Rev Left Radio - Everyday Utopia: Egalitarianism, Human Nature, & The Good Life

Episode Date: May 17, 2023

Professor and author Kristen R. Ghodsee returns to Rev Left to discuss her newest book "Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life". Together, her and Breht discuss intentional communities, social experiments, what utopia even means in this context, scientific v. utopian socialism, criticisms of the nuclear family and the socialist alternative, the function of student debt in modern america, the relationship between religious and spiritual orientations and radial social experimentation, public education, evolutionary biology, and more!   Check out the book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Everyday-Utopia/Kristen-R-Ghodsee/9781982190217   Check out previous Rev Left episodes with Kristen here: https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/size/5/?search=ghodsee   Kristen's website: https://kristenghodsee.com/   The AK47 podcast created and hosted by Kristen: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast   Outro music: "Kill in a Heartbeat" by Danger, Moth   Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio  

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, we have back on the show, fan favorite of the show, Kristen Godsey, to talk about her newest book, Everyday Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life. It's a fascinating book. It's really wonderful. It covers so much fascinating history that I didn't even know about. So many gems in this book.

It's really that the book. breadth of it is fascinating the time and space that you go through and find all these different human efforts to build egalitarian communal societies in the heart of ancient slave societies, medieval feudal societies, and modern day capitalist ones as well. It's a fascinating ride and we're here to talk with the author about it. And I think she said we're the first interview that she's done on this book. So it's pretty cool to be able to get that. As I know she'll do many, many more covering it. And as always, if you like what we do here on RevLeft,

you can join our Patreon and support the show directly at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. We have never, ever, and will never do any advertisers or anything like that. We are 100% listener funded and always will be. We will ride and we will die on the support we get directly from our fans. So if you like what we do and you have the disposable income,

for just as little as $5 a month, you can get access up to three bonus monthly episodes you get a release of the outlines that I draw up for many of the conversations we have you can read those in advance of the episodes coming out and early releases and a bunch of other stuff so thank you to anybody who supports the show if you have a little extra money and you want to support the show patreon.com forward slash rev loved radio that's where you can do it now without further ado let's get to our wonderful conversation with christend gotsy on her new book everyday utopia enjoy

My name is Kristen Godsey, and I am a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. I've written a fair number of academic books, but I'm mostly known for my trade book, why women had better sex under socialism and other arguments for economic independence, which I believe now has actually been translated into 15 languages. And I've got this new book coming out, Everyday Utopia, which we'll be talking about today. Absolutely, yeah. Welcome back to the show. Rev. Left listeners will certainly be familiar with you. I think we've had, I don't even know how many episodes we've done together at this point,

but it's always an honor and a pleasure to speak with you. And this new book, Everyday Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life. And I believe this comes out May 16th, 2023. Is that correct? Yes, May 16th is the date of publication in the United States, and it's May 18th in the United Kingdom. Wonderful. Okay. And I think we're going to try to release this episode on or as near to that date as we possibly can. So when people are listening to it, the book should be available for them. But let's go ahead and get into the book itself. And this book was written in the depths of the COVID pandemic and the context of the chaos and the contradictions. that the pandemic brought to the fore is an interesting place to begin thinking about utopias.

So can you kind of talk about why you wrote the book and how the pandemic influenced you? Yeah, well, I think, you know, obviously many of us in lockdown were reading a lot. I was thinking a lot and feeling really kind of unmoored, as everybody was, I think. But for me, I think the pandemic was also a moment where I realized that there was this sort of radical break with the way the world seemed, you know, intractably to be. And previous to the pandemic, you know, people were talking about things like universal basic income and say, oh, no, you know, you could, the government could never just give money away. And then suddenly during the pandemic, the government just started giving money away, right? So there was this

sort of plastic moment where I think that people were really starting to recognize, that their families and their sort of isolated, you know, atomistic lives were a real liability during the lockdowns. And people rushed to form pandemic pods. And there was all of this kind of creativity around mutual aid and help. And people really kind of rose up and started thinking about different ways of reorganizing their private lives. And that was something that really inspired me to look deeper into the history of how various crises over time in, you know, different historical moments and different cultural contexts, have been inspirations for really profound utopian visions. And that was sort of the launch pad that started me doing all of this

various reading and research into different utopian experiments of the past. Interesting. And yeah, the book is, of course, called Everyday Utopia. And as you point out in the So a sort of introduction of this book, utopia can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, right? Sometimes it is just synonymous with idealism in a pejorative sense. Like, you know, utopians is a sometimes uses a pejorative term. Other instances, it's literally people remind you that it means no place. Like there is no place that is a utopia. So I even think about it, etc. So before we move on, can you kind of just discuss the term utopia, clarify how you are using it, especially given the many different definitions and ideas people have about that term. Absolutely. So as you pointed out, you know, the word was coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas Moore when he wrote the little book, Utopia. And it's a play on the ancient Greek. In ancient Greek, utopia could either mean a no place, but it could also mean a good place. And I think that that ambiguity was intentional. I think that Moore really was playing with this idea of

the very sorts of political arrangements that we might think of as impossible as in not ever being able to happen in any place might actually be a better way of organizing our lives. And, you know, Sir Thomas Moore himself was killed by Henry the 8th, not for this book, but this book certainly was a challenge to the ways in which that particular era in England was a arranging its political and social systems. And so what I want to do when I use the word utopia is really to push back at this pejorative sense of the word, that it's somehow idealistic or impossible. But I also want to recognize that it's pushing the boundaries of the possible. We need utopian thinking in order to push us beyond where we kind of get stuck. politically in the middle.

So there's this idea of utopianism as being this kind of militant optimism or radical hope, this ability to kind of unleash our imaginations and be creative about solutions to the social problems that we face in the 21st century. Yeah, another way that utopia is used, especially it'll probably jump to mind in the audience of this show, is, you know, Marx and Engels made that famous text, socialism, utopian, and scientific, where they're arguing for a scientific socialism against the previous utopian forms of socialism, which they're not necessarily denigrating. They're just showing has real limitations, can be idealist, and isn't rooted in a sort of materialist analysis of history.

And, you know, utopia is, I think, using a much broader sense in this book, but I think certainly some of the experiments you cover could be classified in that utopian socialist, pre-Marxist sort of attempt to, you know, hold property in common, for example, or revolutionize ways of being together in community or even within families, et cetera. So does that kind of make sense to you? And do you think that it's fair to say that some of these experiments probably fall into that broad box of utopian socialism that came, especially pre-Marx? Absolutely. I mean, I deliberately talk about the utopian socialist that Marx and Engels were criticizing. So Fourier and St. Simone, people like Flora Tristan,

But I think that what distinguishes, quote unquote, utopian socialism from scientific socialism is also the role of the state. So for Marx and Engels, the idea was really to kind of seize the state and use the state in this intermediary stage of socialism in order to get to communism, the sort of dictatorship of the proletariat model that Lenin actually imposes in the Soviet Union later. But the utopian socialists were much more interested in this idea of contaminationism, these small communities that would lead by example. And so if you rearranged your sort of most intimate domestic lives, if you started at the very kind of most fundamental unit of society, which is the family, and you started to transform from there, ultimately that would be a much more lasting transformation. Now, Marx and Engels completely disagreed with that, of course, because they thought that you can't build an alternative to capitalism within capitalism. But I think that they missed something really important about this utopian impulse.

