by Dylan Evans
I shook my head. ‘It’s beginning to dawn on me how much I’ve taken on,’ I said.
‘Well, nobody said it was going to be a walk in the park,’ said Scott. ‘Look, you’ve been working flat out the past few weeks. You’re probably just exhausted. Why don’t you come back with us and rest for a day or two?’
I didn’t need much persuading. Scott and Jules lived in a remote glen that made Utopia seem almost suburban by comparison. Even when you turned off the small winding road through the gates of the estate, it took another half hour to drive down the path to their cottage. It was surrounded by mountains on all sides, so they couldn’t even get a TV signal. It would, in fact, have made a much better location for the experiment.
But in a way, Scott and Jules had been doing their own Utopia Experiment for the past few decades. They grew much of their own food and kept chickens. Scott chopped wood for the Rayburn every day, which cooked their food and heated their water. And Julia tended to magnificent vegetable patches that put our amateurish efforts to shame.
When we got back to their cottage that evening, Scott ran me a warm bath. The water in the back boiler on the Rayburn would get so hot that they had to run baths quite often just to stop it from exploding. As I lay there in the steaming tub, enjoying the first bath I had taken for many months, I could feel the tension in my muscles dissolve and the mental darkness dissipate. Later, the three of us ate thick lentil soup in their living room while the Rayburn blazed away and Scott sprinkled the conversation with nuggets of Highland folklore. That night, I slept more soundly than I had done for a long time.
The next morning Scott invited me to go for a walk with him. The light was faint and eerie, and the mist was still rising as we strolled down through the glen, each lost in our own thoughts. We reached a small stream that swirled chaotically around light grey rocks, and I crouched down beside it, mesmerized by the whirling water.
And there I stayed, gazing into the stream. It felt like hours, but it may have been less than a minute. Everything else faded from my vision, and all I could see were the eddies where the current tumbled around the rocks, and the only sound I could hear was the rush of the water. It seemed like the stream was whispering to me, inviting me into the vortex, and its voice was sweet and haunting and irresistible. I wished it would pull me into its frothy arms, and hold me in its cold, loving embrace for ever.
‘Dylan, don’t look at the water!’
Scott gripped my shoulder and pulled me back from the stream. His face was white. Somehow, he had sensed the danger, and broken the spell. He squinted into my eyes like a doctor looking for signs of life in a coma victim.
‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘It’s dangerous to look at the stream for too long when you’re in that frame of mind. The water can play strange tricks on you.’
I felt stunned. What had happened? Why did I get hypnotized by the stream? How did Scott know? Was it really dangerous?
I trusted Scott. He knew the glen intimately, every nook and cranny, and all the spirits that dwelt there. I felt sad to leave the stream behind me, but something told me Scott was right to drag me away.
When I got back to Utopia the following day, everyone was hard at work digging and planting. Harmony had left, and another female volunteer who had arrived had decided she couldn’t face the primitive living conditions, and had gone straight back home the same day. Nick and David were nearing the end of their stay too, their places soon to be filled by Tommy and Pete, two twenty-one-year-old students at Newcastle University. Pete, from Belfast, was studying English, and Tommy, from nearby Holywood in County Down, was studying fine art. I had met them there several months before, when I had given a talk about the experiment in Newcastle.
Tommy was tall, with light red hair and pale blue eyes, and looked like he could handle himself in a fight. Pete was slightly smaller, with short dark hair, and more cerebral. They explained to me, in thick Belfast accents, why they had decided to volunteer.
‘I’m here because I don’t want to live in fear of not being able to cope if society collapses,’ said Pete. He thought that by learning to grow vegetables, look after pigs, weave fleece blankets and acquiring other pre-industrial skills, he’d be better prepared when civilization imploded.
‘I’m also worried about a collapse,’ said Tommy. Besides learning survival skills, he wanted to develop a visual culture for the project. That pleased me. I wanted the experiment to be as much about art and culture as about bodily survival. Right now, though, the priority was digging and planting the vegetable garden.
Tommy and Pete plunged into daily life at Utopia with enthusiasm. Agric found a willing student in Pete, who would listen attentively while he explained his schedule for sowing seeds, or his latest speculations on the date of the impending apocalypse. Tommy threw his back into digging the vegetable patch, and began work on a sign to welcome visitors. He was a graffiti artist and had brought some spray paint with him, so we found a large piece of plywood and Tommy proceeded to spell out UTOPIA in big, bright, bold letters, old school style, and we fixed up the sign to the side of the Barn. It looked rather incongruous, this splash of urban culture in the middle of the Scottish countryside, but no more so than the Mongolian yurt that stood nearby, or the throne-like compost toilet that Adam had built.
After they had been there about a week, I asked Pete and Tommy what they missed most about life back home.
‘Music on demand,’ said Pete, without hesitation.
Tommy nodded in agreement. ‘I can’t believe how much I miss my iPod!’
