Utopias E-Book

Howard P. Segal

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Blackwell Brief Histories of Religion
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 477

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Wiley-Blackwell Brief Histories of Religion Series

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Nature of Utopias

Utopias Defined

Utopias Differ from both Millenarian Movements and Science Fiction

Utopias' Spiritual Qualities are Akin to those of Formal Religions

Utopias' Real Goal: Not Prediction of the Future but Improvement of the Present

How and When Utopias are Expected to be Established

Chapter 2: The Variety of Utopias

The Global Nature of Utopias: Utopias are Predominantly but not Exclusively Western

The Several Genres of Utopianism: Prophecies and Oratory, Political Movements, Communities, Writings, World's Fairs, Cyberspace

Chapter 3: The European Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics

The Pioneering European Visionaries and Their Basic Beliefs: Plato's Republic and More's Utopia

Forging the Connections Between Science, Technology, and Utopia

The Pansophists

The Prophets of Progress: Condorcet, Saint-Simon, and Comte

Dissenters from the Ideology of Unadulterated Scientific and Technological Progress: Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris

The Expansive Visions of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier

The “Scientific” Socialism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Chapter 4: The American Utopias and Utopians and Their Critics

America as Utopia: Potential and Fulfillment

The Pioneering American Visionaries and their Basic Beliefs in America as Land of Opportunity: John Adolphus Etzler, Thomas Ewbank, and Mary Griffith

America as “Second Creation”: Enthusiasm and Disillusionment

Chapter 5: Growing Expectations of Realizing Utopia in the United States and Europe

Later American Technological Utopians: John Macnie Through Harold Loeb

Utopia Within Sight: The American Technocracy Crusade

Utopia Within Reach: “The Best and the Brightest ”—Post-World War II Science and Technology Policy in the United States and Western Europe and the Triumph of the Social Sciences

On Misreading Frankenstein: How Scientific and Technological Advances have Changed Traditional Criticisms of Utopianism in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Chapter 6: Utopia Reconsidered

The Growing Retreat from Space Exploration and Other Megaprojects

Nuclear Power: Its Rise, Fall, and Possible Revival—Maine Yankee as a Case Study

The Declining Belief in Inventors, Engineers, and Scientists as Heroes; in Experts as Unbiased; and in Science and Technology as Social Panaceas

Contemporary Prophets for Profit: The Rise and Partial Fall of Professional Forecasters

Post-colonial Critiques of Western Science and Technology as Measures of “Progress”

Chapter 7: The Resurgence of Utopianism

The Major Contemporary Utopians and Their Basic Beliefs

Social Media: Utopia at One's Fingertips

Recent and Contemporary Utopian Communities

The Star Trek Empire: Science Fiction Becomes Less Escapist

Edutopia: George Lucas and Others

The Fate of Books and Newspapers: Utopian and Dystopian Aspirations

Chapter 8: The Future of Utopias and Utopianism

The “Scientific and Technological Plateau” and the Redefinition of Progress

Conclusion: Why Utopia Still Matters Today and Tomorrow

Further Reading

Index

Wiley-Blackwell Brief Histories of Religion Series

This series offers brief, accessible, and lively accounts of key topics within theology and religion. Each volumepresents both academic and general readers with a selected history of topics which have had a profound effect on religious and cultural life. The word “history” is, therefore, understood in its broadest cultural and social sense. The volumes are based on serious scholarship but they are written engagingly and in terms readily understood by general readers.

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This edition first published 2012© 2012 Howard P. Segal

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Segal, Howard P.

Utopias : a brief history from ancient writings to virtual communities /Howard P. Segal.

pages cm – (Blackwell brief histories of religion; 44)

ISBN 978-1-4051-8328-4 (pbk.) – ISBN 978-1-4051-8329-1 (hardcover) 1. Utopias–History. I. Title.

HX806.S36 2012

335.8′3–6dc23

2011049094

For my wife, Deborah D. Rogers,for our children, Richard William Rogers Segaland Raechel Maya Rogers Segal,and for our beloved shih-tzu, Toms

Preface

I have long found serious, thoughtful utopias and utopians to be fascinating, important, and deserving of respect and inquiry. I remain intrigued by what utopias and utopians tell us about the societies from which they derive and about how those societies might be changed, for better or for worse. In effect, utopianism functions like a microscope: by first isolating and then magnifying aspects of existing, non-utopian societies allegedly needing drastic improvements, it enables us to see more clearly their political, economic, cultural, and psychological mainstreams.

