THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

September 4, 2025

 

Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,

Would not we shatter it to bits — and then

Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!

 

—The Rubaiyat  of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald

*

 

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at…

 

—Oscar Wilde

*

 

To create around ourselves the kind of world that we wish to live in—isn’t that the most important project of our lives?

 

—the Russian clown, Slava Polunin

*

 

I will not cease from mental strife

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green and pleasant land.

 

—William Blake

*

 

Wandering through Eutopias

 

On Saturday, September 13th, I’m going to present ¡Eutopias! at Taborspace—the latest in a series of “entertainments.” Ideas of utopias and of paradise have always intrigued me. My original idea was to talk about, and maybe read from, famous utopias like Plato’s Politeia (The Republic), Thomas More’s Utopia and some more recent visions, like Aldous Huxley’s Island and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia.

 

As I began my researches, the first thing I discovered was that the topic of “utopia” is vast! It was like going down a rabbit hole, and finding endless tunnels branching off. Easy to get lost.

 

Let’s start with Webster’s definitions:

 

utopia (noun)

 

1. often capitalized: a place of ideal perfection, especially in laws, government, and social conditions

2. an impractical scheme for social improvement

3. an imaginary and indefinitely remote place

 

Again, according to Webster’s, synonyms include:

 

paradise, heaven, nirvana, Eden, wonderland, fantasyland, Garden of Eden, Zion, Cockaigne, Sion, promised land, Camelot, Elysium, empyrean, Shangri-la, New Jerusalem, bliss, lotusland, never-never land, joy, fairyland, dreamland, dreamworld, arcadia, blissfulness, euphoria, blessedness, gladness

 

You can see where this is going… There are countless books and scholarly articles written just about “Arcadia” and the pastoral ideal in literature. The last word on the synonym list, “gladness,” is a synonym for “happiness”—which is another endless topic. Where to begin?

 

In this essay, I’m going to suggest that the utopian impulse arises from the irresistible idea that “things could be better than they are.” Another idea I want to explore is that “utopia” might be more about the way we see and experience the world than about the way things are—or might be. I want to look at literary utopias, like More’s and Huxley’s, and also utopian experiments in what we like to call “the real world.” Webster’s synonyms for “utopia” suggest imaginary places, but I’m sitting in Eutopia right now—The Tao of Tea. More about this later…

 

A good starting place for our journey together through utopian realms is with Sir (Saint) Thomas More (1478-1535). He was a critic of capital punishment who had his head chopped off. (His original sentence was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, but Henry VIII commuted it to decapitation.) Thomas More coined the word “utopia” when he wrote a long letter (in Latin) to his friend Erasmus about a fictional traveler who had come upon an island in the New World where the customs were different than in 16th Century England. The two friends liked to joke with each other, and “utopia” could be derived from the Greek outopia, meaning “no place,” or from eutopia, meaning “good place” or “happy place.” In this essay, I am “wandering through Eutopias,” but if I had wandered in More’s Utopia, I would have been arrested and punished for vagrancy. No slackers allowed. In many utopias, like Gerard Winstanley’s, everyone was required to work, unlike Harry McClintock’s Hobo Utopia, “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” where “they hung the jerk that invented work.” But I digress… I can’t help it! I’m in a rabbit warren here! (Note to Reader: this essay may resemble the non-linear way my mind works: “that reminds me of another thing, which reminds me of another thing, which reminds me of another thing…”)

 

On the positive side of the ledger, in More’s Utopia they had NO MONEY! There was free public education for all—including women! There was freedom of religion—as long as you believed in God. War with other countries was to be avoided, if possible. Capital punishment was reserved only for the most extreme crimes, like murder. In More’s day, you could be hung for picking pockets or for being a “witch.”

 

The first major literary utopia is Plato’s Republic—two thousand years before Thomas More’s Utopia, although Webster’s synonym “lotusland” suggests that Homer’s Odyssey gives us glimpses of pleasant imaginary realms—the Land of the Lotus Eaters, and Calypso’s island, and the land of the Phaeacians. In the Gilgamesh epic, the hero visits the mortal-turned-immortal Utnapishtim, who lives in a magical realm at the End of the World.

