DREAMS OF UTOPIA

Utopia is something we dream but never possess. I came to this conclusion after tasting several utopic contenders - living in harmony with nature, farming, vagabonding, and living on various Marxist kibbutzim.

One of them was Kibbutz Yehiam in the western Galilee, where our daughter was raised communally for the first five months of her tender life.

She made a hit with the attendants. She smiled at each as if they were treasured friends. We would come for her each evening for two hours after our work was done.

I was therefore thrilled to find Yael Neeman's account of her early life in Yehiam. In "We were the Future: A Memoir of the Kibbutz," she illuminated the kibbutz life that I had never perceived as an outsider.

The preface provides an overview:

·       The kibbutz movement is one of the most fascinating phenomena of modern history and one of Zionism’s greatest stories. Several hundred communities attempted to live the ideas of equality, freedom, and social justice by giving up private property, individualism, and the “bourgeois” family unit to create an Israeli utopia following the Holocaust—the only example in world history of entire communities voluntarily attempting to live in total equality. However, for the children raised in these communities, the kibbutz was an institution collapsing under the weight of an ideology that marginalized its offspring to make a political statement.

The Marxist kibbutz movement, Hashomer Hatziar, represented the most radical social experiment where all forms of "ownership" had been rejected. Instead, everything was to be "owned" by the collective - children, clothing, and even decision-making. Neeman explains:

·       Public and private issues were decided upon at the kibbutz meetings, and committees were elected there. If someone wanted to leave the kibbutz for higher education, the secretariat, the Education Committee and finally, the kibbutz meeting decided whether he would go or wait, and also, what he would study: Did the course of study he wished to pursue correspond to what the kibbutz needed? If it didn’t, he had to adjust himself to the needs of the community.

Even coupling with one specific sexual partner had originally been disdained.

However, this perspective had been disbanded long before my arrival in Israel. Eventually, human nature overtook this severe ideal, and eventually, everyone settled down with their chosen spouse and were visited by their biological children for between one and two hours every evening.

At the time, I had thought that this had been an ideal arrangement, which allowed the parents to spend quality time with their children. However, according to Neeman, the youth did not connect with their parents. Instead, the parent-child relationship felt artificial and uncomfortable.

This discomfort became magnified when the youth from a neighboring kibbutz visited, necessitating the Yehiam youth to stay with their parents for three days. About this Neeman writes:

·       Our parents’ close proximity seemed sick and crazy, as if we were locked in an embrace with death...We could hardly wait for morning to come.

In this Marxist utopia, there was no room for God or for anything that might undermine Marxist purity. Neeman writes:

·       And not only did God not exist in Hashomer Hatzair, but he was forbidden; he was an irrational, pagan obstacle to the remarkable abilities and productivity of the sublime human being. God was a vestige of the dark Middle Ages.

Anything that smacked of the bourgeoisie was disdained:

·       The [kitchen] workers called us [children] over for a minute, quickly, so no one would see or hear them pampering us, and let us taste the food. And they also asked us if it was good, fishing for compliments because there were no compliments on our kibbutz. Applause at the end of a performance was frowned upon too; that was a bourgeois custom.

Meanwhile, the children would sing:

·       We were born to the sun. We were born to the light.

The vacuum created by the banishment of God had to be filled, and the children "born to the light" had to fill it.

I hadn't been aware of this burden that the youth carried, the weighty expectations placed upon them to fulfill their commune's Marxist ideals. Nor had Neeman in her early years:

·       We were proud that we worked on Yom Kippur and ate wild boar that we roasted on campfires. No circumcision ceremonies were held on our kibbutz. No rabbi set foot on it to perform weddings. The dead were buried in coffins, the Kaddish prayer was not said over them, and any mention of the Bible was forbidden.