Some students of utopias come to the topic by way of personal experiences, such as time spent either living in a utopian community or trying to perfect the world through political or social movements. In the interest of “full disclosure,” let me concede without any apologies that, by contrast, my interest in utopias is largely scholarly. I have never held any passionate beliefs in any remotely utopian projects, have never composed any supposedly utopian manifestoes or other visionary writings, and have never spent time in any self-proclaimed utopian communities or crusades. I am by nature skeptical—if not cynical—about visions and visionaries that claim moral and perhaps intellectual superiority over everything and everyone else. I cannot imagine being seduced by any utopian dream or prophet. Yet I remain fascinated by those who have been so seduced and by the manifestations of their seductions.

As I was completing this book, I happened to receive from my institution's Employee Assistance Program—that is, its counseling service—a four-page pamphlet distributed to all employees entitled “Perfectionism: Too Much of a Good Thing.” The timing was ironic. These pamphlets on various topics appear every few months, and the intention—to alert employees to various issues that might confront them, their families, and their friends—is certainly noble. Though hardly surprised by the uniformly negative tone of this critique of “perfectionism,” I was reminded of the generally unsympathetic reactions of many others over the years as I studied, wrote about, and presented papers on various aspects of utopianism. Since my Princeton graduate-school days, when I was contemplating writing my doctoral dissertation on some aspect of utopianism, far more often than not I have encountered an implicit if not explicit sense of anxiety that my keen interest in the topic might well reflect some kind of pathology.

As set forth in the pamphlet and in countless earlier warnings from other mental health experts, the quest for “unreasonable standards” of whatever variety for either oneself or others can “waste enormous amounts of time” better spent on more pleasant pursuits. One finds nothing in defense of the idealism likewise associated throughout history with “perfectionism.”1 But, While I cannot refute the pamphlet's list of the harmful effects of “perfectionism”—anxiety, misplaced anger, depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, eating disorders, chronic pain, and procrastination—what of the healthy and positive efforts to improve the world that have characterized the foremost utopian projects and their creators? One need not embrace their sometimes naïve, misguided schemes to be more balanced in assessing utopias and utopians throughout history. Their refusal to accept existing values, customs, institutions, and policies is often admirable if not courageous. True, this book is not a formal moral assessment as such, but it does attempt to treat utopias and utopians—and their critics—with fairness and respect.

In researching and writing this book I was greatly assisted by Samara Gopan, of Bangor, Maine; by University of Maine history major Jason Pote; by Melora Norman, Librarian of Unity College of Maine; and above all by Mel Johnson, University of Maine Fogler Library Reference Librarian.

I am most indebted to my dear and talented wife, Deborah Rogers, Professor of English at the University of Maine. She not only encouraged me to undertake and then complete the book but also vastly improved the manuscript with her editorial skills.

I wish to thank Rutgers University Press for its permission to allow me to use portions of my article “Progress and its Discontents: Postwar Science and Technology Policy,” in The Social Sciences Go to Washington, ed. Hamilton Cravens (2004); Purdue University Press for its permission to allow me to use portions of my article “Reengineering the Land-Grant University,” in Engineering in a Land-Grant Context, ed. Alan Marcus (2005) and the Maine Historical Society for its permission to allow me to use portions of my article "Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant: A Technological Utopia in Retrospect," in Maine History, 44 (April 2009), 120–142.

Note

1. Mary D'Alessandro, EAP Messenger, Perfectionism: Too Much of a Good Thing (Employee Assistance Program, University of Maine, October 2010), 2.

Introduction

The term “utopia” typically conjures up naïve, impractical, unrealistic, superficial notions of an allegedly perfect society. In this book, while not defending all utopian schemes against these connotations, I place more emphasis on utopias' positive qualities, especially their illumination of the non-utopian societies from which all utopias spring. Equally importantly, the book traces the varying forms that utopias have taken over the centuries, from their origins in ancient Greece to their growth in the Renaissance and their persistence in the present, including contemporary “high-tech” utopias and cyberspace utopian communities. No less significantly, I also extend the analysis of utopias from an exclusively Western enterprise to a worldwide one—a facet of utopianism ordinarily neglected.

There have been several classical accounts of utopias to which generations of students and scholars are indebted. But it is surely time to update The Story of Utopias (1922), to invoke the title of one of those pioneering studies, which was the first book by the great historian and social critic Lewis Mumford.1 We are by now past the hostility that greeted most utopian proposals throughout much of the twentieth century, when utopias were commonly equated with the nightmarish and pseudo-utopian totalitarian regimes that shaped most of that century, whether right-wing or left-wing, fascist or communist. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century have provided an opportunity for a more balanced assessment of utopias and utopian thought long unavailable when the world was purportedly divided between pure capitalism and pure socialism and when each side routinely demonized the other.2

Admittedly, many who are not ideological extremists still remain skeptical of all utopian expectations, including the ability of science and technology to improve the planet.3 Simultaneously, however, other quarters have seen a renewed positive interest in utopias, thanks in part to visions of cyberspace paradises as well as to more material high-tech advances that grant ordinary persons unprecedented access to information, to communication, and to sources of visionary inspiration. These innovations include computers, the Internet, cell phones, satellites, global positioning devices, smart phones, iPods, and biotechnological developments.

