Wright, in The God Test, aims to set the development of AI in a three-billion-year perspective. Take this very long view, and one can trace the development of what he calls, following the heterodox Catholic scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin, the “noosphere.” This refers to the growth in extent and density, at first very gradually but recently with dizzying speed, of the sum of organic self-organization and cognitive activity. The current stage of this process is “an inchoate planetary brain whose neurons are human brains.” 

Today’s best-known and most advanced AIs are large-language machines (LLMs). Wright’s description is that an LLM is a neural network: layers of microchips vertically connected. Its “trainer” feeds the machine a vast amount of information —  possibly amounting to a large fraction of the entire Internet. Back and forth among the neurons, or chips, weighted strings of numbers (“vectors”) flash at high speed, adjusting and improving the machine’s ability to follow up or respond to any given segment of text. It can also be taught to solve advanced problems in mathematics and medical science. 

That much, most people already know. But apparently, in the last few years, machines have been acquiring personality. Researchers have found that by tweaking individual neurons, an LLM can be made either sycophantic or truculent. Its prose style can be made plainer or subtler. Even character can be altered artificially: a machine can be made to lie strategically, in pursuit of its mission. More disturbing, machines occasionally lie without prompting, a little like the sentient and malignant artificial intelligence HAL in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

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The most troubling data point Wright offers is a comparison between the development curve of AI’s cognitive capacities and the historical development curve of human cognitive evolution. For better or worse, it appears that AIs are poised for a very rapid leveling-up.

The God Test, however, is neither alarmist nor boosterish. Wright knowledgeably and dispassionately discusses the prospects of both AI Utopia and AI Apocalypse. If he is passionate about anything, it is his insistence that something very big is afoot in the near future — the next 10 to 20 years — and that we had better not just stumble into it. Specifically, we had better not — whatever greedy investors may want — develop AIs as fast as possible on all fronts, with no intra-industry consultation and no national or international regulation.  

Why not? The AI disaster most prevalent in the popular imagination is the “infinite paper clips” scenario. An AI is ordered to maximize paper-clip production and proceeds to conquer the world and convert everything metal, including all our dental fillings, into paper clips. This is known as the “subordinate goal” problem: following insufficiently specific directions for achieving some ultimate goal, an AI formulates a subordinate goal that incidentally wreaks havoc. Though this seems to have captured the most attention, it is not, Wright points out, the only, or even the most likely, path to catastrophe. 

Put another way: an AI could engineer a bioweapon of unimaginable destructiveness; or paralyze the world financial system; or take down the internet; or take down something simpler, like the American or Chinese government. Currently existing AIs probably could not do this (though we don’t really know), but some future (and probably not very far in the future) generation of AIs certainly could. And unlike developing a nuclear bomb, it would not require a sizable industrial complex to accomplish that — and would therefore be much harder to detect and prevent. 

The case for some degree of AI international governance is, Wright shows, a no-brainer. Then again, the case for nuclear disarmament was a no-brainer 60 years ago, and the case for strict control of greenhouse gas emissions has been a no-brainer for 30 years. It appears that humans are, politically at least, creatures of very little brain. 

There is, however, no one but the public to appeal to. Expecting restraint from investors or executives is like expecting chastity from Jeffrey Epstein. Computer scientists understand the dangers, but then, Robert Oppenheimer understood the dangers of developing the atomic bomb and went ahead anyway because it was too “technically sweet” to resist. Governments will probably, as usual, follow the line of least resistance, though perhaps this time, with the biosphere, ecosphere, and noosphere all at stake, they’ll pay attention.

The God Test is, perhaps understandably, a little preachy and not as vividly written as one might wish. A few more powerfully imagined doomsday scenarios would have been welcome; likewise, an idyllic portrait or two of AI Utopia. Still, Wright’s preaching is sound: rise above your tribal cognitive biases and learn to cooperate to temper the obvious excesses that AI will bring about, or be damned! 

At the present moment, much AI-related discourse has to do with its likely effect on our imagination and sensibility — that is, our souls. The God Test is not much help here. Wright discusses at some length a celebrated visionary essay by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. Wright’s issue with “Machines of Loving Grace,” a lyrical evocation of AI’s promise, is that Amodei does not mention the most exciting future benefit of AIs, which turns out to be … universal access to superior video games and virtual reality. Is this really the best we can hope for? 

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Was AI called by Cthulhu?

By Michael Cuenco

The noblest promise of AI, I would say, is to allow the huddled masses the leisure, and if necessary the tutelage, to enjoy the best of human culture: Middlemarch and Keats’s poetry; the Saint Matthew Passion and late Beethoven quartets; Raphael and Renoir; Kurosawa and Ray; molecular biology and general relativity; and several lifetimes more of humanity’s supreme achievements; not to make available to everyone the next generation of trashy, vapid electronic entertainment. 

And while Wright is surely right to worry about the AI Apocalypse, someone ought to be worrying about AI Soul-Killing Tedium. Consider one of the earliest and most extensive applications of AI: customer service. It is now next to impossible to connect with a human being to tell one’s problem to. Not only has this eliminated millions of (not altogether unsatisfying) jobs, but by substituting perfectly literal-minded, invincibly stubborn AI interlocutors for merely dense or obstinate human ones, it is probably responsible for raising the national blood pressure by a point or two. HR is another growing field for AIs, carefully engineered to lack imagination or sympathy and highly valued for their ability to repeat “I’m sorry, but that is company policy” for hours on end, which few humans can do.

And then there’s advertising. The uncontrolled proliferation of intrusive commercial messaging should probably be looked at as a kind of cancer within the noosphere. And unregulated AI will aggravate it, vacuuming up inconceivable amounts of personal data from the internet, analyzing it, packaging it, and selling it to advertisers — a development Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has coined “surveillance capitalism.” 

AIs will undoubtedly be marketed to governments, corporations, and consumers for purposes at best trivial and at worst sinister. It might have been different. More than a century ago, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde offered a wise and humane vision of technology’s possibilities: “All unintellectual labor, all monotonous, dull labor … must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery: … while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure — which, and not labor, is the aim of man — or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.” 

Alas, there is no doubt at all that this is not the future of AI. Money has its prerogatives, one of which is to destroy the grace of life for the many in order to endlessly enrich the graceless few. 

By the Nineties, the project slumped into embarrassing failure, from the end of modernist town planning to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The results of the 20th-century experiments were stagnation, famine, gulags, censorship, and eugenics.

Unfortunately, the Californian counter-culturists who fled the collapse of the Sixties dream and found refuge in Silicon Valley didn’t get the memo. Locked in their rooms, with their rudimentary computers, they set about creating a non-earthly utopia. They dreamed about other worlds and other intelligences, fusing anarchism with New Ageism and libertarianism with science fiction.

So began the tragi-comic rebirth of utopianism. Since then, the ideology has evolved with the growth of AI and cybernetics. It is now mainstream right across the tech world, with adherents including tech guru Ray Kurzweil, and billionaires Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. Today’s pioneers of repeating-the-past predict a future of unbounded technological and economic growth.

The “Tech Utopians” have two main projects. The first is abundance: an end to poverty, hunger, sickness, and back-breaking labor. This will supposedly be achieved through vast social engineering projects, masterminded by an elite class, and with the aid of genius machines.

The second is the improvement of humans through scientific progress. A perfect “blank slate” human will be created for utopia 2.0, and they will be morally, intellectually, and physically enhanced. Humans won’t just be cured of illness. They’ll be cured of mortality itself.

These ideas, however, are hardly new. They appeared in nascent form as far back as Plato. Then, during the Enlightenment, they grew stronger, with the promise of a blank-slate society built upon rationalism and science, in which a better type of human would emerge. Today’s Tech Utopians, though mostly claiming to be libertarians, are attempting the same projects — only this time they plan to use AI and biotech to achieve their goals. Elon Musk, for one, envisages a “future of abundance” once AI reaches human-level intelligence (so-called AGI).

