Slow News From Nowhere and Other Utopias?

Slow News?

In Scribbling Towards Utopia (Badley, 2023), I used fragments from my articles and scraps from general reading to help me think about a human utopia for this world rather than for some otherworldly paradise. I wanted to think about such a utopia because globally we seem to be facing an impending apocalypse (see Koro & Wolgermuth, 2023). I failed in that narrative to pay attention to several other accounts of, or references to, utopia. Most especially, I neglected News From Nowhere by the English socialist William Morris (1890/2007) as well as numerous allusions made by, or on behalf of, John Dewey. This essay is an attempt to redress some of that neglect.

Just as Sir Thomas More’s 16th-century Utopia (1516/1992) may be read as a rather antiquated imagining, so William Morris’s version of a 20th-century rural English utopia in his News From Nowhere may now sound dated and rather slow (see Ulmer, 2017). The distinction between Slow (capital “S”) and slow (lower case “s”) may be useful in connection with different attempts writers have made to create their own utopias. Slow (upper case “S”) refers to a state of being in which scholars choose to live their research/writing through locality, materiality, and artisan craft while slow (lower case “s”) is used to denote the rate at which knowledge is produced. As Ulmer notes slow movements are epistemological, about knowledge, whereas Slow movements are ontological, about being. She uses the frame of ontological Slowness to think about scholarly responses to a rapidly increasing pace of academic productivity, thereby trying to find a slower way of scholarly being (see Ulmer, 2017, pp. 201–202).

My own view is that the most important issue raised in Ulmer’s discussion is that of slowness overall rather than of the nice distinction that she draws between Slow and slow. Indeed, a scholar like Richard Rorty might have rejected her distinction entirely since, for example, he once defined pragmatism as based in part on ontological cynicism and epistemological skepticism. Differences may be drawn between cynicism and skepticism, but in general usage (see any thesaurus) the two terms overlap considerably. Indeed, the Concise Oxford Dictionary even defines a cynic as a skeptic. Nowadays, cynics and skeptics are characterized as doubters, questioners, even at times scoffers. The point remains, however, that Slowness (or, as I prefer, slowness overall) connotes “a global phenomenon that promotes living better, creating balance, and moving at different speeds at different times” (see Ulmer, 2017, p. 201). Some might argue that, for example, Dewey’s own slow writing, especially his dense and awkward prose (see Ryan, 1995, p. 369), may well have been important in his attempt to outline his own democratic, liberal, utopia or what Eugene Debs mockingly called Dewey’s slowcialism.

Thomas More provided a valuable prototype of what a this-world utopia might look like. His slow writing (I guess—no computers in Tudor times) was a matter of both being (how he imagined his utopians were) and knowledge (what they believed and understood). I assume his slowness was also part of his choosing to live his writing and research through his own locality (Tudor England), materiality (his elitist position in a divided society), and artisan crafts (the fruits of which he would have enjoyed). I prefer to draw on Ulmer’s account of slowness as a broad, global concept that promotes better living, balanced lives, and moves at different speeds to suit our different purposes (see Ulmer, 2017, p. 201). I am not sure, however, that Morris’s slow and probably stale news version of a local utopia is the significant phenomenon intended in Dewey’s own suggestions about, or visions of, a more modern, democratic, global utopia.

Modern Dewey and Dated Morris?

In some ways, Dewey sounds like a young Marx, or John Ruskin, or William Morris, especially in terms of his own undoubted commitment to “the reunification of everyday work and artistic creation” (see Ryan, 1995, p. 263). Morris in his romantic, utopian novel evokes a mysterious Force that provides the clean, quiet power to drive factories and ships, thus enabling workers to operate happily offstage as it were. Dewey, less mysteriously, “insisted that urban civilization was breeding its own aesthetic” and “stood up for the functionalism of the 1930s quite unabashedly . . . What Dewey objected to was the real and inescapable hideousness of the surroundings industrial societies had built in recent years and the work that most of the working class spent their lives on” (Ryan, 1995, p. 263).

