OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.
YESTERDAY, we discussed some of the problems that can arise when folks try too hard to make the real world more like their Utopian dreams of a more perfect world–dreams that are almost always too rational, simplistic, and/or monocultural for the chaos that is real-life humanity.
Proclaiming a real-life place to already be a Utopia on earth can be even more problematic.
In the late ’70s, I was assigned a college sociology textbook that had a different indigenous tribe in New Guinea to represent each aspect of the authors’ dream society–matrilinear inheritance, collective decision-making, etc. The teacher didn’t like it when I questioned in class why the textbook’s authors had to find a different tribe for each social trait they wanted to promote, implying there was no one group that had it all.
Idealized societies seldom live up to their idealizers’ fantasies. Cuba’s egalitarianism and Singapore’s orderliness both turn out to be propped up by harsh authoritarian practices. “Unspoiled” rural places are often that way because everybody there is too impoverished to spoil them.
One of the most famous cases of Utopianization was Margaret Mead’s landmark book Coming of Age in Samoa. By now, almost everybody knows Mead’s book, a supposedly rigorous sociological study of “free love” and premarital guiltlessness among Pacific Island teens, wasn’t completely factual. Rather, it represented two urges at least as universal as teen sex-confusion:
- (1) the tendancy for people in colonized places to tell a white tourist what the tourist wants to believe about the simple purity of native ways; and
- (2) the tendancy for kids to tell fibs.
Real-life Samoans had, and have, social structures and strictures just like organized societies anywhere on the planet. They might not, on the whole, have had the same specific types of sex-fear and sex-guilt as Westerners (at least before the missionaries did their work); but they had arranged marriages and adultery taboos and all the emotional awkwardness of growing up that you’ll find wherever there are conflicting hormones.
Still, the “Exotic Other” and “Sex-Positive Other” stereotypes remain. And after the Mary Kay LeTourneau TV movie of a few weeks ago, I got to wondering: Would this teacher and her prematurely-mature student have gotten into parental mode if she hadn’t seen those received ideas of innocent licentiousness in his Samoan heritage?
We’re not all one tribe, but we are one species. If we dream of a better way to do things, we shouldn’t force others to express them for us, any more than we should force our current social ways upon them.
(Though the anti-female-genital-mutilation advocates would surely disagree with the latter assertion.)
TOMORROW: Those rah-rah, way-new business magazines.
IN OTHER NEWS: Yep, the Web really is growing like weeds.
ELSEWHERE:
