The Utopia Experiment

by Dylan Evans

  When we got back to Utopia a few days later, another volunteer had arrived. James Durston, a tall young man with short brown hair, was brimming with self-confidence. He was in his late twenties, and had recently moved to India, but was back in the UK for a few weeks, and curious to see what we were up to in Scotland. He had brought some authentic Indian spices with him, which now sat incongruously next to our porridge oats on a shelf in the Barn.

  James plunged into the experiment with gusto. Within a day he had discovered that dandelion roots and stinging nettles made nutritious side dishes when cooked correctly. A few days later and he was baking his own bread and making dinner for nine people. Two weeks in and he had built a bunk-bed, made a chess set and put up a sturdy support for a clutch of runner beans. He loved being outside, even when it was cold and rainy, and he would dig and weed and water the vegetable patch for hours each day.

  James was keen to spread the word about Utopia, and persuaded the Independent, a national newspaper, to let him write a feature about the experiment for them. It was published while I was in hospital, and when I read it, I was devastated. His warm recollections of communal life barely registered; in the self-absorbed way that is typical of depression, all I could see were his remarks about me, towards the end of the article. ‘Evans,’ he wrote, ‘has come and gone, physically and mentally, since the project began.’ It was true, of course, but I didn’t want the whole world to know about my impaired mental state, and my heart sank when I thought what my former colleagues and students, or my friends and family, would think if they read it. I could see the smug expressions of ‘I told you so’ on their faces, as they shook their heads, and pitied me for throwing away my career and my money on such a foolish venture. ‘In fact,’ James added, ‘Dylan is the one thing that could dismantle the entire experiment.’ I resented James for putting that in. Why couldn’t he have spared me the shame and just focused on the volunteers?

  As it was, the volunteers seemed happy enough. ‘It is unlikely,’ wrote James, ‘that Dylan’s mental hibernation will dramatically disrupt the day-to-day workings of the project, though it is frustrating for those on the ground.’ I hadn’t actually noticed their frustration, though I did wonder. I was too afraid to ask them, too afraid I had let them down, but they must have been disappointed when, instead of engaging with the routine activities, I simply hung around in a daze, occasionally picking up an axe or a shovel, only to put it down a few minutes later after achieving nothing. They had every right to expect some kind of leadership on my part, but by June I was barely capable of making conversation, let alone giving direction.

  ‘Ultimately,’ James concluded, ‘I suppose it will be Dylan Evans himself who learns the most from this project.’

  I think he was right about that too.

  One cloudy afternoon in late June, a battered blue van spluttered into Utopia. The sweet smell of the exhaust fumes signalled that it was running on a mix of diesel and vegetable oil. I watched as two men got out, one in his thirties and the other in his twenties. Something about them – or was it me? – made me reluctant to give them a warm welcome.

  ‘What do you want?’ I muttered in a sullen tone of voice.

  ‘We heard about what you’re doing here,’ said the older man. ‘We thought we’d pay you a visit.’

  I didn’t feel like entertaining visitors. I could barely hold a normal conversation with the volunteers any more, let alone with a complete stranger. For a moment I was tempted to tell them to leave, but something inside me relented, and I invited them into the Barn.

  Their names were Nick and Chris, they told us, when we were all sitting round the big table in the semidarkness, sipping mugs of hot dandelion tea that Agric had laboriously prepared. Nick, the elder of the two, lived in the blue van, and grew vegetables on a fifteen-acre site devoted to community-supported agriculture. Chris lived in a caravan (‘one step up from Nick,’ he smiled) and worked on the same site. Between them they grew enough vegetables to feed two hundred people, which made our efforts look pathetic by comparison. Members of their box scheme paid at the onset of the growing season for a share of the anticipated harvest; once harvesting began, Nick and Chris would deliver a box to each subscriber with their weekly shares of vegetables and fruit.