Dewey’s solution to this industrial ugliness was almost completely different from Morris’s invocation of a slow, rural, English paradise. Dewey insisted that his utopian dream was not a matter of mere changes in wages, hours of work, and sanitary conditions. Instead, it was one of radical social alteration and worker participation in both production and social distribution. Such a change would then seriously modify the content of experience into which the creation of objects had been made. This modification of work and working life would help determine the aesthetic quality of the experience of things produced (see Dewey, 1934). Perhaps all this sounds more like early Marx rather than late Morris? Skeptical and cynical conservatives would probably reject it as cryptosocialism anyway. Presumably, Dewey wanted the creation of his kind of democratic utopia as quickly as possible but was patient and realistic enough to wait for a slower implementation.

But Morris, the real narrator of his own story, rather than the invented William Guest, was, clearly enough, a happy, romantic, socialist, activist. What Morris wanted, if News from Nowhere is to be taken seriously, was a gaily-colored world filled with men, women, and children, all of them in the height of good temper and enjoyment—with their holiday mood on, so to say (see Morris, 1908, Ch. XXXII). Here, one of Morris’s main characters in the novel, Dick, is presented as a utopian with a passionate love of the earth rather than life as a thing to be borne and not enjoyed. Also, those sitting down to their communal harvest festival in their graceful Oxford church are described as a crowd of handsome, happy-looking men and women with their bright faces and rich hair over their gay holiday raiment looking like a bed of tulips in the sun (Morris, 1908, Ch. XXXII).

Guest/Morris contrasts this joyous and beautiful crowd of utopians with a man he later meets on the road away from the church: a man who looked old, but whom I knew from habit, now half forgotten, was really not much more than 50. His face was rugged and grimed rather than dirty; his eyes dull and bleared; his body bent, his calves thin and spindly, his feet dragging and limping. His clothing was a mixture of dirt and rags long over-familiar to me. As I passed him, he touched his hat with some real goodwill and courtesy, and much servility (Morris, 1908, Ch. XXXII). If Dick and his friends represent Morris’s new utopia, then this bent and courteous man conjures up the old Victorian world that Morris had come to despise, a world of harsh mastery and worker subservience.

When Morris/Guest reflects on his utopian dream, he initially feels rejected by the utopians he has imagined:

No, it will not do; you cannot be of us; you belong so entirely to the unhappiness of the past that our happiness even would weary you. Go back again, now you have seen us, and your outward eyes have learned that in spite of all the infallible maxims of your day there is yet a time of rest in store for the world, when mastery has changed into fellowship—but not before. Go back again, then, and while you live you will see all around you people engaged in making others live lives which are not their own, while they themselves care nothing for their own real lives—men who hate life though they fear death. Go back and be the happier for having seen us, for having added a little hope to your struggle. Go on living while you may, striving, with whatsoever pain and labour needs must be, to build up little by little the new day of fellowship, and rest, and happiness. (Morris, 1908, Ch. XXXII)

Morris realizes that what he has imagined in his story is not just a dream but rather a possibility, a vision, of utopia, comprising a slow time of happiness, of rest, of hope, and of fellowship. Much of this would have been appreciated even by the not-so-very-romantic John Dewey. But the lesson for Morris was again one of waiting patiently for the slow creation or evolution of a rural, English, utopia.

