by Dylan Evans
That evening, three of the senior researchers took me out for dinner in a local Indian restaurant. As we sat round the table ordering curry, my would-be colleagues looked at me eagerly and quizzed me on my recent experience.
‘So, what were you doing in Scotland?’ asked Nic.
I wondered how to give an honest explanation without making myself seem completely insane.
‘Well, it was kind of an experiment in self-sufficiency,’ I ventured.
Richard raised his eyebrows and grinned. ‘You mean you grew vegetables and stuff?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded, and took a big gulp of wine to hide my embarrassment.
The others chuckled, and I attempted a smile.
‘I just felt I needed a break from academia,’ I said. ‘I wanted to do something different for a while.’
‘And?’ said Nic, looking at me quizzically.
‘It’s a long story,’ I said, and drew a deep breath.
And then, just in the nick of time, the waiter arrived with a big plate of poppadoms and a selection of chutneys. By the time we had served ourselves and I had taken my first bite, Richard had, thankfully, changed topic.
By the end of January 2008 I had moved to Ireland and started work at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre, mercifully abbreviated to 4C by its members. I felt awkward going back to work again, and for the first few weeks I would arrive in the lab each morning with a shell-shocked look on my face, only to sit at my desk stabbing aimlessly at the keyboard, trying in vain to give the impression that I knew what I was doing. At lunchtime I would tag along with my colleagues to some local eatery, where I would try to join in the conversation as best I could, all the while feeling disconnected and dazed, like I was just waking up from a heavy slumber.
That feeling dissipated slowly over the following months, until by September or October it was completely gone, and the world felt real again. In the meantime, I started writing about the Utopia Experiment, trying to pull the various notes I had made into some kind of vaguely coherent narrative. But it was hard. Every time I tried to recall the passage of events, I would wince at the painful memories, and I only managed about ten thousand words before I finally gave up and put the whole thing on ice.
Over the following years, my friends would occasionally ask me if I had written the book yet. And I would tell them that I had put it on the back burner for now, and would return to it in due course. But as time went on, I became less and less convinced I would ever finish it, and the whole project faded away ever more indistinctly into the background of my new life.
In 2008 a friend of mine at Futurelab, a non-profit based in Bristol that focused on innovative approaches to teaching and learning, asked me to write a short piece about the experiment for their blog. But I was still unable to look the memories squarely in the face, and unwilling to admit how badly wrong it had all gone. I tried to put a positive spin on everything, and laid the blame for having to end the experiment prematurely on the volunteers. Unfortunately, one of them spotted the piece when it went live, and posted a comment accusing me of falsifying some of the details.
I guessed who it was. It was James Durston, the journalist who had written the article about Utopia for the Independent which so upset me when I first read it. It was over a year later, but my wounded pride was still smarting, and I lashed out at him online, accusing him of ‘repeating the same nonsense now that you stated in your silly article’.
James came right back at me. ‘Silly article?’ he replied. ‘Read it again, Dylan. Ninety per cent of it is about how much I learnt and enjoyed being there. The few lines I spent on you tucked away near the end are just a description of what I saw in front of me, and what others described. A friend of mine, who also stayed at TUE [the Utopia Experiment] for a few days, met Angus shortly after it was published, and he said it was the only positive article he had seen about the project so far. Don’t be so self-absorbed.’
He was right. My own sense of failure still dominated everything I could remember about Utopia, and prevented me from seeing the good side or wondering about how the volunteers had felt about it all. But I was too proud to admit that to James, and I tried to dodge the bullet by accusing him of ‘yearning for a strong leader to take control’.
James dismissed my psychobabble with the contempt it deserved. But he agreed that the absence of leadership was an issue. ‘The lack of any singular organizing figurehead played the biggest role’ in explaining why things didn’t work out the way I wanted them to, he observed. ‘Without an experimental coordinator, to ensure the volunteers had to innovate to get their necessities,’ he argued, ‘nor a leader within the group to push things along, things very quickly grew stale, and the place became more of a budget eco-holiday camp than a survivalist experiment.
‘While I was there, you were a ghost,’ he went on. ‘I know you had some personal issues to deal with, but while that may excuse your behaviour it doesn’t negate its effects. And I’m pretty sure your issues didn’t appear the day I arrived, and disappear the day I left.’
That hurt. But again, it was true.
The volunteers, he told me, ‘felt let down when the founder would only appear apparition-like, fleetingly and uselessly, before disappearing again without notice. Your presence actually demoralized people. You say you were a participant-observer; you were neither. You say you were marginalized; I saw none of that. We wanted you to be an active, engaged and productive member of the group, but you appeared incapable.’
Finally, though, James was gracious enough to thank me. ‘I don’t want to sound too critical,’ he said. ‘TUE was an experience I will never forget, and many volunteers (myself included) are very grateful to you for having sacrificed so much to set it all up. But it is still frustrating that such a good idea didn’t really come close to reaching its potential, for the simple lack of a bit of project management.’