It’s funny how quickly people become accustomed to something so radically new. For most of human history and all our prehistory the only music we could hear was the stuff we played ourselves. Then, in the last few thousand years, the very rich and powerful had the luxury of paid musicians to entertain them. Yet now, anyone can use technology to summon up a whole orchestra or a rock band. It’s something many people take for granted, and think about only when for some odd reason – such as taking part in an experiment in post-apocalyptic living – they are deprived of it.
I certainly missed music too. I was used to listening to flawless recordings of the finest classical orchestras. Now the best I could get was Adam strumming his guitar and warbling away like a country and western singer with throat cancer. I wondered out loud whether, in the post-industrial future that we were trying to simulate, people might carefully preserve old iPods as valuable treasures. Tommy, an experienced dumpster-diver who used rubbish in his streetwise art, scoffed at the idea. ‘There’ll be thousands of the things lying around,’ he said. ‘You’ll just have to wander into the abandoned houses and pick them up.’
‘Sure, but how long will they be usable?’ I asked. ‘Their batteries will soon run out, and then what? Even if we manage to keep charging things for a while with solar panels or generators, they will eventually break down, and then everything electronic will soon become unusable.’
‘Great!’ interjected Adam. ‘I hate canned music.’
It is one thing to live without technology that you have never experienced, and quite another to go without it after you have enjoyed it. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn’t miss iPods, but I sure did in Utopia.
I began to wonder whether these feelings might point to a weakness in the primitivist credo. Even if the nomadic lifestyle before the advent of agriculture really was better, or more authentic, or more whatever, than the sedentary existence that followed it, we can’t simply return to it now, as if the intervening ten thousand years never happened. Primitivists admit this much, and argue that we will need a process of ‘rewilding’ to readjust to our natural state, but they don’t seem to realize that this would take generations, not years. If civilization collapsed, and we didn’t rebuild it, then perhaps after a few centuries people might recover the lost innocence of the original hunter-gatherers, but the first or second generation of survivors certainly wouldn’t. The memories of civilization could not simply be erased; they
would gnaw at the survivors, and torture them with the recollection of comforts never again to be enjoyed.
An animal born in captivity does not suddenly revert to a wild state if released back into the jungle. On the contrary, it is shell-shocked, and lost.
Besides discussing the things we missed, or didn’t miss, about civilization, we also occasionally argued about what life would be like long after civilization had collapsed – not the first few years after the crash, which we were attempting to simulate, but a hundred years later, or a thousand.
One possibility was that we would end up in a situation like that described by Ernest Callenbach in his short story ‘Chocco’. The narrator is the thirty-first Memory Keeper of the Sun People. He tells the story of a long-lost civilization called the Machine People. It soon becomes clear that the Machine People are us – citizens of the twenty-first century – and that little now remains of our industrial civilization except networks of empty roads and the rusting hulks of millions of cars. The Sun People are our distant descendants, who have returned to the nomadic ways of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but preserve the memory of the Machine People as a warning of how things can go terribly wrong. As the story proceeds, we learn that the world of the Machine People collapsed due to rampant pollution, climate change, and a shortage of fossil fuels. The Sun People are descended from a few rebels who rejected the greed and materialism of the Machine People, smoked marijuana, grew their hair long and worshipped Gaia – a bunch of hippies, in other words. The Sun People are determined not to repeat the errors of their industrial forebears, by, for example, reinventing complex technology.
Nick Bostrom calls this kind of scenario, in which our current economic and technological capabilities are lost and never rebuilt, unrecovered collapse. He argues that this is unlikely, since it is hard to think of a good reason why recovery would not occur. It seems part of human nature to innovate, and all it takes is for one person, or one group, to get a technological edge, and others will be compelled to adopt it or perish. Only if some critical resource were permanently exhausted or destroyed, or the human gene pool irreversibly degenerated, or some discovery were made that enabled tiny groups to bring down civilization at will, might humans fail to recover from a global collapse and remain forever at some pre-industrial level.
The alternative possibility is that, following a global catastrophe, the survivors start to rebuild civilization, with the result that sooner or later we end up back where we are today, as in The Postman, a 1997 film starring Kevin Costner. Based on David Brin’s 1985 novel of the same name, it tells the story of a wandering survivor (Costner) who finds a dead postman and a bag of mail. Donning the dead man’s uniform and taking the mailbag, he stumbles across a settlement, where he pretends to be a real postman from the newly restored government. Gradually, his lie takes on a life of its own as he inducts more volunteers into the fictional postal service. The volunteers carry letters between settlements and inadvertently spread the myth of the restored government. In the final scene of the movie, a crowd of people is gathered to witness the unveiling of a statue of the protagonist, who is recently deceased. From their modern clothing, and signs of contemporary technology, it is clear that civilization has been rebuilt, and is now back to its pre-apocalyptic status.
This is meant to be an optimistic scenario, but to those of us at Utopia it was deeply depressing. Would humanity learn nothing from a global collapse, and repeat the same mistakes that led to disaster in the first place? And if so, what would happen next? Would there be a never-ending cycle of collapse and rebirth? Would the human race be condemned to some kind of Nietzschean eternal return of the same, as in the Ragnarök of Norse mythology, in which the world is consumed by flames, only to resurface anew and be repopulated by the survivors, thus starting the whole tragedy all over again?
