Ecotopia, Maria Farrell, and Emotional self-regulation

This Summer I read Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston by Ernest Callenbach (1975) for the first time. (I may be the only person who came of age in the 70s and 80s who had not done so.) I am unsure who recommended it to me, but thank you. It is very neat to see how ideas around ecological sustainability were conceived back then. (The book itself never uses the term ‘sustainability,’ but its cognate ‘sustain’ is used throughout.) In Ecotopia sustainability involves a kind of voluntary population decline and changes in life-style not the least in terms of a distinct kind of urban planning. I will try to avoid major spoilers in what follows, although I don’t think this is the kind of book that can be damaged by spoilers.

There is a lot to say about the book’s racial and sexual politics (and political economy), its understanding of masculinity, and its implied critique of American militarism and the capture by pharmacological-industrial complex of the political system; but while reading it I was more struck by its implied claims about the nature of emotional self-disciplining and self-regulation in modern capitalist societies. My thoughts on it are inchoate and hesitant, but the attempt to come to terms with them was triggered by a recent post (here) by my co-blogger, Maria Farrell, at Crooked Timber (and the subsequent discussion there.)

Before I get to details, one methodological observation. I tend to think of Utopian fiction of having three, potentially mutually reinforcing characteristics. First, it can sketch the contours of a possible society worth having (or avoiding); second, it can sketch the pathway or slippery slope from here to there. And, third, it can magnify the function or effects of existing social institutions and mores that are so familiar that we may fail to notice them at all. This third characteristic is what I like to call ‘the oblique mirror’ function of utopian work in which a social mechanism is enlarged and we can contemplate it.

Okay so much for set up. Early on, the visitor to Ecotopia, the reporter William Weston (who is a kind of everyman of the capitalist-American subject), notices that the “manners” (one is tempted to say, mœurs in Montesquieu’s sense) of the Ecotopians “are even more unsettling” than their political economy. Again, much of this is shown in terms of sexual manners, which is a mixture of what we now call ‘hook-up culture’ and 1970s style communal and polyamerous living arrangements. But that’s not what I want to focus on (although surely related to what prompted this digression).

Rather, the theme I focus on is first introduced by way of the very early observation by Weston that Ecotopian functionaries refuse to be spoken to as if they were machines. I quote:

People seem to be very loose and playful with each other, as if they had endless time on their hands to explore whatever possibilities might come up. There's none of the implicit threat of open criminal violence that pervades our public places, but there's an awful lot of strong emotion, willfully expressed! The peace of the train ride was broken several times by shouted arguments or insults; people have an insolent kind of curiosity that often leads to tiffs. It's as if they have lost the sense of anonymity which enables us to live together in large numbers. You can't, therefore, approach an Ecotopian functionary as we do. The Ecotopian at the train ticket window simply wouldn't tolerate being spoken to in my usual way—he asked me what I thought he was, a ticket-dispensing machine? In fact, he won't give you the ticket unless you deal with him as a real person, and he insists on dealing with you—asking questions, making remarks to which he expects a sincere reaction, and shouting if he doesn't get it. But most of such sound and fury seems to signify nothing.

Again, I suspect Ecotopia’s implied critique of American urban, ‘public places’ (in the 1970s) cannot be easily decoupled from its (rather problematic) racial politics. But simultaneously its exploration of the implied self-regulation of the expressions of emotions in public spaces under American capitalism is also at least partially orthogonal to such racial politics. By American standards, “these people [Ecotopians] are horribly over-emotional.”

Throughout the book we are shown vignettes of “little emotional dramas.” As our informant-reporter says, “there's something embarrassing and low-class about them, but they're delightful in a way, and both participants and observers seem to be energized by them” in Ecotopia; and we are exposed to a culture in which shouted arguments and insults are not only normal, but also evidence of public health. (Public health is very important to the soft eugenic culture of Ecotopia.) One way they are shown to be healthy is that they create a space for collaborative, bottom-up social problem solving. The expressions of emotions are treated as providing shared epistemic and emotional access to social problems and for inviting fellow citizens into participatory experiments in living. There are a lot of small collective spaces that intense emotions help regulate in Ecotopia.

What’s interesting is that this material in Ecotopia has not aged well despite being rather salient as an oblique mirror to ourselves. (I suspect that even this particular use of ‘low class’ would not be treated at arm’s distance by my students.) While ecological sustainability has been mainstreamed, in fact, public expressions of emotions are now often understood and interpreted as ‘social safety’ issues. And while the norms play out differently for men (bullies) and women (hysterics), our culture has very low tolerance for the kind of emotional sound and fury that Ecotopians express.

In fact, one of the more interesting (and to me truth-apt) implied claims of Ecotopia is that it suggests that our practices of emotional suppression also means we can’t properly read in fine-grained matter the expressed emotions of others and ourselves. (This resonated because I often feel that when I am frustrated or excited — when I am likely to raise my voice — others tend to assume automatically that I am very angry.)

In her piece, Maria is very attentive to how such norms play out in public. I quote two passages:

[I] He was clearly upset, but never raised his voice, used insulting or abusive language or made threatening gestures. He simply didn’t supply the meekness the very stressed out airport employee desired….

[II] We were all white and middle-aged, and while we’d been quite voluble amongst ourselves, we were each careful to speak in soft, unthreatening and really quite feminised ways to the young rent-a-cops

In both passages, Farrell shows us how much emotional self-regulation we do in public, and also how gendered these norms are. In our contemporary culture we also learn to suppress the expression of emotions especially in contexts of escalation of conflict. (Ecotopia is really the polar opposite.) I doubt Farrell was actually afraid herself of the rent-a-cops (but I am happy to be corrected otherwise), but she clearly knows that being emotionally expressive will reduce her credibility in the potentially stressful interaction with them.

As I noted, Callenbach’s Ecotopia is full of vignettes that explore the impact of the absence of such extreme emotional self-regulation of the sort our society requires from its members routinely. That’s compatible with there being very different gendered and racial sanctions for violation of such norms in different local and national contexts. And also compatible with alcohol, drugs, and sports being supplementary mechanisms regulating this.

Now, Callenbach was clearly under the influence of views that viewed certain kind of emotional repression as expressing a socially stratified class society that is inauthentic and as bad for personal and social (public) health. Think of Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, or Marcuse’s work on surplus repression in Eros and Civilization. In Ecotopia Callenbach implies such emotional repression, meekness and inauthenticity, is part and parcel of capitalist patriarchy and a militarized society.

Callenbach clearly expects that a feminized polity and work-place that stresses balance will end emotional repression. (In Ecotopia it is completely normalized to have women in power of social organizations and political life.) I suspect this expectation misses how entrenched emotional repression has become. In her piece Farrell clearly implies this practice is the effect of institutionalizing mechanisms of coercion as distinct from care. That’s surely part of the story in some contexts. But I also suspect that Callenbach is onto something when he implies that our widespread self-repression, in which we turn ourselves to meek emotional automatons, is the product of wider forces of socialization not the least our very long periods of classroom schooling.