The Allure of Eden on Earth: Three books ponder the never-ending search for utopia (Jessa Crispin , September 25, 2026, American Scholar)
Near the end of Journey to Nowhere, Naipaul attends a discussion led by Buckminster Fuller, a utopian architect who believed that one could design a better world with the right ideas, the right architecture, the right urban planning—and the right billionaires converted to the cause. At this particular event, Fuller holds the audience in a state of rapture as he talks about how they can all turn the world into a paradise. “I felt I was working shoulder to shoulder with a chosen few,” Fuller tells the crowd, “a handful of people who were really willing to put their lives out for something beyond themselves.”
“The people here had not come to learn anything,” Naipaul writes. “They had come in search of revelation; they had come to discover how they might save themselves, save mankind, save the world.” And yet here we all still are, half a century on, having the same arguments about the people committed to saving us.
Our Humeian skepticism about Reason has blessedly insulated us from Utopianism.