And I like to say that, you know, we should all think about the other 1%. So we often think of the 1% as the economic elites, the 1% of the income distribution. But it turns out that throughout history and in many different cultural context, there has always been roughly about 1% of the population, which is living in a way that is completely different from the mainstream. And these could be religious communities. These could be anarchist communes. These could be, you know, all sorts of different formulations of human relationships outside of what we would think of as the quote unquote normal way to live. There have always been these utopians. And they're always there. We tend to ignore them,

because there's such a small percentage of the population. But in moments of crisis, in moments of upheaval, I think that the utopians become inspirations for us. And so many ideas that started off as being very utopian ideas, like collective child care, for instance, eventually move their way into the mainstream. So I think of utopianism as a resource for political action, understanding Marx and Engels quite correctly,

criticizing them for being so insubism. and not really dealing with the larger structural issues of capitalism. But at the same time, you know, these utopian communities have persisted everywhere. And I think that they can be extremely valuable to us when we're sort of feeling stuck. And so, yes, I do think that, especially that book, Utopian, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, really kind of takes many of these people to task. It also takes them to task, by the way, because some of them were quite openly religious. And as you know, Marx and Engels were atheists. And they saw religion as part of the infrastructure that oppressed people. And so I think there's an important way that this book is

going back to those original thinkers and seeing what Marx and Engels missed and how we might be able to learn from them in the current contemporary moment. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a very interesting thing to try to explore. And I learned a lot reading through this book. And of course, It is a form of radical prefigurative politics. This is something that certainly exists within the Marxist tradition, but it's something that I think is taken very seriously, in particular in the anarchist tradition, whereas there is this idea that we have to begin constructing

alternative ways of living and being in community within the belly of the beast as a form of trying to set an alternative that could then grow. This takes a modern form, I think, in a certain segment of the co-op movement, who I think rather naively but still interestingly believe that, you know, this development of co-ops could be something that spreads throughout society as an alternative way of structuring a business and can challenge capitalism after it gets to a certain point of development. There's plenty to criticize there as there's plenty to criticize in utopian socialism and scientific socialism for that matter. But it is interesting and it's an interesting thing to explore. And one of the things I've been studying kind of lately just in my free time kind of re-going over early.

American history, the settler colonialism that took place, manifest destiny. And one of the interesting things that I came across recently was this idea that you were talking about 1% of people that try to live alternatively to the dominant culture. You know, there's this phenomena that began to happen, especially as the frontier expanded, where settlers would desert, you know, and go live with the indigenous communities because they saw the way that indigenous people lived, the way that their communal structures were situated. It was a much more human, more preferable way of life. And interestingly, that did not happen very much in the reverse. It wasn't like indigenous people were fleeing their communities to join settler communities. It was very much

a one-way road. And while that's not quite a utopian experiment, it does say something interesting about the ailments and the psychology that was already present in early capitalism in the colonial period. Yeah, and I also think it's very important that many of these utopian socialist communities and thinkers like Robert Owen, I was just in New Lanark in Scotland a couple weeks ago, and I went to visit sort of the birthplace of utopian socialism. Some might actually say the birthplace of socialism writ large and very much the forerunner of this sort of co-op movement that you're talking about. But, you know, Owen himself came to the United States. There was this sort of, frontier mentality, there were these phalanxes, these utopian socialists that came from France, the St. Simonians came to try to build these alternative ways of living. And I do think, you know, the dawn of everything, Graber and Wengro talk a lot about these frontiers, people who kind of decided to go and join these indigenous communities and the way that indigenous communities actually may have inspired some of the ideas of the Enlightenment, right? So I do think that,

that utopianism as a word, as you said, it has this kind of negative derogatory connotation in contemporary politics, but it didn't always. And it's always been a source of these interesting ideas, these ways of reimagining how we might live our everyday lives. And the kind of research that you're doing, I think is really important to help understand

how we got so rigidified in our ways of thinking about what life should look like, what a good life should look like. You know, there's a particular white settler colonial mentality that underpins a lot of our day-to-day existence that many of us are just not really aware of. Yeah, absolutely. You know, the dawn of everything, I knew when that book came out, I've been meaning to get to it lately, like in this last week alone, like three or four times I've randomly come across people recommending it.

So I really got to get on that. And hopefully one day I can even maybe turn that into an episode. where we tackle that text and see what we can learn from it. But let's go ahead and move on in this discussion. And I kind of wanted to touch on this, because this book stood out to me in comparison to your other work that we've covered on the show and that you've put out over the last several years, and that it does have much more autobiographical information than any other book you've written,

as far as I can tell. So can you kind of talk about why you decided to open up in that way? And can you talk about how you used your family and personal history as a jumping off point to tackle some of the major issues you do in your life? book. Okay, so this is a tricky question. It's a hard question. And I'm still a little nervous about it. You know, given that we're recording this before the book is actually out, I'm very aware of how much of myself is in this text and my family. And so as an academic, you know, it's sort of the custom to try to write in an objective way. I mean, occasionally you can use the first

person, you can bring yourself into the text. That's very common in anthropology. But in this book, I really do talk about my family in a way that I have never done before. And it started because I was, there are two chapters specifically about the nuclear family. And as I hit a block, I couldn't bring myself to write them. And I realized as I was struggling with, you know, this sort of feeling of the inability to express what I wanted to say that part of the block was my own family history. And this was again, you know, during the pandemic. And so I called my mom and I had a really long conversation with her on the phone. And that conversation was probably, I would say, about 35 years overdue.

because there were so many things that I did not understand about my own family and as in many families there are certain things that are just not discussed and this was one of those topics that was not discussed and I think for both my mom and for me it was an incredibly difficult but also healing conversation to have in some ways and so I after that conversation, I wrote up some notes and then I started in on the family chapters using the jump the the conversation that I had with my mom as a jumping off point with the full intention of deleting it afterwards because I just needed to get past the block and then I figured once I started writing I could go back and edit it out. But then after it was written at this particular time, the book was

being edited by both an American editor and a British editor because I had, there are two different editions of it. And I showed some of that material to the British editor. And the British editor really impressed upon me the value of keeping it in. And I hesitated for a very long time. But in the end, I thought it was really important to put myself in the text in that way because I think there are a lot of families that have the same sorts of issues that my family had and it doesn't get discussed often enough or when it does get discussed, it's, you know, it's not like professors discussing it, right? And, you know, I didn't do it because I thought that, you know, I wasn't trying to create some kind of victim narrative, but I was trying to impress upon people.

that this is a problem that is much more common than I think most of us realize. And more importantly, that so many conservatives, especially in this country, but I would say around the world, conservatives tend to be very family traditionalists, and they really think of the family as this sort of core institution in society

that needs to be protected from, you know, all of these nefarious, forces that are trying to destroy it, and yet they don't recognize or rarely recognize the incredible amount of pain that nuclear families in particular can hide. And so, yeah, it was difficult. I'm still a little nervous about it, but I think it's very important to, for people to understand where these chapters are coming from. Yeah, no, I can tell that it's something you still are wrestling with a little bit, but very far from this idea that that it's a victim narrative.

