Utopias

A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities

Howard P. Segal

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781405183284
  9781405183291
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118234402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This brief history connects the past and present of utopian thought, from the first utopias in ancient Greece, right up to present day visions of cyberspace communities and paradise.

• Explores the purpose of utopias, what they reveal about the societies who conceive them, and how utopias have changed over the centuries
• Unique in including both non-Western and Western visions of utopia
• Explores the many forms utopias have taken – prophecies and oratory, writings, political movements, world's fairs, physical communities – and also discusses high-tech and cyberspace visions for the first time
• The first book to analyze the implicitly utopian dimensions of reform crusades like Technocracy of the 1930s and Modernization Theory of the 1950s, and the laptop classroom initiatives of recent years

Chapter 1

The Nature of Utopias

Utopias Defined

“Utopia” means the allegedly perfect society. Coined by Thomas More (1478–1535), Lord Chancellor of England, the term is epitomized in his Utopia (1516), which was published first in Latin and then translated into French, German, and Italian before it was translated into English in 1551. More had opposed its translation into his native tongue during his lifetime.

“Utopia” refers to the ideal visions themselves. “Utopianism” refers to the movements that bring them about. The particular components of utopia can vary enormously, and one person's or one society's utopia may be another's anti-utopia or “dystopia.” In coining the term More was making a pun meaning both “good place” and “nowhere.” Nevertheless, we can define “genuine” utopias by comparing them with “false” utopias in three ways.

First, in a genuine utopia, perfection usually entails a radical improvement of physical, social, economic, and psychological conditions. Utopia is—or should be—qualitatively different from pre-utopia and non-utopia. Except when pre-utopia is seen as moving toward utopia—as was long assumed by many to be the case with the United States—radical change is critical to the achievement of utopia. Even here, however, considerable improvements are still believed to be necessary. These improvements are to be achieved through the transformation of institutions, values, norms, and activities. Perfection does not come automatically, and the inhabitants of most utopias remain flawed by nature, except when their flaws might someday be overcome by preliminary versions of genetic engineering. Otherwise, utopian society must maximize virtues and strengths and minimize vices and weaknesses. In evaluating a utopia, the specific objectives and the means devised to reach these objectives define the variety of perfection that is sought. “Perfection,” like “beauty,” is an empty word unless it is given specific content.¹

Second, not only their precise contents but also their comprehensiveness further characterize genuine utopias, which seek changes in most, if not all, areas of society. By contrast, false utopias seek changes in only one or two components, such as schools, prisons, diet, or dress. This is because the proponents of utopias are generally more dissatisfied with the basic structure and direction of their own, non-utopian, society than are the proponents of milder changes. Historian of technology Robert Friedel's monumental 2007 study, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, richly details progress of this more modest degree, a view of the world beginning in the late Middle Ages. He provides myriad examples of persons laboring on farms and in workshops with, in most cases, only limited notions of what they wanted to do, whether they were ultimately successful or not. Yet he does offer repeated examples of what he terms the sustained “capture” of improvement through such means as guilds, professional engineering organizations and engineering schools, and corporate and governmental research and development enterprises. Understandably (if regrettably), Friedel does not discuss technological progress that was largely unintentional and accidental, “un-utopian” instances of “improvement” without an overarching vision. Take, for example, calendar reform, which, according to historian Frank Manuel, would not, in and of itself, qualify as utopian, “but calendar reform that pretended to effect a basic transformation in the human condition might be.”²

A third and final characteristic of genuine utopias is their seriousness of purpose. Whatever their particular form and content, all genuine utopias share the ethos described by political theorist George Kateb:

When we speak of a utopia, we generally mean an ideal society which is not an efflorescence of a diseased or playful or satirical imagination, nor a private or special dream-world, but rather one in which the welfare of all its inhabitants is the central concern, and in which the level of welfare is strikingly higher, and assumed to be more long-lasting, than that of the real world.³

Genuine utopias frequently seek not to escape from the real world but to make the real world better. This objective does not, of course, necessarily translate into practicality or effective action. Compare, for example, fantasies of trips to the moon imagined by Jules Verne and other writers with the Apollo project of NASA that fulfilled its primary objective in 1969 of landing Americans on the moon and returning them safely to earth and that was hailed at the time as an instrument of greater world peace. For years, NASA has identified many pragmatic spin-offs of its Apollo and later space programs that have benefited ordinary Americans and others. NASA missions are indirectly responsible for inventions from MRIs and lasers to more mundane objects such as smoke detectors and dustbusters. In fact, NASA touts the practical implications of its programs on the NASA Spinoff website (http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto) and on Twitter (@NASA_Spinoff).

One further central characteristic of genuine utopias has been well expressed by Ruth Levitas: “the desire for a different, better way of being” is neither innate nor universal. To suggest otherwise is to indulge in fantasies that may be satisfying to those with utopian desires but that lack any historical basis. Countless examples of non-utopian or outright anti-utopian individuals, groups, cultures, and societies can readily be cited. Utopias are perhaps the foremost “socially constructed response to an equally socially constructed gap between the needs and wants generated by a particular society and the satisfactions available to and distributed by it.” This social construction in no way diminishes the significance of genuine utopian visions, past or present. The attempted bridging of that gap, in any number of ways, is what utopias are finally all about.⁴

Utopias Differ from both Millenarian Movements and Science Fiction

Depending on human beings rather than on God to transform the world distinguishes utopias from millenarian movements. In millenarian movements, should God enlist humans, much still depends on God. For instance, the ultra-Orthodox Jews who opposed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 did so on the grounds that it was up to God to establish Israel, according to their reading of the Old Testament. Only with God's approval would they eventually impose Jewish laws, customs, and institutions upon the blessed new state. By contrast, secular Zionists for decades sought to establish a Jewish state by themselves and, of course, finally succeeded.

