The Utopia Experiment (2015) by Dylan Evans
Good Reads meta-data is 275 pages, rated 3.42 by 857 litizens.
Genre: Not-fiction; Subspecies: Therapy.
DNA: British.
Verdict: Utopia?
Tagline: From Rousseauean to Hobbesian.
Author had a mid-life crisis at 40; quit his prestigious, high-paying job, sold his nice cottage, and went bush. Influenced by a steady diet of doomsday and gloomsday reading and viewing, Author decided to see what it would be like to live without civilisation for 18 months.
Though the word ‘utopia’ appears with references to Thomas More and Vasco de Quiroga,* the experiment was explicitly not utopian in that there was no masterplan, ideology, aspiration for perfection, but rather a trial-and-error approach; emphasis on error. Author supposed that a small number of volunteers, about a dozen, would take themselves off to the wilderness and by good will and common sense they would cooperate to survive and prosper. Huh? Yep. How did he get to be 40 if he was that naive? That is what he thought. He financed the project from the cottage sale and slowly recruited others to live rough in the Scottish Highlands. Yep. They would be an autarky and autonomous. As if.
Is it then any wonder that the book opens with the author in a psychiatric hospital reflecting on this experience. Indeed the whole book itself seems to have been a therapeutic exercise. Interspersed with a chronological account of the experiment are discussions with his therapist.
He discovered that Jean-Paul Sartre (p 184) was right about other people. Six, eight, ten people gather and Author proposes that each night they discuss and decide what to do tomorrow. One says that is oppressive. Another asserts spontaneity will suffice without this exhausting organisation. A third says this or that needn’t be done at all. A fourth suggests praying to the Great Spirit. Another is passive-aggressive silent. And so on. After six months of this, Author is losing his grip and running out of money. He wanted to get away from it all only to discover that ‘all’ came along for the ride.
There are several references to Henry Thoreau but none that mention either the income he had from the family business of pencil manufacturing to buy what he needed for his forest living or the fact that while in the woods, in the best tradition of college boys, he sent his laundry home for his mother to do. She also sent lunch to him everyday in that forest deep and dark.
There is no index nor a map, or any illustrations.
*On Quiroga (1475-1565) see Toby Green, Thomas More’s Magician for an account. In short, Father Quiroga tried to institute a modified version of More’s utopia as described in Utopia with natives near Mexico City. That connection probably explains why one edition of More’s Utopia has cover art depicting the Aztec Mexico City. Regrettably I have never been able to find a specimen of this edition, seeing only internet pictures.