Undertaking Utopia

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Kristen R. Ghodsee: The malleability of the future depends on people being able to imagine a future that is different from the present because the future, by necessity, will be different from the present. Sometimes the uncertainty makes us cling to the status quo.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network.

And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we look at, you got it. What Could Go Right? That doesn’t mean we don’t look at what is going wrong. It means that we look at all the things going on in the world from science to culture, to politics, to religion, to you name it, with an eye toward how are things going better than we think, or who is doing the daily work to make sure that things go better than we think.

And one of the conceits of all of this is that if we give into our fears that the future is doomed because our present is leading inexorably downward, we have a higher chance of making the future of our fears a reality and a much, much lower chance of making the future of our dreams and hopes a reality.

And today we’re going to talk to someone who’s actually looked at the history of human beings imagining a better world and trying to create one right now. Utopian communities, utopian dreams, dreams of something really, really different and distinct from the societies that we find ourselves in. So, Emma, please introduce our guest today.

Emma Varvaloucas: All right. So today we are talking with Kristen Ghodsee. She is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where she’s the chair of Russian and East European studies. She’s the author of 12 books. You might have heard of her 2018 one, which was delightfully titled, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and Other Arguments for Economic Independence.

But as Zachary mentioned, we’re going to talk to her about her latest book today, which is called Everyday Utopia: What 2, 000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life.

So let us find out.

Zachary Karabell: Kristen Ghodsee, it is such a pleasure to have you on What Could Go Right? You have a delightfully eclectic resume, and have done as an academic what I thought I could do as an academic and was, never had the vision or ability to execute on.

So you’ve managed to both teach and get tenure in one area and then allow your imagination and skills and passions to, if not run wild, then at least expand in multiple directions beyond your specific academic specialty, which I like, even though I think a lot of academics. are probably like, what?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Oh yeah, stay in your lane, Ghodsee, stay in your lane.

Zachary Karabell: I am, I’m in my lane.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: My lane just is.

Emma Varvaloucas: My multi lane lane.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Multi lane lane, yeah, I like to, I like to feel, I think it’s partially because I come from an interdisciplinary background. And so for me, If you’re studying humanity, which is really kind of the subject of my academic interest and has been for a really long time, that’s history, that’s anthropology, that’s gender studies, that’s archaeology, sometimes evolutionary biology, it’s just all over the place.

And so if you really want to understand what motivates human behavior and what motivates social change over time, you have to have a more capitious view of what we need to study. And I think I’ve just been really fortunate that I’ve been at the kinds of institutions that appreciate my somewhat unconventional academic path and work.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, I was trying to figure this out and I could, I could see a version of a through line going from Eastern European, Russian studies to the question of like sex and feminism and what life is like, particularly for women in a socialist system, to that aspect of socialism and communism that was always utopian, meaning trying to create a different world than the world that we live in.

So I, I, I discern some gossamer through line in there. Is that, I mean, is that, am I reading into it or is that, does that actually exist in there?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Look, I remember the Cold War really well in the eighties and the sort of doom and gloom and pessimism and fear of, what they called at that time, total nuclear annihilate, you know, mutually assured destruction mad. This idea that both superpowers had all of these nuclear weapons pointed at each other. And as Carl Sagan, I think very famously described it, it’s like two guys standing knee deep in gasoline and one guy has three matches and the other guy has four or whatever. I was really a product of that time.

And then, sort of, one day in November 1989, the Cold War just ended, and I happened to be in Europe at the time, and it just completely changed my world. It completely rocked my sense of mental stability. I was pretty young, but I had this kind of abiding fear of the Cold War, abiding fear of, the end of the planet, not so dissimilar from young people today with climate change, and then everything just got better briefly, at least. And I spent that summer in 1990 in Eastern Europe, traveling around feeling the euphoria and the excitement of the end of the Cold War.

And we were talking back then about this thing called the peace dividend. All the money that had once been spent on Cold War competition was now going to be used for education and healthcare and lots of good things. And that’s not how it worked out, but I think that that inspired me to be the kind of person that is interested in this question of radical historical contingency.

And if there’s anything about really existing state socialism in Eastern Europe in the 20th century, it’s the radical historical contingency that people felt both at the beginning of that experiment and quite frankly, at the end. And we in the West really forget the importance of this radical historical contingency.

Emma Varvaloucas: So since we jumped back to the 80s just then, this brings me to a question I wanted to ask you particularly about feminism. So we’re going to talk to you about your latest book, which is Everyday Utopia. And I don’t think anyone would say that we’re living like in a feminist utopia on earth, right?

However, when I do read accounts, or even the account that you talk about in your book, of people growing up in the 70s and 80s, and I could go back prior to that, right, I, so as someone born in 1990, I do look back on those accounts and I’m like, Ooh, like, God, I’m so thankful to be born in 1990. And I imagine, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are going to feel similarly about being born in 2000, 2010.

So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about this idea that feminists in the past, 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, would actually look at our present now and say like, okay, it’s maybe not perfect, maybe not a utopia, but it’s a kind of utopia.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Oh, absolutely. I mean, and we can push, you know, feminism. I mean, in the United States, really, it only goes back to the 20s. But if we’re looking at like the Saint-Simonians and in France after the French revolution, they were advocating for things like divorce. They were advocating for things like women being able to keep their children after divorce, they were advocating for things like using their last names. All of the crazy utopian dreams of the Saint-Simonian feminists are just reality today.

