Upstream - Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee

Episode Date: June 19, 2023

It’s perhaps more important than ever in these especially tumultuous, lonely, and oppressive times that we continue to believe that another world is possible. Simply reimagining the way we raise our children, the homes that we dwell in, the property we horde or share, and the form of the families we choose — can have profound and long-term impacts on the quality of our lives and on the world we’re living in more broadly. By challenging these seemingly ordinary structures of everyday life we can spark and re-spark our collective and individual desire to live in a more just and equitable world. This is the premise of new book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, written by Kristen Ghodsee. In this conversation, we take a journey around the world and through time, exploring some of the most fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes quirky, experiments in alternative ways of living. From Plato to the Buddha, from the Bible to the Communist Manifesto, from ancient Athens to the Soviet Union, we’ll explore what utopian thinking and practice has achieved, not just materially, but also in igniting our capacity for hope, radical imagination, and militant optimism.  Kristen Ghodsee is a Professor of Russian and East European Studies and a member of the Graduate Group in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence and Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism.  Further resources: Just on the Horizon: Nine Utopian Books to Deprogram Our Brains Thank you to Alice Phoebe Lou for the cover art. Upstream's theme music was composed by Robert Raymond. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.  

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Ah Ah Ah Ah Ah The social, political, economic, and familial forms that we have were developed under a very different set of historical circumstances. We cannot cling to them anymore. We have to think forward into the future. And that means that we have to be what humans have always been, which is creative, flexible, and adaptable.

We have a long history of creativity, flexible, and adaptable. We have a long history of creativity, flexibility, and adaptability. And we get the ideas, we get the blueprints for these new ways of thinking that will help us survive into the future from utopianism, from these social dreams. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. from utopianism, from these social dreams. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. It is perhaps more important than ever, in these especially tumultuous, lonely, and oppressive times that we continue to believe that another world is possible. Simply reimagining the ways that we raise our children, the homes we dwell in, the property we hoard or share, and the forms of the families we choose can have profound and long-term impacts on the quality of our lives, as well as on the world we're living in more broadly.

By challenging these seemingly ordinary structures of everyday life, we can spark and re-spark our collective and individual desires to live in a more just and equitable world. This is the premise of the new book, Everyday Utopia, What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, written by Kristen Godsey. In this conversation, we will take a journey around the world and through time, exploring some of the most fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes quirky experiments in alternative ways of living. From Plato to the Buddha, from the Bible to the Communist Manifesto,

from ancient Athens to the Soviet Union, we'll explore what utopian thinking and practice has achieved, and not just materially, but also in igniting our capacity for hope, radical imagination, and militant optimism. Kristen Godsey is a professor of Russian and East European studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the critically acclaimed author of Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence, as well as Red Hangover, Legacies of 20th Century Communism.

Here's Robert in conversation you on the show. And yeah, I guess I'm wondering to start if you could introduce yourself for our listeners and maybe just share a little bit about how you came to do the work that you're doing. Sure. So my name is Kristen Godsey, and I think I have my primary professional identification as a professor of Russian and East European studies and a member of the graduate group in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. at the University of Pennsylvania. And I'm also a writer. I think the book that probably most people know me for is Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence, which came out in 2018. And I think that was originally when we were set to do an interview with each other, but five years have passed and here we are. Pete Here we are. So here we are.

We finally made it. We finally made it. Yeah. We are still surviving, you know, sort of surviving anyway. I have always been interested in issues of the relationship between the family and the polity and the economy. And I've done most of my ethnographic work in Eastern Europe, where I was looking at the aftermath of the fallout of state socialism after 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in the Soviet Union,

and what happened to ordinary people when socialism suddenly and quite dramatically collapsed, and free markets and what they hoped would be liberal democracy were introduced. And so most of my career, I've really looked at the aftermath of the collapse of socialism and the impacts that it's had on ordinary people, men, women who are just working, trying to get by from day to day, wasn't really interested in elite politics, really interested, as I think most ethnographers are, in the experiences of just sort of the average person. And yeah, I think my whole career, my whole life, both as a professor and as a writer, have been in pursuit of some goals for progressive social change. I think that we live in a world that is ailing for many different reasons, and that social

change is something that is the responsibility of everyone. Here I follow the work of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, you know, who said something along the lines of, you know, the only time things have actually changed is when a group of committed people get together and decide that they're going to change it. And I feel that one of the things that we really need today, for all sorts of reasons, is to rethink the role of ordinary people in moving our societies forward. Gotcha. Yeah, that's really helpful background. And so you mentioned Margaret Mead. There's also a quote that you start your book with that I wanted to read for our listeners because I really loved it. And I do think it sort of is a good orienting quote for the rest of the book in many

ways. The quote is from Oscar Wilde, and it goes, a map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at. And yeah, I really, I really loved that. And I'm wondering maybe if you could talk a little bit more. I mean, you touched a little bit about what inspired you to write Everyday Utopia, but maybe you could get a little bit more into it in the context of that quote. And I mean, there's another quote of your own in the book where you write that utopian thinking might be necessary for our collective survival. And so yeah, I'm just, I'm wondering if you can maybe reflect on those quotes a little bit and talk a little bit more about what inspired you to write the book and what you're hoping to accomplish

with it. Yeah, so this was a huge project. And it was very much, I think, a project of the pandemic when we were all locked down and some of us were making sourdough and brewing kombucha or, you know, taking up various hobbies. and brewing kombucha or, you know, taking up various hobbies. For me, I really wanted to do a deep intellectual history of many of the socialist ideas that I've been teaching about for the last 25 to 30 years. And I think there were a lot of things that kind of inspired me, but one of them was there's this obelisk. It's called the Alexander Garden Obelisk. It's a monument.

And it was erected in 1918 by the Bolsheviks. And on it are inscribed the names of 19 people who were sort of seen as intellectual precursors or inspirations to the Bolsheviks. or inspirations to the Bolsheviks. And it was really interesting to look at the names on that monument and to see the way that the Bolsheviks were kind of creating an intellectual history for themselves. And, you know, among those names was Thomas More, the author of the book Utopia from 1516. And there were a variety of other names of socialists and anarchists and other historical figures. But I started to think a lot about this sort of deeper history of utopian thinking and how socialism and communism were both these utopian projects that had a really long human

heritage. And that brought me back really all the way to the Pythagoreans in Croton, in what is today Southern Italy, as well as the really early Cenobitic monastic communities around the Buddha in the subcontinent. And I began to see that there's been this incredible consistency, whether we're talking about Christians or Buddhists or Jews or anarchists or socialists or, you know, feminists, environmentalists, all these different groups of people, when they decide to create their own communities to try to live outside of the mainstream of their societies, they tend to coalesce around a very similar package of ideas about the way that the domestic sphere should be organized. And that was fascinating to me. You know, I really dug in to like book five of Plato's Republic and realized that Plato was not only a kind of proto-feminist, but he was really troubling the notion of the family as it was instantiated in ancient Greek society. So what inspired me to write this book intellectually was a desire to

give my own politics a deeper prehistory, a deeper history than they had. But the flip side of that, so from an intellectual point of view, it was very much driven by a curiosity about where did all these ideas come from? and anarchists and communists and utopian socialists all inventing things out of whole cloth? Or were they drawing on these deeper traditions as the Alexander Monument seemed to suggest? But the other side of this from a political point of view, from an activist point of view, and from the point of view as a mother, I have a 21-year-old who has a lot of friends in that age group. As a professor, I've been teaching 18 to 22 year olds for about 25 years. And in that time, I have really seen an incredible shift in the way that young people are engaging with politics. And I think we're in a moment, particularly during and after the pandemic, but certainly in the context of the climate crisis, where a lot of young people are either becoming completely

apathetic or they're really suffering from a crisis of depression or anxiety or hopelessness, because it just feels like the world around us is spinning out of control and that there's very little that any individual person or even small groups of people or even social movements can do to change things for the better. And so I really wanted to write a book that was hopeful. I wanted to write a book that gave people a kind of roadmap into the future. And that's why I love that Oscar Wilde quote, that a map that doesn't contain utopia is not even worth glancing at. We have to have a utopian vision of the future. We have to have a point at which we all recognize collectively that we might not reach, but that the journey in the direction of that point gives us a kind of forward momentum and optimism and

purpose and hope. Because otherwise, I fear here drawing on the work of the cultural critic Mark Fisher, that we're stuck in the frame of capitalist realism, and that we really have come to believe, too many of us, I believe, have come to accept that there is no alternative to capitalism. And there has to be an alternative to capitalism. We know historically that nothing lasts forever. And so it is absurd, patently absurd for us to believe that capitalism will last forever. Yeah. Thank you so much for bringing that up. And one of the sort of the jokes that we have on this show is anytime somebody brings up Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan, we take a shot. And of course, Margaret Thatcher, the famous quote, there is no alternative that's been abbreviated as Tina. Yes. And also, yeah, you mentioned Mark Fisher. I'm actually currently rereading Capitalist Realism.