I knew he was right, but I still couldn’t admit it in public. And the same unwillingness to tell it like it was kept me from returning to the manuscript I had started, and which lay unfinished while I busied myself with rebuilding my academic career. It would take me almost six years before I was finally ready to write this book and admit, in public, that the blame for what went wrong lay not with the volunteers, but with me.
One day in April 2013 I called my mother on the phone.
‘I’ve decided to finish the Utopia book,’ I told her.
She let out a small gasp of surprise. ‘I thought you’d given up on that project,’ she said.
‘I kind of had. But it was always there in the background.’
‘Well.’ She paused. ‘I bet it will be rather different from the book you thought you’d write when you started the experiment!’
That, I thought to myself, was an understatement.
When our ancestors gave up their nomadic existence and started farming, some ten or eleven thousand years ago, they drove the first nail into the coffin of self-sufficiency. Farming is more efficient than hunting and gathering, so some people could stop producing food and devote their time to other things like making clothes and building houses. They were now dependent on others to provide food for them. But it wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution that this process reached escape velocity.
At the end of the eighteenth century, farmers still made up 90 per cent of the labour force in the US; two centuries later, it is only 2 per cent. There has been a corresponding explosion in the diversity and specialization of the non-food-producing occupations. When Plato wrote about the division of labour, he argued that ‘the minimum state would consist of four or five men’ – a farmer, a builder, a weaver, and one or two others. The 2010 Standard Occupational Classification system used by federal statistical agencies in the US lists 840 different occupations.
With all this diversity comes growing interdependence. Even something as apparently simple as a pencil is the product of hundreds of different people. In Leonard Reed’s little essay ‘I, Pencil’, the pencil itself
declares:
Now, you may say that I go too far in relating the picker of a coffee berry in far off Brazil and food growers elsewhere to my creation; that this is an extreme position. I shall stand by my claim. There isn’t a single person in all these millions, including the president of the pencil company, who contributes more than a tiny, infinitesimal bit of know-how. From the standpoint of know-how the only difference between the miner of graphite in Ceylon and the logger in Oregon is in the type of know-how. Neither the miner nor the logger can be dispensed with, any more than can the chemist at the factory or the worker in the oil field – paraffin being a by-product of petroleum.
The pencil argues that this merits our ‘wonder and awe’, but the tangled web of global interconnections can also be anxiety provoking. It can lead to a sense of helplessness, as the Unabomber argued. Some react, as he did, and Thoreau before him, by setting off on a deluded quest to regain that self-sufficiency our ancestors lost, ignoring the fact that even hunter-gatherers live in groups. The idea that modern civilization might soon collapse only makes our interdependence more worrying. The anxiety that doomers feel when contemplating the modern world is ultimately rooted in a solipsistic hankering for a Robin Crusoe existence.
But the Unabomber was wrong, and the pencil was right. It is good that no man is an island. These global ties bind us together. Even such apparently simple products as pencils are the result of thousands of strangers cooperating.
According to the economist Paul Seabright, ‘citizens of the industrialized market economies have lost their sense of wonder at the fact that they can decide spontaneously to go out in search of food, clothing, furniture and thousands of other useful, attractive, frivolous or life-saving items and when they do so, somebody will have anticipated their actions and thoughtfully made such items available for them to buy’.
Paradoxically, Seabright argues, such cooperation is only made possible by a kind of tunnel vision. By this he means ‘the capacity to play one’s part in the great complex enterprise of creating the prosperity of a modern society without knowing or necessarily caring very much about the overall outcome’. If we all went around wondering about how the global economy worked, or even how to make a pencil by ourselves, the whole system would grind to a halt. We would all be overwhelmed by analysis paralysis.
If self-sufficiency is an illusion, then so is sustainability. Nothing is truly sustainable, in the sense of potentially lasting for ever. Everything runs out in the end. It’s just a question of time.
Environmentalists say that deep-sea trawling is not sustainable because it depletes fish stocks faster than they can renew themselves. Radical ecologists say that modern civilization is not sustainable because it relies on oil, which is a finite resource. A sustainable civilization would presumably run entirely on renewable resources. But nothing is truly renewable, and all the fish will eventually be gone, and the wind will blow no more, for a billion years from now, the oceans will boil away as the sun grows into a supernova. The only way humans will survive then is by leaving the earth and colonizing other planets. But an interplanetary lifestyle won’t be sustainable either, because eventually the stars will burn themselves out and become black holes and the entire universe will become a cold, quiet place, where nothing ever happens.
Given that everything will come to an end eventually, does it really matter if humanity lasts another million years rather than just another thousand? Since civilization is bound to collapse sooner or later, does it matter when?
