One of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there.
Christine JenningsSome people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming
Christine JenningsUtopians don't say, 'The world's corrupt, women make less money, people of color are oppressed at every turn.' You don't list the problems of the world; you describe a world in which those things aren't the case. The critique is implicit and as a result it's kind of a positive critique. You're not listing what's bad, but rather what would be good - you're oriented toward this positive vision.
Christine JenningsAtheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.
Christine JenningsOne of the things that's amazing about reading the private writing of these folks is that they enthusiastically describe things which we have now seen, and which are widely regarded as unappealing. They'll write, "It's going to be beautiful, we're going to have a town of 1,000 stone buildings that are all identical." And we as modern readers think, we've seen that; that's bad Soviet architecture or a public housing project. Nobody fantasizes about living there.
Christine JenningsThe thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.
Christine JenningsThe Jacksonian era is generally talked about in terms of individualism, and the development of free market capitalism, and Victorian prudery. It was shocking to find a parallel history to that - a bunch of Americans with very different priorities. I stumbled on to these people, and then became completely fixated on them. The question that drove me was: how did these reasonable people adopt these extremely unreasonable ideas?
Christine Jennings