Problems of Utopia: Fear of Art, Including--Especially--Non-Intellectual Art

Utopia novels or tracts tend to get a tad tedious--that is, they tend to turn into polemics rather than stay focused on story. The inherent fear of artistic license--that the novel or tract's readers will NOT react as required--creates texts in which the characters lecture others. In Gilman's Herland, they aren't even supposed to dress up, wear jewelry, and distinguish themselves visually. 

Utopians fear art. 

Plato wanted to ban plays. Religious utopias waffle over holidays, maypoles, and the theater. Political utopias put comedy under fire.

Gentleman of Moscow by Amor Towles does an exceptional job painting the moral and artistic annihilations of the Soviet Union. (The protagonist's idealistic friend, who joined the new government, is eventually sent to Siberia for daring to assert in a memoir-type piece that Berlin bread--produced through the art of baking--is better than Russian bread.) 

As I argue in my thesis, a deep abiding fear of language runs through all social orders. Every village, city, and state includes people who are sure that nobody else gets "the joke":  irony, satire, puns, riddles, tall tales, gags, farce, punchlines, knock-knock jokes. Such people tend to be rather humorless anyway--and they often substitute "teasing" for true humor--which makes one wonder if they don't get the joke. 

They will never admit it. Everyone else is completely helpless in the face of exaggeration, nuance, context, non-lecturing literature, flights of fancy, dreams. Everyone else must be protected against such dangerous stuff.

I wish I could argue that all these folks come out of the "special knowledge" Ivory Tower left, a bunch of academics divorced from reality shaking their fingers at all those people bamboozled by the companies and studios that the academics don't approve of. And these academics exist!

The truth is, however, that anyone in any field is capable of feeling that other people have missed the point and must be harried until they are "fixed" of their bad thoughts--inoculated against so-called bad opinions, attitudes, art--at which point the penitent will be allowed to return to the fold. 

In my experience, the harriers or sermonizers are practicing a kind of transference. They are quite susceptible themselves to trends and fads. As the C.S. Lewis quote indicates, they are terrified of appearing "uncool"--not unlike teenagers who group together for protection against anything that differs from the group. It takes time and moral growth to do what they love, not what is "approved."

In Chapter 12 of His in Herland, Alim and Celis discuss folklore. Celis argues that the mentors want to produce "goodness" at the expense of creativity. (My Celis is rather hard-headed and practical. Here, she is observing, not necessarily starting a revolution.)

I [Alim] protested. People innovated. They improved machinery. They came up with new educational methods.

“Not outrageously,” Celis said. “Why do you think the old stories are never told in Troas’s theaters? The ones with unkind parents, brutal kings, devouring monsters? Wars. Famine. Fallen cities. The mentors draw lines. There’s an edge to the world. If we fall off it, we’re lost.”

“People tell the stories anyway.”

“Sure. But the fear is always there. Nobody, not even your Terry, believes someone can explore an idea and not become it.”

“Maybe they do become it. I met Terry and now—” Now I know what I don’t have. Now, I'm considering what else might be possible. 

Celis said, “You can’t be the hero and the villain and the monster and the deviant all at once. Not in reality.”

Unless people are heroes and villains and monsters and deviants all in one.

In the end, no matter what Utopians try, fiction is inherently uncontrollable. Its goal is to lie, enchant, bamboozle, astonish. Its prevalence suggests that human desires precede the supposed ideals of human-created systems: religious, scientific, economic and political. If human desires come first, seamless order will never be entirely possible, no matter what leaders force onto people. Compromise is the only solution. A utopia will always fracture and dissolve. 

One of my favorite movies, Galaxy Quest, contains one of my favorite scenes: Tim Allen's character has to explain to the alien commander that his show (a take-off of Star Trek) is a fabrication ("Explain it to him in words a child could understand"). The character is deeply apologetic.