It's a great book. For an interview that we're going to do and hopefully present that for our listeners in a few months time. So I appreciate you bringing that up. And yeah, your book is incredibly inspiring and inspired. I can just tell. And from all of these, you know, the 2000 years of wild experiments, you present so many really fascinating and diverse examples of different communities and groups looking to, you know, sort of prefigure the world that they want to see right now. And so we're going to get into some of those examples and sort of thematically split them up as you do in the chapters. But to start, I wanted to read another quote. This one

particularly spoke to me as well. So the quote from the book, and it's your quote, is, Utopian visions of how to build a different future often follow moments of great social upheaval. Ordinary people find themselves unmoored from the realities they want to believe to be fixed and immutable. The order of things is disturbed. Certain events, wars, pandemics, natural disasters, scientific breakthroughs disrupt the smooth functioning of the ideologies that bring coherence to the world in which we live. Our sister podcast, which is called The Response, was actually inspired by a book which you also mentioned in your book, A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit. And we spend a lot of time talking about how disasters open up these really beautiful spaces for imagining new possibilities. And so, yeah, that quote really spoke to me. And I'm wondering, yeah, do you have any thoughts on that? Do you want to add anything? Or yeah, just reflect on the context of that quote and the importance of these sort of disruptions

in utopian thinking? Yeah, I think, again, this idea of giving our politics this deeper history. So if we go and we look at Plato's Republic, which is this text, which is incredibly radical and utopian. I mean, we all learn about the allegory of the cave. There are certain things that we learn about, but very few of us, even in university classrooms, grapple with the reality that Plato was completely rethinking family relations in that book, that he was very much a proto-feminist, that he was very much criticizing private property. And part of the reason I think he was able to do that was because the book was written in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian Wars,

which the historian Thucydides called the greatest conflagration of all, right? It was this massive upheaval. It was the end of the golden age of Athenian democracy. It coincided with the rule of the 30 tyrants in Plato's youth, like they became a very unfree society. There was all this upheaval. And it was in that upheaval that allowed Plato to write this book, imagining the ideal city of Kallipolis, which, you know, I think he drew a little bit from the way that the Spartans organized their social life, but he was also very much inspired by what he knew of the Pythagoreans who had formed a commune on Croton. If we fast forward and we think about Thomas More and the original

book called Utopia, that was a word coined by Thomas More, it was written in 1516, right in the aftermath of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and Columbus, and the discovery of all of these continents to the West, which completely upended Europeans' conception of the world that they thought that they knew that they lived in. And Thomas More uses this, you know, fantasy of a guy, Rafael Hitler Day, who lived on an island somewhere near what we would consider Brazil today of utopia, and describing the lives of these utopians really as a way to reflect back on the society of England and Henry VIII at the time. Very radical proposal. And it was actually never translated into English. It was written not in English precisely because I think Thomas More,

who was Lord Chancellor, was very afraid that if Henry had read it, Thomas More would have lost his head sooner. He lost his head in the end anyway. And then somebody like Tommaso Campanella, right, who wrote The City of the Sun in 1602. This book, again, follows hard upon the Copernican revelations of heliocentrism, which completely shattered the worldview of many in the Catholic Church and, of course, is one of the reasons why Campanella himself ended up in prison for most of his life, falling afoul of the Inquisition. So I can give you so many examples of moments of incredible upheaval where the response is this just, I mean, flourishing outbreak of utopian ideas, of radical ideas. And they're so important to the history of humanity. That was the one thing that just became so clear to me as I was researching this book, how so much human progress, so many of the things that we take for granted in the world today are the result of these radical social dreamers on the very fringes of our societies, I like to call them the other 1%. So we have a 1% that's the economic 1%, which is a statistical artifact of if you have 100% of the distribution of wealth, there's always going to be a 1% that's at the top. But the utopian 1% is this group of people who have always been on the margins of our societies. They've always been

out there dreaming up different ways of living and not only dreaming them up, but also trying to make them a reality. And it's in these communities, you know, many of which are just really crazy when you start to read about them, what they were trying to do and how they were organizing themselves and the massive amounts of resistance that they faced. It's in these communities from these communities that we begin to find our way forward through many historical challenges. And I would argue when I say in the book that they're necessary for our survival, I think that the fundamental flexibility and creativity and adaptability of humanity, and we know that we are as a species incredibly flexible and adaptable and creative, that it comes and it has always come from this small percentage of the population that thinks differently about the way we should be living our lives. And we do not appreciate how important these people are historically. And as a result, I think we fail to appreciate how essential they are for us in the present moment as we face so many of the challenges that we're facing today. you know, when the pandemic first hit. And even though it was so challenging and so difficult in so many ways, I think that it left us all, you know, within this crisis, kind of, again, opened

up this like, way to imagine different possibilities of being not everybody was lucky enough to be able to maybe work, start working remotely or take time off of work. But for those lucky few that were able to do that. And then, you know, we also saw a little bit of like a parallel to sort of support that envisioning of what, you know, public life could look like differently with things like, you know, extended unemployment and expanded Medicaid and child tax credits and, like I mentioned, work from home. And of course, these things are all definitely not utopias, but they're getting closer to that, as close as we might be able to get in living in a country like the United States during peak neoliberalism and late capitalism. But, you know, we've been watching slowly every month, almost we see like, you know, all of these things that were were different ways that the public could be served by the state, just sort of rapidly stripped away. And I don't know if this is, you know, a conscious decision or how much this analysis plays into the many disparate and chaotic forces

that govern us. But it does feel like, especially with a lot of the disciplining of labor in terms of raising the interest rates and inflation and all of that kind of stuff, that we're sort of like, whether it's consciously done or not, being told told that like don't expect this to go on like this was just a temporary thing. And you know it just makes it so difficult to for me at least like take this shit seriously anymore right like I think it's become so apparent that scarcity is manufactured and we got a taste just a small taste of what could be and it's being taken away. And I guess I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on that or anything to add. The pandemic, I think, was exactly one of these upheavals that I have been discussing. Because as you said, suddenly, states around the world very quickly expanded their social safety nets in this really profound way that did things like reduce child poverty and give people more choices in their lives.

It was a moment where we saw what is possible if we actually really had democratic and responsive states, if we actually had the willpower to put people over profits. Of course, what also happened is that people took those opportunities with the great resignation or with the quiet quitting, right? Employers right now are sort of desperate to get people back into the office. And it's proving very difficult because people don't want to commute anymore. They don't want to have to try to cobble together some kind of crazy constellation of people and institutions to care for their children. constellation of people and institutions to care for their children. There's a way in which even though our society, especially I would argue in the United States, is doing everything possible to kind of erase the experience of the pandemic and the ways in which the state was able to

help people, actually help people, now they're desperately trying to get us back to the status quo pre-2020. But I think that the cat is out of the bag, right? The Pandora's box here has been opened. People are now able to see that remote work works, that we can balance our work and family lives in a more sane way, that the kind of hedonic treadmill that we were all on before chasing the next promotion and the getting a new car or the next big gadget, you know, the whatever the new Apple visor thing is, that's $3,500 that's going to plunge us into whatever virtual reality. Oh, God. We are not, people are just sort of not falling for it anymore.

And I do think that our imaginations have been opened right now around our family, around our work lives, around our relationships with each other. I agree with you 100% that especially here in the United States, but I think elsewhere as well, the sort of political and economic elites are really trying to go back to pre-2020 because let's face it, pre-2020 was really good for them. But that the world has changed. The climate crisis. I mean, I am in Philadelphia and we've just had this like massive smog cloud that came from Canada, right, New York and DC. It was horrifying. And, you know, people put up signs, I was in Tivoli, New York, and people put up a sign I saw that said, you know, the air could be like this every day, if we're not careful. And I do think that workers who got used to remote work, who realized that they were more productive

at home, are really resisting the return to the office politics. And there are all these upheavals about commercial real estate that are going to result from that. And so it may not feel like it right now because we're in the middle of it. But I'm actually quite optimistic that the pandemic was one of these upheavals. And out of this upheaval, we are going to have this beautiful flourishing of all sorts of different ideas around the way that we organize our lives, around the way that we organize our polities and economies and our families, and that we should be hopeful. We should not let the powers that be claw us back to 2020. We have to drag them kicking and screaming into 2024, 2025, and the rest of this century,

because we have serious challenges that we need to face collectively, and our old ways of doing things are just no longer fit for the present historical moment that we're inhabiting. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much for that. So many good points in there. And I think, yeah, this is a great time to jump into some of the meat of the book in terms of some of these alternative arrangements that you've been talking about. And so I wanted to start with just kind of like a bit of my own experience. So some of the best times in my life were definitely when I was living in more communal situations, you know, whether the more traditional like college experience, I never actually lived in dorms, but I did live in a pretty big house with a bunch of

my friends right off campus. And I also lived in more of a intentional co-op with, you know, about 10 of my friends because we couldn't afford anything else. This was, I graduated right after the 2008-2009 recession. So, you know, living in a big house with a bunch of people, and we did communal meals, and we did all of this stuff that was just really enriching and fun and, you know, alternative ways of living to the more nuclear, the more paired situations that are more common. And yeah, so I'm going to read another quote here from your book, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about the idea of, you know, the traditional single family thing that you sort of critique and examine and then pick apart in the book. So the quote goes,

and again, this is one of your quotes from the book. What if our individual flats and single homes, which feel so normal to us, also represent a particular cultural ideal perpetuated by an economic system that seduces us into the belief that square footage and privacy are both desirable goods for which we should pay a premium? which we should pay a premium. And yeah, so I mean, I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about, you know, why this sort of traditional single family suburban individual lifestyle has problems and, you know, what we could gain from alternative arrangements. And of course, I would love it if you could color that with, you know, some examples of maybe some of your more favorite or what you thought were more interesting examples of alternative ways of living? Yeah, so boy, there's a lot that I want to say. It's always hard to sort of gather my thoughts and say, okay, here we go.