And why should we worry about the human race anyway? Does it matter what happens to the rest of humanity after we die? If we have children, we care what happens to them, of course, and presumably about their children too, but how many generations more can we really care about? And if our descendants fail to leave any children at some point, as must happen to them all eventually when the human race perishes, why should we care about the species as a whole? Is such concern really just a fig leaf for our worries about our own mortality, a secular substitute for the eternal life we long for even when we know we can’t have it?
Nick Bostrom thinks that the inevitable end of the human race need not invalidate our hopes for the future of humanity, because what counts is not eternal survival, but the realization of our full potential as a species, whatever that may be. But then surely we can say the same thing about the individual human life? What counts is not eternal life, which for atheists like me is a pipe dream anyway, but realizing one’s full potential – becoming the best person that one can possibly be. And if we do that, we can die in peace, whether we survive the apocalypse or not, and regardless of what happens to those who come after us.
Pinker is right to say that Hobbes was a better anthropologist than Rousseau, but that does not mean he was a better philosopher. Hobbes was right in thinking that our hunter-gatherer ancestors led lives that were nasty, brutish and short, but he thought there was a way to remedy this. By submitting to a strong sovereign, we can at least live in relative peace. It won’t be a Utopia, but it will be better than the continual war of all against all.
This is a limited form of optimism, but optimism it still is. Rousseau, on the other hand, saw only slavery in the modern state. Even today, I feel this is closer to the truth. And we get still closer by combining the insights of both philosophers. To Hobbes, we owe the realization that there was no Golden Age, no garden of Eden. From Rousseau we learn that progress has been a double-edged sword. Yes, technologies have improved, and the powers of science have increased. We live longer, healthier lives than our ancestors ever did, and we should be grateful for these small mercies. But these changes have not resulted in any fundamental amelioration of the human condition. Every step forward is, from another equally valid perspective, a step closer to the end of the world. Progress inevitably metamorphoses into its opposite. In the long run we are all dead. Even if humans discover how to prolong their lives indefinitely, the universe will eventually unravel and freeze. And then there will be nothingness for ever and ever, and permanent darkness.
But this need not lead to despair. If we confront this basic fact, if we look it straight in the face, unflinchingly, we may go temporarily insane. But we may emerge from the other side of this dark night of the soul with some tranquility, some greater equanimity, and enjoy what little is left to us of this short, hard, beautiful life.
It was 2012, the year the Maya thought the world would come to an end. Actually, they didn’t really think that at all; 21 December 2012 simply marked the end of one baktun – a time period in the Mayan Long Count calendar – and the beginning of the next. But such historical niceties didn’t bother the New Age prophets and opportunistic journalists who pumped out increasingly fanciful speculations as the date approached. One month before the dreaded cataclysm, I was back in the land of the Maya, where the idea for the Utopia Experiment had first come to me, seven years previously.
It was Thanksgiving, and some of my students had decided to cook a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner. I was spending a semester at UFM, a university in Guatemala City, and it felt rather incongruous to be eating turkey and cranberry sauce in the hot midday sun. After the meal, the students passed around some cardboard cut-out hands. They had traced around their open palms on thin coloured card and cut round the outline to make a set of red, yellow and orange hand-shaped pieces. We were supposed to take one each and write on it one thing we felt particularly thankful for. Then we would stick them all on a cardboard tree, which was decorated with a red notice at the bottom on which the words ‘I’m thankful for . . .’ were inscribed in big black letters.
I didn’t have to ponder my answer for very long. It was something I thought about every day, and especially whenever I felt sad or disappointed. It always worked; as soon as I thought about it, my mood would lift. It was a good trick, and as a result I had rarely been miserable for very long ever since I had left Utopia. Or perhaps that was simply due to the fact that I had been on a low dose of antidepressants all
that time too.
I stuck my cardboard hand on the Thanksgiving tree. It read:
‘I’m not living in a field in Scotland.’
And, you know what? I’m glad I did it. Not just because I learned to value things that I previously scorned, like the flawed social institutions that have evolved in their higgledy-piggledy way over hundreds of years, or the myriad little technological developments that make our lives more comfortable than those of our ancestors, from toilet paper to toothpaste. And not just because I’m not living in a field in Scotland any more, either.
I’m glad because I learned something even more valuable. I learned that I’m not invincible, but also that I’m stronger than I thought. And I’m not afraid any more.
I’m not afraid of losing everything I have, and ending up in hospital again, or even living in a field again, if that’s where my winding path takes me. And I’m not afraid of the collapse of civilization either – not because I no longer think it will collapse – who knows? – but because now I’ve looked that possibility squarely in the face.
In his 1757 treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke notes that fear is heightened by obscurity. The monster is always more terrifying when his face is hidden. Conversely, ‘when we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.’ I spent a year trying to get as clear a picture as possible of the collapse of civilization. It almost killed me, but it also purified me, as if it drained every last drop of fear in my body. I stared into the abyss, and I almost fell in, but somehow I came back from the brink and lived to tell the tale.