Yet, at the end of the movie, Galaxy Quest: The Television Show has been revived. The dangers of fiction are weighed against its joys and found less important, not because the dangers may not exist but because a world without fiction is dull and empty and robotic and non-human. It is a world run by lecturing woke academics and offended humorless moral leaders--that is, the well-meaning members of any field or group who feel the need to "enlighten" everyone else and manage their intake. (Literary Weight Watchers.) 

Woe to that generation that replaces our superficial, tacky, sometimes downright stupid television programming with high-minded dramas addressing issues of class, race, orientation, and gender alongside accompanying disclosures of said dramas' underlying ideologies ("triggers") as well as their purposes and applications. A curse upon your heads! (I wrote parts of this post several years ago. Rereading it, I felt positively prophetic!)

When it comes to fiction, the important questions are: Do we viewers/readers believe? Does the plot work? Do the characters live for us? Do we care about them? Are we carried away by the story? Are we satisfied?

Leave the "I'm SO appalled" attitude to the sermonizers. Leave the fun of the thing to the rest of us. 

Problems of Utopias: An Inability to Understand Children

In Herland, Gilman criticizes "old games." At one point, the mentors ask Van if the old games in his culture "develop the faculties you wish to encourage."  Under the pressure of weighty expectations, despite his lack of actual experience and direct knowledge, Van tells the mentors--leaders of an elite group--what they want to hear: most children are bored by old games; one child always has to initiate play to get the duller children moving; in addition, "unoccupied children" commit "foolish, destructive, sometimes evil things."

No Calvin & Hobbes in Herland! 

But then, Gilman was far less observant about children than the Opies.

Sadly enough, Gilman's perspective shows up in other places. Writers of children's books will point out that children's literature--like sci-fi and fantasy--can be quite subversive: topics that adults despise or reject show up anyway, or they show up in ways that are acceptably "childish" and therefore squeak through. 

What these writers often either avoid or fail to acknowledge is how often children's literature is subversive across the board. It isn't only subversive of conservative values; it is subversive of progressive values as well. 

A non-political example illustrates this tendency. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell details how the show Blue's Clues was more likely to garner attention from kids (who rarely pay as much attention to TV as adults assume) than more sophisticated, message-laden, and funny (for adults) supposed kids' shows. What adults found boring (me included!) kids found watchable. 

Likewise, the Opies pointed out that what looks haphazard and unfocused, even boring, behavior to adults does not feel that way to kids at play. 

But Gilman wants something PRODUCTIVE! And she's not alone. Nearly all utopias want to "train" children to be PRODUCTIVE! Even if the utopia builders dismiss "for the good of the state," they still want the children to be heading somewhere for some reason that can, usually, be quantified. 

One of the weirdest games I ever saw was five year olds running from one side of the classroom to the other because they were fish or because it was daytime--I forget which. They thought it was hilarious.  

Kids and utopias really don't mix. 

Problems with Utopias: The Best of Times

In a previous post, I comment on the chronocentric belief that only OUR time has bad stuff in it. A "Golden Age" existed right at some point just beyond society's ability at accurate recall (about 30 years earlier). 

The other side to this type of chronocentrism is the belief that nothing until none could have been any good. All life has led up to now and what WE know.  

Progress does exist. Medicine. Education. "Givens" regarding rights. The early years of the Common Era produced fresh ideas about the individual and God, ideas which filtered across cultures and greatly improved conditions for individuals. As Rodney Stark points out, the Dark Ages are only dark because of how little we know. In general, life got better when the Common Era hit.

The problem with "nothing has ever been as good as now" is that the "good" is so defined not as better medicine or cheaper provision but as "good ways of thinking." 

Utopias often come to rest on the good ways of thinking of...no surprise, the people who are advertising the utopia.  

In Mr. B Sues to Get His Wife Back, my satire of academic theorizing, the CLF (Committee for Literary Fairness) keep insisting that Pamela cannot disagree with their insistence that her marriage is a bad one. The CLF is armed with theories and labels and "correct" ways of dealing with the universe. Any disagreement must be the result of mental damage, not personality and choice. If she disagrees with us, it is because she was "got at."  

This smugness, weirdly enough, can be accompanied by tolerance of the past--but that tolerance falls short when it might be made real (so I had a student "allow" that Shakespeare was a product of his time--but not J.K. Rowling). 

Overall, the smug contempt sounds something like this: 

"Those primitive ancestors of ours didn't know any better when it comes to science and religion and the social order. We do. We are moving forward, beyond their silly thoughts and clearly shallow thinking based on our advanced theories and our talent for maintaining those advanced theories! We don't even have to refute those idiots of the past. We just have to roll our eyes over them like high schoolers at the prom. Har har har. Let us contemplate our magnificence!" 

Herland rests on the above thinking--to an extent. Gilman's perspective is rooted in nineteenth-century Progressivism/Victorianism. The mindset--we have progressed beyond our backwards ancestors--shows up in Victorianism before Darwin. (Evolution as progression wasn't his precise argument, but what people thought he was saying fit well with the ethos of the time.) It continued until two World Wars turned it into a nonsense. It is now back in a slightly different guise. 

This we're-so-much-more-thoughtful-and-cultured-and-insightful insistence shows up in every area of life (not just politically-focused social media, though it flourishes there). A few years ago, I encountered an article by a woman proclaiming how far she has risen above the backwards theological assumptions of her church: In this day and age, sin and guilt are such déclassé concepts! So tacky! I'm beyond all that!

Okay, was my thought. What do you have to offer?

What she had to offer were ponderings from her naval; big thoughts about the nature of the universe based on..."MYSELF." (I'm not kidding.)

Not exactly Thomas Aquinas.

Gilman goes down the road of the aforementioned me-myself-and-I writer. In fairness, Gilman argues that just as the current generation of Herland's citizens is building on the ancestresses' achievements, shall the next generation build on the current leaders' achievements. She acknowledges that their ideas (Gilman's ideas) might prove to be lacking--which is good, cause they were.

And she argues against infant damnation, which is a positive.

Unfortunately, she doesn't argue against infant damnation using logic, faith, or, simply, a better idea--as plenty of people did, including Joseph Smith. She argues against it by having Ellador break down in tears (again, I'm not kidding). 

In sum, Herland's religion has nothing to offer in the place of Presbyterianism, not even anything as witty as Twain's quote. It offers a kind of generalized "we're better" self-label, a kind of "in" group culture filled with rules, cultural appropriateness, and "good thoughts." It's entirely substanceless, in part because it rests on the premise that it doesn't have to justify itself. The quality of being advanced is supposedly enough.

The end result of such smug self-satisfaction (I'm upset about the right things! I curse the right things! I hate the right people! I cry at the right times! I embrace appropriately worthy people and ideas! I use the acceptable verbiage to do all this!) is a remarkable lack of critical thought. That is, the pretense or performance or presentation--Look at our wonderfulness!--is more important than thinking about...anything, really. 

My personal theory is that Utopians are actually hunting for safety. I'm not sure they are aware that under all of the boasts of advanced thinking and edgy ideas, they are in fact--

Intensely reactionary, the kind of reactionary that belongs in countries run by dictators and religious oligarchs. It is less about holding the course (conservatism) or respecting the individual (classical liberalism) and more about retreating to something almost entirely imaginary based on an almost entirely constructed imaginary past which an entirely contrived group of current people truly understands.

Take the current so-called "revolution" on gender. The end result is not a broadening of gender or understanding of human self-perception and sexuality but, rather, "girls must like pink stuff and dolls" while "boys must like trucks and sports." In the meantime, schools that push pronouns on little kids create psychological havoc. Kids are fully capable of liking multiple things at once. Being forced to parse dinosaurs, sports, and unicorns is, to them, weird. 

They are right. It is weird.

My generation asked questions like, "Is it okay for men to cry?" and "Hey, what about women astronauts?!" Simplistic maybe, but we were headed in the right direction. Expand, not retract. The current narrowing is more reminiscent of Victorianism than anything in the last fifty years. 