On a more mundane plane, one increasingly finds the use of the word “utopian” without apology or defensiveness. Examples include articles in the New York Times and elsewhere on a deliberately obscured cluster of homes overlooking the Pacific (“Utopia by the Sea”) designed by several prominent architects; Serenbe, an avowedly utopian experiment some thirty miles outside Atlanta that began as a farm, expanded into a bed and breakfast and then into a few cottages, and has since grown into several small communities; and four successful and still desirable housing complexes for common citizens in Lyon, France, termed Utopies Realisees, or “Achieved Utopias.” Two other, less upbeat articles discuss how in Grenoble, in the French Alps, a failed urban utopian community built in the 1970s has become the site of protests and violence by its now impoverished residents, and how a 2008 exhibit in New York City about a visionary affordable housing project in China contrasts positively, in its small and humane scale, with modern China's common huge and impersonal skyscraper apartment buildings. Further examples are two new books, the first about a small rural Texas town called Utopia that lacks any movie theaters or book or music stores and that only recently became connected to both cable television and the Internet, and the second about someone in search of contemporary utopias, inspired by his having grown up on a street called Utopia Road in a planned community in Southern California. Meanwhile, my own university has a sufficient number of serious scholars of utopia to have warranted favorable articles in the institution's glossy public relations magazine.4

Finally, Boston Beer Company, which makes the Sam Adams Beer, highly popular in New England, now also makes a beer named “Utopias.” Utopias has the United States' highest alcohol content (twenty-seven percent) and is banned in thirteen states. However, for those who can purchase—and afford—it, Utopias guarantees an exceptional taste.5 One can only speculate about its potential effects on serious visionaries.

For many advocates of utopia today—be they Utopias drinkers or not—the traditional gap between prophecy and fulfillment has nearly disappeared, enhancing the appeal of these visions. But historical perspectives are generally and painfully absent in such predictions. This simplifies and distorts discussions of the presumed uniqueness of contemporary utopias and so supposedly justifies the frequent absence of any comparisons with their predecessors. As a professional historian, I feel compelled to remedy this neglect.6

Notes

1. As I was completing this book I learned of the publication not long before of Lyman Tower Sargent's Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Sargent is a leading scholar of utopianism, and his book is, not surprisingly, excellent. As I finished my book I read and then cited his at several points. But our books are quite different and are, I believe, complementary studies.

2. Russell Jacoby's Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought in an Anti-Utopian Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) is a powerful indictment of such prominent post-World War II critics of utopia as Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, and Leo Strauss.

3. On the history of forecasting and the critical role of technology, see I. F. Clarke, The Pattern of Expectation, 1644–2001 (New York: Basic Books, 1979). There is no finer general work on this topic, nor any with more examples.

4. See Patricia Leigh Brown, “Utopia by the Sea,” New York Times, Travel, December 14, 2008, 1, 8; Kevin Sack, “Outside Atlanta, a Utopia Rises,” New York Times, Travel, March 1, 2009, 5; Sally McGrane, “Concrete Dreams: France's Housing Utopias,” New York Times, Travel, August 2, 2009, TR 4; Steven Erlanger, “Grenoble Journal: Utopian Dream Becomes Battleground in France,” New York Times, April 9, 2010, A7; Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Architecture: In Modern China, ‘Little Kingdoms’ for the People,” New York Times, October 13, 2008, C1, C5; Karen Valby, Welcome to Utopia: Notes From a Small Town (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2010); and J. C. Hallman, In Utopia: Six Kinds of Eden, and the Search for a Better Paradise (New York: St. Martin's, 2010). Valby's book is infinitely less pretentious and far more interesting than Hallman's superficial and historically ignorant gloss of utopias past and present. On utopian studies at the University of Maine, see Kristen Andresen, “Searching for Utopia,” UMaine Today, 9 (January/February 2009), 8, 12. The similar unapologetic use of “dystopias” is also increasing. See, for instance, the film Jonestown (2006) about Jim Jones' Jonestown, Guyana, mass suicide on November 18, 1978, as reviewed by Stephen Holden in the New York Times, October 20, 2006, B11; and a review of the video game Grand Theft Auto IV entitled “Forget It, Niko, it's Liberty City, a Dystopian Dream,” in the New York Times, April 28, 2008, B1, B6.

