Dan Snow's History Hit - Pythagoras' Utopia

Episode Date: December 23, 2023

What comes to your mind when you think of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek polymath? Some might think of the Pythagorean theorem, a foundational principle of mathematics. But he was also the enigmatic founder of Pythagoreanism, a mysterious secret society that strove to create a utopia on earth.Today Dan is joined by Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer and author of Everyday Utopia. Kristen delves into this ancient social experiment, and talks about other attempts at paradise in the millennia since.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and James Hickmann, and edited by Ella Blaxill.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. Today I'm learning about the history of utopias, attempts that have been made, that have actually been put into practice to create a better world, to create different kinds of societies which are not marked by brutal economic inequality, punishment, rule and rulers. And these utopias seem to have very interesting things in common. No matter where they occur, in time or in space on the planet, they pop up everywhere in all sorts of different periods. They pool resources. They think about raising children communally. And they broaden the definition of family, of friends, of community. I've got a very cool scholar on the podcast. She's been on before. Christian Gozzi is an American ethnographer. She's professor of Russian

and Eastern European studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She's got a new book out. It's called Everyday Utopia. And she's going to take me right back to the beginning. The first well-attested utopia that established by Pythagoras. You might think he's a mathematician, but no, he's a lot, lot more than that, as you'll hear. And then we're going to look at some other utopias through history and end with a bold thought experiment about colonising the rest of the solar system. It's a big podcast, folks. Enjoy Utopia.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Kristen, good to see you back on the podcast. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here. This is my own version of Utopia. I get to talk to the world's most

brilliant thinkers and historians and live in this space. Utopias go back a long way. People have been coming up with utopias since we've realized the true horror of the actual world we live in. Right, exactly. And, you know, I think it's one of those really kind of crazy stories when you think back to somebody like Pythagoras, for instance. You know, many of us learn about him in school, but we very rarely think of Pythagoras outside of the Pythagorean theorem, right? About the triangle. We learn about the triangle, but we don't learn that he was the great, great grandfather

of utopia. That's crazy. So he was also a kind of political thinker. He was absolutely a political thinker. And actually, you know, the books that we have, there's a lot of weird sources and most of the extant literature that we have about his life and his way of life, because he wasn't just a philosopher. He was kind of like what we think of today as a guru. He had like a way of life. He had a community. He had a way of

being in the world that he thought would make us better human beings and better able to understand the mysteries of mathematics and the universe. And most of the sources that we have are like 800 years after he died. So we don't really know, but we have some really good evidence that he lived in a very utopian way. And essentially what we would call today in the modern world, a commune. He probably is one of the first people in the world to have created a proper functioning commune. That's so cool. He put his money where his mouth is. Okay. Well, tell me, so where was he from? Was he one of the Athenians? Was he? Samos. He was Pythagoras of Samos. And he was very unhappy with the way his life was going, you know? And so he and some of his followers like left mainland Greece and they settled in a little seaside village in what is now Southern Italy. It was then major Greece, like larger Greece, called

Croton. And he started this community and they had these really weird, for that time, quite progressive policies about how they should live together that were really out of the vibe of mainstream Greek way of life. And so lots of people during his lifetime, his contemporaries, but also many, many people after him were like, wow, he did like really weird things like kind of treat women as equals and share property in common and think differently about traditional family forms. And so many of the ideas that the Pythagoreans had in that particular time, and we're talking about like he was alive between 570 and 495 BC. So this is a really long time ago.

They look remarkably progressive from our perspective today. And I guess just also coming back to that colonial point, I guess it's golden age for utopias because there's lots of people setting out to land that they can claim and build on and occupy. And they're able to come up with different forms of government. They can choose oligarchies or tyrannies or have a little democratic experiment. If you're going to put utopias into effect, you do kind of need that space, don't you? Right. You have to get away from mainstream society, which is exactly what he was doing. He wanted to create his own way, a radically egalitarian community,

quite frankly, again, which was really inclusive of women and the world's first known named mathematician, Tiano was a Pythagorean. We know from sources that came after that her own writing and works were contemporary with them. So it's really weird to have like a woman who was considered a sage, a wise woman who had things to say about mathematics and the universe because she happened to be a part of this really weird experimental community. So what you're saying, Kristen, is that the minute women were able to participate in mathematics, you immediately discover that there's a female genius out there. That's suspicious. Wow. Exactly. I mean, in this particular time in Greece, if we're thinking about five centuries BC here, women were just basically baby making machines. Nobody thought that women had brains.