  This was so much more efficient than our attempts to grow our own food that I felt rather embarrassed when Nick and Chris asked about our crops. Their questions were probing and soon they had exposed many of the flaws in the experiment. Eighteen months was too short; why start a big project like this and then abandon it after just a couple of growing seasons? If people could come along for just a month, how would they be motivated to work hard for a harvest they wouldn’t reap? How were we going to make our own clothes when the stuff we had salvaged from civilization had all begun to fall apart? Were we still shopping at Tesco?

  I felt their questions sting like sea salt in a hundred scratches. They were right; my project wasn’t nearly as rustic and authentic as I had anticipated. We still weren’t self-sufficient, and even Agric’s expertise in growing vegetables was no match for the knowledge of these two young men. They were doing it for real, and they had been for years, while we were just play-acting. I could sense their disdain, even though they tried to hide it, as we showed them our tiny vegetable patch, and when they asked me what was growing there, I couldn’t even remember what half the crops were called. I really didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

  Meanwhile, the experiment rumbled along, carried forward by its own momentum. I felt paralysed, like someone watching from a distance while a train barrelled down a track towards a broken bridge, powerless to prevent the impending disaster. Everyone else seemed to get more enthusiastic as time went on, making it even harder for me to question out loud the value of what we were doing. I gazed on with silent horror while they went about their daily duties without a care in the world.

  More volunteers arrived. Tobe and Ruth brought their two-year-old son. They too were convinced that civilization was going to collapse soon.

  ‘We’re selling our flat in London so we can become nomads,’ they told me.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ I felt like saying. ‘It’s a mistake! Civilization isn’t going to collapse any time soon. I sold my house and I wish I hadn’t!’

  But that would have been like Jesus saying he didn’t believe in God, or Moses saying the Promised Land was just a myth.

  ‘We really like what you are doing here,’ they said. ‘We came here so we could learn a bit more about the food-growing side of things. We don’t have much experience of that, and we figure we’ll need to know about it when civilization collapses.’

  Tobe was a sound engineer and had played in a couple of bands. Ruth was a sculptor. They had no survival skills, but they assumed they could pick it all up in a couple of weeks. They were as naive and unrealistic as I had been when I first thought up my experiment. I felt sorry for them, and I felt dishonest when I feigned a smile and nodded in mute assent.

  Why did I no longer believe that civilization was in danger of imminent collapse? What led me to lose my faith in the apocalypse? I would like to say it was due to positive signs of change that began to appear on the horizon. But when I had heard some story beforehand, about some major corporation making efforts to reduce its carbon footprint, I had simply dismissed it as greenwash. So why did I now take such stories seriously?

  I think my change of heart was due to a curious social dynamic. It has often been noted that beliefs tend to spread like viruses; as more and more people come to believe in something, those around them are more likely to adopt the belief. Psychologists call it the bandwagon effect. But with me, the opposite seemed to happen. The more those around me came to believe in the experiment, the more sceptical I became. Call it the difficult bastard effect.

  This had happened on several previous occasions in my life. When I was nineteen I spent a year training to be a priest, only to discover that, unlike my fellow seminarians, I didn’t really be
lieve in God. Ten years later I thought I had discovered the ultimate truth in the writings of Jacques Lacan, only to recoil in horror when I had surrounded myself with his most ardent disciples. I was like a foolish bird that kept alighting on sticky twigs, all coated in birdlime to trap him. Through a combination of luck and sheer bloody-mindedness, I had always managed to struggle free and flutter away, only to spy another branch beckoning me from below. I never seemed to learn that each branch was as sticky as the last. Try as I might, I just could not find the perfect disappointment, the one that would finally kill that pernicious temptress, hope.