So I think that one of the most important things that I'm trying to do in the book, sort of the big message of the book is that many people, but particularly again in the United States, have this idea that what is natural is the couple, monogamous couple, living together in a single family home, surrounded by their own privately owned stuff and providing bi-parental care for their own biological children. Now, we've troubled this a little bit by maybe having, okay, we can have adoptive children and maybe the couple won't be heterosexual, it might be same-sex, but the model is still very much the ideal. And it's such a reified ideal that many people somehow try to give it a prehistory of naturalness that this has been the way it's always been. And it is the best possible blueprint for human flourishing, but it's not. It is a particular outcome of historically contingent social, political,

and economic arrangements. And so much of what I do in the book is to try to get people to see what an aberration this model of the nuclear family in a single family home surrounded by its own private stuff providing bi-parental care to its own biological children is. So that means that I have to have these very specific chapters dealing with each little bit of that. And the very first chapter is this chapter on the dwellings that we inhabit, the way that we organize our private domestic spheres. And as you pointed out, I think any of your listeners who've been to college or university, we spend a lot of time in community with other people when we go away to school, or if you went to a boarding school, or if you happen to live in a collective flat in your 20s, or if you were on a kibbutz, or

if you just happen to have a really big extended family that live together in a bigger house. We all have this experience. And, you know, a lot of my college students will say, oh, you know, those college years were the best years of my life, right? You go to a place like Princeton during reunions, and like, thousands of people come back to celebrate these four years where they were living together communally and sort of basically eating in dining halls and all of the things that we associate with college and sort of more collective forms of dwelling. And yet we don't aspire to. I think the other thing that's really interesting is then at the end of our lives towards as we get older and our kids grow up and go away to college and we find ourselves in these big houses with no kids, all these extra rooms and nobody's in them, you know, we start to crave, wow, maybe I should go to a over 55 community or something like that.

We start to recreate or attempt to recreate these sort of more communal forms of living. And so the irony of that is we do it when we're single, we do it as we age and are childless or childless in the sense that we don't have young children anymore. But the time in our lives when we most need community, when we most need lateral networks of support and love and care and solidarity are when we have young kids. And that's precisely the moment that our society convinces us somehow that the ideal dwelling is this single family box in the suburbs where the good schools are, right? And then we drive our own private cars so that our kids don't have to take the bus or whatever. There's this way in which because the family, especially this nuclear family version of it, is the fundamental unit in society that allows for the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privilege, something that Plato pointed out many millennia ago, because that model

sustains capitalism or feudalism or slave-owning societies, right? Because inequality is a function of the way we organize our domestic lives. We box ourselves into these single family homes. We don't have alternative ways of being in the world, of dwelling in the world, because the system requires that we focus our resources on the care and upbringing of our own biological children. Because if we were to expand those networks of support and love and care, and we cared for other children as much as we do our own, or even just a little bit, you know, maybe a fraction less than we do our own, but we still care about those other children, it would be much harder to maintain the levels of inequality and injustice that we have in our society. So part of this is a critique

of the built environment. We just don't have the housing options available. And where, for instance, big houses are available, and you're like you and your friends in your 20s, right, you decide to get a big house and you subdivide it. And so it sort of becomes like a collective flat. Well, now, house and you subdivide it. And so it sort of becomes like a collective flat. Well, now a lot of neighborhoods are trying to put in place zoning ordinances that don't allow for that form of co-living because they don't want young people to be able to do that. They want young people to aspire to this mortgage, to this single family home, to this debt, so that there'll be obedient workers and obedient members of society. So all of these things are incredibly interconnected. And so again, to come back to

concrete examples here, there have always been people who thought outside the box. So when Pythagoras and his followers wanted to go off and study the mysteries of the universe and understand better about mathematical equations or whatever. What did they do? They left mainland Greece. They decided to reject the oikos or the traditional way of organizing the nuclear family in their society. And they formed a commune in what is today Southern Italy. And they owned their property in common. and they treated women as equals, and they raised their children collectively. They did all of these things that allowed them a kind of freedom that people in mainland Greece bound by these traditional

notions of hearth and home didn't have. And it turns out that that experiment shows up over and over and over again in history in different cultural contexts for very different reasons. Some of them are religious communities. Some of them are secular communities. Some of them have a really sort of shared political purpose. Others are very much insular. They're very much inward looking. But in all all of these cases you have people who are challenging their societies by doing something completely out of the mainstream so for example the essenes which were a jewish group that existed between the second century bce until the first century CE. And they were a group that didn't use money. They owned their property in common. And most importantly, at this particular time in antiquity, they did not believe in slavery. They believed in the principles of self-labor. This is the group, by the way,

which most scholars think are responsible for writing the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so we know a fair bit about their worldview. And of course, not holding slaves and critiquing slavery in a slave-owning society, in a society where money and tribute and taxes were everything that sustained the Roman Empire, you can imagine that this group was utterly crushed, right? We also see other Cenobitic monastic communities. If you look at the Rule of St. Benedict, this document from 530 CE, where he is trying to put down a set of guidelines for how groups of non-related people could live together in a spiritual community, be they monks or nuns, owning again their property in common, raising children in common. Now these are celibate communities, so they're not having children, but they're often taking in orphans. They're often

taking in children that were born out of wedlock or otherwise unwanted. And so you can follow and trace these different communities all the way up until the present day. You have ecovillages in Europe, you have like a matriarchal ecovillage, I write about it in the book in Colombia. It's basically a place where women have come together and are owning all of their property in common, and they're trying to recreate a community run by and for women. You have intentional communities like Twin Oaks, which is in rural Virginia. They've been around now for more than 50 years. You have co-housing experiments. In the book, I talk about Two Echo co-housing, which is up in rural Maine. about building community and connection than they are about maintaining privacy and somehow signaling our social status because we have a big house. And I think, you know, we tend to think of

a private home, both, especially I would say in the United States, where most people believe that they should be at some point in their lives, homeowners. Beyond the idea of housing as a human right, we also think of housing in this country as an asset, right, as an investment vehicle for preserving wealth, and then transferring that wealth intergenerationally. And I just think that we need to, one of the things I spend a lot of time writing in the book about is this idea of decommodifying housing and then also creating architectural forms that allow for us to live more collectively. Now, I recognize I am myself a fairly introverted person and I am totally on board with Virginia Woolf's insight that to be a writer, you need a room of one's own, right? So I'm not saying that we give

up all privacy. I'm just saying that we could literally have bedrooms and bathrooms, perhaps, to ourselves or to our, you know, immediate couple families or constellation of intimates, but those could be submerged in these much more widely constructed social atmospheres, very much, I think, what we think of as dormitories, which themselves, the way that we organize dormitory living goes all the way back to these Cenobitic monastic communities in the very first centuries after the death of Christ, right? So there's this way in which even the model of collective living that we have today, if we trace its own prehistory, we see that it comes from monasteries and nunneries and various forms of collective

living that were meant for people who were trying to come together for a spiritual purpose, but that has been reimagined as a way of organizing together for a spiritual purpose. But that has been reimagined as a way of organizing people for a social purpose and the social purpose and maybe an intellectual purpose in pursuit of knowledge and community, which is what at least theoretically, college is supposed to be about today. Yeah, no, absolutely. And yeah, thank you so much for outlining all of those really interesting and so many fascinating examples in the book. And, you know, speaking of you mentioned like architecture, you know, one of the things that really came out in the book and which stood out for me and which I've thought about a lot in my life is how architecture and city design can like, you know, really shape our experiences and our ideas of even what's possible. And, you know, I mean, as Marxists, we talk a lot about material conditions, right, shaping our realities. Well, these are as material as they get, right? Like the physical conditions that are designed specifically with a very, you know, very specific ideologies and politics in mind, like you mentioned. And yeah, I remember reading an article a few years back called why even driving through suburbia is soul crushing that really outlined, you know, how the way that these neighborhoods are planned restrict us. And, you know, we've been talking about the college campus. And, you know, one of the things I think

about college that people really appreciate, even if we don't know it while we're experiencing it, is like you're in a walkable community, right? You're in what today, you know, people might call a 15 minute city in a way, right? Like, yes, I won't get into all the background about, you know, the sustainability in that and of that and like what goes on behind the scenes that makes that possible. Right. and that and of that and like what goes on behind the scenes that makes that possible. Right. But like, you know, I don't think that a lot of us that think back on college, I think that maybe these were some of the best years of our life. Like, yes, my back didn't hurt all the time.

