Keeping the Faith Without a Religion by Roger Housden

Author:Roger Housden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sounds True

6

Trust the Imperfection

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.

ANTONIO MACHADO,

FROM “LAST NIGHT AS I WAS SLEEPING”

It was Sir Thomas More who first popularized the term Utopia, in his book of that name, published in 1516. But although the word has been commonly used for at least five hundred years, few people today realize that the original Greek comprises U, meaning “not,” and topia, meaning “a place,” which is to say that the ideal place or situation does not and cannot ever exist. Even so, as individuals and as societies, we continue as ever to think that the perfect way of life does exist somewhere and that one day our lives will have everything in place and the heavenly city will shine here on Earth, at least in our little corner, if not everywhere else.

We might wonder then why it is that so many utopian movements have ended not only in tragedy, but also in the very opposite of their lofty ideals. It is not only religious movements that descend into fanaticism in order to spread their own version of a perfect world for everyone. The French and Russian revolutions, equally horrific, were both secular, antireligious tides. The American invasion of Iraq may serve as a more recent example of a utopian ideal gone wrong. Inspired by the neoconservative conviction that American democracy is the ideal social model for everyone, it resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and no democracy at all, American or otherwise.

You might say that political idealism is different; that it always involves individuals driven by insatiable power needs who will use any means to justify their ends. But the same tendency toward entropy—the dispersion and eventual disintegration of what were originally fine and even noble ideals and aspirations—can happen in the most apparently benign of situations. Think of Brook Farm, the utopian community founded in the 1840s in Massachusetts. It drew its inspiration from the Transcendentalist movement, whose leading lights were Emerson and Thoreau. The writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of its founding members. Everyone, women and men, was paid equally for their labors on the farm and in their school. The motive was to have a balance of labor and leisure that enabled all members to work together for the benefit of the greater community—noble ideals indeed. But it took no more than five or six years and a bad fire to set the members against each other and for the community to disintegrate. The same pattern happened over and over in the spiritual and religious communities that mushroomed in the 1960s.

The film Pleasantville (1998) tackles this theme in a sobering and sometimes chilling way. A 1950s community where everyone is deliberately pleasant, where there is no crime and the fire department’s only job is to rescue cats from trees, seems like the perfect place to live. But it all starts to disintegrate when a girl breaks ranks and has sex before marriage. The act unleashes not only sexual feelings,

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