Utopia: In Search of the Dream

Utopia. That good place.

A hope, a dream,

always tantalisingly just out of reach.

Utopia has been imagined a thousand different ways.

Yet when people try to build a utopia,

they struggle and very often fail.

I want to explore why.

We'll encounter experimental communities

searching for greater meaning in life,

utopian ideologies and plans for the masses

that didn't leave space for the individual.

And utopian architects with a faith

that humanity's lot can be improved through better design.

To practise architecture, you're planning for the future,

you're looking far ahead.

This is about how utopias either adapt or else they crumble.

It's about the clash of grand utopian visions and very human flaws,

our craving for community versus our desire to break free.

It's about what happens when you dare to turn utopian dreams into reality.

The term utopia, meaning no place or good place,

was coined by the Tudor statesman and philosopher Thomas More.

In 1516, More dreamt up a fictional society where there was no private

property, an early welfare state, and communal meals.

More's utopia is ambiguous and satirical,

but also decidedly monkish.

More suggests that an ordered way of life is an important part of utopian living.

Here at Belmont Abbey near Hereford, this search for harmony is captured,

it seems to me, in the repetitions of the monks' plainsong.

For us, a monastery is a good place in which to live,

and in which to really attempt

the ideal of monastic life.

And we aim for that.

And then very often there's the reality,

which is not quite on the same level, as it were.

We struggle.

18 Benedictine monks live here with a code that lays down all the

fundamentals of how they live their daily life.

The big decisions are made for them,

freeing up their minds to think and to explore deeper questions

about existence and meaning.

We spend a great deal of our time reading

and meditating the Scriptures, praying,

and trying to live according to the teaching and the example of Jesus Christ.

And, of course, Thomas More

would've done the same in his own way, in family life.

For him, the family was like a small monastery - living in community,

sharing everything, loving one another.

A communal way of life, sharing space and food and wealth.

By extolling monkish equality as the key value

of a radical new society,

More was being incredibly political,

in an age of kings and queens.

In the years that followed,

other religious thinkers came up with new ways of living and put them

into practice in the real world.

Persecuted in Europe,

many radical Protestant sects found a more welcoming home for

their communities in the wide expanse of the New World.

From the Mayflower pilgrims to the Quakers,

America became a testing ground for their utopias.

I've come to Canterbury, New Hampshire.

Believe it or not, this was once a home to America's most radical utopians,

an extraordinary experiment that ultimately failed.

Hard-working and hard-worshipping,

the Shakers got their name as Shaking Quakers

because of their ecstatic movement and dancing during worship.

Canterbury, like other Shaker villages on America's east coast,

is now a living museum,

a place for a fun family outing.

Yet the Shakers' way of life could hardly be more alien

to modern American values of aggressive individualism.

The Shakers were pacifist and communalist,

and - way ahead of their time -

believed in equality between the sexes.

They were founded in the 18th century by Ann Lee,

who had a vision that Christ would reappear in female form.

At their peak in the mid-19th century,

some 18 Shaker communities like Canterbury

were home to over 5,000 converts,

sharing open space, good food,

accommodation and education.

I think that two of the words that guided them

were union and order.

And by union they meant the idea that,

as we would put it today,

everyone's on the same page.

And then the idea of order.

You can see that the buildings are lined up in orderly rows.

They had a set of rules -

the time that they rose in the morning,

the time for their meals,

the time that they had lights out at night.

They had rules for almost everything, as a way of producing

a calm and orderly life.

In an attic of one of the old Shaker dormitories,

a well-used rocking chair reveals much about the Shaker mind-set.

You know, to modern eyes this looks beautiful -

simple, but beautiful.

It's got something Bauhaus about it.

But to Shakers that would've been a nonsense.

They'd say, "We're not interested in beautiful",

"We're interested in useful."

"That's all we're really interested in."

If you make something absolutely useful,

it's just a coincidence if it happens to be beautiful.

It's like an aesthetic that doesn't care about aesthetics.