And yes, I could have two beers without feeling super hung over the next day in my 20s. But I do think that one of the huge things is, you know, yeah, it's that walkability. It's that sense of community. You're all there with one purpose, right? That's to learn. So yeah, I'm wondering, could you talk a little bit, actually, you bring up some really interesting examples of like proto 15 minute cities, specifically like the socialist micro districts and utopian architecture that you talk about, I thought was really fascinating. Yeah. So again, you know, I think we need to go back to like Fourier and the vision of the phalanstery, this sort of self-contained community where everything was walkable. And, you know,

early kibbutzim were also because of the Sabbath restrictions, right? There was a way in which things had to be walkable. But the Soviets, the micro districts, or what are called micro-rayoni, right? These really intentional ways of imagining the architecture of a socialist city, which is fundamentally different from a capitalist city or capitalist city and its suburban rings. So there's been a lot of work in feminist and in architectural circles around how racist and classist and sexist the suburbs are and what drove the creation of the suburbs and the ways in which even the Cold War influenced our architectural options. And unfortunately, because we've now inherited this built environment, we live in a physical

world that is dominated by a particular vision of patriarchal capitalism that emerged in the Cold War of the 50s. And we've inherited that physical built environment. And it's very, very difficult to try to break out of it. The Soviets decided partially because they were building cities from scratch, but also because they were, I think, much more liberal in their desire to erase the old world and try to build the new one, they really took this idea of building a socialist city and what I really want to call a proto 15-minute city. Because these days, everybody is talking about these 15-minute cities as if they didn't already exist in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe and in places like China and Vietnam and

Angola and Cuba. All over the world, you have these heirs to the micro district, which is a self-contained community where you have all these residential living blocks, usually built around a very large green space. And on the ground floor of these buildings, there are usually things like health clinics and kindergartens and butchers and bakers. And you would have special stores that sold milk products, like cheese and milk. But then you would also have repair shops and things like that. And so most of the things that you needed, obviously there would be kindergartens and playgrounds for children to play in. There were no private vehicles. These micro districts were connected with public transportation. If there were cars,

the roads were on the outsides. These, by the way, exist all over the world still today. And you can really feel the difference in the built environment when you walk into these spaces. And a lot of thought and care was put into creating these buildings so that you could raise the standard of living of ordinary working people, so that you could build into the physical environment an expectation of gender equality. Because if you had access to cafeterias and canteens and playgrounds and polyclinics and kindergartens and crushes are in the West, architects and activists who are trying to imagine what the 15-minute city should look like in the future, really need to go back and remember that there were models for this. And they were very successful models.

They worked very well. They worked very well. Now, again, some of these micro districts, like in Eastern Germany or in Bulgaria, you know, they were these panel buildings. They were put up very quickly and, you know, they weren't ideal. Sometimes the walls were really thin and maybe there was asbestos in them and maybe they were smaller than they needed to be, or they didn't have the amenities that they needed. It wasn't perfect. These projects were realized in relatively economically poorer countries. So there were corners that were cut, but the ideal was there. And if they are built in this way to up to sort of more environmental standards and recognizing the balance between the need for privacy and community, I think that this is a beautiful way of organizing our lives in the future. The problem is,

and this is where our economic system really gets in the way, is that developers don't want to build them. People are using, you know, what do you see in Manhattan? You see all these pencil towers going up full of penthouses because people are buying them as investment vehicles. And then on the other side, you have all the baby boomers who have these single family homes, and they have an incredible amount of material wealth invested in their home. It's an asset. And so if developers or if people started building, God forbid, if the government started building really nice public housing options that were like micro districts, you would basically impoverish these people who have a lot of

retirement savings stuck in their mortgages, stuck in the asset, you know, the asset that is their home in the equity that they have in their home. So there are all sorts of factors in our societies that are mitigating against the creation of these more communal ways of dwelling. And then, as I mentioned earlier, when people try to do it spontaneously, there are zoning ordinances that try to come in and prevent people who are not blood related from living together in a house that is meant to be a single family home. So I think, you know, there are a lot of factors that make it difficult, but it is not impossible. And we have really good models for how to do this. And perhaps most importantly, we now have good empirical evidence. There have been studies that show that when we live in community, when we live together in larger groups of people who are sharing resources and sharing appliances and maybe sharing cars and maybe sharing other sorts of things that they need to survive, we lower our carbon footprint. We actually can make real strides towards lowering the ecological impact that sustaining human life has on the planet by living in these wider networks of

care and support and collectivity. And I don't think that's, at that point, the empirical point is, you know, I think uncontestable. I think the problem is that some people just really like their privacy and really think of having a big house as a status symbol and they don't want to give up the status symbol of living alone, of having one's own space. And I understand where that comes from. I don't think that's a sustainable model for the future. And I also think that it is contributing to the pandemic of loneliness and isolation that we're also seeing, in addition to the climate crisis and all of these other things that are going on in the world. Our ideals about how we will get esteem and status are actually making us very lonely and atomized. And we have to address the physical dwellings that we inhabit,

as well as some of the other kinds of political and economic problems that we're discussing. You know, one thing that sort of weaves its way throughout the book, but you also provide its own chapter, its own sort of thematic chapter for is the way that we raise children. And yeah, so my, my sister just had a child about a year and a half ago. And so for the first time in my life, I've, I've really been thinking more about these questions about like, you know, how we raise children in, like we were mentioning this sort of like nuclear suburban ecosystems that we live in, a lot of the limitations with that. And so I'm wondering, maybe if you could outline,

you know, some of the problems with the way that we're currently dealing with the raising of children in the society and what some, you know, better solutions could be. Yeah. So here, I think this is the one chapter where I think a lot of people are going to be more familiar with these once utopian solutions that have now become fairly commonplace. So the key thing, again, is I think everybody who had young kids during the pandemic realized that the nuclear family is really hard when you don't have any form of support. So we do have a real crisis of care in our societies right now. Anybody who's dealing with, you know, raising

young children and trying to find childcare and worrying about schools and all of the various issues that one faces when you have these really kind of heavy and taxing and relentless care obligations is that it is so much easier when you have backup. That's not a radical idea, right? We are as humans, evolutionarily, collective breeders. We've always had cooperative breeders. We've always had grandmothers and older siblings and aunts and uncles, but we've also had what is called fictive kin, you know, other people who are in our wider networks that for one reason or another help provision our young. So, there's a huge range of utopian visions for the family here for raising children. And they go from Plato, I think, who is really at the far extreme, which is that no

parent should know their own child and no child should know their parent, and that they should all be raised collectively by professional nurses. Interestingly, Plato says they would both be men and women who would be doing this child raising. He was very concerned to make sure that all children were nursed effectively. You know, different mothers have different levels of milk production. And so, you know, he wanted all babies to be healthy. So he thought if the children were nursed collectively, everybody would get sufficient nutrition. I mean, he really goes into the details of a lot of this. The Oneida community and the Kibbutzim also had pretty radical views of collective child rearing,

which allowed for things also like collective sleeping. And then you can kind of walk it back from there. Collective sleeping on the kibbutzim was really kind of a failure. There wasn't enough care for the children at night. Many children were very unhappy. You know, when they had nightmares, there weren't enough women to come and console them. And so they really got rid of the collective sleeping, but kept the children's home and kept the collective house for the children, allowing their children to kind of come home at night and sleep and also to spend some hours with their parents during the day. But, you know, things like daycare, things like paid parental leave, paid job protected parental leave, those were once utopian ideas. And many of those utopian ideas kind of were derivative of these earlier utopian

imaginings of collective child rearing. And so I think what we have to understand is that some of the things that many of us who have young kids take for granted today is that just dropping your kid off at child care and picking them up in the afternoon and knowing that they'll be safe and cared for and kind of have a good time, like that in and of itself was once a really utopian idea for certain societies. On the other hand, this more cooperative form of breeding is very much the way that we do things in our lives. And historically speaking, many people had aunts and uncles or godparents who were around who helped raise them. And they had really close relationships with those other loving adults in their lives. And it wasn't a big deal. It wasn't a big problem. So I definitely think that one of the biggest things that I'm trying to do in the

book is to detach the way that we organize our romantic relationships, so what anthropologists would sort of call our mating practices, from our child-rearing practices. So in the contemporary moment around the world today, I would say, most of us tend to think of the romantic partnership as the appropriate container for child rearing. And so we sort of smoosh those two things together into the nuclear family. Again, this idea of the monogamous couple providing exclusive bi-parental care for their biological offspring. And I think that the biggest part of that mistake is sticking those two things together. That in fact, we could raise children in all these other different ways. We could raise children with platonic partners. We could raise children with more than one partner.