At the moment, there is a split between so-called libertarian accelerationists (like Musk and Peter Thiel), the technocrats (like the late Klaus Schwab) and the Left-accelerationists (like Aaron Bastani) over the question of how exactly abundance will be brought about. At one extreme, you have Bastani’s Left-accelerationist “Fully Automated Luxury Communism”, with its vision of a robotics-enhanced society, with Universal Basic Income and free housing, food, education, electricity and healthcare for all. On the other you have Thiel and the Effective Accelerationism plan to destroy all bureaucracies and to replace democracy with a “cognitive elite” of tech specialists who will rule autocratically over newly formed city states.

Uniting the two sides is the idea that the abundance problem will be solved by complex-systems analysis, powered by exponentially growing AI superintelligence.

Is this progress? Alas, no. Even in 1810, French socialist Charles Fourier envisioned a vast “calculating machine” that could solve all human problems. This machine would organize labor, reward undesirable work with tokens, and even assign optimal sexual partners for better offspring and enhanced pleasure. In this way, the “machine calculante” would ensure universal happiness. Perhaps not incidentally, Fourier also believed that his perfect society could turn the sea into lemonade by using gigantic parabolic mirrors to focus moonlight on the waves.

Fourier’s ideas may have been insane, but they were part of a growing faith in the ability of “systems” to deliver harmony and abundance. These ideas were tested in the many agrarian socialist collectives of the 1880s, and then later in the planned economies of communism. Within the USSR, for instance, there were repeated attempts to link military computers with civilian ones, to make a totalising “Automated System for State Planning”.

The National Socialists also hoped to realize their dream of an abundant New Germania through calculation. Hitler himself envisaged a Crimea rich with fruit and cotton, and a Black Sea inexhaustibly full of fish. Yet Hitler’s fantasies had darker echoes too: according to one historian, the Nazis worked with IBM to devise a computer system that organized the transport of millions of people to the gas chambers.

When Tech Utopians tell us that AI will guarantee abundance, then, they are unwittingly pushing us back into the dangerous utopian delusions that emerged from the 19th century — and that failed so catastrophically in the 20th century.

Some might argue that the reason utopia failed in the past was that we didn’t have a super-intelligent computer. Now that we’re close to creating one, all our problems will soon be solved. But such an argument is built on the fallacy that humans are no more than rational beings in cages of flesh. Therefore, all interactions can be planned, all diseases cured. This couldn’t be more wrong.

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Then there’s the question of improved humans. If you’re going to create a perfect society, you need to enhance people, or else they will bring with them all of the flaws of biology and history — suffering, jealousy, hatred, genetic sickness. As American transhumanist Zoltan Istvan said: “Death is the first major challenge for the species to overcome to truly transcend our biology. There’s nothing in the way out there saying we must continue to die.” Meanwhile entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, who is working on a technology called “Mindcloning”, says: “We’re able to put into computer form people’s mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs attitudes and values and keep them alive in a cyber form, looking forward to the future when their minds might be able to be downloaded back into a regenerated human body.”

In a similar spirit, Tech Utopians are now pushing for CRISPR DNA improvements in babies to prevent genetically inheritable diseases, such as sickle cell disease. The next step, for some, is “designer babies” — which, while legally controversial, is now technically possible.

Meanwhile, the transhumanists intend to use AI, genetic engineering, bio-tech, and cybernetics to create a post-human species which will overcome aging and disease. Transhumanist leaders such as Kurzweil and Nick Bostrom, co-founder of Humanity+, now form a powerful belief-core inside Silicon Valley.

And then there is Musk, whose company, Neuralink, is experimenting with new technologies like Brain Chip Interface (BCI), which enables direct communication between the brain’s electrical activity and computers. Musk hopes to implant surgically installed brain chips into millions of people within a decade. He and his acolytes believe these enhanced human subjects will soon be able to communicate telepathically and download knowledge in an instant. Eventually, they insist, we will see a merger of human consciousness with superintelligent AI, allowing us to achieve digital immortality.

Are these utopian technologies leading us forward? Once again: no. Rather, they are regressing back to dogma found in Plato’s Republic, where selective breeding is proposed to create the “guardian class” of philosopher-kings to run the ideal society.

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There are even echoes of Stalin’s scientists, who sought to achieve a breakthrough in human evolution in the form of the “New Soviet Man”. To this end, Soviet scientist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a super-strong human-chimpanzee hybrid, while Alexander Bogdanov sought immortality through blood-transfusion experiments. It’s an experiment that we’ve recently seen repeated by “longevity biohacker” and transhumanist guru Bryan Johnson, who took blood from his teenage son in the attempt to stay young.

This is not the only poignant parallel. Nikolai Koltsov, a Soviet-era biologist, developed eugenic “sperm banks for geniuses”. Nowadays, one of the goals of transhumanist organization Humanity + this decade is to use technology “to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities”.

Such connections are arguably not coincidental but causal. According to tech historians and activists Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres, leaders of the AGI movement “subscribe to [a] set of ideologies which have emerged from the modern eugenics movement and therefore have inherited similar ideals”. They say that the Tech Utopians are guilty of discriminatory attitudes around racial differences in IQ, and that the Tech Utopian goal is “to create a superior being akin to a machine-god”, a process which is resulting in experimental technological “systems that are unscoped and thus unsafe”.

There is evidence for this in the degree of suffering caused in the Brain Chip Interface experiments. Neuralink is currently under federal investigation for the claim that 1,500 animals died during surgical BCI experiments, with the company accused of “causing needless suffering”, related to “Musk’s need for speed research”.

The transhumanist mission will inevitably require a large number of human test subjects. After all, Tech Utopians, with their belief in “long termism”, tend to view short-term sacrifices as essential to the attainment of their transcendent future goals.

Yet as history shows, utopianism always demands its blood sacrifices in the name of the distant paradise. It excludes those deemed unworthy, or it uses them as its lab rats in the name of “improvement”. In other words, today’s Tech Utopian visions aren’t about progress. They are a regressive repeat of history, born out of a willful blindness to the past. We are accelerating backwards into preventable disasters we thought we had left behind.

You are probably thinking that Perfection is about how Millennials are shallow, demotivated and image-obsessed. You are right, but the book goes one step further, offering a diagnosis of that predicament: according to the novel, the real problem facing Millennials is perfection. Millennials are stuck in the paradox of utopia, living lives so good that they’re bad.

To get a feel for this paradox, try a thought experiment: describe an ideal world. Fill it with all the things you think make life great and remove everything that makes life terrible. In the world you are creating, all of your social and political ideals have already been achieved, and nobody has to worry about survival, or oppression, or violence. The food tastes great, it never rains on your picnic, children don’t throw tantrums and everyone always gets a good night’s sleep. Now imagine you have a choice between living there, in that perfect world, and here, in the imperfect one with all the flaws you routinely bemoan. If you are inclined to choose our world, because the one you made up seems too smooth, too perfect, too unreal, then go back and add in a few of those obstacles you removed. Now you have an almost perfect world, perfectly imperfect, with just enough of a taste of struggle to mix things up. If you still don’t want it — because those struggles are too small and too fake — go ahead and add a few more. Good now?

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If your answer is still no, then it is starting to look as though you aren’t going to be satisfied until you’ve added back everything. Nothing short of the real world, with all its real problems, will do. Utopia might be something you want to aim for, but it is not something you want to have. This is the paradox of utopia: why strive for social progress if the endpoint of those efforts is a hollow and sterile world bereft of meaning or purpose? Why do we work so hard to solve problems we would prefer remain unsolved?

Anna and Tom are the couple at the heart of the utopian world of Perfection. There is a lot we never find out about them. We don’t know what they look like. We never hear them converse. We don’t learn about their childhoods, or get a comparison of their temperaments, or access either’s inner life. Generally we are not privy to information that could differentiate them from one another. They have the same job, the same priorities, and, most importantly, the same aesthetic: “Either of them could choose anything on their joint behalf — be it a dish from a menu or an apartment — without a second thought, confident that the other would like it.” They almost always show up as a unit: “Anna and Tom” occurs 121 times in the short novel, 10 times more than the number of times that either name appears on its own.

