Utopia

Thomas More, Ursula Le Guin

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784787592
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease?In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Miville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker.

PART I:
INTRODUCTION

by China Miéville

1

Close to the Shore

If you know from where to set sail, with a friendly pilot offering expertise, it should not take you too long to reach Utopia.

Since the first woman or man first yearned for a better place, dreamers have dreamed them at the tops of mountains and cradled in hidden valleys, above clouds and deep under the earth – but above all they have imagined them on islands. The island utopia has been a standard since antique times: Eusebius’s Panchaea and Iambulus’s Islands of the Sun; Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines, and Antangil, from the 1616 novel of that name; Bacon’s Bensalem; Robert Paltock’s Nosmnbdsgrutt, from Peter Wilkins; Huxley’s Pala; Austin Tappan Wright’s Islandia; and countless more. And in the centre of that great archipelago of dissent and hope, one place, one name, looms largest.

This island, this book, is the paradigm. ‘More’s Utopia’, in the words of the scholar Roland Greene, ‘is perhaps the text that establishes insularity as an early modern vantage [and] introduces a way of thinking that is properly called utopian’, defined by ‘a multifarious phenomenon which I will call island logic’.

But, to repeat, it is not a long voyage to get there. Citizens of More’s Utopia ‘keep up the art of navigation’, pass back and forth on various tasks, trading surpluses of ‘corn, honey, wool, flax, wood, wax, tallow, leather, and cattle … to other nations’. Only the thinnest stretch of ocean separates Utopia from the mainland. For somewhere so famously and constitutively nowhere, this no-place Utopia is very close to the shore.

And there’s a more startling surprise with regard to its island-ness, a fact of which not nearly enough is generally made:

[T]his was no island at first, but a part of the continent. Utopus, that conquered it … brought the rude and uncivilised inhabitants into … good government … Having soon subdued them, he designed to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug … and that the natives might not think he treated them like slaves, he not only forced the inhabitants, but also his own soldiers, to labour in carrying it on. As he set a vast number of men to work, he, beyond all men’s expectations, brought it to a speedy conclusion. And his neighbours, who at first laughed at the folly of the undertaking, no sooner saw it brought to perfection than they were struck with admiration and terror.

This most famous example of the island utopia, the ideal-type itself, is not by nature an island at all. The fifteen miles of water that keep it apart from the main body politic are not there by God’s will, but by the sweat of native people, among others, digging at an invading conqueror’s command. The splendid – utopian – isolation is part of the violent imperial spoils.

The classic reactionary attack on the utopian impulse is that it is, precisely, no place, impossibly distant. But, disavowed and right there, in More’s foundation myth of the dream polity is a very different unease: that, wrought by brutality, coerced from above, it is all too close.

There could be no one better suited to frame More’s foundational text than that great dissident utopian and dissident-utopian thinker, Ursula K. Le Guin. In her words from ‘Utopiyin, Utopiyang’, which follows More’s text in this book, ‘Every utopia since Utopia’ – at least – ‘has also been, clearly or obscurely, actually or possibly, in the author’s or in the readers’ judgement, both a good place and a bad one. Every eutopia contains a dystopia, every dystopia contains a eutopia.’

These contradictions thrive in single heads as easily as between them, and in the texts those heads produce. The interminable debates about what More ‘really’ meant miss this obvious fact, and are thus of as much use as any other discussion of ‘actual’ artistic or political ‘intent’ that treats it as a given or a secret to be decoded. Which is to say: some, but not much.

Was More’s utopia blueprint, or satire, or something else? As if these are exclusive. As if all utopias are not always all of the above, in degrees that vary as much in the context of their reception as of their creation.

The dangerous drive, the dystopia-in-utopia, then, is not only in the impulse, though it can certainly reside there, but in the actuality: that proximity of the island to the shore. Tragedians making their peace with power, liberals loudly warn against utopianism from below (often full of sentimentalism for their own dead radicalism, and lachrymose at their new realism); alongside them the hard-right radicals of power and oppression dream their own dreams of the good life: supremacist arcadias. And those who rule, more powerful and traditionally less voluble than their apologists, calmly configure and effect utopias of their own. In which those they rule have no choice but to live and serve and die.

These are a few of the limits of utopia (explored in the companion essay of that name that follows this one).