It's wonderful - simple, airy, lightweight, super-practical,

easy to stow away

and, just coincidentally, delicious to look at.

Nice chair.

It's a huge irony, of course, that the clean-lined, minimalist

Shaker aesthetic has influenced commercial kitchen design

and flat-pack furniture the world over.

Because while their furniture conquered millions of homes,

the Shakers are no longer here.

The reason lies back in the founder Ann Lee's story.

Her four children died in infancy.

Convinced their deaths were divine punishment for sins of the flesh,

a personal tragedy doomed this utopia.

She bound the Shakers to one very fateful rule -

celibacy.

They were saying, "If you follow us",

"we are offering you a path to a life free of sin,"

"a heaven on earth."

And their prescription for doing this

was to give up the traditional bonds of matrimony

to live as brothers and sisters.

The rigid rule of the group clashed with natural sexual urges

and individual choice.

Perhaps even more significantly,

the vow of celibacy meant that the Shakers were unable to bring up

their own children in their faith.

Like monks, but without the weight of Catholic tradition behind them,

the Shakers relied on new recruits,

taking in orphans and teaching them their way of life.

After the mid-19th century, cities began to grow.

They were very attractive, especially to young people.

So, with opportunities to live a more modern life,

and, of course, for young people, the opportunity to marry,

to have a family of their own, became more and more attractive.

The Shakers clearly had an amazing vision for their time.

This focus on gender equality, well over 200 years ago,

it's extraordinary. But, on the other hand,

there's a kind of flaw in the weave.

This obsession with celibacy means that they can never reproduce,

that the community is surely, inevitably, just going to collapse.

The tension between the utopian ideal and hard reality,

the collective vision and individual freedom,

has been played out in communities all across the world.

In rural Virginia, an eco-commune has become one of America's

longest-enduring experimental communities.

Over 50 years, Twin Oaks has learned to adapt to balance

the needs of the group versus the individual.

Like monks and Shakers before them,

the 106 people who live here share everything -

food, housing, and in Twin Oaks' case,

childcare and sometimes sexual partners.

Unlike the old religious utopias,

the founding principles at Twin Oaks were secular and highly rational.

The psychologist BF Skinner is remembered today for

his controversial experiments on pigeons.

His life's work was an attempt to establish that free will is

an illusion and that behaviour can be modified by systems

of reward and punishment.

In 1948, in his novel Walden Two,

Skinner dreamed up a utopian community where people

are nudged towards living in harmony,

being productive and happy through behavioural engineering.

"What is love..." Skinner writes.

"..Except another name for the use of positive reinforcement?"

In 1960s America, amid anti-war protests,

the beat poets and the emerging counterculture,

people were dropping out to seek alternative answers to life's big questions.

Psychology books setting out new ideas of the self boomed,

and Skinner's behaviourist fantasy started to be read all over again.

My mom and I were living in Los Angeles,

and she read Walden Two and she just sort of looked up and said,

"Does this exist? This is what I want."

In 1967 Josie's mother, Kat Kinkade,

helped to found the Twin Oaks community.

She was a low-level secretary with no college, a single mom.

She had no prospects for a good career,

so she wrote to BF Skinner and said, "So where is it? I'm ready."

And of course he wrote back and said, "Well, sorry, there's no such thing."

Then she saw an ad in a magazine that said,

"Forming Walden Two community."

And the next thing I knew,

within two or three months we had packed up all our earthly goods

and come out on a train.

Well, people aren't equal, we don't pretend that they are.

The idea of equality, we define it as,

no member envying or having cause to envy another member.

Twin Oaks is one big experiment.

Basically, Twin Oaks is setting out to do two things.

One of them is to create a society fit for humans to live in.

The other one is to create humans fit to live in that society.

What was it like in the early days?

It must have been incredibly hard work.

You know, I mean, Twin Oaks ran out of money in its first two months,

and people had to travel 50 miles to go get jobs in order to bring enough