Hot Off the Shelf: Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk
[image description: The book cover for Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk. The background is an up-close photo of tall grass and wildflowers with the title in white blocky letters.]
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. If you’d like a copy for yourself, there’s an affiliate link at the bottom of the page.
This is a spoiler-free review, so read on with confidence.
As someone who grew up going to church and was a part of an insular cultural group (Palestinians in Birmingham, Alabama), I’ve often thought about how as long as you have an “in” (whether by birth or invitation) and are willing to follow a specific set of rules, you can be a part of a built-in community. In the Catholic church community I was a part of growing up, there were social groups that sprang off from the church, like the motorcycle club, the moms’ group, the elderly women’s bunco games, and the youth group. In the Palestinian community, I was a part of, if you were looking for someone to marry it was customary to check out the matches from other families who shared the same culture.
In both cases, these groups, while not official communes, were communal in nature. They each came with ready-made friend groups and encouraged socializing within the group as being a priority over mingling with outsiders. While these ready-made groups certainly have perks (like tons of casseroles dropped off at your door when someone close to you dies and a place to celebrate death––and birth and marriage––rituals), they also have some downfalls. What happens when you no longer believe what the group stands for? What happens when you’re no longer willing or able to adhere to the group’s rules?
I know firsthand since I’m no longer a part of either. As such, I’ve had to find community in other ways and have gotten glimpses of communal activity not attached to heritage or religion.
I’ve noticed for the past couple of years, particularly since the 2016 election, it’s not uncommon to hear my friends jokingly suggest we all start a commune together. Over time, though, the suggestion has become less joking, so I started considering: What would this commune actually look like?
Would it be urban or rural? Would we all learn how to farm and live off the land as much as possible? Would we all live together in one big house or have smaller houses around a common area (like a garden or mess hall) for each individual family unit? Would we try to opt out of capitalism as much as possible or have a cottage industry that allowed us to make money to buy the things we couldn’t make, such as medicine? Would everyone be required to work or would we allow some people to, for example, keep their remote jobs and just pay money into a community fund that was distributed throughout the commune dwellers as needed? How would leadership work––one person in charge, a committee––or would there be leadership at all? How will we handle conflict resolution?
There’s a lot to consider and while I’ve done very little considering myself, Adrian Shirk, author of Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia, has done extensive research on communal living, and that’s what drew me. to the book. These practical and philosophical questions drive the book.
First, the synopsis:
An exploration of American ideas of utopia through the lens of one millennial's quest to live a more communal life under late-stage capitalism.
Told in a series of essays that balance memoir with fieldwork, Heaven Is a Place on Earth is an idiosyncratic study of American utopian experiments—from the Shakers to the radical faerie communes of Short Mountain to the Bronx rebuilding movement—through the lens of one millennial’s quest to create a more communal life in a time of unending economic and social precarity.
When Adrian Shirk's father-in-law has a stroke and loses his ability to speak and walk, she and her husband—both adjuncts in their midtwenties—become his primary caretakers. The stress of daily caretaking, navigating America’s broken health care system, and ordinary twenty-first-century financial insecurity propels Shirk into an odyssey of American utopian experiments in the hopes that they might offer a way forward.
Along the way, Shirk seeks solace in her own community of friends, artists, and theologians. They try to imagine a different kind of life, examining what might be replicable within the histories of utopia-making, and what might be doomed. Rather than "no place," Shirk reframes utopia as something that, according to the laws of capital and conquest, shouldn't be able to exist—but does anyway, if only for a moment.
It’s not lost on me that many communes and aspiring utopias, including many of the ones Shirk details in the book, are based on religious principles. Nor is it lost on me that many of those same communes failed after only a short time. Someone gets greedy, someone gets bossy, and interpersonal conflict threatens the whole experiment.
Perhaps I’m biased (okay, yes, I’m definitely biased) but I expected the other non-religiously based communes Shirk explores to fare better, to last longer, and to be more solvent because they weren’t making stupid rules like saying everyone in the commune had to be celibate. But they, too, were plagued by interpersonal drama that shook the foundation of the communal living experiment.
This unmoored me because my friend group, which frequently suggests that we work toward communal living in an official way, is also not based on religion. Yes, we have a set of informal rules (like to be in our friend group you need to be an intersectional feminist, which includes being pro-Black, pro-LGBTA+, pro-polyamory, pro-abortion, etc. regardless of whether your identity aligns with or whether you personally choose to participate in these practices), but what would we do if someone who we thought shared our thinking were to join us in a commune and harm another person in the group?
There are so many things I wouldn’t have thought to consider about communes had I not read Heaven Is a Place on Earth. It’s enough to make you wonder whether utopias are even possible. Because what is a commune if not an attempt to build the kind of world you want to live in?
This, too, is answered in the book. While the majority of utopias and communes fail for a variety of reasons, there are some that have been going strong for decades and even a few that have been successful for over a century. One could point to these communes and say utopias are possible, though if we equate utopia to heaven, as the book’s title implies, then really only time will tell. Our collective perception of heaven, if we choose to believe in it, is that it is perfect and without end. We don’t yet know if, when enough time passes, the communes we think of as solvent today will continue to stand. There’s even a neat philosophical discussion around the etymology of the word “utopia,” which breaks down into “no place.”
But Heaven Is a Place on Earth isn’t all philosophical discussion and academic jargon. The memoir parts are beautifully done and you really get to see a wide array of communes, both past and present, through the eyes of someone who is heavily weighing the lifestyle for herself. Getting an inside look at Shirk’s research and thought processes helped me make sense of my own potential communal living aspirations.
Heaven Is a Place on Earth actually helped me see that I think my current neighborhood is about as much communal living I’m looking for. We look out for one another, we speak when we see each other out, we pet sit for each other, we work out who will feed (and sometimes adopt) the neighborhood’s stray cats, and we leave vegetables on each other’s porches when our gardens produce more than we can eat. And when one of our houses catches fire, we raise money for a portion of the expenses. Two houses, including mine, have little free libraries that are frequently visited.
There’s an element of mutual aid, but one person’s or family’s survival is not solely on the neighborhood’s shoulders, and every decision is made largely at the individual household level. We don’t pool then redistribute our wealth and we don’t perform labor together as a community aside from the annual neighborhood cleanup days. As much as we enjoy spending time together, at the end of the day, we each go back to our houses and live by and large on our own.
Which isn’t so bad after all.
If you’d like a copy of Heaven Is a Place on Earth by Adrian Shirk for yourself (and I hope you do because it’s FASCINATING), please use my Bookshop link to purchase. Bookshop is an Amazon alternative that supports indie bookstores and this blog.