  Now the same dynamic was undermining my beliefs about global collapse. As the volunteers became more convinced that disaster was imminent, I could see my own journey from speculation to conviction reflected in them like a mirror. As I came to see how stubborn and ridiculous their faith was, I realized how idiotic mine was too. When Agric dismissed the growing global awareness of climate change as mere window-dressing, I could see myself sneering at other objections that my friends had raised when I first told them about my own concerns. Like a religious fundamentalist immune to any evidence that might call his beliefs into question, I had clung to my faith in imminent catastrophe. The idea that our civilization might not only survive global warming but also continue to grow richer had appalled me, and this was perhaps why I had believed so ardently that it would collapse. I had wanted it to. Agric still did.

  Never believe the evidence unless it is supported by a good theory. Or so said some wag, in a clever inversion of the standard view of how science works. And there is a lot of sense in approaching the world that way. We don’t dismiss the whole of chemistry when a high school student gets an unexpected result in the lab. We simply assume that the student has made a mistake. If the theory is solid, it makes sense to reject the anomalous data rather than questioning the theory itself.

  Part of the reason why Agric was so dismissive of any suggestion that civilization might not be about to collapse was the fact that he had a powerful theory. He was in the grip of Malthus, like many before him. Malthus had shown that population growth must always outstrip food supply, right? He had proved it.

  A lot of the appeal of Malthusian reasoning lies in the apparent inescapability of the maths. That’s what seems to have driven the fanatical conviction of the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who began his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, with the dramatic claim that ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.’ The same apparently inexorable mathematical reasoning underpinned The Limits to Growth, a 1972 bestseller that made similar gloomy forecasts on the basis of fancy computer models.

  If you accept the premises of Malthus’s argument, the conclusions do of course follow with the iron necessity of logic. The problem is that fascination with the maths tends to drown out any consideration of whether the premises are, in fact, true or false. And there’s the catch; for there’s no compelling reason to believe that population growth must always outstrip food supply. There is no such thing as a ‘natural carrying capacity’, because the environment that humans live in is not strictly natural. Since the birth of agriculture, humans have used technology to sustain populations well beyond levels that would be possible without it. Who knows what will be possible with the technologies of the future?

  But Malthusians reject technological solutions as mere temporary fixes, and thereby reveal a deep mistrust of human ingenuity. Far from being the solution, ‘our cleverness, our inventiveness,’ says Stephen Emmott in his alarmist pamphlet 10 Billion, ‘are now the drivers of every global problem we face’.

  Don’t look to human intelligence, in other words, to solve our problems; it’s precisely our curiosity that got us into trouble in the first place. Eve should never have eaten from the tree of knowledge. Prometheus should never have stolen fire from the gods. We should give up our arrogant belief in progress, and learn to say enough is enough.

  And so the maths is just a fig leaf, a convenient distraction from the misanthropic spirit that really animates the merchants of doom. But it is a powerful soporific, and it hypnotizes many.

  One morning I awoke to find myself curled up under some bushes, my clothes wet with the early morning dew. I can’t say why I had fallen asleep there, but it was something to do with my madness. I crawled out from the ditch and stood up slowly, my body still stiff and sore from sleeping on the cold earth. It was a grey, misty morning, and it didn’t look like there were any signs of life in Utopia, a few hundred metres further down the gently sloping hill. I trudged away in the opposite direction, towards Romay’s farmhouse.

  ‘What on earth have you been up to?’ exclaimed Romay, when I stumbled into her kitchen, bedraggled and unkempt.

  I said nothing, and slumped into a chair at the rustic kitchen table.

  Romay shook her head, though whether in pity or disapproval I couldn’t tell.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Oh, and a letter came for you.’

  Unenthusiastically, I opened the envelope and scanned the contents. It informed me that I had an appointment with a psychiatrist.

  I had finally acknowledged my need for medical treatment a few weeks before, and been to see a local GP. But when I explained my predicament, he seemed out of his depth, and told me I needed to see a psychiatrist.

  Romay seemed unimpressed. ‘When is it?’ she asked.

  I looked up at her, blinking incredulously.

