Four Utopian Reformers
Dogma is dogma, whether rational or irrational
I had a chance last month to booze it up at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, but by the time I came across it, I’d already guzzled enough gin to fill a Prohibition-era bathtub, so I skipped it.
Bad on me. Sloppy Joe’s was Hemingway’s haunt in the 1930s, back when he was a strutting, liquor-soaked peacock, high on daiquiris and his literary success, years removed from his time in Paris when he was a young journalist, carousing with the Lost Generation in the early 1920s.
Hemingway, Pound, Stein, Fitzgerald—those tortured souls grew up in the rosy dawn of the early twentieth century, what the historians call “la belle époque,” the banquet years. The world in those years was more optimistic about its prospects than Harvey Weinstein at a cocaine-dusted casting call.
Then came the Great War, that meat-grinder of English, French, and German youth, a blood-soaked mash-up of Lincoln’s “total war” and the shiny new toys of industrial slaughter. Ten corpses swapped for a muddy foot of ground, limbs rotting off in trench sludge. It’d be like growing up in a Norman Rockwell painting only to watch your dad ditch the family for a permanent Vegas bender, except every other dad did the same, leaving a generation of warped, hollow-eyed kids staring at the wreckage.
That kind of trauma spawns some wild s***, like the Lost Generation. But they were small-time neurotics compared to the real freak shows that followed the Great War. Like Weimar Germany’s orgiastic fever-dreams or, worse, the twisted fairy tales of Communism and Fascism and their pipe dreams with bayonets.
And then there were the Utopians. These folks popped up like toadstools after a downpour, hell-bent on ditching the factory age. Their reasoning wasn’t half-bad. Mustard gas, landmines, tanks, machine guns: all that death spewed from urban smokestacks. Cities bred factories, factories bred carnage, so screw the whole municipal grid and head for the hills. It was a clarion call to unplug humanity before we short-circuited the planet.
These dreamers hit big after the Great War.
Take Edward Carpenter. He penned Civilization: Its Cause and Cure in 1889, a title begging for “cancer” to round out the alliteration. The book caught fire after the war, hitting fifteen printings by 1921. His fix? Vegetarianism and rural communes—twin pillars to unshackle mankind from “civilization” and glue us back to some cosmic whole. He thought we’d all meld with the Divine, and each other, in one big hug. Oh, and he was an early cheerleader for “uranism, ” his discomforting term for homosexuality (and a term I'll leave uncommented on like a live grenade).
Then there’s Aubrey Westlake, Quaker and Anthroposophist, founder of the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. The guy dabbled in water divining (dousing) and had no patience for traditional religions, so he cooked up his own, the Sun Lodge, a nature-worshipping ladder from Wood Cubs to Pathfinders, all to “regain Paradise.” “To be spiritual, first be natural,” he preached. He also dreamed of a “Forest School” to shepherd kids back to Eden, one muddy footprint at a time.
Rolf Gardiner took it weirder. A disciple of the medieval mystic Joachim of Flora, he figured folk dancing could resurrect British farming. He was obsessed with reviving rural folk traditions, convinced they’d spark a collective brain-shift. A “peasant aristocracy” was his grand oxymoron (utopians don’t sweat contradictions). He swooned over Germany’s 1920s youth movements, even cheered the Nazis early on, seeing them as elite training camps.
Richard St. Barbe Baker founded Men of the Trees in Kenya, one of the first international environmental NGOs. He launched it to convince Kenya’s Bantu tribes not to continue slashing their forests into oblivion. He invented the “Dance of the Trees,” a ritual far more energetic than its rooted and log-like name would imply. He then hauled the movement back to England. Plant enough trees, he figured, and you’d sprout “physical, moral, and spiritual qualities” like some Druidic fertilizer. The outfit’s still kicking today as the International Tree Foundation.
The mainstream scoffed at these movements, referring to them as “muck and mysticism.”
Rationalism, after all, is modernity’s drink of choice. Heck, it’s not just a drink—it’s an intravenous line injected into modernity’s veins.
These reformers rejected modernity’s thralldom to rationalism by embracing irrationalism, including that vague set of irrationalist pursuits that we loosely refer to as “the occult.”
But how far were these reformers from the major rationalist cults of Fascism and Communism?
Not very.
It’s just a matter of hermeneutic taste. Those major cults rode Apollonian rationality; those mystics drove Dionysian irrationality. Opposite lanes, but still the same destination: a fantasy of earthly paradise, barreling forward on dogma, blind to the ditch ahead.
Rationalism or irrationalism, the left hemisphere runs the show either way in the modern world. Left-hemispheric logic sets the goal, and its preferred weapon is rationalism, but it’ll grab any piece of equipment to score. Even the irrational. That’s why the Nazis, those hyper-rational goons, were also knee-deep in occult nonsense.
More on that mess later.