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.