Gilman does the same. To be honest, I've never fully understood her take here, since she suffered post-partum depression after the birth of her daughter and wasn't really an Earth Mother type. Yet Herland is entirely devoted to a gender imperative. The purpose of women is Motherhood, and yes, the "m" is capitalized in the book. 

Perhaps Gilman felt guilty about her own lack of motherliness. She may have embraced the idea of Utah polygamy whereby a woman could go to college while other women watched her kids. Or perhaps Gilman wanted to make her utopia palatable to her audience. Or perhaps she truly embraced the idea of improving future generations: bringing up children should be done right. (Her daughter and she had a strained relationship, which isn't made more understandable by recent scholars wanting the daughter to have had a different attitude towards her "great" parent than she actually did or cared to have or thought about.)

To Gilman's credit, she pairs Motherhood with Fatherhood. 

But the labels (capitalized in the book) are where many utopias reveal their hands. However, revolutionary the catechism, utopias really like the idea that people have been properly pigeonholed.  

In reality, revolutions are often far less forward-thinking than they like to pretend: the "new/evolved" best ways of thinking are often...not terribly new at all. 

Problems with Utopia: The Worst of Times

Utopias, like all so-called revolutions, have to react against something. 

Often, what they react against is "The Worst of Times." The present day is presented as wholly horrific--it must be escaped. And often (though not always) the answer to that horror is a retreat to the past. 

The problem for the utopia builders is that the past was not idyllic. People dealt with it as best they could, the same way as anyone else. 

In pre-written-history, a single skirmish led to the elimination of an entire clan. The child mortality rate was incredibly high. For most of history, healthcare, for all people, was more or less a crapshoot--though people were trying. Medical conditions, ones that appall us now--such as dying from rabies, dysentery, and blood poisoning--were commonplace. Plagues/pandemics didn't just shut down businesses for a year. They wiped out 2/3rds of the population and changed the economic and often the political landscape forever (such changes are, to an extent, still true: that is, disease and volcanoes do more than theory to alter social orders). 

Few people, men, women, minorities, non-minorities, had rights. Most people worked on farms/the land, which doesn't mean they didn't have individual ideas and romances and dreams. But we don't know because most of them didn't write stuff down. They couldn't write. For most of history, most people couldn't write and most of them couldn't read, and that statement includes royalty. 

Children worked and the ones who didn't were treated like pawns to be moved around a chessboard. Conscription was a regular occurrence. Debtors' prisons were a reality. Slavery existed on every continent--and for most of history, it included most populations. It varied in practice. It was still a given.

The variety of food in our current culture simply didn't exist. People ate so they wouldn't die, not for the sake of a "balanced" diet. Many leaders deliberately starved members of their countries up to and beyond Stalin's Russia. Destroying a country's agriculture--salting the earth--in battle was considered a norm.

Death by hanging was commonplace and issued for multiple infractions, most of which we would consider minor. Death by guillotine was considered a kind form of capital punishment. Torture was considered a legitimate investigatory device, not something to be debated or prevented.

There was no such thing as a free press. The left and right's use of "news" for political ends was commonplace. The world was Twitter--only slightly slower on the dissemination end. Sex in office, fraud in office was business-as-usual.

And I could keep going... 

Despite all the negativity, in all time periods, people have...well, okay, yes, a lot of people thought they were living at the end of everything. But they weren't. And most of them simply kept going. Moreover, they defined the world about them in terms of THEIR standards, not in terms of ours (just as we do, as a matter of fact).  

And yet, many utopias maintain that nothing has ever been as awful as it is now and/or nobody recognized the awfulness of the world until now. We need to get back to...

Other people's awfulness, I suppose.  

Problems of Utopias: Nobody Wants to Do the Yucky Jobs

One of the major problems with utopias is that they are invented by people who don't understand grunt work or specialization. 

Grunt Work

Take Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She wasn't as wealthy as her relations, the Beechers, She wasn't as poor as the Alcotts. But she did her own share of grunt work as a writer and lecturer to pay the bills. She wrote constantly. She traveled constantly. And the work was exhausting. 

But it was work she liked, not work she loathed--namely, it wasn't the boring, niggling, not so interesting stuff that must get done at some point. 

When More argues that members of his Utopia only have to work 6 hours a day (aside from the two years when they go off to be farmers), he is ignoring that daily grind--the reality that nothing in an urban environment can be sustained without someone filling the potholes and shoveling up the horse droppings. 

In Lost Horizon, Shangri-la is presented as entirely beautiful and modern--the baths are from Ohio (seriously)--while the well-paid "porters" are credited for the items' arrival. Nobody explains how exactly heavy-duty construction materials, such as pipes, and other items could be carted in over the treacherous passes without (1) numerous porters dying; (2) a major commercial interest noticing. 

And who is putting in all the stuff when it arrives? Are those workers doing the grinding, dusty, dirty work for the good of the other residents? Because they (conveniently) enjoy grinding, dusty, dirty work? They actually might. But it's not the kind of work that can be started and then stopped (only 6 hours a day!) or performed at a leisurely pace (not without causing more problems--see issues in pouring cement). Which means, a group of somebodies is working quite hard behind the façade of delightful and restful beauty.

Roman roads are honored for a reason. Michelangelo's attempt to create decent access to a marble quarry was made for a reason. 

In fairness, Gilman saw grunt work as a specialty. If she had the money (she didn't), she would have willingly paid manual laborers large sums of cash.  

Unfortunately, she didn't understand specialization as a lifestyle. 

Specialization

Gilman is an exception to many utopia builders because she did notice grunt work (she'd had to do it), and she did think it should be fairly compensated. 

In fairness to Gilman, at Fruitlands,

the women did much of the work.

In comparison, one of the more irritating aspects of Plato, More, and many nineteenth century transcendentalists is their conviction that agriculture isn't THAT hard. It is just, you know, work. But anyone can do it. 

More's Utopia sends people to the fields for 2 years after which they can come back (unless, of course, they--wink, wink--WANT to stay). The system utterly ignores the issue of specialization. All the education in the world can't replace hands-on experience. Every 2 years means that every 2 years, an entirely new group of farmers would have to be retrained on how to breed cattle and how/when to plant and how to get the best yields. How to butcher. How to harvest. How to help domesticated animals give birth... 

It's hard to believe that More was this stupid, and C.S. Lewis is likely correct that More was being extremely ironic in a very English "can't you tell I'm joking?" way. 

Bronson Alcott was a sweet  

beloved man--and he was daft. 

The transcendentalists who started farms and then were shocked--shocked!--when they didn't have time to philosophize in the evenings were, in fact, that stupid. 

As mentioned, Gilman understood the theoretical idea of specialization--especially with people who would care for children--but she never grasped it as a reality. Her main female characters in Herland are supposedly specialists--nature girls who roam about checking trees for bugs and so on (forest rangers, basically)--yet they never seem to be in the woods since they are always sitting around with their boyfriends and attending lectures on the meaning of life. 

That is, Gilman utterly fails to grasp what it means to be devoted to a specialty, especially by someone who is not a "meaning of life"  philosopher. If the young women truly love what they do (which Gilman claims), they would either...

(1) Roam all over the country, examining trees and noting issues with bugs and growth. They would compile reports; they would give lectures on THEIR specialty; they would get all nerdy with other forest rangers. 

(2) Pull a Gerald Durrell and spend hours examining a particular patch of earth. 

The young Gerald Durrell did both of the above. When his family arrived on Corfu, he roamed all over the island, learning the language and collecting animals. He also had the capacity to sit for hours noting the behavior of the insects on the wall near one of the family's homes. 

Watch a prepubescent child who is engrossed in a valued (by the child) activity. That combination of energy and obsession is very normal. One minute acting like a dinosaur. The next, learning every single name of every single dinosaur. 

"[Happens] more often than you'd think," 

says Howard about Sheldon and 

Leonard's science fight.

Gilman does not seem to comprehend that any true specialist--educated or not--will act in similar fashion, male or female. Gilman understood specialization in terms of interests, not in terms of behavior. And behavior is not dictated by theory. In fact, it often overrides its so-called "purpose." Specialists don't stop being specialists when their specialty gets in the way of propriety. Or the State's objectives. 