5. See Associated Press, “Boston Beer Offers Potential Utopias,” Boston Globe, December 1, 2009, B6.

6. In its final issue of 2007 (83 (December 24 and 31), 110–111), the New Yorker's cartoons included two full pages by the famous Edward Sorel on “Five Writers in Search of Utopia,” with a few lines below each cartoon humorously summarizing each work. The sheer publication of those cartoons bespoke the revival of a broader interest in the history of utopia.

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 began in 2003 had illusions similar to those of their predecessors more than a century ago. The George W. Bush Administration naïvely thought not only that American democracy could readily be exported to a land devoid of democratic traditions and values but also that American troops would be enthusiastically welcomed as democratic liberators from the tyranny of longtime dictator Saddam Hussein.11

The connections between the rise and fall of religious belief in the twenty-first century and secular substitutes that, at their most optimistic, become utopian are complex and varied. For example, according to both the editor of the highly respected weekly The Economist and his Washington bureau chief, religion is supposedly returning to public life and to intellectuals around the world—and is doing so as a matter of individual voluntary choice and commitment. In God Is Back, they argue that the resurgence of belief is another facet of the innovation economy and society that most nations profess to seek. Belief in the prospect of a better world obviously need not lead to any utopian embrace, but neither does it preclude that. So-called “megachurches” throughout the world are but one example of this growth.12

Still, there is countervailing evidence of declining traditional religious beliefs in the United States and elsewhere. The search for secular alternatives again may include utopianism of different forms. The comprehensive 2008 survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showed a complex picture of the more than 35,000 Americans who participated. There was some decline in the percentage of absolute believers and a growing number of believers who nevertheless maintain some doubts. Equally interesting was the lack of firm commitment the survey observed, remarking that the United States “is a nation of religious drifters, with about half of adults switching faith affiliation at least once during their lives.”13 Lisa Miller's Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife (2010) complements these conclusions in its finding that roughly eighty percent of Americans claim belief in an afterlife but remarkably few can provide any specifics about what they mean by an afterlife.

Utopias' Real Goal: Not Prediction of the Future but Improvement of the Present

Utopias are frequently misunderstood as scientific prophecies whose importance should be determined by the accuracy of their specific predictions. In this respect, the notion that utopias can provide “realistic alternatives” to existing society can be misleading. If anything, this view has grown increasingly popular in recent decades, given our unprecedented electronic access to and processing of information and the consequent growth of forecasting as a serious and profitable industry. If, as the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith wittily observed, economists make predictions not because they know but because they're asked, how much more so does that apply to “professional” social forecasters—and how much more superficial and specious are their predictions? This growth of professional forecasting will be discussed in Chapter 6. The intriguing question (also discussed in that chapter) is why thousands of otherwise intelligent people take social forecasting so seriously—and why many of them later hold up those forecasts as scorecards.

Few such true believers in social forecasting, like their counterparts regarding economic forecasting, would ever categorize themselves as utopians. Neither would tens of thousands, maybe millions, of devotees of contemporary social media and of cyberspace communities—discussed in Chapter 7. It is important not to enlarge the pool of utopians in the name of identifying the utopian rhetoric embraced by so many. Yet the critical point is the seriousness with which such persons treat whatever makes them interested in the future.

Instead, as noted, utopias' principal value is their illumination of alleged problems and solutions back in the “real world” from which they sprang. Utopias should therefore be played back upon the real world rather than be held up as crystal balls.

How and When Utopias are Expected to be Established

It is crucial to keep in mind that not all utopias are intended to be established in the first place. The classic example of such a utopia as an intellectual construct is Plato's Republic (360 BCE). Since Plato did not believe in that prospect, The Republic is the quintessential “Platonic Form.”

The starting point for utopias that could be established is More's Utopia (1516). For centuries thereafter, and continuing at least as late as James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933), utopia was usually discovered by Western travelers who came upon it by accident, for example through erroneous maps, storms at sea, airplane crashes, or, as in Bellamy's Looking Backward, through falling asleep and awakening in utopia. Conditions that eventually brought utopia about included wars, post-war peacetime negotiations, natural disasters, and clashes between continents, nations, classes, races, and, yes, sexes. These utopias were usually placed in the contemporary time of their authors. But, as more of the world became explored and known, it became increasingly necessary to place utopia in unexplored, exotic places in order to claim some originality—for example, under the sea, inside the earth, or in outer space. However, as these sites themselves became explored and relatively familiar, it became necessary to project utopia into the future. At first, European visionaries (discussed in Chapter 3) harbored vague expectations of utopian fulfillment in the distant future, but usually without particular dates. Eventually, though, there arose visions that it was forecast would come about in a specified time within reach of the next generation or two—as with Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888)—and later, within one's own lifetime—as with the date of 1960 in the landmark World of Tomorrow exhibit at the 1939–1940 New York World's Fair or, of course, George Orwell's nightmare 1984 (1949). With Buckminster Fuller's Utopia or Oblivion (1969) came the elimination of any delay: the future was now.

