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.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT, WORLD CHANGE, AND HUMAN NATURE

Diagnosis should precede prescription and intervention. Therefore, we first have to understand the nature and problems of humanity before we can intercede effectively.

Joseph Stalin was convinced that humanity’s problems did not lie within but without. Consequently, his prescription was to change the environment—the State and its economy:

•                  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.

For Stalin, a change in the “manner of life,” namely, a change in the economic and political institutions, would greatly improve the human condition.

Other utopian schemes rely upon the removal of the repressive or capitalistic elements. The Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to suggest that if we could simply remove the capitalist oppressors—the top one percent—we could have a better world. Such thinking is predicated on the idea that if the bad guys are removed, the good guys will naturally thrive and create a benign society.

Why? Because the great majority of people are naturally compassionate and other-centered, but they have been oppressed by those who are selfish. By this line of thinking, all the masses need to do is grow in awareness and self-trust.

According to New Age guru, Shakti Gawain, we have failed to learn how to trust in ourselves:

•                  “When we consistently suppress and distrust our intuitive knowingness, looking instead for external authority, validation, and the approval of others, we give our personal power away…Every time you don’t trust yourself and don’t follow your inner truth, you decrease your aliveness and your body will reflect this with a loss of vitality, numbness, pain, and eventually physical disease.”

How then do we learn how to trust in ourselves? We need to be empowered. How? According to some, by learning how to relate to one another! Yesterday, I attended a workshop given by THEDIALOGUEPROJECT.ORG for high school youth. We were all directed to write the names of three people in the group whom we admired, and what we admired about them. Then, we broke up into pairs and one had to recite the admirable qualities we noticed to the other as the other listened attentively. Then, the other person related back to the first what they understood the presenter to be saying. Finally, we had to process what we felt about the experience of being understood.

This proved to be an easy way to generate human connectedness. I had attended one of their talks before. While I do think that there is a place for these kinds of exercises, they wrongly convey the idea that if we simply learn how to affirm others, those others will in turn reciprocate and the world will be a better place. If we could simply learn the skills of affirmation, we would empower both ourselves and others. Consequently, we would no longer need police or soldiers.

This, of course, is predicated on a positive diagnosis of the human condition, a condition that presupposes that we all naturally want to affiliate, creating a win-win situation for all.

Similarly, many college students believe that love will conquer all, even hate. We just have to learn how to love. These students are convinced that if we had known better how to love, then Hitler, Stalin, and Mao would never have embarked on their genocidal rampages.

How do we love? Well, one way is through affirming conversations. I recently talked with a group of young communists at Columbia University in a conversation I hoped would be affirmative. I began by asking them about their hopes. They answered, “Revolution.” Light-heartedly—at least at first—I probed: “Well certainly, you are not advocating violent revolution?” They were; but they assured me that their revolt would kill a mere 1% of the population.

Again, I probed: “In light of the failed communist experiments of the twentieth century, what hope do you have that yours will be successful?”

They explained that they now had an enlightened Thinker/Leader who would not repeat the mistakes of former Marxist revolutions. Meanwhile, I was wondering if, rightly applied, love could persuade their enlightened Leader to lay aside his sickle in favor of tulips.

Meanwhile, my young, idealistic communist comrades assured me that love for humanity required them to strike a quick, relatively painless and antiseptic blow against the controlling elites.

I wondered about what was motivating them. Whatever it was—anger, jealousy, or self-righteous idealism—it seemed to be more decisive than all the love that I could muster through my affirmative attentiveness and understanding of their concerns.

These students are human beings with the same feelings and needs that I have, but yet, they are also our future murderers—instruments of genocide. Can friendship and conversation turn them around? Would these techniques have turned around Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, or would they have co-opted them for their own sinister designs?  In view of the fact that there has never been a society that has been able to relax  sanctions against anti-social behaviors, I had my doubts about their effectiveness.

I’m certainly not against using the carrot before the club. Some will respond favorably to the carrot, but it seems to be undeniable that the club also has its place.