The idea of tri-parenting or multi-parenting. We could also raise children, like as I mentioned earlier, in these cenobitic monastic communities where you have a bunch of people who are raising orphans and unwanted children. to politicize because one of the other things that I've seen with some of my younger comrades is that they are concerned about the ecological impact of having children. And so you have this movement called the birth strike, where young people are saying they just don't want to have children because it's unfair to the child to bring a life into the world on a burning planet. And also that bringing another human being into the world will actually put a greater burden on that planet. And I think that one of the things that we need to do is really rethink the way we raise children. We don't have to give up on the project altogether. Children can be incredibly joyous and joyful project, but the way we have organized it is the problem. We need to rethink the raising of

the next generation and we need to raise that generation in a way that is more collective, because I think that that collective raising of children or that much more connected way of raising children actually helps us deal with some of the social, political, economic, and ecological problems that we're facing. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Kristen Godsey, author of Everyday Utopia, What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. We'll be right back. Sweet talking our way through another funny day I'm not here in the first place, I've been replaced Haven't quite met this new self of mine Tell me it'll all be fine Tell me I don't need to say the lie

I want you but I don't want you to be mine I want you but I don't want you, but I don't want you to be mine Feels like the paradox of my life Feels like I'll get there when I step it up top We've been balancing on the finest love Dancing on the finest lawn Loving is the cure and the cry Loving is the cure and the cry

The words are there, they're knocking at our teeth I'm feeling bare, hard head to feet I've got nowhere to go and no one to meet I see it now, I see my heart break I see it now, I see what I need To be sitting in the corner of my mind To be sitting in the corner of my mind Sitting in the corner of my mind Sit in the corner of my mind Sit in the corner of my mind Sit in the corner of my mind That was Mother's Eyes by Alice Phoebe Liu.

Now back to our conversation with Kristen Godsey, author of Everyday Utopia, what 2,000 years of wild experiments can teach us about the good life. So, you know, you discuss quite a bit about the issues with the nuclear family and how we raise children in the home in the book. And you just outlined a lot of that for us here. So thank you. And sort of like the next sort of logical step, I think, from that is reimagining, well, first off, understanding the problems with our current education system, especially for, you know, younger children, but you know, I'd say all the way up in public schooling from K through 12,

you know, there's a very, there are a lot of different elements of our education that can be critiqued pretty seriously from young childhood to much older. And so in the book, you talk a little bit about the commodification and instrumentalization of education. And, you know, personally, I have, you know, obviously spent time in the public school system on the one side of, you know, being the one that's being educated. But I've also spent a little bit of time like many years ago, like substitute teaching. And I know a lot of friends who are teachers. And I don't know exactly who said this is probably an analysis that a lot of people have put out there. But you know, you can't help but think that these are institutions that have very specific purposes. And the idea of education is very limited, right? It's almost like a preparation for a few different things, including listening to authority figures arbitrarily, enduring long periods of boredom.

Starts to sound a little bit like... Following directions, right? Meeting deadlines. Boy, doesn't it start to sound like preparation for the capitalist labor force? illustrate this commodification and instrumentalization of education in our current system. And then yeah, like some existing utopian examples of, you know, ways that this could be done differently, or, you know, existing or in the past, or just, you know, ways that we could imagine a different form of education that you think would work better and be better for the people going through it and better for the people that are doing the educating as well? That's a really great question. And I have a lot of different parts of the answer because I myself am the product of public education all the way through. So I went to public K through 12. Then I went to the University of California at Santa

Cruz, which was a public institution. And I went to UC Berkeley, which was a public institution. And it wasn't until I actually became a professor that I started teaching in private schools. And I've taught in two private colleges, and both of them are very elite. And I'm very aware of the ways in which particularly higher education, but I would argue after the 1980s, also K-12 education, is another institution in society that allows for the unequal distribution of wealth and privilege. It actually reinforces inequality in our society for all sorts of reasons. And there's a lot of great scholarship out there about this question. But public education in public schools for all children was the 10th point of the Communist Manifesto. It was once a very utopian demand, which got co-opted for a wide variety of reasons. And part of the reason that it got co-opted was precisely because industrialists and elites wanted to have a certain kind of educated workforce. And schools were a way of disciplining otherwise unruly workers, many of whom were subsistence farmers. And so they had to be kind of conditioned into a new way of working. And so

education went from being a very utopian thing to being almost a dystopian thing. And in the United States, particularly, I don't think we really had very much of a commitment to really good, high quality public education until after the Second World War. You had things like the GI Bill, and then because of the Cold War, because of the launch of Sputnik, you have this National Defense Education Act, which is passed, which puts massive amounts of federal money into expanding the quality and quantity of public education at all levels. And part of this was driven by our fear that the Soviets were winning the Cold War, were beating us at the space race because they were better educated and because they

were better educating their populace and they were better able to identify talent in populations that in the United States, we just assumed not to have that talent, meaning non-white people and women largely. And so there was this desire to invest in raising the educational level of our population, partially driven by the needs of industrialists, our population, partially driven by the needs of industrialists, but also driven by the demands of the Cold War and the sort of superpower competition that came with that. In the late 1980s, I think you began to see this neoliberalization of education. And so that education went from being conceived of as a public good in the service of helping the United States remain a superpower and maintain its hegemonic status in the world, to becoming once again,

a private good that is competed for, that is a way of marking or kind of giving a validation to an unequal distribution of wealth and privilege in our society. And we still see the outcome of that in the differential rates of salary for people who have a high school versus people who have a college education, particularly in the United States. Now, in other countries outside of the United States, tertiary education is still very much considered a public good. And you don't have this colossal level of student debt or all the problems that we have in the United States. The United States really is an aberration here and we really have gone a long way into thinking of education as a

commodity rather than as something that would serve this more utopian goal of actually having an enlightened citizenry. And, you know, again, going all the way back to the Republic, but Thomas More in Utopia spends a lot of time talking about education and lifelong education. The fact that people don't only go to school and then sort of finish, but that as a society, we are constantly educating ourselves. We're reading, we're debating, we're having conversations. medieval Wikipedia, and that children would be educated by walking around the walls of their city with educated adults, with guides who would help them understand math and history and linguistics and theology and all the questions that were pertinent to their growth as human beings, as individuals, as members of a society. So I really think that there are so many great examples of alternative ways of

organizing education. And the one that I really focus on in the book is educational models, particularly the work of Anton Makarenko in Ukraine and of Julius Neyere in Tanzania, that these models that break down the distinction between mental labor and manual labor, this is a big thing in anarchist theory. It goes back to Kropotkin and the idea that we, and Bakunin as well, we should not have a class of people who just thinks and a class of people that actually just works. That these things, all humans are both thinkers and doers, that all people should be doing both mental and manual labor. And unfortunately, I think that the model that we have today is that, you know, there's

this sort of elite strata of education that is really about cultivating mental workers and then a sort of, in our country, a remedial form of education or trade schools or whatever that creates or produces what we would think of as sort of blue-collar workers, the white-collar, blue-collar divide. And I think that is a particular function of the Cold War, and it's very dystopian, and we need to eradicate it. And we also need to eradicate the idea that education and schooling is something that you just do when you're young and then you don't have to do it anymore, as if there aren't constantly things in the world that are changing that we have to learn about. And I also finally

think that we have to think of education absolutely as a public good. We need to pay teachers a really good wage. We need to pay people who are in pre-K education and people who are doing sort of lifelong education, people who are kind of popular educators. We need to recognize that they play a really important role in our societies, and we need to appreciate them and compensate them in a way that makes those jobs desirable for people to go into. in a way that makes those jobs desirable for people to go into. Nobody should be living off of, you know, starvation wages. Nobody should be taking money out of their own private funds to buy chalk or Kleenex or other sorts of educational supplies, which is so often the case in our underfunded public schools. Yeah, no, absolutely. And one other thread that I wanted to stick with before we move on from this sort of realm of education, which I thought was really interesting. You talk a lot about like what values are being taught in our schools, and you bring up a bunch of sort of required like canonical reading that we we have in in our high schools right like

you talk at length about kurt vonnegut's book um harrison bergeron it's a short story harrison bergeron it's one of the most taught pieces in american public schools as well as 1984 by george orwell and aldous huxley's brave World. And for like the tween set, you have Lois Lowry's The Giver. And I would add to that just from my personal experience, Lord of the Flies. Oh, definitely. Yes. Lord of the Flies. Yeah. And Animal Farm. Right. And so I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about, you know, a lot of the times we think of these books, we don't really think about the ideologies that are being sort of conveyed in them. And that, you know, there are people that are making the decisions that this is a book that everybody that's going through whatever 10th grade has to read. But, you know, it also excludes other possible books from being read.

And so there are political decisions being made there. And, you know, just real quickly for our listeners, if you are hearing crying in the background, that's my nephew. And I'm going to keep it in because it definitely goes with the themes of some of the stuff that we're talking about in terms of raising children. we're talking about in terms of raising children. So I'm going to read a quote out to you here. And then I'm wondering if you could just reflect on all this. And this is another quote from your book. If our schools insist on assigning dystopian novels to our children, and our media environment feeds us nothing but a steady diet of doom, gloom, and the impending apocalypse, we must fight against them by allowing ourselves to dream. So yeah, maybe if you could frame, you know, within the context of some of the readings that we just, the books and the short stories that we just talked about. And yeah, this idea of like, what values we're teaching to our children. And yeah.