And certainly that they had brains that were capable of this kind of level of mathematical inquiry. So Pythagoras was so incredibly ahead of his time. And it's not just Pythagoras, but because of his life, because of his influence like Plato in the Republic, Plato is also quite proto-feminist. I mean, he believes that women can also be guardians of his ideal city of Kallipolis, which is probably one of the world's first sort of written utopias. And it's very clear, we know from the third century AD philosopher Iambiclus that Plato was deeply inspired by the Pythagorean way of life, and that's why we know about it. This is interesting because this is a utopia. This is not an intellectual experiment, a written experiment. This is really happening on the

ground. As you say, this remarkable woman is becoming a great mathematician. I mean, this is a new way of ordering a society. Exactly. And I think that, you know, one of the really key things here is that these are people who owned all of their property in common. So there was a saying among the Pythagoreans, which is among friends, all things together, you know, all things in common. So they didn't believe in private property. And this is really out of step with that particular period of time in antiquity. So they didn't believe in private property. And this is really out of step with that particular period of time in antiquity. So here are like a group of people, I mean, possibly you might, you know, if you wanted to apply a contemporary term to them, they were

sort of hippies. They were like weird, nerdy, mathematical hippies who went off and sort of formed this community far away from mainstream society, where they basically, because it was easier for them to survive if they shared their property in common. And they had, you know, really open mind about women participating and about like what the goal of life was rather than just getting money. It was obviously to seek knowledge. Some people say that Pythagoras is like the father of Greek philosophy. I mean, it's complicated because we don't have all the sources that we want, but on a day-to-day level, these were people who like they ate their meals together every day. They basically kind of lived in a big college dorm, we might think of it. And so it's really

remarkable to go back in history and realize that there were these communities and really important communities that decided to live a very different way from the mainstream of their society. And they did that. They made that decision because there was something valuable about making that decision. There was something about creating these communities that helped them thrive. And I think we can learn so much by going back and actually looking at these different kinds of communities, because some of the lessons they teach us are really applicable in the present day. I want to talk about this in a second, but I want to make a comment that makes me sound like a social Darwinist. So I apologize

here. But like, why have we not heard of Croton? If it was so successful and wonderful, why did it not expand and take over from the dominant forms of gender relations and property ownership that we've come to recognize in the ancient world? Well, I think, you know, come on, anytime people decide to do things outside of the mainstream, there's a massive backlash from the mainstream. And the fact that we know about Pythagoras and the Pythagorean way of life shows that it was a really important social experiment. But, you know, most of us have what social psychologists call status quo bias. We don't like to change things. We don't like to shake up, you know, the way we organize, particularly our private lives. And so I think it's really important, even though like we don't

learn about Pythagoras. I think it's quite intentional that we learn about the Pythagorean theorem, but we don't learn about the conditions under which it was produced. That's intentional. Oh yeah. The man wants us to know how to work out the area of a triangle, right? The man does not want us to hear about free love and sharing possessions. Exactly. It is very worrying, right? But I do think that, you know, from the perspective of somebody like me, who's interested in this longer intellectual genealogical history of utopias leading up to the present day, there is a thread. There is a, you know, there is a way in which these ideas keep appearing over and over and over again. And yes, they do get smashed. And,

you know, probably sometimes really, really violently. We can talk about examples of that. But I will tell you that despite the fact that they are often crushed brutally by mainstream society, they keep reappearing and they appear cross-culturally and they appear trans-historically. So everywhere we look around the world, there are always utopians living out there on the margins of society and dreaming about different ways of being in the world, which I think are really important. When you're looking at utopias, have you identified a bias that you have, which is, are there some utopians of like crazy people who keep members of the opposite sex enslaved for sexual purposes, you know,

or is there something trans-historical and different places and periods where we feel that we are kind of crawling towards some important truth about property, about our private lives? Or is it everything, just a whole galaxy of different utopias out there? Well, I think it depends on how you use the word, right? I mean, again, I don't want to get into a semantic debate about the word utopia, but in my view, utopia is a very capacious term that basically brings us closer to our evolutionary anthropological origins. The fact that we were cooperative breeders, the fact that we did in fact tend to be more egalitarian, there's, you know, not completely, there are lots of different examples. If you read books like The Dawn of Everything by David Wengo and David Graeber, you'll know that you can't say anything is natural or unnatural.

