Robert Owen

I seem to be past the point when I was interested in finding a better place to live. After I graduated from college in 1972, I stayed temporarily with my family in Connecticut but wasn't sure what I wanted to do or where I might go. For a time, I considered moving to New Zealand, but then I ended up moving in with my girlfriend, who was living in Columbus, Ohio, not exactly a utopia. I unenthusiastically got married, and, after an exploratory trip to parts of the U.S. and Canada, moved to Eugene, Oregon for a year, during which I lost enthusiasm for that part of the country. After moving to Indiana, having children and getting divorced, I moved to Louisville, Kentucky for a couple of years and then, with job changes, lived in northern Illinois for about twenty-four years until after I retired. Then I decided on Vermont and moved here in 2011. While I don't usually get very socially engaged with the locals wherever I live, I find west-central Vermont appealing for a number of reasons. Besides the low population and pleasant scenery, there are still hints of utopianism here. The U.S. became a testing ground for a wide swath of utopian ideas early in its history, but nearly all of them had some level of religious motivation. The more interesting ones to me are less religious and are related to optimal social structures, and those didn't become popular until the early 19th century. 

Robert Owen (1771-1858) was a Welsh textile manufacturer of humble origins who operated a highly successful plant in New Lanark, Scotland. He had worked in Manchester and hated the miserable living conditions created there by the Industrial Revolution and used New Lanark as a testing ground for some of his theories. His main goals at the time were to improve working conditions for his employees and provide them with better educations. 

When I lived in Indiana, I was not far from New Harmony, which I mentioned in an earlier post. At that time it was a tourist attraction, and I visited it. It was a town built by a religious German group called the Rappites, who were productive and successful, but they eventually ceased to exist because they didn't believe in sex or reproduction. It may be that they had expected Armageddon to occur, and when it didn't, they had no Plan B. They had purchased the Indiana land, which was wilderness at the time, in 1814, developed it considerably, and then moved away to Pennsylvania in 1824. Robert Owen purchased the town and surrounding acreage in 1825 with the goal of setting up an experimental utopian community. Owen became a notable social reformer and later influenced Marx and Engels. To some extent I agree with his main ideas, because he opposed religion, private property and marriage. However, his idea of integrating those ideas into a workable society in the early 19th century was unrealistic, to put it mildly. After he bought the property, he arrived in the East Coast to much fanfare and met John Quincy Adams, James Monroe, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. He also gave a three-hour speech to the three branches of government, telling them that he hoped to eradicate every social evil.

Obviously, Owen was completely unrealistic, but it would have been less apparent at the time, since human nature was not well understood then. While he objected to religion, he seems to have been unaware that religion serves a social function – it was religion that supplied the cohesion that allowed America's early settlers to survive collectively. As it was, he recruited a wide range of people to live in New Harmony without paying much attention to how compatible they would be. He seems to have attracted a few scientific people, along with more general intellectuals and artists, and a slew of farmers and tradespeople. They came from different backgrounds and geographic locations. From what I've read, it does not appear that Owen gave much thought to how they would be organized. With his faith in reason, he thought that they would follow a democratic process and figure it out on their own. They couldn't, and the community hemorrhaged money until Owen and his financial partner, William Maclure, abandoned the project in 1827. Some of the residents remained there and did productive work, but Owen's original plan completely failed. Unfortunately, I don't think that any social models much better than Owen's have emerged since then. A good start would be recognizing that people are not fundamentally rational.

Vermont, as I wrote earlier, was once a Congregational theocracy to some extent. That did provide cohesion originally, but has little to do with why I find the state appealing now. Because it never industrialized much and the population remained low, the groups that have lived here haven't been at each other's throats as much as in some other states. There are wealthy outsiders who have moved here and locals with reduced economic conditions that don't see eye to eye with them, but the wealth contrasts are less conspicuous here than elsewhere. And some of the liberals who moved here are similar to Bernie Sanders and emphasize equality as more than a talking point. Under these conditions, people tend to be more cooperative. The local newspapers also have a positive impact by covering all aspects involving the local population, which is more conducive to creating a cohesive environment than national news outlets or the internet in general. So, in my case, even though there are aspects of European culture that I prefer, which are absent here, I am resigned to remaining in Vermont, because I am better adapted to living here than anywhere else.