COLD OPEN
Naomi: Let us open with a question. What would your perfect world look like? 
Vinson: For me? Yes. I've thought about this a lot. The perfect world. Mm-hmm. Like if you had to just repeat the same day over and over again, right? Mm-hmm. It would be a big city, say New York at one of its times of sort of least population.
Either like late August in New York, or just before Christmas in New York, 
Naomi: Thanksgiving weekend, perhaps Thanksgiving 
Vinson: weekend could be it as well. 
Naomi: Yeah. 
Vinson: And all you do all day is walk stop in at bars and restaurants. This is your only occupation. There's always money in your account, and you get to just hang out with your friends and then continue to walk the streets.
Naomi: That does sound very nice. The 
Vinson: end. 
Alex: It's so interesting you say this, Vincent, because I was thinking you were gonna come in with more of a like, you know, total social structure situation, you know?
Oh, this is, but you're imagining a very personalized experience of what perfection looks like for you. 
Vinson: Yeah. So 
Naomi: if I were going in that direction, it's a social 
Vinson: democracy. 
Naomi: Yeah. If I were going in that direction. Exactly. By the way, everyone's fine. Like poverty's done. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Everyone, like, everyone is able to walk the streets and go into a bar in, in a restaurant with enough money in their pockets.
That's right. That's right. 
Alex: Well, so I would probably do the same thing as Vincent, but in the past, like, um, in my own personal past, maybe like 1994, I would wanna go see it from my adult eyes. Oh. Maybe that, that's nice. Maybe I go to Paris in the sixties and just check that out. Okay. 
Vinson: Okay. Right in your perfect world.
Rudy Giuliani is the mayor. I get it. Damn. I understand. 
Naomi: Damn. Listen, it's America's Mayor now in forever, 
MUSIC
Vinson:This is Critics At Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. 
Alex: I'm Alex Schwartz. 
Naomi: And I'm Nomi Fry. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening and the culture right now and how we got here. Hi guys. Hello. Hey. What's up? Good, good. 
Alex: What's up Is good? Good. Good's up and already 
Naomi: We're off and running. We're off to a running start. So today you guys we're jumping into the waters of a mystery puzzle box, sci-fi show on Apple tv. And no, I'm not talking about severance, which we have discussed. We're talking about pluribus.
        CLIP - PLURIBUS TRAILER 
Pluribus was created by Vince Gilligan. He's a well-known TV creator, but yeah, 
Vinson: he did, um, he did Breaking Bad very famously. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. Better call Saul. Notably also, which you know might be important in this context, a former X-files guy, wrote on many seasons of that legendary sci-fi show.
Alex: Guys, I have to just come clean at the top. I have not seen many of his shows. Okay. I'm a bit, I'm a bit of a Gilligan idiot. 
Naomi: Okay, well, well, we'll talk Gilligan, we'll talk today and specifically we'll talk Pluribus mostly.
And it stars Ray Seehorn, who was also in Better Call, Saul as Carol Stka, the Misanthropic romantic author who finds herself maybe the lone bulwark against a worldwide scourge of sudden confounding happy unity. The show is definitely intriguing on its own terms, but the premise also opens up for us, I think, to something bigger, which is Utopias philosophers and artists and architects have long been preoccupied with what makes an ideal society.
Right? Yes, for sure. I mean, so many examples. 
Alex: Plato. Plato just comes to mind. Saint 
Vinson: Augustine, the, the, the city of God. 
Naomi: Mm-hmm. There he is. There he is. Thomas Moore, sir. Thomas Moore. There we go. Of course. John Lennon. John Goddamn Lennon. Oh, imagine there's no heaven. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Oh yeah. My friends. Oh yeah. Um, but of course, as our lives and technology have become more complex, it's become more difficult, I think, to imagine a perfect world that's perfect for everyone in it. So the big question I have for us today is what's ideal about an ideal society? That's today on critics at large.
Pluribus and the lure of utopia.
________________


Naomi: Okay, let's start with Pluribus, 
um, and just, uh, not a trigger warning, but something to say before we dive in. We're gonna be mentioning some things that the show considers spoilers. However, we are only going to talk about what happens in the first three episodes that are currently out on Apple tv. So, you know, we're, we're not gonna spoil anything beyond that, but you should be aware that we are gonna, you know, reveal some plot points that are happening.
Uh. In the first three. So with that caveat in mind, does someone want to attempt a brief summary of what the hell is going on on this show? 
Alex:  Alright. Here's what's going on as far as I can tell, right? In the first three episodes of Pluribus, okay, this thing begins with a bunch of nerdy scientists gazing at the sky.
Something is happening. What could it be? They gather around a computer. Aha. They're saying all kinds of sciencey things. Something is going on. At the same time, we meet Carol Stka, the Ray Seehorn character, who's a kind of sour puss romantic writer. Mm-hmm. She thinks her readers are a bunch of suckers.
She has a new book out. She doesn't like meeting the people who love her work, even though they've made her quite wealthy. And she lives in a nice house in Albuquerque with her manager, who is secretly her girlfriend, and she's on book tour while she's on book tour. This scientific thing is progressing at a US military installation.
