UTOPIAN DREAMS
A Search for a Better Life
by Tobias Jones
Faber £12.99 pp288 The original Utopia, Sir Thomas More’s, was a refuge from poverty. Modern readers find its regulations authoritarian. But the starving, homeless peasants More had in mind when he wrote it would have gladly accepted them in exchange for shelter and a full stomach. Tobias Jones, by contrast, is a refugee from affluence. Consumerism saddens and sickens him. His possessions do not bring him happiness, and our crazy addiction to travel, rushing round the globe in search of the perfect place, is, he believes, a recipe for discontent. Reared, like other thirtysomethings, in a secular society that values individual freedom above all else, he feels he has missed out on religious experience, and does not know what it would be like to live in a community. The quest to fill these gaps is his book’s subject.
The five utopian communes he chooses to sample are varied but not, he admits, varied enough. Other regions — India, Japan, Israel — suggested themselves for research. But he decided to stick to the two countries he knew best, Italy and England. His first stop-over is Damanhur, a new-age settlement for the rich in northern Italy, built, according to its founder, on an intersection of “synchronic lines”, capable of “catalysing the great cosmic forces”. Expensive spirals of metal and glass are on sale, to facilitate transit to different “planes of existence”. In its tawdry, crackpot way it apes the Faustian dream of Renaissance alchemists. “We’re here to become gods,” an acolyte confides.
Sceptical, Jones selects a more austere venue for his next investigation, the Catholic commune of Nomadelfia on the Tuscan coast. Founded by an Italian priest who protected Jewish children during the war, it is run on gospel lines. As in More’s Utopia, there is no private property or money. Everything is held in common. Also on the More pattern, Nomadelfians do not live in family units but in groups of about 30 people of all ages, and to discourage exclusive and possibly corrupting personal ties the groups change every three years. Following the monastic rule of St Benedict, everyone does manual labour in the fields. They keep cows and bees, cultivate vines, and grow their own food. The community has its own broadcasting service that records and rebroadcasts suitable programmes, first deleting violent and sexual material and all advertising, since it breeds envy and unhappiness. A guiding purpose is to rear and educate abandoned babies and children, and reclaim young offenders sent to Nomadelfia by the courts. Jones finds it idyllic. So far as he can see there are no disciplinary problems, and the manual labour reconnects him with reality. He has lived all his previous life, he realises, in a virtual world. The only thing that worries him is the intransigent Catholicism. Non-Catholics, Nomadelfians believe, are not really Christians.
This would have worried More’s Utopians, too, since they favoured complete religious toleration. In search of a more inclusive creed, Jones travels to the Quaker model village of New Earswick, near York, founded on Joseph Rowntree’s chocolate money, and to its retirement colony Hartrigg Oaks, started in the 1990s. For More’s Utopians, old age was not a problem as they practised euthanasia. Hartrigg Oaks is a more appealing solution. It buzzes with third-age educational activity, and there is no compulsion to socialise. If you want, you can be private and reclusive. On the other hand, it is not cheap, so it recruits, in effect, only from the brainier members of the professional class.
No doubt this has its attractions, but a ghetto of ageing intellectuals is too rarefied for Jones’s utopian purposes. So he renews his search and lands up in Sicily, on a co-operative run by Libera Terra. This is an organisation that puts estates confiscated from convicted mafiosi to socially useful ends, in accordance with a law passed in 1996. Students, the unemployed and recovering drug addicts cultivate the soil and sell their produce.
But the locals are often unfriendly, and side with the criminals. The co-operative’s crops are vandalised, its tractors torched. We are back in the world of Jones’s first book, The Dark Heart of Italy, which strove to fathom the land’s unfathomable corruption and the power and wealth of its “owner” Silvio Berlusconi. When his government took over in 2001 the number of confiscated estates fell drastically. It seems that Libera Terra, once a seed of hope, is struggling to survive.
Perhaps that is why Jones comes back to Britain for his last commune, at Pilsdon in Dorset. Like Libera Terra, it takes in society’s rejects, alcoholics, addicts, tramps, drifters. Founded by a clergyman, Percy Smith, in 1958, it seeks to reinvent Nicholas Ferrar’s 17th-century community, Little Gidding, but the religious side is optional. There are few rules beyond a ban on drugs, alcohol and violence. People come and go, sometimes to prison, sometimes for a spell on the road. Scarred and tattooed, they are types who would, Jones reflects, be terrifying to middle England, and it moves him to see the gentleness with which they dandle his baby daughter.
Moments like this make his book live. He is best at describing physical experiences — milking a cow on a freezing morning, or laying a willow hedge. On abstractions he is less good. When he starts to theorise about communes it is like watching someone try to tether a half-inflated hot-air balloon in a strong wind. He is fond of expatiating on the qualities we need to make us “fully human”. But the idea that some people are more human than others is the primal utopian fault, and leads all too easily to a decision to eliminate the less human ones. Not that Jones would ever countenance such a step, of course. He comes across as a gentle idealist of a kind that, in a previous age, would certainly have gone into the church.
Perhaps he still may. The more he learns, the more his admiration for Christianity grows. Wherever the old or addicts or orphans are being cared for, he finds there is some form of Christianity behind it. Even Libera Terra was the brainchild of a priest. By the end, Jones no longer believes in human freedom as an ideal. The truest communities are those where the rules are toughest, he decides. For a community to work, everyone must share a sense of the sacred. He used to think that Christianity was just a useful incentive to selfless behaviour — it was “true” because it worked. But now he thinks it works because it is true.
Utopian Dreams is less sensational than Jones’s previous book but, given our fashionable disparagement of religion, it required as much courage to write and is just as alerting. At the end, he renounces travel altogether, draws an imaginary circle a mile in radius around his Bristol home, and seeks out unusual communities and alternative lifestyle groups in that restricted space. The number is, he reports, “staggering”, and he is no longer cynical about them as he might have been before his journeys. He has come to believe that “there really are ways of living that are more noble and valid”, and that many people are seeking them. Reading him, you start to believe it, too.
In the community
Jones found the Dorset community liberating. “One of the strange things about living here,” he writes, “is that it’s not just that the weak need the strong — but the strong need the weak. It’s not to do with feeling smug because one is being charitable, but something very different. Almost exactly the reverse: one feels exponentially less conceited. Those who have been emotionally skinned, who are in exposed agony, have a gift. They break down the prison of prestige.”
Read on .... books
Utopia by Thomas More, trans and ed by Paul Turner (Penguin Classics £5.99)
Vibrant translation from the original, revised and updated
Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £11.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