Other Utopian Influences on Dewey

Perhaps the greatest influence (utopian or not) on Dewey was the extraordinary development in which he came to think that every aspect of philosophy was an aspect of understanding a modern democratic society. For Dewey, democracy was deeper than a mere set of political arrangements: indeed, “he defended democracy as the modern secular, realization of the kingdom of God on earth . . . [and] put together an astonishing combination of old hankerings and new understandings” (see Ryan, 1995, p. 86). Dewey’s democracy was not just a system of majority rule designed to allow popular pressure to sway legislation, nor even a domesticated version of class warfare but a form of deep and rich communication between citizens and intelligent action (see Ryan, 1995, p. 86). This did not mean that a democracy should be controlled by an intelligentsia of professors and social critics but rather that intellectuals could help us to think our way through life’s puzzles and obscurities. The techniques of philosophy and science should help us deal with our social and political problems . . . a slow process which did not produce clinching arguments as such but descriptions of how we (plumbers, rocket scientists, schoolteachers, or migrant workers) could better manage our lives (see Ryan, 1995, p. 87). Is this Dewey’s invention of a slow democracy, a precursor to the slow movements referenced in Ulmer (2017)?

Dewey’s democratic views were those of an advanced liberal rather than those of an out-and-out socialist like William Morris. He was

politically radical, attached to the rights of women, attached to a secular state, siding with labour against capital, but not confiscatory, not “impossibilist,” not insurrectionary, and in the last resort not particularly socialist if by “socialist” we mean attaching great importance to public ownership and the abolition of private property in the means of production. (see Ryan, 1995, pp. 87–88)

This also sounds like a Deweyan valorization of slowness in general.

Dewey’s rejection of Marxist socialism stemmed as much from his dislike of “Debsian socialism” given its semi-insurrectionary view of the class struggle (and therefore hardly slow). Indeed, Eugene Debs was inclined toward a final showdown between capital and labor in the form of a revolutionary general strike. Dewey’s own radical, liberal, reformist views, as noted earlier, were scoffed at by Debs as slowcialism. Dewey was more interested in a new form of slow liberalism rather than socialism even though he, too, deplored the inequalities of modern society and insisted that “Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial, as well as civil and political” (see Ryan, 1995, pp. 111–112). What Dewey wanted was not socialism as such but the democratization of work—at best a kind of guild socialism. He wanted owners and workers together to understand that work was a form of social service. In effect, Dewey seems not only to have fallen for a form of slow socialism but also for processes of slow democratic becoming, of slow democratic being, and of slow democratic knowing.

Another version of socialism (indeed of utopian socialism) that Dewey examined was that promoted in Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888). Its hero hated the squalor of life in 1887 Boston and regularly quarreled with his fiancée who could not understand his radical views. He fell asleep and appeared to wake up in Boston of 2000. There he found his utopia: poverty had been abolished and absolute equality established. His host, the omniscient Dr. Lecte, explained that in this brave new world there was no politics, no money, no free market, and no social disorder. Apparently, William Morris hated the book, calling it a cockney utopia because it contained nothing about the pleasures of work, of artistic creation, and of sociability (see Bellamy, 1888; Ryan, 1995, pp. 113–114). It also sounds as if it had arrived far too quickly rather than slowly and deeply.

Indeed, Bellamy’s attempt to create a passable utopia may itself be regarded as cold and unfriendly in its tidiness: It concentrated on formal financial equality and showed that glacial managerial efficiency had replaced politics. A crucial feature was that each person would get an identical annual income while hours of work were adjusted to square supply and demand. This utopia appeared to be driven by fear rather than hope, a kind of collectivist, hierarchical, and strange, mixture of individualist and anti-individualist notions. It was also American in the sense that its brave new world emerged from the bad old one without revolution: “It is a triumph of good sense, not of an insurrectionary army” (see Ryan, 1995, pp. 113–114). Bellamy himself refused to call his utopia socialist fearing that “in polite society socialism evoked thoughts of free love and beards. He called it nationalism” (Ryan, 1995, p. 114). Although Dewey, unlike Morris, thought Looking Backward worthy enough to be ranked second only to Marx’s Capital in a list of the most influential books of the previous 50 years, he refused to recognize it as a plausible basis for a social movement since its message was that politics was essentially ugly and disruptive (see Ryan, 1995, pp. 114–115). Nevertheless, Dewey would have liked its good sense and lack of revolutionary fervor.

