislike the Japanese, who are fond of black.”  But can City of the Sun inhabitants beat ninjas?)

Chianese also includes pastorally-inclined and spiritually-charged statements or poetry from the Books of Isaiah and Matthew, from Ovid, and from Marlowe, Raleigh, and Blake.  That makes sense, since (as White argues in his intro to Famous Utopias, the anthology discussed yesterday) the whole naive idea of a perfected human community no doubt arises more from a timeless longing for escape from the misery of the mundane real world (by any means) than from a rational analysis of what can realistically be done with that world.

He concludes the volume with three documents interesting mainly for their similarity to each other, which will no doubt become only more obvious with passing centuries: a Romantic political manifesto from Percy Bysshe Shelley (as I’ve noted with awe before, the husband of sci-fi’s founder and the son-in-law of the founders of anarchism and feminism), our own Bill of Rights, and the 1966 party platform of the Black Panthers.

As with the constitutions of Europe, the Black Panther platform should be seen as a flattering reminder that even people who like to think of themselves as working in opposition to mainstream-U.S.-style capitalism and individualism (and are quite explicit about it in the case of the Black Panthers) often mimic the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in their rhetoric, implicitly treating those documents with respect and entering into a dialogue with them, all within what will be easily read as a single broader tradition by the inhabitants of the Mars Colonies or what have you four centuries hence when economics as we know it has given way to life as holographic cyber-organisms without politics.

And speaking of the future: tomorrow, the sci-fi-like socialist classic Looking Backward.

Book Selection: "Famous Utopias"

I’m expanding my Book Selections of the Month to include about half my blog entries for this month (my “Month of Utopia”), all more or less on utopian themes (with those themes in turn more or less fitting into the original sci-fi/fantasy mandate I gave myself for all my 2009 Book Selections, if anyone still remembers that year-long plan).

One of six majors works of utopian writing collected in the book Famous Utopias (edited by Frederic R. White in 1946, when the world needed optimistic visions) is Thomas More’s Utopia itself (arguably not the first work of utopian literature if you count things such as Plato’s Republic, but a good place to start and influential enough to give the genre its name). The dismaying thing about Utopia, I think, is just how familiar it sounds, not in a way that makes one think it was ahead of its time but in a way that makes one think idealists haven’t really learned much in the intervening 500 years.

The sympathetic character who describes the land of Utopia to us is an apostate priest dissatisfied with the existing social order in Europe — which is interesting, given that Thomas More is remembered as a martyr fighting for Catholic orthodoxy against Henry VIII’s schismatic scheming, even if More’s greatest work is seen as a precursor to socially and politically revolutionary thinking. But then, sloppy and banal as it may sound to say so, a lot of seemingly contradictory zealous tendencies do start to blur together and overlap in practice.

The priest character, sounding a lot like a bitter left-wing grad student, sees the decadence of the Church, the aristocrats, monarchy — and arrives, with almost no intervening logical steps, at the conclusion that the key to fixing it all is: ABOLISH PRIVATE PROPERTY. Having done that, inhabitants of Western civilization, like the people of Utopia, would realize that all their interests — all! — were common interests and that everything can be done collectively without fanfare, excessive ornamentation, sexual jealousy, etc., etc.

Which is to say: Far from being innovative, progressive thinkers, the kind of people who come to these same conclusions today have been making the same argument for 500 years. There is nothing new about thinking that socialism will somehow fix everything and, by throwing us all in the same boat, make us forget our petty, selfish, individual desires. Problem solved. Except More understood nothing about human nature or economics and was completely wrong in his (implied) policy preferences, as was Fourier, as was Marx, and so on.

From works by Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare, we get a bit of nature-worship (though I’d call Shakespeare an admirably skeptical-yet-conservative fellow overall, perhaps not coincidentally the greatest writer in the language) and the all-too-easy idea, later trumpeted by Rousseau, that if we simply lived in accord with nature, all of society’s contradiction and conflicts would fall away like so many useless chains, leaving us content and free-spirited.

From Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, we get lots and lots of meandering monologues about how big the collective housing should be, what rituals should be performed at what time of year, assurances the fictional society described is still basically Christian — and in the end, in a genuinely shocking final revelation, a long description of his fictional society’s super-scientific powers, with mastery over nature so complete, so accurate in its forecasting of things to come in the four centuries since, and so smug, it’s almost enough to make one tremble and want to subscribe to the socially-conservative, anti-biotech twenty-first-century journal by the same name. But then you remember how short and difficult life was before those 400 years of progress and you decide to save your money and be grateful we live in the modern world.