Base something, one of these things, some proper noun mm-hmm. That I'm forgetting. Um, you need a 
Vinson: code to get in. You 
Alex:  need a code to get in. The virus escapes a rat, bites a lab tech, and all of a sudden that tech is shaking like a leaf, and then coming out of her shaking, kissing someone else. And all sorts, it's like a kissing virus.
Everyone's kissing, everyone's licking, everyone wants to spread the thing. Mm-hmm. They're, they're methodically licking, kissing until this thing goes around the world and finally catches up with Carol Stka. There is a day when everyone in the world all starts quivering and trembling. Mm-hmm. Together.
Like leaves, like leaves, like so many leaves. It's like a big epileptic fit that everyone is undergoing and when the fit is over, some people. Are dead. Other people, most other people are happy. They've all joined this hive mind situation. They now know everything there is to know. Any knowledge is shared knowledge.
And then there are people like Carol who have had nothing happen to them who are the same as before, but are now in this total new world and have to navigate it. And so the show is about Carol trying to figure this out and she immediately freaks. She doesn't like it. First of all, you know, her partner's disappeared.
It's not great. But also she's totally alone here. Everyone's behaving like a weirdo. Everyone she meets is calling her by her name, which would absolutely freak me out. Don't like it. Don't like it one bit. And she sets out to meet the other people on Earth. There are apparently 12 others like her who have not been affected by this thing yet.
And when she does, she finds out that she's even more lone than she thought. 
Naomi: That was great. Alice. Masterful. One thing I will add is that. And, uh, you, you, you mentioned this, but I think it bears maybe emphasizing, is that this hive mind, this new we entity is relentlessly peaceful and positive, at least as far as we can tell in these first three episodes.
All they wanna do is be kind to each other because that's like being kind to themselves, right? Because there's no longer an individual entity. But also be kind to someone like Carol, who is very, you know, quite angry and combative towards them. But they bend over backwards to kind of accommodate her. And another thing that happens is they're very sensitive.
So every time Carol gets upset, even a little bit, like a little shove or like raising her voice. And this is something that is very hard for Carol to control because she is a sour puss Um, the we entity un mass starts shaking, fainting, 
        CLIP - PLURIBUS
And, and so the effects of anger, the effects of any negative feeling on this we entity are dire. And it's a, it's kind of a moral question for someone like Carol who is used to, you know, being kind of sour and aggressive and et cetera.
She realizes that her bad individual feelings affect this new peer group. 
Vinson: That's right. 
Naomi: What did you think? I'm eager to hear what your feelings were about this show. 
Vinson: I. Really enjoy it in part because of this is a lasting thing in Gilligan's work, partially because it seems like his early training in a genre format like the X-Files and then later participation in the so-called golden age of television, um, make some really alive both to visual style generally, but also more specifically to the sort of genre implications of visual style.
There are moments in the first episode that looked like B horror. Mm-hmm. Carol is trying to get the body of her lover into the, the back of a pickup truck and the, there's the hot red lights on her. And partially because of this visual style and also because of the writing, it artfully in a way that I think is another sort of Gilligan signature, really skirts the line between various forms of very somber.
Uh, tragedy and lots of like, notes of comedy. 
Alex: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: So it kind of hits me in that zone really well. Um, but there's also, it's kind of, I don't know about you guys, but it felt to me like a parable. I, I kept on thinking about the Tower of Babel. 
Alex: Mm-hmm. Same actually. Yeah. That, that there were 
Vinson: like over and over and sort of whatever the wisdom literature, there is this thing of you think that you want a certain kind of perfection, but actually, um, it is a hell and a nightmare.
It's like in a different context. It could really be a kind of like. Anti-communist fable. And I was thinking about that too. Totally. Um, it, it just ideologically, it's really kind of disorienting in a way that I'm, as we're trying to piece together the events and what actually happened, what this alien society is that imposed this code on humanity or whatever, it's also similarly a puzzle of what is the ideology of this show and what it's, it trying to say.
And I, and I'm enjoying that. 
Naomi: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think it's very open, ideologically, and again, I, I, I should know it as I have that we're only discussing the first three episodes I haven't watched further. So it's interesting to me to see how this develops because you say a parable, but a parable for what?
Exactly. Right. You know what I mean? It's like, is it about like how Yeah. How Carol is like the one lone hero who's. Fighting the good fight for like, um, yeah. Individualism against this sinister like hive mind pod people type thing.
Or maybe it's about, maybe she's like an annoying American who's like hanging on to her, like selfish individuality, vis-a-vis, you know, something that might be good for a lot of people. Positive collectivism. Yeah. Yeah. Collectivism or, you know, or maybe it's about a kind of like AI tech utopia that's very sinister.
Um, that's, you know, kind of like looming and, uh, this one person being like, no, I'm a human. I'm a person. Yeah. Why is everyone like part of this ai like freaky like, you know, repository of like memories and texts that humans have created from the dawn of time itself. So that I think is. Is curious and, I would like to see how this develops.