The way I engaged with it, I found it very moving. I found it incredibly relatable. And I think it added something of real value to the text. It grounds the text in a very interesting way because it's your personal, real, lived experience and use that as a jumping off point to talk about bigger and deeper issues. So I actually thought it worked very, very well. And I found those parts of the book incredibly interesting. And as I said, very relatable because I don't know anybody whose family is anything close to perfect.

And there's at least elements in everybody's family that are negative, that can be outright abusive, that can be complicated in a whole bunch of different ways, and the insular nature of the nuclear family in particular. It can be a site of real trauma for people. And I think a lot of people resonate with that. And I think a book about utopia, sort of an abstract idea in some sense, is really brought down and grounded by your personal experience. So I applaud you for that. Thank you. And we will get to the nuclear family here in a bit and talk more about it because that was a crucial part of the book and a fascinating part of the book. But before we get there, let's kind of continue to talk a little bit more about the broad approach and focus of the book, which are these experiments in utopia or alternative ways of building community.

So you cover many different utopian experiments, many of which I think most people are completely ignorant of, including myself in many instances. I just kind of wanted to ask, which of these experiments sort of stood out to you as either particularly surprising or surprisingly advanced or otherwise noteworthy and why? Wow. Okay. So there are so many and there are many more that didn't make it into the book. So among my favorites are the Bogle Meals, who were a kind of eighth, ninth century heretical Christian sect that originated in the Balkans. They were basically vegan celibate anarchists. And they're absolutely fascinating. They are slowly pushed out and exiled from this part of the world. And they end up in northern Italy as the Cathars and ultimately in southern France as the Albigensians.

And they are, they're such a massive challenge to the Christian church, to the Catholic Church at this particular moment in time. that they're heavily persecuted and ultimately they are the first victims of the Inquisition and they're completely wiped out in the 13th century during the Albigensian Crusade. And so they're a group that very few people know about and I think they're really interesting. I also think that historically speaking, some of these early religious sects like the Jewish ascines who are thought to be the folks that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. They refused to use money in an era when slavery was ubiquitous. They refused to hold slaves.

They were really living in a very communal way as a challenge to their Roman overlords. And of course, they were also pretty much wiped out. More recently, I'm really fascinated by eco-villages. Those are a lot of them, like Tamera in southern Portugal. There's also Nashira in Colombia, which is a matriarchal eco village where women have all the power. And they kind of own everything in common and raise their children in common. It won a World Habitat Award, I believe, at some point in the last 10 or 15 years. So there are these really interesting spaces where people are experimenting with other ways of living.

But one of my absolute favorites, or just I'm really fascinated by this place, is it's called experimental archaeology. And it's the campus gali, which is in southern Germany very near the Swiss border. And it's a group of people who are building a 10th century Benedictine cloister using the methods and materials that would have been. appropriate for that particular period of time. So they're using wooden dowels instead of nails, and they're using very thin leather instead of glass for windows. And when I visited them, you have this incredible understanding

that these are people who are laboring on this project. It's a big project. And it will not be completed in their lifetime. And so they go to work to, and they're using these, you know, medieval methods to build this. It's called the plan of St. Gall. And they have a community where they study together and they're really thinking about what it means to live in harmony, both with other people and with nature, in a way that I just find absolutely fascinating. So there are a lot of interesting examples like that in the book.

Well, one of the ones that you covered, and I was just telling you how I'm kind of revisiting. some early American history stuff, and I actually just two weeks ago came across, I think it's pronounced the Oneida community. I had never- The Oneida community, yes. Can you talk about them really quick? Because that was an American formation. That was very interesting to me. Yeah. Actually, I went to the Oneida mansion in upstate New York just in January. And this is an incredible. They were a utopian sort of socialist community. They were called perfectionists. and they lived together in a big group marriage of about 300 men, women, and children. All of the men were married to all of the women, and they raised their children in common.

And they had, you know, various industries, they made traps. And they were really rather thriving, successful community until they obviously ran afoul of American adultery laws and were, you know, persecuted and eventually John Humphrey Noyes, who was the sort of founder of this community, had to flee to Canada, and eventually everybody sort of either married off to each other. And then they founded the silverware company, Oneida. You can still actually buy Oneida silverware today. But this is an absolute fascinating period of American history. Interestingly, founded around 1848 the same time that Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifest. And they were very much in the tradition of what I call in the book Bible communists, right?

They owned all their property in common and they had this really interesting, different vision of family as a way of reaching spiritual perfection. They had some odd practices. I mean, certainly, you know, not everything was perfect. But it's just so interesting to see the creativity of people who decide to live in a very, very different way from the mainstream. Yeah, absolutely. that part very interesting and dovetails with some of the stuff I'm researching in my personal

time and then also I'm reading at the same time Angles is on the origins of the family private property in the state in which he talks historically about you know group marriages throughout history and so I found that this community reviving that form of group marriage where everybody's married to everybody I found that incredibly interesting and very much in line with with what he's talking about in that text but he's talking about it you know hundreds or thousands of years ago not in the modern world. So a community like this existing while Engels is writing with Marx, you know, it gets very, very interesting to think about. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, you know, there were these experiments all throughout history in very different places that people are just

unaware of. Totally. Yeah, absolutely. Now, you mentioned the Bible communists, and one thing that sticks out is that a good chunk of the experiments in these alternative community formations that you explore are rooted in or related to religious and spiritual faith movements. This shouldn't be surprising. I mean, many of these have happened before modernity even and religious faith is certainly a pillar of people's existence for thousands of years before modernity and the Enlightenment and, you know, today I think it's kind of falling away. But I think it's interesting as well that as religious faith in the orthodox sense decreases, there's still a spiritual thirst that people are trying to pursue. But I'm just interested in this relationship between

religiosity and the impetus to form these alternative communities. And I also think that there's progressive and even revolutionary elements, as well as often at least, reactionary or even cultish dynamics that can emerge in some of these. So can you kind of talk about the religious reasons behind some of the experiments and how they can both be progressive and or reactionary? Yes, absolutely. And I definitely think like the fear of cults is is real and legitimate. And that a lot of people, you know, sort of rightly are suspicious of a group of people who go off and try to build a different sort of community on their own because they are worried about a kind of cult of personality or some sort of we, and we have examples of that in the past. But I think that if you look at various religious traditions, In Hinduism and Jainism, you have the idea of Apari-Graha, which is non-possessiveness. In Buddhism, you have the eightfold path and the doctrine of right livelihood in the Bible.