Later the vacuum would become oppressive. Meanwhile, the ideal was accepted as the unexamined norm in the automatic way that lunch would follow breakfast. Neeman reflects:

·       The boys and girls who graduated from the educational institution [where they would go at age 12 on a neighboring kibbutz] had been born on the kibbutz, had absorbed its values from the very beginning, and had not been damaged by the bourgeois institutions of family and education. They would lead the kibbutzim and the city dwellers, who came from the various city branches of Hashomer Hatzair to fulfill their ideological dreams in the kibbutzim, to a better world. During his years in the institution, the new child would mature into a new man living on a kibbutz, fully connected to and involved in the life of the country.

However, the ideal was never able to fill the vacuum. Neeman reports that, once into their teen years, they began to be plagued by questions of the meaning of life, which would not be satisfied by the standard kibbutz answers. While they felt a debt to the kibbutz, it had a stomach that could never be filled:

·       We worked out of a guilty conscience for a system that would never be satisfied. We felt as if our conscience was a biological, organic part of our body, like an invisible inner hump.

It was an ideal Neeman knew she could never meet. In this regard, I found a recent interview quite revealing:

·       Nevertheless, her childhood memories are happy ones. Contrary to popular characterizations, she said, separating children from families was not an inhumane policy: “It was created from a belief that it would make a better human being and a better family, After all, families are not so ideal all the time. When we ex-kibbutzniks speak among ourselves about this issue, we call it a paradox because most of us were really happy in this strange arrangement. Yet none of us want our children or grandchildren growing up like that.”

As a result, most of the kibbutz youth have voted with their feet and have fled their utopia for the world of the bourgeoisie.

Time has passed its verdict on what seems to have been the world's most successful communist/socialist experiment and has found it wanting.

Time has also been ruthless with other communal experiments. The 70s had been the heyday for communal living in the States. My wife and I visited several, none of which can be found today. Nevertheless, in each instance, it members had been convinced that they had found their permanent home.

We had also spent time in the Longhouse in Borneo, where the tribesmen live communally under their chief. They share games, singing, and the communal connectedness of a large extended family. But once again, the youth gladly give it all up for their own dream of an education, a city job, and enough money to buy a pickup.

Why can we not find utopia? Why is it only vapor that we cannot grasp and keep? Perhaps we can understand this with the help of a couple of analogies:

A man saw a butterfly struggling mightily to emerge from its cocoon, and so he helped free it. However, it died. Why? The butterfly needs the benefit of the struggle to pump its liquids into its wings.

Similarly, baboons build stable communities through the practice of grooming. However, grooming loses all its relevance without the troublesome pests – ticks and lice. Without these predators and other threats, the baboon community cannot survive.

Is it possible that we too require an assortment of threats in order to prosper? To use an extreme example, perhaps we also need death. I remember seeing a video of a woman recovered from the rubble of an earthquake, after five days. The hugging and the tears of joy shed by the husband were touching, to say the least. I wondered, “Had he been complaining about her the week before?” If so, what had changed his disdain into joy? The prospect of losing what he had had!

What would we be like if we lived in a perfect utopia where there was no death and no loss? Wouldn’t we become callous and take every relationship for granted or even as a burden? Would we have any room for gratefulness and love?

Instead, it seems that there are many blessings that we cannot yet handle, blessings that might destroy us. Perhaps all we can do is just dream about a more perfect world. Perhaps we would again just spoil Eden if we were there. Perhaps the door to this enchanted Garden will swing open to us once we have been readied for it.

GOD SUBSTITUTES: COMPETING WITH GOD

We sense that true equality is the ideal, and we desperately attempt to achieve it through income equality, thinking that this will produce a true equality where love reigns supreme.

However, this noble goal has easily eluded our grasp. Communism has tried to achieve it by equalizing our material existence at a disastrous cost of 100,000,000 exterminated lives. But even after this prohibitive cost, love has remained a far-away ideal.

Perhaps the voluntary Israeli Kibbutz came closest. Clothing, food, work, children, and even sexual partners were equally shared. However, love was fleeting and the entire experiment proved unsustainable.