Yeah. So I do think that there's a very good reason why we are in a historical moment where there's all these book bans going on and all this sort of anxiety about what books children have access to and what books are being taught in our schools. But this is an incredibly political and fraught decision. And the fact that in the United States, we insist on teaching all of these dystopian texts to our children. I think that the effect of it is to shut down social dreaming. It's to say, yeah, you might think that the world is unfair, but don't try to change it because the minute you try to change it, it's going to get worse. And here are all these examples of people who tried to change it, societies or communities that tried to change it, but it got worse and it got really worse. And the key thing is that all

of these books play on this terrible fear of us being unloved and alone. And children are really sensitive to that fear of being unloved and alone. It's a very primal fear. And so what's so worrisome to me about all of these texts that we teach our children is that part of what is going on in these books, many of which are a product of the 20th century, is that you're telling people that if they try to create more connected, more egalitarian communities that are more resource sharing, that are more about the whole rather than focusing exclusively and only on the individual, this is the explicit message, by the way, of the Harrison Bergeron story by Kurt Vonnegut, is that people will end up miserable, unhappy, and alone, that that will be the result. It's going to be a dystopian hell. And, you know, I think first of all,

history has proven otherwise. I'm not saying that there haven't been some utopian projects that have gone horribly and terribly wrong. I would be a fool to ignore them. But I think that we are collectively doing ourselves a major disservice by only focusing on the negative ones. There is a way in which we also have a lot of positive examples and that people striving together in community to work together to make the world a better place is often the very thing that makes the world a better place. And there are innumerable examples of that. And so I did a little piece for Lit Hub, which was 10, I think it was 10 utopian books to help us deprogram our brains.

You can go look at that if you're interested in the books that I suggest. But for instance, Aldous Huxley, who wrote Brave New World, towards the end of his life wrote a wonderful novel called Island, which is an explicitly utopian text, and which is a text that he wished everybody would read because it's about hope, and it's about community, and it's about all sorts of wild ideas that he had later in his life. But unfortunately, the book that we read of Aldous Huxley, if we read any, is always Brave New World. It's always the dystopian one. There are other books out there like Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. I can think of a variety of science fiction and fantasy books that fill us with hope and creativity. There was a wonderful trilogy that my daughter gave me, the first book of which was called Scythe, which was about a kind of benevolent AI. So there are all sorts of ways in which we could be reading our way into a more

hopeful future. And it's not just books, right? It's television. We get inundated with things like Black Mirror or Squid Game, right? These very, or The Handmaid's Tale, these dystopian series that we see on television or movies like The Hunger Games or Parasite, to go back a little further, Children of Men, these really, really bleak visions of the future that I think can be very immobilizing to us in the present because when we see these bleak visions of the future, we tend to cling to the status quo because we're afraid of the future. We're afraid of changing things lest they go terribly wrong. And, you know, I understand what psychologists call status quo bias. You know, behavioral economists have written a lot about how people really don't

like feeling regret and how they're much less likely to feel regret about a bad outcome that resulted from inaction than about a bad outcome that resulted from us making a decision. And so this kind of gives us the status quo bias. It makes us reticent to shake things up too much. But it's precisely this status quo bias that keeps us in these systems of iniquity and injustice and unsustainability. We are living in a world that is rapidly changing. And the social, political, changing and the social, political, economic, and familial forms that we have were developed under a very different set of historical circumstances. We cannot cling to them anymore. We have to think forward into the future. And that means that we have to be what humans have always been, which is creative, flexible, and adaptable. We have a long history of creativity,

flexibility, and adaptability. And we get the ideas, we get the blueprints for these new ways of thinking that will help us survive into the future from utopianism, from these social dreams. You know, one of the things that I talk about in the book that I think is such an important point that I always forget to make in these conversations is that in my world of academia, and certainly in the worlds of science and in business, there's this term blue sky thinking. Blue sky thinking is like a very fashionable term for thinking outside the box, for breaking boundaries, you know, moving fast and breaking things or whatever. Like, let's just radically reimagine how we're going to do X, Y, or Z, or let's, you know, blue sky think our way out of the climate change through geoengineering or, you know, blasting sulfate

particles into the atmosphere or refreezing the polar ice caps or all these other things that we are thinking of doing scientifically or economically. But when it comes to society, when it comes especially to our families, we are so conservative. And what I want to say is that the most important blue sky thinking is often the blue sky thinking that happens around our private lives. And we have to allow ourselves the ability to social dream. The minute we stop social dreaming, we will get stuck in the past and we will lose our creativity and flexibility and the adaptability that we need to survive in the future. So we've talked about architecture and design and living arrangements. We've talked about

child rearing. We've talked about education. And so you round out the sort of themes in your book with an examination of private property. And specifically, the title of the chapter where you explore this question is Imagine No Possessions. I Wonder Why We Can't. And yeah, I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, you know, why you included a chapter on sort of abolishing property as a form of utopia and maybe outlining a little bit of the alternatives and other forms of non-possession, utopian ways of living that you outline in the book. Yeah. So I think, again, as I said at the very outset of our conversation, that I wanted to give a deeper history to some of the political beliefs that I hold, right? And to try to understand the Marxist impulse around property,

it has a much deeper history. So if we think back to Hinduism, right? One of the fundamental principles of Hinduism is aparigraha, which is non-possessiveness. And it is in and of itself a very clear critique of property. If we go back to the Buddhists and we look at the four noble truths and the eightfold path, one of those principles is the principle of right livelihood, which also has within it a critique of property, of hoarding, of an unequal distribution of wealth. If we look at the Essenes, as I mentioned earlier, they had a critique of money and of slaveholding. If you read the Bible, right, in Acts 2 and Acts 4, there is explicit language that says that the followers of Christ owned all of their property in common, and that whenever anyone had need, in common, and that whenever anyone had need, somebody who joined the community would sell some of their property and distribute the money amongst the other followers of Christ.

But even in prehistory, if we look at ancient Greece, the Pythagoreans had a saying among them, koinata na philon, which meant, among friends, all is shared. In the Republic, the guardians share all their property in common. And Plato very clearly says that if you introduce property, if you introduce the word mine, M-I-N-E, mine, as in the possessive pronoun mine, into a community of people, they will care more about their own wealth and privilege than they do about being guardians of the city. So not a single one of the utopian communities that I looked at did not have some version of this critique of property. Now, I think it's really important here to go back to people like Proudhon

and Kropotkin and understand that there's a big difference between property and possession. You could have possessions, right? That what we're really talking about here is like productive property. So what we Marxists would call the means of production. And many of these communities were trying also to be productive, self-sustainable, productive communities, in addition to living in this particular way of sharing property. But I think that one of the reasons why we have the particular family forms that we do, the reasons that we have the single family boxes that we live in, the reasons that we educate our children and raise our children in the ways that we do is to justify an unequal distribution of property. And I really see that in the historical record, cross-culturally, that where you have people or groups or communities which have much

wider extended networks of consanguineous and non-consanguineous kin living together, they tend to have less accumulations of property and they tend to be more egalitarian. The tighter your nuclear family, the tighter your family and kinship relations, the more you have inequality in society and the higher your level of property accumulation. Now, if you're a capitalist or if you believe that humans thrive and that human societies do better when they have higher levels of economic development, which means higher levels of property accumulation, which means higher levels of private property, which also means higher levels of inequality. And you might say that, okay, the nuclear family is an essential building block of a very high standard of living. And I know a lot of people are going to make that argument. I've seen that argument a million times. And actually, there's really good empirical evidence to support that argument, that the more nuclear the family, the more developed the society.

But first of all, from an environmental point of view, that's unsustainable in the long run. From a social justice point of view, it is predicated on an incredible amount of inequality and sexism and racism and other forms of discrimination. And also, I think from just a psychological and evolutionary anthropological point of view, it is also predicated on a particular vision of human flourishing, which I think is out of sync with the way that most people want to live. We don't want to live in these isolated islands of our own private stuff. We want to be with friends. We want to be with lateral colleagues and neighbors and congregants and other forms of association. And what has happened in our desire to have this rapid economic progress, to have this rapid accumulation of property, to have this economic development, is that we've retreated further and further and further into the individual.