The show totally didn't work for me on the level of character and dialogue like it seemed to me very, and also I didn't find it funny at all. I know that the character is supposed to be like, you're supposed to laugh when she's like, what the fuck is happening? And I'm like, okay. We get it. And again, I dunno if we'll see on episode five that in fact there's like a repository of like hell somewhere, you know, in the margins that we're not.
But so far it seems like within a day the revolution has happened and there's, yeah, people died, but we don't really see whatever happened to these people. Everything seems hunky dory and now things are good. Alex, what did you think?
Alex: Yes. What did I think three episodes in, I feel intrigued enough to continue watching. Mm-hmm. And I don't feel that I can commit right now to a like Yep. Thumbs up or thumbs down situation. Here's what I'll say. No. Yes. I, I got, I think there's been a lot of attention that the show gives to wanting to make sure we really get that Carol is sour and negative and cannot be brought around to be kind for even one minute Yeah.
To another person. Unless there's some kind of like. Immediate onus on her to do that. And at the same time, she does have an ethical framework, an ethical qualms. You know, she, she, she asks at some point how many people she killed when she went into one of her rage fits, and she learns that the number is in the millions, and she calls herself Stalin. Which comes back to your point that there 
is something Soviet, like early Soviet about this world. Yeah, certainly. I, one thing I did think about while watching this show was about like Soviet propaganda art, all the workers working together, there's a, there's to your point, Vincent, about, um, Gilligan's Visual Sense.
There's a scene that I really, really liked where Carol as the white woman, individualist American she is, yeah. Pulls up to Sprouts her local supermarket to find that it is totally empty and she has been offered food by, she has a handler, we should say at this point. Her handler's name is Zosia. 
Naomi:  Yes. 
Alex: She is a woman who speaks with an unplaceable accent and is kind of like the demeanor of an un hassled flight attendant.
Like wants to help you. Do you have enough water as you bury your lover? You know, maybe we can do that for you. We have food for you. And Carol wants to do things herself because that's what being a person is. It's doing things for yourself. She shows that the supermarket, it's empty. She asks why, and she learns that.
It's because the hive mind. The rest of the people, the US has figured out very quickly that there are much better ways to distribute resources that will cause much less waste, that will ensure that no one goes hungry. So they don't need this particular supermarket, but she says, Nope, I wanna shop for myself and 
Vinson: I want my sprouts back. 
Alex: I want my sprouts back. And. Within seconds, you get this collaborative effort of all the trucks filled with produce and filled with products arriving, Juju, ju parking in the parking lot, people bringing down the ramps, getting the boxes off, putting them in. And it is, you know, right. Is, is, I don't think Vince Gilligan, I think he's more interesting than this.
I don't think he's going for a dystopic like, you know, let's show 1920s ASO propaganda. You know, how horrible that really can be. But I think he's drawing on these things. one thing that I do find interesting about the show that again, we don't really know why this is the case, is that Carol is treated and so are the other.
12 with a level of obsequiousness that is frightening and discomforting. But, Carol meets another guy who's from Mauritania, who's loving the situation and when a group of them have a meeting in Bilbao, Carol sits in Coach for the Airplane. Even though she's the only person riding and this other guy comes in on Air Force one because he's just said he wants to have that.
Mm-hmm. And he can, he can have anything. So it's this kind of interesting mix between. This collective, um, utilitarian endeavor. And at the same time, this utter pampering that we associate with the 1% of our own worlds,
Naomi:  Yeah. but it also seems that the joint, the, the, the kind of the new we is also living kind of pretty well, 
Alex:   as far as we know. I mean, again, there's a lot as about the world of the show.
We don't yet know, we don't know. We haven't seen where these people sleep. 
Naomi: Do some people still have like tiny shacks and some people live in mansions. 
Vinson: They say, first of all, they're all the same person. Yes. So it would be diff it it, so the, even the idea of inequality seems kind of. Muddied or negated in this situation.
Mm-hmm. At least according to them, a lot of the information that we get about them, we get from them. So, huge caveat. Right? But they say that they can't kill anything. They would prefer to eat vegetarian. They, um, they cannot, uh, harm anyone. They, um, it's like a 
Alex:  kind of jainism, 
Vinson: it, it is a sort of, they don't wanna 
Alex:  intentionally step on insects.
It's that kind of thing. 
Vinson: to be clear, they present this not as a matter necessarily of choice, this is their nature. Yeah. Um, and so the, so the idea is like, you know, we all say, what if there was world peace? What if nobody wanted war?
What if we all worked together? Mm-hmm. Uh, in this world that this is not only a fate mutually chosen, it is a biological imperative.
Alex: Yeah, I think the big question of the show or the Big Que, there are probably few that the show's driving at, but the big question is this question of the collective versus the individual. And, we as human beings with flaws and with desires and with, you know, angers that may or may not rise to the level of Carol are positioned to identify with a carol.
This seems, and like many visions of utopia slash dystopia, one person's utopia might be another person's dystopia. So I'm, I am interested to see how that dynamic continues to play out.