Dewey’s commitment to democracy and his interest in the details of work and working life were more likely to make him a follower of Morris and Ruskin rather than of Bellamy. His Art as Experience (Dewey, 1934) showed how far he would go toward an aesthetic socialism, toward a view of art that linked everyday work in the similar ways that Morris had done. As such Dewey’s philosophy reinforced his social and political ideals. Also, Dewey, in his common-sense way, spoke easily and naturally about the role of the state as a benign coordinating mechanism and as a benign structure of law and morality that allows us to live a common life as equal citizens and equally valuable members of the great community: Though Dewey was not a political romantic, he did want political and social institutions and philosophical ideas to fit together. He was thereby disregarded by conservatives even though he was never a fire-raising leftist (see Ryan, 1995, pp. 115–117). He was, I think, careful and slow rather than urgent and quick.

Dewey’s Utopia: The Great Democratic Community?

Both Bellamy and Morris might be regarded as utopian romantics who imagined parochial dreams as solutions to the specific, adverse, conditions of their own relatively small (then) communities in metropolitan Boston and in rural England. By contrast, Dewey’s dream was first a much broader (and slower?) vision of transforming the whole of the United States into a truly participative democracy: this prototype would then be “dedicated to his inspiring utopian vision of a worldwide, organic ‘Great Community’ composed of truly participatory, collaborative, and interdependent societies” (see Benson et al., 2007, p. ix). In this formulation, “participatory democracy constitutes the best means human beings have yet devised to help solve the terribly complex problems they inevitably confront while trying to achieve long and happy lives” (Benson et al., 2007, p. x).

Here, too, is a role for academics, among others, in “helping their own communities and nations create the truly democratic society that Dewey envisioned as necessary if the world were to be transformed into a ‘Great Community,’ an integrated world of interactive, interdependent, truly collaborative, truly democratic societies” (Benson et al., 2007, p. xii). Unfortunately, Dewey never developed a practical strategy to implement this part of his vision. One important suggestion to correct this fault was that academics should help develop university-assisted community schools as “the best practical means to help realize Dewey’s general theory of participatory democracy” (Benson et al., 2007, p. xiii).

A different and more up-to-date way of putting Dewey’s interest in participatory (and utopian) democracy may be seen in Richard Rorty’s last series of published works (see Rorty, 2021). In these lectures, participatory democracy is presented more as a commitment to human self-determination. It is a pragmatist’s identification with anti-authoritarianism, its goal emancipation, and the freedom that consists in humans taking full responsibility for our own claims and actions. In this conception, pragmatism is an intellectual movement of world-historical significance . . . aiming at nothing less than a second Enlightenment . . . substituting the secular for the sacred in our understanding of the source and nature of our most fundamental obligations (see Brandom, 2021, p. vii).

Dewey’s vision was focused both on the parochial (his ideal description of democracy was the town meeting) toward the global. The authority that Rorty and Dewey wanted us to respect was not other-worldly but was firmly based on human freedom, self-reliance, and solidarity as well as on social commitment to, and participation in, liberal political practices and institutions: “Instead of looking outside of human practice for our ultimate commitments, we are to look to what emerges in conducting the human conversation” (Brandom, 2021, p. ix). What we may conclude from this is that in our human conversations, conducted in local and global environments, we should identify what Dewey called problems and frame inquiries to cope with them (see Brandom, 2021, p. xii).

This, too, entails that what we should learn from the Enlightenment is that we answer only to each other, that we are beholden to no authority outside our practices (Brandom, 2021, p. xxii). However, we should remind ourselves that Rorty (operating as a follower of Dewey) also criticized Enlightenment philosophy by condemning and rejecting both its rationalism and its empiricism: There is no ultimate correctness or overriding nonhuman authority. Such criticism helped him displace natural science and philosophy in favor of art, education, and politics. To a large extent, Rorty followed Dewey by engaging in (slow) discursive social practices as part of his critical, anti-authoritarian conception of reason, becoming a prophet of emancipatory reflective reason (see Brandom, 2021, pp. xxiv–xxvi). Like Dewey, Rorty, too, wanted human beings to develop a great global community.

