Early on in Richard Bean’s Pitcairn, Ned Young surveys the work of his fellow Bounty mutineer William Brown, who has been appointed the island’s ‘gardener’. Upon finding Brown, Young exclaims: “Look at this! William, you have turned the Garden of Eden into… Norwich.”
It’s a funny line, and seemingly glib, but neatly encapsulates the provinciality of even our grandest ideals. Whether it’s British hedgerows or greed and desire, it can be hard to shake off the things we believe we have left behind – however far we travel.
But yet we keep searching for ‘utopia’ – a fairer, usually simpler place, free from the failings of whichever society has let us down. And throughout history, this quest has blended the literal with the metaphorical. When Bean has one character marvelling that “we find ourselves at the beginning of time,” he’s tapping into a longstanding tradition of locating paradise abroad.
From the earliest travel reports to Thomas More’s hugely influential book of 1516, in which Utopia is an island, our notions of a better place have been anchored to the idea that it is somewhere else. Oscar Wilde once wrote that “a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.”
Utopia as a place carved out far from civilisation is a pervasive idea throughout art and literature, glimpsed in everything from The Swiss Family Robinson to Alex Garland’s The Beach. It’s usually an unspoilt space – like somewhere from before The Fall, whether that’s the Garden of Eden or pre-capitalism. It’s about wiping the slate clean and starting again by getting back to nature.
Equating moral goodness with a return to life in a ‘state of nature’ gained huge traction in the eighteenth century. It was popularised by the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who argued that the advent of modern society, with its focus on private ownership and self-advancement, had destroyed the natural bonds of community that provide true freedom.
But what we laud as a ‘state of nature’ is often just a sublimated version of our own values and principles disguised by pretty foliage. Bean makes this point with black humour in Pitcairn. Grand talk of “Man and Woman in a natural state,” living “without prejudices” and “knowing no other god but love”, is followed by utter incredulity at the notion that the island’s females might receive equal property rights.
Religion has been central to real-life attempts to build new societies. It’s pivotal to the narrative of modern-day Pitcairn’s history and helped to propel The Mayflower into the New World more than a century before the mutiny on The Bounty. But utopia-like origin myths tend to sweep tricky truths beneath the carpet – for every celebratory Pilgrim Fathers story there are displaced Native Americans.
In Bean’s take on Pitcairn, religion is a tool to be exploited. Talk of the will of God is used to subjugate others on the island after a revolt. In this sense, utopia and a repressive, Orwellian 1984-style dystopia are not separate states – the latter is the dark side of the coin when an ideology is threatened or someone’s survival is at stake. When disease or hunger strike, the rhetoric of harmony and equality tends to disappear.
In the end, it’s all relative, however you dress it up. But the urge to create utopia is enduring. People continue to cleave to the idea that things will be better if they can recreate an imagined ‘start’ or an earlier time. This desire is particularly acute when times are tough – when we feel that an existing society has let us down, whether financially, politically or culturally.
In the increasingly secular western world of the past century, religion as the driving force for returning to an idealised origin point has been translated into nostalgia for a past in which everyone left their doors unlocked and neighbours helped each other out. One of the most literal manifestations of this is Celebration, the purpose-built town developed by the Walt Disney Company – pure Americana with white picket fences, piped music and even artificial snow-falls.
Barring one murder, Celebration has been praised for its safety. But many have found this picture-perfect idyll – which opened its gates in 1996 – unsettling. Its neatness and order seem inimical to real life. And the homogeneity of such master-planned communities, with their manifestoes and rules, can feel exclusionary. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2010 census revealed that 91% of Celebration’s population was white.
A very different kind of utopia-building was Taylor Camp, on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Started in 1969 by 13 hippies on land given to them by the brother of actress Elizabeth Taylor, it grew into a community that lasted for eight years. As detailed in John Wehrheim’s absorbing eponymous photographic history of the camp, this complex of treehouses was filled by those who had rejected mainstream society’s values.
Now, it would be easy to scoff at Taylor Camp’s clothes-optional, flower-power set-up. The ‘dippy-hippy’ stereotype has had decades to take root. But the camp was a response to a time of huge social upheaval, as the fight for civil rights intensified and America reeled from the Vietnam War and then Watergate. It offered both a refuge and an alternative way of life to a deeply disillusioned younger generation.
Apart from a few troublemakers, life in Taylor Camp – which deliberately had no designated ‘leader’ – seems largely to have been harmonious. But, nevertheless, writes Wehrheim, it was seen by the indigenous islanders as a disruption of their lives. However well-intentioned they might have been, people weren’t flooding into a conveniently deserted paradise. Kauai had its own customs and practices. And Taylor Camp only lasted as long as it did because of a resourceful local lawyer. For the majority of its existence, he succeeded in fending off attempts by the state Attorney General’s office to evict the inhabitants. When the government finally won, state employees shipped out the remaining residents and torched the site. Since then, Kauai has become a tourist hotspot. There’s a park where the camp used to be.
Real-life Utopias are fragile – vulnerable to the same vagaries of human nature and commercial imperatives as anything else. Even in its best years, Taylor Camp couldn’t entirely shut out the rest of the world. The local shop accepted government food stamps; and while some campers owned businesses, others lived on state welfare. Cutting all ties with whichever society we are trying to leave behind is no easy task.
That was certainly the lesson of Castaway, the BBC’s reality TV social experiment from 2000. The programme followed a group of men, women and children as they attempted to establish a self-sufficient, sustainable community on an isolated Scottish island. It was a classic example of the back-to-basics impulse; another attempt to return to a ‘truer’ state of nature.
But the problems that beset the group showed how enmeshed in the modern world they still were. A flu outbreak saw some shipped off the island, while a nearby case of meningitis prompted the programme-makers to supply everyone with antibiotics. And although the volunteers may have fallen short of actually killing each other, there is kinship between their jealousies, rivalries and cliques and the tensions of the settlers in Pitcairn.
If there is a connecting thread throughout all of this, it is people’s tendency to treat the spaces in which they seek to carve out their utopias as little more than reflections of their dreams and ideals, rather than real places. Such ignorance can lead to disaster. Several of Pitcairn’s early settlers were wiped out by disease, as were many Pilgrim Fathers before them. Countless grand social schemes have come crashing to the ground because of a fundamental lack of knowledge.
A recent case in point is the complete failure of Fordlândia, a now-abandoned industrial town erected deep in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 by the industrialist Henry Ford, to secure a source of rubber for Ford Motor Company. His utopian vision of creating a model community in the jungles of Brazil quickly fell apart, as disgruntled native workers clashed with – and eventually revolted against – the US-style management of the factory, food and accommodation.
On top of this, Ford’s managers didn’t understand the complex tropical ecosystem of the Amazon. Rubber trees that had been widely