Naomi: Artists have tried to envision a perfect society for centuries that's in a minute on critics at large from the New Yorker.
::MIDROLL::
Naomi: Okay, you guys, we've been talking about pluribus and we have been talking about the vision of Utopia that it presents, which so far seems pretty gentle. Um, and as far as we can see, apart from the many, many people who died during the kind of transition into Utopia, millions, it's a MAs. Millions and millions.
Once Utopia is achieved. It seems to be, you know, imagine there's no war, there's no strife, et cetera, et cetera. Easy if you try, et cetera. It's easy if you try. And it made me wonder about Utopias in general in TV and movies and novels. Do you guys have your favorite representations of Utopia or if not necessarily favorite than ones you kind of go back to?
Vinson: I've got one. Okay. I don't know if either of you ever read this book, but it was one of my favorite books when I was nine, 10 years old. Okay. Um, it's a book by Lois Lowry. It's called The Giver. Oh, 
Naomi: oh, I remember The Giver, but Indeed, yeah, the Giver. 
Vinson: Um, it's about a young kid named Jonas who was born into a society that presents itself as utopian.
Everybody has submitted themselves to something called Capital S Sameness. When you are sort of around the age of reason, 12, 13. You start to, you know, experience strong emotions like, you know, sexual dreams, all this kind of stuff. Uh, you're given kind of medicine to sort of dull your emotions. They, they call them stirrings, but Jonas finds himself impervious to this dulling down.
And it's because he's horny. He's, he's the horny motherfucker. First of all, I was like, finally a hero I can relate to. Um, um, no, he is, uh, designated. It's designated that one day he will become what the society calls the receiver of all memories. Somebody's got to know what happened before the sameness.
And he is therefore paired with the, the former receiver who we come to know as the giver. And so this older man mentors Jonas and teaches him what the society really is. And he comes to know that it's kind of a, an exploitative. Genocidal society. Spoiler alert, Jonas has fallen in love with this little kid. He's kind of a run to the pack and he sees through the, the givers, um, promptings, his father give this little child, this is a, a dark book for kids, and this is why I loved it. Give this child a lethal injection and then throws him down a shoot.
It's like, you know, if you can't fit into our society mm-hmm. Goodbye. Mm-hmm. And so Jonas has this moral. Quandary. He's receiving all these memories of a freer different world, and the book is really about his crisis of conscious around is this actually a good society that presents itself as having conquered the tumult of difference.
Is it a good society? It, it captivated me as a child. I've never forgotten it. It's still, even though I haven't read it in many years, it's still one of my favorite books. 
Alex:  It's kind of like the 1984 for the tween set, you know? I feel like, and I loved it too, Vincent. Yeah. I feel like it gets it. Similar ideas about, and this is often a theme I think of.
These utopian slash dystopian fantasies. And, and it's interesting to me how thin that line can be, where some kind of conformity is necessary. Some kind of system that's imposed from the top. Yeah. That everyone has to be a cog in the machine of, and as long as you're a willing cog, everything is fine and you don't 
Vinson: have to choose your career, 
Naomi: somebody will give it to you.
Exactly. Yeah. And you just, we need a strong leader, et cetera. And, 
Alex: and willing and willing worker bees. Yes. Mm-hmm. And the second, you're not one of those, your purpose is gone and out you go. Yeah. Um, oh yeah. I love the giver. 
Vinson: It, it left a mark on me that, uh, has not yet been raised. Is 
Alex:  there a moment where he can, like, he gets memory of cold sled or something?
Vinson:The main memory that the giver wants to impart to him is somebody being on the top of a hill. I'm sorry. 
Naomi: Oh my God, he's crying. Oh, it's guys, this is, it's this is, it's just, this is what memory is. This is what it can do. It's just a 
Vinson: kid sledding through the snow. 
Naomi: Oh my God. Oh, Rosebud man. Rosebud. And 
Vinson: it's like the most vivid thing that has ever, it's literally Vincent's, Rosebud.
Naomi: It's rosebud. The sled, the poor, I'm 
Vinson: sorry. Oh 
Alex: my God. Listeners, Vincent is weeping. And let it be known again. This is the thing guys. Core memory is someone else's memory. This is the power of art. When we see it, we have to call it out. We have to love it. 
Naomi: But this is partly what being a person. Means to have these experiences to, and to remember these things after the fact. Alex, do you have like a favorite utopia or veering into dystopia? I guess it's a, it's a good question.
Alex: I mean, I don't know if I have a favorite, but there are two. Kind of genres that immediately come to mind if I may. Mm-hmm. Um, one is we just have to shout out Sir Thomas Moore. You know, what a freak. That man just went for it. He just imagined himself. He was a man for all seasons. He was a man. He was a man for all seasons.
And he just said, I'm going to do it. I'm going to imagine a no place. 'cause of course, utopia means no place where stuff is very different than it is here in me, old England. And what's kind of great about, um, utopia by Sir Thomas Moore is that some of the things he imagines. Aren't that far a cry from actual human society goals that some places later sort of to questionable degrees of success caught up with, such as religious tolerance.