Most of those solo-namings are in the few pages describing their sex life, which is a source of mild concern to them: “a thought would worm its way into that bliss: that was the same sex they’d had last week, two months ago, three years ago.” But sex is an exception to the rule: they don’t have the corresponding worry when it comes to the basic pattern of their lives, their jobs, their tastes, the amorphous friend group that stays the same even as its members come and go, their relationship with their families, or the prospect of children — they don’t want any, and that’s that. They enjoy their lives, and each other, and each falls asleep with “a silent and strangely solemn prayer for things to remain exactly as they were. It was always answered.” The novel offers us what passes for a plot in the small rumblings of discontent that Anna and Tom experience — remember the little fake obstacles you added back in to your utopia — which prompt them to travel, to return home, to travel again. In Perfection, nothing really changes, because nothing can change. Everything is the same.

Anna and Tom are not different from each other, nor do they differ from the other expats who populate their friend group. Their apartment is not distinctive either: on vacation in Lisbon, they look at listings of Airbnbs and encounter one indistinguishable from their own. Anna and Tom are originally from somewhere in Southern Europe, but we never learn exactly where. Spain? Italy? Greece? It doesn’t matter, I suppose, because it’s all the same. Sameness saturates the novel, even though Anna and Tom, by profession and self-conception, are explicitly presented as curators of difference: “Their exact titles varied depending on the job, but they were always in English, even in their native language: web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist. What they created were differences.” They worked their way into these jobs from youth, having grown up alongside the internet, already as teens pre-occupied with constructing “personal websites and profiles that reflected their tastes and interests, lists of things that made them special”. Why does the quest for difference end in a blanket sameness?

To answer that question, we have to return to the paradox of utopia, which is to say, the tension between what makes a world feel good and what makes it feel real. Humans are creatures who reshape their environments to suit their needs. We are artificers; we produce artificiality. The better we get at crafting the world that works for us — eliminating the parts that cause us trouble and rearranging the remainder — the more perfect and more artificial our environment becomes. This applies to our physical environment: a tangled heap of fallen twigs becomes a neat cone, the better to start a fire. But it also applies to our social environment and even our intimate relationships. A cadre of humans thrown into a wilderness will be forced to stick together for warmth and security, but, given the resources to move into giant mansions where each family member has their own wing, they will. You can blame this on capitalism, but only in the sense that capitalism makes us rich, and wealth supercharges our power of artificing.

As lovely as that bright, warm, smooth, safe artificial world looks to the humans stuck in the scary dark forest, as soon as we insert them into it, they complain. They start to feel lonely. No longer sure that anyone needs them, each tries to prove their value — “this mansion is better off with me in it!” — by showcasing their own distinctiveness. But the more exclusively they devote themselves to producing this impression of uniqueness on one another, the more similar they become. They’re living what was once their dream, but they are not happy. They continue to feel that what they need is just a bit of difference, a touch of authenticity, some jagged edges. Remember those little fake obstacles again. Where are they going to get them? They might travel, only to find that everywhere is pretty much the same. They might take up the plight of those less fortunate, whom they regard with a touch of envy — after all, their struggles didn’t have to be invented, because their obstacles are not fake. Or they might occupy themselves with normative pictures. Anna and Tom try all of these routes, settling on the last.

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The torture of an unphilosophical life

By Agnes Callard

A normative picture is a picture that reverses the typical direction of evaluation. Usually, the quality of a picture — be it a drawing, or a photograph, or a painting — lies, at least in part, in its ability to accurately capture an independently existing reality. A normative picture is, by contrast, a picture that tells you what reality is supposed to look like. Reality succeeds if it matches the picture, rather than vice versa. Social media is filled with normative pictures, and Anna and Tom spend their lives, first, producing such pictures, both on behalf of their work clients, and so as to populate their own Instagram accounts, and, second, consuming them, which is to say, wrangling their lives so as to make them match the aforementioned pictures. The normative picture tells you that you have not quite arrived at utopia, because this — this image of two glasses of Campari on a table overlooking a vineyard backlit by the sunset, “laptops usually somewhere in the frame to prove they weren’t on holiday” — is what utopia looks like. The normative picture reassures you that perfection still has to be struggled for, that there is still work to do, which means that complete happiness could, in fact, be yours, if only you could close that last little gap.

Perfection doesn’t wear its genre on its sleeve, but I read it as horror. It describes a human future that is bad in a brand new way. It is not violent, or painful, but something even worse: deadly quiet. And I think this horror story is meant as a warning for the reader. On the one hand, Anna and Tom are profoundly unreal. They couldn’t be real people. On the other hand, we could become them.

If worries about Millennials eating too much avocado toast seem like a distant, foolish dream now that we have real problems like rising authoritarianism and runaway inflation and the prospect of confronting whatever AI is going to turn (us) into, then Latronico’s novel suggests a reframing. Yes, there are problems everywhere, and yes, we should try to solve them, but the fact that we won’t know what to do with ourselves once we have succeeded — that is also a problem, and it remains with us even when we are not thinking about it.

Disillusion gives birth to demoralization, and a demoralized public is a potentially disaffected one. This is one reason why almost every English novel before Thomas Hardy ends on an affirmative note, even if this runs counter to what it has actually shown about the world. Art must edify as well as entertain. It must raise our spirits as well as feed our curiosity about our fellow humans, show things as they are but also as they might be in some more just, compassionate parallel universe. Fiction makes up for the deficiencies of reality.

Even so, it’s important that optimism isn’t overdone. This is partly because people are quick enough to see through hollow promises and bogus superlatives. But it’s also because, while our rulers may be idealistic, prating of a new Golden Age of peace and prosperity, the populace is spontaneously materialistic, more interested in the price of eggs than the advent of Utopia. The bankers and CEOs are materialists as well, though they’re aware that one needs the odd burst of piety and patriotic rhetoric to mask the naked self-interest of their actual activities. Ruling classes are not always fooled by their own ideology. This is why it’s a futile pursuit to speak truth to power, since power usually knows the truth anyway. Power understands that one occasionally needs to invoke God, the greatness of the nation and the spirit of selflessness without allowing it to interrupt the daily business of screwing one’s competitors. As the wit remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.

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The return of America's Puritans

By Terry Eagleton

The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration showed all this well enough. The man himself was in Messianic mode, sent by God to save the nation: as though the Almighty’s first attempt at this task, by sending a close family member, hadn’t quite come off. Looking around the world, one feels bound to agree. Trump was in a performative mood as well, which may require some explaining. For philosophers of language, performative statements are the kind of utterance that gets something done. Promising, cursing, blessing, welcoming, instructing, forgiving, forbidding: these are examples of language as action, doing something by saying something, not describing the world but bringing some new state of affairs into existence through the power of the word.

It was in this spirit that Trump decreed on being elected that there were now only two genders in the United States. It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken, which is to say that performative language is a kind of magic. You can transform the world with a movement of the lips. You can even conjure new geographical features into existence, such as Mount McKinley or the Gulf of America. The same goes for Trump’s declaration that “The Golden Age of America begins right now”, which is less an observation like “What a fine library!” than a creative act like “I declare this library open”. Idealism in the sense of a positive vision of the world begins to merge into idealism in its more philosophical sense, meaning the power of the mind to create reality in its own image. If the truth is inconvenient, you can replace it by legislating an alternative truth into being.

This is all the more acceptable if you live in a world in which everything is in flux. Change and fluidity are hallmarks of postmodern culture, which means that no statement about reality can be definitive. It all depends on who says it, for what reason, at what place and time. There is no single truth about anything. The world exists in a whole spectrum of different ways at any given time, so that almost any description of it is likely to be true from some standpoint or other. Being true to the way things are means acknowledging that things are in no way particular. Hence the emergence of post-truth civilization, in which Trump is a wronged innocent. Since you can’t make an objective judgment between this and the belief that he is a crook and a liar, reason becomes pointless and the two opinions simply have to fight it out. Post-truth leads to violence.