Notes

1. On the complexity of depictions of human nature by Plato, More, and other utopians, see Gorman Beauchamp, “Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies: Human Nature in Utopia,” Philosophy and Literature, 31 (October 2007), 280–293.

2. Frank E. Manuel, “Toward a Psychological History of Utopias,” in Utopias and Utopian Thought: A Timely Appraisal, ed. Manuel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 70.

3. George Kateb, Utopia and its Enemies (New York: Free Press, 1963), 6 n. 6.

4. Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 181–182. This book is the best general introduction to utopianism as an intellectual and historical phenomenon. But Levitas says little about utopian communities and nothing about non-Western utopias. Also useful is Krishan Kumar, Utopianism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

5. See the obituary of Forrest J. Ackerman by Bruce Weber, New York Times, December 6, 2008, B10.

6. See Peter Dizikes, “Reporter's Notebook: Jules Verne, Desperado? MIT Historian of Science Rosalind Williams On the Overlooked Legacy of Jules Verne, Anti-Globalization Visionary,” MIT News, December 10, 2009, web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/williams-verne-1210.html.

7. These developments are made clear by De Witt Douglas Kilgore's Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). By “Astrofuturism” Kilgore means the “tradition of speculative fiction and science writing inaugurated by scientists and science popularizers during the space race of the 1950s” (p. 2).

8. If Kilgore identifies himself as an African American, he goes far beyond lamenting the general absence of African Americans in the literature he analyzes. As he readily concedes, his lifelong fascination with space—despite the absence of “role models”—connects him to thousands of other Americans, white and non-white alike. See also Marleen S. Barr, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Robin Roberts, A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Ellen Susan Peel, Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2002); and Vanessa E. Jones, “Race, the Final Frontier,” Boston Globe, July 31, 2007, E1, E2.

9. Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 10.

10. See Howard P. Segal, “Young West: The Psyche of Technological Utopianism,” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 19 (December 1977), 50–58; and Justin Nordstrom, “Unlikely Utopians: Solomon Schindler, Henry Mendes, and American Judaism in the 1890s,” Utopian Studies, 20 (2009), 275–297.

11. Susan M. Matarese, American Foreign Policy and the Utopian Imagination (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001) is a pioneering study of the connections between the two that examines the several dimensions of “national image.”

12. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World (New York: Penguin, 2009) and the critical review by Michiko Kakutani, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, March 31, 2009, C1, C6.

13. See Eric Gorski, Associated Press, “Survey: Americans Switch Faiths Early, Often,” Bangor Daily News, April 28, 2009, C8. See also Peter Steinfels, “Beliefs: Uncertainties About the Contemporary Role of Doubt in Religion,” New York Times, July 19, 2008, B10; and Josie Huang, “Survey Finds Religious Identification Declining,” script of Maine Public Radio story, March 20, 2009.

Chapter 2

The Variety of Utopias

Geographical Scope and Genres

The Global Nature of Utopias: Utopias are Predominantly but not Exclusively Western

In their monumental 1979 book on utopian thought, historians Frank and Fritzie Manuel wrote that “the profusion of Western utopias has not been equaled in any other culture.” Since the 1970s, the Manuels' point of view has become a matter of considerable debate and historiographical revision, particularly with the flowering of such scholarly fields as post-colonial studies.1 Lyman Tower Sargent's Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (2010) argues nearly the very opposite of the Manuels: “While the word ‘utopia’ originated at a particular time and place, utopianism has existed in every cultural tradition.”2 If Sargent is more accurate than the Manuels, he may have gone too far in the opposite direction, at least in terms of visions that look forward rather than backward.

Before proceeding to the chapters that analyze utopia in the Western world, it is imperative to examine the phenomenon of utopianism from a non-Western perspective. Indeed, the claims made by contemporary high-tech proponents of utopia to be effected in our own day invariably invoke the familiar argument that we are in a time of unprecedented globalization, so that what happens in the West is either imitated by or initiated in other parts of the world. But here as elsewhere the rhetoric of globalization must be supported by the facts.

It is now evident that there have been significant written utopias and some actual movements to try to achieve utopia in China, Japan, Latin America, and India (those from India will be discussed later, in Chapter 6, as part of the ongoing “post-colonial” critique of Western imperialism, not least Western science and technology). In addition, Israel's many kibbutzim implicitly constitute utopian communities (see Chapter 7).

