Translator: Riaki Poništ Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
My father, before he died,
he told me that he'd spent most of his life
imagining that Scotland could be a utopia.
And he died rather unhappy,
as much as that had not come to pass,
He'd seen two referendums on independence happen within his lifetime;
he was sure that was the key
to his own personal happiness and to freedom.
And I said to him, "Well Dad, you know
the idea of having Scotland as a utopia is a little bit flawed,
as much as a utopia tends to be an island or has historically has been an island."
And he said, "Oh well, we'll just sail away then from England."
And this is very much part of the kind of utopian ethos
to sail away across the ocean and to start again.
I've become very interested in the way that utopia clings to certain myths
and motifs, and rather concerned now
on the 500th anniversary of Sir Thomas More's "Utopia".
We're seeing a bit of a resurgence in utopianism in the world
whether that's eco-utopianism, technological utopianism,
social justice warriors who believe they can make the world a perfect place
and so on.
So I thought I'd bring my dad back to life just to have a conversation with him
about how his utopia could actually work; what it would be it be like.
So first of all, my father insists that we sail away
and we find a place that no one's ever found before.
And this, when you look at the history of utopias,
you see there's a great parallel between an unmapped world
and the rise in utopian beliefs.
For example, in the 17th century, we had the Salzburgers, the Mennonites,
and the Huguenots, all fleeing from persecution across the ocean
to the unmapped spaces of America.
And the whole idea of a world which has not yet fully been discovered
was very prevalent in the Middle Ages, where you see
that there are some extraordinary books brought out in the 1400s.
There was a chap called Sir. John Mandeville,
who created an entirely fake story of his travels across the world.
Some of the characters who inhabited it used their feet for parasols,
had the head of animals et cetera.
This was accepted as fact.
There was also from the 12th to the 17th century,
a Christian missionary exploration
to find Prester John,
the king of an entirely imaginary Christian kingdom,
which was supposed to exist somewhere around India.
No one bothered to check the fact that a man can't live for 500 years
because that was the age he would have been.
The idea of "terra incognita," the blank slate,
is crucial to the utopian ideal.
It's funny because when Scotland actually tried
to make its own little utopia in 1700, it went over the ocean as well.
There was a thing called "The Darien Scheme" of 1700
in which 2000 Scots tried to settle on the Isthmus in Panama,
and only 400 of them came back because they picked the wrong spot;
picked a malarial swamp full of natives and Spaniards.
So that was the end of their utopian project.
The idea of the blank slate, the empty map,
goes way back to the Christians, basically.
The foundational myth of Eden and it flows all the way through
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revelation
up to the hippies, which is where my father
came across this idea that we need an empty space for a blank man
that humankind can be redrawn from an empty page.
There's a phrase by Chairman Mao, which is that the Chinese peasant
is a blank page upon which we draw perfect images, beautiful pictures.
My father's motif for his utopia was that the New Scotland -
the new place of perfection - would be like a newborn child,
an image that comes up again and again in utopianism.
So one of the reasons my father was so interested in utopia
is the promise of "free love" being around the old man and all that.
It's a thing that's been tried again and again and again.
It started off in the 3rd century with a heretical cult called the Adamites,
who believed in nudity, and communal sex, in community of wives;
this means basically that everyone is having sex with everyone else.
They believed that this would get rid of competitiveness
and covetousness and that through congress
with each other's bodies, they could become closer to God.
It was a heresy, they were all wiped out.
Again in the 13th century, it was tried by the Taborite and the Piccards
and the Brethren of the Free Spirit.
The Vatican got wit of it and slaughtered them all.
In the 19th century, there was a very interesting chap
called Charles Fourier who decided that in his utopia,
which was called Phalanstères,
everyone would sleep with each other on a rota.
(Laughter)
You could exchange tokens, now.
You've all got to sleep with each other.
There was one little quirk to this utopia
which was that the token system favored the elderly.
Tokens could be exchanged for menial labor.
So for example, if you wanted to get out of your rota
of cleaning the toilets, you can sleep with Uncle Hector.
(Laughter)
Having said that, he did reserve the job
specifically of cleaning the toilets for children
because he believed that since they couldn't partake
in sexual behaviour that they should do the dirtiest jobs.