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The mental power that transforms the world is traditionally known as the will, and in American culture the will is infinite. Madonna attributed her recovery from a serious illness to the fact that she “didn’t believe in limitations”. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or 30 years time. What obstructs the will is the flesh, with all of its flaws and constraints, so that the only true freedom would be to de-materialize yourself, escaping from the body altogether. It’s this, not just a prudishness about sexuality, which lies at the root of the Puritan hatred of the body. To be a body is to be finite, and to be finite is to be plunged into permanent conflict with one’s true self, which is the infinite power of God within you. If you were to shuck off the body entirely, however, you would be nothing, so that the ultimate freedom is pure negativity. To act is to shape the world according to your wishes; but it is also to be a prisoner of what you create, since whatever you create is fated to be finite, and finitude is a scandal to the infinity which is the life of God in his creatures.

This is why there can never be an American utopia. The nation is doomed to remain divided — not just between George Clooney and the Proud Boys, but between the flesh and the spirit, which is to say between its actual achievements and the eternally unappeased desire which will always find them lacking. There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonized, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centauri as well as Mars. All one’s ideals succeed in doing is showing how far reality has fallen short of them. You can call this state of affairs permanent progress or chronic unhappiness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that it was both. The only future it can’t deal with is the one we are all forced to confront: death.

Because of their different history, the British are nothing like as idealist as the Americans. A prime minister who claimed that God saved his life, so that he could save the country, would probably be ridiculed rather than applauded. A long heritage of empiricism means that the contemporary British believe in what they can touch and taste, whatever the imperial fantasizes of their ancestors and the chauvinism of the far-Right. Rather than stamping your identity on the world, you allow the world to shape your identity. The past is to be broken with in some respects, but conformed to in others. Gratitude for God’s special interest in the nation is largely confined to the last night of the Proms. Pessimism rather than bright-eyed enterprise sets the cultural tone. Alexis de Tocqueville remarks in his Democracy in America that Americans discourage negative comments about the weather. In Britain, they are well-nigh compulsory.

Optimism and pessimism, however, are for the most part mere temperamental affairs, without much moral substance. It’s no credit to smile at adversity if this comes to you as naturally as sneezing. This is where optimism differs from hope. Trump’s vision of a prosperous United States, supreme among the nations, may sound like hope but is actually just small-boy bragging. Much of what he says about America is really about himself. Genuine hope has to be based on realism rather than fantasy. The frail, tentative hope that sometimes emerges as the final note of a tragic drama is worth attending to because it has been dearly bought. Optimism, by contrast, is for the most part hope bought on the cheap. In the end, the only positive vision that counts is one that has faced the worst: yet still manages to affirm. Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.

Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture. You can pardon a convict with a stroke of the pen, but most cultural change moves more like a glacier than a mountain stream. Culture in the sense of everyday customs and allegiances has its roots in a whole complex history. It represents what one might call the collective unconscious, and tends to resist being engineered into or out of existence. It is the stuff of which identities are made, which means that it’s a lot harder to change than your shoes or even your accent. Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change color. The narcissist insists that the world must be pliant to his touch, raging like an infant when it resists his desires. He would rather destroy material reality than allow it to frustrate his schemes. And Trump has his finger on the nuclear button.

But that alliance is now faltering, and the search is on for a new one between young radical intellectuals and the wider masses. And whatever form it takes, it’s far from clear that it will follow the progressive lines that have characterised youth politics for the last two centuries.

The politics of students, and of that ambiguous class of 20-somethings whose lifestyle remains studenty even after graduation, has been a meaningful force for change ever since young people began flocking to higher education. For a new wave of higher-education institutions was, as historian Sheldon Rothblatt argues, inseparable from the class politics that emerged with that era.

In France, for example, the grandes écoles were founded after the French Revolution, and sought to shape a post-revolutionary elite to govern the country according to Enlightenment principles. These were the youth whose presence on the streets in 1848 was so conspicuous. In Prussia, meanwhile, a newly-powerful industrial bourgeoisie saw education as a key means of constructing a widespread national identity, which would serve their interests against the entrenched Prussian aristocracy.

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Such institutions served as crucibles of national identity, finishing schools for the bourgeoisie — and also as a stretch of time in which young, idealistic, middle-class youth absorb high-minded ideas while remaining relatively free of economic and political obligations. It should come as no surprise, then, that such young people have often used that time to develop utopian visions, which they then seek to realise in the wider world.

Such youthful radicalism was, in the 19th century, a fertile breeding-ground for nationalism, liberalism and revolutionary fervour alike. Half a century later and somewhat further east, too, students and young elite radicals played a key role in the revolutions that brought down the Tsar, and brought the Soviet Union into being (and some of their number into power).

But today’s utopians appear actively hostile to more place-bound constituencies, whose causes they championed in earlier ages. Most now prefer a borderless and often identity-driven form of youth activism that came of age with the internet, in the dominant mass student-activist cause of my youth in the late Nineties: the Jubilee 2000 campaign. This sought to persuade Western nations and international institutions to forgive the unpayable debts owed by the world’s poorest countries. Forget helping the poor in your own country, in other words: the proper scale for idealism is now planetary.

In aid of this planetary scope, too, all intellectual traces of a link between centres of power and feelings of national solidarity have become increasingly deprecated. This consensus is now well-entrenched in higher education, with institutions and youthful activists in lockstep: just this week, the Quality Assurance Agency, which monitors academic standards, recommended “decolonisation” across the board — even in science and maths.

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And supporters argue that this change is driven by students themselves. But it’s less universally well-supported by ordinary Britons outside rarefied social and political circles. When, last week, Streatham MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy loudly applauded a Cambridge Union vote in favour of Britain paying reparations for past imperial depredations, the response from the general public was cynical. At the more polite end were accusations that “a prominent subset of the elite want to take money away from working Britons and give it to governments who openly hate us”. At the less polite end, responses were more along the lines of “Fuck off, you fucking grifters”.

Is this simply the latest front in what the historian and political theorist Peter Turchin calls, “the problem of an excess of educated men”? With too many would-be rulers, and not enough positions for them all to fill, Turchin argues, the result is invariably a large number of disgruntled also-rans who combine intellectual firepower with strong senses of entitlement and grievance. In Turchin’s view, this “over-production of elites” helped precipitate the uprisings of 1848, as well as the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Young scions of an emerging bourgeoisie, without obligation to land-holding aristocrats and eager for a slice of political power, joined forces with the new urban poor and industrial proletariat to demand political reforms.

While the 1848 uprisings were swiftly put down, they had long-term consequences including much that we take for granted in the modern political settlement. (Arguably the long-term consequences of Soviet Russia also include a great deal we take for granted in the modern student-activist outlook.) Most remaining systems of serfdom were swept away, while (significantly from the perspective of bourgeois youth interest) governments crafted a series of political compromises with the emerging middle class and their working-class allies.

In Paris, the legacy of 1848 for workers included a shorter working day, a minimum wage and a guaranteed right to work; in Germany, the revolts spurred the move toward freedom of the press, jury trials, and expanded suffrage. Over the longer term, the same political changes also solidified Europe’s nation-states into more or less the political forms we have today, as the romantic idea of national fellow-feeling spread outward from the new graduate intellectual class to the masses.

In the process, many young activists also did well for themselves. And the cynical response to calls for “reparations” suggest others see in this campaign something like the same professed desire to help others while also accruing personal power and influence. Someone, after all, must be tasked with purging those libraries of reactionary classics such as Shakespeare, and administering funds designated for “reparations”. Who better than those who campaigned for the change?

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If such efforts no longer command much support from the masses, the hinge moment for this slow coming-apart of the radical coalition was another uprising in Paris. In May 1968, the stones were once again torn up by students fired by something like the liberalising energy of their 1848 predecessors. Or intra-elite competition, perhaps: after all, this was a baby-boom generation reaching adulthood in far greater numbers than their elders. The result was, once again, social upheaval — followed by accession of many revolutionaries to the elite, where many of the 1968 revolutionaries ended up as politicians and other establishment figures.

