Letter from Utopia

Religion or a lifestyle choice? Pass the gravy...

It’s Week 2.

The Utopia Experiment began on April 1, a reminder of the humorous twist to it, despite the dark scenario we’re playing out. It’s a mild evening and eight of us are sitting on a motley collection of old chairs around the table in the barn – all men, although three female volunteers have been and gone over the past few weeks, some helping with preparations last month. Our taste buds tingle as the smell of chicken wafts over from the Rayburn. The chicken is a gift from Ross, who brought three with him, oven-ready, when he arrived in Utopia this afternoon. Meat is a treat: we’ve been on pulses, potatoes and pasta for the past few weeks. One of the three vegetarians has decided to eat meat while he’s here.

I ask Pete and Tommy, both 21 and from Northern Ireland, why they have come. Pete replies that he doesn’t want to live in fear of not being able to cope if society collapses. He reckons that by learning to grow vegetables, look after pigs, weave fleece blankets and acquire other preindustrial skills, he’ll be better prepared if we’re right. Tommy is also worried about a possible catastrophic breakdown in social order brought on by global warming and the end of cheap oil. He’s studying art at Newcastle University. Besides learning survival skills, he wants to develop a visual culture for the project. I want our experiment to be as much about art and culture as about bodily survival – but right now the priority is digging and planting the vegetable garden.

The chicken is tender and juicy. There’s stuffing, sauce, roast potatoes, steamed carrots – even a bottle of wine. It’s all bizarrely civilised, and I wonder how long people would keep up such urbane habits if the scenario were real. Maybe the survivors would cling to old habits – Sunday lunch, politely asking for the gravy – as a way of comforting themselves, an attempt to retain some precrash normality. There’s a pathos that speaks both of resilience and denial. The kitchen seems to echo this. It’s struggling to be a normal 21st-century kitchen rather than a postapocalyptic survival tool. The lack of plumbing is accepted as an inconvenience, not as a basic feature of life after the crash, which is what it would be if our sewage systems crumbled through lack of maintenance.

There’s none of the tension that you might expect from throwing a bunch of strangers together, the kind that reality-TV shows need. It’s not to say we don’t have our moments, of course, but they have been rare so far. Maybe it’s just early days, or maybe it’s also the shared commitment to the experiment. Even Adam doesn’t object when we start to allocate tasks for the next day, though previously he has done so on the ground that it’s against his religion to plan anything. “That’s not religion,” Pete objected when Adam brought this up. “That’s just an excuse for a lifestyle choice.”

The volunteers here are mostly nonreligious, and I wonder how realistic that is. The prisoners in Auschwitz with strong religious beliefs tended to survive better than those without them, and in Utopian Dreams, a book about intentional communities, Tobias Jones argues that small communities work only when they have religion at their core. The Utopia Experiment is open to people of all religious beliefs and none, inspired by the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from religion, but I sense that in time this might lead to serious divisions.