We've become more and more and more isolated. And our isolation is the result, in some ways, of this accumulation of property. And so if we could stop focusing on the property, stop using accumulated property as a marker for status and esteem in our societies, I think that that would go a long way into creating a happier, more connected, more contented, and more sustainable and just society in the long run. Now, again, as I pointed out with the childcare examples, there's a sliding scale here of the most extreme forms of non-possessiveness, many of which are religious in orientation, to just like sharing your wheelbarrow with your neighbors, right? Or joining a car cooperative,

or figuring out ways to do our laundry more communally so that laundry machines, you know, washers and dryers, which have a lifespan of about 10 years each, don't end up in landfill every decade. Like there are all sorts of ways in which we could reduce our carbon footprint and create more contented communities and strive for greater levels of social justice and egalitarianism by taking more incremental steps in this direction. It's not an all or nothing proposition. It is a sliding scale. And what I do in the book and what I try to explain in the book and give examples of in the book is all these different ways of imagining how we might rethink our relationships to property in order to live more just and sustainable and

connected lives in the future. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I also couldn't help think like, so you brought up just off the top of your head, I'm sure the idea of shared laundry and my partner and I are currently looking for a place to move in together. And one of the things on like my like absolute need this list is like an in-unit washer and dryer. Yeah. And then I'm also thinking, though, like, you know, I lived when I lived in Arlington, Vermont for a few years, I didn't ever have an unit washer and dryer and I'd always

go to the laundromat. And it was always like, you know, it takes time. But it was always like, you know, I would go I'd throw my stuff in the washer and I would like go on a walk, I might go to the coffee shop, I would hang out in the laundromat sometimes and like, you know, strike up a conversation with someone. And the thing is, like, I'm just thinking, you know, I'm thinking of this off the top of my head, but like, sometimes the structural limitations to what would otherwise be the sort of more, I guess, you know, you could just call them more utopian ideas of ways of living in the world. Like we butt up against the structural reality of the world we live in. For example, not everybody has the time to go to the laundromat and like, you know, dick around for a

few hours while the laundry is being done. And that's what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking that I want to in unit washer and dryer is like, it's so much faster, right? Yeah. And you can do it on your own schedule. And it's not because like, I don't want to have a conversation with somebody in the laundry room. It's because I'm so fucking busy that, you know? Yeah. Right. And so there are other ways of doing it, right? So, I mean, you know, obviously I was giving a very concrete example of like sharing a laundry.. That's like a that's like step one, right? But in the Soviet Union, there were public laundries. And you know, for instance, at Twin Oaks, I mentioned Twin Oaks, they have this, this is where the interaction with private property is really wonderfully

exemplified. So they have this thing called community wardrobe and everybody in that community owns all of their clothes in common. Now, obviously they, you know, they have their own underwear or whatever, but like, you know, clothing like the laundry sheets, towels, everything is collectively owned and there is a centralized laundry and everybody in Twin Oaks gets a certain number of labor credits for doing jobs that need to be done in the community. And so there's a central laundry. Everybody drops off their stuff at the central laundry.

It is laundered, ironed, whatever, hung up, sorted by size and color and type. And at any time, you can walk into that room and you can get whatever clothes that you want. If you get particularly attached to an item of clothing, or if you go out with your allowance and you buy something that's special to you, you're perfectly allowed to keep it for yourself, but you're not allowed to put it in the public laundry. You need to launder it yourself. So here's the utopian vision there, right? So, you know, for instance, sheets and towels are a pain in the butt, right, to wash. They take forever to dry. They're bulky. These are the kinds of things that

could easily, there could be a centralized place where, you know, there's a centralized system where you can drop off your sheets and your towels and, you know, baby diapers or whatever certain kinds of laundering that are really tedious and time consuming. But the in-house laundry also has the effect not only of isolating you, right, from other people because you don't have the time, but it also really reinforces a certain kind of gender relations because in many households, it's usually the women who are doing the laundering, who are doing the, you know, the work that needs to be done to sustain the household. And so even in communities like co-housing communities, where there's a collective laundry, I say collective laundry, but literally it just, it's like a laundry mat, but it's like

belongs to the community. And women use that as a place to congregate. They use it as a place to connect with each other. And so when you isolate women at home doing their own laundry, it prevents the kind of sociality that is available to people when they're doing these chores. Maybe not only collectively, that's the possibility, that's the model at Twin Oaks, but at least doing them in community. So I lived, just to give a little personal anecdote here, I lived in a building in Helsinki where there was a laundry mat downstairs for the building and there were scheduled times. So it was very, very well organized. I think the Finns are particularly good at organizing these kinds of things where you just,

you could pre-book your laundry times, which was great. And there was like a very nice room next door where there was a library and, you know, there was like a very nice room next door where there was a library and, you know, there was like a coffee machine. I also lived for a year in the housing in Princeton of the Institute for Advanced Study, which is a place where you have all these scholars and professors who come together and we have our own apartments, but there's a collective laundry. And so many people, when they first move into this community, they complain about the collective laundry. Now the collective laundry is in walking distance. So you can go drop your clothes off and then go home and then go back. There are a lot of machines there. So there's almost always a

machine available, but there's also attached to it, a little room with a piano. There's a play room for kids. There's a library there. And when I first moved into this community, I complained about it too, like everybody else does, because we're all so used to having our own washer and dryer at home. And it's so much easier. You can just bung it in and then you, you know, get it out and it's done and you have to fold it or whatever. But the thing that happened is that after a month or two, I actually really started to enjoy doing laundry because I met other scholars. Now, this wasn't a public laundromat, right? This was a laundromat that was available only to people living within this community. So it was probably about 100 people living in this community, maybe a little bit more. But they were all other scholars. And they were all other people with whom

I might have shared interests. And I got invited to parties, I organized playdates for my daughter, I ended up going to, you know, dinners or poetry readings, there were so many things that came out of doing my laundry with other people that I did not appreciate so that when I moved away and I went back to having my own in-house washer and dryer, which as you point out is very convenient when you are time pressed, I missed the community. And I realized that I had traded off community for convenience. And I believe that we are all in a moment living in a society where we are constantly trading off community for convenience. You know, we're ordering our groceries online and having them delivered to our door instead of going to the grocery store. And we are waiting on StubHub for some algorithm to let us in

to buy Taylor Swift tickets instead of waiting in line like I did when I was younger. I've waited in hour-long lines, oh, many multiple hour-long lines for tickets. I have overnighted for tickets for a concert or a film that I really wanted to see. And yeah, I will tell you, it was a major pain in the butt. But God, it was so fun to be in a line with a bunch of other Star Wars geeks, right? Or U2 stans, that we were a community and it was an experience that we had together that we shared that was joyous, that was fun. And, you know, we held each other's spaces in line when we had to go to the bathroom or to get food. And we struck up conversations with strangers. And we shared a community experience that was profound in its ability to connect us. And it was based, this is the irony, it was based on an inconvenience.

In fact, a lot of people who grew up under socialism say exactly this thing, that yeah, they had to queue up all the time for various things and for various reasons, but it was a social event. And especially because a lot of older people, like in these extended families where you lived closer maybe to your grandparents, older relatives were essential for a family because they were the ones who could go and afford to stand in line all day. And then they came back with these great things that nobody else could get because they couldn't stand in line. So I'm not saying that we should stand in line as a way of making our societies more connected, but I'm just trying to use that as an example of

a way in which so much of modern life is about increasing levels of convenience that are chipping away at our ability to forge and maintain community. And I don't think we reflect on that trade-off often enough. And it's essential that we do it. Kristen, you're taking me back to my childhood here. I grew up partly in Iran. My mom's side is Iranian. And so like, in the late 80s, early 90s, I was a little kid living in Shiraz. And because of sanctions, there were long milk lines. Me and my cousin were the ones that were sent off to stand in like those lines every morning. And yeah, like, I love how you frame that, like this inconvenience, this thing that we have to do because of, you know, imposed scarcity and just, you know, terrible reasons behind it. But in those lines, there were people along the lines like making delicious bread and like kebabs and like it was more than just standing in line. And me and my cousin would have fun and we'd like take a little soccer ball and hang out and in the line, you know?

So yeah, I just thought that was a really interesting example that you used to illustrate that because it definitely maps onto my experience. So I appreciate you bringing that up. Yeah. And I mean, this is going to be, I mean, I'm really going to out myself as a super nerd right now. But, you know, I have very clear memories of standing in line for every single Star Wars movie after Empire Strikes Back. I mean, Empire Strikes Back included. Like, I was too young for the original because my parents took me to see it in the drive-in.

And I don't think there was a line, right? Because people didn't know about it yet. The phenomenon hadn't quite taken off. But from Empire Strikes Back on, including the embarrassing episodes one, two, and three, I was in line. And more often than not, I was in costume. And everybody else was in costume. And there were people having lightsaber duels. And there were people talking about what was going to happen and what, you know, the next installment was going to be and what the effects were and what the creatures were. And, I mean, geez, it was just actually pay absurd amounts of money to go hang out with like your fellow Star Trek fans or whatever. All they do is replicate in a fancier venue the energy and excitement that we used to have standing in line to get tickets. Right.