Acts 2 verses 44 through 47 and Acts 4 verses 32 through 33. Talk about the disciples living and sharing all of their property in common. And so when you look at some of these communities historically like the Boca Meals or the Albigensians or more recently like the Huterites or the Bruderhof or various sort of spiritual communities, ashrams in India or eco-villages that have a kind of spiritual bent, a lot of them are drawing on this long tradition of a group of people sharing their lives together and sharing their property in common. And I think that it's very important to understand that not all of them are cults. Not all of them are, you know, somehow kind of going to devolve into a bunch of people in Guyana drinking Kool-Aid and committing mass suicide, which is obviously the fear. But you're absolutely right. I think that any religious text can be read in a progressive or liberal way, or can be read. can be read in a very conservative and reactionary way.

That's the nature of these texts. That's the nature of doing exegetical interpretations of these texts, and all religions do that to a certain extent. But what I was interested in was because we know so much about the cults and the reactionary interpretations, we don't really learn very much about the liberal and progressive ones. And the way that they work, and more importantly, as I talk about in the book, the way that our tax code accommodates them, which I think is also really interesting.

So if you think about the Catholic Workers movement, for instance, which is an anarchist organization that has been around for decades where, you know, groups of people really sort of take a vow of poverty. And again, they put themselves in service of the poor, of the downtrodden, of the needy as part of their faith. It's more of an anarchist organization. than it is a socialist one. But it's very much rooted in Catholicism, and it's been very successful at surviving on the boundary between kind of anarchist theory and Catholic theology. And I think that we don't hear enough about things like the Catholic Workers movement,

because they're successful and they're not cultish, right? When we do hear about these movements, we tend to hear about the ones that have gone wrong. True. Yeah, that's a great point. I actually, by the time this episode comes out, we'll have also released another episode on a book called Jesus, A Life in Class Conflict, where my two guests, one a scholar out of Australia and one under the UK, they apply historical materialism to the life and times of Jesus and talk about the ways in which the Jesus movement did fly in the face

of certain orthodoxies of the time, had different interpretations of the family, were met with accusations of being effeminate and what, you know, a real masculine community should look like. And it's just very interesting to dive into how the Jesus movement in and of itself had many of these dynamics going on and were seen by the broader cultural mainstream at that time as a progressive force in a lot of ways, but also one that was anathema to the dominant structures that currently existed. And obviously he ran afoul of the state of authorities and was crucified for it. So if people are interested in diving deeper into a historical materialist account of

Jesus and the Jesus movement, definitely check that out. But it's no surprise to me that religious and spiritual belief and faith is a continual pattern that emerges in these attempts to find new communities and build new ways of being in relation to one another. Exactly. Yeah, I just wanted to jump in there and just say one other thing, which is, you know, if we think about any sort of cenobitic monastic community. So groups of people who are living in monasteries or abbeys or nunneries or whatever,

you know, you have a group of people who are living together and sharing property in order to kind of prove their devotion to God. There's a reason why Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries in England. These were in some ways radical communities. outside of the mainstream. When we think of monasteries, we generally tend to think of them in a conservative light. But they didn't necessarily have to be.

They could actually be quite progressive and quite radical in their own ways. If you think of some of these orders like the Jesuits or the mendicants, right, they definitely had a theology that often challenged the mainstream doctrines of the Catholic Church. And certainly people like Tolstoy, in Russia, when he was late Tolstoy, when he was writing texts like the kingdom of God is within you, he is very much seen as the founder of Christian anarchism. And he makes a big distinction between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed and basically says that Christianity, you know, after 325 is not really Christianity anymore.

It's that early Christianity. That's the one that is true. And his commitment to nonviolence and his commitment to, really thinking about and taking the sermon on the Mount seriously, ended up inspiring Gandhi, who he exchanged letters with in the early 20th century, and then ultimately people like Martin Luther King. So there's this entire kind of left libertarian tradition that roots itself back to Tolstoy and the idea of Christian anarchism. But again, it's not something that we necessarily learn about when we read Tolstoy in high school or college, right?

We read War and Peace and we read Anna Karenina, but we don't pay attention to these later texts, which are really important in thinking about the intersections between social justice and faith. Yeah. Yeah, a very important point. And as you've been saying throughout this conversation, and we don't need to linger on this too long because I think it is a feature that you've sort of spoken to already. But this idea of communal property, holding communal property in common amongst this community, this radical egalitarianism, is often one of the hallmarks of these alternative communities. Can you talk a little bit just about how that is a, seems to be at least, a pillar of these movements?

Yeah, you know, as I said, you know, when we think about things like non-possessiveness in Hinduism or right livelihood in Buddhism or those passages in Acts, which make it very clear that the disciples of Jesus owned all of their property in common, it's explicit, right? that when anybody had need, they sold their property and they distributed it amongst themselves. And so if you look at contemporary communities like the Bruderhof, for instance, they, or the Hutterites in Canada, they will say explicitly that they don't own any individual property because they are living like the disciples in acts. Similarly, the Shakers, which are a celibate group, which is mostly dying out, but which was very popular in the United States. in the 18th and 19th centuries, they also very much root their non-possessiveness, their refusal to own private property to insist on common property in the Bible.

Now, obviously, there are anarchist traditions and socialist and communist traditions that come either from these utopian socialist texts like Fourier and Saint-Simon and Owen and Tristan, as well as, you know, the classical Marx and Engels, and various socialist theorists that also talk about the necessity of owning property in common. So you're getting it from both the secular side and the religious side.

And very much it's rooted in this idea. I mean, and as I point out in the book, by the way, I think it's also really important that Pythagoras, like the guy who created the Pythagorean theorem, right? And like 2,500 years ago, he created a community, in Crotonin, in now what is Southern Italy, that practiced communal property. There was a saying in Greek that all things among friends should be shared. When Plato writes the Republic, he talks about communal property. When Thomas Moore writes Utopia, he's talking about communal property. So there is a long history well before Marx and Engels and well before people like

Bakun and Kupon and Prudon, talking about the way that property creates division amongst people. And if you're going to build a community, you have to have your property in common. Yeah, and that really stuck out to me. I mean, of course, I know this on some level, but, you know, whether we're talking about ancient slave societies, medieval feudal societies, or modern capitalist societies, right? These are all class societies rooted in some people owning property and some people not being able to own property or literally being owned as property. And whether you're talking ancient slave societies, feudal societies or capitalist societies, there's always this attempt to make these class stratifications synonymous with human nature. These things are just how humans are,

trying to do anything different is against human nature. But what we actually see is human nature again and again and again popping up through the cracks of class society to try to reimagine an egalitarian structure where class is more or less abolished and things are held in common. So in every period of class society, there is always still these attempts, marginal as they may be, attacked as they may be, that are really representative, I think, of some deep strain in our human nature, which seeks to escape these class stratifications, these class prisons, and to build a society on truly egalitarian grounds.