But there's certainly this deep, long tendency for us to be much more altruistic and communal than we are today. You brought up social Darwinism, right? There's a way in which our economic system is predicated on this idea that we're naturally very hobbsy and selfish and that life would be brutish and nasty and short if we didn't actually have some kind of sovereign to rule over us and guarantee our rights to property and so on and so forth. But I think that there's so much archaeological and anthropological evidence right now. And I'm adding to this a lot of historical evidence that shows that, you know what, throughout history, there have been these communities that have said, nope, the way that you're organizing property and

the way that you're organizing gender relations and the way that you're organizing the family, all of that is just wrong. And it's actually hurting and hurtful to human beings. And there's a whole other way of living. And it's sometimes those narratives are religious. I want to make it very clear that in my book, I talk about both secular and spiritual communities because I think the spiritual communities are really important because some people think about communes and they think only secular communes. Monasticism sounds very similar to that. Oh yeah. I talk about monastics because I think that a lot of, especially contemporary visions of communal living actually come out of monasticism. If you think about university dorms,

they're totally modeled on monastic living. So there's all sorts of resonances, both spiritually and from a secular point of view. Okay. So what else defines utopias as you describe them? You've talked about sort of living in communities, right? So not being isolated in our detached houses, surrounded by lawn, wilting under the hot sun, a kind of form of communal living, a form of shared property. That's important. Yeah, right. Shared property is important. Also a commitment to kind of what I would call collective child rearing or community

child rearing or cooperative breeding. There's all sorts of different words that gets used for this. But like even in monastic communities, as you pointed out, where you have celibates, Benedictine cloisters or Beguinages, right? Even people who are celibate tend to take in orphans or otherwise unwanted children, children born out of wedlock, for instance, or women who get pregnant out of wedlock. I mean, they raise children and they raise those children collectively. They don't raise them in this kind of like isolated nuclear family. And so if we think about the history of

the West, there's this really interesting way in which we organize our domestic sphere, which I'm calling utopian. And I identify it as a certain idea about the dwellings within which we live, the way we own property, the way we have and raise our young children, and the way we imagine our social networks. Rather than focusing on the nuclear family, thinking of those as more capacious. And this can mean aunts and uncles. This can mean godparents. This could mean neighbors, colleagues, friends. This could mean your fellow monastics. I mean, I'm thinking very capaciously about what people today might call chosen family, for instance. But I think there's

a great story here, which is that there are ordinary, you know, when we think about the past, we often think about individuals because we read history as a story of certain individuals who did certain things often. But what I'm calling utopia, and I want to make it very clear that for me, utopia is never going to be somebody who's like a charismatic leader leading some kind of a cult or something like that, where people can't leave. These are voluntary, fairly egalitarian communities where people join and they're finding something satisfying about the way these people are living together and sharing property and sharing ideals of family in common. And their day-to-day life means having meals with other people, like doing, sharing chores, doing work together, taking care of each other's children,

like doing things in a way that really prioritizes cooperation and connection over competition and private wealth accumulation. And that is a story of history that we very rarely hear about. And so I think it's really important that we learn about it when we can. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Head. We're talking about utopia. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. To be continued... And popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit.

Wherever you get your podcasts. There's another extraordinary example in your book. Tell about bogomilism bogomilism yeah so this is one of the examples of a spiritual community and the bogomils are a fascinating group of people they were from the 9th 10th century in what was the first bulgarian kingdom they had some roots deeper in the Ottoman Empire, but they really start to like gain traction in Bulgaria in the Middle Ages. And, you know, I like to call them basically sort of asexual vegan anarchists, because if you actually spend some time looking at what the Bokomils believed and also the reaction against them, they were really interesting in the sense that they,

first of all, believed that the material world was the work of the devil. They were Manicheans, so they were a dualist sect, which believed that there was a God in heaven that was in charge of the spiritual realm. And then there was a God on earth, which was in charge of all material things and that the God on earth was basically the devil. And so they thought that human bodies, that humans were angels whose spirits had been trapped in material form. And so because angels were pure spirit, they believed that the spirit was sexless. And so they allowed women to become the sort of highest spiritual leaders among them. They were called the Perfecti. And the idea was, is that as you got close to death, there was this ritual that was performed called consolation. And then it's almost like kind of

