This week I finished a grant application and now I get to actually work on the dissertation! It might be a relief after all the hoop-jumping. I celebrated last night by sitting down with my Christmas present, Fyfe and Lightman’s Science in the Marketplace. Ann Schteir’s chapter on the sensitive plant, “Sensitive, Bashful, and Chaste? Articulating the Mimosa in Science” reminded me of Linnaeus’s idea for a clock based on the opening times of various flowers. I wish I had the same inner guide. — CCL

 Anyone who knows about my interests in analogies for social organization drawn from nature will understand why I like the Cooperative’s logo — beehives and honey — with the motto, “Like minds, acting together and sharing the rewards.” In addition to its values of equality, self-help, and democracy, The Cooperative stands, these days, for Fair Trade, for active citizenship, for environmental responsibility, and for ethical treatment of animals and people. 

So failure? Standing by the Robert Owen statue around the corner from Holyoake House, the answer came pretty easily: in the long run, Owen’s communities were not failures — they were experiments. The modern cooperative movement owes more to William King and George Holyoake and the Rochdale Pioneers than to Owen, but the seeds of the movement were there in “village of co-operation” at New Lanark and in the London Equitable Labour Exchange.

The question of “failure” is really a question about what science is, what it looks like, and what it produces. If we take New Harmony on its own terms, for example, it would appear to be a failure, as Owen lost a great deal of money in it. But if we take it to have been an experiment, it becomes one is a series of Owenite experiments, and we then value it differently, especially if we consider a The Cooperative Group to be one of its products, and we agree with the choices being made by that group. And just in case you’re starting to think of The Cooperative as a big-brother-style corporation, remember that it’s choices are the result of the opinions of all of its members, not just a board of directors or CEO.

If I were writing about the physical or life sciences — say, Watson and Crick in the laboratory, trying to figure out the structure of DNA, a “failed” experiment and the knowledge gained from it would be par for the course. But social experiments are trickier, as it is harder to trace their beginnings, their conclusions, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. In short, looking at social experiments is a sticky endeavor — what all can be categorized as one? Is it necessary that, in order to be called an experiment, a social experiment must be conducted under similar conditions as a laboratory experiment, with controls and variables? Does it matter if someone is intentionally “conducting” the experiment or not? To use one extreme example: Primo Levi wrote in Survival in Auschwitz that Auschwitz was itself a large scientific experiment, one in which human nature was exposed to its bare, raw limits. He posited that we can learn more about human nature from what happened there than we can from day-to-day life, just as we can only learn some scientific “facts,” such as the structure of DNA, from specialised laboratory conditions. His conclusion strikes many people as odd, because we think of experiments as moments in time in which actors intentionally manipulate variables in order to find out something, not in order to exterminate a group of people. In the case of Auschwitz, learning was a byproduct of hatred.

I’m not interested in hagiography and I am not advocating Owenite or co-operative principles in my work. But as I stood in the “cooperation” part of Manchester today, outside The Co-operative grocery, I did see Owen’s place in the history of some of my own world, and of some of the variables I hope we are still tweaking in our own daily experiments. This is why studying social experiments is so difficult: it’s really not that different from day-to-day life — after all, many people work daily to make a better world. The quest to make life “better” motivates Democrats, Republicans, Tories and Labour and, as I remind my HSCI 3550 students, the Nazis were engaged in an attempt to make a better world too. The difference is the principles and values engaged in the endeavor and the vision of what the better world will look like.

Even if he suffered from some early-nineteenth-century form of Attention Deficit Disorder, and ran from experiment to experiment as the spirit took him, Owen provided his society with “A New View,” which we can still see, especially in Manchester. Cooperative values — reminding me of my childhood favorite No Fighting, No Biting — are all around me, and failure has become, for me, redefined.

I was so happy to see a panel of experts revisiting this subject this week — turns out, we still dream of going back to simpler times. The panelists on “In the Know, with Clifford Banes” ask, Should Americans Return To A Simpler, Stone Age Lifestyle?