They’re such a reality that we don’t even think of them as once having been utopian demands. Similarly, in the late 19th century, people like Clara Zetkin were really arguing for what we would now call childcare or daycare centers. And her request for having a place where working women could go to drop off their children during the day was also similarly considered a utopian demand.

And yet, you know, I think millions of Americans drop their children off at daycare and they don’t think that they’re participating in a utopian experiment.

Emma Varvaloucas: Definitely not.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Definitely not, right? I mean, anybody who sends their child to a public school is also very much the, you know, beneficiary of utopian dreaming.

I mean, the idea of public education at public expense for all children in public schools, let’s not forget was the 10th point on the Communist Manifesto in 1848. And people said, that’s total craziness. Why would anyone pay to educate other people’s children? And yet again, we participate in these institutions, which are the product of utopian, previous generations of utopian thinkers.

And so definitely there is no doubt in my mind that feminists in particular, women’s activists, have benefited from this long legacy of women making demands. And some of those demands were considered absolutely outrageous at the time that they made them. But in 2024, They’re just a normal part of our lives.

We completely take it for granted. And so yes, I definitely believe that it’s so much better to have been born in 1990 than it is to have been born in 1970 or 1950 or 1920. And you can just keep going back. There is this sort of forward progression because of this wonderful historical contingency and people, it’s people, it’s ordinary men and women who are actually able to change the future, who are able to make demands of their societies that initially get rejected and they persist and then things change.

And then when they change, we forget that those demands were ever considered crazy in the first place.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah, I mean, in our contemporary climate, them’s fighting words.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: I know.

Zachary Karabell: Emma and I have remarked regularly over the past three to four years, the degree to which sentiments expressed as you just have are either embraced warmly with a, Uh, I so want to hear that, or reacted to very angrily, like, What are you talking about? Look at all this problematic in the world.

And, you know, we, we did a couple of earlier podcasts, one with Rachel Shteir, who wrote a really interesting biography of Betty Friedan, and one with Drew Gilpin Faust, who was the president of Harvard University in its simpler days. And, you know, both, of course, were marked very much as you just did on this sort of pathway in the 20th century, in particular, that would have just been inconceivable.

I mean, it was conceivable to the Saint-Simonians as a utopia. It wasn’t conceivable as a real world reality. But, and let’s talk a little now about the Utopia book, because part of the problem, of course, is that another thing we’ve remarked on a lot on this show and the work that we do at The Progress Network is human beings just reset to their current level as normal.

So they, they, they treat as normative, not only what the current reality is, but kind of like the best version of the current reality. So, which is, I guess, both a problem and maybe in your view, because one of your points about utopia, right, is that it’s a necessary ingredient in change. The very fact of reaching for something that is other and better that isn’t in our current world is part of what gets us there.

So how do you view the present in light of that fuel. I mean, are we, are we running on fumes? Is it more present than we think?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: I think it’s much more present than we think because we, as you often say on The Progress Network, you know, we are surrounded by this sort of doom and gloom in the news. And we are attracted to negative stories.

I mean, we are fed them. We are taught in schools, if you grew up in the United States or the UK, you read books like Lord of the Flies, you get 1984, Animal Farm, you sometimes get Brave New World, even younger kids are reading things like The Giver by Lois Lowry. These are all dystopian books. We are fed, force fed, I would say, a steady diet of dystopianism from a very young age in this country, and I would argue also in the UK.

Other countries aren’t as negative with their kids as we are. And I do think that that steady diet of dystopianism is a sort of form of social engineering to make sure that we don’t dream too radically. And yet there are always dreamers. And from an evolutionary anthropological point of view, we are, as a species, the children of dreamers and, and, and people who had hope for the future, people who propelled themselves into the future.

You know, one of my favorite things to kind of grapple with and talk about with people is debates about the origins of bipedalism, which is this.

Emma Varvaloucas: I wasn’t expecting that.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Yeah. Yeah. I have like weird conversations with people, but. Bipedalism is one of those things that like scientists just get really, I mean, in this field anyway, anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, they get really kind of uptight about like, was bipedalism an adaption to savanna life, like the savanna hypothesis, or there’s more recent evidence by the study of chimpanzees, like, did we learn to walk on two feet in the trees? And, you know, because we were reaching for higher branches to get fruit.

This is, and there’s like all sorts of new evidence. People are looking at like CT scans of hip joints and thumbs and like, why did we start walking on two feet?

But what that debate often misses is that we came down from the trees, you know, somewhere between 4. 2 and 3. 5 million years ago, humanity or our predecessors, they came down from the trees and we don’t really know why. That’s why bipedalism is such an interesting question because it’s like, did we become bipedal afterwards or were we bipedal and then that facilitated it?

But to answer this question about like the positives, the people that first came down from the trees or our ancestors, you know, the, the beings, they were probably considered crazy utopians, right? They were like the floor cult. You know, they were the ones who were living on the floor of the forest and everybody was like, Oh, stay away from those people. They’re crazy. They left the safety of the trees and they’re now on the floor of the forest.