That's always going to be a threat to the powers that. be and that often is why these you know alternative communities get attacked or outright crushed but it's very interesting and sort of shows the lie behind this idea that these radical inequalities and these class stratifications are synonymous with human nature exactly and you know I think it's that that that one percent right there are always people who are going to say no we don't want to live this way we don't want to have this property we don't want to have this power I mean the Albigensians in southern France, the reason that they fell victim to the Inquisition was because they criticized the Catholic Church for its desire to have material wealth, right? And so, and that's a huge

criticism in the Middle Ages of the Catholic Church. I mean, there were other reasons as well, but I think that as you point out, there is something profoundly deeply rooted in our prehistory that gives us an impetus towards this sort of radical egalitarianism. And it shows up in different ways, in different places, in different epochs. But it's consistent. There are always people who are saying, no, we don't want to live this way. We don't want to live with slavery. We don't want to live with feudalism.

We don't want to live with capitalism. And that, to me, was a fascinating part of doing the research for this. book was realizing how persistent the exact same critiques of property, of family, of education, of housing, all of these things go back well into, you know, the very earliest moments of written history that we have. Yeah. Incredibly well said. And it's also why slave societies, feudal societies and capitalist ones require a monumental amount of violence to maintain them. Yes. That's no accident either.

All right. Let's go ahead and move on to the chapter that's titled in the book, The Good School. And in this, you discuss many things, and this is a huge question. So take this in any direction that you want. You discuss public education, the commodification of education, especially at the university level today. You explore alternative ways of thinking about and experimenting with education. And this is particularly interesting in part because here in the U.S., public schools are chronically underfund. and the right in this country has spent decades trying to attack and undermine the very idea of equal access and robust public education for everybody regardless of income as a social good in its own right and as in my opinion a basic human right. So it's still very much a live question. And under socialism, under communism, the education of people is taken very seriously. I mean, how many socialist revolutions, the first thing they do is raise the literacy levels of the people.

try to bring in people that were usually kept out because of their class position from school, bring them into education and get them educated. This is something that we're very, very concerned with. So can you kind of talk about some of the arguments and you make and the history you unravel in this chapter titled The Good School? Yeah, so this is a huge question. I feel like I could, and this is one that I really know a lot about. So I'll just be really brief here. I think that the key thing in this chapter is that, you know, public education, the radical expansion of publicly funded education was one of those core principles on the Communist Manifesto. And it was once a very revolutionary demand. It got co-opted for industrialist purposes.

And now, again, it is being attacked because of this idea that education can actually teach people to think critically about the structures that are oppressing them. And that's a dangerous thing. And there are so many examples of that going on in the United States today. Some of them I talk about in the book. Others I allude to because I had to finish writing that chapter. But the key thing in that book is that I look at the Ukrainian. pedagog, a guy called Anton Makarenko. And I also look at Julius Nejere in Tanzania.

And these various socialist or communist experiments with education that really tried to marry the life of the mind with the life of the body with labor, mental labor with physical labor. Manual labor is what Makarenko calls it. And he's really drawing a little bit on Krupportkin's ideas of education. But he really instituted some fascinating experiments in the Soviet Union, which we in the West are usually unaware of unless you happen to study pedagogy. In the 20th century, UNESCO sort of hailed Makarenko as one of the four most important pedagogues of the era, basically. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about what are the sorts of reforms that we would need in the education.

system. And I'm talking not only about K through 12 and higher education, but I also spend some time talking about ongoing adult education, the ways in which we can integrate education and learning into our daily lives. So I talk about Campanella walls. Like instead of having billboards with advertisements, we could have billboards with poetry or billboards with star charts or certain kind of educational, you know, what we think of as sort of like public service. announcements or things like that. Festivals of philosophy, like the one that I attended in Modena, where, you know, professors and ordinary people, you know, scholars and philosophers and construction workers and bus drivers sit around and debate about Aristotle and what it

means to be human in the 21st century. So it's a way of tackling this issue of education by expanding, first of all, the definition of education so that it's not just specifically about schools, but it's also about recognizing that there is no such thing as neutral education. All education is ultimately ideological. And the reason why reactionary forces are always trying to attack or control education is that in order to control society, you have to control the minds and thoughts of the next generation. And so that's why schools become such a big battleground. And, you know, my feeling is that, you know, too many people sort of seed ground on education. They say that we shouldn't really be using

education to shape, you know, people's minds, so to speak. But we do it all the time when we tell kids not to cheat, when we tell kids not to bully each other, when we tell kids to share and get along. We are training them for ultimately existing in our society. So we need to be more deliberate and thoughtful about those processes. Yeah, absolutely. I really encourage people to get the book and this chapter really stood out as fascinating. We can't cover it all in an hour or so interview, but I really highly recommended. I found it interesting. And you're absolutely correct, too. You know this firsthand, this longstanding reactionary attack on education in general, public education in general, but the university education in particular, and what they often use,

much to us on the left's sort of chagrin and kind of amusement, is anti-communist hysteria. You know, these universities are turning kids into Marxists and revolutionaries. No, these schools, if anything, are turning kids in, like, especially business schools and stuff, and just neoliberals. But really, the best thing that comes out of, especially maybe even humanities departments, is this broad education of history, of the history of human thought, of different ways of viewing the world. And this is in and of itself a threat to those reactionary elements of the ruling class who really want us to be just educated enough. to be good, competent workers for the economy, but not so educated that we start questioning the basic assumptions of this, in my opinion, insanely antithetical to human nature and human well-being society that we live in. So they really are scared of just more people having

more access to robust education because that in and of itself is not Marxist propaganda. It's just critical thought, basic history, and the human condition. And that is enough to put them on their back foot and make them, you know, burn books and try to demonize universities and all the stuff that we see today. Exactly. You did say there's this commodification of school at the university level, and I myself am $65,000 in debt for a bachelor's degree. It's certainly shifted even, as you say in the book, in your experience as being a professor, there's been a significant shift. Can you just talk a little bit about that before we move on? Yeah. I mean, it's just so apparent that the higher education in the United States has sort of been taken over by this neoliberal

