American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History

Peter Swirski

May 2011 · Routledge

About this ebook

The United States today is afflicted with political alienation, militarized violence, institutionalized poverty, and social agony. Worst of all, perhaps, it is afflicted with chronic and acute ahistoricism. America insist on ignoring the context of its present dilemmas. It insists on forgetting what preceded the headlines of today and on denying continuity with history. It insists, in short, on its exceptionalism.

American Utopia and Social Engineering sets out to correct this amnesia. It misses no opportunity to flesh out both the historical premises and the political promises behind the social policies and political events of the period. These interdisciplinary concerns provide, in turn, the framework for the analyses of works of American literature that mirror their times and mores.

Novels considered include: B.F. Skinner and Walden Two (1948), easily the most scandalous utopia of the century, if not of all times; Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), an anatomy of political disfranchisement American-style; Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (1982), a neo-Darwinian beast fable about morality in the thermonuclear age; Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome (1986), a diagnostic novel about engineering violence out of America’s streets and minds; and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), an alternative history of homegrown ‘soft’ fascism.

With the help of the five novels and the social models outlined therein, Peter Swirski interrogates key aspects of sociobiology and behavioural psychology, voting and referenda procedures, morality and altruism, multilevel selection and proverbial wisdom, violence and chip-implant technology, and the adaptive role of emotions in our private and public lives.

Ratings and reviews

Peter Swirski doesn’t write an easy book American Utopia which one should labor hard to learn from. The book does offer great things to learn, not just regarding American society, politics, or literature. “It seeks to draw from the American experience lessons that hold no less for other societies and other cultures.”(P2) This tells true of American Utopia. The important lesson in Part 1 of the book is, without answering the evolutionary desires of people no social engineering can hope to succeed. By this lesson, we can even judge, say, Chinese experience! The PRC has witnessed two famous cases of social engineering: the Great Leap and the Reform & Opening-Up, the former of which turned out a flagrant failure but the latter has gone well so far. Why this? People in China would readily explicate it from Marxism. But who would see it, as Swirski urges us to, from the point of view of evolution. Obviously, the evolutionary desires like family tie, parental investment, private space or interests, etc. were openly denied in the Great Leap whereas recognized and encouraged in today’s social engineering. Now Swirski’ s lesson enlightens us how the two cases led to opposite results. Other lessons are no less universally applicable. Part 2 is an apparent critique of American democracy and voting, but it can also be a critique of any so-called democracy in the world that is short of the Swiss model. Part 5 lectures on the fact that American people would rather believe emotionally than know rationally what a politician is saying. What is true of emotion in American politics is true everywhere in today’s world, whether in politics, commerce or everyday life. The universality of these lessons accounts for the very value of American Utopia. Perhaps like most cultural or interdisciplinary studies, American Utopia, handling a diversity of topics and issues, appears only “loosely cohesive”. But it is cohesive and coherent. First, each part is tight with a novel for the center, round which various discussions revolve freely. Sometimes a discussion may go very far, but it will surely find its way back like a comet does on its elliptical orbit. Second, though each part can stand in itself they come together for the good reason of relating American utopia and social engineering. Actually all 5 parts related to each other closely, for example, altruism, emotion and aggression discussed in later parts find clues in Part 1; mind control in Part 4 echoes the mental engineering in Part 2, charisma in Part 2 is renewed in Part 5 and so on. What’s more, evolution that underlies Swirski’s study functions as another bond between the individual parts. But there is something less perfect as far as evolution functions as a bond or the bedrock of his study. Since Part 1 and 3 are all about evolution, Part 4 and 5 deal with aggression and emotion which are themselves evolution, it is expected that Part 2 should have much to do with evolution as well but actually it has little or none.

About the author

Peter Swirski is Research Director at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Professor of American Literature and Culture at UMSL. He is the author of ten acclaimed books in American Literature and American Studies, among them the bestselling From Lowbrow to Nobrow (2005) and Ars Americana, Ars Politica (2010).