Shocked at a brand of waywardness

Ann Althouse has an interesting post, Whatever happened to Primo Communist Flitworth. She is relaying information from a book she is reading and is drawing attention to a humorous name. These quotes refer to utopian communes enthusiastically pursued back at the beginning of the 19th century.

I focus on her two quotes from the book The Men Who United the States by Simon Winchester. Speaking of the failure of an utopian socialist commune, New Harmony, founded by Robert Owen:

As is so often the way with utopias, factions developed — no fewer than ten had formed within just two years of Owen’s arrival, and all began bickering, squabbling, and arguing for various rewritings of the commune rules, each splinter group jostling for ideological supremacy. In the end, a demoralized and disillusioned Owen, shocked at a brand of waywardness he had never experienced back home among the Scots, returned to Britain. His confidence was sorely shaken: his ideas for the universal betterment of the working classes began slowly to evaporate, and he became steadily ever more marginalized and ridiculed a figure.

The founder, Robert Owen, returned to the UK and attempted another commune.

Robert Owen’s final grand gesture was the creation of an immense and ruinously expensive cooperative community in Hampshire called Queenswood, in which seven hundred people lived, their inner quadrangle illuminated by “koniophostic light,” with conveyor belts bringing food from central kitchens to their dining halls. Couples moved in. A first baby born at Queenswood was formally named Primo Communist Flitworth. But the community never really prospered and closed after only a short while.

Althouse's quotes are a reminder of just how often the desire to pursue the perfectibility of people in a commune setting fails, and of how often they fail for very similar reasons. The totalitarian hope for interchangeable and passively cooperative people is always subverted by messy individuality that obstreperously insists on its own agency.