  ‘Today,’ I said.

  An hour or so later, Romay drove me to the hospital.

  ‘Do you want me to come in with you?’ she asked.

  I shook my head and she drove off. As I waited in reception, I looked around at the clean white walls, the comfortable chairs, the official notices and signs. It all seemed very alien. I felt like an anthropologist who had just spent a year with some indigenous tribe in a Melanesian island and was finding it hard to readjust to the modern world.

  The receptionist called my name, and I walked down the corridor to the room she had indicated.

  I knocked on the door and went in. A tall blonde woman stood up to greet me.

  ‘Hi, I’m Dr Williams,’ she said. ‘And this is Dr Douglas. She’s doing her residency here at the moment. Is it OK if she sits in?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I mumbled, and sat down at the chair opposite the two women, who looked very neat and well dressed. I was wearing muddy old boots, faded blue combat trousers and a baggy woollen sweater. My hair was lank and greasy, and I picked compulsively at the stubble on my chin.

  ‘What brings you here today?’

  ‘I feel like killing myself,’ I said.

  ‘When did these feelings start?’

  Gradually, I told Dr Williams about the past few months, about the past year, about the Utopia Experiment, about Bo, about everything. Finally, she laid her pen down and asked if she could go and fetch a colleague.

  A few minutes later she returned with a smartly dressed Asian man.

  ‘This is Dr Satoshi,’ she said. ‘He’s the senior psychiatrist here.’

  Dr Satoshi sat down beside me.

  ‘Dr Williams has told me a bit about your story,’ he said. ‘I’d like to offer you a bed here for a few days.’

  Tears began to well up in my eyes. The thought of staying here, in the hospital, filled me with a sense of relief. But it also scared the hell out of me. But then, surely anything was better than Utopia? I desperately needed to get away from that place, and where else could I go?

  ‘Can I think about it?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, please do,’ said Dr Satoshi reassuringly. ‘Take your time. Why don’t you head down to the cafeteria and get some tea or coffee? You can mull it over there.’

  Dr Williams showed me to the cafeteria but I didn’t have any money so she bought a cup of tea for me, and left me alon
e to ponder Dr Satoshi’s offer. My head was spinning. What should I do? I kept changing my mind. I would accept the offer. I would politely decline. I would stay in the hospital. I would head straight back to Utopia. I couldn’t bear to spend another minute in that hellhole. I couldn’t abandon my experiment.

  I spent the next few hours like that, sitting in the hospital cafeteria, changing my mind every few seconds. By mid-afternoon I was exhausted.

  Dr Williams came into the cafeteria and sat down at my table. I was still gripping the Styrofoam cup, though I had drunk the tea long ago.

  ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Will you stay?’

  ‘I don’t . . . I don’t know . . .’ I stammered.

  ‘Would you like to see Dr Satoshi again?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  So we walked back up the corridor to Dr Satoshi’s office, and he once again explained that there was a bed for me here if I wanted it, and that it was his recommendation that I stay here for a few days at least.

  ‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’ll stay.’

  Dr Satoshi looked pleased. But just as he reached for a file on his desk, I changed my mind.

  ‘Hold on!’ I muttered. ‘I don’t think I will stay here after all.’

  Dr Satoshi looked across at Dr Williams.

  She nodded.

  Dr Satoshi cleared his throat. ‘You’re clearly incapable of making decisions,’ he said. ‘We’re going to detain you under the Mental Health Act for your own safety.’

  And that was it. I was no longer a free man. From that point on, if I walked out of the hospital on my own, the police would bring me back. And I felt curiously relieved.

  14. ESCAPE

  During my last week in hospital three of the volunteers came to visit. I was in my room when a nurse told me I had visitors, and I found Agric, Tommy and Pete waiting for me in the common room area in my ward, looking very out of place in their muddy boots and faded jeans.

  ‘How are you doing?’ asked Agric, a friendly smile on his face.