Similarly, Christian pre-Millennialists, who believe that Jesus will return without human intervention, do not try to improve the world. If anything, they want conditions to deteriorate precisely to quicken Jesus' return. This was the case with James Watt, the controversial Secretary of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan, regarding the fate of so much of the American environment under his control. By comparison, post-Millennialists believe that Jesus will return only after humans improve their world and themselves, though they do not believe in the perfectibility of either, given original sin.

Utopias differ from science fiction in their basic concern for changing rather than abandoning or ignoring non-utopian communities and societies. Science fiction, on the other hand, consists primarily of escapist fantasies about exploration to distant lands, to depths below the earth, or to outer space. Coinage of the term “science fiction” is credited to Forrest J. Ackerman (1916–2008), but it was applied by him and others to works published before his time.⁵ Verne's works such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1866), and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) provide classic examples of science fiction. However imaginative they may be, any impact upon the society left behind is quite secondary. As historian Rosalind Williams contends, Verne's various escape routes from his own society's “science-driven globalization” represent far more than a desire to entertain children and adults. Yet, she concedes, his imagined inventions were intended to free his characters from the “entanglements of the modern, industrializing, globalizing world.” They were not primarily designed to alter it.⁶

The case of the fairly obscure American writer David Lasser is no less revealing. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lasser edited pulp fiction with the legendary Hugo Gernsback. But Gernsback fired Lasser for becoming too concerned with the social and economic crises of the contemporary Great Depression. Lasser then looked to space travel to transcend these and other actual problems, such as nationalism and racism. The first president of the American Interplanetary Society in 1930, Lasser represents the progressive side of science fiction often silenced by technically obsessed persons such as Gernsback but associated in Europe with H. G. Wells above all. During the Cold War, Lasser argued for a world peace that would prevent the extension of tensions between capitalism and communism into space. This distinguished Lasser from better-known post-World War II space scientists and popularizers of space exploration—such as Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, and Willy Ley, who favored extending traditional American imperialism into space. Von Braun made a remarkably successful transition from Nazi war criminal to charismatic leader of the American space program. Ben Bova and Gerard O'Neill, later advocates of space exploration, were not, however, the same kind of conservative Cold War warriors.⁷

In recent decades, science fiction has become ever more engaged with the “real world” it would supposedly either transform or escape from. Rejecting the white male technocratic elitism of their predecessors, such contemporary writers as Vonda N. McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Allen Steele envision space communities as models of racial and gender diversity. Meanwhile, established writers such as Doris Lessing, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood continued with this trend when they moved into science fiction.⁸

Utopias' Spiritual Qualities are Akin to those of Formal Religions

Krishan Kumar argues that there is “a fundamental contradiction between religion and utopia”⁹ because of the distinctions drawn above regarding changes to be brought about by human beings versus changes to be brought about by God, or regarding concerns for this world versus those for the next world. But that common stance is simplistic and ignores the fact that most secular utopias that achieve some longevity still have a spiritual dimension. This might be a faith in science and/or technology as panaceas, often as saviors—a focal point of this book—but it does provide a non-material dimension that cannot be ignored. No less importantly, utopias that envision a far longer, happier, more fulfilling life in this world as compared with salvation in another world or reincarnation in this world usually envision a future in which the very poverty, disease, stagnation, and hopelessness that make salvation and/or reincarnation so appealing are eliminated.

Some European and American utopian writings and many communities have had religion in more conventional forms as their principal theme and cause. If, not surprisingly, Christianity has been the commonest faith, Mormonism and Judaism, for example, have also been represented, as have obscure, sometimes mystical creeds. Overall, religion-based communities have lasted longer than those based on secular beliefs such as socialism. Notable exceptions to this generalization have been communities that fell apart after the loss of founding charismatic leaders. For example, the Oneida community established by John Humphrey Noyes in New York State in 1848 could not continue after Noyes fled to Canada in 1879 before he could be arrested for immoral behavior, as elaborated in Chapter 2. There have also been interesting mixtures: for instance, one of the most intriguing sequels to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) was the work Young West (1894), written by a Reform Rabbi, Solomon Schindler, who tried to enlist other American Jews in Bellamy's Nationalist political crusade.¹⁰

More broadly, the general notion of America as utopia has gradually become part of America's so-called civil religion, whereby a supposedly secular nation repeatedly invokes God at public ceremonies and in the formulation of public policy. The United States became, in these terms, a de facto utopia, unique among the world's nations and yet a model for them all. Americans, including many policy-makers, have argued both that the country's uniqueness makes it morally superior to all other countries and that the United States could somehow still lift up all other, inferior nations to attempt to approach its high standards. To be sure, the apparent paradox of this position—of simultaneous tendencies toward isolationism and toward foreign aggression—is often lost on its policy proponents and on ordinary citizens alike. Moreover, Americans' use of “Manifest Destiny” to rationalize both westward and overseas expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries exemplifies the utopian dimension of mainstream American history. Most recently, the “neo-conservative” planners behind the Iraq War that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Wiley-Blackwell Brief Histories of Religion Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Nature of Utopias
• Chapter 2: The Variety of Utopias
• Chapter 3: The European Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics
• Chapter 4: The American Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics
• Chapter 5: Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia in the United States and Europe
• Chapter 6: Utopia Reconsidered
• Chapter 7: The Resurgence of Utopianism
• Chapter 8: The Future of Utopias and Utopianism
• Further Reading
• Index