So, I mean, I do think that there's this there is this way in which, you know, I mean, yeah, during the pandemic, it was wonderful that we could all get groceries delivered to our door. And I will not tell you that it isn't convenient to have your own washer and dryer in your house, because my God, it really is, especially if you have a kid or if you're looking after a puppy, like I am right now, you know, there's a way in which being able to do laundry whenever you want to, and it's not, the laundry machine isn't filled and, you know, you have access to the dryer and, you know, nobody's going to take your stuff out and leave it on top or whatever. You don't wait and lose

time going to a laundromat. I mean, all of that is really important and I'm not belittling that in any way. But the fact of the matter is my appliances, I know this for a fact because I just recently had to replace a refrigerator, they last 10 years. That is their planned obsolescent lifespan. And so 10 years from now, I'm going to dump these two appliances and I'm going to get new ones. And 10 years from that, I'm going to do the same thing. We literally have massive landscapes, land filled with unwanted appliances. And this is, you know, from an environmental perspective, a problem. And so I think that this idea of communal laundry or collective laundry, or even just public laundry or whatever, shared laundry, I don't know what the appropriate term here would be. It is a very concrete, small change that we could make in our private lives. It is an inconvenient one to be sure, but it addresses all sorts of interesting problems at the same time. It addresses the environmental problem and the climate crisis. It addresses the pandemic of

loneliness and isolation that we have and that many people are struggling with. I would also argue that related to that, it addresses maybe our increasing levels of depression and anxiety because, you know, we are so isolated and people are very fearful of the environment. And I also think, and this is something that I could spend more time talking about, but I'll just assert here, it also addresses gender inequality because it is true that it is often in most households, not all by any means, but in many households, it is women and mothers, primary caregivers who are the ones responsible for doing the laundry. And those are the people who are very, very isolated from each other. And they could really use the community that maybe doing laundry in a shared space or doing laundry of collectively

owned clothes or whatever it is that we're doing is also going to address. So here you have one small little change. This is what I love about the beauty of utopian thinking. It's a tiny little node in our daily lives, right? I do laundry like maybe once a week, maybe twice a month if I really let it go. But this is a small change that if we all individually, collectively started changing our habits around just this one thing, how we launder our clothing, it would have these profound impacts in multiple aspects of our lives and multiple aspects of our societies and challenging different problems that we're facing. And that's the kind of thing where I think the creativity of thinking outside the box, it may be that collective laundry is just a dead end. It's not going to work. But there are other things like that that might work, right? The sharing economy. There's this way in which I mentioned in the book, things like Zipcar or Rent the Runway, or some of these websites where people are literally not owning their designer clothes or not owning their cars, but are sort of sharing them in common.

Even though the sharing is being mediated by a for-profit company right now, it's opening people up to the idea that we actually could share our resources in common in a more sustainable way. So I do think that there's incredible work that could be done in this area. And I will say, and that is being done in this area by lots of different groups in society right now. I'm not inventing any of this out of whole cloth. And that chapter is full of different examples of how we might rethink our relationship to property. Yeah, thank you so much. And I love that we sort of went deep into this example of laundry and collective laundry to illustrate so many other and equally important points. And I think one of the things that you left out maybe in all the benefits, it's like

environmental benefits, social benefits, gender benefits, and you end up with nice, clean pile of folded clothes at the end. So what's wrong with that? What's wrong with that? Right, right. That's a great way to sell communism. Yeah, we'll all have clean, nice clothes. Yeah, no, I mean, you know, but it's like, it's one of those examples.

You really can go deep, right? You can take this one thing and just really push it, push it to the, you know, I mentioned Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Yeah. Which is this wonderful science fiction book. Everybody must read this book. I'm a, you know, I'm kind of an Ursula Le Guin pusher, I think. And she talks about this sort of anarchist community on this planet called Henares, where they have exactly this thing called a public laundry, and nobody owns anything that is a textile of their own. and nobody owns anything that is a textile of their own.

They just go to this central building and they take whatever they need. And then when it's dirty, they return it to the central building and they get whatever they need. And it's laundered and folded and taken care of. And there's this wonderful moment in the book where the main character, Shevek, he sort of gets attached to an orange blanket. And he keeps the

blanket, right? And part of the keeping of the blanket, part of the attachment of the blanket, presumably, is the laundering of the blanket. And I think that that's important, right? I'm not saying that we shouldn't have connections to our material possessions. We've all had things of sentimental value, a gift that somebody gave us, right? Or, you know, a piece of jewelry or a book or something that is meaningful and imbued with a kind of value, a sort of totem in our private lives. We don't have to abolish those things. I'm not saying that. And I don't think anybody is saying that when they're talking about the socialization of productive property. What we're saying is that property should not become the thing that divides us, right? And in this example of laundry that we

just had, because, you know, I mean, obviously, socialists and communists are going to be talking about the means of production. But a laundry machine is not really the means of production. It's like the means of sustainability of cleanliness, right? I mean, unless you're the owner of a commercial laundromat, laundry machines like washers and dryers are not the means of production. But in this case, there's this way in which it is our attachment to our material possessions that then prefigures a sort of attachment to a necessity for appliances, which then prefigures a home within which to house those appliances, which then prefigures

an entire economy that is, you know, invested in building these single family homes, right? And so you see how we go from laundry to like neoliberal capitalism in the blink of an eye. But the a very small one, but it is an intervention point. And it's one that I think that these utopian societies and experiments sort of force us to consider more seriously than we are want to do when we are focused always on the larger structures of society, rather than starting with these small little intervention points with which we interact every single day. I love that. Yeah, that's such a great way to sort of think about it and flip that narrative on its head, the narrative of we have to change structures and be focusing on these much larger things. And I think this is one of the things I loved about your book too, is just in general, this idea of zooming in, thinking about our personal lives and these

arrangements that we've sort of, you know, either found ourselves in or have been imposed upon us and using those as, yeah, like we mentioned, intervention points or just ways to reimagine and prefigure the worlds that we want to see and this is you know something i've been thinking a lot about lately is sort of the tension it doesn't have to be a tension but like the tension between something that you might just really like vaguely or in a vulgar way describe as like a tension between more Marxist versus anarchist strategies and revolutionary theories and this idea of I think it does very much come out of anarchist thought of prefiguring the world and you see all of these beautiful ways that people are doing mutual aid or forming collectives or in disaster relief, like really doing this like on the ground work

that is, and I think you mentioned this in the book, actually, I had a few quotes that I wanted to pull out here about, you know, muscles, right? Like what you write, both individualism and cooperation are learned traits, like muscles, the more we use them, the stronger they become, right? And then you also write, hope is a muscle that we must use. Some people train their memories. Why not get into the habit of routinely flexing our emotional and cognitive capacities for hope by imagining a better world tomorrow together? And yeah, I would love to close out maybe with those quotes and with you talk about the importance of hope of dreaming for a better world. You call it militant optimism. I've heard the term radical optimism used by the narrator and the actor Peter Coyote.

Another quote that I love that's related to all of this is Chris Hedges. He says, you know, I don't fight fascists because I think I'm going to win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. And, you know, I love that because you're sort of, you're not tethering your action to some concrete outcome, right? You're doing it because what else are you going to do, right? And because as you write, hope and imagining a better future are really healthy and important for us in our minds and our society. So yeah, I'm wondering, yeah, to close out, if you had any reflections on that, any final thoughts that you'd want to share? And yeah. Sure. So I think you just really summed up very well my last chapter where I talk about hope

as an emotional state, which is the opposite of fear and anxiety and hopelessness. But there's also hope as the cognitive capacity, which is the opposite of memory. And very few people think of hope as a cognitive capacity towards the future the way that memory is a cognitive capacity towards the past. towards the future, the way that memory is a cognitive capacity towards the past. So for those of us who are good at memorizing things or remembering things, we have this ability to recall specific incidents or to, you know, rote memorize information that you then can regurgitate onto an exam or whatever. There's a way in which we train ourselves to remember things because it's important

to remember them. Well, it turns out that hope, the ability to imagine alternative futures, and then to come up with concrete plans to achieve those futures and to deal with the obstacles and challenges that we're going to face on the way to those futures, that is also a cognitive capacity, and it atrophies if you don't use it. Just like being in a community, dealing with other people, being surrounded by others and tending to their needs and navigating their needs is a muscle. And many people had that muscle atrophy during the pandemic. You know, those first few months of social interaction outside of our immediate spheres

of whoever we happen to be living with were very awkward for a lot of people. I think some people still haven't gotten over it, right? Because we sort of fell out of the habit of socializing, of interacting with strangers. And so all of these things are muscles. And hope is a muscle. Hope is a cognitive capacity that we can strengthen. And utopianism is a way of strengthening that cognitive capacity for hope. So I want to end with this wonderful quote by the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano. And I have to paraphrase it because I don't have it memorized and I don't have it in front of me. But the gist of it is a just wonderful sentiment. And it's what is utopia? I walk two steps towards it and it walks two steps away, recedes two steps away. I walk another 10 steps towards it and it recedes 10 steps away from me. No matter how far I walk

in the direction of utopia, utopia keeps receding. It keeps moving away from me. So what is the point of utopia? The point is to keep walking. I love that idea that there are social dreams, there are ways of imagining the future, there are ways of being in the world that are never going to be fully instantiated as the way we dream of them, as the way we want them to be. But as long as we're moving in the direction of those dreams, we are doing really important political work. And the worst thing that we can do is to give up on those dreams. So that's what I hope people take away from this book. And that's what I hope people take away from the historical moment that we're living in, was that things may feel really bleak, but it's precisely in this moment of upheaval, of all of the old rules sort of being thrown out

the window, that we have the ability to be creative and adaptive and flexible in the way that humanity has always been. And I really am hopeful that things can get better. I'm not saying they will, because I'm not naive, but I think that they can get better and that they get better by us using collectively our cognitive capacities for hope to make them better. them better. You've been listening to an Upstream Conversation with Kristen Godsey, author of Everyday Utopia, What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Alice Phoebe Liu for the intermission music.

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