There have been numerous attempts to engineer societies. Usually they have limited to framing laws that better reflect the existing customs and prevailing moral sensibilities of a people. Sometimes this has worked well as in the case of the United States Constitution.
More rarely a people have attempted to remake their entire society including their customs and moral principles. This has generally required strict discipline and re-education of the citizens. Here the results have been generally dismal.
Ancient Sparta was one of the first but harsh as it was, there was much to admire about it. It was an interesting experiment, yet it failed to take root. Although they won their military victory over Athens it is Athenian culture that has come down to us as the light of western civilization.
Later attempts to reinvent a culture have been nightmarish failures often resulting in wholesale slaughter of portions of the population. Nazi Germany, Salin’s USSR, Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” all drenched the 20th century in blood.
Experimenting with Utopian societies is almost a tradition in United States. Most have been religious based, the Mormons and the Amish are two that have been successful, although the Mormons have since largely rejoined the main stream of American culture.
Most Utopian societies fail pretty quickly because they are based on an understanding of human nature that is just plain wrong. Communism, whether the deadly virulent variety practiced by the Soviets or the benign voluntary “hippie” communes of the1960s, failed because it is the nature of human being to experience “ownership” of the products of their own labor. Those things are mine not ours unless I say so.
Utopian societies are founded to make people better. Their inspiration is based on some one’s belief that things would be better if people acted differently than they generally do. Generally the price of admission to one of these utopias is agreement of the participants to “clean up their act.” Prescribed behavior is then enforced by the group.
New Atlantis is not envisioned as a Utopia. It is simply an environment where people can live and go about their business whatever they conceive that to be. But it is unique in human history because it is an environment which has boundary conditions that are carefully and consciously designed to fit humans as they actually exist with all their evolutionary quirks and foibles (and we have plenty!) in stead of someone’s belief of how they ought to be.
We first have to have an understanding of what human nature is and in that we are guiding by empiricism and the scientific method. That does not mean that the culture that best fits human nature is ordered and “scientific” like Huxley’s Brave New World.
Quiet the opposite as will be seen. Humans are not all sapient, not simply intellectual. They are emotional, spiritual, sentient beings as well and it is fundamental to understand the nature and nuances of those aspects if we are to be successful.
The founding principles of New Atlantis are drawn not only from the Sciences; Anthropology, Sociology, and Psychology (Evolutionary and Archetypal) but also from what those sciences can tell us about our human moral, spiritual and aesthetic sensibilities.