You know, and then at some other point, the people on the floor of the forest said, Hey, like look at that grass over there. I wonder what’s over going on in the grass. Let’s, let’s go check out the grass. And then there were people who were living in the grass and, and the people on the floor were like, look at those crazy people over there. They’re like living in the grass, right?

And on ad infinitum, right? The idea is that there is an evolutionary advantage to hope. It, it, it, it moves us forward. And you’re absolutely right, Zachary. I think thems are, them are fighting words. Like people don’t want to hear that. People think of optimism, people think of utopianism, people think of hope as naïve, as you’ve said, and I think that that’s such an interesting way of sort of browbeating people out of something that is just a natural occurring facet of the human mind and of human experience.

It’s essential for us, and we all do have it. You know, we, we plod on, on some level, although it’s getting harder. I was just looking at a Gallup survey and surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation. This is very specific to the United States, but. You know, according to Gallup in 2023, something like 29 percent of Americans have been suffered, have suffered from depression in their lifetimes. And I think something like 17. 9 percent are currently being treated for depression.

That’s a really high level of depression. And the Kaiser Family Foundation looked at census data from 2020, I believe, and they also found something like 30 percent of Americans were self reporting depression in 2020, which is understandable because of the pandemic. But they found that 50 percent of people between the age of 18 and 24 were reporting depression.

So one of the things about depression is this lack of hope. So I do think that we’re in a moment where people are losing the possibility of potentially shaping the future to be better or to even just be different.

Let’s put aside the question of better or worse, and just think about different. So, so they’re like these two forces. There’s this one force, which is this sort of natural proclivity towards hope and optimism and utopianism and agency, like I can change the future. and then this larger societal problem that we’re struggling with, which is depression and anxiety and people losing faith in the future.

And I’m a college professor. I see it with my students all the time. They’re just immobilized by fear and, and anxiety about what’s coming down the pike at them.

Emma Varvaloucas: Being someone who’s like very much so in the club of optimists, like, I agree with everything that you just said. And yet at the same time, I found when I was reading your book, which is this history of like all kinds of different alternative living arrangements, different ways of organizing the family, raising kids, things like that. Like, I really wanted to nitpick, like I really wanted to find things wrong with these like communes and different communities that have been set up over the years in different places. And I was like, why are you doing that? Like what? What is this like nitpicking thing that I find coming out from myself?

Which I think definitely speaks to what you just said. I would love to, for people to get a taste of the book in that respect, like the kinds of examples that you give to give people an idea of like, Hey, there are some alternative ideas, alternative arrangements out there that we could consider and that other people have tried. And here are some of them.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: This is a pandemic book in many ways. And I was reflecting in those early months of the pandemic on the ways in which ordinary people in the United States, no matter what their political proclivities, were rushing out to create pandemic pods. And to share childcaring and homeschooling responsibilities with their neighbors, with their friends, with colleagues, with comrades, whatever.

And also the, the interesting examples of mutual aid societies, mutual aid networks that started to appear in the early pandemic. Some of these were explicitly political, but some of them were just organized by churches and community organizations because people realized that they needed to help each other.

And so I was like, That’s so interesting. Yes, there were federal programs that were put in place to help people, but there was this incredible sense of bottom up activism and commitment to kind of community support. So in my neighborhood, for instance, we had some elderly neighbors who were afraid to go to the grocery store. And so people were like organizing, making sure that those people had groceries.

It was a small thing, and yet it was really, really important for those people who couldn’t otherwise go to the grocery store. So the target of the book is, in terms of an intellectual target, it is the idea that is very hegemonic in the United States, and I would say more broadly in the global north, although it is being chipped away at in different places for different reasons, that the appropriate container for child rearing is a sort of romantic couple that provides relatively exclusive bi parental care for their own biological children, sometimes adopted, but usually the preference is for biological children, in a single family home surrounded by their privately owned stuff.

And one of the things that I, I try to do in the book is I take each part of that and I, I sort of explain the history of where it came from and how it’s somewhat at odds from our historical and evolutionary, anthropological flexibility, adaptability, and creativity around these ideas. And I show contemporary communities or historical communities that have completely done it differently.

And why those experiments either failed or succeeded for a long time and then kind of petered out, and what are the communities in the world today? And so, yes, I spend a lot of time looking at intentional communities. I look at co housing. I look at co living. I look at tri parenting or multi parenting. I look at kibbutzim.

So, you know, certain kinds of experience, but I also spend a lot of time talking about cenobitic monastic communities. So groups of men or women who live celibate lives, but still live together in community. I look at the Bruderhof, which is a kind of group of Christian pacifists that collectively own their property.

So I’m looking at lots of different examples of people, millions of people around the world today that are living their lives in ways that we would consider, we meaning sort of like mainstream normie society, completely utopian, completely outside of what is considered normal, exactly like, you know, our relatives looking down at the people hanging out on the floor of the forest saying, look at those weird floor dwelling people, right? Don’t go talk to them. They’re strange.

We have that same view of people who are living in intentional communities or eco villages. I spend a lot of time talking about eco villages because I think eco villages are a really good example of this.

