Snarl

During times of economic hardship, the word “Utopian” emerges, usually spat out as a curse. The idea of a harmonious social and political order has devolved into a contemptible pipedream of radicals and revolutionaries. When I recently suggested that the enormous taxpayer funds spent to reinvigorate the economy might be better used helping the now insolvent common man—the taxpayer—with his upside-down mortgages and in retraining him for new and emerging technologies a listener responded with a snarl, “That’s utopian!” His loathing for my proposal was evident: his posture threatened combat, his face contorted in loathing. “Utopian” was evidently, to him, not a pleasant concept. How did a word suggesting a place of political, social, and economic perfection come to such low regard?

Sir Thomas More invented the word, loosely translated from Greek as “No place,” for his imaginary city in his book Utopia in 1516. Five hundred years later the rugged individualist American acquires his disdain for all things Utopian from the welfare state described by More and Utopian dreamers before and since him. We are more comfortable with the heroic stature of an Ayn Rand protagonist than with the idea of the citizen as a minor function in a vast socio-economic machine. A lone person struggling against great odds to amass wealth and fame is a worthy hero to a culture coming of age in an environment of war and celebrity. In that mindset, a contented drone is nevertheless a drone. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), describing a dysfunctional utopian future, continues to sell while his Island (1962), chronicling a near-perfect society on a remote south-seas island, remains an out-of-print book discussed only among bibliophiles and daydreamers.
Plato’s Republic, written 2,000 years before More’s work, did nothing to promote perfect social order as an attainable goal. His perfect world, ruled by a philosopher-king who was a model for Ayn Rand’s heroic industrial magnate, fares better among readers in the western world, though his handling of women as state property and the use of slaves leaves many readers squirming with unease. His was a Spartan world where a socialist economy prevailed, children were wards of the state, and art censored. The Republic served as Plato’s personal fantasy. It benefits the philosopher-king but is no Utopia to women and slaves.

Saint Augustine, too, promoted a Utopian vision. His Heavenly City on earth led to the founding of religious settlements seeking a perfect society of like-minded pilgrims, but those harmonious colonies soon disbanded or deteriorated into villages and towns as messy and disordered as the ones we live in today or ended in disaster like the Jonestown Massacre. A common vision and shared belief, it seems, are not enough to maintain perfection.

Ursula K. Le Guin has experimented with the utopian ideal more than any other writer. In 1971, she published a short story describing a perfect society in “Those Who Walk Away From Omalon.” She sets up the reader with a pleasant world of carefree living and then reveals the terrible price paid for the perfect society. Those who walked away from Omalon preferred the imperfect world of strife and insecurity over an easy life lived in guilt.

Huxley’s Island, James Hilton’s Shangri-La (from Lost Horizon, 1933), and Francis Bacon’s 1626 New Atlantis represent earthly paradises distant and isolated in time and place, and therefore of minor interest to modern utopists. However, to the casual reader, they are pleasant fantasies, an escape from the monotonous grind of daily life in a dystopian reality. The desert island-hidden valley utopia rarely dwells on social-economic-political details, and that brand of utopian literature reads more like escapist fantasy than serious political discussion.
The collapse of the world economic system, ongoing culture wars, and the growing evidence of greed as the fuel that drove the good times have brought utopianism back into the political discussion as we seek a means to bring about “a more perfect union”-- a more stable economic environment. The depression of the 1930s brought socialism into the debate. Earlier economic crises, called “Panics” in their day, introduced such proletarian institutions as the labor union, the end of child labor, and migrations from agricultural to industrial centers. Each advance of socialist values has met resistance, often violent resistance, by mainstream society. The recent rise of utopian discussion fares no better.

Business and government leaders call for patience. They repeat with metronomic frequency the mantra that, when the bank vaults are full and failing industries revived, the benefits will trickle down to the rest of us. To which a growing number of Americans snarl, “That’s utopian!”

Suggested Reading
The Republic, Plato, 3rd century BC
The Confessions of Saint Augustine, c. 400 AD
Utopia, Sir Thomas More, 1516
New Atlantis, Francis Bacon, 1626
News From Nowhere, William Morris, 1890
Island, Aldous Huxley, 1932
Lost Horizon, James Hilton, 1933
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1963
The Dispossessed; An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, 1985, 1986