Like many utopia builders, Gilman didn't observe the world. She explained it.

Problems with Utopias: The Problem of Wanting Homogeneity Without Acknowledging How It Comes About

Occasionally, people in my church will exclaim, "The Church is the same wherever you go!" 

I've never found that statement particularly confronting. It isn't human nature, for one thing.  

This desire for sameness can't be blamed on religion or right-wingers. I've encountered it with leftists who want "small town" lovableness without the small town tendency to hold witch trials. They want the benefits of "we all know each other, have the same attitudes about important topics, and extol the same rituals" with none of the negatives. They want streamlined government services without asking, "What infrastructure is needed to make that happen?" 

Thomas More's Utopia promotes cities that are all "exactly alike" in layout. Plato likewise argues that the elite members of his Republic will share "common houses and meet at common meals." 

The similarity in architecture and habits extends to an acceptance of established norms (ironically, since utopias are often formed in protest of standing norms). James Hilton's Shangri-la, for instance--though somewhat more hands-off than Plato and More's utopias--is based around the entirely unbelievable assumption that two people in a dispute--over a woman, for instance--will settle it peacefully because one person will let the matter go out of sheer "que sera sera" whateverness (as if an entire culture was run by Bingleys rather than Darcys). 

Hilton has his main character, Conway (who is something of a que sera sera guy himself) question the ability to get people to let things go. As with More and Plato, stigma (or "shame") is the operating factor, the inculcation of a belief that certain things are simply "not done." 

Gilman's Herland plays with the idea of accepted norms but she is less willing to explain precisely where so much harmony starts from. She promotes individuality and an unnerving degree of cultural sameness at the same time. That is, she wants the easygoing "that's just the way things are" attitude of Shangri-la (More and Plato are more willing to punish people). Unlike Hilton, however, she doesn't have an entire tradition of cultural mores to back her approach. 

An inability to recognize the inherent tension between cultural sameness and individual-do-what-you-want autonomy is one of the most annoying aspects of people who praise utopias. Many countries with greater cultural convergence than America/Europe also have far stricter immigration laws. Many countries with greater cultural convergence include far more stigmas about behaviors, even placing those behavior into the category of mental illness. Many countries with greater cultural convergence exhibit far more deference to older people, so that in the BL that I watch/read, achieving the parents' consent or, at least, the parents' lack of disapprobation is considered a primary goal. (So is going to school, getting good grades, working hard, and not causing unnecessary furor in public settings.) Pluralism takes a back seat to not rocking the boat.

The response to these obvious observations is for utopia-praisers to hack up cultures and people to create imaginary results. Preachers of "it's so much better over there" ignore that most other cultures are as complicated and multi-faceted as their own. Instead, they (1) present those cultures as monolithic entities; (2) "translate" those cultures to fit their needs and views. 

The result is wishful thinking: nothing is that homogeneous, not if humans are involved. 

Problems with Utopias: Civil Order and Stigma

Many utopias purport not to need a police or other type of civil force. Citizens are described as complying with the society's blueprint. The authors rarely address probable realities, such as More's city-dwellers refusing to move to the countryside or the same people leaving the countryside before their 2 years of required labor are up. The idea that "it says so on paper, so it will happen" is part and parcel of utopian wishful thinking. 

The narrator within More's text, for instance, claims that there are few private disputes in Utopia, which "observation" doesn't correspond to any human society that has ever existed in history. 

Granted, More's Utopia is partly a thought experiment--but one imagines that a thought experiment would include some way to enforce the expected social customs/structure. Faced with how often human beings would fall short, how could the place possibly be kept going as described?

There are only two ways: totalitarianism or stigma/condemnation. 

More falls back on a combination. The ultimate punishment is in fact death--first, the malefactor (breaker of customs) is placed into slavery (from which the malefactor can be pardoned), but if the prisoner/slave continues to rebel, the slave is killed. (How slaves are monitored is bypassed: the necessary number of guards is never addressed.)

