There is life beyond the monogamous couple, exhausted and precarious, with two children that they raise, barely, isolated in a modest middle-class single-family home. There are more possible worlds and even better ones. You just have to dream about them, encourages American ethnographer Kristen Ghodsee (Patterson, New Jersey, 53 years old). This professor of Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania just published Everyday Utopias (Captain Swing), a round trip through the last two millennia of human history in search of other ways of coexistence that teach us to live better. “This is not a self-help book on how to be happier. It is a book about understanding that other human beings made the world the way it is today and that, collectively, we can make the world the way it will be in the future,” he warns in a videoconference conversation.
Ghodsee explores change projects to shake up the established way of life. And he remembers that today's world is full of realities that were once utopian dreams: divorce, for example, was once a crazy idea; and public school, too. Jesus Christ was one utopian dreamer and Buddha, another. It is not so strange or crazy, the ethnographer agrees, to daydream. And in these times, she says, it is even necessary.
Ask. Why do we need utopias?
Answer. Because they take us out of status quo, they make us lose the idea that the world as we live today is fixed and cannot change. And it is the dreamers, the utopians, who can make us move forward. Utopia is an incredibly productive concept for us to think about different ways of living in the world.
Q. Give me some examples of utopian demands that may become reality in the future.
R. Universal and free solar energy. Now, there are many economic interests that oppose making photovoltaic panels free for everyone because a huge place where profits are generated would disappear and many people would lose a lot of money. But we could eliminate the need for fossil fuels and generate electricity of certain types in countries where the sun abounds, like Spain, for example. If we had the idea that electricity, that solar energy, was just a right of citizenship, the government would give you solar panels and collect your energy. Likewise, living in families that are not necessarily our blood relatives, like living with our chosen families, living with friends, neighbors, colleagues, comrades, whatever, seems very radical right now, but in reality it is not that radical: We have done it in the past and it would be a very natural change.
Q. Do utopias have haters?
R. Utopians always have enemies because they challenge people with wealth and privilege. In the case of Jesus Christ, he was challenging the Roman Empire. In the case of Buddha, he was challenging the traditional Hindu caste system. In the case of people like Marx and Engels [padres del comunismo], were challenging bourgeois authority and capitalism. They dream of ways of being in the world that will undermine the structural systems that sustain the wealth and privilege of a particular elite. And, of course, those elites are going to fight back. So, if you are a very rich white man living in the United States, utopia is not a good thing for you.
Q. If you are Donald Trump, for example.
R. If you are Donald Trump, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Elon Musk, utopia is not going to be your thing. You will fight against utopia as much as you can. But for ordinary people, for those of us who live in the world that Musk and Trump are trying to create, utopia is the only way we will be able to work together to imagine a better future beyond the Donald Trumps and Elon Musks of the world.
“Patriarchy evolved to allow extreme inequalities to be sustainable over time”
Q. What does a better world look like?
R. At a collective level, a better world is for the human species to survive on the planet. Right now, we are facing very serious problems: the climate crisis, the pandemic of loneliness and social isolation, extreme inequality, the care crisis and, furthermore, the technological crisis, with artificial intelligence, robots and automation. We are facing five really big existential crises and utopian visions of the good life are all about ensuring that human beings are still on the planet surviving for the next 400 years. But I also believe that, on an individual level, the most important factor in determining whether you live a happy and healthy life is your relationships with other people. Therefore, any utopian vision of the future that cares about the human race and our health and well-being will promote cooperation and connection over competition and isolation.
Q. In the book he reviews various alternatives for coexistence and delves into the effect of what he calls “the two Ps”: patrilocality and patrilineality. Is patriarchy the great enemy of everyone?
R. Yes. Patriarchy works very well with capitalism and creates a set of family relationships that allows two things: on the one hand, it allows the intergenerational transfer of wealth and privileges from parents to their legitimate children and therefore worsens inequality and prevents us from sharing; Second, patriarchy creates a world in which the raising of the next generation is done for free, mostly by women in the private sphere. And capitalism benefits because it needs workers and consumers, but does not want to pay for them. Patriarchy is a system that evolved to allow extreme inequalities in society to be sustainable over time.