business model. They've been corporatized. I mean, technically they're nonprofit organizations, but the internal structures of big universities, they've just become kind of, you know, mills for extracting money and tuition from their students and sort of spinning them out with these pieces of paper that are bachelor's degrees, which are no longer the kind of ticket to a solid work life that they might have once been. And I, you know, I think that there's all of this administrative bloat to me. Many people have talked about this. I mean, I feel a little uncomfortable saying this because obviously some of this critique comes from the right. But as somebody who's in the university, I can tell you that the proliferation of deans and administrators in my 25 years in the

university. I have seen it with my own eyes. And it doesn't improve the quality of education. It just improves the expansiveness of the bureaucracy, which is increasing tuition and putting a lot of students, you know, people like you, in unmanageable amounts of debt. So I, you know, I do talk about that in the book. There have been many great books about that particular question. But I think that part of the problem is that we shouldn't think of education as a commodity because it's not just the administrative bloat that's the problem. It's also student attitudes. A lot of young people go into a good university, like the one that I teach at, for instance,

with the idea that this is like they're burnishing their personal brand. They're building their human capital. That education is a very individual thing for each person. to take what they can from in order to go out and become like good little capitalist workers and exploiters. And the original purpose of public education, which was to make us more critically engaged citizens or more thoughtful, you know, just human beings on a basic level to ask these big questions to give us time to read and think and process, unfortunately a lot of that has dropped out and it's just become very instrumentalist and opportunistic. And I really mourn the change

because it has happened in my lifetime. And I don't know. I kind of hope that it's reversible, but I'm not 100% sure if it is under the current system, under the way things are presently organized. Yeah, I completely agree. And while it might echo some right-wing critiques, I think we should fully never cede that ground to them because they're going to take it in these grotesque ways and end up with these grotesque conclusions. We have to account for the fact that, you know, the administrative bloat is part of the problem here, these multi-million dollar campuses

and how you have to just have a certain amount of income just to pay the overhead in maintenance of these huge campuses. I mean, we could do things differently, but we're so far in. It's hard to imagine a way out, as you say. I will say this, though. I don't think this is a conspiracy or maybe even a conscious choice,

but I do think it comes into play where strapping students with this huge amount of debt if they want to get a college education, which we've all been told, is the only way to even a slightly decent life, so we all go and do it. And then we have this huge debt hanging over our heads. Well, it's kind of convenient because what does huge amount of debt do? It tends to make people more obedient. It makes them more desperate for an income. It makes them more likely to put up with shitty conditions, shitty wages, shitty bosses. And also, it's a great recruitment tool for the military that say, hey, high school kid, you don't want to go get $100,000 in debt, do you?

Well, you can come fight and die for corporate profits halfway across the world and we'll pay for your education if you manage to get back home safe. So I see like there's these other institutions of power in our society that actually benefit whether consciously or not, whether strategically constructed or not by the state of affairs. And those are like the military and the overall capitalist class in this country are very, very powerful sectors of interest. And so if you're trying to solve these problems, it's not just the administrative blow. just the universities themselves. It's these other sort of structures in our society that have a real interest in sort of maintaining the status quo. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, we talk about the United States being a place of liberty or whatever. But, you know, I have colleagues in Europe and they don't even think about the costs, right, of sending their children to college.

young people in Europe are completely unsaddled, unburdened with this kind of debt. And so that makes them so much more free to choose the life paths that they want to choose. You're absolutely right when you say that student debt, like mortgage debt, like credit card debt, like all sorts of debt, is a way of indenturing people to futures that they don't want to participate in. I feel really strongly about this. And because I've lived abroad and because I'm aware of the way that other countries organize their higher education systems, I know that it's possible to have really high quality public education at the university level that does not create a whole class of indentured servants to capital. But we choose to do that in our country. And I think that that has created all sorts of downstream problems, not only because of this sort of feeling of really profound unfriend because you're constantly worried about this student debt, which you can't discharge in bankruptcy, for instance, but also because there's a way in which, as you said, the meritocracy, Michael Sandell, the philosopher at Harvard has this wonderful book called the meritocracy trap, where we, if we don't succeed if we go to college and we work hard and we get the degree, we get this degree

and then we have this debt and we can't get a job and we can't pay it off. There's this way in which all of the blame comes on you. It's not on the system. It's on the individual. And I just think that is, not only is that kind of a moral wrong, just on the most fundamental level, but I also think that it contributes very much to the high levels of anxiety and despair and depression that we see among young people today and this sort of general nihilism about the future. And so I think that all of these, as you pointed out so well, in what you said, all of these issues are related. We can't deal with them individually without looking at the larger structures within which these issues emerge. Yeah, absolutely. One more quick point on that, and we can move on. The right

wing sort of rhetoric against student debt relief in particular is to try to play this faux-class war game where they say, oh, you're going to, you're going to spend public money to go, you know, help these rich, privileged college students pay off their debt, but not the insert white guy in a hard hat, you know, a guy over here and try to pit these two people against each other. But I always remind people, rich kids don't have debt. Like, the rich kids that come from the richest families just have their families pay off their debt. And then they enter their adult lives, not only with amazing connections and a great foundation of wealth and resources, but also with an many cases no debt who are impacted most by debt it's kids from the working class often people of color trying to forge a better life trying to break generational cycles of poverty who don't have those resources who don't have a rich mommy and daddy who can pay off their debt who are burdened by the debt and then inflicted fatal injuries by the interest rate as these things balloon out of out of any proportion and control so you know obviously people listening to this show aren't going to be super susceptible to that faux populist argument by the right. But I always like to point that

out. Yeah, no, that's absolutely correct. Absolutely fantastic point that needs to be hammered home more because I do think that this rhetoric against the forgiveness of student debt is so retrograde and so damaging. Totally. All right, let's go ahead and move into the family part of the book. This is a really important part of this text, something I found incredibly interesting, focuses on the nuclear family, on monogamy, on what you call family expansionism, as opposed to family abolitionism, as you point out, which can sometimes very easily put people on their defensive back foot when that even term comes up. Now, we all have families. We all have conflicted feelings about the families we were born into. Some of us had better experiences than others. This, again, is a huge

question. But maybe you can just focus on the problems with the nuclear family and what exactly you mean by family expansionism? Yeah, so I think there's been a long Marxist critique and not only a Marxist critique, but again, if we go all the way back to Plato's Republic, Plato very much criticizes the institution of the nuclear family as the institution in society that actually ends up being quite divisive. And he imagines, you know, in his ideal city of Callipolis, that the guardian, the people who are sort of the rulers and the warriors and the administrators of this city would not have nuclear families, would not have anything that looks like the kind of family

that we imagine as quote unquote natural. So one of the things that I do in these two chapters, which I think are really important parts of the book, is to look at the evolutionary biology and anthropology of the family. And this is a very contested realm. Obviously, it's prehistory. We're always looking for little scraps of evidence here and there. In recent years, the fields of archaeogenetics and archaeobiology have helped us get a clearer idea of early peoples like those in Chattahuyuk, who were like on the cusp of becoming agriculturalists. You know, they were sort of hunter gatherers who sometimes grew food. we know that they didn't live in consanguineous families. They didn't have a concept of kinship the way that we do today.