However, a real and sustainable love, equality, and brotherhood require more than an outward rearrangement of materials and circumstances. They require the hand of God. The Apostle Paul wrote that Our God is able to put us together in a way that achieves a true equality and love for one another:

• “The parts [members] of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.” (1 Corinthians 12:22-26)

While we are correct to think in terms of equality, true equality can only be achieved through substantive internal change achieved by the hand of God. To try to achieve this on our own is to force a rose bud to bloom by prying its pedals apart before its appointed time. It is the difference between rape and consensual love. It is the gift of God alone.

Sex and Civilization

With the West massively committed to redefining sex, marriage and the family, it might be fruitful to see if any of these innovations have already been tried and what has been history’s verdict regarding them.

Brian Fitzpatrick suggests that the most “definitive work on the rise and fall of civilizations, was published in 1934 by Oxford anthropologist J.D. Unwin”:

• In Sex and Culture, Unwin studied 86 human civilizations ranging from tiny South Sea island principalities to mighty Rome. He found that a society’s destiny is linked inseparably to the limits it imposes on sexual expression and that those sexual constraints correlate directly to its theological sophistication and religious commitment.

• Unwin noted that the most primitive societies had only rudimentary spiritual beliefs and virtually no restrictions on sexual expression, whereas societies with more sophisticated theologies placed greater restrictions on sexual expression and achieved greater social development.

• In particular, cultures that adopt what Unwin dubbed “absolute monogamy” proved to be the most vigorous, economically productive, artistically creative, scientifically innovative, and geographically expansive societies on earth. Absolute monogamy is a very strict moral code. Under absolute monogamy, sex can occur only within one-man/ one-woman marriage. Premarital and extramarital sex are not tolerated and divorce is prohibited.

Why should sexual prohibitions cause social flourishing? Perhaps for the same reason that tobacco prohibitions might cause health to flourish! There are things that are pleasurable for a season, whose final bill might prove unaffordable.

There are other things or institutions that tend to tame the beast within. For one thing, there is nothing comparable to a committed and trusting relationship. Only within such an institution can a couple make the necessary sacrifices for the sake of family well-being.

I had worked for the New York City Department of Probation for 15 years. Countless times, I’ve had probationers tell me:

• Mr. Mann, I have a wife and child now. I really need to settle down and find a job!

They were committed to taming the beast within with a commitment to something more glorious. However, society is now telling these probationers:

• “Families” can take many different forms, and no one can say that one is better than another.

Perhaps he doesn’t need that job after all. However, In This Present Age, sociologist Robert Nisbet writes:

• “What sociologists are prone to call social disintegration is really nothing more than the spectacle of a rising number of individuals playing fast and loose with other individuals in relationships of trust and responsibility.”

Without trust, commitment cannot survive, and without commitment, we are left with nothing more than social disintegration and children who believe that life is just about taking care of #1!

Our behaviors can undermine our families and the future welfare of our children, and our ideas and beliefs will undermine our behaviors. If sexual freedom is pushed as a virtue or as a “human right,” it will become increasingly difficult to resist those momentary, powerful urges. And when our sexual conduct undermines the stability of our families, it also undermines society.

Fitzpatrick refers to the work of Harvard historian Carle Zimmerman:

• [He] concludes that “the creative periods in civilization have been based upon” the strongest form of family, which he terms the “domestic” type: “The domestic family affords a comparatively stable social structure and yet frees the individual sufficiently from family influence to perform the creative work necessary for a great civilization.” (Family and Civilization) 

• In other words, in an amoral, hedonistic society, you can’t trust the people you need to trust, not even your spouse. Moreover, if people can make and break relationships at will, with no legal repercussions or social stigma, they are much more likely to abandon their marriages—at their children’s expense—when the going gets tough. Husbands with roving eyes are much more likely to trade in their wives for new models. (Whistleblower, Nov. 2010, pp. 38f)

It is no surprise, therefore, that social commentator, Michael Novak, concludes:

• One unforgettable law has been learned through all the disasters and injustices of the last thousand years: If things go well with the family, life is worth living; when the family falters, life falls apart.