So the book is an attempt to open people’s minds to these alternative ways of living. And because the book deals with things like family and dwelling and property and community, I think that a lot of people have the same reaction that you do, which is they want to like, be like, No, this can’t happen. This isn’t normal. I feel uncomfortable with this. Please, please, please just like, let me go back to the way things were.

And that’s totally okay. I, I’m, I’m very open minded and generous with people who resist me. I think that’s fine. The point is to show people that human beings are very creative, adaptable, and flexible. And we have survived as a species because we are creative, adaptable, and flexible. And that’s not only in terms of our external political systems and our external economic arrangements.

It’s also in our private lives.

Emma Varvaloucas: Having met people that grew up in, for lack of a better term, some kind of intentional living community, they like, really contribute to society. They are wonderful people up and down. And then other people you meet that grew up in those places, I’m like, you’re, you’re kind of weird.

Like they don’t seem to, I’m thinking of two specific people in my head right now and it’s hard to put your finger on why, but it’s just, you just feel that they’re odd.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: They probably are. I mean, I’m not, they are, you have to be different, right? You really do if you think about that, right? I mean, anyone, and we’re uncomfortable around those people for a reason. Because they challenge us to, to reflect on our own oddness that is acceptable, right? Like, because we’re all individuals and we’re all unique and we’re all different, and yet certain kinds of oddness are acceptable in society. And other kinds of oddness are like weird and we want to marginalize them.

Here’s a great example, of the idea of celibacy. So, you know, there is a movement of people who are choosing asexuality. And, you know, there’s lots of discussion about whether, like what the differences are. And there are really important differences between people who choose celibacy and people who identify as asexual. But, but people who choose to be not in romantic relationships, they get coded very differently if they’re a member of official religious order.

Like, you don’t think it’s weird that a nun doesn’t have a boyfriend, right? But you’re like, made an aunt who, for whatever reason, chose to not get married. She’s a spinster or, you know, she’s odd, right?

J.D. Vance, one of my favorite, you know, things recently is the childless cat lady thing. Because he’s, he’s making an argument that people who are childless cat ladies or childless people, because he includes like Buttigieg in that, are not fit to govern, and yet he is a Catholic, and you know, the entirety of the Catholic hierarchy are a bunch of childless rogue brothers as far as I’m concerned, right? So, and there are nuns who teach in school who never had children.

And so, again, it’s about social coding. And we, we don’t, as humans, we are suspicious of people who are not like us. That’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I think we need to call attention to that because sometimes the people who are different from us, especially people who are doing things differently, we could learn from them and they might be the very people who are to be able to pull us into the future, to show us pathways into this historical, the malleability of the future depends on people being able to imagine a future that is different from the present because the future by necessity will be different from the present. And sometimes the frightening nature of that future, the uncertainty makes us cling to the status quo. We have this thing called status quo bias, but in fact, at the end of the day, we know that things change, and we also know that human beings have survived lots of radical changes.

And it’s because I believe that we have this sort of utopian, persistent utopian 1 percent is what I call them. The kind of people on the margins who, as you said, they’re kind of weird and they are, and that’s okay. We need the weirdos. We need the dreamers, right? There was that. I don’t know if you guys remember this, but.

Zachary Karabell: The famous Apple, Apple commercial II.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Exactly. The Apple computer commercial, Steve, it was narrated by Steve Jobs, right? The crazy ones, the, you know, square pegs in the round holes. He, he’s showing these images, black and white images of Gandhi and Martin Luther King and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, right?

And he’s saying, these are the people that move society forward. These are the dreamers. These are the people that actually innovate. And a lot of people love that commercial just because it was a good commercial. But it’s like, I sort of want to say, why do we, why do we accept that narrative for the selling of Apple products, but we don’t accept that narrative for building a better future for ourselves?

Zachary Karabell: It was also a cultural moment and it harkens back. I mean, you also have Shakespeare, Lovers, Mad Men, and Dreamers. So I grew up around the same time you did, inspired by some of the same cultural tropes, you know, Carl Sagan, and Star Trek as this great vision of a endless, bountiful future.

And I don’t know your particular background. I mean, I actually was intentional community adjacent in the seventies growing up. Something called the Center for the Living Force, which was created by a Hungarian mystic who channeled an ancient spirit guide, conveniently named The Guide, who then married a Venezuelan psychiatrist in the lineage of Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich, and they formed together to create this thing called The Pathwork, based on these lectures, a lot of therapists, a whole community in Phoenician New York, another one outside of Washington, DC.

It also became this place where kind of everybody in intentional community land in the 70s passed through and did workshops from like rebirthing and breathwork and Muktananda and whoever was around was around. And it was great being a teenager in that, right? Because everything was acceptable. You could kind of, there was no shame in trying to be whoever you were going to be.

But, apropos Emma’s point, it’s also true that even at the time it was, those communities were populated by an inordinate number of people who were just chronically lost. And I’m not saying that scornfully. I’m just saying that observationally, that their desire to find something was far beyond their capacity to find anything.

And these were not always particularly happy, maybe happy is not the right word, right? I mean, I’m not sure that the human condition is one of stasis and happiness often has a static quality to it, but they were troubled. A lot of these communities were troubled and self consuming. And I think in your book, you know, one of the things that is evidently true about a lot of these utopian experiments is that they they have kind of effloresce and then they disintegrate unless they can build much more rigid institutions like the Catholic Church or like where you start having a very rule based thing which is kind of the antithesis of the utopia you’re talking about.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Exactly.