So in these chapters, I really try to root contemporary discussions about family expansionism. That's the word that I prefer to use, the idea of chosen family, the idea of living in wider networks of kin and non-kin that give us support and care into this much longer history of evolutionary biology and anthropology around the family. And what we know from these studies, many of which are still being done in the present day, is that human beings are incredibly flexible around their family forms. You can have monogamy, you can have celibacy, you can have polygamy, you can have polygamy, you can have polygamy, you can have polyandri, and polygyny, which are, you know, one woman with multiple husbands or one man with multiple

wives. You can have group marriage. And that family forms, so our mating practices, are not necessarily related to our child rearing practices. They can be separated. So you can be in a monogamous couple, but be raising your children collaboratively with a bigger group of people. So I want to talk about the incredible flexibility of the family over time and in different cultural contexts and how the family is an institution that often changes in relation to climactic, geographic, economic, and social circumstances. And so this idea that our vision of one man and one woman together raising their children in a bi-parental model is somehow the natural way that he, human beings are is completely false. It's completely belied by all of the anthropological and

archaeological evidence that we have. We know that humans like pair bonding, but we also know that humans have often raised their children in much wider networks of care and cooperation. And so rather than abolishing the family, which as you pointed out, gets people's hackles up really quickly, I want to think about expanding our notions of family specifically to include very different ways of imagining the relationship between our mating practices and our child-rearing practices. Yeah, so much interesting stuff here. You know, human nature arguments are obviously used here as well, right?

There's this idea that the nuclear family is human nature, that monogamy is human nature, Much of the reaction we see against feminism and LGBTQ community today often couches their anti-women and anti-LGBQ sentiment in this idea of either, of course, like for religious zealots on the far right, divinely ordered hierarchies or for others, natural hierarchies or natural family formations and that these things are, these different ways of doing things are seen as anathema or going against some human nature. so it's interesting to see the human nature argument be applied here and i always tell people i think historical materialists should be skeptical by definition of any attempt to naturalize and universalize the contemporary status quo because when you start actually investigating historically and seeing how things arise out of certain material bases and how when those material bases shift so do the superstructure so do things like family formation and relationship formation so anytime you hear somebody, especially on the conservative right, claim something is human nature and universal

to everybody. That should immediately sort of open up your skepticism here. But one element of this that I do think is kind of interesting in the contemporary context is that the poorer you are, the lower in the working class you are, let's say, in the United States, the more actual likely it is that at the very least you have this extended family to help you raise children, to help you pay bills, et cetera. We live, for example, I have three kids and a wife, and we live next to her parents, to my parents, to my grandparents, to my sister who has a big family, and we're constantly relying on our family for help, you know, with child rearing, with watching our kids, why we try to do something for ourselves, or just anything at all. It's constantly coming up and

thank God we do have that. I think interestingly, there's an element of like the professional upper class in this society who because they're sort of going out and getting jobs and maybe leaving their hometown and flying to coastal cities that they actually maybe have less of this because of their current class position where they leave the safety of their hometown and their family networks and have to try to pave their own way more or less completely alone and alienated from anybody that can help now they often have the resources to expand that like really rich people can of course buy a team of nannies and can actually buy their way into having this extended family and for some people in like the upperly mobile upper echelons of the middle class

but not quite super wealthy especially in super expensive cities they're kind of in this purgatory where they don't necessarily have the resources to buy the extension of the family and they left behind the natural extensive family that could help them with things like child rearing so i don't know, I just kind of find that interesting and try to see how these things apply to, you know, everybody that's living today. Yeah, no, I mean, I do think that we still see a lot of flexibility around family forms. And, you know, one of the things that a lot of conservatives in this country are very, quote, unquote, you know, concerned about is single motherhood, for instance, right?

the ways in which a lot of conservatives feel that single-parent families are a problem and divorce is a problem. And women's rights and feminism are a problem because women are economically independent enough either to get divorced or to have their children outside of the traditional bonds of marriage. And yet, you know, why do they stop at two parents? If two parents are better than one, you know, one of the questions that I ask in the book is, why not have three parents? are four parents. You know, a lot of states don't allow for more than two legal parents for a child. Some states are now allowing three or more to accommodate step parents, surrogates, you know, egg donors. And I think that, you know, just other grandparents, godparents, people that are in

children's lives. And we need to, there's a legal framework for this, but there's also a social framework for this, right? It's really important, I think, as you point out, to have these much wider networks of consanguaneous care and support with grandparents and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and wider extended family networks that are kin-based. But we can also think about non-kin-based, right? We can also think about chosen families. I mean, all of these models should be available to us. And I think that the monogamous nuclear family, as many, many, many socialist feminists have pointed out from Engels through Babel, through Colentai, who we've talked about on this podcast before, they have seen how the individual family, the monogamous nuclear family, is the

institution in society that allows for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege. from fathers to their legitimate children. And so if you want to upturn capitalism, if you want to undermine these social and cultural practices that uphold the capitalist system, you actually have to start with the family. And that is a critique, again, that goes back to Pythagoras, it goes back to Plato,

it goes to the Spartans, it goes to many, many, many previous societies that challenged our way of thinking about the family, as this institution, which allows for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege. Yeah, perfectly, perfectly said, highly recommend people get the book and read through that section because we can't possibly cover it here. But I have one concluding question to ask you before we wrap up this conversation. And that is about your concluding chapter, which uses beautifully and lovingly, because I love this as well, the prism of Star Trek to think through our possible futures and

offer up a vision of humanity's future that is optimistic and that also challenges bedrock assumptions of our modern lives and society. So can you kind of just discuss in an open way this last chapter and why you chose to conclude your book this way? So I'm a huge Star Trek fan. I don't think that's a secret. It comes out. I completely nerded out in the last chapter. I totally did. Star Trek kind of helped me get through the pandemic. I did an entire rewatch of the next generation. And I've been following, you know, Discovery and Strange New Worlds and Picard and Lower Decks and all the new series. I love them all. So I wanted to end on a hopeful note. So many books that have come out can be so depressing. And I ended up reading a lot of

Karl Monheim and Ernst Bloch, who are two German theorists who talk about hope. And I also got interested in some of the psychological literature on hope as a cognitive capacity rather than as an emotion. And again, I go through this in great detail in this final chapter. But the nutshell of this is that memory, we all know that we can train our memory. So if we rather than keeping a grocery list, if we go to the grocery store with just the list of things that we need in our head, we're exercising our memory. If we memorize people's phone numbers, rather than just relying on speed dial from our phones,

we are exercising our memory. For older people, there are all these incredible memory exercises that you can do to strengthen this sort of muscle. It's a cognitive capacity that can atrophy like a muscle. So what some psychologists have realized is that hope is also a cognitive capacity. It's an emotion. It's the opposite of despair and fear. It is an emotion, but it is also a cognitive capacity. So when you think about the future, if you're just an optimist, you just think, oh, the future will get better. But if you're a radical hope person or a hoper, right, a militant optimist to use some of the terminology from people like Bloch and Mannheim,

You believe in your capability to influence the future, your capability to make things change. And so when you practice hope as a cognitive capacity, you are actually strengthening your ability to imagine a better future. And I think that too many of us have allowed our cognitive capacity of hope to atrophy, especially during the pandemic. and especially in the face of the climate crisis and rising inequality and fears of AI and automation and just a sort of general zeitgeist of despair around late capitalism. We have lost the ability to hope.