But if the student activists of 1968 were still demanding liberalisation, like their predecessors in 1848, the world had changed around them. The grievance that triggered the riots captures just how far. The precipitating factor wasn’t poverty, or even political idealism, but individual desire: specifically, a ban on students spending the night in each others’ dorms.

The riots triggered a general strike that nearly brought down the French government. But at root, 1968 was a sexual revolution, that only took on the cause of the industrial proletariat as a kind of afterthought.

Since 1968, student idealism has continued on that rarefied trajectory. As the West has de-industrialised, so youth politics has lost interest in the industrial working class, and instead turned either to pursuing the individualistic politics of identity, or expanded beyond the “national” polities first forged in the student politics of the 19th century toward global issues such as poverty or climate.

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In my own youth, I wholeheartedly embraced this planetary vision. The Jubilee 2000 campaign made a tremendous impression on me at the time, fuelling my youthful idealism about the power of the internet to network people worldwide for the good of humanity. Looking back, though, I’ve come to wonder if it doesn’t serve more to illustrate how the digital age has changed the dynamic of intra-elite competition that’s characterised student activism since universities emerged as formative institutions for the industrial bourgeoisie.

Drop the Debt campaigners of my acquaintance now sport OBEs and comfortable berths in the 21st-century NGOcracy, much as many soixante-huitards before them ended up at the heart of the liberal French establishment. The organisations themselves are still going, not to mention paying the salaries of activists, researchers, fundraisers and so on.

Meanwhile, it’s far from clear whether the campaign achieved much to ease the burden of debt in the long term. Tens of millions signed the petition. There were concerts. Bono got involved. And over $100bn of debt was forgiven. In the early 2010s, David Golding of Debt Justice made a celebratory video showing how ordinary people in Zambia had benefited from this forgiveness. But last year, The Economist reported that in 2020 Zambia, a key beneficiary of Jubilee 2000, was once again as indebted as ever. The only difference is that this time Zambia’s creditors aren’t the IMF, but an opaque web of international lenders including China and Saudi Arabia, largely immune to moral pressure from well-meaning Western campaigners.

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None of this is to say that activists were wrong exactly, in calling for debt cancellation. It’s more to suggest that political idealism meshes at best uncomfortably with the fallen nature of humankind. And with that in mind, where a utopian scheme seems likely to run aground on the disappointing complexities of reality, the principal beneficiaries of such utopianism — however well-intentioned — may end up being those who appoint themselves to realise that utopia in the world. And as this grows starker, without delivering any obvious benefits to the masses whose lives may be up-ended by another bout of student radicalism, it’s hard to see the time-honoured coalition between progressive radicals and the working class holding up.

The great unanswered question for today’s students, then, is this: where is the mass support today for the rarefied post-1968 brand of idealism that’s come to dominate youth politics? Even the soixante-huitards acted in a coalition of sorts with France’s industrial proletariat; but the post-national orientation of student activism today feels more like a revolution against what’s left of that proletariat, than anything calculated to serve working-class interests.

The counterpoint might be: well, the industrial age is behind us now, so who cares? It’s not like the masses have disappeared, but who knows what the new political poles are. And today’s students are making a big gamble, when they assume that even a post-industrial working class will rally behind the middle-class activist call for more post-nationalism, more identity politics, and more skimming of funds from the real economy for redistribution on moral grounds such as “reparations”.

It’s long been taken for granted that youth politics only ever gets more liberal. But when post-nationalism, globalism and so on is now an overtly elitist project, a truly radical youthful counter-elite would be one that mobilised mass revolutionary support by swinging back in the other direction. In this uncertain moment, perhaps the only subversive move would be to draw a line under the liberalising project begun in 1848, and seek mass support for a politics of limits.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

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That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

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Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

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The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

But until recently, it seemed like we were all meant to aspire to the own-nothing-and-be-happy life. It’s a vision in which travel is easy, possessions are minimal (and delivered by drone), work happens remotely on a laptop, and different geographies aren’t homes so much as flavours to sample on a tasting menu.

Perhaps no voice expresses this more elegantly than the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh, who this week wrote a plaintive defence of the frictionless life: “The myth of the man-child”.

The childless bachelor male, Ganesh claims, isn’t a perpetual adolescent. Far from it: this figure is cultivated, high-minded, “austere” and well-travelled, with “a decorum, almost a formality, born of aversion to the smells, stains and general boisterousness of a kid-filled home”. The most adult conversations, Ganesh reports, “are with the childless”.

This isn’t the first defence of the frictionless life he’s written. Shortly before the pandemic hit in earnest, he made “The climate case for childlessness”, in which he acknowledged that it’s not really about climate at all, but a desire to stay unencumbered. It’s about “a taste for leisure, a dread of sexual monotony”. He and others like him did not, he says, “hate to ‘bring a child into this world’ […] so much as into our diaries”.

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And this is driven, he claims, by a desire for “maximum control” over life: “I know with some precision the list of cities in which I want to pass the rest of this decade, and in what sequence” — a plan that, he acknowledges, wouldn’t be workable with a spouse and children in tow. Ganesh realises this makes him selfish. But he sees this as “a bid for a more, not a less serious life”.

There was a time I would have nodded energetically along with this idea. I wanted, I would say, joy rather than contentment. (I’m pretty sure I recall claiming that the latter emotion merely ‘bovine’.) I spent my twenties living light, travelling lots, and resisting the accumulation of permanent possessions or obligations.

I could have bought a flat in London back when it was affordable; but I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be tied down. Nor did I want a long-term relationship. I didn’t feel stable or coherent enough to tolerate the sheer consistency of commitment to just one other person.

As for the most serious such commitment there is — children — the prospect gave me recurring nightmares. In this I was an early adopter of a now-mainstream Western trend: to remain “child-free”. Many frame this in ecological terms, as in the recent COP26 protest by Population Matters aimed at encouraging people to breed less to save the earth. But a recent Pew poll reported the most common reason given by childless Americans for their decision is simply “I just don’t want to”.

I don’t want to sound like I’m picking on Ganesh, who is thoughtful and clearly aware of the inverse correlation between freedom and intimacy. “Our horizons widen as our commitments narrow,” he observes in his defence of the ‘man-child’. Or, as he puts it differently in a column mourning the decline of expat city-states: “shallowness can be emancipating”.

Even as he defends the atomised hyper-liberal lifestyle, Ganesh is not insensible to what can be lost. He comments, for example, on the way pets “fill a hole” for many millennials in a way allotments, or religion, or volunteering might once have done: “Their dog or cat is the only endothermic mammal that some outwardly successful peers can count on for affection, or don’t have to walk on eggshells around.”

And in any case, even he is uncomfortably aware that his preferred way of life as a “middle class world citizen” may be on borrowed time. Climate anxiety, political instability, middle-class wage stagnation and, more recently, pandemic restrictions all militate against the democratic opening-up of the world to mass frictionlessness.

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But here’s the rub: swapping emancipation for shallowness is less enjoyable when you can’t afford the consumerist upside of minimal ties. One of the first columns I ever wrote here discussed the growing demographic who have embraced liberal atomisation, only to find changing economic conditions have denied them the disposable income that makes being unencumbered fun.

It’s all very well rejecting loyalties and obligations, if your earnings open the full range of upscale world-citizenship for your delectation. But Ganesh has little to offer those who lose this abundance. His best suggestion is that if you own nothing, having spent your twenties acquiring memories, you can always be happy by marrying into money in your thirties. It scarcely needs saying that while this might at a pinch be plausible advice for the kind of 20-something who reads the Financial Times, it’s unlikely to be of use more generally.

For the bottom tier of the new knowledge class is materially increasingly difficult to distinguish from gig-economy proles: both groups own nothing, and neither seems especially happy. Political unrest is rising and, as I’ve argued, the principal distinction between the Left-wing version of this discontent — antifa — and its alt-Right counterpart is cultural.

Some have belatedly realised they traded deep commitments for horizons that aren’t wide at all but shrinking rapidly. Happily not all of these disappointed would-be world citizens have responded by setting cities on fire. And it’s far from a foregone conclusion that the unlucky also-rans who got the atomisation but not the spending-money are all doomed to a future eating mealworm slurry in tiny one-person ‘pod’ homes.