Zachary Karabell: So I don’t know like i i mean i totally 110 percent agree with the, without that utopian impulse, we’re left with spinning our own wheels, often in darkness.

But, it is also true that that utopian impulse does tend to come up against the realities of both individual human fears and limitations, and collective rigidity. So I’m just wondering, you know, is there a way around that?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: I don’t think there’s an easy way around that. Absolutely not. I mean, that is the reality of this impulse that we have, right?

And I do think that people who have this impulse, you know, they suffer sometimes for it, which is why people avoid that impulse in themselves or if they have that impulse, they try to suppress it, because first of all, there’s, you know, the sort of societal derision that you’re going to face for thinking differently.

And again, I, you know, I like to use the example of Christianity because if you go back and you read the Bible and you really think about the Pre 325 Christians. So, these are Christians before what people in the Catholic Church would call the Peace of Constantine, where Christianity becomes, like you said, a state religion and there’s rules associated with it in a hierarchy.

The Pre 325 Christians are a bunch of crazy hippies, right? You know, Acts 2 and 4, they’re all living together in a commune, sharing their community, their property in common. There’s all sorts of really interesting things going on in the Bible that, that obviously the Romans were, you know, persecuting these communities very heavily. That’s part of the story of Christianity.

And yet, when we think about the fact that Christianity survived, I mean, there are like 1. 4 million Catholics alone in the world today. And I think Christians, it’s much higher than that. It’s more than 2 billion, right? So I don’t want to make it sound like, oh yeah, it’s so easy and great to be a utopian because it’s not. It never has been. I don’t think it ever will be.

But I do think it’s essential for humanity to respect and, and, and understand this utopian impulse and not automatically shut it down or nitpick it to death because it’s so radically different from what we think of as the kind of stable status quo. It’s this whole problem of the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, right?

People might have a really good idea about the future. They might have a really powerful vision for how things could be different, but it’s unknown and it’s unknowable. And so they will, they will stay, they, you know, most of us are the people who stayed in the trees. Let’s face it. Most of us are the people who cling to the comforts of ordinary, thinking the, the comforts of what we might call normie society, not necessarily because we like them, but because they’re familiar to us.

And if they’re familiar to us and we accept them as part of our world, then nobody’s going to say, Oh, well, that person is a weirdo because you’re part of the community. You’re part of the, you know, kind of consensus around what is or isn’t normal.

It would be interesting to think about like a study of like, are people who tend to be more utopian, less happy in the long run? Or are they like happy despite all of the societal derision that they face?

I will say that one of the things that’s really interesting is that it was, it’s a lot harder to be different in the United States than it is to be different in other countries, with some exceptions. I think the United States, you know, we talk a lot about freedom and we talk a lot about opportunity and we talk a lot about individualism. And yet, we don’t really like people who are too individualistic, as in, like, thinking differently, and we don’t really like people who are kind of pursuing their own path.

If they stray too differently, then we immediately say, oh, well, you know, they’re weird, or they’re strange, or they’re lost, or they’re malfunctioning in some way. The fact that, you know, 50 percent of our young people are reporting signs of depression, that should be the thing that really worries us. If we had a society that was a little bit more open minded, maybe people would be able to kind of free themselves from some of the burdens of being unhappy with the way the world is, but not feeling safe or comfortable to imagine a different world.

And that’s part of why I think utopian experiments, in whatever flavor they come, because they come in all sorts of different flavors. They’re so important for us because they show us that across history, and in every single cultural context, there are weirdos, to use your word, right? There’s stranger, there’s people that are strange, and sometimes they’re feared, sometimes they’re actually admired.

Sometimes they’re looked up to, they’re veneered, they’re venerated, and they’re often the people that come, that come to the rescue of those societies in the long run.

Emma Varvaloucas: The one thing I would add to that too is that it also seems that the standards of assessment are different for like status quo versus someone that’s doing a bit of straying off the path, meaning like, I came into the book like a little bit anti, I guess, anti community living, if that’s a thing. I just have like poor associations with it. One, because of some relatives I have that grew up in like a hippie atmosphere that was very damaging. Another because I, before I came to The Progress Network, I worked at a Buddhist publication and the greatest thing you can do, I think, to ruin any religious sentiment is to peer behind the curtain of all of the religious organizations of your religion. It’s just, like, it’s too much information.

So, when I was reading through your examples, that, like, one thing going wrong would be enough for me to say, well, this isn’t going to work, you know, like, let’s say there’s some kind of violence in the community. Versus if you’re talking about something like the nuclear family, like it’s not, it’s not like violence doesn’t occur within the nuclear family.

And you talk about this with some, some personal examples in the book. Yeah, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit of just this, the standard of assessment being completely different when you’re talking about things that you are familiar with.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Yeah. I mean, Daniel Kahneman has this wonderful, you know, discussion of status quo bias.

Which is that people fear loss more than they value gain. This has been demonstrated very well within the psychological literature. And I just think that we all know people who are in extremely bad relationships. They could be marriages, they could be long term relationships, and they would be probably much happier if they got out of that relationship, but they fear that if they leave that relationship, no one will ever love them again. That they will be alone and unloved.

