The Promise of Paradise: Utopian Communities in BC

Fritz Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies and
director of information resources at the University of Calgary. He is
also the author of A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel
Resistance of 1869–70.

Andrew Scott, an award-winning nonfiction writer, journalist, and
editor, has discovered British Columbia history—particularly its
bizarre twists and turns—in The Promise of Paradise. Mostly Scott
summarizes the old chestnuts: William Duncan of Metlakatla, the
Norwegian Colonies of Hagensberg and Quatsino, the Danish settlers at
Cape Scott, the Finns at Sointula, the Doukhobors in the interior, and,
of course, Brother XII. One chapter on postwar alternative experiments
and another on utopian experiments in British Columbia today provide
much new information, even if the analysis reads like a chatty newspaper
feature.

As might be expected, the book focuses on the sensational and the
organization on the traditional. But Scott does add value to the
well-trod topic. First, he attempts to make it relevant to contemporary
readers. Second, he actually visits the site of each utopian experiment.
When he talks to the descendants and, where possible, the survivors of
early experiments, the power of his language makes the reader feel as
though listening and seeing through Scott’s ears and eyes.

Scott also visits today’s “communitarians” in their utopias. He
concludes that “all utopias are doomed”—their goals
unattainable—and that the real value is in the journey. He sees
utopian communities as “laboratories” wherein we can “invent
improved versions” of ourselves. Unfortunately he does not carry this
argument—or, for that matter, any other argument—throughout the
book. For Scott, Brother XII of Valdes and de Courcy Islands is a lesson
to those who would surrender their free will to a tyrant in pursuit of
communitarian ideals, and the Doukhobors are an example of a
“courageous people struggling to preserve their idealism in a cynical,
imperfect world.”

Scott concludes his meandering with several modern platitudes. He sees
the current efforts by some of Canada’s aboriginal peoples to form
self-sufficient and self-governing communities within federal and
provincial legal environments as a plausible utopian future for us all.
His utopian world would be a set of loosely connected but emotionally
and economically self-sufficient communities—back to the small
villages of the past. Scott wants not to create utopia, but rather to
re-create some mystical past that exists only in the golden recesses of
his mind.