Utopias in China and Japan

China has a tradition of utopian writings that long predated contact with the West. Such writings were most commonly celebrations of a “primitive” golden age, and their outlook was predominately agrarian and scientifically and technologically stagnant. It is usually assumed that they looked backward, not forward. As Koon-ki Ho put it in a 1983 survey of “The Utopian Tradition in China,” on the one hand the utopian concept is not “indigenous” to China. Yet, on the other hand, in “the absence” of the kind of Western utopian writings involving state “socio-political planning,” the Chinese “developed their own literary escapist utopias and satirical utopias”3 that yearned for the past.

Let me be clear: it is by no means necessary that utopian visions either look ahead or be scientifically or technologically advanced. William Morris' News from Nowhere (1890) harkens back to his version of medieval England, albeit with some acceptance of modernity. Furthermore, as Ho observes, both escapist and satirical utopias can connect to the future precisely when their treatment of the past is conveyed to readers as being romanticized if not outright invented. For that matter, Ho continues, locating the golden age in the past did not mean that the Chinese were expected simply to await “the spontaneous return of happiness” but were instead expected to work toward it. Hence, these Chinese utopians were more “pragmatic” visionaries than “theoretical” ones.4

Going further, in 2002 Zhang Longxi surveyed “The Utopian Vision, East and West” and concluded that many Chinese utopians, especially those adhering to the influential ideas of Confucius, actually looked to the future more than to the past. They used the golden age to spur improvements in the present that ideally would lead to perfection in the future. Both individually and collectively, Chinese visionaries were expected to try to change the world with a “sense of urgency” rather than remain passively nostalgic for the “good old days.”5

Two Taoist concepts characterize many of these Chinese utopian works: ta thung and thai phing. Ta thung refers to a time of “great togetherness” within one worldwide community, a time of harmony, equality, and justice in a culture without governmental structure, bureaucracies, or social classes. Especially appealing to poor peasant farmers, ta thung was invoked over several centuries, and in fact was sustained into the twentieth century through the revolutionary movements led by Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Tse-Tung respectively. Thai phing, “the Realm of Great Peace and Equality,” was also fundamentally nostalgic even though it looked to a vision of a future state that would restore the golden age and appealed not only to rebellious peasants but also to entrenched ruling classes. Developing the concept of a past that might inspire a different present and in turn a different future, Confucian scholars gradually revised these two concepts to accommodate notions of evolution and progress. But not until European and North American civilizations and cultures began to influence China in the nineteenth century did Western utopian thought, epitomized by Khang Yu-Wei's Ta Thung Shu (Book of the Great Togetherness), start to emerge.6

It took Khang (1858–1927) nearly three decades to complete the book, which was not published in full until 1935. During this time he was immersed simultaneously in complementary philosophical and political crusades to transform Confucius into a utopian political reformer and to persuade the emperor to modernize the civil service, to establish both Western-style provincial schools and Beijing University, and to give women basic rights. His was an avowedly modern vision of a democratic world state governed by a world parliament, extending equal rights to women and men, abolishing private property, developing a universal language, and powered both by atomic energy and by a love of science and technology. Institutions would be cooperative and international in scope, the means of production would be publicly owned, goods and services would be provided for all, obsession with money would thereby cease, education would be vocational in orientation, military institutions would be greatly diminished, and the numerous other scientific and technological advances would also be highly practical. Accepting the view that people are innately good, Khang concluded that history could be a story of unceasing progress leading toward utopia rather than the familiar tale of cycles of rising and falling; this constituted an extraordinary leap of faith in his time and culture.7

Chairman Mao's utopian visions of the mid-twentieth century did not, of course, ultimately fulfill these dreams. Far from it, as his many multi-year plans, top-down communal establishments, and ruthless tactics have more often been termed dystopian. A review of a 2010 book by Frank Dikotter on Mao's Great Famine was entitled “Mao's Utopia a Medley of Death and Destruction.” Ironically, as Ho concludes, save for “a report on the condition of hell, we cannot find any genuine dystopia in the history of Chinese literature” until the twentieth century.8

Unlike Khang's work, the few pre-nineteenth-century “utopias” in other Asian societies such as Burma (now Myanmar) were primarily satires devoid of substantial alternative visions of existing societies.9 Little more need be said about them here.