a Western form of Buddhism, rather than being reincarnated in the physical flesh, at some point, your spirit would then be free. And people who had reached this state, which is really very similar to what we would call enlightenment in Buddhism, you could then choose to remain on earth as something like a bodhisattva. They called it a perfect person and help other people reach this state of pure spirit. And they allowed women to do that. Now, they were kicked out of Bulgaria because, and there's a great quote from the Middle Ages, there was a medieval Bulgarian priest, and this is the quote about the heretical Bogomils. He said, they teach their followers not to obey their masters. They scorn the rich. They hate the Tsars. They ridicule their superiors. They

reproach the nobles and believe that God looks in horror on those who labor for the Tsar and advise every serf not to work for his master. So you can imagine that they were pretty unwelcome and they get sort of kicked out. They settled for a while in Bosnia-Herzegovina, that area, what we now call Bosnia-Herzegovina, then move into northern Italy, where we call them now the Cathars, and ultimately into southern France, where they are known often as the Albigensians. And then they're just utterly, completely destroyed in the Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th century.

And then the last few remaining ones that survived the crusade are basically all murdered in the Inquisition. So unfortunately, it's a sad tale. They were very much critical of the Catholic church and they had this other way of life. And they, you know, attracted a lot of followers, particularly women, and the Catholics didn't want anything to do with that. So they were crushed. But again, their legacies remained. And some people call them proto-Protestants.

A lot of people will argue that the Protestant Reformation would not have happened had it not been for the earlier spiritual, quote unquote, heresies of the Bogomils, the Cathars, and the Albigensians. That's the moment when the papal legate, the kind of Catholic establishment figure, that when he says, kill them all, God will know his own. Exactly. Kill them all. And so he actually murders men, women, children, Catholics, everybody. Because that quote is somebody is saying, well, how do we know who's a Cathar and who's a Catholic? Don't worry, God will know. Yeah. And basically the law comes down. Don't worry, just massacre them all. I mean, some people, the word genocide gets thrown around a lot, but some them all. I mean, some people, the word genocide

gets thrown around a lot, but some people will say that the Albigensian Crusade was one of the first ideological genocides where every single member of this group who believed in this, you know, theology of Manichean dualism, they were just literally murdered. Every single one, every woman, every child, every last one of them murdered. If these utopias seem to be closer to our natural state of being and these utopias, we can assume they're enjoyed and they nourish and the people within them thrive. Why does a clever scholar like you have to go and identify them with a magnifying glass from our past? Like, what is it about our nature that makes the alternatives? Like, how did property and violence and alcohol hack our brains? It seems crazy, right?

Well, it doesn't seem that crazy when you understand this sort of like longer sweep of history. I think some people will say, and I often get this question, well, how can you talk about these utopian communities as being really important to human history? And I even argue that they're essential. What makes us human, what makes us thrive as a species is these utopian communities, because it's from these communities that we get so many ideas when we face challenges, particularly environmental or geographic or political or economic challenges. We turn to the utopians and we hope that they have something to tell us, right? The kind of blue sky thinking dreamers out there.

But I will say, and I've spent a lot of time and I argue this in the book, that early Buddhists, early followers of the Buddha and pre-325 Christians, so before Christianity becomes a state religion under Constantine, those are 100% utopian communities. They were really marginal in the societies within which they existed. And if you look at those communities today, I mean, there are 1.2 billion Catholics alone. That's not Christians, that's just Catholics. And both Christianity and Buddhism are major world religions. So these ideas exist parallel to us. The problem is, I think, that we have been seduced, especially those of us living in the global north and the UK and the US are probably the worst offenders in this sense, to think of self-sufficiency

and kind of private wealth accumulation and this sort of idea of the nuclear family with bi-parental care for your own biological children in your single family home, surrounded by hordes of your own privately owned stuff. Like that's the kind of ideal that we have. And yet it's completely incongruous with the way that we evolved. And so you're absolutely right. How are we so completely led astray? And I think the reason we're so led astray, I mean, I, you know, I think there are lots of reasons, but I think that the thing is that everything about the way we live, think about your house. Think about like, if you want to buy a house or you want to rent a flat, like they're all single family homes. How are you going to move in with like four other