And that, and so they, they persist in a relationship. They persist in something that may be unhealthy or, you know, really seriously unsatisfying, or in some cases quite violent, because they’re afraid of the unknown. I think in a microcosm, that feeling of, Well, I have this and it may not be perfect, but it’s what I have and it’s what I know. And if I try to do something different, it could be better, but it could also be worse.

And that fear of potential loss immobilizes us in so many ways. We can find ourselves and it can be really small things in our lives that we are just not willing to address in a purely utilitarian sense, sort of the cost benefit analysis of like option A versus option B if option B is the one that we have to choose.

So in Kahneman’s work, he talks a lot about how people don’t like feeling regret and it turns out that we feel a lot more regret about decisions that we made that end up in bad consequences versus doing nothing and, and, and ending up in bad consequences. Because in both cases, there are bad consequences, but in one case, you actively chose something that led to those bad consequences.

And in the other case, you did nothing. And so the “do nothing” part is the part that I feel like we get stuck in. And when coming back to this stuff about depression and anxiety, pessimism and cynicism is in immobilizing for a lot of people. It actually prevents us from making choices because it’s just hard to see that anything could go right.

I mean, again, you guys are on The Progress Network, so you know this very well. But I, but I, you know, again, you have to apply this to your personal life. So in, in the case of the family, like you just said, right, if you’re living with multiple parents for some reason, or you know, somebody who lived with multiple parents. And something went bad in a family arrangement where you have more than two parents. It’s so easy to say, Oh, well, that’s because of the family, right?

But there are millions of kids walking around in the United States today who have violent or neglectful or otherwise just absent parents. I mean, it is terrible when you look at the statistics and yet very few people are saying it’s a problem of the nuclear family.

Interestingly, David Brooks did say that in The Atlantic a couple years ago, and I think he really put his finger on something, right? When, when the romantic relationship is the appropriate container for parenthood and that romantic relationship is unstable and breaks up, that’s really bad for the family.

And so I, I just do think that a lot of this is status quo bias, right? We are hardwired, some of us, to just avoid regret and regret sucks. I’m not saying like we should all go out and regret things, but those among us who are willing to overcome our fear of regret. And not in everything, I mean, some people are more risk averse in certain areas of their lives than others.

But I think it’s interesting to just think about where that risk aversion comes from and what it does to our society as a whole, because I think it’s actually having serious impacts.

Zachary Karabell: There’s kind of a dark side of utopia that we also need to grapple with, which is, Jim Jones in Guiana was a utopian community. Heaven’s Gate, the famous, we’re gonna all go and ascend, and 39 people commit suicide in the late nineties, was a utopian community. Waco, the Branch Davidians were a utopian community.

There’s a degree to which Utopians romanticize utopians and fail to look at the dark side of Utopians. I’m not saying, this is not a counter argument for, we should therefore not embrace the utopian impulse because i, you know, I think we’re all in agreement. I mean, unfortunately, we’re a bit of an amen choir about this, the three of us, that that impulse is what drives the future in a constructive direction.

But I do think we need to recognize that, like, along the way, not everything in that impulse ends up being constructive. There’s, there can be a huge amount of destruction, I mean, you wrote about this a lot in terms of socialism and communism, that, that balance of incremental change versus radical revolutionary. Do you smash the old to try to create the new, which is a violent act, or do you allow for some sort of evolutionary change, or do you separate, right? The Quakers were separatists, the early American Puritans and Pilgrims were utopian, you know, they were going off to create a community unlike the ones that they were born into.

So that’s kind of woven into the DNA of the United States, and it is, it is clearly true. We have, as societies become more powerful, rich, ossified, as the fear of loss of power becomes more palpable as opposed to the dream that you will attain something is, is more driving. You know, that balance tends to shift, right?

There’s a reason that later stage societies tend to be less utopian than earlier stage ones. Other than celebrating that impulse and as, you know, your role as an idea person to, to illuminate to people who may not otherwise be aware that, that this impulse is manifest and there are all these examples and we should be attuned to the possibility that the world we’re living in doesn’t need to be the world that we live in.

It’s a choice. It’s a construct. Things change. Human society has always. Is there any other thing that we can do to kind of engender that in a constructive way that you could see as a viable, like we’re missing a certain ingredient that we need to re inject or inject anew?

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Yes, absolutely. I believe that we should be spending a lot more time with our friends and families and our lateral networks of care and support.

So one of the things that I talk about in this book is how all of these different utopian communities of so many different flavors and historical epochs and secular versus religious, one of the things that they are trying to do is to maximize human connectivity and to propose solutions to the problem of isolation and loneliness and the care crisis and so many of the things that are actually very relevant and present in our society today.

So, we’ve got the Surgeon General worrying about loneliness and social isolation. We’ve got the Harvard Study of Adult Development that shows very clearly this wonderful longitudinal study that says that the thing that predicts happiness at the end of our lives and contentment is, more than anything else, the quality of our relationships with each other.

And so, as we move into a future where the climate is going to be different, okay? It could be radically different. It could be incrementally different. We don’t know. But one of the things that we do know, I have a colleague in biological anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania who does work on human biology at the extremes.

