A Paradise Built in Hell Read Online Free PDF Page A

fiercer and dreams are larger.
    “There is no alternative,” the conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcher liked to say, but there is, and it appears where it is least expected, as well as where it is most diligently cultivated. Changing the world is the other way to imagine salvaging the self—and others, for the utopian impulse is generous even when it’s wrongheaded. And utopias of sorts arise in the present, in Argentina, in Mexico, in countless social, economic, and agricultural experiments in Europe, in India, and in the United States; among other places. The map of utopias is cluttered nowadays with experiments by other names, and the very idea is expanding. It needs to open up a little more to contain disaster communities. These remarkable societies suggest that, just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, so human beings reset themselves to something altruistic, communitarian, resourceful, and imaginative after a disaster, that we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.
    The two most basic goals of social utopias are to eliminate deprivation—hunger, ignorance, homelessness—and to forge a society in which no one is an outsider, no one is alienated. By this standard, Holshouser’s free food and warm social atmosphere achieved both, on however tiny a scale, and versions of the Mizpah Café sprung up all over the ruined city.
    Some religious attempts at utopia are authoritarian, led by a charismatic leader, by elders, by rigid rules that create outcasts, but the secular utopias have mostly been committed to liberty, democracy, and shared power. The widespread disdain for revolution and utopia takes as its object lesson the Soviet-style attempts at coercive utopias, in which the original ideals of leveling and sharing go deeply awry, the achievement critiqued in George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 and other dystopian novels. Many fail to notice that it is not the ideals, the ends, but the coercive and authoritarian means that poison paradise. There are utopias whose ideals pointedly include freedom from coercion and dispersal of power to the many. Most utopian visions nowadays include many worlds, many versions, rather than a coercive one true way. The anthropologist David Graeber writes, “Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because they dreamed great dreams—actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination—but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties. This led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence.” There are plenty of failed revolutions and revolutions such as the French Revolution that lapse into bloodbaths—and yet when that revolution was over, France would never be dominated by an absolutist monarchy again; ordinary French people had more rights, and people around the world had an enlarged sense of the possible. All revolutions fail because they set their sights heaven-high, but none of them fail to do something, and many increase the amount of liberty, justice, and hope for their heirs.
    Unpoliced utopian experiments have arisen often in the United States. The ascetic rural Shakers have lasted from 1775, when they arrived in New York from England, into—by the tenuous thread of a few older survivors—the present. Less stable experiments proliferated in the nineteenth century. There was, for example, Brook Farm in Massachusetts in the 1840s, in which a lot of bookish idealists tried, not very effectively, to till the earth to realize an ideal union of mental and physical labor and collective life. There was also the socialist Kaweah Colony in the mountains of California in the 1880s and 1890s (the land they homesteaded is now part of Sequoia National Park, and the giant tree they named the Karl Marx Tree is now the General Sherman sequoia). Many argue that the United States