The whole idea of defending utopia is a huge problem
because as soon as you've started this wonderful world
in which everyone can have free sex, everyone's going to want to come
have a piece of the action or they are going to see
how utopia is working and just want to invade you.
And part of the problem with this Scottish Darien Scheme
to start with was that they were constantly fending off
invasion left, right, and centre.
So I say to my farther to my father who is a pacifist and a hippie,
"What about protecting yourselves?
You're going to have to have a wall."
My father says, "Yeah, okay, we'll have a wall, fair enough."
I say, "Well, why stop there, why don't you have some cannons?"
And he goes, "Well yes, we want to keep those nassty capitalists away, so yeah,
we'll have to have some cannons as well."
But he doesn't accept of course that he's just created
a military enclosure,
(Laughter)
to have his utopia within.
Then there's the question of work; who will do what in our enclosed utopia?
Now, we could have a set up a bit like that which was proposed
by Karl Marx, which is that you spend the morning as a farmer,
the afternoon as a fisherman,
and the evening you do a bit of arts and crafts,
and you can discuss socialism if you want.
And believe it or not, there are utopian communities even to today
which do try to put that into practice.
In Findhorn, in the north of Scotland,
a place where I have been and stayed, there is a weekly rota;
so you do admin, you do house cleaning, and you do gardening.
Now one of the problems I found with this and a lot of people secretly told me
was that it's really great for demotivation.
Because the people who get really good at something whether it's housecleaning
want to kind of be respected for doing that work.
But of course next week they are onto something
they don't want to do and they're back again.
So it's a kind of anti-specialist system and it's deliberately so,
to discourage people from being better than others.
So everyone ends up kind of mediocre at everything
and no one really gets a reward.
On the subject of rewards, there is of course the issue of money.
And my father is hugely against the idea of money.
He's a fan of John Lennon and the song "Imagine".
Imagine there's no possessions, I wonder if you can, et cetera.
We all had a weep at that in the 1970s.
But really, what would it be like to have a utopia with no money?
There's only really one option,
which is you have to have community of property.
If you look at Sir Thomas More's "Utopia", he states very simply in there
that actually what we'll do is we'll pull all our resources,
we'll put them in a warehouse, anytime anyone needs something -
pots, pans, clothes whatever - you go to the warehouse,
and you'l file your receipt, we all share everything.
And that sounds lovely.
And it's been attempted in a few periods of history for real.
There was a chap called Gerard Winstanley who was the founder of the Diggers.
The Diggers managed to achieve community of property
before they were wiped out.
Again in Munster in 1503, there were the Anabaptists.
And they managed to seize the town, institute the seizure of all wealth,
redistribute it to everyone and this lasted for a whole year.
One of the problems, though, with this system that they instituted
was that they decided as well to slaughter everyone who was wealthy.
There were some allegations as well at the time the wives were treated
as property, the wives of the wealthy.
So it wasn't really a great solution.
It was, however, a solution which was very captivating
to the young Karl Marx, who was inspired
by the Diggers and by the Anabaptists, and the idea of community of property.
Now, when you have community of property, and when you get rid of the money system,
you no longer have a price mechanism
which tells you, "Are we running out of trees?"
Or, "Are we running out of cheese?"
Just because you can't see the prices going up and down.
So, what you have to have is one thing my father despises,
is bureaucracy.
You have to have a lot of paperwork all of a sudden in your utopia
just to work out what you've got.
"Are we running out of something?"
"Are we having a surplus of something?"
When I was in the FIndhorn community in the north of Scotland,
there was an inexplicable surge in the number of beetroot.
(Laughter)
You couldn't get rid of the damn things.
And you had to eat them day-in, day-out, whatever.
It was creating a problem.
There was also a shortage of mayonnaise.
There's nothing that makes beetroot taste better
than a bit of mayonnaise.
Now these are fairly trivial issues,
but you know the whole question of use value comes in here;
how do you manage to get a use value for everything?
How do you calculate the use value of everything in your utopia?
You have to come up with something like a utopian supercomputer.
Those on the Internet:
there's a movement on the Internet called "the Zeitgeist Movement".
It basically expoundss that one day there will be a utopian supercomputer
in which we'll input all the information from the Internet, and all the information
from everyone on our personal needs
and it will calculate the perfect plan for the world,
redistributing everyone's everything and making us all equal.