She works with NASA, she looks at people in high altitudes, she looks at people in extreme weather circumstances and in places where there are high pathogenic loads. And one of the things that she finds is that when human biology is stressed, not surprisingly, our cortisol and testosterone levels go through the roof.

We are less efficient in terms of our calorie usage and we lose vestibular function, which is our ability to navigate through the world. And one of the things that she shows consistently that mitigates the effects of this extreme taxing of our biology, whether it’s zero gravity or extreme hot, heat or cold, is human connection.

It is the strength of our relationships with each other. And so to the extent that we can share more of our time with our friends and loved ones and communities and that those relationships are healthy and thriving. First of all, we know that that was super important during the pandemic and we know that going forward into the future, it’s going to be the thing that’s going to help us survive.

And we know from these longitudinal studies that at the end of our lives, it’s going to be the thing that is the most important. That’s where we should be focusing our energy. And that’s where we should be focusing our attention, on ways in which we can build societies that optimize human connectivity and human love, care, and support in these lateral networks that are not necessarily only based in the nuclear family, although they can include the nuclear family, but to have this much more capacious idea of family and of connectivity.

And that may sound utopian to some people. I mean, I think, you know, more than a third of Americans are living alone and that’s a real issue for us. But if we take anything practically from these utopian experiments, it is the fact that they tried, some successfully, some less successfully, to build communities where people supported each other through thick and thin, and where people were able to thrive and, and flourish in those environments.

And so I think, you know, we can, just one last thing, prepper communities. This is like a weird side note. Like I get these strange intellectual fascinations, but one of them was about preppers because preppers are super interesting because they’re like the ultimate, like the future is, is going to be awful, and so I have to take all necessary steps right now in order to, to ensure that my future survival will, you know, that I will be able to survive in the future.

So there are two kinds of preppers. And there are preppers that are, like, building bunkers and arming themselves to the teeth and they are, you know, sort of buying their way into some weird fantasy of, like, private survival.

And then there are preppers that are basically trying to build these weird futuristic utopian communities where people are, like, back to the land, growing their own food, creating off the grid, sustainable communities that will survive the apocalypse, right? These post civilizational folks.

And I think it’s really interesting that you can sort of look at these preppers as the products of two very different historical traditions in humanity. And some of the preppers are just way more individualistic and other preppers are much more sort of community oriented. And if I were to make a prediction, and you know, the apocalypse happens tomorrow, and we’re just scattered groups of, you know, bits and bobs of people left on the planet, I think in the long run, it’s the communal preppers that are going to survive for the very simple reason that they have people to reproduce with, while the lonely guys in their bunkers are going to be hanging out with their guns and drinking beer, you know, until they die. And then that’ll be the end of them.

So in the long run, we’ve got to think about these, these ways that we can create communities and it doesn’t have to be like that you run off and join a commune. I make it very clear in the book that that’s not what I’m advocating, but I do think we can learn something from the people who have in the past and the people who are doing it today and why they’re doing it and what it means for us as a species.

Emma Varvaloucas: That has put me on two very random mind tracks, sorry, really quick before Zachary wraps this up, which was MAGA and The Walking Dead. Zachary, I can elucidate that when we get off the interview and do our discussion. Yes.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: But I also wanted to just say one other thing that I forgot to say in response to your comment about the Waco, the Branch Davidians and Jim Jones and stuff, which is, I’m sorry, but can you look at the history of the Catholic Church for a second? I mean, forget about the Crusades and the witch burnings, and, um, let’s just talk about the sexual abuse scandals in recent years. A lot of Catholics have a really hard time accepting the violence and the abuse that has characterized the Catholic Church.

And yet at last glance, the number of Catholics in the world is still increasing. And so I think, you know, you’re absolutely right. There are negatives. I am not, and I am very clear in the book that there are negatives. And I have spent the vast majority of my life studying the negatives of really existing state socialism in Eastern Europe.

So I am well aware of how utopian blueprint societies can go awfully, horribly wrong, but I know that, but you know, that doesn’t mean that we should shut down social dreaming altogether. I think the same way that practicing Catholics in their minds have to justify to themselves all of the horrible history of their church and all of the horrible things that have been done in the name of that church by members of that church, and they’re able to do that, we should be able to take some of the negative associations that we have with utopianism and reject them, and recognize that there are these potential dangers, but still take the basic core idea of what utopian represents for us and run with it to make it better in the future, to use it as a tool.

I don’t think utopia is a place that we get. We never arrive. Anybody who tells you that you’ve arrived and then here’s the blueprint and how, here’s how we’re going to stay here, run in the opposite direction as far as you can, right? Utopia has to be flexible, has to be changing. It has to be a blueprint that does not exist.

It can’t be a blueprint. It has to be a vision that is eternally flexible and willing to accommodate change because the one thing we know is that the world is always changing.

Zachary Karabell: That is a great note to end on, and an appropriate one given the origins of the word utopia, which is not a real place, and I think if there comes a time where we have to recreate pandemic pods, although I really hope there isn’t a time where we have to do that, we would all do well to have Kristen Ghodsee in our pod, granted, we, that’s a physical impossibility, but it’s a.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Hey, there are holograms.

