Oh, hi there, all - greetings from a Chicago autumn day that is finally starting to feel like how Chicago autumn days are supposed to feel. (Not that I'm complaining about the string of late-season warmth we've been having here; it just feels surreal and portentious, that's all, like it's some kind of affront to God that we'll all be paying for later this year. Which, yes, I know, is a strange opinion to hear from an atheist, but cut me a little slack - even us non-believers can occasionally develop a fear of God's wrath.) As regular readers know, things here at my journal have slowed down quite a bit this autumn, as my own life has slowed down as well and I simply find myself with a whole lot less interesting things to talk about. In fact, things have been so bad recently that my last two entries (posted only so that people wouldn't think I had died or something) dealt with nothing else but the uber-nerdy subject of JRR Tolkien, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and what this project's continual popularity has to say about societal mythology, national and cultural norms, and the like.

So imagine my surprise when I got a number of emails this week from readers, letting me know that they in fact enjoy those kinds of purely intellectual digressions from me more than anything else that I publish here, and how they wished that I would write more of them during the periods like now that not a lot is going on in my personal life. Well, color me surprised, man! See, for those who don't know, I've actually been doing this journal for seven years now, which in internet terms I guess makes me a decrepid old man by now; and when I first started this journal, I was still in my twenties and active in the poetry-slam community, which meant that my entries back then were a lot more about getting fucked up, starting fistfights, and having hot one-night-stands with crazy little beautiful poets.

It's been easy for me to admit that my life has changed quite a bit over those seven years; that I'm no longer pursuing a career as a writer, that I hardly ever drink anymore, that my social life has gone kaput and my sex life as well. And it's easy for me to admit that my journal has changed quite a bit because of all this - that I write a lot more about business issues now, for example, since I'm in the middle of trying to open a small business myself, and a lot less about crazy nights out since I hardly ever have crazy nights out anymore. But for some reason, I don't know, I just find it really difficult to admit that my audience has changed over those last seven years as well - that there are a growing amount of readers now who tune in expressly for those intellectual digressions, or to read about international travel, or the ins-and-outs of programming your own website, etc etc. And this is especially true among a lot of my younger readers, most of whom were too young to even read such a journal when it first started (just in case you long-term readers weren't feeling old enough already), and have no idea I used to have such a crazy personal life in the first place.

Okay, so I'm going to try to keep all this more in mind these days, and to in fact post more entries about nerdy intellectual subjects on a more regular basis, and hope that the emails I've received about all this truly are a representative sample of how all of you are feeling about this journal. And so, yeah, I've been spending some time this week thinking about utopian societies, so thought today I would share some of it with you...and as is usual in my life, it all came about originally in this completely random way. See, I don't know if any of you have gotten into this habit yourself, but anytime now that I'm about to watch a movie on television or via VCR/DVD, I have this habit now of first looking up the movie at both the Internet Movie Database and Wikipedia. And I do this because there is just so much damn cool supplementary information about movies at these two sites - trivia, goofs, behind-the-scenes reports, info on how much money the movie went on to make, how many awards it went on to receive. It just seemingly never ends at those two sites; and as an admittedly obsessive movie buff, such info just does nothing but enhance my enjoyment of the movies themselves.

But Wikipedia, of course, is not just a movie database but a full-featured hyperlink-based encyclopedia as well, which means that most entries contain at least a couple links to related subjects which have nothing to do with actual movies. So for example, the other day I got a chance to again see Excalibur, the 1981 King Arthur movie that just blew my friends and I away when it first came out, but now can be awfully silly at times when you watch it again. (Although, I admit, that scene where Uther fucks his enemy's wife while wearing a suit of armor is still pretty hot. And did you know that actress is the director's daughter? John Boorman is fucked up, man - after all, this is the same guy who brought us Deliverance.) But anyway, the Wikipedia entry on the movie also talks about Camelot, the gold and silver castle where King Arthur supposedly lived during the years of peace in his reign, which in turn linked to a separate entry at Wikipedia about utopian societies.

So then I jumped over to that entry and that one was really long and fascinating as well, and linked to such other fascinating digressions as the history of socialism and the like. I'll tell you, I've been really impressed with what I've seen happen at Wikipedia over the couple of years it's now been in existence; who knew that a decentralized, amateur-based publication like that would end up regulating itself so well, and producing such lovely and authoritative entries on so many different subjects? And so the entry contains not just a definition of what a utopia is, but also traces its history back to Plato (who coined the term), references most of the major literary projects on the subject, lists a whole series of utopian societies that people really have established in the physical world (along with their eventual fates), and even discusses some of the Latin words related to the subject. (Most people probably know of 'dystopia,' of course, but did you know that there's a 'heterotopia' as well? It's commonly used to describe virtual realities, like the 'cyberspace' of William Gibson's novels or the actual World Wide Web. And what a better term for the web, man, than the actual term 'web;' I think I'm going to start referring to the online world as 'the Heterotopia' more often.)

Utopian societies are just such a fascinating subject, don't you think? I mean, even the general subject of societies themselves are pretty interesting when you think about it, because it's just so distinctly human; this idea that people have to live in organized groups with other people, because humans are such weak physical animals that they'd all die if they didn't. Most societies on earth, of course, are the result of a piecemeal process, of just certain ways of doing things becoming slowly popular over time, to the point that they become the norm, and with it sometimes based on the worst of human qualities instead of the best. So how intriguing, then, to try to plan a society from scratch, all of it designed under one unifying theory, in a way so that the common problems that come with societification (crime, pollution, poverty, sickness) are eliminated.