 

One more thought about Odysseus and utopia. The beautiful Goddess Calypso offers him a life of pleasure and immortality (!), but he wants to go home and live out his last years with his wife Penelope. That’s his utopia!

 

I wouldn’t want to live in Plato’s ideal city-state—(like Stephen Dedalus, I would get kicked out, anyway)—but I want to give Plato full credit for doing something radical and new—criticizing his own society. Aristophanes does this too, in a comic vein, without presenting serious alternatives. That’s not his job. He’s a comedian. 

 

Plato was the first person to write out a detailed rational alternative to his society. Up until that time, my guess is that people accepted the society that they lived in as “the way things are.” Maybe there was some complaining, and even a few suggestions. Of course, as Heraclitus and the Buddhists say, everything is always changing, and especially in Periclean Athens, where there were major innovations in theater, democracy, philosophy and sculpture.

 

Unlike Homer’s imaginary Land of the Lotus Eaters, Plato was imagining societal improvements that he hoped would actually come about. Even though Athenians were proud of their city and considered it superior to other cities, Plato believed that there was a lot of room for improvement. He missed some obvious things, like the abolition of slavery and equal rights for women. He outlined five different forms of government, of which he felt rule by a Philosopher-King was the best. Democracy was near the bottom of his list.

 

The five forms of government that Plato outlined, in ranked order, are: Aristocracy, Timocracy, Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny. We think of “Aristocracy” as meaning rule by an “upper class.” Plato, who coined the word, meant something different. From aristos, “the best,” he meant rule by the wisest and most virtuous people in the polis. Plato, who devoted his life to Philosophy, the “love of wisdom,” wanted to ensure that the ruler of a city state was, by rigorous training, the wisest person. Someone like him. He spent a lot of his life trying to get his philosophy students to go into politics and to get tyrants to become philosophers. That last project didn’t go well for him. He was arrested and sold into slavery by the tyrant Dionysius I of Syracuse.

 

Timocracy was rule by (hopefully) honorable military leaders. Oligarchy is rule by wealthy elites—something we are quite familiar with. There has never been a pure Democracy—not here and not in Periclean Athens. Plato thought that because people were susceptible to demagogues, they might actually elect a tyrant. Fortunately, that could never happen here. 

 

Plato had a special, personal reason for distrusting Democracy. The citizens of Athens had voted to put his beloved teacher Socrates to death. 

 

Tyrannos was once a neutral word that just meant “king.” By Plato’s day, experience with tyrants had given the word a negative connotation. They were more likely to be selfish and cruel than wise and virtuous.

 

A form of government that Plato doesn’t mention is “Kleptocracy,” rule by thieves and conmen who use their political power to enrich themselves. There are many examples in the modern world, including the Somoza Family in Nicaragua, Putin and the other Russian oligarchs, the Saudi royal family, the Trump family, et cetera. Maybe Plato didn’t need the word “kleptocracy” because it was assumed that kings (tyrants) like Cyrus the Great naturally amassed the most wealth.

 

Plato’s system was rational—too rational. It highlights some fatal flaws in utopian visions: there is no one right way to live; one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia; good societies are not created by one person telling everyone else how to live. They evolve out of complex collective changes—for better or worse.

 

There’s a eutopia inside Plato’s utopia, known as the Allegory of the Cave. According to Plato, our ordinary experience of the world is a play of shadows on the walls of a cave. We can break our chains, make our way to the mouth of the cave, and see the Sun. In India this is known as moksha, “Freedom”; in Buddhism, nirvana, which might be translated as “extinction.” Buddha spoke of it as “waking up.” Plato said that if you try to tell the dreamers in the cave about the indescribable reality you have seen, they will think you are mad.

 

In the two thousand years between Plato’s vision and More’s, people in Europe weren’t writing about how things could be better here on earth. This was seen as a Fallen World. Hopeless, really. Paradise would come for some after death, in Heaven. Jesus’ death on the cross redeemed humanity from Sin and Death. Unless it didn’t. In Dante’s vision, an eternal Paradise of Light and Love for the fortunate few is balanced with a nightmare vision of eternal punishment, pain, torment and damnation for the majority of “sinful” humans.