This theme is extended in Dewey’s Dream (Benson et al., 2007) that I have previously cited. That dream includes Dewey’s advocation of a social theory in which understanding of democratic society as a moral organism is related to the notion of positive freedom through which individuals could make the best of themselves as social beings. Indeed, Dewey stressed that, at least conceptually, democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all social organizations . . . [so that] not participating in the formation or expression of the common will, [individuals] do not embody it in themselves: “Having no share in society, society has none in them” (see Benson et al., 2007, pp. 3–4).

However, Dewey may be charged with offering attractive descriptions of democracy as associated living, of schools as embryonic communities, and of politics as the education of citizens without specifying how democratic education or politics might be developed. To critics, such ideas just seemed to be little more than a delusionary, utopian, plan (see Benson et al., 2007, p. 12). Nevertheless, Dewey did eventually come to believe that the key to a better society lay in education: no effective democratic schooling system, no democratic society. Again, however, he failed to give enough attention to the role that universities could play in providing a comprehensive strategy to realize what he passionately believed in: a democratic system of school and society (see Benson et al., 2007, pp. 21–22). Creating such a system would be a slow old process with only the occasional epiphany to quicken progress.

The practical way of achieving this utopian dream was, therefore, the creation of a public schooling system that provided students with training in science, in art, in history, methods of inquiry, the fundamental tools of communication and discourse, a trained and sound body, skilful eye and hand, habits of industry, perseverance, and serviceableness, becoming active, effective members of a democratic, progressive society, and being educated for both leadership and obedience (see Benson et al., 2007, pp. 22–23). Presumably, Dewey was wary about training for leadership as another version of the 19th-century authoritarianism derided by Edward Bellamy, one that employed notions of ultimate correctness and glacial managerial efficiency to replace the ugliness of politics. Dewey would also have condemned the notion of obedience being similar to the harsh mastery and worker subservience and servility that Morris excoriated in News From Nowhere.

Dewey’s description of an apparently benign and progressive public schooling system contrasts dramatically with the account of education in News From Nowhere. Morris’s central character, Dick, leads the dreaming William Guest to the balmy freshness of Kensington woods where groups of children, fine specimens of their race, enjoyed themselves to the utmost. As Dick explained, the children went to play in the woods for weeks in the summertime, living in tents: We encourage them to do it; they learn to do things for themselves, and get to notice the wild creatures; and the less they stew inside houses the better for them. But what about school? Dick was astonished: School—I don’t see how it can have anything to do with children. But as a system of education (see Morris, 1908, Ch. V)?

Morris here seems concerned not just to condemn Victorian schooling but alternatively to set up a non-system of his own as Dick points out: I can assure you our children learn, whether they go through a system of teaching or not—they can all swim, ride ponies, know how to cook, the bigger lads can mow, many can thatch and do odd jobs at carpentering, and they know how to keep shop. Here, Morris shows us how these utopians learn about how to fit into an apparently slow, idyllic, rural life (see Morris, 1908, Ch. V).

But what about mental education, the teaching of minds? Book-learning? Most learn to read by the age of 4. They are not encouraged to write too early because it gets them into the habit of ugly writing that is unnecessary when printing can be done easily. (Of course, much of this suggests the great Art and Crafts Movement of which Morris was a key figure.) Utopian children can talk French and soon get to know German and can pick up Welsh or Irish quickly. They learn Latin and Greek, too, alongside modern languages. And, after all, it doesn’t seem to do them much harm even if they do grow up book-students (see Morris, 1908, Ch. V).

On their walk, Dick and Morris/Guest look down on both Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. The utopians had cleaned the abbey but Guest wanted to know whether they still used the Houses of Parliament. Dick burst out laughing: He had read about the strange game they played there and immediately disparaged it because it was now used as a place for a subsidiary market and to store manure (see Morris, 1908, Ch. V). The strange game, politics, though not necessarily in the Victorian sense trashed by Morris, was, of course, what Dewey wanted to continue and improve in his slow quest for a great global community.