Zachary Karabell: Holograms, books on tape, words to read. So we want to thank you for your inspiring, eclectic, unique, interesting, compelling, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, non disciplinary work, and I look forward to seeing what your, your mind and spirit turns to next.

So thank you for your time.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you, Kristen.

Kristen R. Ghodsee: This was great. Thanks.

Zachary Karabell: All right, so we loved that conversation, expectedly. And indeed. But I do want to pick up on your, your MAGA and Walking Dead.

Emma Varvaloucas: Walking Dead. What happens to the people after this apocalypse?

It’s all about community and like who survives and who doesn’t and what kind of communities are created. That was the Walking Dead point. And the MAGA point was the underappreciated fact that MAGA, like, like proper full on MAGA, I don’t mean like general people who voted for Donald Trump. I think it’s underappreciated how much that is about community for people.

Zachary Karabell: Totally.

Emma Varvaloucas: I read a really interesting article, I forget where now, but it was, it was somebody who was a big MAGA guy, and he was like, you know, if Donald Trump goes away after this election, like, I’m just really going to miss my people, you know, like you go to these rallies and it’s like, you see your people, you have a community there, you bond, you have a shared passion.

So that’s where the MAGA and Walking Dead combo came from.

Zachary Karabell: I was totally thinking the MAGA point. And it’s great that you raised that because it was like in my head as well of there is a deep utopian impulse there that society could be different, the country could be different in a really palpable, immediate, forceful way that I think is underappreciated, underrecognized, I mean, of course, we’re recording this 20x days before the election. We’ll see what happens. Obviously, these are conversations we’re either going to have looking back, digesting what happened, or we’re going to be having trying to figure out what’s going on. Either way, conversations that we are going to need to continue to have.

And, look, for those of you who don’t know, part of the point of creating The Progress Network, a lot of that was those themes were echoed in the conversation with Kristen, which is societies that fail to envision a future manifestly better and different than the one that exists in the present, are less likely to be able to create that future, that the utopian impulse, the belief that we can create a better future, is in itself a necessary ingredient in doing that, and that too much focus on everything that’s going wrong and too much fear about where that will lead can be its own self fulfilling prophecy in the absence of a vision of how things could be better and some willingness to take the risks to try to make that.

So this is the kind of work that we’re trying to draw attention to.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, personally, I would love a follow up book on how to make sure that the utopian impulse does not become destructive. I feel like there’s so many books about like cults that became death cults or whatever. Like we know what went wrong, but it’s like, how do you avoid going wrong with utopian impulse?

I would love to read that book.

Zachary Karabell: That’s the problem, the human impulse, which is, you know, we want to create, we want to change, but we also want to control, all right? We want to open ourselves up to the endless possibility of the future, but we still have fear and we still have desire and we still have all the things that can also lead to the very antithesis of whatever it is that we’re trying to create.

And a lot of the perverse arc of utopian communities are born of that impulse on the one hand, then juxtaposed to, I want to control. I don’t want to die. I want to have as much stuff as possible. I want to be impervious. And look, I think you are some of the counter reaction to the utopian impulse of Silicon Valley in the nineties, and even into the aughts, where you have a culture that really is pretty strongly turning against the very heroes of that earlier era, the Googles, the Facebooks, the Metas, and Tesla, or whatever, is a reflection of how many of the people who drove those visions in the 90s have turned out to be kind of, you know, petulant billionaires.

The fact that they’re billionaires doesn’t make them petulant. It’s the two together who want it their way, right? They want to call the shots. They want to make the rules. It’s almost as if they’ve lost their own utopian vision.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, it’s the same thing with like anyone that isn’t adherent to any religion and they start with a lot of like innocent fervor and then they learn too much and that that fervor fades.

And like a person that like really has a spiritual commitment is someone that like figures out how to deal with the fact that even spiritual gurus, even Silicon Valley people, whoever, whatever, at the end of the day, they’re going to be humans and they’re going to be fallible. And I think the real test is seeing if you can deal with holding both trues in your hands and plowing forward anyway.

Which a lot of us don’t do, right? We just give up. We’re like, eh screw you. You guys suck.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened to Steve Jobs if he had not died young in the sense of like, would he have, would he have been in the same basket as a lot of these people now culturally where his heroic moment would have given way to a lot of scorn and demonization from the culture?

I don’t know. He gets to be frozen in amber, right? As this perfect articulator of a vision.

Thank you all for listening. We will be back with you right before November 5th.

Emma Varvaloucas: And right after.

Zachary Karabell: Mark that in your calendars and we’ll see how we all manage that. Right, Emma?

Emma Varvaloucas: Oh, the knot of anxiety is growing bigger as we speak.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. Anyway, thank you all for listening. Tune into our newsy Progress Report. Get our weekly newsletter, What Could Go Right?, in your inbox. Go to theprogressnetwork.org and sign up for it. It’s free, free, free. Thank you to The Podglomerate for producing, the team at The Progress Network, for constructing the backbones of everything we do, and thank you, Emma, for co hosting.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thank you, Zachary, as always, and thanks, everyone, for listening.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? is produced by The Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by The Podglomerate. 

To find out more about What Could Go Right?, The Progress Network or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. 

Thanks for listening.