 

An Interlude: 

 

For me, The Library is Eutopia!—Multnomah County Library or my own library. Powell’s Books. Belmont Books, Backstory Books & Yarn! BOOKS!!! Every book, like every person, is a World. Some of my best friends are authors: Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, Susan Griffin, R. H. Blyth, Thomas Traherne, Harold Bloom, William Blake, J. Krishnamurti, Hafez, Han Shan, Lao Tzu… It’s a list that goes on and on and on.

 

Moving right along…

 

Another way of looking at utopias is that every time someone, alone or with others, attempts to make something new, something beautiful, something good, it is a utopian experiment—starting a nonprofit organization (there are millions of them on Planet Earth), opening a new restaurant or a new bookstore, growing a garden, painting a picture, making a movie, putting on a play. Eutopias are everywhere!

 

It’s important to note that some people’s ideas of a better world are at odds with other people’s ideas. In many imagined utopias wealth is abolished and people share everything. That’s definitely not Ayn Rand’s version. And at the worst, some utopian visions, when put into practice, bring about more suffering than we can even begin to imagine. The visions of Adolf Hitler and Mao Tse-Tung, and the deaths of millions, come to mind. Many attempts to make things better, make them worse. The dream of the Industrial Revolution to free us from toil and solve all our problems had ecological consequences that were not imagined.

 

In fact, there’s always a Snake in the Garden. No matter how good your idea, there will be problems. Because any imagined world, just like “the real world,” has things in it that “don’t work”—that are unfair, unjust, flawed. No matter how clever we are, we can’t avoid suffering or death.

 

According to the legend, Prince Gautama was already a grown man with a wife and a son before he had any idea that there were such things as sickness, old age and death. He was so troubled by these things that he left his palace in search of some kind of answer. After years of soul searching, he had an experience of perfect inner peace and freedom. He taught that suffering is caused by craving and that when we wake from our delusions we get off the endless Wheel of Birth and Death—we’re awake, we’ve seen the Sun, we’re free! In later Buddhism, the bodhisattvas decided that they didn’t want to get off that Wheel. They wanted to return again and again to the world of suffering mortals in order to help them.

 

Back in the Hippie Days, a lot of people started communes, where they could go back to the Land, grow organic fruits and vegetables, and live together in Peace and Harmony. This was not a new idea. In the Nineteenth Century there were all kinds of ideas about, and experiments with, making a better world (for humans), like Brook Farm and Oneida. Two impressive examples are The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and the spiritual vision of Joseph Smith and the founding of the Mormon Church.

 

some notes: 

 

Every society and every culture, from the first homo sapiens till now, is an experiment, a work in progress, that is always changing—slowly or rapidly. And they are all different. Because they are not all alike (impossible!), you will naturally find that in some places people are relatively friendly and happy, and in other places people, on the whole, might be more angry or unhappy. There are countries where practically every adult is an alcoholic! That can’t be good. In Bali, there’s a special ceremony for children when they reach the age of six months. They  touch the earth for the first time! Up until then, they are constantly held by mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors.

 

This variety is true not just of countries and cultures, but of states and cities and towns and families. By sheer chance, you can be born into a family where you are loved and admired and valued, or one where you get your teeth knocked out.

 

Now, back to Marx and Engels and the Mormons…

 

The basic idea of Communism is: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” This doesn’t sound so terrible, does it? In fact this idea is as old as the hills. When people lived in tribes and hunted and gathered food, this was the only possible arrangement. Food was shared with everyone—even those too old or too young to get it for themselves.

 

On More’s island of Utopia, and in many imagined and actual utopian experiments, sharing was preferred to competition. The words “communism” and “community” are related. The dreams of Marx and Engels didn’t turn out well in places like Russia and China because of ruthless totalitarian ideologues who were happy to murder millions of people in order to pave the road to a “better world.” Maybe “mixed-economies,” like those in Scandinavia, provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

 

Marx’s vision and Buddha’s and Muhammad’s changed the world. Joseph Smith’s vision changed Utah. Just kidding. But it certainly caught on with a lot of people. According to a statistical report of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, as of December 31, 2024, there were 17,509,781 members worldwide. 

 

Every religion and every country—every town and city!—can be seen as a utopian experiment. They are all flawed. That’s the Snake in the Garden. And the “flaws” are not small. Sometimes they are mind-boggling. Anti-Semitism for the Nazis. Our “Founding Fathers” were in favor of Free Speech and Freedom of Religion. Those are good things. Unfortunately, our utopian experiment was “flawed” by a program of genocide against the people who already lived here, and the most brutal slavery in the history of the world.