And one of the things that I love about Star Trek is that it is a, it's a television show, it's a series that has been going on now for so long that is all about hope. all about believing in the possibility that ordinary people like you and me can change the future. And so I wanted to end on a note that, you know, maybe it sounds corny, maybe it's inappropriate. I don't know. You know, it's certainly not my academic voice.

This is a book that's very far afield from the kind of really grounded empirical research that I do. I wanted to end this book with a message that we can change things. And sometimes we have to change things in the smallest unit of society, our families, our immediate friends and comrades, but that hoping together out loud and constantly in dialogue with each other and with other members of our most kind of intimate circles is a way of strengthening this cognitive capacity. for hope and of hopefully instantiating the possibility of change. And we may not see it in our

lifetimes, like those folks in campus Gowli who are building, you know, this imagination of a Benedictine cloister that they will never see the end result up, but they work every day for this goal that they know is in the future. I think that that's an incredibly positive and uplifting message, and I think it's a message that we need now perhaps more than ever. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, those of us on the left, we certainly, you know, socialist, communist, Marxist, anarchist, whatever, we're very good at offering critique. We're very good at pointing out all the ways in which modern society alienates and fails and destroys. And sometimes it can even be hard to conjure up in ourselves this optimism or this hope, which we have to have. And I think one of the things we should work at trying to do, and I think this book is definitely a gesture in this direction, is to offer these visions, these visions of what. could be instead of what is, not simply a critique and a dismantling of all the terrible things that are happening now and not merely dystopian, you know, possibilities that are coming next, is it going to be Blade Runner? Is it going to be Brave New World? Is it going to be, you know,

big brothers watching us at 1984? You know, all these dystopian visions we offer up. Star Trek is one of those endearing cultural products that that continues to inspire multiple generations simply in some sense by offering a vision of what could be. And then people take that positive, you know, optimistic, sometimes even utopian vision of where humanity can be. And that in and of itself can act as an engine of hope. Do you agree with that? Oh, yeah. That's what I feel is the most important thing that you can take from this, you know, sort of long history of utopian societies is that there are just there's this this one percent of people out there and there always have been in all eras and in all cultural contexts where people say I'm going to just I have

this crazy idea of how I might be able to rearrange the world and rather than going out there and trying to just convince everybody to live like me I'm just going to start doing it with the people that are around me and we're going to see how it goes and maybe it'll inspire others and maybe it won't. Obviously, as you said, many of these communities get crushed and they get crushed because they do present such a huge challenge to the status quo, which in some ways gives credence to the idea that this sort of radical hope, this sort of militant ability to imagine what might be rather than what is, is the fundamental engine of social change in the long run. And, you know, there's this wonderful quote about from Martin Luther King, Jr., that, you know, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

And I think that what utopian communities teach us is that, yes, the moral arc of the universe is long, but it must be bent towards justice. And it's often those utopian dreamers out there on the margins of society that are doing the bending. Amen. Amen. Now, you mentioned Martin Luther King, Jr., so the very last thing I just want to ask, it's true that Martin Luther King Jr. was a fan of Star Trek, eh? Oh, absolutely. It was the only thing he allowed his children to stay up to watch. And, yeah, when Nichols wanted to leave the show, the actress who played O'Hura on the original series, he personally convinced her to stay on the show because he said that she had a role with Diggins. and that was why they were marching that in the future, you know, people of different races would

work together, would kiss on screen, right? Women and men would work side by side. Russians and Americans would work side by side. It was an incredibly radical view at a time when American society was still very conservative. And I think it's such a great story to read about Martin Luther King as a as a like a kind of a star trek stand we would call him today yeah that was so interesting i never knew that and reading that i was like wow that was really really cool and the fact that he even like conversed with her directly and said she should stay on the show because of what it represents i just thought that was a really cool little gem and it's one of many many gems that are in this book the book is everyday utopia what two thousand years of wild experiments

can teach us about the good life the author is christin godsey fan favorite, a personal favorite guest of mine. Every time you come on, I absolutely love it. Before I let you go, though, can you let listeners know where they can find this book online and your other work? Yeah, so I'm at christengotsie.com, pretty easy to find. The book should be at bookshop.org, which is a website that allows you to buy books and support the local independent bookstores in your communities.

Obviously, it's on other sorts of platforms. It's also available as an audiobook. book. And yeah, no, I think, you know, I would really appreciate your support. And I'm so grateful to be able to talk about this book on the show because it's always so fun to have these conversations with you. Definitely. Well, keep up the great work and I'm sure me, you and I will talk again soon. Definitely. Thanks a lot. Take care. The sun in June, I can't bring myself to love. Underneath in the earth, there is so much life to be known.

Someday, afterward, we will know what is like on again. Even after in the morning, you hear we see me. Even after when you're in the morning You hear me pray I see cicadas over the moon Paper thin wings are affecting your mood I hear the ocean deep in your breath You shouldn't have to see me like this.

Killing a heartbeat, bleed if you like me. Give it a moment to kick in. Killing a heartbeat, left on and breathing. Give it a moment to kick in. I don't, I don't, I don't know. Where you, where you, where you should go? Close eyes, short time Would have happened so far, so bad

I stayed, you left, God I wish you would have to change. Even after in the morning Hear me sing when you hear me hear me Even after when you're in morning You'll hear me pray And when the time comes to let you go I'll do my best to leave you alone. And when the time comes, I'll take a risk

because you shouldn't have to see me like this. Killing a heartbeat, bleed if you like me. Give it a moment to kick in. Killing a heartbeat left out of me. Give it a moment to kick in I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't know Where you, where you should go Killing a heartbeat, bleed if you like me, giving a moment to kick it in.

Killing a heartbeat, let down and breathe me, giving a moment to kick in. Killing a heartbeat, bleed it feeling a moment to kick in. Tear me apart if I get it Killing a heartbeat Smoking you guys A moment to listen I don't know Killing a heart me

Sleep if you like me Give it a moment to kick you in Killing Killing up heart me Lefted on me In the moment to kick in You know, yeah.