Many are responding in far more constructive ways. For every doomer meme or creepy WEF video, subcultures are emerging in which people raised to be maximally individualist are trying to work out how to live together. In its most mundane form, this looks like a backlash against waiting till your thirties to have kids, or young parents writing about how to rebuild local community. In its more Bay Area-esque form, the social organiser Richard Bartlett is working on strategies for making ‘decentralised’ communities more capable of long-term interpersonal commitment, and thus less vulnerable to the well-documented tendency utopias have of imploding.

Or further out on the apocalyptic spectrum lie green land-based projects such as the Rizoma Field School, which is one of a growing network of families and groups attempting what adherents call ‘Doomer Optimism’: an approach to life based on the idea that things will probably get a lot worse, but that all is not lost if we can find ‘regenerative paths forward’. It seeks to develop sustainable forms of farming and community life, and also teach them to others. Many of these are a long way from the egalitarian ideals of the hippie commune era, and often explicitly opposed to the progressive and hyper-individualist ideas that drove such utopian ventures.

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Will any of this work? ‘Doomer optimist’, smallholder and sustainability academic Jason Snyder is acutely aware of the difficulties likely to be faced by the first generations after Peak Frictionlessness. “An uprooted generation will suffer all sorts of embarrassing contradictions as they try to relocalise,” he observed earlier this year. “They should do it anyway”.

I won’t bore you with how I came to reconsider my commitment to the frictionless life, beyond saying I’m glad I did so just about young enough to form a family before I got too old for that option to be open. But Snyder is right: adjusting to a life organised around the commitments I always feared hasn’t always been easy. It’s not uncommon for family members to get exasperated with me when I do something that implies I still think of myself as a solitary atom-self rather than a member of the team.

I don’t think I’m the only voluntary adopter of a more encumbered life to wrestle with this. The Bay Area technologist Venkatesh Rao captured something of the resulting ambivalence recently. In an increasingly politically unstable world, Rao acknowledged, the frictionless life may be less prudent than stockpiling supplies and working for a durable, secure home. Even so, he doesn’t seem wholly thrilled, tweeting nostalgically: “Remember when the ideal was a backpack, phone, passport, credit card?”. In contrast: “Owning lots of shit and supplies is a PITA [pain in the arse]”.

But what else can we do? Ganesh is right that narrower commitments mean wider horizons. But that’s assuming you can afford to enjoy those wider horizons. And for the rest, when emancipation is unaffordable, all you get is the shallowness.

In response, growing numbers are struggling, however clumsily, to rebuild all those commitments we were raised to discard. It might not work, but I refuse to be cynical towards anyone who’s trying. After all, some loves are worth sacrificing a measure of freedom for. And as the world grows stranger and more unstable, perhaps these are all we’ll be able to rely on.

And then, in 1906, an earthquake destroyed the fragile city. Buildings toppled. Broken gas pipes and fallen powerlines started fires. The authorities tried in vain to create firebreaks, resorting to dynamiting whole blocks of houses, but there was no stopping the fires that burned for another four days. More than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. At least 3,000 people were killed, and the majority of survivors were displaced from their homes.

It is what followed the disaster, though, that is truly fascinating. San Francisco transformed. It went from a city renowned for cut-throat competition, race riots and brothels to the site of an extraordinary upsurge of public-spiritedness. Residents who survived built impromptu health clinics and makeshift shelters.

A beautician, Anna Amelia Holshouser, recalled how she and others stitched blankets and sheets together to make a tent for children, and then set up a soup kitchen, feeding as many strangers as they could out of a few unbroken plates and tin cans. All across the wrecked landscape, groups of survivors banded together to create places of safety and mutual aid. Rebecca Solnit describes the small-scale initiatives on each rubble-strewn street of San Francisco as “little utopias” — that is, idealistic micro-societies where people lived as much for others as for themselves, spontaneously rejecting the dominant narrative of individualism.

What occurred in San Francisco was a rare thing, but it had happened before and it would happen again. Over and over throughout history, idealistic, cooperative communities have sprouted up in the wake of disasters.

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There are few examples as clear as the communities that followed the First World War, less than a decade after the earthquake in San Francisco. On a single day in the war — 22 August 1914 — the French army lost 27,000 men: half as many soldiers dead as the United States would later lose in the entire Vietnam War. In addition to ten million lives lost over the course of the conflict there was the wider damage: the uncounted millions scarred in body and mind; the disorienting sense of an entire social order destroyed.

People reeled under the compound effect of war and an influenza pandemic — robbed of their young, their hopes destroyed, uncertain of what the future held. But amid the destruction arose an impulse that was optimistic, energetic and humanitarian.

As in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, small groups of men and women began to rebuild, starting experimental settlements, renouncing old ways of living and trying to create new ones. Many people around the world believed the old social order was to blame for the Great War: the preoccupation with capitalist gain and nationalistic competition. Their response was to lead lives built around philosophies of non-materialistic mutual aid. In Germany, coteries of students and intellectuals took to the country to live collectively and farm cooperatively. In Japan, so many idealistic settlements were started that the conservative press reported anxiously on a “new village craze”. These post-war groups, though drastically different in style and structure, all had shades of the resilient, compassionate and communally-minded action that defined the days after the earthquake in San Francisco.

What can we learn from these reactions to disaster? Perhaps simply that adversity itself can prompt what is good in mankind — the urge to redraft the lines along which our societies are built for the better; a turn to co-operative social striving that would otherwise never have manifested.

And yet few utopias last long. In San Francisco, it was just a matter of days before thousands of soldiers were “restoring order” in the city — which included shooting those who were trying to collect food for the needy. New modes of living rarely spark large-scale social transformations, and all too often the status quo resumes.

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But short-lived though most utopian communities are, they are connected in a beneficial way to the existing social order. They are in what German sociologist Karl Mannheim called “dialectical tension” with it: offering a reconfigured version of the outside world, expanding people’s sense of social possibilities, while at the same time being shaped by the mainstream’s needs. Even the communities that disintegrate quickly leave traces behind them, some of which are absorbed into the dominant social structures. And their examples gesture towards the fundamental idealism and resiliency in the human spirit, and the easily forgotten truth that it is always possible to recast the way we live.

We’re passing through another disaster now. And though the defining nature of this pandemic has been that people have been forced to live apart, it has nonetheless sparked impressive examples of idealistic activity, of cooperation and social action. Drivers in Wuhan created a volunteer car fleet to transport medical workers to hospitals when public transport shut down; young people in India mobilised to provide aid packages for those without savings; experts created the open-source library “Coronavirus Tech Handbook”, pooling knowledge on technologies and organisational methods for fighting the pandemic.

Climate change is a slower-moving crisis. Like the First World War, it has sparked in many a sense of the failure of the underlying systems of society and governance, which seem to be unable or unwilling to cope and change. Collectives experimenting with low-impact modes of communal living — ecotopias, as some of them call themselves — are proliferating.

At Old Hall Community in Suffolk, a group of 50 share a manor house, farming, cooking communally and keeping their carbon footprint as near as possible to net zero. In the mountains of Asturias in northern Spain, sixty Spanish, French, Danish and German women and men live in the remote commune of Matavenero, where they grow their own food, build their own houses and consume as little as they can. There are larger initiatives, including the community of Toyosato in Japan, where several hundred participants aim to demonstrate a fulfilling life built on sustainable farming, cooperation and minimal possessions. This settlement is one of more than 70 low-impact communities that form the Yamagishi movement, which stretches to Australia, Brazil, Switzerland and the United States.

These contemporary utopias are not a replacement for long-sighted national and international legislation, or for the much-needed regulation of corporate actors. In many ways they may be less effective than change-oriented activists such as Extinction Rebellion. But ecotopians put their money where their mouths are. They live in the way they think we all ought to live.