But the fact that the utopian impulse is always stained doesn’t mean it can or should be denied or battened down. It is as inevitable as hate and anger and joy, and as necessary. Utopianism isn’t hope, still less optimism: it is need, and it is desire. For recognition, like all desire, and/but for the specifics of its reveries and programmes, too; and above all for betterness tout court. For alterity, something other than the exhausting social lie. For rest. And when the cracks in history open wide enough, the impulse may even jimmy them a little wider.

We can’t do without this book. We are all and have always been Thomas More’s children. Even his literary ancestors were also his preemptive descendants, throwing him up, making him a hinge point, so his ditch-demanding king could give their earlier yearnings a name. That we must keep returning to the text, with whatever suspicion, is to honour it. It gave us a formulation, a concept, we needed.

Though it is perhaps past time to rethink that word.

We don’t know much of the society that Utopus and his armies destroyed – that’s the nature of such forced forgetting – but we know its name. It’s mentioned en swaggering colonial passant, a hapax legomenon pilfered from Gnosticism: ‘for Abraxa was its first name’. We know the history of such encounters, too; that every brutalised, genocided and enslaved people in history have, like the Abraxans, been ‘rude and uncivilised’ in the tracts of their invaders.

A start for any habitable utopia must be to overturn the ideological bullshit of empire, and, unsentimentally but respectfully, to revisit the traduced and defamed cultures on the bones of which some conqueror’s utopian dreams were piled up. ‘Utopia’ is to the political imaginary of betterness as ‘Rhodesia’ is to Zimbabwe, ‘Gold Coast’ to Ghana.

How, then, might we set out for New Abraxa?

‘I don’t think we’re ever going to get to utopia again by going forward’, says Le Guin, in ‘A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to Be’. And so she suggests instead the formula people of the Swampy Cree First Nation have traditionally used in orientation to the future: Usà puyew usu wapiw!

‘I go backward, look forward’, it means. It describes the porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum, backing into a rock crevice, from where it can watch for danger ahead. ‘In order to speculate safely on an inhabitable future’, she says, ‘perhaps we would do well to find a rock crevice and go backward.’ Far from hyperbolic, the adjective ‘inhabitable’ seems admirably restrained in the face of the social and ecological degradation of accelerating neoliberalism.

From those rocks, the porcupine can plot its own utopias. And, at least as important, going backward, looking forward, it can try to escape the onrushing utopias of those in power.

But such utopias of the powerful have levelled many landscapes. They’re distinguished by their flattening power, by the fields of rubble they leave. What if they sweep up all the rocks and leave none between which to hide?

That defensive porcupine gait recalls another. The motion has a counterpart, a poignant inversion, the buffeting of a figure long-since a cliché of radical pessimism, but the endless citation of which (including in ‘The Limits of Utopia’, here) still can’t quite strip it of its power and importance.

Walter Benjamin’s angel of history.

His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread … His face is turned to the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet … [A] storm … blowing from Paradise … irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The porcupine goes backward, looks forward, to see futures – to avoid some, to plan another. The angel goes forward, looks backward, in anguish – plunging towards a future it can’t see, mourning pasts it can’t redeem.

Which way are the predatory utopias twisting us? Is the porcupine pulled from its broken crevice and wrenched around to hurtle future-ward in their slipstream? Or does the angel manage to catch the walls of the canyon with the tips of its outstretched wings and hold on and turn and wriggle into a place to hide and grit its teeth and face the telos of the wind?

Will the porcupine become the angel, or the angel the porcupine?

Yet again, there’s no either/or. The history of all hitherto existing societies – it’s been pointed out many times – is a history of monsters, on all sides. Our utopianism is always-already a chimera. Angelus erethizon: a porcupine with celestial wings; a seraph bristling with spines.

And like those other hybrids which ultimately overthrew the ghastly utopia that created and despised them, our cousins, the beast-men of More(au), it must learn to move with an unprecedented crossbred gait. To use its parts and powers in ungainly but effective ways. Stilt-walking on wingtips, gripping with the quills of feathers and the quills of a sharper weapon kind. Fighting on four legs, two, and none, and swimming – it’s close to the shore – to New Abraxa.

It will move, perhaps, as it is just possible we might, with a new motion neither and both animal and divine.

2

The Limits of Utopia

Dystopias infect official reports.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demands a shift in our emissions by a third to avoid utter disaster. KPMG, in the leaden chattiness of corporate power-point-ese, sees the same horizon. NASA part-funds a report warning that systemic civilizational collapse ‘is difficult to avoid’.