 

And another thing, and another thing…

 

Our whole civilization is “flawed” by being Patriarchal. The God of Abraham doesn’t have a wife! 

 

Our Scientific-Materialist-Rational-Industrial-Capitalist Civilization is slightly flawed by the fact that in order to make the planet into a theme park for humans, it is bringing about the sixth major “Extinction Event” in the history of the planet. That’s not good.

 

The world is always everything-at-once. While most people are trying to be helpful, there are always some geniuses that are working on new methods to kill everything that lives. It has been ever thus. 

 

Vladimir Putin could decide—all by himself—to have the Russian military invade Ukraine. The United Nations is the eutopian experiment that’s supposed to prevent that from happening, but, alas!, it’s flawed. Like this essay. Like everything.

 

On the other hand…

 

I don’t want to end my essay on eutopias on a gloomy or despairing note. That would be wrong! It is dismaying for those of us with dreams of universal peace and love and happiness to witness seemingly endless examples of violence and greed and fear. It seems to me that the news media and social media relentlessly distort our perception of what is happening. If someone goes into a store or a school or a church and shoots people, it makes the news. If a mother puts her newborn baby to her breast, it’s not news. Is someone grows a carrot, if a doctor in an emergency room saves a life, if a child sings a song, if a poet writes a poem, if people volunteer at a food bank, if a puppy licks your face, it’s not news. You get the idea. I’m pretty sure that what’s happening right now on our beautiful blue planet is that most people are doing good things, things that are useful and helpful—cooking food, teaching school, making love, fixing the plumbing. Mostly people are generous and kind. 

 

Even if some people are trapped in visions of hatred and fear, we can live in love. If hurt people hurt people, we can be part of the healing. We can continue to help co-create a culture that nurtures what is best in everyone. In spite of countervailing forces, we can be kind. We can be good. We don’t have to wait for Eutopia to come “some day.” We can make Eutopia where we are, for ourselves and for others (who aren’t really “other.”)

 

Spring is expected to come again next year. (A firetruck just drove by and the handsome young firemen waved to the children.) We can write poems, sing, dance, put on plays, meditate, do yoga. We can re-read “Song of Myself.” We can laugh and cry.

 

If you look for them, you can find eutopias everywhere.

 

Everything, without exception, is miraculous.

 

Everyone, without exception, has a radiant beauty at the core of their being.

 

I’m sorry…

 

I didn’t get around to talking about Brook Farm, Sankai Juku, Huxley’s Island, Woodstock, Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme, Gonzalo’s vision in The Tempest, the pastoral eutopias in The Winter’s Tale and As You Like It, Slava Polunin’s Moulin Jaune, Bread & Puppet Theater, The Farm in Tennessee and Plenty, The Big Orange Splot, World Central Kitchen, Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Ko-Falen, Plum Village, Farmers Markets, Homeboy Industries, Shakespeare’s Globe, Elysian Fields, the East Village, Portland, Plato’s Academy, Oregon Country Fair, the Quakers, the Shakers, the writings and projects of Christopher Alexander, pirate utopias, Golgonooza, Shangri-La, Alice’s Wonderland, Transition Towns, Valhalla, Esalen, Las Vegas, Atlantis, The Book of Revelations, Portland’s Japanese Garden…

 

There are endless tunnels in the rabbit warren. They go on and on…

 

In Conclusion (for now):

 

The Multnomah County Library is Eutopia. The Tao of Tea is Eutopia. Thursday morning coffee with my friends is Eutopia. FaceTime conversations with Howard Thoresen in New York and WhatsApp video conversations with Stratis Panourios in Athens are Eutopias. The room where I sit on the couch every morning, across from Nancy, enjoying quiet time and journal writing is Eutopia.

 

And…

 

Silence is Eutopia. Samādhi is Eutopia. 

 

There’s a place I like to go every day, a place of deep peace and boundless bliss, a place of miracles everywhere and love without limit. I call it “The Golden World.” 

 

My primary felt sense is that I’m living in Paradise, that Eutopia is my home.

 

–Johnny Stallings