Christine Jennings Quotes

• I was really interested in 20th century communalism and alternative communities, the boom of communes in the 60s and 70s. That led me back to the 19th century. I was shocked to find what I would describe as far more utopian ideas in the 19th century than in the 20th century. Not only were the ideas so extreme, but surprising people were adopting them.

  Christine Jennings

  Ideas, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• But if you'd only ever lived in small wooden house in the middle of wilderness, it sounded much better. Especially because it provided intense community, and these people lived in incredible isolation.

  Christine Jennings

  People, House, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  5 Copy quote

• The vision shared by both [French utopian] Charles Fourier and Robert Owen was for an entire town to fit into one structure. Owen's design for what he called a "parallelogram" was essentially to have a whole city in one building, laid out around a huge quadrangle. Fourier's scheme was to build a massive Versailles-like structure that he called a "phalanstery." In both cases they had these architectural dreams that we now recognize as pretty unappealing.

  Christine Jennings

  Dream, Cities, Design

  Source: therumpus.net

  10 Copy quote

• They [Oneida people] didn't want to fix problems one at a time. If someone invited them to a feminist convention, their answer would have been, 'In the new world women will have total equality, so lets spend our energy creating that whole new world.' And to their credit, the women at Oneida probably had far greater practical equality than what any of the women gathered at Seneca Falls experienced in their lifetimes.

  Christine Jennings

  Fall, Creating, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Utopian fiction is really boring. I had to read a lot of it, and it's not that much fun. But they're fascinating to me as historical documents. Cabet [Icaria's founder and author of the utopian novel, Travels in Icaria], is writing in the 1830s, and his idea of the perfect society reveals a lot about his time. But his book is uniquely bad.

  Christine Jennings

  Fun, Book, Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The fatal flaw of most utopian visions is that they're fundamentally static, and that's not a comfortable place for humans to live. Fourier was very good at imagining a utopia that is constantly changing and very busy, but a vision of paradise that would have been most tantalizing to an underfed overworked factory worker in 1840 doesn't have much appeal in fiction because it's not a story.

  Christine Jennings

  Vision, Fiction, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

  6 Copy quote

• I worry that I may have overstated the impact of Civil War on the utopians. By the time the Civil War comes, most of the communities were quite separated from the wider American society. Their rhetoric is still about transforming the world, but they're not having that much traffic with their neighbors.

  Christine Jennings

  War, Impact, Worry

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The thing that had fueled these utopian communities was a literal belief, and not just a general sense of optimism, that the earth was about to become a paradise. That idea cannot hold water after the war.

  Christine Jennings

  War, Ideas, Water

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The Enlightenment faith that things are getting a little bit better each decade becomes difficult to support. People recognized that there had just been a war that was worse than the war of 1812, and worse than the Revolution; things were clearly not getting better and better.

  Christine Jennings

  War, People, Support

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• So there's that change of general consciousness, and then there's this boom after the war, this expansion into the West. It was like the 1950s. The American economy was pumping at top speed. The kinds of people who would move into these communities and organize their lives around a utopian dream now had dreams about the West.

  Christine Jennings

  Dream, War, Moving

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The thought was, 'We're going to go to California, where the soil is black and ten feet deep, and there are no rocks, and there's gold in the hills.' The West becomes the surface onto which people project their fantasies, where once the future had been the place they projected their fantasies. So it's not just the war that ends the utopian communities, but what follows.

  Christine Jennings

  War, Rocks, California

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.

  Christine Jennings

  Past, America, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• don't think I should be in the business of making big pronouncements about where we are now, but I would say that dissatisfaction is as acute now as it was then. What's different, and what I think we can learn from these people, despite their abundant folly, is that we're not using the future as the organizing principle for our critique.

  Christine Jennings

  Thinking, People, Principles

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Utopians don't say, 'The world's corrupt, women make less money, people of color are oppressed at every turn.' You don't list the problems of the world; you describe a world in which those things aren't the case. The critique is implicit and as a result it's kind of a positive critique. You're not listing what's bad, but rather what would be good - you're oriented toward this positive vision.

  Christine Jennings

  Color, People, Vision

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Because the utopian's worldview was framed around moving toward this perfected future, it helped stimulate the private exertions that add up to social progress. Progress is work. People need to build things and sacrifice and have a harder life for things to get better. On its own, I don't think even the most brilliant critique stimulates that kind of effort as well as an appealing vision of the future.

  Christine Jennings

  Moving, Sacrifice, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The Oneida Perfectionists, along with some of the others, believed that feminism, and abolitionism, and other causes that they pursued in their own way without participating with other people outside of their communities, were all piecemeal reforms. That's what makes a utopian a utopian, this idea that they were going to create a whole new world from scratch.

  Christine Jennings

  Ideas, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Margaret Fuller was already a celebrity, travelling around the world. Emerson, who was the axis around which that whole community turned, just didn't like Fourier's ideas very much. He thought it was all too rigid and programmatic. He said, "Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely life." He thought it was an inhumane system - the day is scheduled too precisely. He didn't think it would work, and he was right.

  Christine Jennings

  Thinking, Axes, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• These weren't college kids on acid. They were preachers, and bankers, and farmers, and the salt of American society subscribing to ideas that now seem so wild to us. These people had the most radical visions of what the future could be. And this was happening in an era we don't typically associate with sexual experimentation, or communism, or things like that.

  Christine Jennings

  Kids, College, Ideas

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The Jacksonian era is generally talked about in terms of individualism, and the development of free market capitalism, and Victorian prudery. It was shocking to find a parallel history to that - a bunch of Americans with very different priorities. I stumbled on to these people, and then became completely fixated on them. The question that drove me was: how did these reasonable people adopt these extremely unreasonable ideas?

  Christine Jennings

  Ideas, People, Priorities

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• That to me was one of the most exciting, and weird puzzles of this book: how are the most religious people and the least religious people of their time all drawn to very similar visions of utopia?

  Christine Jennings

  Religious, Book, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Atheist isn't really the right word because they tended to believe in some sort of Enlightenment, capital 'N' Nature kind of god. But these were people who in their times were criticized as infidels.

  Christine Jennings

  Atheist, Believe, People

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The religious and irreligious are agreeing with each other almost all the time. Their rhetoric is the same, and their plans are the same. Through slightly different interpretations, they all think the same thing is going to happen, that the Earth is going to be perfected and that humans are going to do the work of perfecting it.

  Christine Jennings

  Religious, Thinking, Earth

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• Some people think God is going to guide those humans. The Oneida community and the Shakers both believed that they had received revelations about how to build the New Jerusalem that the Bible says is coming

  Christine Jennings

  Thinking, People, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• The secular utopians basically said the exact same thing, they just took the Bible out of the equation. The religious and the secular groups recognized each other as fellow travellers. They exchanged newsletters and asked each other questions like, "What's a good soup pot to use if you're making dinner for 800 people?" They had these practical connections.

  Christine Jennings

  Religious, People, Connections

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

• There are two instances I studied in which a community moved, amazingly, into an preexisting village built by other, earlier communalists. The Rappites were a German millenarian sect I mostly leave out of the story, even though they are fascinating, because they're focused on salvation and retreating from the world, as opposed to transforming it, like the other groups I write about.

  Christine Jennings

  Writing, Two, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

  4 Copy quote

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