Hmm mm-hmm. You know, in, in Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia. 
You know, you can worship the moon, you can worship the sun. It's a wild act of imagination that because it's so many hundreds of years old, we all sort of take for granted. Mm-hmm. But it's, this is, this is why I admiringly call him a freak, at least the Sir Thomas Moore of, of writing utopia.
It's like he really just imagined all of that, including two slaves for every household. You know, that was part of his utopia. But yeah. You know, they could work some you slavery, some you win, some you lose some. Exactly. Can't be right all the time. Um, alright, getting more serious. One genre of utopia that fascinates me and that I have found myself drawn to is the whole feminist utopia idea of what if life weren't terrible for women?
Just, let's start with that idea. What if we weren't imagine, imagine, imagine that. Um, what if we weren't the oppressed class worldwide and our lives weren't controlled by men? Wouldn't that be great? And usually in these utopias, it requires the absence of men
One of my favorites, which I definitely read in like a gender studies class in college, was the Gary Air by Monique Fatigue. Nomi, does this say anything to you? I remember Monique Viti. Yep. A French philosopher and feminist, but I don't remember that particular text. It's like in little bursts you get, um, these Amazonian women training for war against the men.
And there are even some young men who are won over to their cause. Thank you male feminists. We see you, we salute you. And then they triumph. Hooray. And that's, and that's pretty much that. Like this is where I feel a little bit conflicted. Okay. I definitely got a thrill out of reading this in college.
It's very thrilling to imagine all these women, the warrior women, the peasant warrior women training and going after the men and all these. But I do find imaginatively, you then get a little bit boxed into a corner with all this. That's why a great utopia kind of needs. Mm-hmm. It needs the dissenter, it needs, it needs the individual, this is what I mean about the individual versus the collective.
Can any true collective situation be a utopia for people like us who value the needs and wants, and frankly, wrinkles of being a person? 
Naomi: Yeah. It's a good, it's a good question. I mean, I think one text that I kept thinking about when I was watching Pluribus. is Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Mm-hmm. The Steven Spielberg movie with Richard Dreyfus, um, from 1977, in which, much like in Pluribus there is a signal that is delivered from the Stars. And in this case, Dreyfus is one of the chosen, one of the few chosen who is called by the signal and kind of is, inexplicably drawn to something that these aliens are trying to tell him.
and the whole movie is about kind of his search to join another society. Essentially, he is unhappy as an individual in the society that is. His, uh, natural habitat, 
This is a movie that kind of ends with the creation at least potentially, or what we are made to believe will be a utopian experience for him, And it's incredibly moving. It's one of my favorite movies because you get the sense that he is finally home and that things will be good for him.
Finally, um, you guys, we've talked about some fictional examples mm-hmm. Of Utopia. Um, what about real life? I mean, God, there's been. Plenty of examples of people trying to create God's own country right here on Earth. I mean, not God necessarily, but a sense of like, we can live a utopia right here, right now.
Another world is possible. Mm-hmm. What are your thoughts about that? 
Alex: Yeah, I mean, this is, there's nothing more human than the impulse to constantly try to perfect humanity and to solve humanity's problems by shaving off the unfortunate, the human bumps that keep us all in friction with each other all the time.
There's so many different examples. One I'm thinking of right now because I'm excited for the new Mona Feld movie. The Testament of Ann Lee is the shakers, this religious group of people who shared something in common.
You know, I think sex as a very anarchic part of the human experience is something that comes up again and again in utopian societies. Both imagined real, like in some, the whole thing is not controlling sex.
Let it go, do whatever you want sex with everyone. And in others, I would say probably most others, sex becomes something that very much has to be controlled And of course, the shakers did not believe in reproducing. They did believe in making beautiful, simple wooden furniture and little jewelry boxes.
Naomi:  Yeah, I mean, you know, on the upside, pleasant round barn, on the downside, no sex and no continuation of, of the shaker line. You know, you win some, you lose some. And the same is true of, uh, the Israeli kibbutz. Ah, ah, yeah. Uh, Zionist socialist notion of coming to Palestine and establishing these communal living situations called kibbutz, where everything is shared and everything is equal.
Sharing food, sharing, like sharing resources, uh, sharing the tasks. Uh, you know, it's usually, you know, there was some sort of agricultural concern. And, you know, my, my very own husband was born in a kibbutz and spent his first two years of his life. There. And he, for those two years as a baby, he lived in a children's house.
Oh, wow. He did not live with his parents. And how did that work out for him? Uh, probably not great. Mm-hmm. You know, but that was the way really, I mean, later on there are still kibbutz. Um, most of them have, have, have become, you know, not really socialist, but at the time, this was the late sixties, the, the mother would come and like nurse her baby, but would go back to her house And there were nurses that shared taking care of them. And, uh. That was the way, and of course the idea this stemmed from that everybody would share and women also wouldn't be burdened in the same way by the labor you had to perform as a mother and wouldn't instead do other things.