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There seems to be a time limit on utopian communities. When the disasters that inspired them are forgotten, they generally collapse, or are absorbed back into the old order with its attendant oppressions and injustices. Sometimes, they mitigate that old order, demonstrating practices that can help make society a little better, a little more just. But climate change falls outside of this pattern. We are not likely to live to see the end of this global disaster. And if we insist on holding fast to the old order, to the dominant ideologies of hyper-individualism and materialism, the crisis will only deepen.

Utopian living, at its best, creates an opening in the fabric of society, allowing us to see how fragile the habits and structures which seem immutable in day-to-day life really are. “While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” wrote the young reformer Dorothy Day of the San Francisco earthquake, having watched her mother give away her clothes to survivors. We haven’t quite reached the moment of imaginative, communal rebuilding that people are capable of when faced with disaster. We must hope that this moment will arrive soon.

This was a considerable improvement on Imagine’s last prominent public outing. In March 2020, Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot decided to cheer up everybody on lockdown by asking 26 of her celebrity pals to film themselves singing a line, irrespective of their ability to hold a tune. The a cappella montage did at least provide the most terrifying phase of the pandemic with a shared moment of unintentional hilarity and a lasting monument to the hubris of well-meaning celebrities with nothing to do. One guilty participant, the actor Chris O’Dowd, put it down to “that first wave of creative diarrhoea that seemed to encase the entire world”. Of course, Gadot had to choose Imagine.

Imagine, which turns 50 in September, occupies a unique place in our culture. When the song’s producer, Phil Spector, first heard it, he thought it was “like the national anthem”; but like Spector’s reputation, that assessment has proved complicated to say the least. While some regard it as beautiful and profound, or at least unifyingly inoffensive, others damn it as a sanctimonious monstrosity. It was voted the UK’s favourite song lyric in 1999, the best single of all time in 2001, and the greatest song ever in 2004. Yet it has also been named as the worst song in the world so often that to despise it has become a cliché. “I am hardly the first writer to dislike Imagine,” wrote the critic Tom Ewing. “In fact, the laurels on the comment thread are likely to go to anyone who can make a really good case for its beauty, wisdom or excellence.” This cannot be put down to just its chronic overfamiliarity. Other played-to-death songs such as Hey Jude or Bohemian Rhapsody aren’t nearly as divisive. So what is it about Imagine that drives so many people crazy?

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

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People who find Imagine about as deep as a Keep Calm and Carry On poster might be surprised by how seriously contemporary critics took it, but it is a startlingly radical lyric wrapped in a musical comfort blanket. Running from the myth of Beatle John, Lennon was desperate to shed every form of baggage, and Imagine magnifies this process of renunciation to global proportions. Like Gimme Some Truth, God or Give Peace a Chance, it is a list of things to reject. The first verse scraps heaven and hell; the second bins nations, religions and war; and the third abolishes possessions and poverty.

As the chorus acknowledges (“You may say I’m a dreamer”), that’s a lot for one song to ask for. Its haters are divided between those who consider this prospectus anodyne drivel and those who find its picture of a godless, classless, borderless world “a vision of hell”, as one writer put it. Lennon told the NME that it was “anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional, anti-capitalistic, virtually the Communist Manifesto, even though I’m not particularly a Communist and I do not belong to any movement”. He preferred “a nice British socialism” to “the way some daft Russian might do it”.

“Imagine no religion” angered the kind of people who had still not forgiven Lennon for saying the Beatles were more popular than Jesus but it was “Imagine no possessions” that became the main bone of contention. “Was it a millionaire who said imagine no possessions?” sang Elvis Costello in his 1991 single The Other Side of Summer. Lennon himself realised that he’d misjudged the next line, tweaking the inadvertently condescending “I wonder if you can” to “I wonder if we can” in at least one performance.

The visuals don’t help his case. Lennon decided to film the making of the album and a clip from the movie — John playing his white baby grand piano in his big white mansion — became the music video for Imagine. He should have anticipated that this tableau of smug luxury would sit uneasily with the third verse, but to be fair to him, he was at the time very happy to play benefit concerts and give money to all kinds of causes, including two of the Chicago Seven defendants, Biafran refugees and Clydeside shipbuilders, one of whom misheard the name of the donor and shouted out, “But Lenin’s dead!”

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I’m not convinced that it’s inherently hypocritical for a rich man to imagine a different world, given that anyone who has a big enough platform to spread such a message is almost inevitably wealthy. Still, one has to love the card that Elton John sent to the couple at their extravagant home in Manhattan’s Dakota Building: “Imagine six apartments/ It isn’t hard to do/ One is full of fur coats/ Another’s full of shoes.”

By the time they moved into the Dakota in 1973, Lennon’s revolutionary phase had flamed out. Lennon biographer John Wiener argues that Imagine “seemed to many movement people a hymn to the New Left in defeat”. Not long after the hot mess of Lennon’s 1972 protest album Some Time in New York City, Richard Nixon won reelection in a landslide and Lennon made a brisk, bitter retreat from politics. The FBI, which had been monitoring him as a potentially dangerous radical, closed its file.

It seems remarkable now that when it was released as a single in the US, Imagine hung around the charts for no longer than Power to the People had done and was outperformed by Paul McCartney’s amiable Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. It didn’t come out in the UK until 1975, when it peaked at number six. McCartney angered his estranged friend by telling Melody Maker that he liked Imagine because it wasn’t as political as John’s recent stuff. Lennon shot back with a furious letter: “So you think Imagine ain’t political? It’s Working Class Hero with sugar on it for conservatives like yourself!! You obviously didn’t dig the words. Imagine!”

It’s the sugar that makes the song so portable. It may have the most comprehensive agenda of any hit single ever made but Imagine sounds modest, tentative and unassuming. On a compositional level, it is almost childishly simple. (You can hear an instrumental scrap of it, called John’s Piano Piece, in outtakes from the Beatles’ 1969 Let It Be sessions.) The basic track was recorded in less than half an hour (they used the second of three takes) and the subsequent string arrangement was extraordinarily restrained for a Spector production. The Tokyo version, orchestrated by Hans Zimmer, is far too grandiose; a thought experiment should not be oversold.

Imagine, therefore, lends itself to occasions when something hopeful but not overbearing is required. After Lennon was murdered in 1980, the song topped the UK charts for four weeks but its suitability for mourning is much broader than that. Stevie Wonder performed it in 1996 in honour of the victims of a terrorist bombing during the games, Neil Young reached for it at a 9/11 tribute concert and Madonna chose it to remember those who died in the 2004 tsunami. As Slate’s Katy Waldman wrote when it again became a song of grieving after the assault on the Bataclan in Paris in 2015, “No one who has just watched footage of families mourning their loved ones in the wake of a terrorist attack is ready to swallow a dose of unalloyed affirmation. The song seems veined with the sad understanding that its own dream is too simple.”

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Yet at the same time, Imagine still carries enough of a residual political charge to have been banned by the BBC during the first Gulf War and (briefly) by the US radio network Clear Channel after 9/11. At the end of 2001, Rolling Stone called it “a new national hymn, a strong, quiet counterweight to the institutional psalms and fight songs… that have filled the air since the terrorist attacks.” Former President Jimmy Carter told NPR that on his travels around the world, he heard it “used almost equally with national anthems”.

Imagine is rather like a tourist attraction in your hometown: you’re so used to seeing it in the background that you forget why it’s remarkable. To be honest, I need never hear it again but I’ve warmed to it in recent years precisely because its naked idealism is so very uncool and so easy to deride. There has never been a song like it and it would take a supernatural blend of talent, ego and idealism for anyone to even attempt one. Can you imagine what Twitter would do if, say, Chris Martin tried it?

Unless I am seriously underestimating the global appetite for utopian socialism, most listeners are not embracing it on a literal level as a time-capsule of Lennon and Ono’s post-Sixties art-school radicalism. As Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello has said, “If people really believed the sentiments John Lennon expressed in that song, we would have had revolution in this country a long time ago.” It has become instead a generous vessel for all kinds of aspirations, both big and small. Three years ago, the Observer asked Ono what the word “imagine” meant to her and she replied simply: “To think of something to hope for.” You may say I’m a sucker but I find that idea hard to hate.