Dewey wanted his imagined democratic schools to enable students to become capable of both social and political leadership though he viewed the current system as being full of unnatural institutions that were contrary to human nature and daily community life. The question of education for Dewey was, unlike that expressed in News From Nowhere, a matter of taking hold of the learner’s activities and giving them direction: “Through direction, through organized use, they tend toward valuable results, instead of scattering or being left to merely impulsive expression” (see Benson et al., 2007, p. 27). So much for William Morris—formal schooling must replace the informal learning characteristic of the past. Dewey was hardly a freeschooler but rather a progressive and slow, yet determined, even firm, educator.

I imagine that Dewey was at least a tacit promoter of slow writing, not in the sense of slowing the pace of scholarship but as a slower way of scholarly being, of creating, and producing. Also, it was not about doing things at a snail’s pace or attempting to drag the whole planet back to some pre-industrial utopia, but it was about rethinking daily life (see Ulmer, 2017, p. 202). In this context of slowness and slow scholarship, Dewey was not a backward-looking, pre-industrial, utopian, fantasist. He was, rather, a pragmatist who wanted to improve both local and global communities that embraced the modern world and helped (slowly perhaps) to create a more democratic one.

One key feature in helping to create that democratic world, of radically rethinking daily life, lay in committing universities to the (probably slow) development of democratic education and societies. The creation of a global democratic culture requires us to encompass democratic values, ways of knowing and acting, ethical judgments, analytical competencies, skills of engagement, and to have concern for our fellow human beings as well as the environment itself, human rights, openness to cultural diversity, and tolerance to the views of others. Universities could (perhaps should) be used as implementers of this Deweyan vision for a global great community (see Benson et al., 2007, pp.117–120). The realization of such a vision would, Dewey believed, “at last enable all human beings to lead long, healthy, active, peaceful, virtuous, and happy lives” (Benson et al., 2007, p.126). At last, too, a democratic utopia, no doubt slowly achieved.

However, many non-Western societies have been skeptical and no doubt cynical about being urged to adopt Western ways such as greater democratization. Indeed, Rorty, a self-described loyal Westerner, suggested that non-Western societies should abandon slavery, practice religious toleration, educate women, permit mixed marriages, tolerate homosexuality and conscientious objection to war, and so on. All societies functioning in such ways would then be acceptable as members of a moral global community. But such a slowly-becoming global community requires us to build, what we have failed to do so far, a community of trust (Rorty, 2021, p. 157). The idea of enforcing Western visions onto the rest of the planet should be replaced by approaching the non-West in the role of someone with an instructive story of a democratic utopia to tell (see Rorty, 2021, p. 158).

An Encomium for Dewey the Democratic Visionary

Dewey was a curious visionary. He did not speak or write about a distant goal or a city not built with human hands. His vision was about the here and now, not about returning to some pre-modern idyll, about the potential of the modern world, modern society, and modern man. He was skilled at infusing the here and the now with a kind of transcendent glow. He became the most influential preacher of his age with a creed for liberals (not really socialists or communists), reformers, teachers, and democrats. And “he will remain a rich source of intellectual nourishment for anyone not absolutely locked within the anxieties of his or her own heart and not absolutely despondent about the prospects of the modern world” (see Ryan, 1995, p. 369).

Most particularly, Dewey wanted Americans (and, eventually, slowly, the rest of us) to share a civic religion (democracy) that substituted utopian striving for claims to theological knowledge. He even inspired others to hope that the United States would eventually (slowly) yield up sovereignty to what Tennyson called the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. However, such a democratic utopia would never exist unless individual nation-states, urged on by their own citizens, cooperated in setting it up (see Rorty, 1998, p. 3).

Slowness Is All?