In some ways I obviously un understand the imperative and it was kind of a good thoughts in some way, but in other ways I don't think it was that great for a lot of people, the children and the parents both. 
Vinson: Uh, it's funny you mention 
Naomi: mm-hmm. 
Vinson: How utopia often manifests itself in terms of national projects. Yeah. Because I was thinking about the founding of Liberia, 
Alex: okay? Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: Starting in the early 19th century, a movement to repatriate return. Yes. You could call it a mythical repatriation, whatever. Uh, mostly African Americans, also many, um, black Caribbeans to form a nation in Africa under the idea that in order to finally get true, not only recognition, but freedom, black people who had been the subjects of the transatlantic slave trade would have a better chance at freedom in Africa than in the West.
Naomi: Yeah. 
Vinson: And a nation was in fact founded. Yeah. Uh, and I mean, talk about. Often utopia when it sort of encroaches into real life and people convince themselves that it is worth actually materially pursuing. What an undertaking. People crossing oceans, changing their whole lives. Um, and truly forming a nation, which, you know, was the first free African nation, only Ethiopia also wasn't, uh, colonized, but they had a sort of, there was an occupation by the Italians, whatever.
Um, but of course there was later on a coup, there was a Liberian civil war. Mm-hmm. You know? Nations, the nation state, whatever, its promises of protection, communal living, sharing freedom, often, um, devolve into resembling the, the nations from which the, their peoples are sort of plucked out. Um, and so that has always stood for me as a sort of tragic, but also in a certain way, impressive example of how utopia can really be pursued, but then also like what the, what the aftershocks of that really are.
Naomi: Sure. Yeah. I mean I, I, I think the question, all the examples that we shared obviously had a lot of blind spots in the, and downfalls. Why do we think it is that utopias generally fall, fall short? 
Alex:  Well, I mean it's the, the examples both of you brought are so interesting is corollaries, because of course they both, and, and to some extent the shaker example as well depends on this idea of a paradise lost an idea that once upon a time there was perfection.
There was. Happiness. There was a sense of connection. There was unity, there was nationhood, then catastrophe happened. Exile happened, enslavement happened. But we can get back, we can find a way back to paradise. And I think that initial burst of energy to try to restore what has been lost is one of the most beautiful human impulses, maybe.
Mm-hmm. A kind of collective endeavor that is about more than the individual. And, you know, a phrase, just a little phrase comes to mind from each, according to his ability to each according to his need. It's that it's, it's a form of Marxism. We're going to, we're gonna form a society in which everybody has a purpose and the ultimate goal is a collective one, but we can honor the individual and value the individual and their abilities as well.
Like, that's the utopia. I think they fall apart because the balance is very hard to sustain. Mm-hmm. And then, as we may have seen in history and here and there. An increasingly repressive form of enforcement is necessary to keep all these pieces of delicate balance in play.
Naomi: in a minute –  Utopias may usually fall short, but is there value in the optimism they represent? This is critics at large from the New Yorker
::MIDROLL::
Naomi: we've been talking about utopia. I don't know why this is making me feel so like dark, I mean, I, I am not the most optimistic person. Right. I'm the kind of person who's like, this is probably like a false promise if we're hoping towards, you know, any type of utopian thinking.
But I'm also thinking if you're like stuck in pessimistic dystopic thinking, are you foreclosing on kind of like greater promise of, or greater potential of imagination? Like, why am I such a, you know, sad sack about this? 
Alex:  You know who you remind me of? Carol?
Naomi:  Oh, no.
Alex:  Oh, yes. Nomi, no. Oh, yes. No. Carol is, there was a reason you didn't like her. She hit too close to home. Oh no, Mary, I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. 
Naomi: Oh God. Okay. How should we approach the idea of utopia? Like, I mean, are there benefits to having a little bit of hope to, you know, looking ahead with, with stars in our eyes, or maybe it's a fool's errand? 
Vinson: Yeah, I mean, I, when we get into this topic, especially vis-a-vis, uh, utopia and perhaps thinking about political projects, I think about the Italian anti-fascist, intellectual Antonio Gramsci who talked about, um, pessimism of the intellect.
I know what the world is like mm-hmm. But optimism of the will, the, the will to imagine better futures, better possibilities, better outcomes, and letting that sort of seesaw that. Discomforting balance guide your interactions with the world, never expecting to arrive at total utopia, acknowledging the flawed nature of human beings and the fucked nature of our systems, et cetera, but still leaving some spark of optimism, kind of, of the, the heart and will, which is very hard to do.
Naomi: Yeah. 
Vinson: And is strangely counter-cultural, right? Because, um, there's a thin line between responsibly saying, someone who's o offering me perfection might be actually a, a malign actor, which is fair enough, but also that can often be turned to political ends that say, better is not possible, and it, it takes a fine balance of discernment to, to acknowledge the former, but. To kind of reject the latter and say, no, no, no. Better is possible. 
Alex: Yeah. 
Vinson: And I don't want my continuing apprehension of how rough the world is to dull me to reasonable alternatives that could make our lives better.
