Failed Utopias: Can You Buy an Immaculate World With Dirty Money?

Paradise has borders. There are always some people who are permitted inside its walls, and those who are cast out––for Utopia to exist, there has to be an elsewhere, where the unfortunate reside. The privileged citizens of that perfect world know that there is a bad way to live, and they, the Utopians, have chosen to live better. This conviction that there is a better life, and the means to pursue it, is the purview of a privileged minority. And so often in the enactment of that idealized world, terrible harm befalls those who exist outside (and even, sometimes, inside) its boundaries.

The original title for my new novel was Privilege. Because of the complexity and multivalence of that term, I eventually changed the title––I had no desire (or right) to claim to represent the wide and important connotations of that word in the much more modest concerns of my small novel. In titling it that originally, I was interested in just one(ish) dimension of the term: that of the enormous financial security a person must possess before they are able to even begin considering “how to live.” Not “how to scrape by and feed a family,” but rather, how to live an ethical, just life that will enrich not only oneself but that will ultimately serve to uplift an entire society. The bandwidth required to worry about this sort of thing is not really available to most people, and the economic ability to do anything concrete about it is even rarer.

The characters in my novel are part of the small proportion of people who do have the wiggle room to attempt this experiment––they have safety nets and roofs over their heads. They even have the incredible wealth of land ownership allowing them to tinker with carrots and chickens and solar-heated showers. This type of project, reserved for the lucky (and often undeserving) few has a strong American tradition––is, in fact, the founding mythology of this country: A band of people who desire to live differently, radically differently, leave England and head into the woods of North America to carve out a living for themselves. Self-reliance becomes synonymous with the social experiment that will be America, coupled with the firm belief in the righteousness of the lifestyle. And, of course, ignoring the disastrous consequences of this determined undertaking, overlooking genocide and the total destruction of entire species. There is a cost to remaking the world.

Right-living is plagued by this conflict: the desire to live ethically usually involves a series of more or less evil compromises. People who believe they are doing the right thing will do many wrong things to achieve their goals. On a large scale, this can mean the end of entire civilizations. I became interested in what that looks like on a small scale.

The smallest scale, of course being: one individual. Thoreau, in taking to the woods near Walden Pond, became the emblem of American self-reliance, the quintessential philosopher of a return to nature and the virtues of a small, sustainable life. Though still taught in nearly every high-school in the country, most people dismiss him because of his mother’s cucumber sandwiches––that is, we are now able to recognize the extremities of privilege that permitted him to write this touchstone of American thought. While not quite on a scale with the wholesale murder of tens of thousands of indigenous people, Walden has come to represent the idea that there is a price to bucking society. Living outside the borders of traditional society typically involves some kind of exploitation.

Nowhere does this become more apparent than in the small American communities that have sought a reworking of the social order. While writing We Went to the Woods, I researched several intentional communities in the US, though I focused particularly on the Oneida Community in Upstate New York. A small Utopian commune that blossomed and waned during the middle of the 19th century, Oneida was a perfectionist community that believed in shared labor, collective discussion and (a version of) sexual equality. And like many intentional communities, the question of sex became the largest and ultimately most divisive issue for these Utopians.

Oneidans practiced “complex marriage;” the term “free love” is apocryphally attributed to the founder of the Oneida community, John Humphrey Noyes. While ostensibly this served to undermine the patriarchal system of traditional marriage by allowing both women and men to choose their own sexual partners, it should come as no surprise that this isn’t entirely how it worked out. Initially a satisfactory arrangement wherein members chose their partners, soon these choices were being determined by a committee of elders, headed up by the male (and aging) founder of the community. I’m sure you can guess who had the largest number of young, attractive wives under this system.

Indeed, these sexual practices proved to be the downfall of the entire community. Dissatisfaction and infighting splintered the group internally, while the society outside of Oneida, ordinary civilians living in Hamilton, NY, agitated to have Noyes arrested for rape. After he fled the country, the Oneida community gradually disbanded, until it reincorporated as a silver manufacturing company, Oneida Limited.

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I visited the Oneida Community Mansion on a chilly spring day in April of 2017. I’d been reading about the community and its histories for months in the luxurious Cornell libraries, looking down on the city of Ithaca. This Ivy League perch was the only place I was able to locate out-of-print copies of diaries of community members, diaries which chronicled excitement, hard work, and usually heart break. I wanted to go in person to the site of the community and spend a night in the house, get a feel for the scale of their enterprise. And of course, see if the place was haunted.

Visitors to the Mansion can take a free tour, a thorough and fascinating stroll through the estate, often narrated by descendants of the original members of the community. Though I knew a lot of the historical background, it was the apocryphal stories of daily life I craved. The tour did not disappoint: I got to hear tales about the elaborate productions of Shakespeare put on in the auditorium, the menu at communal dinners (strawberries and cream!), and, memorably, of a sinister death and the actual existence of an honest-to-god headless corpse buried somewhere on the grounds.

The house is fancy. The main building is a nearly 100,000-square foot late Victorian mansion, and it is comfortably furnished with many of its original pieces. It’s current-day operation as a historical site-cum-hotel reinforces the sense of pleasurable remove one feels as soon as one pulls up the long driveway—it embodies the privilege of paying to find respite from the outside world. The mansion was constructed using donations contributed by its early members, most of whom had some personal wealth and enough education to engage with the founders’ perfectionist goals—they committed their significant resources to the collective project and were guaranteed a place in the community. The rest of the money came from the proceeds of the community’s earliest success in business: animal traps.

Much of the seed money for the Oneida community came from high-quality steel animal traps that caught animals from the size of rabbits to bears and held them captive until they either froze to death or were slaughtered. Production of these traps was a niche market, and Oneida was able to generate a great deal of their capital from the high demand of the 19th century, selling their traps overseas as well as domestically.

Eventually the community transitioned towards making spoons, a much less morally ambiguous enterprise that capitalized, ironically, on the idea of the nuclear family. But, it is maybe a larger irony that a non-violent, often vegetarian community owes their financial success to a fantastically cruel method of hunting, a method they exploited to great profit even while claiming not to believe in capitalism or private property.

Oneida made a good attempt—of the many Utopian communities I looked at, Oneida had a pretty good innings, and managed to achieve a number of its goals, even while ultimately falling short. Even as it collapsed, the personal wealth of the original members was protected—incorporating as a silver company allowed the community to redistribute earlier contributions in the form of shares, ensuring that few were left destitute. Still, unsurprisingly, male privilege won out as the community transitioned back to a traditional society—women, especially those who had born children out of wedlock, found themselves unwed mothers, unable to hold property or maintain businesses they had begun. Those who weren’t able to remarry fell through the cracks, and died poverty-stricken and shunned.

No matter which example of Utopia I looked at, there seemed to be a simple reality: Someone pays for the privilege of learning how to live. In writing We Went to the Woods, I wanted to explore how humans who are invested in moral and political rightness find themselves doing evil—to each other and to those outside the group. Having made a decision to live ethically, how do people nevertheless justify bad behavior? What sorts of conversations happen as people begin to rationalize their compromises? And, ultimately, problematically: is there any other way to change the world?

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Caite Dolan-Leach’s novel We Went to the Woods is out now from Random House.