Perhaps this should lead us to a reassessment of humanity and our prescriptions for a better world. Perhaps we have faults at the core of our being that all of the loving affirmations in the world cannot adequately address. Occupy Wall Street and the communists are convinced that they can create a better world by removing the evil elites.

However, the elites are the people who are rich in affirmations. They are successful and have had their needs met, at least more completely than the rest of us. Aren’t they the ones who should be models of self-actualization and humanity? However, affirmations can also harden us in our pride and self-trust.

If our illness lies at the core of our being, perhaps we need to be reborn from above, as the Prophet Ezekiel wrote:

•                  I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules. You shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and you shall be my people, and I will be your God. And I will deliver you from all your uncleannesses (Ezekiel 36:25-29).

If this is correct, then all of our attempts at self-rectification, revolution, and social re-designing are, at best, superficial and temporary. Instead, the inside must first be changed before the outside can be meaningfully addressed.

Democracy in America: A Fading Reality

In 1947, Henry Steele Commager wrote about  Alexis De Tocqueville’s classic Democracy in America:

• By common consent, his Democracy in America [1835-40] is the most illuminating commentary on American character and institutions ever penned by a foreigner, the one which a century after its appearance, seems best assured of immortality. (xi)

The world had been looking at the peculiar experiment of American democracy and the great progress associated with it. Tocqueville observed America’s intimate connection with its faith:

• Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention. (200)

• America, one of the freest and most enlightened nations in the world, fulfills all the outward duties of religion with fervor. (200)

However, Tocqueville warned that the American democracy and success could not easily be replicated in another environment:

• This government can only be maintained on certain conditions of intelligence, private morality, and religious faith which we [French] do not possess. (xvi-xii) 

According to Tocqueville, the necessary glue and guidance came from their faith:

• The great austerity of manners which is observable in the United States arises, in the first instance, from religious faith.” (198) 

He called “religion in America” the “foremost of the political institutions.” Tocqueville wasn’t suggesting that Christianity had become the mandated faith. However, he observed that everyone acted in accordance with this faith:

• I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion, for who can search the human heart? But I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizen or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society… The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other. (200-201)

Certainly, the U.S. wasn’t legally a Christian nation. However, in character and in practice it was:

• Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent. (199)

How was its Christian character manifested? Tocqueville compared the USA with his France and the bloody, chaotic revolution it had endured in the name of “freedom and equality”:

• No one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible… an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all the tyrants of future ages. Thus, while the law permits Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving, and forbids them to commit what is rash and unjust. (200)

For Tocqueville, democracy alone could not deliver the benefits. It had to be underpinned by Christian faith. This hadn’t been the case in France; nor would it be the case in the future genocidal upheavals that had ravaged the Western world. Instead, Tocqueville observed that Christianity had placed necessary limits upon the possible excesses of democracy, especially in regards to the institution of Christian family:

• There is certainly no country in the world where the tie of marriage is so much respected as in America, or where conjugal happiness is more highly or worthily appreciated. In Europe, almost all the disturbances of society arise from the irregularities of domestic life. To despise the natural bonds and legitimate pleasures of home is to contract a taste for excesses, a restlessness of heart, and the evil of fluctuating desires. Agitated by the tumultuous passions which frequently disturb his dwelling, the European is galled by the obedience which the legislative powers of the State exact. But when the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace… While the European endeavors to forget his domestic troubles by agitating society, the American derives from his own home that love of order which he afterward carries with him into public affairs. (199)

Meanwhile, the United States is actively engaged in dismantling this very source of peace, throwing out the definition of family and of sexual identity, even forbidding any mention of what had once been the foundations for its peace.

The battle cry of “freedom and equality” and other forms of social agitation, coming from agitated souls, have ironically created the most oppressive forms of dictatorships and resulting human exterminations, namely Communism, National Socialism and other idealistic promises of utopia. God help us!