It was clear which of these two scenarios we preferred. Permanent primitivism was our idea of Utopia. And we preferred not to ask ourselves how plausible this really was.
A third possibility, which we never discussed, is that civilization might not keep on collapsing and re-emerging over and over again, but that at some point would reach escape velocity, and attain a vastly superior level of technological sophistication than that which we currently enjoy. In this scenario, our descendants construct advanced artificial intelligence, enhance their bodies by means of molecular nanotechnology, and colonize the rest of our galaxy.
This was the scenario that the Unabomber feared, because he was convinced that such far-reaching technological development would reduce humans to mere cogs in a huge impersonal machine. But what if he was wrong? What if there are long-term technological futures in which life is better than it is today? Science fiction has little to offer the imagination here. Dystopian plots far outnumber the few utopian ones. Robots turn against us (I, Robot), telescreens are used to brainwash us and monitor our every move (1984), or – even worse – historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, are all purged in the name of pleasure and order (Brave New World). The few positive visions seem to be aimed at children, like The Jetsons, an American cartoon from the 1960s, and Tomorrowland, one of the areas in Disneyland. ‘Tomorrow can be a wonderful age,’ Walt Disney himself insisted. ‘Our scientists today are opening the doors of the Space Age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.’ That kind of optimism about the future seems rather quaint now.
Why are we so bad at imagining positive forms of technological change? Is it due to some innate conservative bias etched deeply into human nature, or merely a contingent feature of contemporary society? Francis Bacon was able to imagine all sorts of wonderful technological developments in his seventeenth-century Utopia, New Atlantis. Humans would breed plants to grow bigger and produce sweeter fruit, design machines for controlling the weather, and build skyscrapers half a mile high. Such optimism seems alien in today’s cynical world, but it seems perverse to rule out the possibility of a bright future in which technology leads to a net improvement in the human condition.
If pressed, most of us will admit that there’s something profoundly unknowable about the future, especially a distant future, and yet we still feel hunches about the way things are heading. These hunches reveal more about our personal temperament – our individual proclivities towards optimism or pessimism – than about the world itself.
As time wound on, our conversations in Utopia began to take on a darker hue. In particular, as we continued to speculate about life after the crash, the subject of violence would crop up with increasing frequency.
Several of the volunteers had already raised doubts about the scenario I had sketched out as a framework for the experiment, which portrayed our settlement as a group of strangers who had seen the writing on the wall and had come together to prepare for the impending collapse of civilization. By the time disaster struck, they would be in an enviable position; located far from the chaos of the big cities, with their own supply of food and water, their camp would be a magnet for less well-prepared survivors. And not many newcomers could be accommodated. The land could only support a limited number of people. Sooner or later we would have to stop people from coming in. Would those unwelcome visitors simply turn round and go away? What if they were starving? What if there were lots of them? What if they were armed?
When the topic came up again one evening, Pete suggested we organize some exercises during the experiment in which we would simulate an attack on the community by marauding gunmen. But how would we defend ourselves? We hadn’t stockpiled any guns ourselves, so we would have to make our own weapons.
‘Personally I like the idea of utilizing booby traps,’ mused Angus. ‘This keeps us at a distance from a potential enemy and out of harm’s way.’
‘How about a couple of longbows trained on visitors as a deterrent?’ suggested Pete.
‘Good idea,’ said Tommy. ‘And they would be good company to keep when hunting and foraging away from Utopia.’
‘And what about organizing a few workshops in bomb-making?’ Angus went on. ‘A couple of petrol bombs should deter most thieves. Anyone have an interest in pyrotechnics, or any experience with mining or demolition?’
Nobody raised their hand.
‘We’d better read up on this shit then,’ said Angus.
The conversation about defence was all well and good as an exercise in collaborative fiction, but as time went on I began to get worried that it was acquiring an increasingly realistic tone. The subject seemed to exert a weird fascination on the group, like a flame around which we bedraggled moths began to circle ever more closely. New solutions to the problem would be suggested, but the conversation always seemed to end with what became Angus’s most memorable stock-phrase: ‘Attack dogs and pipe bombs’.
One evening, as we returned once again to the topic, I caught sight of one of the volunteers take out a big hunting knife and caress the blade lovingly with his index finger. A copy of the Unabomber manifesto lay open on the table. If a police officer happened to come in now, I thought to myself, he might easily mistake us for some rabid bunch of eco-terrorists, holed up in the woods and preparing for their next atrocity.
As if he had caught my thought, Adam leapt to his feet.
‘Can you hear that?’ he hissed.
‘What?’
‘It’s a helicopter! Come outside!’
Reluctantly, and slightly fearfully, I followed Adam out of the Barn. It was dark outside, and I couldn’t see anything in the cloudy sky, but the sound, though faint, was unmistakable. It was the dull thud-thud-thud of helicopter blades.