Utopia Means 'Nowhere'
A Dismal Errand: Part 3
Hate reading? Mentally challenged? Blind? Listen to this post as part of the podcast mini-series, “Expanding Erewhonian Nightmare.”
If you’ve followed my last few posts about the notoriously overpriced organic grocer Erewhon, you may have wondered where the hell all the words were headed. And after reading three, four, five rambling run-on sentences in a row, you might have reasonably concluded—Nowhere. “Bro, this isn’t going anywhere.” “He’s just riffing around some well-trod TikTok territory.” “…poking fun at some bourgie LA boutique.” “…shit’s low hanging fruit.”
Indeed, Erewhon is easy critical pickings. No one needs to win a Noble Prize to notice the serious divide between the company’s breezy creed—“If we fill our bodies with the very best that Earth has to offer, we can become our best selves”—and the obvious huckster bunco of a $25 bottle of Ophora ‘Hyper Oxygenated’ water.
Do we really become our best selves by succumbing to such sad scams?
Probably not. But you can imagine yourself a member of the aristocracy (the Greek aristos means ‘the best’), at least until you return home, take a couple sips, and feeling a little worse for wear, find yourself forced to admit, as you hold that half empty glass, you are but the ruler of your own emptiness.
As a defense against such misallocations of energy, I have my own crappy little creed: Utopia means nowhere. Do you long for peace and rest, ample health, wealth, a hot bod, and more intimate relations with God? Do you imagine a repackaged jug of agua sucked off Montecito’s municipal system might be just the missing key you need to jumpstart your transcendence? Sorry, bro… Utopia means nowhere.
That phrase entered my head at the end of high school in a political science class when we read Thomas More’s 1516 satire Utopia. In the Greek language, so I learned during fifth period from Dr. Luna, the word utopos literally meant ‘no place’, nowhere, and the primary lesson I took from that book, independent from anything printed in its pages, was that stubborn little aphoristic stab.
Utopia does not mean a state or place of total perfection.
Since age seventeen, that mantra has insulated me from any number of dumb ideas and bad behaviors—like launching a blog or buying a $43 bottle of Erewhon’s organic vanilla extract. Often I want to share the rotten wisdom in prose or in person. I imagine myself talking to all the fit moms, a bagger at the local Erewhon—“Vanilla!! Whatcha bakin’, banana bread??”—and carrying the groceries out to the car, I toss off my business card, “Text me if you need a lift to the lobotomy!” Because for years, living in Los Angeles, I heard in that weird word Erewhon, whenever it was whispered, the awful longing for a great beyond. And I’ve thought, too, between its soothing syllables, that I sometimes heard the low pitch hiss of a hospital hose, the warm gas going in, anesthetic filling the lungs of the senile and insane as they breathed the sacred refrain—Erewhon. To get there you had to go under. And inside their anxious eyes, you could see the wheels still turning, the steamrollers of rubber yoga mats ready to unfurl a padded and brightly paved world of perfect wellness. Of course it was worth the cost. Every bit essential as early plastic surgery. Has anyone noticed the aesthetic?
Erewhon’s proprietary products are packaged just like anesthetics, their basic black and white labels focused on information, free from all pictorial decor, more monochrome and cold than a carton or vial of Vicodin. Did they arrive fresh from the farm or pharmacy? A cornucopia of vitamin nutrients or a cabinet of controlled substances? I’m not sure, but as any loyal paying cult-member can probably tell you, you don’t ascend through questions.
As for myself, an incomplete picture was always okay. I didn’t want to know anything more about the place beyond the vaguely prayerful sounding name (Amen-Yahweh-Erewhon) and the precious way with which people pronounced it, as though it were something vital and living and listening in, intelligent and omnipresent, almost like the spirit of Capitalism itself.
Imagine my embarrassment then when I found out my cynical smartass wasn’t even wise enough to read the writing on the wall…
The letters from my own trite teenage tautology—“Utopia means N-o-w-h-e-r-e”—made up nothing but the name of the health food store I claimed to hate and knew actually nothing about. How had I failed to notice this irony?
Christina and I were driving to another estate sale in Santa Monica some months ago the first time either of us ever bothered to Google the grocer.
“Weird,” she said. “It means… nowhere?”
It was something she, if anyone, should have seen, even more than me. There had been a period of four to five months the year before when our relationship suffered badly at the hands of The New York Times daily Spelling Bee, which Christina couldn’t stop pulling up before bed, both of us squinting at her phone, unwilling to stop making words from the set of seven letters until we’d jumped from “Amazing” to “Genius” level. These sexless excursions into midnight nerdom grew increasingly competitive around the pangrams—words that used all seven letters at least once. Pangrams brought the biggest points and most prestige. And I remember, in particular, one of the last of them during that period of accidental abstinence, a word that she found first:
“Nowhere,” she said that day in Santa Monica. “Erewhon’s a pangram for nowhere!”
