Necessary Utopias
There are times when dystopian thought is necessary. There are eras when social anxieties are smothered beneath self-satisfied, positivist rhetoric, as in Late Victorian England when H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine. There are times when frightening new social anxieties need to be brought to light, as Huxley did with Brave New World, Orwell did in 1984, Atwood did in both The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. Intelligent, coherent dystopian thinking can be the most effective way of troubleshooting the effect of new technologies and social movements on humanity.
Today, however, dystopian thought has become the default for authors writing about the future. The sheer volume of recent books and movies that depict dystopian realities (some ingeniously, some lazily) is unsettling. We live in a time when dystopian thought is easy. Really, it’s hard not to view a future in anything but a dystopian light. Given our certainties about failing ecosystems, bankrupt political systems, and technologies unconstrained by ethics or common sense, there is something perverse – maybe pornographic – about our fascinated attention to the contours of our own destruction. |
And it is for this very reason that utopian thought is more necessary than ever. In Life 3.0, Max Tegmark argues as much (as an MIT scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, he knows as much about possible futures for humanity as anyone). Given the transformational nature of our technologies, and the environmental tipping-point we’re at, it’s totally irresponsible not to try and imagine our way out of this. Utopian thinking can be a road map – how do we get from here to there? How do we get it right?
Our Utopias tells us something fundamental and crucially important about ourselves. The landscapes of our Utopian worlds reveal our values, and the (not always obvious) nature of our desires.
In the paradise imagined by medieval Germans (Schlaraffenland) and French (Cockaigne), for instance, sausages grew on trees and fish leapt into your (lazily) outstretched hand. Hoboes in the 1930's sang of a "lake of stew and of whisky too" that "you can paddle all around it in a big canoe." |
It’s true, I know – Utopian writing can be irritating; all those ambitious little planny-planners scribbling out their plans, scheduling meal times and sleeping arrangements and drafting new moralities.
So I’m quite happy to keep our Utopian visions literary. Utopia works best when it is located in a text. From the page Utopian visions can help us imagine our way out of our small perspectives.
And thus: Utopian thinking is necessary because, at its best, it is the most effective means of critical thinking (much more so, I would argue, than dystopian thought, which today only runs along well-trodden paths). A few years ago I taught a critical thinking course focused on utopian thought. In my syllabus I sought to justify my course to the students: So why study Utopias? Because Utopian writing, I would contend, is always an argument -- a uniquely imaginative, lively and vigorous sort of argument. Utopian writing is always a critique of some existing order, and is always an effort to demonstrate tangibly the superiority of another set of values. It contains within it an author’s, and sometimes a society’s, most deep-seated values, biases and beliefs. Most importantly, utopian writing forms a particular style of argument that allows us to see beyond the limits imposed upon us by the society and culture within which we exist. The culture within which we are born shapes the way we see and understand the world. What we consider to be normal is largely the product of the environment within which we are raised. Many (or all, some assert) or our values, biases, perceptions, our beliefs about what is right and wrong and what is acceptable, are derived from, or even in reaction to, the society within which we live, think and dream. And thus, our environment can determine the limits of our perspectives and our understanding of the world, often in a way that makes positive changes difficult or impossible – simply because they are literally unimaginable, or perceived as so far out of the mainstream as to be considered “unrealistic.” Slavery, for example, was considered to be an absolutely normal, acceptable, and even natural social relationship in a huge variety of cultures across the globe, for most of human history. A well-intended individual, growing up in such a society, would find it not only objectionable, but immensely difficult – even impossible – to imagine a world in which each human is accorded the same rights and liberties. In order to be critical thinkers, then, we must find strategies for perceiving the silent, invisible arguments that surround us and shape our perceptions; we must figure out strategies for analyzing them and responding to them. In the finest tradition of critical thinking, utopian writing allows us to see beyond the limits imposed upon our understanding by allowing us to imagine worlds based on entirely different sets of social values. In so doing it allows us to understand and critique our own world in a way that we otherwise may be unable to. And finally, utopian writing presents us with arguments that matter. There is a lot at stake in Utopian argument: what would it take, Utopian thinkers consider, to create a successful society for its citizens? How are we, as individuals and communities, to be happy? |
A bunch of Utopias, in one map (from an old U.S. newspaper). Notice the isles of the Hesperides, just east of the Land of Nod? And Plato's Republic, just north of Yongy-Bongy-Bo?
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