Utopian thought in Japan is another matter. It has been argued that there were no true utopian visions in this country prior to the mid-nineteenth century. But it has been claimed that elements of utopian thought can be found in thinkers of the Tokugawa period (1603–1868) who were influenced by Neo-Confucian thought. That thought was “highly rational, positivistic, and rigidly oriented in its orthodox form toward the exaltation of ethical, harmonious, human relationships.”10

Examples of such “proto-utopian” Japanese thinkers include Ishida Baigan (1685–1744), who combined an emphasis on the moral cultivation of the self (derived from Neo-Confucian thought) with the value of an intense devotion to work, in contrast to the Neo-Confucian emphasis on study and work. As Eiji Takemura notes, “It thus became possible, at least in theory, for the masses to cultivate themselves so as to attain unity with nature, and actively participate in social betterment.” The goal was not to attain individualistic ends, but instead to cultivate society as a whole.11 An older visionary, Ogy Sorai (1666–1727), was apparently “the first to suggest that a true sage is a man who takes thought for the future and seeks to plan social reforms to prevent contingencies from disturbing the institutional order.” Sorai's thought was directed against the idea that just action was a direct extension of inner virtue. Rather, he wanted to establish an alternative basis for political action, taking account of human diversity. He used a vision of creation to construct “an open ended vision of historical continuity, an expansive view of the future that theoretically allows no closure.”12 A later thinker, Ninomiya Sontoku (1787–1856), was a commoner who lived most of his life in villages. He founded a movement of agricultural rehabilitation and social engineering important in the Kanto region in the first half of the nineteenth century. As George Bikle notes, “his stress upon the importance of agrarian planning and devotion to the ideal of cooperative self-help served as a model for many utopian visionaries during the Meiji [1868–1912] and Taisho [1912–1926] periods.”13

After having been “opened” to the West by the 1855 visit of American Commodore Matthew Perry, Japan produced a “flood of utopias,” visionary writings that drew upon both traditional Japanese traditions such as those mentioned above and Western utopias. This development of utopian ideas was at least in part a response to modernization.14 For example, consider the growth of the Japanese socialist and labor movement, founded in Tokyo most importantly by Suzuki Bunji and Abe Iso in the form of socialist study groups. The most significant of these study groups was the Yu¯aikai (Friendly Society), organized in 1912. The Yaikai was heavily influenced by Fabianism, a type of utopian socialism originating in Britain that emphasized social planning. Following World War I, and particularly after the Communist penetration of the labor movement by 1924, utopian socialist ideals gradually declined. After the catastrophic Tokyo earthquake of 1923, Christian messianic utopian movements became especially influential, as did eschatological Buddhist traditions.15 In the 1930s, the increasingly Fascist political regime persecuted all utopian movements, socialist and religious alike, as they threatened both the imperial colonialist and the anti-socialist monopoly capitalist ideals of the new regime. In the years before and during World War II, Japan's avowedly utopian vision of a “Greater East Asian” colonial empire and culture became all too real for the many Asian neighbors it conquered, using technologies ranging from airplanes to bulldozers. As Bikle has pointed out, the freedoms protected by the post-war Japanese constitution “have encouraged the reemergence of utopian idealism into full flower.”16

Latin American Utopias

In Latin America, utopian ideas have often been imported from Europe and then applied and transformed in complex ways in response to highly diverse cultures and political situations. While Latin America has rarely spawned utopian communities, utopian ideas have been highly influential, in sometimes indirect ways. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquest pitted Iberian conquistadors against highly organized Indian groups—Mayan, Aztec, and Incan—but also against myriad heterogeneous peoples. Though these peoples might be called “Indians” to distinguish them from Europeans, this designation did not “denote some uniform seamless culture.”17 The various cosmological perspectives and world-views of these groups are beyond this book's purview. Nevertheless, they remain critical to Latin America's social and cultural history and to any discussion of utopianism. From the beginning of the period of “discovery” and conquest, Europeans themselves were influenced by what they imagined American Indian societies to be like. Some viewed them as living in a “primitive” Garden of Eden; legends of the golden kingdom, el dorado, proliferated, motivating various exploratory expeditions. In fact, the inspiration for More's Utopia, the most influential of the European utopias, was his vision of “Amerindian” society.18

In subsequent centuries, European ideas were transformed within Latin American societies. In the early nineteenth century, neoclassical Enlightenment culture informed the wars of independence and attempts to build modern, rational, liberal republics. For example, the Venezuelan poet, Andrés Bello (1781–1865), who had tutored the liberating general, Simon Bolívar, advocated cultural reconciliation with Spain, but he also believed that European cultural values would find new life and development in the Americas. He advocated an agriculture that would carefully cultivate the soil and produce abundant fruits as a means to founding a rationally ordered society, based on a partnership of man and nature.19 Another teacher of Bolívar, Simon Rodriquez (1769–1854), articulated a philosophy that advocated education for all classes and for women as well as men; stressed the importance of practical studies; and believed in human perfectibility through education.20 Around the same time, another poet, the Argentinian Esteban Echeverría (1805–1851), wrote political essays influenced by the technologically elitist French visionary Henri de Saint-Simon, whose social engineering ideals are discussed in Chapter 3. But this top-down effort eventually failed to impress grass-roots Argentinians and so faded away. Opposing the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas, Echeverría advocated a new Argentina based on liberty and justice.21