I made several attempts at communal living in my bohemian twenties, but never hit on a formula that worked. Somehow, infighting always seemed to creep back into our little corner of heaven on earth.

So I have little personal advice to offer the latest group to join the 21^st-century rush for the connected life: radical black separatists. Black Hammer, a group that describes itself as “dedicated toward building a sustainable future for all colonised people worldwide”, recently announced that they’ve crowdfunded enough money to purchase 200 acres of Colorado mountain land. There, they propose to found “Hammer City”, a communist “ethnostate” that promises “no rent”, “no cops” and “no white people”.

I can tell Black Hammer this, though. Their project is not, as they hope, a wholesale rejection of everything mainstream America stands for. Rather, they’re embracing one of the American Dream’s most archetypal forms: the pursuit of utopia.

In the early seventeenth century, thousands of Puritans sailed from England to the New World to found their ideal society free of oppression. For the Puritans, the stifling authority of the Catholic Church was an impediment to their close relationship to God — and even English Protestants were milquetoasts who had submitted to the corrupting yoke of earthly authority by installing the monarch as head of their church. Rejecting all these sources of external control, the Puritans fled for the New World and a blank slate for their vision.

After displacing at least some of this New World’s indigenous inhabitants, they flourished in Massachusetts. And in doing so they set a vital template for what America is: somewhere you go to create heaven on earth. With enough faith, the Puritan model suggested, a visionary few can throw off the stifling weight of convention and authority, carving out a new, untainted utopia on unclaimed soil.

This template didn’t disappear with the settlement of the continent. By the 19^th century, even the New World’s weight of authority and convention prompted renewed efforts to secede from the mainstream and create still more perfect micro-utopias inside the larger American one.

According to John Harrison, there were some 130 attempts at founding utopian communes in pre-Civil War America. Around 16 of these were inspired by the proto-socialist visions of Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen, who envisaged common property, collective work and communal childcare. The French proto-communist thinker Charles Fourier, also wildly popular at the time, similarly outlined a vision of utopian communities where everyone’s natural inclinations corresponded perfectly to all the types of work that needed doing; it prompted some 300 American efforts to found Fourierist “intentional communities” in the 1840s.

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But all the Owenite endeavours collapsed, including the one founded in 1825 by Owen himself. And most of the Fourierist intentional communities survived for a maximum of three years.

What went wrong? Many of their difficulties can be attributed to the fact that people who imagine ideal societies rarely have the practical skills needed to realise them. When French Fourierist Victor Considérant founded his La Réunion community in Texas in 1855, artists, lawyers, musicians and journalists flocked to the community — but they were joined by fewer than ten farmers. The project collapsed after 18 months amid homesickness, bickering and a distinct lack of home-grown produce.

In Black Hammer, something of the same skills gap may already be in evidence. Though we’re yet to discover how successful Hammer City will prove, critics have pointed to the short high-altitude Colorado growing season, the evident poverty of the soil and their failure to consider water rights as factors which may impede the successful creation of a self-sufficient utopia.

But some of the challenges to would-be utopians may also relate to the worldview of utopians more broadly. In 2019, “regenerative agriculture” advocate Chris Newman argued that “progressive” agriculture should challenge the racist, individualist “yeoman farmer” model and take a more collectivist approach. He then put this into practice, transforming his Sylvanaqua farm into a collective of 75-100 people “with a particular focus on providing opportunities of ownership for people traditionally denied such roles in agriculture: people of colour, LGBT folks, and women”. Speaking to progressive publication Mother Jones last year, Newman argued that “marginalised” people were “better equipped to think of more innovative models for how sustainable agriculture can work than most of the white people who are incumbent in agriculture”.

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But reports suggest it’s not going well. First-hand accounts describe unsanitary conditions and animal cruelty, while the farm’s chaotic expansion plans and disorganised management culminated in the abrupt resignation of Newman. The whole team of “marginalised people” has been summarily fired, and there’s a crowdfunder under way to help them with resettlement costs.

Was this inevitable? The question of “sustainability” is often applied to ecological systems, but we use it far less frequently in social contexts. Yet if there’s such a thing as social sustainability, how can it be achieved? If stories percolating from Sylvanaqua are to be believed, the answer may not be as simple as hiring people with personal experience of oppression.

A clue to what does work may be found in one of the more durable antebellum American utopias: the Oneida Community, founded in 1848 by John Humphrey Noyes. Oneida was, in some ways, similar to the Fourierist and Owenite experiments: a radically communal settlement in which property was held in common and children were raised collectively. More radical still, members practised a form of sexual communitarianism Noyes termed “complex marriage”, which meant anyone could have sex with anyone else who consented.

But unlike the Fourierist experiments, Oneida lasted until 1879. How? The principal difference seems to be that unlike secular communitarians, Noyes was a Christian, and Oneida was united by strong (if eccentric) religious faith.

Yet even so, Oneida eventually foundered on the problem of generational continuity. Despite his commitment to dismantling family bonds, Noyes attempted to hand leadership on to his own son. Theodore Noyes, though, didn’t have his father’s charisma or convictions; the community imploded, with members scattering and its assets distributed among members in 1880 as joint-stock holdings. Oneida survives to this day, but only as a silverware company.

Not all such communities fail. The Amish arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1730s to create their own heaven on earth. In 1900, there were around 5,000 Amish; and yet despite holding themselves radically apart from mainstream America, famously by rejecting most modern technology, the sect has around 350,000 members in North America today. And that figure is only set grow: the Old Order Amish double their numbers every 20 years.

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Of course, if a utopia is successful enough, we stop thinking of it as such. Of the visionary communities founded in America during the 19^th century, the most successful now wields considerable institutional power in its home state of Utah and boasts over 16 million members worldwide: the Mormons.

The common factor in keeping a utopia going, then, appears to be a religious creed. One Maine tradesman, who goes by the Twitter pseudonym ‘BoiltOwl’, views hippy dreams of returning to the land as always destined to fail. As he sees it, “sustainability, boutique agri-business, gentrifying the general store, does not have the heft needed to last”. In contrast, he describes the slow “colonisation” of his neighbourhood by the Amish, and how their effectiveness is powered by their religious commitments and rejection of individualism:

The Amish are ideologically committed. They are not atomised, individual actors responding to civilisational malaise like the hippies. They are connected families, connected through marriage, buying connected land and lots of it.

In his view, the Amish formula is the one that will win: “They are exclusive, focused on generational continuation and self-aware — a powerful bulwark against the most corrosive elements of the modern world.”

So perhaps the main reason all my efforts at communal living failed was that they were secular. For if the history of American attempts at founding the Promised Land are anything to go by, having a robust religious creed is less an impediment to successful utopia than a vital precondition.

On this yardstick, what’s the prognosis for Black Hammer? The group professes a virulent form of the belief system commonly known as “wokeness” — a worldview commonly described these days as a religion. And if wokeness actually is a religion, it ought to be better able to facilitate community living than liberal secular individualism.

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My colleague Peter Franklin argued yesterday that, contra many recent laments, “wokeness” is far from being a “religion” set to supplant Christianity. Perhaps the acid test of whether or not he’s right is whether Black Hammer thrives. For the long list of failed secular utopias, and slightly shorter list of thriving religious ones, suggests the cultural sustainability of a shared faith is as crucial to a community’s survival as soil quality, water rights or farming skill.

Does a belief system help communities live together? Does it inspire its adherents to create things that will outlast them? Is it a faith that encourages children to be born and raised as happy adults who stay in the community? This is certainly the case for the Amish, but only time will tell whether Black Hammer’s beliefs meet these criteria — or those of “wokeness” in general.

While today’s progressives are all for “dismantling” social norms, no community can sustain itself beyond one generation unless it’s also capable of maintaining them over the long haul. If “woke” ideas fail this test, Black Hammer is unlikely to survive. And the many more mainstream institutions that have embraced such doctrines may also find themselves crumbling, for want of the kind of faith that inspires its believers to build.