people? Right. I mean, think about the way we organize our families. Most birth certificates allow only two parents. You know, it's very difficult to think about a more capacious parenting unit that might include grandparents or aunts and uncles or godparents or whatever. So there's an entire legal structure. There's an entire built environment. There's an entire ideology around individual acquisition that pushes us into thinking that there's an entire built environment, there's an entire ideology around individual acquisition that pushes us into thinking that there's a certain right way of living your life. And I think that, you know, like if you look at utopian communities that exist today, and there are many that exist today, by the way, all over the world, eco-villages and

intentional communities and neo-baginages and all sorts of places where people are actually trying to bring these ideas back into life, partially to combat the isolation and loneliness that is so pervasive in our societies, partially to reduce our carbon footprints, you know, for environmental reasons, living together and sharing resources and certainly sharing heating and cooling in a dwelling is really efficient. And I also think, you know, there's a way that living this way also helps us deal with inequality. We live in societies, you and me, where 60 percent of wealth is inherited. So we organizing our domestic lives can have really important and profound effects on the world in which we live.

But it's also a threat. It's a huge threat to the prevailing economic system within which we live that wants to commodify our relationships and so on and so forth. I've written about that elsewhere. So I just think it takes time. And it's not just me. I think a lot of people are really interested in these ideas. They just don't have the deeper history, the experiences, the stories, like people like Pythagoras and Tiano or Plato or Thomas More, all these different experiments and imaginations,

right, that people have learned and not learned over time. There's a really important thread that connects us to this more natural way of living. And I think that studying these utopian communities really helps us understand that thread. Now, tell me, this might sound a bit weird, but we have, just as the ancient Greeks moved out into Eastern Mediterranean, North Africa, some British settlers, of course, moved into what was not an empty space, but an empty space created by fire and sword in North America and elsewhere. If we got an opportunity over the next 200 years, when we talk about settling on Mars,

talk about the moon, does this conversation need to be part of this? It's not just the technology that will allow us to get there, but for me, I'm so fascinated by how we are going to choose to organize ourselves when we get there. And it seems to me that your work is super important in that respect, because we don't need to export the model that is dominant on Earth at the moment. Exactly. And I think that, you know, if we do think about settlements on the moon or settlements on Mars or settlements on asteroids or spaceships that are going to be traveling, you know, satellites that are going to be orbiting the planet. Like we have the ability to reorganize the way that we live, that we think of family, that we identify kin. There's a wonderful word in English called kith. Nobody uses it. It's archaic, right? But we have this term kith and kin. And your kith are the people that you know. They're your comrades, your colleagues, your neighbors, your friends. And kith were really important. You know, there were kinfolk and

there used to be this word kithfolk. And I think if we're going to be on Mars and there's some really great evolutionary, biological and biological anthropological evidence that shows that we in extreme environments, high altitudes, extremes of temperature, other planets, right? There's research being done with NASA that when we are strained biologically as human beings, we have like biological limits to the temperatures, for instance, or the lack of gravity or the lack of oxygen that we can endure. When we are under stress, you can take saliva samples and test things like cortisol and testosterone. And it shows that when we're under an incredible amount of stress, two things happen.

One, we burn way more calories, so we become less efficient. And second of all, it compromises our neuroendocrine system. So it actually makes us less able to move through space in a graceful way. It actually gives us a suppression of our vestibular function. And the one thing, the one thing that mitigates against both of these effects is being with other people. against both of these effects is being with other people. So as we are on a planet where our environment is going to be more hostile to our biology in the future, and if we are going to settle other planets or we're going to be in space in any way, the most important thing that we need to survive, literally to biologically thrive in these environments is other people. And so we need

to think and we need to look at these longer, deeper historical experiments about how we can live together in harmony with each other and with nature. And I think that is what the long history of utopia shows us is totally possible. So we should all be reading, like if you're on a space shuttle to Mars, right? We need to be actually thinking about this longer history of how we could live together in harmony with each other and with nature. Well, thank you so much. That's inspiring stuff. The happiest times I've ever enjoyed as a family is when I'm with a wider group of kith and kin. When my sister-in-law moves in with us or my sisters, it feels very much more natural than our isolated two-parent setup. So anecdotally,

that's true. I don't have to go to Mars and experience my biological limits to work that one out. Kristen, what a wonderful book. Please tell everyone what it's called. It's called Everyday Utopia, and it has two different subtitles, but in the UK, it's called In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home is the subtitle. Yeah, with Bodley Head. Thank you very much, Nad indeed. Good luck with it. Thank you.