I remember thinking of all those bygone Spelling Bees and feeling stung, stupid, and a mildly psychotic. How had I missed it? But I quickly comforted myself with the certainty that, when compared against the teeming masses, the millions of Angelenos who wouldn’t know where to begin to look for the logical origin of a wellness mecca named ‘nowhere,’ I was uniquely situated to pontificate upon the now obviously problematic root of that weird word. Erewhon was not the dubious New Age name of some intelligent moss paddy the Algonquins’ eunuch priests once prayed to for rain. No, it was something worse. And soon, once I had summarized my sole memory of Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia, I could persuade myself again that I was in full possession of Erewhon’s essential shallowness and forget the shithole forever.
“It’s utopia. It’s a reference to utopia. A clever way of calling themselves a utopia,” I said. “Utopia means nowhere. Sir Thomas More invented the word in 1516 in...”
But wait, had I just called my New Age enemy clever? I wondered what else I might be missing. How much did I really know? Maybe in my desire never to be duped or disappointed, I’d become dangerously closed off to carefree commonsense wellness culture. Had I thrown the baby out with the Ophora ‘Hyper Oxygenated’ bath water? There was a chance, too, I thought, that the grocer wasn’t even proclaiming itself a utopia, a paradise of perfect health. The word Nowhere wasn’t written outright. It was scrambled. Could this be yet a further clever clue, a coded reference to the fact that, try as we might, we’ll never reach perfection?
Was Erewhon, in its very own name, attempting to inject a hidden dose of realism into the Hyper Inflated world of wellness?
“Wow,” Christina said. “It came from a novel called Erewhon, written in 1872 by some English guy, Samuel Butler.”
The sting was almost complete. Not only was Erewhon a fabulous pangram, but it was also a reference to a classic work of literature, one that, as I writer, I’d never read or heard referenced before. Of course I had to get a copy.
And here now, beyond TikTok, the Buzzfeed clickbait, and all the celebrity envy, I must reach for the high hanging fruit.
Erewhon is a truly hellacious name for a health food store—especially one headquartered in Southern California.
In the 1872 novel Erewhon, it is illegal to be unhealthy, and the sick are put in prison. In the novel, the unnamed narrator, after crossing a remote mountain range, discovers in the hinterlands of New Zealand a realm called Erewhon, which has achieved a remarkable state of perfection, a social arrangement commonly called, well, utopia. And warmly welcomed into this brave new world, he wades into the customs, rituals and rules of law, attempting to discover the secret of Erewhon’s perfection. Eventually, after not a lot of searching, he finds the progressive new principal underpinning society’s perfection: those who are unhealthy, sick, and diseased represent the new world’s criminal class. The ill are not ushered into hospitals and sanitariums but corralled into prisons and concentration camps where they are punished for their failure . . . but a failure to do what?
In the Erewhonian world, when you are not well, you have personally failed.
Health is something chosen.
One arrives at sickness not through fate or misfortune but moral failing.
It is the philosophy of the Nazis, a form of proto-fascism, and a fascinating name—to put it mildly—for a health food store made famous by celebrities with prices that would put most families in a tent on Skid Row.
In the dystopian novel of Erewhon, it is not happiness that is enforced as in Brave New World but HEALTH. The social body achieves a state of perfection only so long as individual bodies remain unblemished. The preservation of the good demands the amputation of the bad.
In one particularly memorable scene, the narrator of Butler’s novel visits a courthouse where he hears a magistrate pronouncing judgement. Sounds like my life story.
“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly. You are a bad and dangerous person, and stand branded in the eyes of your fellow-countrymen with one of the most heinous known offences… the great crime of laboring under pulmonary consumption.”
As Kerry Howley, who I mentioned in my last post—and who scooped me on this dark Erewhonian insight a couple months ago—writes in New York Magazine: “Could it be that America’s buzziest grocery store, its wellness mecca, was named in honor of the idea of incarcerating sick people? And no one noticed?”
The answer is YES. Erewhon’s initial 1960s founders, Michio and Aveline Kushi, named the store after the favorite book of their health food guru, George Ohsawa, father of the ‘macrobiotic’ diet. Ohsawa apparently did not read Butler’s Erewhon as a scathing critique of the rise of social-Darwinism in Victorian Europe, but a blueprint for a better world, one without Skid Rows, sick wards, and adult acne. According to Aveline Kushi, “Quoting Samuel Butler’s Erewhon,” Ohsawa “would say that sick people should be sent to jail and criminals should be sent to the hospital.” Aveline once confessed that she, too, “admired this imaginary realm.”
Join me next time as I unpack the full insanity of a health food store named Erewhon, and pushing beyond Samuel Butler’s novel, show why the name Erewhon is a disastrous name not simply for any health food store, but particularly for one headquartered in Southern California.
Curious to see where this one goes.