Perhaps not. There are times when we locally and globally just have to quicken up to cope with natural emergencies, pandemics, wars, climate change, and a forthcoming apocalypse. In her Writing Slow Ontology article, Jasmine Ulmer’s main concern was that qualitative researchers might begin to create writing that was not unproductive as such but was differently productive (see Ulmer, 2017, p. 201). In my own narrative, I try to be differently productive by concentrating on dreams and visions of utopia imagined by those I guess to be slow writers. Ulmer’s fear was (is) that ontological uncertainty about the accelerating pace of academic production across the globe has led to doubts about what we do and what is important in what we do (Ulmer, 2017, p. 201). My fear is that if we don’t continue with some form of utopian striving (a Rortyan phrase), then we could succumb to a forthcoming apocalypse (see Koro & Wolgermuth, 2023).

In her article Ulmer also promotes slow writing as an alternative inquiry process. Her hope was (is) to spark a long-term collective endeavor that nurtures healthy, sustainable, productive, balanced, meaningful, and slower approaches to inquiry (see Ulmer, 2017, p. 208). All these approaches would be desirable, even necessary, in any utopia I think we should strive for. My versions of slow writing inquiry processes have included various approaches I have tried over the years. Indeed, I maintain that all academic productions such as articles, autoethnographies, memoirs, narratives and so on are varieties of (sometimes unusual and creative) essays. I concluded an essay about essaying by arguing that essaying “is more about becoming than being and is a way of freely, slowly and skeptically ruminating on and critiquing our patchwork selves and our fragmented world” (see Badley, 2019, p. 814). I have also maintained that we should write dangerously and “see [slow] critique not as debunking or denunciation but as affirmative questioning to help us suggest solutions to our problems and for the realization of our utopian hopes” (Badley, 2021a, p. 722).

In sum, I see my articles and essays in Montaigne’s sense of being adventurous attempts and in Dewey’s of being both serious and playful: “To be playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the ideal mental condition. Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence of intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of the mind upon a topic” (Dewey, 1910/1991, p. 218). I am unashamedly a scribbler trying to be a writer where “writing represents (in every sense of the word) enjoyment. It plays enjoyment, renders it present and absent. It is play. . .” (Derrida, 1976, p. 312). I have tried my shaky hand at writing an associative collage (see Badley, 2021b, p. 452, n. 1). I’ve pretended to be posthumous (Badley, 2022) and to be lost in an academic funhouse (Badley, 2013) while I claim to be a post-academic human writing for human readers (Badley, 2019). I have written my own dream inquiry (Badley, 2011) and presented a case for adventurous writing (Badley, 2015). I see these attempts at being both serious and playful in my writing adventures in similar ways to the slow, joyful writing promoted by Jasmine Ulmer. I enjoy my slow, geriatric, writing and especially my modest utopian strivings even if I can’t always claim that I do them properly.

John Dewey regularly offered a slow critique of both education and democracy (see Dewey, 1916) in his own quest for a realistic utopia. For him, education could be conceived either retrospectively or prospectively, as a process of accommodating the future to the past, or as a utilization of the past as a resource for developing the present and the future (or here and now as Alan Ryan put it). His utopian idea of education might thus be summarized as a continuous reconstruction of human experience rather than as a preparation for a remote future or as a recapitulation of the past (see Dewey, 1916, Ch. Six). Dewey’s utopia was meant to be about the (probably slow) progress and improvement of individuals, societies, and the global community itself.

Dewey saw education as a socially democratic process eventually enabling human beings to achieve a utopian ideal in which the interests of a group were shared by all its members together with a fullness and freedom which would enable it to interact with other groups and societies. An undesirable society was one that set up barriers to free communication, whereas an ideal society would promote equal participation for all its members and secure flexible reforms of its institutions through democratic interaction. It would and should provide an education that gave all a personal interest in social relationships and control (see Dewey, 1916, Ch. Seven). This may be old news from more than 100 years ago, perhaps, but it still provides a utopian ideal that our local and global communities have yet to attain, slowly or quickly.