Imaginary Worlds - A Perfect World

Episode Date: February 25, 2015

A French philosopher is certain his ideas will help human beings evolve -- not just emotionally or psychologically. We will start to grow tails. And that inspires his disciples to start a socialist commune in the Wild West of 1850s Texas. Were utopians the first science fiction thinkers? Featuring Julia Barton and Eric Rabkin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Josh makes it from like millet. This is reporter Julia Barton. She's in my apartment and she's telling me what she had for breakfast, which is a classic question we use in public radio to adjust microphone levels. That sounds awesome. So normally this podcast follows my obsessions, but this one, this episode is about one of hers. Julia is really fascinated by a 19th century French philosopher named Charles Fourier. He was a young man during the French Revolution,

and he saw how human society could be completely reconstructed. And that experiment ended with a lot of beheadings and then Napoleon. But he was like, you know, we can get it right. And he developed all these ideas about how you could change the way people live. He had answers to everything. So like, well, nobody's going to want to clean the latrines, you know, and he's like, no, children love filth. And people would say, well, what about families? And he was like, well, certain people love raising children. Other people hate it. So there would just be the people who like raising children would raise all the children. Now, from a Freudian perspective, he was actually really ahead of his time.

He believed that people were guided by pent up emotions and passions that society was trying to suppress. You know, which grew out of his own resentment of being forced to be a merchant in his family instead of what his true passion was, and being unmarried because none of the marriage options really appealed to him. Was he gay? He was, as he put it, sapphic. He loved lesbians.

Okay. And he came to accept this about himself later because it made him like one of the higher higher evolved personality types um yeah but you didn't know that no four year was actually ahead of his time in a lot of ways he was pro-women's rights even pro-gay rights he believed that once we adopt these enlightened ideas human beings would start to change and evolve. And this is where things get weird, because he didn't mean change and evolve emotionally.

He meant that human beings would start to grow tails. Like, really. That was his philosophy. And he had disciples. Like, one of them was named Victor Considerant, who was a politician. And Julia showed me these political cartoons from the 1840s that were just ridiculing him. This sort of tail business with the eye on it would come back to haunt Considerant. So you see him here as half man, half butterfly. A man with a tail sticking out of his...

So yeah, there he is with... he's holding two ends of his tail. Is that two ends of his tail? I don't know. And one has an eye on it and he's got antlers. Yeah. And turn the pages more. It's really, it's funny because they took the tail motif and like. Oh my God.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, there he is. He's looking at the eye on his own tail. And he can't fit his pants on, you know, sort of he suddenly evolved and he. He can't fit his pants on you know sort of he suddenly evolved and he he can't fit his own pants on right because sideron keeps a watchful eye on his enemy and then he's uh he's holding the tail like it's a it's a little spy camera exactly so no what why were we going to evolve tails with with eyes on them is it because we're going to unleash um the the phaetons sorry no no no but you could find little hints of fourierism in scientology um no it was just because we were triggering the next sort of

level we were holding it back with our stubbornness so thing institutions like the church you know government trade all of these things were backwards to Fourier. He was like, enough already. Like we, we, once we are the catalyst, God says like, ah, you have finally figured it out. You've advanced the next level. I'm going to unlock, um, you know, you're on level 10. I'm going to now unlock the, uh, um, we're going to lock these genes, even though he didn't know the word gene. That's basically what he's talking about. In a way. yeah. Or sort of like a, you know, human potential movement. Like we could be so much more if we would just stop with these dumb, you know, rituals and institutions. So Fourier dies and his disciple, Victor Considérant, you know, the guy that was ridiculed by all those cartoonists,

has to flee France because he gets caught up in the 1848 revolution. The one that was the plot of Les Miserables. And so he comes to America to start over and he travels the country looking for other followers of Charles Fourier and that eventually leads him to Texas. And it was the springtime. It was in Texas. It was a really beautiful time of year there. And he was like, this is amazing out here.