We should also be grateful that utopian/totalitarian thinking is not something people fall into as guiltlessly as they did back when Tommaso Campanella (another apostate priest) wrote The City of the Sun, around the same time as Bacon’s work. If one imagines that all people naturally fall into a homogenous unanimity of preferences in the absence of social pressures, there’s no need to worry that the harsh legal prescriptions one imagines laying down will be ever be much objected to. And so, say what you will about the marvelous orderliness and symmetry of Campanella’s city state of concentric circular walls and constant learning — at the end of the day, he still has a pleasant, well-meaning visitor to that city state tell our narrator, with clear admiration:

For with them, deformity is unknown. When the women are exercised, they get a clear complexion, and become strong of limb, tall and agile, and with them beauty consists of tallness and strength. Therefore, if any woman dyes her face, so that it may become beautiful, or uses high-heeled boots so that she may appear tall, or garments with trains to cover her wooden shoes, she is condemned to capital punishment.

Behold the progressive, reformist tradition in all its liberationist, proto-feminist glory. Tomorrow, an anthology of somewhat more recent visions.

Ephemerisle Ends for Now, Utopia Endures

I said yesterday that Jeffrey Friedman thinks a great danger of regulation is that it increases the risk of system-wide failure by ensuring that everyone is doing things the same standardized way.  To Patri Friedman (no relation — though he is the grandson of Milton and Rose Friedman and the son of David Friedman), the radical solution to homogeneity is to start as many experimental countries as possible (an idea that I, as a “panarchy” sympathizer, must admire).

This weekend, Patri held a conference called Ephemerisle in San Francisco Bay, in a bunch of lashed-together boats, to discuss how new countries might be created on the high seas — “seasteading,” as they call it.  At least one intrepid young wonk I know attended (perhaps not coincidentally, the only wonk I’ve ever heard cite the polar kraken from Magic the Gathering in a political debate).

Nowadays, calling any scheme “utopian” is almost a kiss of death (and as something of a conservative, I think that’s mostly a healthy thing — you don’t want people retooling society at the drop of a hat and screwing everything up).  Seasteading, however — even if it proves infeasible for mundane engineering, legal, or financial reasons — is “utopian” in a good way, I think, that is, in the fashion of nineteenth-century American experimental communities, which is to say: providing people with concrete examples of how you want things to be (on a very localized scale) rather than just philosophizing about it or, worse, imposing the model on everyone even without working it all out as either philosophy or small-scale experiment (e.g., the USSR, etc.).

The classic, familiar utopian schemes, which I’ll start looking at tomorrow, tend to have the frightening characteristic of being quasi-totalitarian plans that their authors seemed prepared to impose on everyone simply because they worked so well in their own imaginations.  But little experimental utopias that actually turn out to work well — or at least contain a few good ideas others could adapt without wrecking civilization — are of course a good thing, and we should take care to make that distinction (it might be even better if we had completely different words for these global vs. local sorts of schemes, though historically they have often gone together, of course, with the local experiment intended as a tiny foothold in the real world for the global scheme to come).

Though Patri Friedman sparred online a bit with my Arkansas legislator friend Dan Greenberg — who wishes market ideologues would devote more time to our existing political institutions — there is one attitude (aside from an admiration for markets) that they have in common (and which they share with the aforementioned Jeffrey Friedman, whose Critical Review journal boasts Greenberg as its senior editor): the view that simply philosophizing and arguing with people is virtually useless.

•Patri Friedman recognizes that it’s probably better to just secede and do your own thing when faced with the impossible task of persuading 300 million fellow citizens to try doing things your way.

•Dan Greenberg (like me, a former Brown philosophy major) recognizes that most people pay so little attention to philosophy and logical argumentation that you’re better off just legislating and getting things done instead of waiting for them to agree with you.

•Jeffrey Friedman thinks one of the best arguments for the market is the fact that you as an individual can simply drop products or organizations that dissatisfy you and patronize ones that work rather than having to convene the whole society to argue about, say, what the best way is to run a car company, which is the sort of complex topic on which there will never be a shortage of plausible-sounding — but utterly contradictory — arguments.

Likewise, there are some very pretty-sounding (but often tragically wrong or overly simplistic) models out there for structuring society as a whole — and, starting tomorrow, perhaps we can learn something from a sympathetic look at some of the classic ones, even with their flaws, and even if we have no intention of adopting them (at least not on my boat, not while I’m mayor).