It's a wonderful challenge to us intellectuals - and I don't mean that term pretentiously, but simply as 'someone who enjoys sitting around for big periods of time, thinking about stuff.' I mean, no wonder utopian ideals were such a big part of the early Socialist movement, because Socialism is an intellectual's wet dream - an entire government, spirituality, and way of life based on rational thought, led by those who sit around thinking about stuff the most. Of course, this is the eternal curse of Socialism too, is that these intellectuals spend so much time sitting around arguing about intellectual stuff, nothing ever gets accomplished. Just look at Germany, for example, where a Socialist government was put in place in the years between WWI and WWII (known historically as the 'Weimar Era,' because that's the city where they were based) - you had 16 fucking Constitutions in 13 years, while the country basically fell apart around them, to the point that a forceful guy like Hitler could seize power simply by promising action and then delivering on it.

And I guess that's really the most fascinating thing about utopian societies in a nutshell - that they always sound so damn good on paper, and for the most part work out so damn strange when people attempt to actually implement them. I mean, just take the curious case of Walden II and Los Horcones as a good example, two projects that are not officially related but are intricately linked nonetheless. Walden II is in actuality one of those freaky novel/manifesto hybrids that were so popular between the end of WWII and the death of Kennedy, like when crazy ol' Ayn Rand (God love her!) was publishing Atlas Shrugged and the like; and this one in particular was written by BF Skinner, an early pioneer in the field of Behaviorism. Also known by some as 'operant conditioning,' it's basically a specialty within psychology that attempts to apply scientific principles to human behavior; to theorize, for example, that behavior can be changed through outside action, and that it can be measured and analyzed objectively.

Behaviorism has been the subject of controversy since first invented, and continues to be so; and Skinner certainly didn't make things easier, what with such statements like that free will and dignity are holding humans back from our next stage of evolutionary improvement. Most behaviorists regularly deny it, for example, but critics regularly accuse their community of thinking of humans as programmable robots (or 'black boxes'), able to be manipulated through experiment into 'being' a certain type of person, or behaving in a certain way. And certainly, the Nazis believed this to such an extent that they actually ran all these freaky terror-inducing experiments on prisoners, a practice now known as 'eugenics,' and so that association doesn't exactly help behaviorists quell controversy. And it's true that Skinner proposed and then actually built physical environments were behavior could be studied in a precise scientific way (that is, where you remove all outside stimuli, so that your control measures can be objectively measured), now known as 'Skinner boxes;' some were tame and have become staples of the scientific community, like mazes rats run through in labs, while some were controversial unto themselves, like the freaky stand-up crib/tomb thing he built for his newborn, that regulated temperature and sunlight and all this shit, in an attempt to give her a 'scientifically perfect childhood.'

And so Walden II is both intriguing and controversial as well, because it's all about a utopian society supposedly built that is entirely run on Skinner's behaviorist principles. And with this being a postwar novel/manifesto hybrid, of course, the society runs perfectly, and the book has this Zen-like structure of a newbie touring the grounds, asking questions of his tour guide and getting long expositions about behaviorism back. Ah, the postwar utopian novel/manifesto hybrids - how I love you so! Why doesn't anyone write books like those anymore, huh? It's a great read, to be sure, for the same reason all those hybrids are (as well as Socialist manifestos, for that matter); because it's wonderful to see how such a society would exist in a perfect world, and to see all these perfect delicate little answers that have supposedly been constructed for every possible argument against it. And besides, like Objectivism I think there is a practical purpose to such a thing as well; namely, us realists can actually learn some lessons about the world from such hybrids, and at least partially implement some of the principles in our own lives, no matter how loudly purists howl about such a thing.

But then, see, the '60s and '70s came around, when all those damn hippies first came into being and then into power, and a bunch of old hypothetical utopian societies were dragged out and actually attempted to put into practice. That Wikpedia article links to one of them, a place called Los Horcones in northern Mexico; and this place has actually been in continual existence for over 30 years now and is still operating, so is a particularly interesting one to examine. They're careful to point out at their website that there isn't a direct connection, but in reality the place was designed to be a real-world implementation of Skinner's Walden II; I mean, even their email address starts with "Walden2," and they also run an organization called the "Walden 2 International Society." And what this basically means is communal living - where no one gets individually paid, where no one individually owns any possessions, where the children are raised in group housing away from their parents, where a radical form of government called Personocracy is used to decide affairs. And not only that, but the community serves as a giant Skinner box as well, where a 30-year, continually evolving behaviorist experiment has been taking place, with results recorded and policies changed as deemed fit.

The Los Horcones website is truly one of the more fascinating things in the Heterotopia I've come across in a long time, and I highly recommend anyone with a free afternoon or evening spending some time reading through the mutitidue of pages there. What makes it so fascinating, of course, is to see how the society has had to actually implement itself out in the real world, what has been necessary to change over three decades, and what the long-term results have been of having this supposedly perfect society actually in practice. And in particular there's just this treasure trove of half-mentioned statements and read-between-the-lines comments there about what the project's been like, which of course is yet another thing intellectuals are especially great at. You can tell what's been going wrong there by what they're not talking about that went right, and you can sort of glean this understanding of what it must be like to actually live there, all the joys and headaches mixed together.

Oops, out of space! I'll finish up my thoughts on the subject tomorrow - I still have quite a bit to say, so hold tight.