We may quibble with the models, but not that the end of everything is right out there, for everyone to discuss.

The stench and blare of poisoned cities, lugubrious underground bunkers, ash landscapes … Worseness is the bad conscience of betterness, dystopias are rebukes integral to the utopian tradition. We hanker and warn, our best dreams and our worst standing together against our waking.

Fuck this up, and it’s a desiccated, flooded, cold, hot, dead Earth. Get it right? There are lifetimes’-worth of pre-dreams of New Edens, from le Guin and Piercy and innumerable others, going right back, visions of what, nearly two millennia ago, the Church Father Lactantius, in The Divine Institutes, called the ‘Renewed World’.

[T]he earth will open its fruitfulness, and bring forth the most abundant fruits of its own accord; the rocky mountains shall drop with honey; streams of wine shall run down, and rivers flow with milk; in short, the world itself shall rejoice, and all nature exult, being rescued and set free from the dominion of evil and impiety, and guilt and error.

And it’s never only the world that’s in question: for Lactantius, as for all the best utopias, it’s humanity too. The world will rejoice because we at last will be capable of inhabiting it, free from the evil and impiety and guilt and error with which we’ve excoriated it. The relationship between humanity and what we’d now call the environment will be healed.

But so rich a lineage has hardly stopped countless environmentalisms from failing, not merely to change the world, but to change the agenda about changing the world.

We who want another, better Earth are understandably proud to keep alternatives alive in this, an epoch that punishes thoughts of change. We need utopias. That’s almost a given in activism. If an alternative to this world were inconceivable, how could we change it?

But utopia has its limits: utopia can be toxic. What price hopelessness, indeed? But what price hope?

In 1985 the city government announced that it would locate a trash incinerator in South Central Los Angeles, a year after California Waste Management paid half a million taxpayers’ dollars to the consultancy firm Cerrell Associates for advice on locating such controversial toxic facilities. The Cerrell Report is a how-to, a checklist outlining the qualities of the ‘ “least resistant” personality profile’. Target the less educated, it advises. The elderly. ‘Middle- and higher-socioeconomic strata neighborhoods’, it says, ‘should not fall at least within the one-mile and five-mile radii of the proposed site.’

Target the poor.

That this is the strategy is unsurprising: that they admit it raises eyebrows. ‘You know’, one wants to whisper, ‘that we can hear you?’

In fact the local community did resist, and successfully. But what are sometimes called the Big Ten green groups – the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, and others – refused the request to join the campaign. Because, they said, it was not an environmental, but a ‘community health’ issue.

The fallacies of Big Green. Start with heuristics like rural versus urban, nature versus the social, and in the face of oppressive power you easily become complicit, or worse, in environmental injustice, in racism. Such simplistic urbophobic utopianism can unite the most nostalgic conservative, seeking solace in a national park, with the most extropian post-hippy touting an eco-start-up.

For Lactantius, it was God who would heal a broken nature. This is a more secular age – sort of. But not everyone leaves such messianism aside: some incorporate it into a new, and newly vacuous, totality.

In 1968, Stewart Brand opened the first Whole Earth Catalogue with an image of the Blue Planet, Spaceship Earth, a survival pod in which we mutually cuddle. Beside it the text read, ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’

Here, says the image, is a beautiful Gaian totality. Here, say the words, is the ecological subject: ‘We’. Which obviously leaves unanswered, in the famous punchline to the blistering, uneasy joke, Tonto’s question to the Lone Ranger: ‘Who is “we”?’

Faced with the scale of what’s coming, there’s a common and baleful propriety, a self-shackling green politeness. ‘Anything’, the argument goes, ‘is better than nothing.’ Hence solutions to tempt business, and the pleading for ecologically inflected economic rationality. Capitalism, we are told by Jonathan Porritt, an eminent British environmentalist, is the only game in town.

And businesses do adapt, according to their priorities. Whatever the barking of their pet deniers, the oil companies all have Climate Change Divisions – less to fight that change than to plan for profit during it. Companies extend into newly monetised territories. Thus the brief biofuels boom, and that supposed solution to the planet’s problems drives rapid deforestation and food riots, before the industry and market tank. The invisible hand is supposed to clean up its own mess, with Emissions Trading Schemes and offsetting. Opportunities and ince...