The section on Punishments and Rewards focuses more on stigma/condemnation. The virtuous are rewarded with accolades while the threat of possible stigma lurks around every corner (social media, anyone?). Citizens, for instance, can eat at home rather than in communal cafeterias but "no one does it willingly because it is not thought proper...besides, it would be stupid." 

Guess all us homebodies will have to go live in one of the colonies (thank goodness!). 

Many utopias disguise stigma/condemnation with assumptions of compliance. They then rave about harmony and beautiful vistas, rather like small-minded American idealists being ushered about by bored Soviet hospitality managers. Oh, my, everything looks so nice--how can Reagan be so critical of the USSR?! (See PJ O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell.)

In truth, these assumptions of compliance are a variation on stigma/condemnation. When people applaud their "niceness" or "good intentions" or "high-mindedness" or "identity" or, for that matter, when they point out how entirely "non-nice" other people are and therefore, deserving of rebuke), they are arguing for stigma. It becomes okay to take away the non-nice people's jobs, smear their reputations, steal their life's work, commit violence against them, and attempt through various venues to cow them into submission. 

Jealousy and small-mindedness under a veneer of benevolent righteousness. 

Problems with Utopias: Problem of Isolation

Over the next year or so, I will be posting now and again from my "sub-blogs." 

The post here is from the associated blog, Problems with Utopias.

* * *

It is typical of utopia novels/tracts to start with "I met a man who told me about..." similar to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

More's Utopia, for instance, is described by a traveler, Raphael, who claims the place was already populated when a group of Romans and Egyptians arrived there in a shipwreck. The resulting perfection is a combination of those cultures. James Hilton's Shangri-la is described by one man to another man based on the first man's encounter with Conway (the Ronald Colman character in the 1937 movie). Shangri-la is in the mountains and only reached by Conway and his companions when their plane is hijacked. 

The implication is that these places exist within the real world but are difficult to reach. Only the occasional survivor or visitor will find a way to pass on the story. 

The problem is that in reality, stuff and people leak out. Why wouldn't Utopia's fisherman keep sailing? Why wouldn't Herland's citizens up and leave? George Mallory isn't the only one who wanted to climb a mountain because it was there.

In fairness, Gilman's women are infinitely practical, which is a welcome change from rampaging idealism, but human nature is not infinitely practical, male or female. Road trips and rituals like Rumspringa exist for a reason. Good grief, Gilman got a divorce and hauled herself and a child all the way across the country to California--why wouldn't her women do the same? For that matter, at age 25, I drove cross-country in a non-air-conditioned Dodge Colt (stick shift) in the summer with a cat by myself. I would never do that now! (People get more risk-adverse as they age.) 

Even during Japan's most extreme isolationist period, people still knew it was there and eventually showed up in a "here we are; what are you going to do now?" way. (And, yes, people did leave, even if they did so partly unintentionally. Courtesy of Eugene, see John Manjiro, "whose biography would barely be believable as fiction.")

In addition, one of the most fascinating revelations of archeological digs is how much people in the past got around. Goods from Asia show up in medieval England. Folks from England show up in the Mediterranean world.

Not to forget, during the nineteenth century, that time of no-holds-barred nationalism, the attempt by antiquarians to discover the "pure" past of a nation ended in failure. German fairy tales weren't German--for one, a lot of them were French. 

And so on.

Isolation is necessary to utopias. Mobile people undermine utopias since (1) restless people indicate that people care about more things than their immediate "needs" (sorry, Marx); (2) if mobile people can leave, other mobile people can arrive, and there goes the perfectly structured society. 

Star Trek tackled this problem in several ways (setting aside the utopian ideals of the show itself). TOS tackled it philosophically: How can you thrive if you are too happy? TNG tackled it, to my mind, somewhat more realistically. In "Masterpiece Society," the engineers on the planet are too excited about Enterprise technology to give it up. Now we see the cost of not being part of a space-faring community! No, thanks!

Welcome to human nature.