In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, various forms of Marxism were influential in Latin America. Their impact extended from communist to socialist movements, and from the advocates of violence to those supporting various forms of democracy and non-violence. All were affected by the Cuban revolution of 1959 led by Fidel Castro. As with other forms of utopian thought, the influence of Marxism is highly diverse. Mixed with nationalist-populist as well as reformist ideas, the form taken by utopian Marxist ideals has been contingent on the particular place and political circumstance.22

In 2003 an exhibit was held in Brussels on “Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America.” A companion text with the same title appeared in 2005. The many contributors examine the contradictory nature of several leading Latin American cities. These were cities that, unlike older European ones, could be planned from the outset and so avoid the errors found in their European counterparts. But the Latin American cities were often established on the ruins—and the blood and violence—of pre-Hispanic cities destroyed by the European conquerors. In Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and (most explicitly utopian) Brasilia, plus some university communities in Mexico and elsewhere, planning often failed amid crime, political instability, corruption, and population growth.23

In oil-rich Venezuela, long-time President Hugo Chavez has been building several new utopian cities that would supposedly escape the major problems—the “cruelties”—of those earlier Latin American urban centers. Unlike their predecessors, these urban utopias would be carved from the wilderness, not atop pre-Hispanic communities. In theory, at least, they would be genuinely socialist, environmentally sensitive, and economically self-sustainable.24

In many areas of Latin America during recent decades, the movement of indigenous peoples toward autonomy and the assertion of human rights has finally led them to “imagine their own utopia.” A prime example is that of the indigenous Chiapas Indians in southeastern Mexico, whose uprising began in 1994. They are steadily freeing themselves from the constricting vision of Indians found in More's Utopia. This does not translate into any declaration that “their societies are utopian.” Instead, it means that, “like all peoples everywhere,” they deserve the basic human rights denied them for far too long.25

By contrast, Brazil, Latin America's largest country, has been particularly amenable to antithetical and autocratic religious and millenarian tendencies. A recent study of utopias in twentieth-century Latin American literature finds a similar embrace of the distant past in which anti-democratic, elitist, and pre-industrial values prevail.26

Finally, as helpful as it might be to connect these various Asian and Latin American visions of both the future and the past to other, non-utopian political, economic, social, and cultural developments in those respective societies, to do so would go beyond the scope of this book. Suffice it to say that discontent with the status quo in these societies over the centuries, as revealed by the more “aggressive” utopian visions, may well have trickled down to the proverbial masses and may reflect pervasive discontent among them. Direct links between those visions and actual events cannot, however, be established.

The Several Genres of Utopianism: Prophecies and Oratory, Political Movements, Communities, Writings, World's Fairs, Cyberspace

Utopianism has taken various forms over the centuries. In the beginning there were prophecies and oratory from the eighteenth century on declaring the New World as superior to Europe's Old World in its greater natural resources, greater areas of potential settlement, and comparatively greater freedom of speech, religion, and politics. Then came political movements—such as varieties of socialism that went far beyond equal distribution of wages and wealth; forms of engineering-led technocracy; and the American Bellamy-led Nationalist movement. Along with these were actual communities, especially in France, England, and the United States, and, in the twentieth century, in Israel in the form of kibbutzim. A bit later came world's fairs and, most recently, cyberspace “virtual” communities. Because utopianism is usually studied piecemeal, it is important to recognize its multiple dimensions and the relationships between them.

With rare exceptions, neither form of utopian expression—communities or writings—had many followers or much influence. But the exceptions, which include a handful of communities such as the American Shakers and a handful of writings such as Bellamy's Looking Backward, do deserve our attention.

Utopian Communities in America: Especially Brook Farm, the Shakers, and Oneida

America's many actual communities varied considerably in viewpoint, organization, size, stability, economic development, and longevity. Because the United States overall had already been proclaimed a potential utopia by many at home and abroad, it was a logical extension of that dream for many prospective communitarians—both European and native-born—to try to establish their particular utopias on a small scale in America. Even when, as with most of the earliest New England colonists such as the Pilgrims and the Puritans, the belief in human beings' permanently flawed character prevailed, there was still the hope of substantial improvement by virtue of the opportunity for the comparative freedom to practice one's religion.27

Until Robert Fogarty's All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914