Right. And so that balance is hard to maintain. Yeah. 
Alex: And 
Vinson: that's why I think it makes us feel really seasick inside. I feel it too. Yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. 
Naomi: And I think for me, there's also the kind of fear of like, whose version of Utopia,  obviously, I know what I, what I think like a, a, a better world looks like, yeah, I want everyone to have free healthcare, for instance, or I want resources to be more equally distributed, et cetera, et cetera.
but then for some people, I mean, what is Make America great again? If not a call to, yeah, a different kind of utopia. Absolutely. One that like Yeah. Is reactive, you know, looks make great again. You know, like we used to be great.
Mm-hmm. But what does that mean? You know, like we used to be more white, we used to be more traditional, you know, gender, sexuality, you know, all of those metrics. Like everybody knew their place vibes, right? That's 
Alex: right. 
Naomi: And so it's like who is determining what this utopia looks like, what the values are that can kind of animate this project And certainly.
A lot of people believe in the utopia that Donald Trump has been promising for, for, for the last like decade. 
Vinson: You know, that makes me think of, have, I don't know if we've discussed this on this podcast, the absolutely insane post by the Department of Homeland Security on platforms like Instagram and X of a Thomas Kincaid painting called Morning Pledge.
These very, the Painter 
Naomi: of Light. 
Vinson: Yeah. The Painter of Light, these glowing houses on perfect streets with a, uh, a United States flag. The sort of aesthetics of, I don't know if this is how Kincaid meant them, I don't know his politics or his disposition mm-hmm. But of a sort of white utopia where there's no crime and everybody, uh, said the Pledge of Allegiance, you know, uh, the world that Maga Promises has aesthetics, has its own notions of perfection.
Naomi: Absolutely. Oh, definitely. Absolutely. 
Vinson: That exclude. Certainly everybody in this room and many more. 
Alex: Yeah, the slash between utopia and dystopia can be very, very thin, and I think that's exactly it. The question is who you're including and how many you're including, and there are collective visions that include all, and there are very selective visions that that include.
Very few you can talk about. Maga, you could talk about the Hunger Games, like mm-hmm. Same difference maybe, but think some of it is about framing. I think actually there is some power here. Mm-hmm. We don't have to just give in to the dystopian vision. For instance, there is this Dutch guy I've become aware of. Okay. Who I kind of like. Um, his name is Rucker Bregman. He's written a few popular books that are kind of along this vein.
And one of them, is called Utopia for Realists, which got me interested for this episode. The subtitle is How we Can Build the Ideal World, and part of what he's talking about is the fact that society seen from the vantage point of the past. Current society in the West already looks quite a lot better.
People are living longer the 40 hour work week mm-hmm. Became a thing. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, but infant mortality went down. All the things that we take for granted and we wanna build on, 
Actually. It took quite a lot of work and quite a lot of political will and collective will to get us and fight to get us to the place where we are today. And so he's pushing for further ideas that seem perhaps utopian. Mm-hmm. But he says, why the 15 hour work week? 
Mm-hmm.  Why should it be impossible? We have the ability to, you know, create such productivity that there is no need to be working around the clock, et cetera, et cetera.
Mm-hmm. Um, so there are reasons to be optimistic and to kind of reject, I think a fearful framing. 
Naomi: I do think that part of the pessimism, apart from the fact that the world, you know, a lot of bad things are happening in the world right now, so it's hard to keep, keep kind of like, uh, an optimistic viewpoint about things is that certain ideas of utopia right now are attached often to individuals, uh, who I think we all probably find suspect.
You know, the, the sort of idea of techno utopia, you know, whether it's like Sam. Altman and like open AI or like Elon Musk who you know, is like the idea of an electric car is a great thing, but it's like you wanna go to Mars? Yeah. The idea of like space. Sure. I mean, bring it all, it's fine. It's just like all of these things, these techno Utopian ISTs.
Yeah. These titans of industry certainly don't seem to be, for the most part, acting for the public good. Chad, GPT. It'll just be like, you know, a repository of all knowledge and you can just like, instead of like interacting with other individuals in like, you know, a humanistic, equitable way, you're just gonna like sit in your pod and talk to.
This little bot. Yeah. You know? Mm-hmm. That's kind of the vision of the world that we're getting. 
Alex: Yeah. I think, um, first of all, I wanna say just about Chachi pt. That that was another element that I think the show,pluribus got right where the way that the pod people, the way that the US speaks to Carol is very chat, GPT.
First of all, there is a hive mind, much like chat, GPT, drawing on all the knowledge again. And Carol's big on saying, did they consent to this? Did they give their consent? In the same way that we know so many people did not give their consent, certainly not to have their ideas, their writings, their work fed into the hive mind of chat, GBT, and then regurgitated accurately or inaccurately is the case very often is back to anyone who asks.
And also to me, the most chilling quality of both that. Chad PT itself in the show is the Obsequiousness. Mm-hmm. The kind of, how can I help you? Yes. We're here to give you what you want, because wanting is the most important thing, and you should be pleased at all times, but no mean response to what you're saying.
