What happened to Utopia?

As I live within walking distance of one of the most absurd of all self-proclaimed ‘Utopias’, and one of the most long-lasting - the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea - a few thoughts on the concept seem to be in order.

The neologism  ‘utopia’ means ‘no-place’ or ‘nowhere’ in Greek. It was coined by Thomas More for his eponymous book, published in 1516. In  this Utopia, writes More, “[n]obody owns anything but everyone is rich, for what greater wealth can there be than cheerfulness, peace of mind, and freedom from anxiety?” The  title is also    a pun,  because when spoken it sounds like eu-topos,  or ‘good place.’ So  More    aimed to bring  the negative and  the  desire for a better society into  fruitful partnership.

The dream of a perfect society didn’t originate with More,  and is probably  as old as humankind. It speaks of a desire for a better life than the one we have.  What More  did was  to give  this impossible place  a new name,  one that stuck. ‘Arcadia,’ ‘Heaven,’ ‘The Land of the Immortals,’ ‘Horai,’ ‘Shambala,’ ‘The Land of Milk and Honey,’ ‘The Pure Land,’ ‘Neverland,’ ‘Shangri-La,’ ‘The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,’ ‘The Matrix,’    are  a few of the other names for this perfect place, coming from different periods, cultures, and ideological or artistic contexts. 

 More’s purpose was  satirical. He aimed to expose the failures of society as it actually was, and worked in the empty space  between a society that can be imagined and the one that   really exists.  He  used the negative not in a purely nullifying or privative sense, but  as a way of clearing the way for an imaginatively tangible alternative reality.    The negation, ‘nowhere,’  exposes    the oppressive  positivity of ‘somewhere’,  of  regimes that claim to be sanctioned by God or natural right  but actually   perpetuate  the  selfish interests of an elite and are incurably bellicose.  We may be  condemned to live in a  ‘topos’ – a place that is very far from perfect,  but within our  minds we are  capable of  a negation that generates  a  hypothetical ‘no-place’ that  can then help us to resist the temptation to  normalize  cruelty, greed and inequality, and motivate us to bring about change.  We can dream beyond the  constraints of the every-day present world.

 As  Oscar Wilde wisely advised, all maps of the world should contain such a ‘nowhere’, although as he also remarked,   once we land there we will almost certainly immediately feel like setting off again in search of another, better, ‘nowhere.’  And,  like all utopian visions, More’s was inevitably constrained by the limited perspective of  his  present.    Utopia has slaves.  We easily overestimate  our capacity to see beyond our own prejudiced and narrow horizon. “Nearly all creators of utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache”, writes George Orwell. ‘Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”  The twentieth century is full of failed  ideologically-driven ‘utopias,’    the tragic  consequences of confusing imagination  with  reality.  When Utopia  is understood to have actually once existed, or it is believed that it could one day actually exist, then  the act of imaginative negation can easily  become the basis for ruthless action in the present. It leads to the   suppression of  the  difficult and usually  tedious truth  that all real social advances  only ever take the form of  small gains made piecemeal  against a general background of   unpredictability and misfortune.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

I live near the DMZ (the Demilitarized Zone), a strip of land running across the entire Korean Peninsula, cutting it roughly in half by crossing the 38th parallel at an angle, with the west end lying south of the parallel and the eastern to the north. It is 155 miles long, approximately 2.5 miles wide and is the most heavily militarized border in the world. Where I live the DMZ is only fifty miles from Seoul, and at some points it dips even closer to the capital.

It was created with the cessation of fighting in the Korean War in 1953 (the war is officially still on, as no peace treaty was ever signed), and in fact consists of two lines of defenses marking the edges of a buffer zone spreading out on both sides of what is known as the central Military Demarcation Line - the true border between North and South Korea. This line, which only a few patrolling UN soldiers ever see, is indicated by a string of small yellow rusting metal signs written in English and Korean on one side and Chinese and Korean on the other. The Southern limits of the buffer zone are established by substantial defense line (and presumably something similar exists at the Northern side).

Our village is surrounded by army bases, so we often see soldiers, and hear the sound of rifles and machine guns, and occasionally, bigger ordnance. Sometimes, helicopters fly over on their way too Panmunjom, ten miles away, which is where the two sides have meetings, and the only place along the DMZ where you can cross over from one Korea to another - Trump, Kim Jong-un, and Moon Jae-in all stepped back and forth recently, which made for a good photo opportunity. From the roof on our house we can see the mountains of North Korea beyond the Imjin River. At night, isolated lights appear near the peaks of the closest – lookout positions, no doubt. Sometimes, I imagine North Korean soldiers peering at us through binoculars.

I feel as if I’m at the edge of the world – the known world, or maybe the 'Americanized' world. It’s a bit like being located on a map from the Middle Ages next to the area designated terra incognita. There can’t be many such places left on Earth today, certainly not ones that are entirely humanly constructed, in this case, the result of a temporary political expedient thought up by American engineers at the end of World War Two, which has since gotten frozen into place.

In fact, nothing much has happened along the DMZ in the period since it was established. Ironically, as long as you abide by the strict rules imposed, the DMZ is undoubtedly a much safer place to be than Gangnam, the busy downtown district in south Seoul, and certainly safer than London or New York. Nevertheless, occasionally bad things have happened. Between 1966 and 1969 there were several confrontations; in 1968 alone 181 serious violations in and around the DMZ resulted in the deaths of 145 South Koreans and 17 US soldiers, and an unspecified number of North Koreans. In 1976, down near Panmunjom, the most infamous incident took place - what became known as the Axe Murder Incident, in which North Korean soldiers hacked to death two US officers who had ventured out with a crew to prune a tree obstructing surveillance. Occasionally, North Korean soldiers defect across the DMZ, the most dramatic being a year or so ago when a soldier ran across the line at Panmunjom itself.

Today, the business of postmodern warfare is being conducted otherwise. Paul Virilio outlines the transition: from obstruction, to destruction, to communication. From castles, to artillery, to technologies of information control - the ‘information bomb’ and weapon-systems of elusive interactivity. Anachronistically, the DMZ perpetuates the first stages of warfare – it is all ‘ramparts’, ‘shields’ and ‘elephants’. But contemporary war-making has also moved on beyond the second phase - old-fashioned destruction. For, as Virilio notes, what in 1983 he was calling ‘Pure War’, characterised above all by speed, by 2007 when he published a new edition of his book, Pure War: Twenty-Five Years Later, had ceded to ‘Impure War’ or ‘Infowar’. Contemporary warfare is asymmetric and transpolitical, inaugurating a dangerous new era of belligerent ‘metropolitics’ in which the focus of aggression is the city, the camouflage of choice a sweatshirt, jeans and backpack. “Pure War is still around,” Virilio clarifies: “it’s still possible to press the button and send out missiles – Korea can do it, Iran can do it, and so can others; but in reality the real displacement of strategy is in this fusion between hyper-terrorist civil war and international war, to the point that they’re indistinguishable.”

DMZ tourism is on the rise. You can, for example, do bus tours of the zone, and visit three tunnels dug by the North Koreans. Their height and width is decidedly claustrophobic, and for me, a tall Westerner, very low, though probably not for the soldiers of what Christopher Hitchens called the “nation of racists dwarfs”. There are bicycle tracks, an annual marathon, and art exhibitions - one, called REAL DMZ, in which I participated in 2012. There are cycle routes. The area covered by DMZ itself is an accidental nature reserve, giving some idea of what things would be like without human interference.

You could say that the DMZ has been increasingly normalized.