This is so beautiful. He just really fell in love with this region of North Texas. And actually, he'd been meeting Frenchmen along the way, you know, people who knew him. And they were like, hell yeah, man, you need to come to America. This is where it's at. You know know they were all giving him the same message and so he wrote this treaty in sort of a fever called oh Texas you know to Texas he really laid on thick he was a really good persuasive pamphleteer from his years as a journalist and it's a propagandist for the movement so he laid it on thick, and he thought, you know, like, this will take years to develop.

But within a year, it was fully funded, and people were, like, ready to get on boats. And they came, boatloads of Frenchmen following him like Moses into the desert, hoping to create a utopian socialist commune in Texas in the 1850s. How did that pan out? Well, before we get there, I wanted to explore something. This whole idea of speeding up human evolution, of taking evolution into your own hands, is actually cutting-edge science today. There's a movement called transhumanism, where people want to use genetics to alter their bodies, like grow a tail or fins or stripes. If you've ever seen the sci-fi series Orphan Black, the villains on that show are a fictionalized version of the transhumanists.

Neolution gives us the opportunity at a self-directed evolution. I believe that's not only a choice, but a human right. And that got me wondering, was Charles Fourier really one of the first science fiction thinkers? I mean, are utopias in general kind of like the roots of the tree that eventually branches out into science fiction? I found this scholar of utopian literature, Eric Rabkin, and he says, yes, utopias were a precursor to science fiction. But this started way before the French cartoonists were ridiculing Charles Fourier. The word utopia, it's coined by Thomas More in a book called Utopia, published in 1516.

In this novel, utopia is the name of a fictional island. Utopians don't value gold. They actually use gold to make chamber pots, and they're anti-war. But they believe wisely that if they don't protect themselves, especially having all this gold around, others will attack their island. So they have a very simple foreign policy. They will hire mercenaries who will simply conquer the islands next to theirs. But if you take this policy and extend it, it becomes one of world domination. One of the reasons that Henry VIII said, will someone rid me of this priest, leading to the decapitation of Thomas More, is clearly that he was meaning to criticize the expansionist foreign policy of that island nation, Britain. So utopias are usually a way for a writer to make a veiled critique of the society that he or she is living in. But then we started having these amazing technological breakthroughs, the beginning

of the 20th century. And some people started to think maybe utopia is possible. There are lots of works, both prose and poetry, that talk about how science will eventually make things perfect. It doesn't just say it's going to keep getting better and better. They say we're going to achieve perfection. But if you look at authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury, who come from the golden age of science fiction, when the future was going to be awesome, if you look at what they actually wrote,

they're pretty skeptical that technology could ever create a perfect world. actually wrote, they're pretty skeptical that technology could ever create a perfect world. For example, the most widely read, multiply copied, and still always in print book by Arthur C. Clarke is Childhood's End. Childhood's End is a story in which aliens come down and prevent us from fighting anymore. Well, it's because they don't try to reason with us. You just get wiped out. You know, they can project pain. So when people at first try to do it, they're just, their guts, you know. And so human society starts to become a utopia.

With concerts all the time and wonderful discussions and poetry. But interestingly enough, although there are actors and musicians, there are no playwrights or composers. Because with a completely controlled world and nothing to drive us to go forward, creativity is sapped. So how will this go on? is sapped. So how will this go on? It turns out that human beings are being kept from killing themselves so that something called total breakthrough can happen. And in total breakthrough, human beings spontaneously become these glowing hot spirits which manage to coalesce and become a perfect root mind. They then go off into space and reach down sort of as a funnel of fire and consume all of the earth and go off into space.

That's the end. So what Clark has given us has been a utopia, all right. But when they finally get something that is better than being human, they aren't human at all. I don't think I realized until talking to you how horrible these utopias are. They all sound awful. sound awful. It's like when you go on a vacation to a tropical island and you realize you are bored out of your mind and you are intellectually unstimulated and everybody else seems to be having a wonderful time and you're like, what is wrong with me? Why am I bored? Why don't I want to go back to New York and it's winter? What am I, crazy? Yeah, right. I'm with you. I'm with you. And boredom is a driving force. If nothing is going wrong, but there's nothing worth doing, people go crazy. You need to have to do something.