I think there's a difference between a top down and a bottom up utopia. Mm-hmm. When someone is creating a vision of Utopia to justify a product that they stand to gain quite substantially from, such as Mark Zuckerberg saying, we think that connectivity will make the world a better place. They just happened to have created this thing called Facebook, and guess what?
It's gonna connect everyone and it's gonna be great. Facebook is the Tower of Babel. Yeah. Everyone's gonna be able to, to talk about everything. Only good things. Of course. That's a product that's being sold. Okay. Contrast this with an Emma Goldman, you know, Emma Goldman in her running around the Lower East Side. And slash Lincoln Center. If you go to see Ragtime, shout out to you. Shana Taub. Do Emma Goldman, right. An anarchist feminist for the workers for I think 
Naomi: again, a Jewish woman with glasses.
Alex: Oh, represent. It all comes down to who you want to be in your collective. More, the more the merrier. Dare I say it? I think that's the true, that's the true question. Right. And a, a top down utopia is not a utopia. Right. For the people. For for the more. Yeah. 
Naomi: Yeah.  I think one of the reasons that Carol Rails against, uh, the, the we is that it is creepy because what we like, what we struggle with often, but what we also like about other humans is that there's friction, right?
There are different ideas. There's disagreement, there's like passion that comes from these elements, right? Whereas the idea of kind of like. Frictionless, robotic, complete unity of thought and opinion is not something that appeals. 
Alex: Yeah. Or does it, I mean, I was just thinking about this, um, this little factoid that regularly makes the rounds about how Finland is the happiest place on earth, Uhhuh and how the fins, whenever this is cited, love to say.
Yeah. Because we define happiness differently than you guys. You know, we're not, we're not a hedonic people. Right. We're not, after not running to all the time, we're just basically wanting everything to be fine. Yeah. And so our happiness levels are higher, you know? Is that a utopia that would be acceptable?
Probably not to most Americans. This is very un-American. Yeah. We're wanting, striving people. And I was even, I've been struck in our own conversation by how the three of us are all coming out as advocates for individuality. I dare say. Not at the expense of the collective good. You know, I think some of us would like to see some universal healthcare, universal childcare, these kinds of basic (please god) Yeah.
Things. But still, you know, we, we, yeah. It's, yeah,
Naomi:  I know. It's interesting, right? Yeah. A little because, because it's like, there are things about this American mindset of ambition, individuality, striving, but like, me, me, me at all costs, which I absolutely hate, but I am very important to myself. Yeah. My thoughts are important to myself.
I'm a fucking, yes. I'm a writer. 
Alex: Yeah. 
Naomi: Like, I transmit my opinions. You presume that your thoughts are important to others. I, I sort of have ended up presuming, I guess, that my thoughts are important to others, even though it kind of goes against like my, my base feelings. But in, in general, yes. So it's, it's, it's interesting to think about, but 
Vinson: yeah. And this is the moral dimension of the cliche that all writers should be readers. 'cause it's like, 
Naomi: yeah, I am a reader Vincent. It's true. It's true. Yeah. 
Vinson: My. Thoughts are important to me precisely because some, the thoughts of so many others have been important to me. Do you know what I mean? Love. And I think this is the difference between, I love that.
Okay. The top down and bottom up is that like, yeah, we can have a unanimity of purpose. A unanimity of goodwill, which does not equate to a unanimity of affect. You know, it's like, if you think about the, the title of the so pluribus, it's like yeah. Out of many one. Uh, but also when you think of pluralism, that great ideal, it's promise is precisely that we can be very different.
Alex: Mm-hmm. 
Vinson: And live in different neighborhoods and have different practices and different ideas of what a good mood is, ideas of happiness. And maybe even this is impossible. I don't know. But, and yet, still do no harm. 
Naomi: That's what we want. We want it all. We want it all. We want it all. Can we have it all? Is it possible?
I dunno. Can we have it all? Question mark. 
Alex: Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Before we go today, uh, we wanna 
Naomi: take a quick moment to praise our producer for the last six months, Ms. Michelle O'Brien. 
Vinson: I mean,  Michelle has guided us and prepared us to do this podcast.
Do you think Le BooBoo's come outta nowhere? She went somewhere to get that for us. She's got just an amazing sense of professionalism and artistic form, but also an incredible sense of humor and of fun. 
Alex: She has made working on the show a utopia. 
Vinson: Yay. 
Alex:  I'm not even kidding. It's true. Collaboration's true.
That's what it's all about. So Michelle, from all of us, we love you. Love we, it's, it's a joy to work with you and we cannot thank you enough. 
This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. This episode was produced by Michelle O'Brien and our senior producer, whom we're very excited to have back is Rhiannon Corby.
Her executive producer is Steven Valentino. Conde Nast's head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadra composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from James Ost with Mixing by Mike Kuman. You can find every episode of Critics at Large at New yorker.com/critics and listeners. Next week is Thanksgiving, but we'll be back in December with an episode about the newest installment of the Knives Out Series and why we love the Who Done It.
We'll see you then.