Millions of followers on YouTube.
I think it's tyrannical, but nonetheless young people seem to like it.
So yes, it really does beg the question
of once you started to calculate the value of everything in utopia;
what is the value of privacy?
What are the value of pots and pans?
Let's say that.
Let's say we've gone down the collectivization route
and we've got rid of the pots and pans, as Chairman Mao did.
If you have your own pots and pans in a collectivized economy,
it means you're actually starting a black market.
Anything that's off the plan with your utopian supercomputer,
your total plan, starts to be trade-able in a black market.
And what you find is the more that communities get planned,
the more the black market grows.
Basically someone's going,
"I'll swap you 45 beetroots
for a go with Uncle Hector."
(Laughter)
Now, when things start to go wrong in utopia,
when you have a problem with the beetroot for example,
or you're starving, or the clothes are not that great,
it would be good to be able to voice your complaints in some way.
But what tends to happen within the history of utopian movements,
in the 19th century for example,
there were 200 utopian communities in North America.
But they get taken over by a kind of group-think;
there are those core supporters of the utopia who just want it to work,
and they just think, "Can we just give it another year?
we'll sort the beetroot problem out by then.
You'll have lettuce, you'll have cheese."
And there are the groups of complainers who have to be watched.
So what happens, as happened with in Mao's China, if you remember this,
people were turned into informants on everyone else within the country.
And it all starts to get a bit authoritarian.
My father is far away now in his sense of what's working as a utopia.
This is made worse by the island mentality that is embedded within the utopian ideal.
In the fact that we've cut yourself off from the rest of the world
the utopia is no longer trading with the rest of the world.
As a result, the people within the utopia no longer have a currency
that they can use to buy things that they need from the outside world.
Take technology for example;
a mobile phone involves, say, up to 12 pieces
that come from different parts of the world and they're all put together.
The utopians have only got the technology that they arrived with.
And it's running down, and it's breaking down,
and they can't complain because they're under surveillance.
Actually, finally my father realizes
that he's going to have to start silencing the people that are complaining.
He doesn't want to kill them, he just wants put them somewhere
where no one one can hear or see them.
(Laughter)
Final test of my father's utopia.
All this free love that was going on is children.
Children really are the test of the whole blank page theory of utopia.
Children fail every test.
The children of utopians are not better or nicer than any other children.
They say, "Me, me, me, me, me."
They grab, they fight, they bully.
And these are all normal, developmental stages.
And the parents of utopians are kind of disgusted and disappointed
with their children.
Very few utopias in the history of utopias have lasted more than one generation.
Also, mothers don't like
when push comes to shove, no matter how utopian they are,
they don't actually take care of other people's children
as well as they take care of their own.
Fathers, maybe they are pretty useless anyway, generally trying to trade things
for beetroot with Uncle Hector.
But the whole thing just falls apart
because people realize that they actually care more for their own kids.
And then that's when the mass-exodus happens from utopia.
It begs the question of what utopia really is.
I think it's a mistake.
It's come about from the evolution of its own thought.
It came about from an unmapped world, and from a bunch of Christian heresies
which filled in the empty spaces in the map.
If you look at some of the utopian thoughts
that are popular today, they all tend to rely upon one Christian heresy;
millenarianism, the idea that the world is going to end soon.
Some disasters is going to happen and after that,
we are going to have utopia.
This was the basis for so many utopian movements,
which were largely religious through the 17th, 18th, and 19th, century.
The end of the world is coming soon,
and after, we're going to be delivered Heaven on Earth.
Think about Marxism in these terms.
You have the final collapse of capitalism, then it leads to universal equality.
The French Revolution; the bloody destruction
of the people in charge, the kings and queens, and then universal peace.
Even the ecological utopia as well is based on this same terror
of the impending apocalypse.
I think back on my father's life, and I think he could have been happier
if he'd known these things about utopia, if he'd known it's really, really tough
to make a utopia work and no one is actually done it yet.
I think he could have been a lot happier if, rather than discounting
everything in his life and everyone around him,
from the light illuminated from a perfect world -
and he found everything wanting - if he'd actually understood
that life is compromise and life is not perfect,
he would have been a lot happier.
So I ask you to erase utopia from your mental map.
And go enjoy your beetroot.
Thank you.
(Applause)