Understanding Humanity and Utopia: The Great Divide

The way we conceive humanity and our problems determines the nature of our solutions. Gandhi disdained technology and thought that the return to the simple life would solve many of our problems:

• Gandhi’s idea that technology was evil and that a simple, natural life was morally superior came from British idealists like John Ruskin. Sensitive people like him had become critical of England’s Industrial Revolution because of the exploitation, oppression, and other evils associated with its “dark satanic mills.” Mahatma Gandhi brought this opposition to technology to India. (Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book that Made your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization,111)

Shakti Gawain, author of Creative Visualizations, taught that our problems arose from alienation from the inner self. Therefore, her answer consisted of learning to trust the “truth” we find within:

• “When we consistently suppress and distrust our intuitive knowingness, looking instead for external authority, validation, and the approval of others, we give our personal power away…Every time you don’t trust yourself and don’t follow your inner truth, you decreased your aliveness and your body will reflect this with a loss of vitality, numbness, pain, and eventually physical disease.” 

Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin was convinced that attaining paradise was a matter of changing the environment – the State and its economy:

• 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.

Similarly, The Humanist Manifesto II asserts that “Using technology wisely” can produce the “abundant and meaningful life”:

• “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.” 

Many other utopian schemes rely upon the removal of the repressive or capitalistic elements. The Occupy Wall Street movement seemed to suggest that if we could simply remove the capitalist oppressors - the top one percent – we could have a better world. Other movements placed their hopes on the elimination of those deemed evil or less evolved.

Interestingly, all of these “solutions” have one thing in common – a belief in the essential goodness of humanity, or at least of their particular group, and the superficiality of our problems. Those who believe that humanity has been corrupted by society, also believe that humanity can be easily reformed by a radical change of society.

When we believe that our problems are superficial, we will generate constant flow of utopian dreams. Such dreams are usually revolutionary. They are not content to merely improve the present system but to remove it.

When confronted with the horrors of National Socialism, Communism, and ISIS – and various other utopian movements, each promising to create a better world – the “believer” will insist that these are mere aberrations, easily corrected by the right people and re-education programs. Such hope is inevitably based upon a benign assessment of humanity.

However, what if the genocides, rapes, and abductions are the result of deeper problems that social changes will not touch? What if we are not controlled by rational argumentation or the means of production but by baser instincts?

And here is related consideration. What if there is a human nature that requires a certain kind of care? Then we have to ask the question: “Is this nature best served by sexual liberation? Communism? Finding one’s own truth? Psychotropic drugs?”

This is the Mason-Dixon Line – the great polarizing divide. It depends on our understanding of humanity. How fluid and remedial is our nature? The progressive answers, “very fluid and remedial.” The conservative answers very differently, and these answers determine how readily we will pursue radical change.

The Bible testifies of the pervasive sinfulness of humanity.  According to Jesus, we are normally addicted to darkness, the denial of the truth (John 3:19-20). The veracity of His assessment is evident at every turn. One Sabbath, Jesus healed a man with a “shriveled hand.” Instead of praising God at this miraculous deed:

• The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus. (Luke 6:11)

This same hatred of the Light of God is ubiquitously evident. After Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead after four days in the grave:

• Some of [those who saw the miracle] went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him. (John 11:46-48) 

They were unwilling to consider the implications of this great miracle. Instead, they plotted together to kill Jesus and eliminate His unbearable Light.

Jesus even prophesied that the enemies of the Light would not only eliminate Him but also those associated with Him, all the while convincing themselves that they were performing a virtuous act:

• They will put you out of the synagogue; in fact, the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think they are offering a service to God. (John 16:2) 

According to the Bible, human perversity is so deep-seated that it requires radical surgery. We must be changed from above. In light of this understanding, utopianism is sheer fantasy, like building a mansion on a cesspool.

We are that cesspool. This is a truth that I had denied, disguised, and suppressed for years. It was just too unsettling! However, through the assurance of my Savior’s love and forgiveness, He granted me the courage to face the disorienting Light, and the closer I came to it, the more I was enabled to see the ugliness within.

Fire can either consume us or free us from our bonds. Rather than psychologically crippling me, the Light freed me. I no longer have to hide and put on a facade. I can non-defensively bask in the truth, knowing that my worth is unassailably buried in His love and care.

This does not represent a rejection of social change, but instead a recognition of our human limitations.