Was there, I mean, conventional thinking would be that the sort of post-60s political landscape is when sort of utopians really fell out. Utopias fell out of fashion. Is that about right, would you say? I don't think that they fell out of fashion in the 70s. I think they fell out of fashion about 1917. I'm pointing to the Russian Revolution. There were people, remember the McCarthy era is about rooting out people who once upon a time had said, yeah, yeah, communism. And most of them that got rooted out said, yeah, but I outgrew it. I realized it was wrong. You know, the Stalinist purges made them all go away. So Stalin killed all utopias. Among that and 20 million other people. Yeah, exactly. Do you have a personal favorite utopia in fictional utopia?

You mean a positive utopia? Yes. No. I don't believe in it. I'm 68 years old, Eric. There were things that I really wanted a lot when I was 6 and then 8 and then 28 and then 48. And the pleasure I have as a grandparent is not something that I aspired to before I became a parent. I don't want a world that freezes me into things. I want adaptability. Well, then what draws you to the subject so much then? What do you find the most

compelling thing about it? I think the desire to make the world better is crucial, especially as the population increases and the resources become fewer. I want the world better for me. I want the world better for my friends. I want the world better for humanity in general just because I believe in humanity. But I have to be candid. I'm more concerned with my grandchildren having a world that can allow them happiness. I don't think that the only way to get happiness is to make it be permanent and inescapable. So I like utopia because it drives us to consider how to make things happy.

But that doesn't mean that I want to have it function as a blueprint. They're aspirational. Yeah. Yeah. You need something. Yeah. You need hope. Victor Consideron had a lot of hope. Remember, he's the guy that brought that whole group of Frenchmen over to Texas to carve out a utopian society. Julia Barton says for a while things are going okay.

Considerance's wife, Julie Considerance, sets up a salon in the woods. They string these hammocks between the cedar trees and they lie, you know, and look at the stars between the branches and they talk about all these social movements and how to solve all the problems of humanity. You know, while they're sitting out there in these hammocks, which are strung between the trees so that, you know, like the snakes can't bite them. Yeah, they were screwed. The main leadership did leave. Considerant was the first. He ran away.

Really? Yes, he ran away in the middle of the night. Oh my God, leaving his disciples there? Yes. And he was furious at them. I mean, he refused to come back. They were like, come back and just, you know, sign some papers so we can, you know, dissolve this thing.

He was like, no way. I'll never return to that fatherless bastard, you know. So he was worthless. But those French people, they stayed. They learned the skills of living on the frontier. And they got absorbed in the larger population of the closest town, which was called Dallas, Julia Barton's hometown. In fact, that big tower that you see the opening credits of Dallas is dedicated to those pioneers.

They brought all these skills that you would never otherwise find on the frontier, you know, and they also brought this sort of aspirational thing where they had, they'd been to the opera. And Dallas does have a lot of culture. Dallas has a lot of culture and it also has an aspiration to classiness that is really deep and quite strong, you know, and sometimes it's damaging. And sometimes, you know, it results in beautiful things. But it's, it's like a primal need there, you know, we've got to be classy, we need the nicest clothes, you know, we need the nicest cars, we need the nicest buildings, we need the fanciest architects. And so I think there's this uneasiness about that tension between, you know, sort of these European aspirations and

the reality of being on the frontier. And if that's not, if that doesn't go back to the Fourierists, then I don't know what the hell does, you know. It's easy to make fun of utopias and the people that believe in them. But a lot of what those dreamers imagined just became the world we live in. I mean, we have so many freedoms and technological gadgets that they were dying for. The problem is once you get that stuff, it's never enough. Even if you grow a tail, then you want an eyeball at the end of the tail. Because that makes so much sense. Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Julia Barton, Eric Rabkin, Jonathan Beecher, and Angela Johnson. My editor is Kerry Hillman. I mean, I want to love this guy, you know, until I came across the vicious Jew hating. Oh my God. I know. I know.

Until I came across the vicious Jew-hating. Oh my God, I know, I know. I would love to hear from you guys. What future topics would you like me to explore? Or, you know, as a fan, to have an interesting take on something that you just really love. Let me know. You can tweet to me at Eve Malinsky or comment on the show's Facebook page. My website, which regularly features a different drawing for each particular episode, is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.