The new family configurations are not only a violation of traditional values; they are also a violation of our own nature. We are not made for sexual gluttony. While we can choose to live gluttonously, there is another part of our nature – a deeper core - that rebels against it.

Much of Israel had been settled by radical socialistic communities – kibbutzim. The ideal shared by many of these communities was to have everything in common. This included their clothing, sexual partners, and even their children. Anything else constituted ownership – a dirty word in their thinking.

However, over the years, they succumbed to the pull of their deepest human desires/needs. Consequently, each gravitated to a single mate, forming committed monogamous unions. Even though, in many instances, the children are still raised communally, they return to their own parents in the evenings, thereby proclaiming afresh that there is no place like home, and home is with one’s own committed parents.

Humanity and its Rut

Humanity has always suffered from a broad array of problems – hatred, envy, bitterness, violence, unforgiveness, and denial – and has never been without various “solutions” and their diagnoses of the problems from which to choose. Inevitably, the solutions take either of two forms – changing either the outer environment or the inner one.

Outer change is often associated with revolution. Something has to be radically changed. Communism/atheism had been convinced that changing the means of production would also change everything else, creating a workmen’s paradise. The infamous Joseph Stalin wrote:

• “Whatever is the mode of production of a society, such in the main is the society itself, its ideas, and theories, its political views and institutions. Or, to put it more crudely, whatever is man’s manner of life, such is his manner of thought.”

Indeed, “man’s manner of life [affects] his manner of thought.” However, there also seem to be deeper determinants of thought – a breeding ground that a change in mere economic superficialities cannot touch.

I had lived on several Israeli Kibbutzim – perhaps the most radical communist experiments. Owning everything in common clearly had failed to touch our most basic problems. Meanwhile, other communist experiments have uniformly proved to be one enormous, unmitigated blight upon humanity.

The Humanist Manifesto II  identifies a quasi-external problem – ignorance – and therefore promotes its opposite, science and technology, as the solutions:

• “Using technology wisely, we can control our environment, conquer poverty, markedly reduce disease, extend our life-span, significantly modify our behavior, alter the course of human evolution and cultural development, unlock vast new powers, and provide humankind with unparalleled opportunity for achieving an abundant and meaningful life.”

While science and technology have enabled us to live more affluent and comfortable lives, they too seem to have stopped short of touching the source of our problems. Consequently, depression and suicide rates have been accelerating.

Some solutions, although blaming society, have taken a more internal focus. David Noebel writes about the confidence that humanist psychology has placed in the self:

• “Every humanist psychologist believes the secret to better mental health lies in getting in touch with the unspoiled, inner self.  When man strips himself of all the evil forced on him by society, he will become a positive agent with virtually unlimited potential…The three major assumptions of Humanist psychology are: man is good by nature and therefore perfectible; society and its social institutions are responsible for man’s evil acts; and mental health can be restored to everyone who gets in touch with his inner ‘good’ self.”

If we all possess a “good self,” how is it that all societies – and they are made up of many “good selves” – have become so evil? And if they have all become evil, what hope can we have? Perhaps then if we change society into a utopia, the same internal forces that had corrupted society initially will once again corrupt it.

Perhaps, instead, our very evident human problems are more resistant to change than the progressives have banked upon. Perhaps each one of us is the problem. This is precisely the substance of the Judeo-Christian revelation. Isaiah indicts the entire human race in this manner:

• Their feet rush into sin; they are swift to shed innocent blood. Their thoughts are evil thoughts; ruin and destruction mark their ways. The way of peace they do not know; there is no justice in their paths. They have turned them into crooked roads; no one who walks in them will know peace. (Isaiah 59:7-8)

Nor can we even correct ourselves. Our problems are intractable:

• The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? (Jeremiah 17:9-10)

Our problems are deeper than we want to acknowledge. As strong as we might be, we cannot lift ourselves out of our rut. Only Another can do that for us.