Q. Explains distant utopian experiments and others more installed in the current system, such as coliving. Isn't this model a capitalist euphemism that protects precariousness?
R. At this moment, I think the colivinghe cohousing and sharing property is a way for precarious people to survive in a cruel economic system that is creating a growing underclass. But I also think that those ways of being in the world create solidarity between people who, ultimately, are going to be very dangerous for that economic system. He coliving It is a kind of scam to get the poor or poor young people to live together. But, for the people who benefit from capitalism in the long term, it is dangerous because it teaches the young and precarious that there are other ways of being in the world that will ultimately undermine the system they are trying to preserve.
Q. Does the importance we give to single-family housing enslave us?
R. Yes. We have a very limited view of what it means to be a successful person. For a young person, it is having your own home. There is a kind of fantasy of a single-family home. We constantly buy to maintain this ideal of a single-family home in a single-family car and all our privately owned things. And that is very good for capitalism, but very bad for the planet and for our social relations.
Q. Regarding loneliness, he says that it weakens our physical and mental health, but we still aspire to have our individual home. Are we masochists?
R. No. We are people who live with a natural tendency and a desire to hav
e social status. We want to be loved and admired, to be considered successful. Having our own single-family homes is a symbol of success. We don't do it because we want to isolate ourselves from each other. What we have to do is really think about where that norm comes from and how to change it. The idea that we have a normal and natural way of living as a family, of living in a community, is stupid and ahistorical and goes completely against the anthropological record.
Q. He defends sharing parenting beyond the nuclear family, but admits reluctance to this model. Is the mother-child bond idealized?
R. Obviously yes. If you are a woman and you are breastfeeding, it is really disturbing to realize that milk comes out with the cry of any baby, not just yours. People don't talk about it. I'm not saying attachment theory isn't real: I think babies need a lot of touch and attention, but I don't necessarily think it has to be the mother. Historically, many mothers died during childbirth, and if the mother-child bond were irreplaceable, we would disappear as a species. The mother-child bond is extremely idealized and overemphasized because patriarchy and capitalism demand that women do all this work of raising children for free. They don't want to pay them. They don't want to socialize this work. So the best way to get women to do this work is to say that you do it for love. The idealization of motherhood is a way to ensure that women do not demand compensation or recognition for the important social reproductive work they perform at home.
Q. Some utopian alternatives failed throughout history. Does it make sense to be afraid of utopia?
R. We should fear any idea of utopia as a finished project. What we know from history is that any utopia that becomes fixed quickly becomes a dystopia. For utopia to work, you always have to imagine that it will be dynamic and changing.
“The idealization of motherhood is a way to ensure that women do not demand compensation for their social work in the home.”
Q. Do we lack time to think about alternative futures?
R. To most of us, yes. We are very tired. On the international tour of this book, I have been very fascinated by the fact that it is those over 60 and those under 25 who have the most open minds. Everyone in the middle is too tired to think about it. And I think it's because young people and old people have time to read, to daydream, to imagine. For those of us in those middle-of-the-sandwich years it's very hard, it's extremely difficult to find time to sit and daydream about how you can make your life a better experience. You're just trying to survive day to day. And that seems very sad to me. Most of us are too tired to have any imagination.
Q. You propose a militant optimism. How do we join that?
R. Hope is an emotion, but it is also a cognitive ability: you can imagine yourself in the future in a way that gives you room to make that future a reality. When I speak of militant optimism, of radical hope, it is not a change of attitude. It is not an emotional state. It is a political commitment to the future. And the way to cultivate that political commitment is to share the possibility of change with others. In everything you do, you have to make a political commitment to making the world the way you think it will be better. And when I talk about militant optimism, I literally mean militant; in the sense that I refuse to let people tell me that the world is immutable.
I refuse to let people tell me that my individual anxiety, fear, and feelings of helplessness aren't a structural problem, that they're just something wrong with my brain, and that I should take a pill to make it go away. This is a mental health crisis. My feelings of despair are a structural problem and require structural solutions. So, instead of giving in to hopelessness and fear, we must use them to build a better future. Being a militant optimist is a moral commitment to the future: it is about believing that today we can create the future we want to see.
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